Choke (5 page)

Louis Duckworthy had worked for the Police Department of Wymee Falls for fifteen years, achieving the rank of Detective. Some people, Immy knew, thought he had what it took to become Chief eventually. His career and his life were both cut short during a robbery at what was then still called the Double D Diner.

He had dropped in to see his brother and shoot the breeze after his shift, as he often did before returning home to Hortense and their twelve-year-old daughter Immy. Huey had been making a vegetable run, and it was assumed that Louie had entered the kitchen to wait for him. Since it was after hours and the restaurant was closed, they also assumed he had let himself in through the back door with his key.

When Huey returned from his errands, he found the kitchen door locked and his brother, shot and bleeding, on the kitchen floor. Detective Duckworthy died later in the hospital. The money till and the safe were both empty. It was the night before Huey usually deposited the week’s receipts, so the thieves netted themselves a tidy sum.

Since the back door, the kind that had to be secured with a key, had been relocked, and Louie’s key was still in his pocket, police investigators assumed the robbers had an inside accomplice. Although the murdering thieves were apprehended, the inside helper was never identified.

Immy flashed from the vision she had always had of her father, bleeding on the kitchen floor of the diner, to a vision of Hugh, dead in the same exact place. She had, of course, never seen either her injured father or Hugh’s body in that spot, but she had a good enough imagination.

If only she hadn’t left Uncle Huey on such bad terms. He wasn’t a horrible guy and had been decent to her. Immy always regarded him as a less vivid version of her father. Huey was average height, and her father had been over six feet. Huey had dull brown hair, but her father’s had been the same shiny chestnut as Drew’s and just as curly.

Uncle Huey had been so mean lately, though. He had yelled at Immy over every little thing, flaring up at the least little imperfection. In retrospect, she wondered if something had been bothering him. He was never a jovial person, but he wasn’t too hard to get along with. Usually.

That last morning Immy had knocked a bin of flour onto the floor, and Huey had almost skyrocketed through the ceiling. Immy couldn’t understand that, and it surprised her. It wasn’t as if she had never done that before. She had spilled every condiment the diner owned at one time or another, and she always cleaned up her messes. That day was no exception. She had even watered the scraggly pot of parsley he kept on the windowsill in the dining room. The poor thing got western sun and dried out every other day, but Huey insisted it be kept in the window. Live plants make the place classy, he’d say.

Since Immy was pretty sure she was going to be getting a new job, Huey’s request to work extra hours had been a good excuse to walk out. His twangy whine had followed her out the door. She would always remember that as their last encounter. What she would give to have a better last memory.

Immy looked up at the clock over the television. She had skipped lunch, and it would soon be time to pick up her daughter.

Drew ran into the house, shedding her light purple jacket, as soon as Immy stopped the van.

Immy called after her. “Wait!” She hurried into the trailer. “Drew, just go potty and put your jacket back on.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Let’s not fight, Drew. This is important. Geemaw’s in trouble at the police station.”

“Did the pleece arrest her?”

Good question. She had been there all day. Was she being questioned all this time, or was she rotting in a jail cell? “Well, I’m not sure. We have to find out what’s going on, Drew. Get your jacket back on, and we’ll go see.”

She had cased the joint earlier, just before she picked up Drew, and now Immy circled the police building twice. The air still held a nip as spring moseyed along, taking its time getting to Saltlick. She would be glad when they quit having to bother with jackets, and the grass greened up. The dry, brown ivy that climbed the side of the police station and rustled in the wind would soon turn glossy green. The station looked a lot better in the summer.

Crossing her fingers, she hoped her strategy was a good one. It might be better if Drew weren’t with her, but that couldn’t be helped. She hadn’t been able to think of a plan all day. In fact, she had been expecting her mother to call for a ride home in the morning, then in the early afternoon. Now mid-afternoon was disappearing, and still no call. Wasn’t an arrested person allowed one phone call?

Earlier, after aimlessly leafing through her PI Guidebook for hours, she had formulated a plan. It hadn’t come from the book but from a TV show she had seen about a jailbreak. The book didn’t have anything in it about jailbreaks.

