Hunt for the Lost Treasure

Chapter 24 — Maria's Mayhem

Maria was beginning to get worried. She hadn’t heard back from Beck in over three days. He was supposed to let her know when he had received their fee from Karsten and then returned to pick her up. She wasn’t supposed to kill Mrs. Beach until he’d secured the money for Purdue's trade. That way they would have another hostage to work with if things went south for their plans.

It was beginning to be very taxing on Maria's frail emotional state to take care of a hostage for this long. There was a reason why she did the technological spying and left the people skills to her boyfriend — Maria had spent much of her life in rehab facilities and nuthouses for being a bit on the reckless side when it came to the security of other human beings.

When she was twelve she’d spent a few months in juvenile detention for killing the neighbor's cats and hanging them from nooses in her mother's yard. When she was seventeen she’d slit a man's throat with a beer bottle at a bike rally, but got away with no witnesses. She was an avid admirer of hardcore pornography and snuff films and resorted to cutting when she became really unhappy.

Now she had to babysit a living thing she felt nothing for — Mrs. Sylvia Beach — the woman who begged her for all sorts of favors from the other side of the door all day. It drove the anti-social Maria insane to listen to Sylvia's incessant imploring and weeping.

“My God, you are spoiled!” Maria roared from her chair in front of the monitors.

“I just need to go to the toilet, Maria,” Sylvia explained. “I won't be long.”

“Hold it. I'm on the phone,” Maria barked. In front of her the screens streamed Nina Gould's house in Oban, still revealing absolutely no movement since her man had grabbed Purdue almost a week before. In her hand she was holding her rigged cell phone, the one she used for scrambled communication with Beck, and what it revealed for the umpteenth time was just too much for her. By the tone it sounded she knew that the apparatus inside had been destroyed completely, otherwise it would have given her a Morse code signal that Beck was just offline or away from the device.

“Please, Maria!” Sylvia moaned.

“Piss in a cup, you annoying brat!” Maria sneered, feeling a terrible despair embrace her, a lonely sense of loss she could not describe.

It had been a long time since she’d received any feedback from him and it was time to do something about it. As usual, it was raining in Glasgow and even the pizza man was tardy with Maria's delivery. “Should have gone out to buy food myself,” she grunted. “Would have given me a goddamn break from this bitch, for one thing.”

The feisty Maria took the Glock Beck always left her for protection and jerked open Sylvia's door, finding the doctor's wife cowering on the stained sleeper couch, the only furniture in the room. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot when she peeked over her folded arms.

“Come on, then!” Maria snapped. “Take a leak and wipe your nose. Jesus. Clean yourself up a bit. We are going out.”

Terrified that this was the drive to her execution, Sylvia started sobbing hysterically.

“Please, no! I just want to go home! I won't tell a soul about this, Maria. Please, just let me see my children again!”

“You know, this is all probably very effective on weak-willed doctors and the like in that little village of yours,” Maria panted impatiently, rocketing toward her hostage and shoving the gun against her cheek, “but here in Glasgow that is called begging for pain. Now, you have exactly one minute to empty your bladder and compose yourself or I swear to God I am wasting you and throwing you in the Clyde, understand?”

Sylvia nodded, her face still in a horrible wince of despair. She got off the couch and Maria grabbed her by the arm to drag her along to the bathroom with the barrel of the Glock snugly nestled under Sylvia's bottom rib. “Hurry. Hoodie on.”

The road trip was ominous and balefully quiet between the two women. Sylvia was praying inside her head while remaining mute as the car raced north on the A82, just passing Balloch from a sign post they’d passed. Sylvia wanted to know where she was going to be executed, but she dared not ask. For the past hour she had managed not to provoke her unstable guardian and she hoped to keep things nice and smooth until she could break away. Maria was really good at ties, though. Unless Sylvia could find her way to a tool shed or building depot she had no chance of freeing herself from her restraints.

They still had a good two-hour trip ahead of them with the traffic and weather impairing their speed. Maria was eating the lukewarm pizza she’d had delivered at her home before they took off.

“Eat something,” Maria muttered through a mouthful of chicken mushroom pastry.

“No, thank you,” Sylvia answered as politely as she could.

“Eat!” Maria shouted. “I’m not having you ransomed if you look like shit.”

“Ransom?” Sylvia asked as her face lit up.

“Yes, you imbecile. I am going to trade you for a lot of money. Doctors are loaded, aren't they?” came Maria's rhetorical question.

“I'm going home?” Sylvia asked incredulously. Maria smiled. She was convinced that her abusive boyfriend was dead, and it presented her with new possibilities.

“Yes, you are going home… if he wants you,” Maria laughed. “By now he has gotten himself a new piece of jive and told your kids you ran away with the circus!”

“He will pay anything to get me back. My husband loves me.”

“Oh save it!” Maria hissed. “Stop deluding yourself. You are just a safe shield against any scrutiny. Your only value is as his front while he hustles behind your back. Wake the fuck up. They don't love us, they tolerate us and they are willing to lie to great lengths to keep us docile and compliant so that they can safely fuck around and look pious. If he wants you back, it will be for your children, sweetie. Only to raise them for him so that he has more free time on his hands for those adolescent patients he so loves to inject.”

“Lance is not like that!” Sylvia screamed furiously. “He will do anything to get me back. Just because you allow your boyfriend to treat you like shit, doesn't mean other women are as worthless to their husbands as you clearly are!”

Sylvia saw the blood spatter against her window before she even felt the blow Maria dealt her. It took her a moment to register what had happened, but then she felt the intense agony ensue in full force under her eye.

“That is called a pistol-whip, bitch! Keep talking!” Maria raged, barely keeping the car on the road in her fit of fury. But Sylvia would not talk anymore. She felt the swelling on her cheekbone well up under her right eye, already impairing her sight through that eye. Her nose was gushing, but she used her hoodie to pinch her nose and drain any blood that escaped.

When they reached the darkening roads of the late afternoon town of Dalmally, Maria pulled over into the village. She tossed the scrambled cell phone in Sylvia's lap. “Call your husband. Tell him to wire this to those three accounts.” She gave her a piece of paper with three bank account numbers in different countries. “They are untraceable and they belong to government officials who have nothing to do with this, so if I draw the funds and I get a trace from the National Crime Agency someone innocent will be implicated.”

Sylvia hastily dialed her husband's number with trembling hands, her fingers erring four times before she got the right number punched in.

“Just remember to tell him; I know where you live,” Maria reminded her. “And Sylvia?”

“Yes, Maria?”

“Remember that I know where your children go to school, what they look like and what their names are,” Maria threatened so truthfully that Sylvia Beach started crying again. Maria was not done. “Tell him there is a gun to your head.”

“Oh, Maria, I am already causing him such duress just with this phone call. I hate lying to him to agitate him even more,” Sylvia said.

Maria pushed the Glock against Sylvia's head, silencing her in the clattering rain that pelted the car windows and roof off the railroad. She pulled back the hammer. “There. Now you're not lying.”