Hostage

“I’m not kidding. You want to spend the rest of the day cleaning vomit off the back seat?”

Vaughan eased over to the curb. She flipped the switch to activate the blue strobes on her light bar, climbed out and opened the back door.

“Hurry up,” she said.

Pretending that his wrists were still cuffed behind his back, Sozinho scooted to the edge of the seat and started dry heaving over the gutter, retching convincingly while Vaughan stood there with her hands on her hips looking down on him.

“We’re going to offer you treatment for your drinking problem,” she said. “Maybe you can turn your life around.”

A vehicle backfired a couple of blocks away. Probably a truck making a delivery over on First Street, where most of the town’s businesses were located.

It was the diversion Sozinho had been waiting for.

When Vaughan shifted her eyes in the direction of the disturbance, Sozinho clocked her in the jaw with a right uppercut. Her knees buckled and she collapsed forward into Sozinho’s arms. She reached for her pistol, but she was groggy and slow and Sozinho beat her to it. He tossed the gun on the floorboard where it was out of reach, and then he kicked off his left shoe and reached down and peeled off his sock, which had been soaked in chloroform.

He held the sock over Vaughan’s face until her muscles went slack, and then he cuffed her wrists and folded her into the back seat. All this in less than thirty seconds.

It was almost eight o’clock, and almost everyone in Hope was where they needed to be for the morning.

And hardly anyone ever used Old Slaughterhouse Road anyway.

No pedestrians, no cars driving by. Nobody had seen anything.

Sozinho went through Vaughan’s pockets and the compartments on her gun belt. He took her cell phone and a canister of pepper spray and an ID case and thirty-two dollars in cash. Knowing that the phone’s location could be tracked, he tossed it to the pavement and stomped on it, and then he grabbed the pistol from the floorboard and walked around and climbed into the driver’s seat. He switched the light bar off and put the car in gear and made a U-turn at the first intersection.

4

Retro got the call from Ashton at 8:07.

She called him on his cell phone instead of the police radio.

“I didn’t want this to go out over the airwaves yet,” she said.

Nervously.

Informally.

More like a friend-to-friend exchange instead of official police business, as if she suspected that something was very wrong but wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet.

“What’s going on?” Retro said.

“I need you to swing by the diner. Vaughan called and said she was on her way to the station with a subject in custody. That was twenty minutes ago, and she hasn’t shown up yet.”

“Why didn’t she call for backup?”

“It was nothing. Public intoxication and destruction of property. She said the guy was cooperative. What really worries me is that she’s not responding to my calls. I’ve tried the radio and her cell phone.”

“Did you get a description on the perp?”

“Yes. Caucasian with brown eyes and brown hair, approximately thirty-five years old. No ID.”

“I’m on my way over there,” Retro said. “She probably walked back inside and bought the guy a hamburger or something. You know how she is.”

“But why isn’t she answering her phone?”

“Maybe the battery went dead.”

“Okay. Give me a call when you know something.”

“I will.”

Retro switched on his light bar and headed over to Second Street, going a little faster than the posted speed limit and pulsing his siren through the red lights, trying to reach Vaughan on the radio every thirty seconds or so.

No answer.

He turned the corner and parked on the street, climbed out and saw the writing on the sidewalk and the blotches on the fire hydrant and the can of spray paint that had rolled into the gutter. He would need to call in a clean-up crew to deal with the mess, but first he wanted to find out what happened to Vaughan.

He walked around the block, didn’t see her car anywhere.

He entered the diner, which was still busy with the breakfast crowd. There was a waitress wiping down one of the tables in front, a young lady Retro didn’t recognize. He motioned for her to come up to the counter.

“Have a seat,” she said from across the room, gesturing toward the booth reserved for the Hope Police Department.

“I need to talk to you,” Retro said.

She left her bottle of spray cleaner and her roll of paper towels on the table and hurried to the front of the restaurant.

“What can I do for you, sir?” she said.

“Was there a female officer here about an hour ago?”

“Yes, sir. I served her. She ordered eggs and bacon and hash browns and toast, but then she walked outside and arrested some guy before she had a chance to eat much of it.”

“She never came back inside?”