A Field of Red (11 page)

On the benches in front of O’Shaughnessy’s, directly across the street from the trash bin, the two plainclothes cops watched while carrying on a fake conversation.

“This is bullshit,” Detective Barnes said under his breath. “They should have been here by now, if they were coming.”

Deputy Peters kept his eyes on the trash can across the street. Even though he was the youngest man on the CMPD, he knew as well as anyone that these next few minutes could be the most important moments of the investigation. “Yup. Though I’m not sure how cursing is going to help.”

Barnes looked him. “What?”

“Cursing,” Deputy Peters said. “You know it’s just a crutch, right? My mom used to say that smart people can figure out other words to say.”

Barnes shook his head and looked back at the drop location. “Well, I’m your superior, and I sure as shit don’t agree,” he said, smiling.

A young blonde woman in a short skirt exited the doors from O’Shaughnessy’s, her long hair blowing in the breeze. She turned and started up the sidewalk in front of the two policemen, and Peters noticed her out of the corner of his eyes. She was under dressed, to say the least, for the crisp weather. She was wearing a very short skirt, long brown boots, and one of those tight push-up tops that made her breasts look like dogs sitting up for a treat.

As she passed in front of the men, they both turned to look at her. She smiled at them and then stumbled awkwardly, falling to the sidewalk and cursing loudly. Her purse fell to the ground, and the contents scattered on the sidewalk—wallet, keys, money, even a deck of playing cards. Dollar bills fluttered in the air and blew away.

“Oh, come on!” she yelled, pulling at her top.

Both of the police officers stood to help her. Deputy Peters couldn’t help but notice that her small skirt had ripped in the fall. A hint of purple panties showed from underneath.

“Are you okay?” Detective Barnes asked, leaning over her. He was hurriedly helping the young woman. Peters thought he was trying to get the woman out of an active police scene.

She smiled up at him, a hand over her breasts. “I think I’m okay, but I popped out of my top!”

Barnes smiled at Peters, his eyebrows going up.

The woman fumbled at her top, her breast flattened with one hand as she worked it back into the tight shirt. Barnes and Peters gathered up her purse and the items that had spilled out. Cigarettes, the wallet, money, and a deck of playing cards, which had gone everywhere. Coins littered the sidewalk. Peters fumbled with the cards and dropped some of them as he tried to hurry, gathering them up while trying to keep one eye on the trash can across the street. It took them a minute to gather the items.

From up the street, someone was shouting.

Barnes looked up and saw Chief King and the father of the kidnapping victim. They were both running down the sidewalk in front of the toy shop, pointing.

“He’s got the bag!” Chief King was yelling. “He’s got the bag!”

Peters and Barnes turned. They saw a young man running up Main Street away from them, away from the trash bin.

He had the bag.

The young man was in his twenties, scraggly hair, and wearing a camouflage jacket. He sprinted across the street, catty-corner away from the cops and the woman on the ground, and ran up onto the sidewalk on the O’Shaughnessy’s side of the street, heading east. He ran past the Clean Soap store and ducked into the new antique store just past it.

The cops bolted after him. Deputy Peters could hear King shouting into his radio for Sergeant Burwell and the other police at the eastern roadblock to leave their positions to assist.

In moments, Barnes and Peters chased the young man into the new antique store, though the young man had gotten a good head-start. Two years ago, this had been a small video game store known as the Big Robot Game Café. Deputy Peters had been in here on a few occasions. It had been a unique, play-by-the-hour video game store, where kids paid to play video games on big screen TVs. They had occasionally held overnight events and costume parties for the youth that showed up to play, but it hadn’t taken off. Peters had dropped in once in a while to chat with the owner, who had gone on to be a writer for the local paper. The business had closed in 2010, and the space was now occupied by a new store, Elise’s Antiques.

He and Barnes burst in the door, looking around. There was no one there.

“A kid just come in here?” Barnes shouted into the store, his gun out. “Hello?”

Peters looked around. He could see the large sales floor in front of them, covered with antiques. To the left was a hallway that ran back to other rooms, and a staircase that ran upward. To the right a storeroom. Two displays of merchandise were knocked over, and a table that had been upended, its contents strewn across the carpet.

“Up the stairs!” Barnes said to Peters, pointing. Peters turned and sprinted up the wooden stairs that led to a loft area, piled high with old furniture. In one corner stood an old jukebox, and an older gentlemen stooped over it, repairing the front.

