Spitting Image (18 page)

SARAH AND I drove to the meeting. She drove, I sat in the passenger seat and tried to force my mind to relax, stop thinking of the thousands of ways this could all go horribly wrong. It must have worked on some level because she glanced over at me and smiled.

“Are you bopping your head along to the radio?” she asked with a grin.

“I guess I was.”

“This is Metric,” she pointed out.

“I like Metric.”

“Can you admit that?” she asked. “Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen aren’t going to show up and confiscate your Old Fogey Fossil Rock Club membership card?”

“I don’t
just
like old music,” I explained. “I
still
like old music. Most really bad music doesn’t last, so classic stations tend to play just the better stuff that survived. Hair band music from the 80s is the exception that proves the rule.”

“I just never saw you as an Indie Rock kinda guy.”

“My Indie Rock credentials are impeccable,” I said. “I saw Throwing Muses at the Middle East back in about 1987. Mostly because I had a huge crush on Tanya Donelly, but if anything that should increase my cred.”

She laughed. “I can just see you as a guy groupie. Then you could write a tell-all book and claim
Green
was really about you. Or that you broke up the band when Kristen Hersch got jealous. You could have been Throwing Muses’ Yoko.”

I laughed at that. I loved Sarah joking about something. Hearing her laugh was one of my favorite things about her.

“You really had a crush on Tanya Donelly?” she asked with a smile.

“Big time,” I replied. “Tanya and Kay Hanley from Letters to Cleo.”

She threw back her head an laughed. “Oh, God. You’re so
old.
”

“Sarah my dear,” I said, “I was way too old for Donelly.”

“Yes,” she said, “but if you talk about women from two centuries ago, it’s different. I can look at old paintings of Emma Hamilton and say ‘OK, I get it.’ But these women are singers I listened to when I was twelve. That’s like you crushing on my aunt.” She laughed again. “Of course, my aunt wasn’t cool enough to be in Throwing Muses, but it’s just hilarious. Oh, man.
Bright Yellow Gun
isn’t a euphemism, is it?” She had another fit of laughter.

“Not so far as I know,” I replied. “Not about me, anyway. My crush on Miss Donelly was unrequited. I’m surprised you know so much about them. I’d think they were just before your time.”

“I was a teenager in the 90s, and I had a big Indie Rock Chick phase. It was a good decade for that. Plenty of girl groups. Even Hole, before we all knew Courtney Love was a trainwreck.”

“Did you want to be the girl with the most cake?”

“I did,” she replied. “I had ambitions to get away from my roots, to escape the expectation that I’d grown up to be another working class Catholic housewife. I wanted to lash out and rebel. I did, in fact, want to be the girl with the most cake. So the angry Indie Rock chicks spoke to me. For a young girl feeling stifled and craving independence that stuff was like crack.”

“Did you own a lot of flannel?” I asked.

“Oh I had flannel, I had a pair of Doc Martin’s, I even had a plaid skirt to go with my black leather jacket.”

I thought for a moment. “You don’t still have the plaid skirt and the leather jacket, do you?”

She laughed again. “Down, boy.” She patted my thigh. “Maybe if we live through this, and everything works out, and I go a year without being kidnapped, I’ll surprise you on your birthday.”

“I don’t know my birthday,” I pointed out.

“Then it will be even more of a surprise.”

I felt a warm glow in the pit of my stomach. And one a bit lower, but that wasn’t as important or surprising. There was a flicker of hope. She could make a joke about us, and about a future. One involving short skirts on my birthday. That had to be a positive sign.

Maybe she was just joking, my rotten cynical side chimed in. I’d had similar conversations with Nique. But I had never dressed up like a pirate for Nique.

The talk was a welcome distraction. Soon enough we pulled up in front of the cabin.

“You ready?” I asked.

She took a big breath, let it out slowly. “As I’ll ever be.”

PLAYING THE PART of a vacationing couple, we got our bags out of the trunk and walked into the cabin. I just more or less assumed we were being watched. I expected Amelia’s minions to strike at any moment, capturing me with the help of Brad in the guise of Sarah.

Hopefully unknown to them would be Daniels – or more likely, his people – waiting in ambush. Daniels didn’t seem like the kind of man to get his hands very dirty.

And last, I hoped, would be my people, in the form of two very scary aging veterans who were like Leatherstocking and Chingachgook if they had been written by Robert B Parker instead of James Fennimore Cooper.

It was like a Russian nesting doll of deceit and violence, with me and the woman I loved in the center.

