Ken Douglas - Scorpion

There was no panic. No one screaming, no one pushing, no one fighting to get off. They’d cheated death and they all knew it.

She watched as Broxton flicked open his seatbelt and stood. He stepped over her and bent over and gathered up the contents of the fallen briefcase and filled it. Other passengers were picking up around themselves, standing and stretching, the dangling masks, the only sign that this flight had been any different from any other.

Broxton gave the child a smile and Maria saw the gratitude in the little girl’s eyes. He handed the briefcase to her father and received a smile back for his kindness. Then he pulled his carry-on bag from the overhead locker.

“ I’m staying at the Hilton,” Maria said. “Maybe we could have dinner or something.”

“ I’d like that,” Broxton said. Then he asked her if she needed any help getting off the aircraft. She wiggled her foot. It didn’t really hurt very much anymore, but she nodded anyway. A small kind of fib, but she was still shaken up and she wanted to stay with him just a little longer.

Ten minutes later they were inside the terminal. Broxton had an arm around her waist, even though she didn’t need any help walking. She was dragging her bag on its trolley. He had his bag slung over his right shoulder. Then he froze. She saw him bite into his lower lip, saw the smile slide off his face, felt the spike that must be knifing through his heart.

She turned to see what he was seeing.

He was staring at a rack of newspapers, studying the front page of the Trinidad Guardian, caught by a color picture of a smiling blue-eyed blonde with her arms wrapped around the man from the plane, the prime minister’s body guard, Kevin Underfield. For a second she thought the blonde woman resembled the Barbie doll he’d handed back to the little girl. She was smiling up at the man and he was smiling at the camera, like he was the cat that just swallowed the canary. Then she read the headlines.

ARE THERE WEDDING BELLS IN DANI’S FUTURE?

“ Your girl?” she asked.

“ My girl,” he said.

Sheriff Earl Lawson heard the buzzing of the flies a few seconds before he inhaled the repugnant odors of dried blood and human feces. The nauseating smells filtered through dry and dusty air and assaulted him as surely as the plague of flies that attacked his face, tickling, biting, itching. Frantically he tried to move his hands to brush them away, but couldn’t. He shook his head back and forth, but it didn’t seem to bother them. He tried to move, but he was frozen in place, wedged in tight or paralyzed. Shivers tingled along his spine, sweat fed the flies on his neck and face.

He opened his eyes and was swallowed by the darkness. He strained to see, but flies attacked his open eyes and he forced them shut in an effort to keep them out. He fought a rising urge to scream. He squeezed his eyes into slits, trying in vain to see some light. Nothing but flies and more flies. The constant buzzing, combined with the roasting heat, made him feel like he was in an oven being baked alive, the pig in the pit, buried for the luau, flies on his face instead of an apple in the mouth.

He tried to speak, to call out, but couldn’t. Something was wrapped around his face, wrapped around the back of his neck, wrapped around his mouth. He forced his tongue between his lips and touched something sticky. Tape. His mouth was taped shut.

He struggled to bring a hand up, to pull it off, but his arms were frozen behind his back. He moved his wrists. Handcuffs. He tried to roll over, to bury his face into whatever he was laying on, anything to keep the flies off. They were at his nostrils. He felt one crawling in and he snorted it out, but it came right back, it or another, there seemed to be thousands. Terror gripped him. They were going to flood up his nasal passages, he was going to drown in flies.

No, the thought screamed at him, no, not like this. He fought for control, fought against the rising panic, fought the fear, fought the terror, and like a scalded snake, he bucked his body and managed to flop onto his side. That chased the flies away from his face and gave him the renewed energy for another jerk and twist. Then he was on his stomach, face against an oily, dusty carpet. In an instant the flies were back, but with his face pressed into the carpet they couldn’t get up his nose or into his eyes, but they were at his ears and on the back of his neck, crawling under his shirt.

Where was he? What happened? What went wrong?

Then he remembered the briefcase and shooting Johnny Lee Tyler. Somebody smacked him in the back of the head. Kids must have had an accomplice. How could he have been so stupid? There must have been two cars, of course. Darren’s father, it had to be.

He wondered if they got Jackson, too. They must have, otherwise he’d be home counting the cash. They must have come in that garage quiet and careful. Must have snuck up behind them. One clobbered Jackson and the other got him. He tried to slow his breathing, tried to think. There had to be a way out. He wondered again where he was and how long he’d been unconscious.

His legs weren’t straight. Before he’d rolled over they were bent at his side, now they were bent unnaturally and uncomfortably against something, a roof of some kind. He tried to straighten them, but they were wedged firmly against whatever he was encased in. He thought of a coffin and shuddered, but it couldn’t be, not with the flies. Besides, it was too big.

He heard the sound of an engine starting. Then he felt movement. All of a sudden he knew where he was. The car hit a bump or went down a curb, then accelerated, throwing him toward the back of the trunk and scattering the flies. He smacked into something warm. Not warm like human warm, but not cold like stone either. Something in between. A dead man turning cold.

Johnny Lee Tyler, Darren or Jackson. He wondered who, and he shivered, despite the heat. Maybe all of them were in here with him. Maybe one of them was alive, like him. Maybe Jackson. Between the two of them they could get out of anything. He moaned through the tape, a mournful sound, like a poisoned dog.

No answer.

He moaned again, louder.

Still no answer. Whoever was in the trunk with him was dead. He tried to think. The man next to him was dead, and he wasn’t. That was fact. Again he tried moving his legs, but still he couldn’t. They were tied together. Whoever taped, cuffed and bound him obviously wanted him alive. That was a good sign. You didn’t go to that much trouble with a man if you wanted him dead. He wondered what they wanted with him, what they’d ask of him.

But he didn’t wonder about what he’d do for them, because he knew the answer. Anything.

Please, God, let me make it.

A spasm of cold fear shot through him as he sucked hot air in through his nose. The dry air brought along other smells besides the coppery scent of blood and the revolting smell of shit — grease, oil, dust and death. He fought the rising bile. To vomit now was to die. He thought about death for a second and he wanted to scream and rage, but he was trussed up tighter than a rodeo calf.

Please, God, please.

The car accelerated, swerved, fishtailed and he tasted the rising dust as it swirled around in the trunk. He felt something slam into the back of his head and he wanted to cry out, because he was butting heads with a dead man.

Please, God, please.

Then the car was on the pavement and going fast.

It made another hard right and he pulled his head to the side to avoid smacking into the body again, and he banged his head into something harder, something made of metal, like a jack or a tire iron.

“ Shit,” he murmured through the tape, angry now, and ashamed. He tried to think, but the shame rode over rational thought. He was Earl Lawson. Big Earl Lawson. Sheriff, sportsman, strong as an ox, tough as they come, hale and hearty, leader of men, ex marine, and now a coward. They’d broken him in seconds. All it took was a few flies, a dead man and a trunk and he was whimpering like a woman, praying to a god he didn’t believe in.