Hostage

3

Hope was a small town, and the police station was only a few minutes from the diner.

Which meant Sozinho needed to work fast.

He waited until Officer Vaughan started the engine and pulled out onto Second Street, and then he opened his mouth and lifted his tongue and let the key fall to his lap. He raised his buttocks off the seat just enough for the shiny little notched cylinder to slide back to his fingertips, and then he pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and discreetly worked it around until he found the hole in the left handcuff.

He twisted the key clockwise, and the cuff popped open.

Which was quite a relief, since there had been at least a five percent chance that it wouldn’t.

Sozinho waited until Vaughan turned onto Old Slaughterhouse Road, a decaying thoroughfare with very little traffic, ready to make his move as they approached the abandoned meat processing plant. This was the most direct route from the diner to the police station, according to the man in the black leather jacket. Things might have been a bit more challenging if Vaughan had taken the long way around, but she didn’t. She hardly ever took the long way, the man in the black leather jacket had said, even though it was a much smoother ride. She liked the bumpy old short cut, which worked out beautifully for Sozinho.

“I’m sick,” he shouted. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

“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.