The police station was a tidy, one-story brick building. The grandest things about it were the double entry doors of thick glass, surrounded by an attractive, light stone facing. Small windows ran down one side of the building, the ones near the rear heavily barred. Midway was a door. Immy eyed the barred windows.

That’s probably where Mother is,
she thought,
in one of those cells.
She pressed her lips together tight, determined to get her mother out of stir.

She parked by the side door and sat in the car for a moment wondering what she would find inside. She pictured her mother a victim of police brutality, being manhandled while helpless in handcuffs. Pictured her having her mug shot taken, having her chubby fingers pressed into sticky fingerprint goo. Pictured her writhing on the floor, being tased. She felt a shiver, light as a tarantula, crawl up her spine.

“OK, Drew, let’s go see Geemaw.”

“She’s arrested in there?” Drew threw her seatbelt off and climbed out of her car seat. She looked eager to see the inside of the station.

Immy took Drew’s hand, maybe as much for her own feeling of security as Drew’s, walked around to the front, and pushed through the doors.

She walked to the glass—probably bulletproof, or why would it be there?—and asked the creamy-hued, overly made-up woman behind it, whom she had known all her life, if she could please see Hortense Duckworthy.

“I’ll check. And who are you?” Hortense would have said her drawl was mellifluous. Immy wondered if those bleached eyebrows could go any higher.

“What do you mean, who am I? We went to school together, kindergarten to twelve, Tabitha.”
I didn’t like you then any better, either, Miss Cheerleader Homecoming Queen Football Team Floozy.
“My mother is back there, and I want to see her.” Drew jumped up and down trying to see. Immy reached down and lifted her to sit on the counter.

Tabitha, who had picked up an old-fashioned telephone receiver, slammed it down and stood. “Get her off there.” Mellifluousness was gone.

Immy took a step back, even though the thick glass was between them. “OK, OK. She just wanted to see. You don’t have to be so rude.”

“Have a seat over there.” Tabitha jabbed a finger toward the molded plastic chairs that lined the wall.

As they sat, Tabitha seemed to calm down. She resumed her call, keeping the two miscreants in sight of her narrowed eyes, lined in black and shadowed in powder blue. Immy set her jaw. Drew kicked the metal chair leg over and over. Grimy, well-thumbed magazines littered a small table, but Immy didn’t want to touch them. The air hung stale.

Immy thought hard, then approached the guardian of the window again. Time to get her plan rolling. “My daughter needs to use a restroom,” she said.

Tabitha didn’t answer, but she must have summoned him somehow, because eventually Emmett’s assistant Ralph appeared. He opened a door and motioned them to follow him.

Ralph had a big grin for them, probably for Immy herself, she thought. He’d been two years ahead of her in school and had always been a little sweet on her. He had been a football player, though, and she didn’t hang around with that crowd. She was intimidated by people that big, except for Mother, and had never responded to his overtures. She didn’t think Ralph had been in any of the accelerated classes she had been assigned to, but to this day, he still called her occasionally.

They trailed behind Ralph down the hallway and past a heavy door. The outside door on the side of the building, right where she had parked, stood across the hallway. Two doors away was a restroom marked Women.

This just might work,
she thought, seeing how close the restroom was.

Immy paused outside the heavy door to peek through the small glass window, crisscrossed with embedded wire. Her mother slumped in a folding chair at a battered table. She looked exhausted, but she was alone. There were no visible bruises or lacerations. There could be hidden ones, though. There were torture methods that left no marks. Immy hoped she wasn’t too late.

Ralph, fully uniformed and armed, loomed in the hallway while she and Drew entered the restroom. He was still there when they emerged. It seemed rude, even if he did give them a polite nod. He led them past the room that held Hortense just as the smoke alarms started shrieking.

Imogene held her breath. Now was when her plan would either work or not.

Ralph threw open the interrogation room door where Hortense was and ran toward the front. “Fire!” he yelled. “Follow me!” He ran fast for such a big guy.

