Willing Hostage

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Willing Hostage

Marlys Millhiser

For my parents

Doris and Harold Enabnit

…
virtue is an individual, not a group, attribute
.

—R
OBERT
N. K
HARASCH

The Institutional Imperative:

How to Understand the United States Government

and Other Bulky Objects

Chapter One

The sign of the heron cast a distended shadow across double strips of pavement. The shadow, distorted and jetty, inked through sunlight to the ditch beyond, through barbed wire and a cow grazing alone.

Leah turned the yellow Volkswagen into the drive and stopped beside the gas pumps. The Volks was as dry as she was and Enveco was her only living credit card. The signs of the heron had been ominously few since she'd left Chicago.

She fell against the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

Fatigue exploded sunspots behind her eyelids, sent shudders through flattened muscles. Heat fingers searched along the dampness of her back where she'd pulled away from the seat.

…
The whisper of leaves, the rubbery splat of tires on hot pavement as a car passed, the whining of dogs
…

…
A splatter of red across a soap bar … the smear of it across tile
…
the contrast against the white tub
…
the red stain oozing toward the drain
.…

Relaxing muscles jerked. The acid of her stomach rose to her tongue. Leah pushed at the door as if the car were in flames and forced aching legs to stand on the concrete outside.

The whining turned to barking. Four medium-sized dogs with very large teeth fought the wire of their individual cages in the back of a pickup.

Leah glanced up at the familiar sign of the heron for reassurance. The neon bird stood on one leg, blue-gray, serene and supreme.

The dogs snarled as a door slapped its frame and they turned stiffened tails toward Leah, then whimpered into silence as a man came around the pickup and growled at them. Tearing great hunks from a hamburger with his teeth, he climbed into the truck and drove off.

“Fill it?”

“What?” She swung around to find a cowboy leaning against the pumps.

“Your car. You want gas?” He didn't look like a friendly cowboy.

“Oh … yes. But don't fill it.” She reached into the car for her shoulder bag. “How much would two dollars get me?”

“Not much.”

“How about four?”

“Twice as much as not much.”

“I'll take four dollars' worth.” She had a credit card, but when and how would she pay Enveco? “Can you tell me how far it is to Ted's Place?”

“You're here.”

“Here” was a building, gas pumps, and the cow still gazing across the double highway. The map had shown it as the first entrance to the mountains on the route she'd followed from Chicago. A place to stay overnight, rest, and gain courage before starting a new life.

“But on the map it showed a town.”

“I don't make the maps.”

The sun was too bright through her sunglasses. She felt like an alien on an enemy planet—a hungry alien.

The building didn't look like a gas station. It looked something like an Americanized version of a Swiss chalet. Interspersed with the dormer windows of the second story were the letters T … E … D … S.

“How far is the next town?”

The tree behind Ted's whispered its leaves in answer. It seemed to be the only tree for miles.

“Depends on which way you're going.”

“That way.” Leah pointed toward the dark shapes waiting on the skyline behind Ted's Place.

“The next town'd be Walden, over the pass. About ninety miles. Check the oil?”

“No.” What were ninety more miles after today?

“Best thing this late in the day”—he smeared at the windshield with a rag—“go to Fort Collins. Spend the night. Start off in the morning.”

Spend the night. Spend. “I just came through there.” She found her Enveco card and handed it to him.

“Best thing,” he repeated as she followed him toward the building. A dark-gold car parked beside it. Under the striped awnings the windows were full of signs—
LUNCH
;
GROCERIES
;
SPORTING GOODS
;
COORS BEER
;
LIGHT OLYMPIA BEER
;
BUD
;
COLORADO HUNTING, FISHING LICENSES
.

Three steps led down to the door where another sign declared
NO PACKS, NO PETS
!

But it was the smell that made her swallow and grab the doorframe. Hamburgers. Lovely, meaty, juicy, rich-smelling hamburgers.

