Deep-Fried Homicide (The Laurel Falls Mysteries Book 1) (24 page)

“How long have you been in this, Dooley?” Logan asked. Dooley wasn’t that smart and if they were quick and smart, they might just get out of this with their skins.

“Almost from the start. I caught on right after they started digging at the cemetery. I took one of my men’s shifts one night when his wife went into labor and I noticed a truck pull out of there with a load of dirt. I knew there hadn’t been nobody die in town for a while, so I figured something was up. I went in there to arrest ’em, but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, if you know what I mean.”

“So,” Rick began shakily, “you took the bribe and just let it all go on under the town’s noses. They kill Horace too? Were you in on that?”

Dooley actually looked sad for a minute. He hung his head and shook it slowly back and forth. “I didn’t know about Horace until after it happened. He apparently got a whiff that something was going on in his cemetery and he barged right in on ’em. If he had come to me first, I would have cut him in. But…ah well!”

“Ah well!” Rick felt his back tense and his hands fidgeted in the air, wanting to become fists. “You just let them get away with it. They’re running guns right through the center of town and they killed Horace to cover it up. And you just let it happen.”

“First of all, they ain’t running guns, you dimwit. They’re cooking meth. A ton of meth. You ever figure out what a ton of meth sells for? I’ll tell you. It sells for enough that my cut of it is five million dollars. I’m due to retire in a few years, Rick. And life don’t go well for a retired cop living just on his pension.”

“Well, you’ll be living high on the hog now, won’t you?” Rick wanted to leap across the distance between them and choke the life right out of Dooley; choke him until his eyeballs exploded from his head and his hands curled up into little balls.

“I will. And if nobody had poked their nose into things, it would have been a victimless crime. They would have cooked a little meth, shipped it out to the dealers, then divvied up the money. Not a single soul would have been any the wiser. Now I got a dead caretaker and two hostages to figure out. Actually, three hostages, since they got your wife down in the tunnel.”

“If they’ve hurt her, I swear to God…” Rick’s face had gone a dangerous shade of red. For a moment, even he thought he might do something stupid like rush Dooley. Then he calmed himself.

“You ain’t doing nothin’,” Dooley sneered. “Now, get down on your knees and put your hands behind your backs.”

Rick and Logan looked at each other and, almost imperceptibly, Rick raised and then lowered his elbow an inch. Logan nodded. Then they were struggling onto their knees, their hands slipping around so that they rested on the smalls of their backs.

Rick and Logan had been around guns and had cuffed enough people that they knew. They just knew. And they waited. As soon as they heard the sound of jangling cuffs, they spun as one, Logan laying a tight hold on the barrel of the rifle and Rick lashing out with a vicious right cross.

For a brief moment, Dooley tried to maintain his grip on the rifle. The two men had known that he’d have to tuck the rifle under his arm in order to produce the cuffs and restrain the hostages. Logan was big and strong and the suddenness of his movement left Dooley with only two choices: hold onto the cuffs or grab onto the gun with both hands. The power with which Logan yanked on the gun pulled him off balance a bit and sent a wave of pain shooting across Dooley’s chest. The gun slipped free and Logan flipped it, aiming it at Dooley.

Rick’s prize-fighter punch sent Dooley’s jaw jutting off in the opposite direction from the rest of his head and, he was sure, loosened a few teeth to boot. The man’s head snapped around and Rick saw him fall, arms reaching to the heavens as he tumbled toward the ground. When he hit, he was out like a light.

Logan shoved the gun up under his chin for good measure and gave it a little shove. “You have no idea how bad I want to pull this trigger right now.”

Rick put a hand on Logan’s arm and shook his head. “I know, pal. But let’s just cuff him and let the courts sort it out. Prison isn’t kind to cops, you know?”

Logan nodded and then bent, grabbing one of the lost pairs of cuffs. Rick took the other and together, they bound the man’s ankles and wrists, left wrist to right ankle, right wrist to left ankle. There was no way he would escape after that.

