J. Jance - Deadly Stakes

“Which gives us plausible deniability,” B. concluded.

“Exactly,” Stuart said, suppressing a grin. “That’s the name of the game.”

“Mr. Ramey,” B. said, “you are a gem, and I’m on my way to collect that phone.”

Ali awakened in the dark. She was cold and lying on her side in a moving vehicle. She could feel rough carpeting under her cheek and against her nose. She was crammed into a space that was far too small for her five-ten frame. One arm was locked under her body; her legs were drawn up into a fetal position. When she tried to straighten them, she couldn’t. There was no room to stretch out or even move from her side to a more comfortable position. Something behind her-luggage or boxes or both-made it impossible for her to move so much as an inch, even though her whole body was screaming for relief.

Ali had no idea how she had come to be there. She tried to remember where she had been and what she had been doing. She could assemble only a few broken pieces of memory. It played in an endless loop like an old newsreel, jagged and jerky. She made one futile effort to yell for help, but that came to nothing. The roar of passing freeway traffic, mostly trucks, drowned out everything. Knowing no one could have heard her, she didn’t bother expending the energy to shout again.

She shut her eyes to close out the artificial darkness, hoping that would help focus her mind and take her back to what had happened before she landed in this trunk. Someone in a trunk. Those words lodged in her brain; it seemed as though they were important and should mean something to her. Had this happened to her before, or had it happened to someone else? No matter how she tried, soon everything but the crammed trunk and the feel of scratchy carpet on her face was shrouded in a wad of thick, cottony mental fog.

She lay there for a long time, drifting between waking and sleeping and trying to put the odd fragments of memory into some kind of reasonable order. She remembered a house-a big house with wooden floors. She remembered seeing a huge fireplace with a painting over it. The woman in the picture had been wearing a bright blue evening dress-an old-fashioned evening dress, something from the fifties or maybe the sixties. Who was she? Where was she? Was she someone Ali knew? Did she have something to do with a woman in a trunk?

The more Ali tried to force order out of chaos, the more the images slipped away from her. It was like grasping at straws.

Straws. That word caught in her head and spun there like a piece of dried grass whirling in an eddy in a rocky mountain stream. What kind of straw was it? One of those that folded over, like in a hospital room? A tall thick one, like from a DQ milk shake? A tiny thin one that might show up in a cocktail from a bar? Or was it maybe the other kind of straw, like in The Three Little Pigs: I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!

Then, as suddenly as the word had landed in her brain, the whole idea of straw drifted away into nothingness. A little later, she realized dimly that the car had stopped. It occurred to her that perhaps she should try to do something about that-pound on the trunk lid or scream her head off-but she couldn’t bring herself to do either one. Lulled by a strange listlessness that was more hopelessness than anything, she fell back into a sleep that offered some blessed relief from the waking nightmare of being locked in a trunk.

Lucy Ramirez noticed the old woman in the far corner of the restaurant as soon as she came on duty at three o’clock for her four-hour afternoon shift at the Burger King in Gila Bend, where she worked as head cashier. The old woman, who looked to be years younger than Nana, Lucy’s grandmother, sat quietly in the booth, thumbing through a photo album. She seemed to be waiting for someone to bring her an order from the serving line. The problem was, no customers were waiting in the serving line.

“What about the woman in the corner?” Lucy asked Rosemary, who was closing out her register.

“No idea,” Rosemary replied. “She showed up about an hour ago. An Indian guy from the reservation dropped her off. She got out of his pickup and came inside alone. I guess she’s waiting for someone.”

Lucy settled in to work. As a single mother with three kids to support, she was grateful to have any job at all in a place like Gila Bend, where jobs were scarce. She had come back home after her divorce because she and her kids were able to live rent-free in her grandmother’s single-wide mobile home. Lucy was also grateful that Nana was willing to look after the kids once they got out of school in the afternoon. If she’d had to pay for a babysitter out of her paltry weekly paychecks, there wouldn’t have been any point in working.

Lucy had given up fighting to get money from Sam, her deadbeat ex, who had never paid so much as a single dime of court-ordered child support. The state had tried to go after him, but when Sam did bother to work, it was usually for cash under the table, so there was no paycheck to garnish. Since he didn’t mess around with bank accounts, either, the state couldn’t collect.

That was the bad news, but things were beginning to change for the better. Lucy had a new boyfriend. Tommy Grayson was a really nice guy who swore he loved her and seemed to love her kids as well. He made decent money working as a guard in the prison just up the road. He had a house that was way better than Nana’s single-wide. If she moved in with Tommy, not only would the kids be able to go to the same school, they’d be only a few miles from Nana.

In the two years since Lucy’s divorce, Tommy Grayson was her first serious relationship. And where had she met him? In the order line, of course. A Whopper Full Meal Deal, hold the mayo, and a Diet Coke. Tommy was another reason Lucy was grateful for her job. It even seemed possible that someday he would get around to popping the question. There was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that she would say yes.

When Lucy finished working through her first batch of arriving customers, the old lady was still there, sitting and studying the photo album with intense concentration. She was there later, after the minor afternoon rush of kids once school got out. When things slowed down and Lucy went out to bus tables and pick up trash, the woman was still sitting there, paging through the book. Approaching the table, Lucy could see it was a wedding album. One glimpse of the beautiful bride and the handsome tux-clad groom was enough to make Lucy’s mouth water. It looked like a fairy-tale wedding, the kind Lucy had always wanted.

“Your daughter’s wedding?” Lucy asked when the old woman looked up and noticed her.

“Oh, no, not my daughter’s,” she said. “My son’s.”

Lucy was about to leave the woman to her book when she spotted the colorful metal cane propped next to the woman on the bench seat. “Are you all right?” Lucy asked.

The woman seemed momentarily mystified. “Oh, yes,” she said finally. “I’m just fine. I’m waiting for my husband, James. I think he went into the restroom. I’m sure he’ll be out in a minute.”

It didn’t seem possible that someone could have been in the men’s restroom that long, but maybe something had happened to the old guy. If he was as old as the woman, maybe he was frail and sick and had passed out in one of the stalls. Once Lucy got back to the counter, she asked one of the cooks to check the men’s restroom, just in case.

“Nobody’s in there,” he reported. “No one at all.”

Lucy went back over to the woman in the booth. “Can I get you something?”

“A cup of coffee would be very nice,” the woman said. Then she looked around the booth anxiously. “But I don’t see my purse. Do you?”