Love Game (11 page)

“So I should start sawing?” I asked him. My throat
had gotten thick, and there was a distinct burning in the back of my eyes.

“I was a goner, anyway,” I continued. “Gangrene. I forgot to take my antibiotics this morning. Gangrene is a bad way to go.” My voice hitched. I didn’t want to go. I had just arrived. I wanted years more. I wanted to grow old and decrepit and have others take care of me.

“You don’t say much,” I noted. “Kind of the strong, silent type. Me, too.” Remington arched an eyebrow. “Talking is overrated,” I said. “I mean, unless you have something to say, like how we’re going to get out of here.” He looked deep into my eyes—like, Mariana Trench deep—and the meaning was clear. “There is no way out of here, is there?” I asked. A tear rolled down my cheek, and my nose filled. He wiped the tear off with his thumb and let it rest on my face a moment.

“My skin is usually softer,” I said. “The plaster has hardened.” His hand dropped to his side. “You have a lot of muscles.”

Remington’s mouth turned up in a smile. “I fight.”

“Excuse me?”

“UFC,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Mixed martial arts,” he explained. “Cage fighting. I used to do it full-time, but now I do it on the side. Being a cop is safer.”

“We’re kind of in a cage now,” I noted.

As if on cue, we looked around at our panic room. Dark, with a red tinge. The air was fetid, and the temperature was rising. Sweat rolled down my back.
I was tired. Sleepy. Luanda was snoring loudly, curled up in the fetal position on the floor.

“This is crazy,” I said. “Grandma should know I’m in trouble. It’s that woman’s fault.” I pointed at the sleeping Luanda. “She’s jamming her signals!”

Luanda snorted. “What the fuck happened!” she shrieked, and sat up.

“The detective saved us from being entombed in plaster, but now we’re going to suffocate to death,” Lucy explained to her.

“Unless Rellik decides to kill us himself, like he did to the people in the other room,” Bridget pointed out.

Luanda stood and straightened out her skirts. The feathers in her hair had fallen forward, making her look like a bird. A bird from the sixties. She was either brewing a major freak-out or she was on the verge of a stroke. Her right eye drooped, and there was a distinct spasm in her nostril.

She chest-bumped Remington. “What the hell are you going to do, copper?” She growled, “What kind of crap luck do we have, getting the only incompetent loser cop stuck in this tin can with us?”

I thought Luanda was being unfair. The Cannes police force was made up almost exclusively of incompetent loser cops, and none of them looked nearly as good without a shirt as Detective Remington Cumberbatch.

“Professor McGonagall has a point,” Ruth said. “You’re supposed to protect and serve. Not a lot of protecting and serving going on.”

Remington remained stoic in the face of so much criticism and inevitable death. He exuded quiet strength, and despite the attacks on his competency,
I was glad he was there. I felt safer. He had already saved us from a plaster-induced death, and I was holding out hope he could get us out of there alive.

“Is this a bad time to say I have to pee?” I asked. I shouldn’t have gone for that third cup of coffee this morning. I was pretty close to having an accident. I was squeezing my knees together, but it wasn’t helping.

“What kind of cop goes out without a gun?” Luanda asked him. “Or a phone? Any cop would be better than you. I wish any other cop in the universe were locked up in here with us.”

The red light went out, plunging us into darkness. We froze, waiting for the light to come back on, but it stayed pitch-black.

“Do you hear that?” Bridget asked.

“Like a rattlesnake is at the door,” Lucy said.

“No,” Ruth said. “It sounds like a teakettle, an angry one. Like it’s going to blow.”

“Flash bomb,” Remington said, and pushed us to the other side of the room, gathering us in his long arms. Just as we reached the wall, bright light flooded the room, forcing me to shield my eyes. A loud boom went off at the door, and it creaked open.

Remington charged the door but was taken down when a man was hurled into the room. Remington stumbled backward under the weight of the body but quickly caught his balance, tossing the man aside like he was a rag doll.

But he wasn’t quick enough. The door clicked closed, and despite Remington’s furious attempts to open it, we were once again locked in, the lights turned off, leaving only the dim, buzzing red glow.

The man lay facedown on the floor near a puddle of wet plaster. He wasn’t moving, and I hoped he wasn’t dead. Not only because I would need a whole lot of Xanax if I were trapped in a small room with a corpse, but also because I recognized the cut of his suit.