With a nod of approval, Rick said, “Now, let’s get Rachel out of that hole in the ground.”

Chapter 12

E
verything in the tunnel had exploded into action and for a moment, it was like an episode of the Keystone Cops. Rachel’s hands were still bound by the partially intact rope but she managed to lever herself to her knees and now she simply stood there, watching and listening.

Once the cooks had taken off toward the cemetery end of the tunnel, she had been left to her own devices. There were voices and noises coming from both directions now, though, and she wasn’t sure which way she should go. Heck, she wasn’t even sure if she
should
go.

About two minutes after the cooks had vacated, the men from the beach exit ran past her at breakneck speed. They spared not a glance as they ran past, bound for where, she didn’t know.

There were burners still lit on the main lab table and Rachel went to it. She had no idea just how shaken she was until she tried to remove one of the beakers from its burner and saw her hands trembling. For that matter, both her arms were trembling, right up to the elbows. But she managed to get the beaker safely onto the table, then adjusted the burner so that the flame was much higher and thinner.

She wasn’t sure how it would go, whether she would end up free and burned or merely free, but she knew she had to get that rope off. She pulled her wrists apart as hard as she could and cocked her hands backward to their full extent. Then, gradually, she lowered the rope toward the tip of the flame, not wanting it to get too close to her wrists for too long.

The heat hit before the ropes reached the flame and she bit into her lip. She had burned herself horribly one day while removing a large casserole from the oven. She still bore the scar from it and the pain from that burn had lasted for months. Now, she was risking a much worse burn. But she gritted her teeth and let the rope dart down into the flame. A bit of the fiber caught and smoldered, then fizzled out. She tried again but the heat of it was just too much to bear.

Near hysterical now, she looked around for something sharp, something that could be used to cut the ropes. There seemed to be nothing in that lab that would do the job, and then she spotted it. Next to the pile of large boxes was a barrel full of heaven knew what. And on top of that barrel was a utility knife. She ran to it and grasped it firmly in one hand, using the fingers of her other hand to work the blade out of the end. It was old and rusty and the blade looked dull. She doubted it would cut a decent steak. But she clenched it in her hand and worked the blade furiously back and forth over the rope, watching as it ate through several fibers at a time.

She had made better progress by picking at the fibers with her fingernails. Frustration boiled up and she almost screamed and threw the knife. But she kept at it, sawing faster, nicking her wrist twice, but finally working the rope down to where the remaining strands could hold her no longer. That last pull at her wrists popped the rope in two and it fell uselessly to the ground.

“Ha!” she spat at the rope, then dropped the knife to the table.

At that moment, both the cooks and the first group of men ran past once more, this time from the cemetery toward the beach. Whatever they had originally been running to, something had chased them back.

The voices from either end were getting louder and Rachel thought she heard a gunshot. Sound echoed horribly in the confines of the tunnel, so she couldn’t be sure. Someone even worse than the thugs who had captured her were in that tunnel and now she was caught between the warring factions.

Her mind spun with possibilities. She might be able to get back to the hole through which she had fallen, but then what? She couldn’t reach it to climb out. And it would take her several trips to carry enough boxes and barrels to that hole that she could climb on them and escape…
if
she could lift those boxes and barrels.

She had almost decided to run toward the cemetery and take her chances when a lone figure ran into view. His face was taut and pale and his eyes were those of a trapped wild animal. He took no care with her, simply grabbed her arm and wrenched her hard toward the far wall where the boxes were.

The large metal trunk sat next to the barrel and the man kicked it open. Inside were several small boxes, some tools, and a first aid kit. He bent to removing these, casting them away rapidly and then shoving Rachel toward the trunk.

“Get in!” he yelled and gave her another shove.

She stepped in quickly, confused but ready to trust him, for some reason.

The trunk was large enough to fit a stack of twin mattresses four deep. Once her feet hit the bottom of the trunk, the man placed his hand on top of her head and pushed. “Lay down. Hurry!”

