The van rolled on while Angie and I, we managed to establish, tried to get our bearings. I could tell from her voice that she was less than six feet away and we managed to figure out that the two guys we’d met had put bags over our heads and tied our hands behind us, then thrown us in the cargo area of the van. The bag over my head was not tied, so it felt loose, and I was trying to stand so I could bend over and make it fall off.
‘Can you see anything?’ I asked Angie.
‘No, but my other senses are heightened.’ Of course they were. ‘The thing over my head is burlap. I like the smell of burlap.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. It smells like grammar school, or something.’
The bag wouldn’t come off my head. ‘They took your purse?’ I asked. That would mean they had her gun.
‘For all the good it’ll do them.’
I knew she wasn’t really going to shoot anybody. ‘You’re right about that,’ I said.
‘Yeah. Do you think we should sit back-to-back and try to untie each other?’ Angie watches a lot of movies.
‘Do you really think that’ll work?’ I asked.
‘What else do you have to do?’ she countered. She had a point.
‘OK.’ I sat down, which made my life easier, if not less dark. ‘Where are you?’
‘In the back of a van.’
‘You’re a million laughs. If we’re going to sit back-to-back, I need to know where your back is.’
We managed to find each other’s backs, but any efforts to untie hands with hands that were also tied were, we discovered, doomed to failure. We gave up after only a few minutes.
‘They didn’t cover this possibility in law school,’ I said.
‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’ Angie, who had seemed more excited than scared the whole time we were driving on the magical mystery tour, had moved on to the next thing.
‘I don’t know. I’m hoping it’s not someplace where it’s easier to dispose of the bodies.’ I was – and I’d like to make this clear for the record – not excited. Terrified, sure. Angry, you bet. Plotting hideous revenge? I wouldn’t put it past me. But definitely not excited.
‘Hey Sand.’ Angie wasn’t concerned with where our bodies might end up, which was remarkable given that she had the better body according to pretty much any metric you could use to make your computations. ‘How come they put bags over our heads?’
She had distracted me from my self-body-shaming. ‘What?’
‘Why’d they put bags over our heads?’
That seemed an odd question. ‘I don’t know. Isn’t that what you do when you kidnap somebody?’
‘We’d already seen their faces. They’re putting us into a van that, if I remember correctly and I do, has no windows. Why’d they put bags over our heads?’
It seemed to me she was concentrating on the wrong aspect of our predicament. ‘Shouldn’t we be working on how to get out of the van?’ I asked.
‘While it’s going along at forty miles an hour? Probably not. Do you have your phone? Mine was in my purse.’
My phone! Of course! If I could call the cops, or at least Trench, or Patrick, who always seemed to be able to make anything you need appear in seconds … ‘I think it’s in my jacket pocket,’ I said.
‘Great!’ My friend, overlooking the obvious.
‘My hands are tied behind my back, Angie. Really hard to get to the inside pocket on my jacket right now, and I can’t see anything so I wouldn’t know who I was dialing.’
‘Hang on.’ Angie started to make noises that I would have associated with her only if another person, probably male, was present, and I wasn’t. ‘Dammit! I can’t walk my way out of these ropes.’
The van slowed down and I did not consider that a great sign. ‘Nothing you’ve seen in the movies is gonna work, Ang,’ I told her. ‘We’ve got to figure our own way out of here and promise never to tell it to a screenwriter.’
But the grunting went on even as the van came to a halt. ‘It’s all about my butt,’ Angie said.
‘You’ve met guys who thought so.’
‘Not the good ones.’
It felt like the van parked, possibly on gravel from the sound of it. ‘We should have been thinking of a plan,’ I said.
‘Oh, I have a plan,’ Angie assured me.
Then the van doors opened and I felt someone pulling on my ankles. I must have been facing toward the door with my back toward the cabin of the van. I thought about kicking but that wasn’t getting me out of this burlap bag (which, just so you know, smelled like burlap and that was not great) or these ropes.
The hands pulling me were not rough and calloused. I couldn’t tell whether they were different hands than had dragged me into the van. Either way, this guy was going to have some major problems with the American Bar Association when I was done with him. ‘Hey,’ I said involuntarily.
‘What?’ Angie, not my abductor.
I didn’t answer her other than to say I was all right. My hands were tied behind me and I had a bag over my head, so it’s possible I wasn’t in the best mood.
They stood me up (and I assumed Angie as well but how would I know?) on what felt like a paved surface. Then the bag was lifted off my head and I blinked in the increased light. I mean, burlap isn’t that thick.
The two men from before were standing between Angie – whose burlap sack had also been taken off her head, which probably made her think of high school or something – and me. It was like a weird sandwich, casting the two guys as filling and Angie and me as the bread.