“Excuse me—did anyone come up here?” Peters asked.

The old man turned and shook his head, surprised by the interruption.

“Nope, been slow all day. Why?”

“We’re pursuing a suspect,” Peters said quickly. “He came in here and disappeared.”

 The old man nodded. “I heard something downstairs, but I thought it was the wind. You might check out back.”

Peters was confused. “There’s a back door?”

“Off the storeroom,” the old man said slowly. “There’s a curtain.”

Peters shook his head and ran back downstairs. He saw Barnes coming back up a short hallway that led to two rooms and a bathroom in the back.

“Nothing,” Barnes said. “Storeroom and three other rooms that branch off the hallway but nothing else. You?”

Peters shook his head and pointed. “The owner says there’s a back door, off the storeroom.”

Barnes shook his head. “No, I looked in there.”

Together, they bolted behind the sales counter and into a small storeroom. The room was piled high with boxes and furniture. One corner was free of boxes. The wall was draped by a floor-to-ceiling curtain.

Barnes walked over and pulled it aside. Behind the curtain was a door to the outside. Peters could see light coming in through a security peephole in the door.

“Oh, Jesus. I didn’t see it there.”

Barnes yanked the door open.

Behind the antique store was a large, unkempt lot. The last time Peters had seen it, the lot had been filled with scrub brush and gravel, but the new occupants of the shop had converted half of it to an outdoor shopping area. Old doors leaned up against the adjoining buildings, and vintage bathtubs and shutters, marked for sale, hunkered in the short grass. A low fence ringed the merchandise. It was broken only by a hinged gate that stood open, leading to the other half of the back lot, nearest the alley, used for employee parking.

Across the alley, which ran east to west, was the large parking lot for the new A Cut Above Hair Studios. He remembered the parking lot, which had caused quite a bit of controversy related to its previous owner, a small grocery store. Across Dow Street from the parking lot, another alley ran south away from downtown and away from any roads.

In that alley, Peters saw a car, racing away. It looked like an old Mustang.

“Barnes, look,” Peters said, pointing.

Detective Barnes cursed under this breath and tabbed the radio at his shoulder. “Dispatch, suspect escaped—he ran out the back of the old Big Robot. He must’ve had a car waiting here by the alley. He’s in an orange Mustang, 70s or 80s, headed up the alley between First and Second streets.”

Chief King came on the radio.

“Roger that, Barnes. Burwell, other units head south to Broadway to intercept. He’s probably heading for Canal Road and points south and east.”

Peters nodded. It was just about the only way out of town heading south on that side of the tracks.

“Meet you out front,” Barnes answered into the radio, shaking his head.

They walked back inside, thanking the proprietor, who was picking up merchandise that had been knocked over. They apologized for the excitement, then walked out to the front steps and saw Chief King, who looked at them.

“How did you lose him?”

“There was a back door I didn’t know was there,” Barnes said. “The space has several small rooms, which we cleared first. He must’ve had a car waiting in the lot behind the store.”

Peters spoke up. “When it was the Big Robot place, I used to come in here all the time. Never knew there was a back door. I always thought it was just storage.”

King nodded.

“Let’s see,” Chief King said, starting into the store.

“I’m gonna help the girl,” Peters said.

King stopped and looked.

“What girl?”

Deputy Peters turned and looked. The sidewalk in front of O’Shaughnessy’s was empty.

“There was the girl that fell,” Barnes said, looking up the street in both directions. “She tripped and tore her skirt, and...oh crap.”

King shook his head.

“I saw her, too. She was attractive, I’ll give you that. But I can’t write this off as coincidence. She was gone when we got here, so either she recovered remarkably quickly—”

“Or she was in on it,” Barnes said.

King nodded. At their feet, several of the young woman’s playing cards skittered through the gutter to join the carpet of fallen leaves.

The car raced away from downtown Cooper’s Mill, heading south, weaving through the tight alleyway before coming out in a parking lot that fronted Broadway. George knew the town of Cooper’s Mill very well. He took Broadway to Second, turned left, then right on German and came out on Third. He turned left again, following Third until the road abruptly swerved to the right, turning up and over the train tracks behind Maple Hill Nurseries.

This had been one iffy part of the plan—if a train had been passing through town, George might have been trapped on this side of the tracks until the train was gone. Bad idea, with a big bag of money sitting next to you and the cops behind you. Fortunately, the boss had double-checked the train schedule. It had accounted for the odd time required from the ransom drop. They needed to time it so there were no trains.

