The Book of 21 (26 page)

She sat the suitcase on the rear seat, popped the latches, and opened it. She snatched a pair of jeans that lay atop the pile of clothes. In a blur, she slipped her legs into the jeans, and brought the pants up over her naked pelvis.

A sigh of relief escaped her. The tightness of the jeans helped to relieve some of the vulnerability and helplessness she had been feeling. While buttoning the jeans, she peered into the suitcase to see what other gifts might be waiting for her.

Marco had packed quite a few other items. The first that she saw was a nightgown—a gift from her mother. Since Kim refused to wear this huge swath of flannel, she would never have packed it. She knew, however, that any detectives reviewing her murder scene would probably have thought little about it; everyone’s tastes were different.

Moving the nightgown revealed a few shirts, several pairs of khakis, and six of the twelve pairs of shoes that Kim owned. Though Marco might have been overcompensating for the female interest in shoes, Kim was glad to have access to a broad range of her footwear. She pulled out a pair of white Keds and sat down on the asphalt to put them on.

While she tied the Keds, she noticed a man walking across the lot in her direction. The man was tall, dark, and well-built; he reminded her of Marco. After a few seconds of observation, she knew it was not her abductor, but she also knew that Marco was not in this alone.

She knelt and pretended to be securing the suitcase, but she was really securing her grip on the pepper spray. Based on a blurry reflection of the man in the poorly maintained paint of her car, she guessed he was still about fifty feet from her. That fact that was confirmed when his voice came over her shoulder.

“Excuse me, miss…”

Kim stood and tightened her grip on the pepper spray. While bending over toward the suitcase, she looked down her left side to the pavement. The easterly sun was pointing in the wrong direction to give her the forewarning of the man’s shadow; instead, the shadow of the car dimmed the asphalt behind her. She continued making motions as if she was repositioning the suitcase, while she watched and waited.

About ten feet behind her, a pair of feet clad in docksiders stepped into sight and halted. There was silence. She waited to see what would happen next.

“Excuse me, miss. Do you need any help?”

Kim continued to pretend she was maneuvering the luggage as she watched the man’s feet. She resolved to spray him if he came any closer. She saw the man shift his weight to his right foot and knew he was waiting for a reply.

“I’m fine, thanks. I’m just in a hurry, and this suitcase is giving me problems.”

He shifted his weight over to his left foot. “Do you want some help with it?”

“No, thanks. I have it.”

The feet remained motionless for a second. “Here, let me see if I can help you. We thought you might be in some kind of trouble.” The feet then took one step, then another.

Kim wheeled about, lifted the small can toward the man’s face, and unleashed an acrid blast. At the splash of the pepper spray, the man grabbed his face and let out a muffled scream. He staggered forward and reached out for something on which to steady himself, then crumpled to the hard asphalt.

Kim heard a little girl in the distance cry, “Daddy!”

That exclamation was followed by the voice of an older female screaming, “Oh my God! Bob! Are you all right?”

Kim looked up, saw the two females running across the parking lot, and realized she had just victimized someone that was trying to help. She bent down towards the man. As she reached out to him, he rolled away and gurgled in fear.

“I’m sorry! I thought—” Kim winced with sympathy pains, but there was no time to explain the situation or make it right. “Get that stuff washed off as soon as you can.” Standing, she took one last look at the man and then hustled to the driver’s seat.

The man’s wife fell on her knees next to him and continued to scream, “Oh my God! Bob! Bob!”

“Get him to a sink right away,” Kim yelled to her.

As the woman continued to panic at Bob’s side, Kim started the engine. Looking back, she saw Bob struggling to his feet and motioning toward the restrooms; that was her cue. She backed out of the spot, swinging wide of Bob and his family, and then headed back onto I-80.

As the tires of the small Nissan left the asphalt ramp and met with the concrete of the Interstate highway, Kim tried to make sense of her foolishness. She knew she needed to start thinking and acting again; her fear and gut reaction to events had to go away.