She did as she was told and the man climbed in next to her, spooning, for lack of a better word, as he placed himself between Rachel and the front of the trunk. He shut the lid and whispered to her, his voice oddly deadened by the confines of the trunk.

“Don’t move and don’t talk. This’ll be over in a few moments.”

“What’ll be over?”

“Shh! What part of ‘don’t talk’ don’t you understand?”

She said not another word as she lay there, in the dark, pressed between the back of the trunk and a strange man who had, she surmised, just saved her life.

“S
hould we just go through the hole or do you think we should go in from the beach?” Logan asked, peering down into that dark, gaping hole in the ground.

“There’s no telling where they’ve got her down there,” Rick said thoughtfully. “And it’s a hell of a long tunnel.” He scrubbed the back of his hand over his chin and stared at the ground. “It would probably be better to sneak in from the cave. But I don’t think the guns will do us any good. One shot and they’ll be onto us.”

“Jungle warfare it is!” Logan declared. “But I’m keeping the guns on me just in case.”

“Agreed.”

The two men marched off toward the beach. The truck would have been quicker, but they didn’t want to alert any of the guards that might still be around the cave. Best to go in overland, nice and quiet, and take them by surprise. They were amazingly quiet for two such large men and they managed to hike through the woods and down the path to the beach without anyone knowing they were there.

The sky was overcast; the moon a Cheshire Cat’s smile. They hugged the rocks as they closed in on the cave, wanting to keep themselves in as much darkness as possible. Walking in the sand requires special talent but walking quietly in the sand required training. Boots lifted straight up and went straight down on their toes, minimizing slippage and the tell-tale crunching of grit beneath them.

They had rounded the first outcropping of boulders near the mouth of the cave and everything still felt right. They were aware but not paranoid, not easily freaked out. Earlier, they had scouted The Point and made sure that no guards had been posted there to keep a lookout on the cave mouth below. Now, they had simply to round that large pile of boulders and slip into the cave. Then they would be mostly home free.

As they rounded those boulders, a curious thing happened. Logan happened to glance over at Rick, checking to see if he was ready to move into the cave proper. As he did so, he spotted two reds dots on Rick’s chest. Looking down, he saw there were two more on his own.

“Snipers,” Logan whispered, pointing at his own chest.

Rick looked, first at this friend’s chest, then his eyes, and he knew they were done for.

What happened next was fast and furious and seemed to take on a life of its own.

O
utside of that trunk, the world had exploded into a cacophony of noise and movement. Voices yelled in anger and in fear, things were toppled and smashed. Twice, someone or something bumped into the trunk in which Rachel lay, making her clamp her hands over her mouth in order to fight back a cry. The man beside her was as still as stone and twice as silent. She figured he had done this before. His nerves were unshakeable.

The sound of exploding glass made her wince and she feared that an explosion might follow. She didn’t know much about cooking meth, but she knew that the chemicals involved were volatile and tended to explode more often than not. It had never been part of her life plan to die in a meth lab explosion.

It went on forever, or so it seemed to Rachel. If the TV shows she watched had any degree of accuracy, no one would fire a weapon in the vicinity of all those chemicals. That much was in her favor. Little else was.

Someone large and with a deep voice came to stand near their trunk then. He yelled orders and threats and apparently took every opportunity to use physical force on the others.

“Get down! On your knees! On your knees now!”

Rachel quivered and out of instinct she put a hand on the man’s arm. Then he did the most peculiar thing. He reached out and gave her hand a squeeze and a pat. That and nothing more.

There were yells of complaint and threats of lawyers bandied about outside. Faces were punched as the unmistakable sound of flesh hitting flesh could be heard. Rachel listened hard, waiting for the moment that she would hear a familiar voice. There was really only one voice Rachel wanted to hear: Rick’s.

R
ick and Logan stood in a halo of bright light, hands raised to shield their eyes from the spotlight. Voices yelled, some carrying more than others. Seemingly out of nowhere, men appeared on every side of them, guns raised, voices angry and panicked at the same time. Out of experience, Rick and Logan shot their hands into the air and two men raced in to relieve them of their weapons.