Remington rolled the man over with his foot. He stared for a moment. Then he exhaled slowly and ran his fingers through his Bruno Mars hair. “Hello, boss,” he said.

FOR THE
first time in what seemed like forever, our attention was shifted beyond our imprisonment. Police chief Spencer Bolton lay unconscious on the panic room floor.

I held my breath, willing him to show a sign of life. My lower lip threatened to wobble, and my eyes got watery. It was unthinkable that Spencer could be dead. He was way too obnoxious to die. I had just gotten used to him—almost—and if he didn’t wake up soon and say something offensive, I was going to lose it.

“Goddamned crazy Rellik is working his way through town,” Ruth said. “He’s dragged in half of Cannes already. At this rate I could open Tea Time in here.”

“I wish he’d thought to kidnap Bird Gonzalez,” Lucy added. “At least then I could get a shampoo and set while we’re stuck here.”

“I wonder if his psychosis was triggered by being raised in a sexist, misogynistic society,” Bridget said.

Spencer moaned.

“I think he needs mouth-to-mouth,” Luanda said. “I’ll do it.” She dropped to her knees and leaned down.

“I think he’s breathing,” I told her.

“The cosmos is telling me he needs the kiss of life,” Luanda said.

“Is that what they’re calling it these days? The cosmos?” Ruth asked. “Lady, your cosmos is way too old and loony for that boy.”

“I think we need to give him some air,” Remington said, gently lifting Luanda off Spencer and moving her to the side.

Spencer stirred, opened one eye, took stock of his condition, and jumped up into his best Rocky stance.

“Chill, boss,” Remington said. “You’re among friends.”

Spencer’s eyes darted from person to person until they landed on me. “Are you kidding me?” he asked in my direction.

I put my hands on my hips and scowled at him. “What are
you
doing here?” I asked, as if he were crashing our party.

“What am I doing
where
? What are
you
doing here?”

“She’s trapped in this panic room with the rest of us, darlin’,” Lucy said.

“Panic room?” He directed the question to Remington.

Remington caught Spencer up on our situation, his demeanor never changing from his usual calm and cool. His voice was all business, unemotional, and yummy smooth jazz.

Spencer rubbed his head. “Rellik got me, too. I was
searching the house, and suddenly I was hit from behind. Never saw him.”

“Why were you searching the house?” I asked.

“Your grandmother, Pinkie. She said a phony matchmaker was jamming her signals, but I should take a look at the flipper’s house. He must have seen me coming. He took me by surprise.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. “What’s this white stuff on my face?”

“What do you mean, ‘phony matchmaker’?” Luanda asked.

“You got knocked out by the bad guy again?” I asked him.

“What’s your point?” He had crossed his arms in front of him.

“It’s just that … Never mind,” I said.

“No, Pinkie, what were you going to say?”

“It’s just that, well, what good are you? Every time there’s a psycho killer about to kill me, you get your head bashed in.”

Spencer’s face turned bright red, almost disappearing in the red light. “That’s only happened twice!” he shouted, holding up two fingers to illustrate his point.

“The two times you were there when a psycho killer was about to kill me!”

Lucy grabbed my arm and tugged me back toward her. “Darlin’, he’s about to explode,” she said. “You better take cover.”

“Did you at least keep your gun?” I asked from behind Lucy.

Spencer patted his body. His eyes grew enormous, like high beams on a country road.

“All right!” Spencer announced after a minute. “Let’s get out of here.”

“The door is sealed shut, boss,” Remington told him.

“I figured as much, Tiny,” Spencer said.

The two men huddled in talk of escape. Meanwhile, Luanda began to moan and speak in tongues.

“Just what we were missing,” Ruth complained. “Stop sucking up the oxygen, Barbra Streisand.”

“I’m communing,” Luanda said.

“You’re sucking air, you mean,” Ruth said.

“I think we should remain calm,” Bridget said. “We are all sisters in the cause and should support one another.”

“I see cancer in your future,” Luanda told Bridget.

Lucy gasped. “Don’t talk to my friend that way. Take that back, you crazy fraud.”

“I am not a crazy fraud. I am Luanda Laughing-Eagle.”

“See, that’s very interesting,” Bridget said, trying to calm the situation. “What tribe are you from?”

