“Yes,” Sherona said so quickly he blinked. She seemed to come out of her trance and sat up straighter. “The Trading Company and the diner share a common coal room—where they used to keep the coals to run the furnaces.”
“What’s the layout of the coal room, exactly, in relation to the diner?” Rill asked. He’d helped Sherona on a couple of occasions load supplies into the back room. He listened carefully while she described the interior structure of the buildings in relation to the diner storage room. It seemed that the coal room was attached to the large pantry in her storage room.
“Does Stash know about the coal room?”
“I can’t imagine why he would,” Sherona replied.
“I’m going to go tell Mulligan. It could be key information for them to have,” Rill said, standing. He paused when he saw that two more police cars had pulled up in the street, cherry lights flashing. A cop wearing a light brown uniform charged out of the driver’s seat and ran around Mulligan’s car, only to jolt backward and barely catch himself from falling on his ass when he ran straight into Mulligan’s opening car door. Mulligan began shouting at the dazed deputy.
“Oh my God, Rill, what’s going to happen to Derek and Katie and the others?” Sherona murmured behind him, obviously watching the same thing he was. She sounded desperate, and Rill understood why. It was a little like realizing Barney Fife had been put in charge of your most valuable treasure.
Rill cast a grim look over his shoulder. “It’s going to be okay, Sherona.”
He headed toward Mulligan and his bumbling crew, wishing he really believed what he’d said. Mulligan immediately started ranting at him to leave the “restricted area” or face arrest when Rill approached. He was trying his hardest not to lose his temper and find an opening to give the information about the coal room when he glanced down the street and saw Sherona was missing from the steps.
“Now, are you going to get out of here, Pierce, or should I get out my handcuffs? I’ve had just about enough of your interference.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. Sherona had just run behind the long strip of ancient storefronts that lined Main Street.
“Shit,” Rill muttered under his breath.
“That’s it. You’re under arrest for interfering with an officer of the law,” Mulligan shouted.
Rill looked down at the sheriff in mixed outrage and disbelief and staggered backward. He suddenly turned and jogged down the street.
“Set foot inside this restricted area again and I’ll arrest you for sure, Pierce,” Mulligan shouted.
Rill hardly heard him. He reached the end of the street and glanced around, wondering if any of the police were watching him. All three men were on their radios, receivers held up to their mouths, jabbering rapidly, each absorbed in his separate communications.
Rill ran across the street at top speed, wondering if he’d be too late to stop Sherona from doing something stupid.
Twenty -nine
“Do I really have to tie up Errol?” Katie asked Marcus Stash. “You know he’d be much better if he could look at one of his airplanes while we sit back here in this storeroom, Marcus.”
Stash seemed undecided and beleaguered by her request, but eventually barked out an order for her to tie Errol up and be quiet. Rill had always told her she wouldn’t know how to shut her mouth even if her life depended on it.
Katie found out for certain that was true on the day Marcus Stash went crazy.
“Why don’t you let Derek go, Marcus?” she reasoned as Stash tied her hands behind her back once she’d restrained her fellow hostages. He’d checked to make sure she’d tied the others tight. She’d thought to fight Stash when he put down his gun to restrain her, but at the last second, he told her he’d shoot Errol if she so much as moved a muscle while he did it. He set down the gun much closer to him than her, so Katie couldn’t justify anything rash with Errol’s life at stake. Still, she continued with the only weapon she had.
Her mouth.
“You can’t have meant for Derek to be caught up in this. Sherona wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t want a kid to get hurt in all this, would you?”
Stash’s blondish-brown hair seemed to stand straight up from rising agitation versus a crew cut. A sheen of sweat shone on his ruddy features.
“All right, I’ll think about it, okay? Just . . . give me some peace for a minute, will you?” he barked.
“Sure,” Katie said as she immediately began to work her nimble wrists around in the knot. Nobody tied her hands up aside from Rill, she thought irritably.
She glanced around, taking in the details of her surroundings. The fluorescent lights made everything seem surreally bright. She sat next to Errol and a sack of potatoes. The back door was at the end of a short hallway to the right of her. An enormous pantry entrance was to her right, as well, but in her vision, whereas the rear exit wasn’t. The door to the pantry was partially opened, and she saw shelves filled with cartons and cans of food. Stash had taken Errol’s crutches from him and leaned them against the wall next to the pantry.
Katie watched, trying to contain her terror, as Stash placed the switch box for the dynamite on a crate. The green light at the top of the box that flickered on and off struck Katie as very ominous. It was strange and awful to consider what it would be like to die in an explosion. She’d never see her parents, or Everett . . . or Rill again.
She’d never see her and Rill’s baby. Period.
The possibility seemed too untenable to think about, so Katie squashed the idea down until it was a distant nightmare.