It wasn’t the worst plan. They wanted me alive, so they wouldn’t shoot first. They thought Sarah was one of them, so they wouldn’t shoot her. And I knew they were coming, and they didn’t know that I knew. So it could have been worse.

“You ready?” I asked Sarah.

“Do I have a choice?” she asked with a shaky smile.

My phone buzzed. I looked at the text from Bob.
Here they come. 4 to the door, 3 outside
.

“Not anymore,” I said. “It’s showtime.”

The door burst open and two men charged in, handguns drawn. I stepped in front of Sarah, put my hands up. I didn’t want to do anything to make them shoot.

“Don’t move!” shouted one of them. “Keep those hands up.”

That seemed reasonable, so I did. Two more entered the cabin, sweeping the area with their pistols. The leader spun me around and patted me down, finding my .45 in the small of my back. I had expected that. As I hoped, he stopped after finding one gun and never looked for the nine millimeter at my ankle.

I had to admit, John had a point. I could never have hidden the big Colt there.

As the men secured the room, the woman from the house in Rowley entered. Amelia, I assumed.

“Mr Danet,” she said. “It seems the tables have turned. Where is your faithful Indian companion?”

One of the men handed her my Colt. “Oh, my,” she purred. “What a big gun.”

I didn’t bother to respond to that.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You know what I want,” she said. “And I grow tired of asking. So this is your choice,” she placed a specimen cup on the table. “Give us a sample, or my associates will start breaking things until you do.”

“And then what?” I asked. “Do you expect me to believe you’ll just let me walk away?”

“I do. I have no reason to kill you. Disposing of corpses is problematic. You probably have people who will miss you and look for you. Some of them are dangerous, and I am tired of this fight. If you, or any of your associates moves against us, we will blacken your names, ruin you reputations and leave you wishing we had simply killed you.”

I nodded. That was probably true. They could make themselves hard to find, and imitate any of us. I would never be able to feel safe, never know what I might be accused of, be easily proven guilty of. She was telling me that she didn’t have to kill me because she didn’t have a reason to fear me, and I had every reason to fear her.

I heard Sarah’s sharp intake of breath behind me. I don’t think she realized just how much power they had, how nakedly they displayed it.

Amelia speared her with a look.

I didn’t know if they expected her to keep playing along, but I wasn’t supposed to know she was an imposter, so I kept up my end of the charade.

“It’s going to be alright,” I told her. “They’ll let us go.”

Amelia looked at me, looked back at Sarah. I could see suspicion in her eyes. I took a deep breath, looked at the men around her, scanning for a weakness, a lapse in readiness. If this went to hell early, I wanted to know who would be easiest to jump. I stepped in front of Sarah, which wouldn’t look odd to them if I were still in the dark that she was an imposter. It also put me between her and the guns. I was pretty sure they didn’t want to shoot me quite yet.

Amelia returned her attention to me. “Enough games. This is your last chance. Accept this offer or suffer the consequences.”

I didn’t point out that we’d all been suffering them for a while now, and her offer was pretty unacceptable even without threats. Partly because I’m a gentleman, and partly because I was hoping the cavalry would arrive soon.

She tossed the sample cup to me. “Choose wisely.”

I caught it. Looked at the half dozen gunmen in the room. “You mean here and now?”

“I hate to be this way, but I just don’t trust you to return it to me later.”

“There are a lot of weapons pointed at me, and this is pretty public,” I said. “Even if I agree, I don’t know that I can do this.”

She looked at me, thinking. An evil smile spread over her face, starting with a curl of her lip and a glint in her eyes, and finally a subtle shift in her whole carriage. The tension drained away and a cockiness replaced it. She had a plan, and not just a good plan, a nasty one.

She spoke to one of the other men in a language I didn’t understand. He grinned, opened a closet door and searched it. When he finished, he nodded.

“Since we have your phone and your gun, and David has just made sure the closet has no secret escape hatch or stockpile of weapons, we can give you a bit of privacy.” She looked at Sarah and her evil grin widened. “Bring your girlfriend. She can help you out. We’ll give you the traditional Seven Minutes in Heaven.”

Sarah, who was, as far as Amelia knew, still Brad, gave a slow, nervous nod.

“And then you come out with my sample,” she continued. “Or we start breaking bones. Maybe her bones. After you do decide to play nice, and I assure you, eventually you will, you can heal them. I’m sure she won’t hold that against you.”

Yeah, no chance I was going to let my potential kids be raised by this pack of wolves. I wondered if she’d actually have Brad’s fingers broken to test me. And if he’d go along. Probably not. Maybe she thought she knew me enough to bluff on that. I wouldn’t ever let them hurt Sarah if I could stop it, so maybe she was banking on that.