Across the tracks, the road became Maple Hill and wound between several large greenhouses and warehouses behind the retail Maple Hill Nurseries operations. Maple Hill Nurseries took up dozens of acres of land on the south side of town, but nobody ever came back here, unless they worked at Maple Hill.  The whole area was taken up with greenhouses and loading docks and employee parking lots. The rarely-used road continued south, away from the greenhouses, and crossed a tiny, one-lane bridge, screened by an overgrowth of trees. Half of the people in town probably didn’t even know this bridge was there. Passing through a large stand of trees and over a thin, dark creek, the road emerged back into the sunlight, coming out on the northern edge of Maple Hill Cemetery.

The car snaked through the headstones and stopped near the exit to Hyatt Street, well south of the downtown area and the roadblocks the police officers had set up. George stopped under a large tree and idled quietly.

While he waited, he glanced over at the leather satchel. He’d been told what to do with the contents.

First, he carefully opened the bag. Even though he’d been assured against it, there was a chance there would be an explosive dye pack inside. George had been told about dye packs, which are used in nearly 75% of bank robberies in the U.S. and usually consisted of a hollowed-out stack of real bills that would explode on a timer, staining nearby money and the thief with a red dye.

George opened the bag carefully, but nothing happened. He took out one pack of money at a time, flipping slowly through it, looking for anything odd. He found a thin, metal device hidden inside one stack of money and pulled it out—it was a tiny GPS device—and tossed the money into the back. He continued through the stacks, finding several more metal devices while he waited.

After a minute, he heard the low buzzing rumble of a small, gasoline-powered scooter coming down Hyatt Street toward the cemetery. He looked up and saw the scooter with a young woman driving. The vehicle was nothing more than a push scooter but, with the attached engine, it puttered along Hyatt, moving quickly in front of St. Jude’s Catholic Church. George got out and opened the trunk. When the scooter reached the entrance to the cemetery, the woman directed it off the pavement and over to the car. She climbed off.

“Everything go OK?”

“Yup,” Chastity nodded. “But I tore my skirt.”

Indeed, her tiny white skirt was torn, showing off a stripe of purple beneath. He folded the scooter in half, lifting it up into the trunk. She straightened her skirt and climbed into the passenger seat.

The young man in the camouflage coat slammed the trunk lid and got back into the car. He put the Mustang in gear and smiled at her, then pulled the car out onto Hyatt and turned south, driving out of town.

He took Evanston and then a series of back roads, heading in the general direction of the airport.

“Don’t worry,” George said, handing her a bottle of water and nodding at the large leather bag between them. “When we get to San Francisco, I’ll buy you another one. Heck, I’ll buy you twenty. Really excellent ones. Here, I got about half of the money checked.”

She smiled and opened the bag, searching for more trackers. As she found them, she tossed the packets of money into the back. She finished searching all the money and put the trackers—they had found almost a dozen of them—back into the black satchel. She twisted the lid off of the bottle of water and dumped the contents into the bag, keeping the bottle. He drove on for another quarter mile and then, at the next corner, he slowed, so she could toss the bag into the ditch next to the road.

“That will work?” she asked.

George nodded and turned the car, heading to the airport. “The boss said the GPS trackers will lead to here, water will kill the bugs and anything sewn into the lining of the bag. By the time they search for, and find, the bag, we’ll be long gone.”

She smiled and climbed over the back. He couldn’t help but steal another peek at her panties as she wiggled over the seat. Chastity grabbed another bag, a green duffel, and started stuffing the money inside, checking each stack carefully, again, for trackers they might have missed.

They were to leave the money inside the Mustang in the long-term parking at Dayton International Airport, taking the waiting Corolla home. Someone else would retrieve the cash and probably just leave the car at the airport. It was great place to ditch a car. So many people came and went. And the boss had said that any surveillance footage of the parking lots would take weeks or months to process.

“You know,” she said from the backseat. “Once we know this money is clean, we should just keep driving, Puddin’. We’ve got the money, and this car, and…”

George shook his head.

“Nah, the boss would find us,” George said. “Even out in California. And this car is stolen anyway. No, let’s do the deal and wait for our cut, then we can leave together.”

He glanced in the mirror at her, but she wasn’t looking at him. Chastity was staring out the window, deep in thought.