Page 34 of Sting
As she massaged feeling back into them, she asked, “What is this place?”
“Looks to be some kind of multipurpose garage. Today, it’s a hideout.”
The corrugated tin roof had seen better days. The walls were constructed of wood, unpainted and weathered. Daylight squeezed in between the vertical slats and shone like tiny spotlights through the knotholes.
For the most part, the cavernous space was empty, but a large oil stain in the center of the concrete floor indicated that at one time it had housed a piece of machinery or a vehicle of some sort. A stack of bald tires occupied one corner. Some fishing gear including a net hung from pegs nailed into one wall. There was also a bow, the string attached at only one end. She didn’t see any arrows. An outboard motor lay on its side against one wall. The end of one of its rusty blades had broken off, and the engine casing was covered with grit and cobwebs.
When her gaze came back to Shaw Kinnard, he was inserting a battery into the back of a cell phone. Her heart spiked with optimism. “Is that mine?”
“Mickey’s.”
“Where’s mine?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said. “I hid it, but not in the same place that I hid its battery or the car keys.” He spread his arms. “You’re welcome to search all you want. You won’t find them, and even if you did they wouldn’t do you any good.” He raised his shirttail to reveal that his pistol, without the sound suppressor, was still holstered on his belt. He watched the phone’s screen, waiting for it to boot up.
“The police can trace cell phones,” she said.
“Yes, but this has a disposable SIM card. Brand-new. Mickey put it in yesterday morning before we left New Orleans for Tobias. He’s called only one person on it, and only one person has called him.”
She didn’t have to guess who. “Are you going to call him now?”
“No. I’m gonna let him call me.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He already has. Five times.” He turned the phone to where she could see the call log. Caller Unknown had in fact called several times. “He’ll call.” He slid the phone into his breast pocket, where he had secured the slip of paper with the phone number on it.
“That moron with the skull on his shirt can verify that everything I told you was the truth, that he was only trying to pick me up and that I didn’t know he was sneaking me his number. You can call him using Mickey’s phone.”
“Bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Because by now the police will have questioned everybody who was in the bar at the time of the killing, including him. Especially him, since the two of you were so chummy. His phone was probably confiscated during questioning. So if I call the number he wrote down for you, and it does turn out to be his, a cop will be on the other end.”
“But with a disposable number—”
“The police have their ways and means. I’m not taking any chances.” He frowned ruefully. “Sorry. You probably had your heart set on me making a mistake. I don’t make mistakes.”
His sympathetic, patronizing tone infuriated her. “You’ll make one.”
He looked even more regretful over her self-delusion.
“You have to sleep at some point.”
“That’s true.” He grabbed her hand and towed her toward the door of the enclosure, which he’d left standing open after driving the car through. “You need to see this.”
The door was wide, like a barn door. A broken padlock dangled from a loose hook, which accounted for the loud clanging; he’d taken a tire iron to it. The oversized hinges were corroded with rust.
He pulled her through the opening to the outside. “Take a good look at the middle of nowhere.”
Her heart sank, because the landscape beyond the derelict structure couldn’t be more accurately described—and it looked exactly the same as the swampy landscape they’d left hours before. He must have been driving in circles all night, not only since he’d blindfolded her, but from the time he’d stuffed her into the car and left the beer joint on the banks of the bayou.
The narrow gravel road on which they’d arrived bridged a ditch at least twenty yards across. It was filled with water so opaque and ominously still that its depth was impossible to gauge. On the far side of the ditch, the road disappeared into a grove of cypresses and hardwoods that blotted out the daylight, creating a deep twilight beneath branches draped with forlorn-looking clusters of Spanish moss.
“And behind us…”
He pulled her along to the corner of the building, which she saw backed up to a body of water similar in viscosity to that in the ditch. It wound through stands of trees and around spits of land, creating a seemingly endless labyrinth of channels extending all the way to the horizon in every direction.
