Trapped (3 page)

She was surprised at how easy the knife entered his chest. It missed the bones of his rib cage as it effortlessly sliced sideways all the way to the hilt. The knife was long enough that the tip would be close to protruding out his back.

The look on his face was indiscernible. A mixture of shock, anger and surprise. He looked down at the handle sticking out of him. His balance lost, the driver fell back onto the tiled floor where blood seeped out of his body. Blood formed on his lips. It began to bubble.

He was dying and she had killed him. Yet she felt nothing other than one step closer to freedom.

The boy was still in the back. The rest of them were outside. She had to deal with the boy.

Melissa snatched her car keys off the floor, pocketed them and stepped over the dying driver. He moaned and rested his head back. Resignation covered his face. He knew it was over.

Melissa quietly tiptoed to the front door and turned the thumb lock to secure it. She peeked outside. Trent was in the van with the woman and the little girl. Trent had a gun. She would have to deal with that later, she reminded herself. First, the boy.

She walked back to the driver hunched over low so no one could see her from outside. He wasn’t moving. She looked up at the counter to make sure the boy wasn’t watching and then rifled through the driver’s pockets looking for a weapon. He had a gun in a holster under his left arm. She unclipped the holster and yanked the gun free.

“Get up and turn around slowly.”

The boy. He must have been in the kitchen. Now he was standing behind her.

“How did you do it?” The boy was sobbing. She heard it in his voice. “How could you?”

She eased the gun toward her waist area and started to stand.

“Hands where I can see ‘em.”

“Listen,” Melissa said. She was surprised how much talking hurt. The area where she got punched was still throbbing. Only using as little of her mouth as she could, Melissa continued. “We don’t have to do this. It was all a misunderstanding.”

Blood began to seep into her vision from the kick she got on her forehead. She hadn’t turned around yet. Only one hand was in the air, the other holding the weapon.

“No, bitch. No misunderstanding. You just killed the only man who ever loved me. He took me in when my dad threw me out. He got me this job.”

It was easy to connect the dots. “Listen, tonight is why he got you the job. So you would be able to do terrible things to people.”

“No, Kevin was all about righting the world’s wrongs. He told me about you. He said … wait a second. Turn around. Look at me!”

“Do you have a weapon?” Melissa asked. “Are you going to hurt me?”

“Damn right. Turn around or you get it in the back.”

Melissa turned slowly, rolling the gun around by her side, protected from view. The boy held a hammer in his right hand. It was high, over his head like he was going to throw a baseball.

“Is that the best you’ve got?” she asked. “There’s a whole restaurant in the back and you come out with a hammer.”

The boy was shaking. She could see the hammer vibrating in the air. His eyes were wild, darting from her to the dead man on the floor. In that moment she felt sorry for him. His age hurt him in two ways. He wasn’t mature enough to have made better decisions with whom to associate with and now, the lack of maturity made this scene even more difficult to deal with and understand. She had to disarm him, but the wild look on his face made things that much more difficult.

“Let’s talk about this. Maybe we can work something out. I know you’re frightened,” Melissa said.

“There’s nothing to work out. There’s me alive and you dead. Once that’s done, then you and me have worked out everything we’re supposed to deal with. Do not mistake my shaking for fear. I am fucking angry. I’m so gone right now that I may need to murder Trent out there for leaving you two alone. Now,” he took a deep breath. “Step to me, bitch. Come closer so I can have a good look at what a whore is like. Come on,” he said.

A large bang erupted at the front door about four feet behind the boy. As Melissa jumped, her hand holding the gun popped out of hiding. The boy had also jumped and spun around to see what had caused the noise. In that two second window, Melissa brought the weapon up to aim at the boy. He turned back to her.

“Let me in,” Trent yelled from outside.

Melissa fired. The impact of the bullet shocked him. He looked down. The hand holding the hammer lowered. Melissa held the gun ready should she need to use it again. She caught a look of absolute surprise on Trent’s face.

Blood spread slowly across the floor outward from the boy’s foot. The wound had been a lucky shot. The bullet entered in front of the ankle. His right leg shook and buckled. The hammer fell free from his hand and smacked hard onto the restaurant’s floor, bouncing twice. The boy fell to the floor beside it.

It wasn’t a killing wound. She only wanted to incapacitate him.

Melissa ran past the fallen boy to the back. White aprons hung on the wall just inside the door. She grabbed two and ran back to the bleeding boy.

“Here, wrap your lower leg with the apron’s straps or you’ll die from blood loss.”

Trent reefed on the door behind her. Melissa came up quick and aimed the gun at his head through the window. He stepped back at least two feet.

“Do not fuck with me!” she shouted. She had no idea where this side of her came from, only that now it had escaped she was quite happy to have it.

“Not by a long shot,” he yelled back and pulled out his own weapon.

As fast as he produced the gun he shot it. Glass sprayed out toward her. She screamed and ducked her head, raising her arms to cover herself. When she looked up, Trent was reaching through the broken window to unlock the bolt. An audible click told her he was in.

It all happened too fast. Things were spiraling out of control. She spun and bolted for the back of the restaurant. Two more bullets rang out behind her. One came so close she heard the wind parting as it passed her head. Once she made it into the back room, Melissa, in a frantic gesture that must’ve looked like she was trying to put a fire out, touched herself everywhere searching for a bullet hole. Her hands came back dry.