Chapter 34:
A Drive to Fields

Amy waved to the approaching cab and watched it swerve toward them. The cabbie made his way through two lanes of heavy traffic in a surprisingly short amount of time. John thought it was hilarious that, while so many people in Philadelphia found it hard to get a cab, a pretty girl could simply lift her arm and within seconds have a cabbie making a beeline toward her.

As the green
Quaker Taxi
cab stopped in front of them, John thought back to the cab he rode in last night. Turning to Amy, he could tell she was thinking the same thing. The cab came all too readily, and too quickly.

John leaned over and peered into the window. The cab smelled like an old shoe. The operator’s license showed the name of Samir Singh. The smiling face on the license matched the smiling face in the front seat. John knew that, even though the man seemed to be a legitimate cab driver, a valid license did not necessarily preclude him from being a member of a secret sect of lunatics.

“Where would you like to go, my friend?” he asked, with a thick Indian accent that rolled over the stinking vinyl.

It was unlikely that Mezzalura controlled every cab in the city, but John was still wary of the ease with which the cab was hailed and the alacrity with which the cab came. Mezzalura might only have one cab driver left on her team, but if that cab driver was the one currently in front of him, it would mean trouble. John was unsure of how he could test the driver enough to put himself at ease.

Turning to a different approach, he wondered whether he should just hijack the cab. The problem was a theft would be reported. Once that happened, auto-theft tracing systems would quickly show everyone where he was.

John’s mind wandered back to last night; he had stupidly parked the cab outside of Kim’s apartment. It was likely that Mezzalura knew about the tracking systems. She could have found him easily; that was sloppy.

He wondered why Mezzalura missed the opportunity. It was all too easy to phone in a theft. It was a mistake on her part that he could not reconcile.

Returning to the present, he pondered the possibility of whether the cabbie in front of him had been tailing him all night. The cab would have had to drive past him numerous times as he hiked from the diner to Shalby’s, in order to avoid crawling along behind his limping gait. He was in pain during the trek, but figured he would have noticed a circling green cab. Furthermore, he figured anyone following him would have taken advantage of two-to-one odds at Shalby’s place, and put an end to this chase.

Just as he was about to open the cab door, however, he thought again. Between the probing in the dark outside the Roundhouse and the ruse to lure him into the woods, Mezzalura had a few opportunities to kill him. She always waited. After talking to Shalby, he now knew that she wanted to get information out of him before she killed him. If that was still the case, ending the chase was not her goal—at least not just yet.

Based on Shalby’s description of Mezzalura’s group, they did not seem to be attached to good old Ben; if she wanted information, and thought John could give her something more valuable than Shalby’s life, she would probably make the trade. The staged cab chase on the way to the woods told him they were not afraid to take a loss if they could get something out of it. He knew that trading Shalby’s life for an opportunity at the information she wanted would be just one more maneuver in the chess game she had been playing with him all night—as cold and calculated as trading a pawn for a queen. John looked at the cabbie and wondered whether the man had sat outside Shalby’s apartment, waiting for the fat old cop to die.

“I don’t have all day my friend. Do you need a ride?” the cabbie beckoned again.

“Uh, no. We’ll walk, sorry,” John replied, backing away.

The cabbie shrugged, and replied, “Suit yourself.”

As the cab rolled away, Amy asked, “Unless this place is a few blocks away, you’ll never make it hobbling on that ankle. Now what do we do?”

John no longer had a badge that would allow him to commandeer cars, and while public transportation was always available, it would be a poor choice if people were following him. They could easily trail a slow-moving bus. Even more problematic, was the idea that a tail could reference publically posted bus routes, move other associates into place along the stops, and then pass the bus along like a baton. It would be impossible to spot a tail with an ever-changing face. John needed another way, and he turned to the parking lot behind him.

The closest car was an old Chevy pickup. At first, he thought the paint was cream, or a dirty white, but then he realized that years of exposure to the sun had bleached its once yellow paint. Numerous rust spots dotted the truck’s body and bed and gave the impression that the vehicle might fall apart at any moment. John estimated the truck’s total value was less than the cost of an anti-theft device. It was perfect.