Luanda blinked. “What tribe? I am my own tribe.”

“First lucid thing you’ve said,” Ruth muttered.

“I see gum disease in your future, old hag,” Luanda told Ruth.

“Ha!” Ruth shouted, and wagged her finger in Luanda’s face. “Shows what you know. I already have it! I bet you didn’t see that coming, psycho lady.”

Things went pretty fast after that. Luanda and Ruth charged each other like rhinos. There was a lot of shuffling and a few lady grunts as they locked in combat, which looked remarkably like an episode of
Dancing with the Stars
.

“Locked up by a crazy killer in a dark panic room, with no oxygen or means of escape, and an octogenarian and a phony witch lady decide to rumble,” Lucy said. “I never want to leave this town. Cannes is a village on happy juice. LSD. It’s
The Wizard of Oz
on shrooms.”

“I’m not a proponent of woman-on-woman violence, but I’m secretly hoping Luanda gets owned and Ruth beats her ass,” Bridget said to me.

I was, too, but I was also worried that they were using up the last of our air. I was also worried that Ruth was going to have a cataclysmic stroke and I was going to get an elbow in the eye from Luanda, who was swinging her arms with wild abandon. She hadn’t made contact with Ruth yet, but, with my luck, she was going to find my skull sooner or later.

“Are you kidding me?” Spencer pulled them apart and held them at arm’s length from each other. Somehow a feather had come out of Luanda’s hair and landed in Ruth’s mouth. Ruth spit it out as she huffed and puffed from the exertion of her fight. Luanda was breathing easier, but she was sweating so much that her hair was dripping, and her clothes stuck to her in thick, wet layers.

“We’re getting the hell out of here,” Spencer said. “Everybody in the center of the room.”

We moved together into a tight circle.

“The door is locked, handsome,” Lucy told Spencer.

“I think outside the box.” Spencer removed his jacket and gave it to me to hold. “Just for a minute, Pinkie. Don’t burn it or sneeze on it. You think you can handle that?”

“So funny I forgot to laugh,” I said.

Spencer rolled up his shirtsleeves and proceeded to throw his body at the walls. The racket was earsplitting as he pounded the metal with his shoulder. Who did he think he was, Superman? I was about to laugh at him for trying to break through the walls of a super-high-tech modern panic room, when the wall buckled and dented under the pressure of his battering-ram strength.

He took a step back and surveyed the damage. “That’s what I thought. They focus the security on the obvious, on the door. They never think outside of the box.”

Then it was just a matter of time. Spencer and Remington put everything they had into mangling the wall. With the possibility of escape becoming a reality, I breathed easier and even had to pee less.

“If they weren’t saving us, I would be pretty PO’d that they were having the females stand back while they saved us,” Bridget said.

“It is rather sexist in a hot, stimulating way,” Lucy commented.

Watching Remington and Spencer literally rip apart the wall with their bare hands was indeed stimulating. They grunted and their muscles rippled as they worked. Shirtless Remington was a sight to see. Spencer wasn’t half bad, either. I couldn’t look away. I bit my lower lip and caught myself panting.

“This is the most foreplay I’ve gotten in thirty-five years,” Ruth said.

The noise was deafening. Each manipulation of the metal wall sounded like a car crash. After about twenty minutes, a sliver of bright light broke through the gap in the wall, along with a rush of fresh air.

Spencer ordered us to get out of the way. Remington peeled back a section of the wall, and Spencer climbed through. I held my breath.

The sound of voices floated through the opening. Remington motioned us to stay back, but we moved forward as a group, trying to see or hear what was going on.

I could make out Spencer’s voice. He was using his authoritarian cop voice, but I couldn’t hear the words. Was he negotiating with Rellik? Had he found the bodies of the poor people next door? I thought of Mavis and Felicia and their lovely shop, of how kind they were to me, even though Felicia wanted me to read.

I sniffed and wiped my eyes. With my fear of dying melting away, my focus turned to the murder of the innocent people next door. The cruelty and injustice was too much to bear. How could one man feel that he had the power to extinguish lives on a whim? How could he be so evil?

My nose ran, and I wiped it with the back of my hand. Bridget put her arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder. I heard her hiccup and swallow back tears. Our grief was contagious. Soon Lucy was sniffling and wiping her eyes, too.