We were no longer on the studio lot, which was not even a tiny surprise. But it was a little odd that we appeared to be in the actual middle of nowhere. It was paved, with asphalt, on the small stretch where we and the van stood, and appeared to have once been a driveway for some structure that had long been demolished and overgrown. Everywhere around us there was nothing but dirt and weeds. It was like being in the least exotic desert on the planet.
‘So let me get this straight,’ Angie said as soon as we were upright and unmasked. ‘You put the bags over our heads and drove us here, then took the bags off. Were you afraid we’d know what the inside of the van looked like in the dark?’
‘Turn around,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘We’ll cut the ropes.’
Not wishing to question our good luck but wondering whether they thought this would make the bodies look less like they’d been abducted, I turned my bound hands toward the dark-haired man. The blond held a gun on me while the one I’d decided was my kidnapper pulled a knife out of a sheath on his belt and cut the ropes.
All the clichés are true. I shook my hands and rubbed my wrists. It’s what you do when your hands have been tied. I told you that so you won’t feel that you have to experience it yourself.
As soon as my bonds were cut, the blond put the gun in the pocket of his jacket and my kidnapper turned toward Angie.
Except she was already holding her gun on him, hands still tied but in front of her. The blond, completely flatfooted, reached back into his pocket. ‘Don’t,’ Angie said. ‘I’ve never missed anyone I’ve aimed at.’ That was, I assumed, technically true, since she’d never pointed a gun at anyone before in her life. ‘Now reach into that pocket and pull out the gun using your thumb and your pinkie and nothing else.’
‘How’d you get your hands free?’ I asked her. ‘And I thought they’d taken your gun.’
‘They took my purse.’ Angie was still intent on her target. My guy, still holding the knife, was clearly trying to figure out if he should rush her. The look in her eyes convinced both of them to make no sudden moves. ‘I had the gun out of it as soon as I saw the van when we left Reeves’s office.’
‘Drop the knife,’ I said from behind the dark-haired man, who had his back to me. ‘And don’t turn around or you’re a dead man.’ I didn’t know what I meant but it sounded good.
The guy dropped the knife and I picked it up. I wanted to ask him for the sheath too. ‘Take off your belt.’
‘Sandy!’ Angie found that amusing. Meanwhile the blond-haired man had removed the gun from his pocket just like she’d instructed and laid it carefully on the asphalt in front of him.
‘Don’t be gross,’ I told her. ‘And how’d you get your hands free?’ It was worth asking again.
‘Yeah, how?’ asked the dark-haired man. ‘I tied those ropes tight.’
‘The belt,’ I reminded my kidnapper. ‘Now.’
The guy started undoing his belt. I glanced back at Angie.
‘I told you it was all about my butt,’ she told me. ‘I managed to squeeze my way out right at the end there. I’ll be sore for a couple of days but it was worth it.’
‘I’ll say.’
‘See?’ Angie exulted. ‘Sometimes the movie stuff does work.’
The dark-haired criminal had his belt off. ‘The pants now?’ he asked.
‘Ugh, no. Just give me the belt.’
He did and I removed the sheath to put the knife in. Then I made the guy take off his jacket and found a small handgun in the right-hand pocket. I put that in my own belt but did not remove it to put the knife and sheath on my waist. It would have ruined the line of my outfit.
‘OK, let’s hear it,’ Angie said. ‘Who sent you and what did they tell you to do with us?’
‘I got a call from a guy I don’t know,’ the dark-haired guy said. ‘They offered us money to take you two out here and leave you here.’
Angie and I looked at each other. That gave blond guy the idea that he had a moment to act, and Angie immediately fired directly into the ground in front of his feet. A piece of asphalt flew up and missed his head by inches. The guy put his hands up, visibly shaken.
The shot reverberated in the nothing around us for a good few seconds.
‘Get the message?’ Angie growled. The guy nodded his head convincingly.
I directed my attention at my personal prisoner, who had at one time been my captor. It’s funny how things work out when you’re with Angie. ‘This anonymous person just calls you out of the blue, doesn’t identify himself, and asks you to kidnap two women and leave them in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason?’ I shook my head. ‘Couldn’t you have gotten into at least a community college?’
‘The money was good.’ He was looking at his shoes, probably in shame.
I tied my abductor’s hands behind him using his belt. Then I used his knife to cut the ropes on Angie’s hands but made sure to leave enough length to tie her kidnapper up. We got them into the back of the van without putting our hands on them – a technique that hopefully they would learn from the next time they decide to take hostages – and locked the door behind them. The keys were actually left in the van’s ignition.
‘Those are some really bad kidnappers,’ Angie said as she slipped behind the steering wheel.
‘Be thankful they are,’ I said.
‘By the way, when I shot the ground in front of that guy?’ Angie looked sideways at me.
‘Yeah?’
‘I was aiming for his leg.’