Instead of obeying and following Ralph, Immy ran into the room and straight to her mother. Her plan was working. At first, Hortense wouldn’t, or couldn’t, get up. She must have been sitting there for hours in that hard chair.

She grabbed her mother’s hand. Stupid Ralph. If the station were really burning out of control, he would have let her mother fry in here.

“Is that the fire alarm? Is there a fire?” Hortense gave her daughter a dazed look.

Immy had never seen her mother look so demoralized and bedraggled. “It’s part of my plan to get you out of here, Mother, my plan to spring you.”

“Darling,” she whispered back, “they think I killed Hugh. I really think that they really think that.” There was fear in her wide eyes.

Immy paused just a second to figure out her mother’s syntax, then resumed her urging. “Quick, before they come back.” Immy tugged Hortense to her feet and dragged her into the hallway. It was empty, but she could see people milling about in the front vestibule through the open door.

“This way,” Immy urged.

Hortense shook her head to clear it, stood tall, and was suddenly energized. The three pushed through the side door, clambered into the van, and Immy sped away, avoiding the front of the building.

“Ah. It worked! The old fire-in-the-wastebasket trick.”

“You set the fire?” Her mother looked at her in amazement.

See, I’m not so helpless. Not so stupid, either.
Immy nodded and a big grin split her face. “Jailbreak! How cool is that?”

“Mommy.” Drew’s tiny voice piped from the back seat.

Immy turned to see her daughter’s puckered brow and worried eyes. “It’s all right, sweetie. Fasten your seat belt. Mommy and Geemaw are all right. Aren’t we, Mother?” The last question was more for Drew’s sake than her own.

“Where we going, Mommy?” piped Drew.

Immy felt her mother and her daughter looking at her.

“Well, what’s the next part of your plan?” asked Hortense.

Immy drove straight out of Saltlick and came to the next small town, Cowtail. Her plan had only extended through the jailbreak, so now she was improvising.

“I think we’d better lay low somewhere until the heat blows over, Mother.”

“Imogene, why are you talking like that? You sound like a character in an old movie. An old, terrible movie.”

More like the old detective novels she had read, Immy thought. She loved the way those characters talked.

“Still,” Immy said, “don’t you think we ought to hide out? Where would they not think to look for us?”

Hortense stared out the van window. They wended down Cowtail’s main street, Second Avenue, as opposed to Saltlick’s main drag, Second Street. Hortense had often voiced to Immy her opinion of the unoriginality of the city founders of both towns who had used exactly two brain cells to name the streets.

At the far edge of town squatted a squalid little strip motel, fronted by a trash-filled, dry swimming pool and advertising itself as Cowtail’s Finest. “That’s a falsehood,” said Hortense. “There’s a nicer one at the other end of town. We just passed it.”

“Then let’s stay here.” Immy turned the van onto the asphalt in front of the door marked Office at the end of the building and jumped out. “They won’t look here, will they? I’ll see if I can park around back.”

Half the long, rectangular building’s rooms faced the road, but the ones on the back side, away from the highway, faced a cow pasture and couldn’t be seen from the main road. Immy booked one in the rear and hurried to move the van out of sight.

It didn’t take long to move in, since they lacked luggage. Drew tested the bed by jumping on it. Hortense inspected the bathroom by sniffing it. The bed and the bathroom must have both passed their tests, because Drew turned her attention to the TV remote, and Hortense entered the bathroom to use it.

Immy stood at the foot of the double bed and thought hard, frowning at the worn carpeting. She caught one elbow and drummed her other fingers against the side of her face. She couldn’t picture the three of them in the bed before her. Maybe they could get a rollaway cot from the office. For now, she fished her trusty
PI Guidebook
out of her purse and sank onto the bed to page through it and try to formulate the next step of her plan.

“I know you’re wondering,” said Hortense, emerging from the bathroom, “why I reinvented reality for Chief Emersen. If those towels were any thinner, you could use them for wrapping paper.” She flapped her still damp hands and settled onto the other side of the bed from Immy, who felt it depress at least a foot.

“I wondered why you lied, yes,” said Immy. “I know you went to the diner.”