Still was a dick move.

“And you think this is going to work?” I asked, playing for time. “It’s not like some mood lighting and Marvin Gaye on the stereo is going to make me forget the whole threats and guns and coercion thing.”

She sighed. “And yet you continue to try my patience.” She fixed me with an icy glare, then reached into her purse, dug out a prescription bottle and tossed it to me. “Those should do the job. Miracle of modern medicine. If they don’t, just remember there are less pleasant ways for me to get your sperm. We could tie a rope around your neck and toss you off the deck. That usually works. Or we could get a doctor and remove some of it whether you want to or not.

“I’m getting what I want. And then I am done with you. The only choice you have is how difficult you want to make it on yourself.”

I thought about that. I figured it was probably bluff. It’s true, a hanged man often ejaculates, but if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t get a second chance, and while they could surely trick a doctor into coming somewhere with them, it would leave a loose end, and they wanted to avoid those.

I looked at the bottle of little blue pills. Maybe that was something I could use. Time of onset of those was about half an hour. I could use that time. I didn’t think claiming a bit of performance anxiety and waiting for the meds would be enough to push them to do anything too rash.

Funny to think that surrounding me with armed men wasn’t the rash option.

I shook a pill into my hand and made a show of taking it. I actually palmed it so I could get rid of it later. I didn’t think it fit the heroic image I like to project if I had to go through a gun battle or careful negotiation with a distracting bulge in my shorts.

One of the men gestured with the muzzle of his weapon, and we walked into the closet. It was large, as closets go, intended to hold heavy winter jackets, ski boots and other bulky winter equipment. In the middle of summer, there wasn’t anything as offensive as a ski pole or even a scarf I could strangle my foes with, even if I had planned a desperate escape.

It might seem crazy for them to let me out of their sight like this, but Amelia was a calculating enemy. As far as she knew, Sarah was Brad, able to keep an eye on me, while I was oblivious, so if I did have a plan, chances are I’d confide in her. Sneaky. I wondered how far Brad would have taken the charade. Maybe pretty far. Spies do what they have to do, and he was no green recruit.

He’d reached a breaking point somewhere, though. If Amelia treated him this way all the time, I wasn’t surprised he’d turned his coat.

As the door closed, Sarah leaned close to me and whispered. “Now what? And don’t even joke about supposing a blowjob is out of the question.”

“There will never be a better time for that joke,” I pointed out. “But this buys us a few minutes for help to get here. Is there anything in your purse we could use as a substitute? Like shampoo or lotion or anything that would look kinda semen-y in the bottom of a sample cup?”

“Sorry, no.”

I took the opportunity to move the gun from my ankle, which is awkward, to my waistband which is quicker. They’d already taken one gun from me; chances were they wouldn’t frisk me again.

“We have to play for time,” I said. “They took my phone. Text Bob and see if he sees any movement around the cabin. And tell him get ready to go. When we come out with an empty cup, things might get exciting fast.”

She dug out her phone and sent a quick message. After a few seconds she said. “Bob says there are some people moving in. I hope it’s Daniels.”

So did I. They wouldn’t wait forever out there for me to finish, and even excusing the delay on nerves wouldn’t buy all that much time. I hoped Daniels’ people would have them all rounded up and I could come out.

“How long have we got?”

“I don’t think all that long,” I said. “This is supposed to be business, not pleasure. The whole performance anxiety thing should buy us a few minutes. And I think they’ll give us the benefit of the doubt because they think you’re on their side. But I think Brad would want to get this over with.”

“No wonder he sold her out,” she said. “The way she talks to me–him, as far as she knows– is so degrading. It’s one thing to give an order, but she really enjoys the idea of making him get you off in a closet while they all listen. She thinks it’s hilarious. What a bitch.”

“Once you start using people, you get used to it,” I said. “Then it becomes normal. Then you stop thinking of them as people, and they just become tools. Been that way forever.”

“Well it sucks.”

“It does,” I agreed. “That’s why every so often the people rise up and guillotine the nobility.”

“Any chance we can do that today?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Anyway, it’s viscerally satisfying in theory, but in practice it tends to get messy.”

There was a knock on the door. “Are we finished?” Amelia asked in a saccharine tone. “I don’t mean to be impatient, I just don’t remember it taking so long last time.”

“That’s it,” whispered Sarah. “I’m going to shoot her.”

I raised my voice. “Almost there.” Quieter, I breathed in Sarah’s ear, “Stay calm. Play for time.”

“Just a little. Like in the shoulder. Then you can fix her.”