“Yeah, I think I do,” I said. “Benny didn’t tell me any names, but I’m pretty sure I have it figured out.”
“Who?” Jeanine asked.
“I don’t want to say until I’m sure. I’m waiting for Morelli to get off work. I want to run it by him before I officially go to the police with it.”
I watched Barbara when I laid the trap. She didn’t look panicked. Mostly she looked like she’d had a skosh too much wine and was having a hard time focusing.
“Well, I should be going,” I said. “Thanks for the wine. This was nice. We should do this more often.”
I got in my Macan, drove around the block, and parked a couple houses down from Barbara’s house. I cut my lights and settled back to wait. In the Sherlock Holmes movies it took no time at all for the guilty person to leave their home and go to the scene of the crime to make sure everything was still okay.
After I’d waited for almost an hour, a car cruised down the street and turned into Jeanine’s driveway. Bernie was home from work. Barbara’s lights went off in her house, and I had high hopes that she’d get into her car and lead me to Grandma. After twenty minutes I decided that Barbara had gone to bed. So much for Sherlock Holmes.
I rode past my parents’ house. It was dark except for a single light in an upstairs bedroom window. I rode past Morelli’s house next. Dark. No green SUV parked in front. He was still at work.
I went home and studied the Miracle list one more time. I turned the television on to Turner Classics. A Charlie Chan movie was playing. Black and white. 1936. Maybe it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes who used the bluff to smoke out the villain. Maybe it was Charlie Chan. Maybe it was every movie detective between the years 1933 and 1945. When you watch movies late at night with a glass of wine, they tend to blur together.
Halfway through Charlie Chan I went to the kitchen for a snack and heard what sounded like a kitten mewing on the other side of my door. I looked out my security peephole. Nothing. Nobody there. The mewing continued. I opened my door and looked down at a small gray kitten.
Something went ZINNNG in my head, and when I came around I was confused and in a state of utter panic. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t see. My heart was pounding in my chest, and I was struggling to breathe. I think I was crying, but it was impossible to know for sure in the confusion and darkness. I could have been sweating. I could have been having a nightmare and nothing was real. For a moment I thought I was buried alive.
The confusion started to clear, and I inched into survival mode. One step at a time, I told myself. Breathe. Think. Hard to tell if I was blind or simply in total darkness. I saw a thin seam of light above me. I wasn’t blind. I was in a container. I could feel the sides. It had a lid, but the lid wasn’t completely sealed. I couldn’t remember being placed in a container. What did I remember? A kitten. And then a big blank space. I wasn’t in pain, so I hadn’t been hit on the head and knocked out. I’d probably been stunned. And it had been a big charge. That would mean I’d been completely out for just a few minutes. It could have been longer if I’d gotten stunned a second time. The confusion would have lasted five or ten minutes. I’d stun-gunned a lot of people, and I knew the progression of symptoms. I was okay with this. Better to be stunned than to have a concussion.
I couldn’t open my mouth. Duct tape, I thought. My hands were bound behind my back. Not with cuffs or plasti-cuffs. More duct tape. There was vibration under me. I was being taken somewhere in a truck or a van. I could sense when we stopped and when we took a corner.
Charlie Chan came through for me. My bluff had worked. I’d been abducted by the amateur. Barbara. She’d found a couple new goons to work for her, and here I was getting trucked away and hopefully they’d take me to Grandma. The troublesome part of all this was that she’d already killed a guy who’d become a liability. I didn’t have my cellphone on me. Nothing that Ranger could track. We slowed and bumped over a stretch of uneven surface. I hoped we weren’t at the landfill. That thought gave me another moment of panic.
We came to a stop, and I heard a vehicle door slam shut and another get wrenched open. My container was tipped back slightly, and I was rolled a couple feet and then dropped a couple feet, hitting hard on what I assumed was the ground. I sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like the landfill. I was tipped back again and rolled along. I couldn’t tell how many people were walking with me. There was no talking. The person dragging me was breathing heavily. Out of shape or maybe nervous and scared. There were scraping sounds, and I was jerked up a step. Just one. Door threshold, I thought. Door slammed shut.
I heard muffled speech from someone a short distance away. A latch was released, the lid to the container was opened, and the container was dumped on its side. I blinked in the sudden light and saw that I’d been stuffed into a blue recycling container with wheels. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me out. It was Bernard Stupe.
I was in a windowless room about the size of a two-car garage. Grandma was at the far end, standing beside a cot. She looked disheveled but alert. There were some water bottles and fast food bags on the floor by the cot. She was handcuffed to a chain that stretched through an open door behind her. I could see part of a toilet through the door.
“Asshole,” Grandma yelled at him.
“Shut up,” Bernie yelled back. “One more word and no more cookies.”
Grandma gave him the finger. “Cookie this, you dirtbag.”
He ripped the tape off my mouth and rolled the recycling bin over to the door.
“I didn’t see this coming,” I said. “I’m surprised you would throw in with Barbara.”
“Barbara has no part in this,” Bernie said.
“Jeanine?”
“Are you kidding me? Ms. Turn the Other Cheek and Be a Good Person? Miss Sweetness and I’m So Sorry? I don’t think so.” He went out the door and returned with a length of chain and a padlock. “I wasn’t counting on this, so I’m going to have to improvise. I thought it was all finally moving along to a happy ending, and then Jeanine came home and told me you had it figured out. She said you talked to Benny and you’d figured out who was masterminding everything. Okay, so she didn’t say ‘mastermind,’ but that’s what she meant.”
He dragged me up to my feet and over to Grandma. He wrapped the chain around my ankle and secured it with the padlock. He walked the other end of the chain into the bathroom, and I could hear him fidgeting with it.
He came out, took a pocketknife from his jeans pocket, and sliced the duct tape off my wrists. I reached out to grab him, but he jumped away.
“I don’t get it,” I said to Bernie. “Why did you hire those two guys to kidnap Grandma?”
“Zeus and what’s his name? It was a reasonable idea in the beginning. It was supposed to be that this big strong guy waits for the right moment, snatches the old lady, and brings her here to stay for a couple days. It’s calm. It’s simple. It’s relatively nonviolent. Turns out Zeus is a moron. He picks up some loser idiot at a bar and they decide to go in like a SWAT team on a suicide mission. What the heck was he thinking? He broke down a kitchen door and disrupted your mother’s ironing. They weren’t supposed to be armed. Guns weren’t part of the plan.”
“You hired the god of Thunder,” Grandma said. “What did you expect?”