John hobbled over to the elderly pickup and tried the door. It opened. On the crust-ridden floor underneath the driver’s seat lay a hammer, utility knife, and blue-handled screwdriver.

“John, don’t even think about it,” Amy admonished.

“Come on, get in. With the door unlocked, and a screwdriver inside, the owner’s practically begging us to take this old thing. We will probably be doing him a favor, since he’s probably going to get a new truck out of this. Anyway, if the department doesn’t pay for any damage I do, a wreck like this is all I can afford to pay for myself.” John tossed the shovel into the truck bed, and took the crowbar with him into the truck cab.

Amy sighed in disgust and made her way around to the passenger door.

John had watched countless police training videos on how a thief could hotwire a car in mere seconds, so he knew this would be a quick process. He used the crowbar to pound the screwdriver into the cover of the steering column. On the third strike of the crowbar, the cover broke loose; John quickly pulled it free and threw it onto the floor. He pounded the screwdriver into the ignition switch and pried the switch out of the column. Now that he had everything in sight, he knew exactly what wires that he needed. He made the correct connections, and the truck engine started to sputter.

“At least we didn’t have to go back into the store for a screwdriver,” Amy groaned.

The truck rolled forward slowly. John removed his foot from the pedal and waited for the engine to finish coughing as it burned off the excess fuel. When the engine finally started to purr, John stepped on the gas slowly.

He smiled at Amy, and said, “There’s a bit of an art to driving this thing.”

“Yeah, you’re just like Picasso.”

“We’ll get there just fine. The graveyard’s not far, only a few minutes.”

“It’s not even nine o’clock, and I’ve already helped you wipe someone’s blood off of yourself, stolen a car, and started on my way to disturb someone’s grave. This is just wonderful.”

John focused on the renewed coughing of the engine, rather than the griping of Amy. He listened a second or two as the engine worked through a sputtering fit.

“Come on, Amy, just enjoy the sweet ride. It will be over soon.”

“Sure it will,” she retorted. “The exhaust fumes in here are awful. It smells like we’re leaking gas.”

“I know.”

She laid her head back and closed her eyes, then asked, “How far is it?”

“Only a couple of minutes; we’ll be there before you get to sleep.”

Amy let out an exasperated breath and then sat up. After digging in her purse a few minutes, she pulled out a small pencil. She looked for a mirror and finally settled for the one on the side of the truck. She rolled down the window, adjusted the mirror, and started to apply the eyeliner.

John’s face contorted in bewilderment. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“That’s not the most important thing we need to think about right now.”

“Look, it will make me feel better, and I’m not hurting anything.”

“I was using that mirror.” John realized that this was a weak plea, but he was trying to think of some reason, any reason, to make her stop, and thereby prevent her from poking her eye out.

“You have two other mirrors, use them,” she snapped.

The truck bounced in and out of a pothole. John darted a quick glance, half expecting to see the sharp pencil impaled in Amy’s eyeball. It was not.

“I don’t need to run you to the hospital right now to get a pencil removed from your eye. Besides that, I’d like to have as many mirrors as possible to see whether somebody is trying to roll up on us and pop some lead into our asses.”

“I’m almost done.” She calmly capped the small pencil and dropped it into her purse. After digging in the purse a bit more, she pulled out a compact and began dabbing foundation on her cheeks. “If it makes you feel better, I can’t do my lipstick. I have no tissues left to blot with; you used them all to sop up blood.”

“How selfish of me,” he sighed.

He failed to fathom why makeup was so important to women. If the truck took one unexpected bounce in the wrong direction, Amy would be scrawling liner on an eye-patch.

He tried to focus on driving, but as he passed through an intersection, he looked to his left to see a woman touching up her lipstick. He assumed it must be some sort of telepathic feminine solidarity. At least, he thought, she was at a stoplight; about once a year, a patrolman would tell John a story about a woman causing an accident because she was putting on her greasepaint while the car was actually in motion. He wished the state legislature would stop worrying about people using cell phones in cars, and instead focus on laws against the application of cosmetics when behind the wheel. He calmed himself with the thought, “Makeup doesn’t kill people; self-absorbed morons kill people.”