She ran past the fryer and a well-used wooden chopping table and ducked in beside the freezer door. The large silver handle was cold to the touch. Melissa pulled out the handle and eased the door open to conceal herself behind it near the wall. When they came into the back they’d figure she was hiding in the freezer. She peeked around the edge of the door. No one had followed her into the back yet.

She looked to her right at the hole where orders were passed through from the front. Trent was there, grinning like a pervert with his pants down. The problem wasn’t Trent so much. The problem was his weapon. It was aimed directly at her head. In the second Melissa saw his hand twitch she dropped down and yanked on the freezer door, hoping it would move another foot to conceal her from him. A bullet punched the door about six inches above her head.

She screamed, sprawled out on the floor and pushed off the wall with her legs. The gun extended above her head, her finger yanking on the trigger again and again. Melissa fired in Trent’s general direction. She couldn’t tell if she hit him or not. She lay spread out under the edge of a long metal table that sat like an island in the middle of the restaurant’s kitchen.

She couldn’t hear too well after the popping of the weapons. She wondered if the woman and the girl had driven away in the van yet. Without knowing how to check the gun to see if there were any bullets left, Melissa looked around for a weapon. The closest thing she saw in the back was a knife and that wouldn’t work against a man with a gun.

The freezer door remained wide open. From this angle she could see all the way to the back. She blinked and took a second look. She saw the head and part of a shoulder of the woman who had served her coffee when she had first shown up at the restaurant.

So that’s what they did with the owners.

She heard someone moan from the front of the restaurant. It sounded like the boy.

“Call an ambulance,” he shouted.

“Is Trent dead?” she asked.

“Yes. You shot him in the forehead. It’s over … please help me.”

Was he telling her the truth? Or did they just want her to stand and reveal her position?

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“You don’t.”

Whether Trent was dead or not, she couldn’t remain under the table all night. She moved her head out of hiding to peek. No one was in the hole that looked out to the front. With a last glance around the back room, she edged out farther. No one accosted her. No gun was fired.

It took her a full minute to get to a standing position. The beating of her heart seemed louder in her ears than the boy’s soft moans from the other room. A part of her couldn’t believe what had happened. It was like a dream. Or a nightmare. She also had no idea how her husband Layton was going to explain the woman Vicky.

Melissa knew on every level that tonight would completely change her life. The only way to find out how much, was to walk out of this restaurant alive. She had every intention of doing that. This had become a game humans played since the beginning of time. The Mayans beheaded the losing team, the Gladiators died in the Coliseum. On this evening, in this restaurant, people had died. The victor wouldn’t be the most agile or the most physically fit. No, tonight’s successor would be the smartest one. Melissa knew her best weapon was her mind. Right now it was honed and alert, ready to outwit her opponent.

She knew Trent wasn’t dead. No way. Her random shots were wild. It would’ve been seriously lucky for her to’ve had a direct hit. The moment she began firing, Trent had ducked back.

Now, standing slightly bent over in the kitchen, a perfect target, she only had seconds to accomplish her goal before Trent would lay down another barrage of steel projectiles.

Inching for the rear of the restaurant, she shouted to the front, “Is there a phone out there I could use to call an ambulance for you?”

“Yes,” the boy shouted back. “It’s right by the cash register. Please hurry.”

“Okay, but you’re sure Trent is dead? I don’t want to come out there and get a nasty surprise.”

“Yes, please hurry. I can’t seem to stop this bleeding.”

She grabbed a cloth that lay across one of the back sinks. After balling it up, she got into position.

“Okay, here I come.”

Melissa tossed the cloth and ran for the back door. The balled-up linen sailed through the opening over the doors that led to the front. She was three steps from the back when a hail of bullets were shot into the cloth and the wall behind it. Before her assailant could realize that he’d been duped, Melissa was already reefing on the metal bar of the back door. It opened without protest and she burst out into the night.

What surprised her the most wasn’t that she had gotten out of the building unscathed or that the idiots in the front of the restaurant were too stupid to figure out what they had allowed her to do.

What surprised her was the vehicle that sat parked in the far corner of the lot in the darkest area, unlit by any of the building’s lights.

The vehicle was a Lincoln Navigator with twenty-four inch silver rims.

The exact vehicle and rims that her husband drove.

It all came together. Layton had orchestrated everything. He was in on all of it. He hired these thugs to take care of her. That meant he knew what was in her trunk and he planned to take it. They’d been together for almost nine years. How could she not see who he really was in all that time?

She heard scuffling noises behind her. Without wasting time to turn and look, Melissa ran for the side of the building and turned the corner. A quick sprint brought her to the front of the restaurant where she saw her Cadillac and the van that was still idling beside it.

The trunk of the Cadillac was open. She knew her husband had done this. He had stolen what was rightfully hers and he wanted to kill her for it. The feeling of being so unwanted that the person you love would rather have you dead was quite debilitating. She felt a paralysis of loneliness as she stood in the darkened night and stared at the open trunk.

The night lit up in front of her. It all happened so fast. She only caught a glimpse before her eyes closed out of reflex.

The idling van had exploded into a huge fireball. Her Cadillac rocked beside it as it’s windows all shattered in unison. The force of the explosion came fast, knocking her into the air and back at least ten feet.

The gun fell from her grasp as Melissa put both hands behind her to help break the fall. She landed in a small bush, rolled backwards going over her head, and ended up on her stomach with the wind knocked out of her. After a few quick gasps, she got her breathing back under control.

The van was completely engulfed in flames. No one could survive that. Her car was starting to catch the fingers of flame.