Leah ignored the three men staring at her from a booth and the smiling dude behind the lunch counter under the Dr. Pepper clock. She walked around postcard racks and piled bundles of firewood to the sign at the back that read
REST ROOMS
.

Once in the ladies', she gulped water from the spigot, wetting her face and some of her hair. When it seemed that her stomach would accept the needed moisture, she brought the bottle of Maalox from her purse and drank from it.

A sign on the wall told her exactly how to dispose of soiled sanitary napkins. Another instructed her on how to release paper towels from the dispenser. She hated signs, but always read them.

The fire in her middle had subsided a little. Hadn't it?

The image of the three men in the booth slid before her own in the mirror above the sink. So there were three men in a booth.

But all of them had crowded into one side. And they were too large to sit comfortably that way. The one on the outside had grinned at her … expectantly? The dark one sitting so stiffly in the middle.…

Leah shrugged them off. She mustn't think of them. They'd been eating hamburgers.

The three were lined up at the cash register as she emerged from the hall. They didn't see her and she slid behind the grinner as the cowboy handed her the Enveco card, a ballpoint pen, and a clipboard with the gauzy layers of paper and carbons that would make her pay up. Environmental Energy Corporation was printed across the top.

“If you hadn't blown this,” the grinner said to the dark man, still in the middle, “you could'a had a nice cushy job on the farm, showing off bag jobs or something.”

She signed Leah Harper to the bill, but not before the dark man turned a look of murder on the jocular man so close behind him. It seemed to include Leah and she stepped away quickly.

If ever she came face to face with a murderer, she told herself, that's how he would look.

Hunger. It makes people fanciful. She selected a carton of milk from a glass-fronted cooler and a loaf of sliced cheese. On a rack not far away, she found bread. When she turned to the cash register, the three men were walking out the door.

As she left Ted's with her purchases, they were standing beside the dark-gold car. “… Illinois license plate?”

“Well what do you expect? It
is
a blonde in a yellow Volks.”

Leah hurried to the Volks. This was one blonde who was interested only in food. But as the car and her stomach growled in unison, a face intruded through the open window.

“Are you Sheila?” His eyes seemed to be hidden because his grin pulled at their corners so hard that it pressed the upper eyelids down.

“No, I'm not Sheila.” She stared into the eye slits that the grin left and experienced an odd sense of danger. No reason for that sudden feeling … but it was strong enough to add an unpleasant tingle to a queasy stomach.

“Charlie!” The cry came from behind them and she turned to see the two remaining men wrestle each other to the ground.

Charlie backed away and Leah jammed the Volkswagen into gear, roared out of Ted's drive, turned right and then right again where the side road heading west met the highway under the sign of the heron.

Charlie had joined the scuffle by the time she passed the side of Ted's Place.

A sign read
WALDEN 92, CAMERON PASS—OPEN
.

She should make Walden in under two hours. And she'd better. Two hours were about all she had left in her.

Leah steped hard on the gas pedal, anxious to put miles between herself and the strange trio back at Ted's. She didn't envy Sheila, whoever she was. What was a bag job done on a farm?

Fighting the bread wrapper with one hand until she'd extracted a slice of pasty tasteless bread, munching it as slowly as she could endure, Leah Harper faced the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Chapter Two

Her sisters' eyes had accused Leah over the lid of the coffin. Annette, her elegant clothes washing out her face. Suzie, adding the weight of another pregnancy. Two pairs of eyes, the same color blue. “This takes care of one of your problems,” they seemed to say. “Where do you go from here, sister?”

That was the moment Leah had decided to go. Anywhere.

After the funeral, Ralph, Annette's doctor-husband, asked, “What will you do now that your mother is gone, Leah? Go back to New York?”

“No, I think I'll go west.” She couldn't go
back
anywhere.

“West? What's west of Chicago?”

What
was
west of Chicago? She had been east and had seen oceans.… “I'm going to … to the mountains.” The decision had been made that quickly.

Leah couldn't admit to her family that she was running
from
another failure and hadn't thought clearly about what she was running
to
. And so she'd said, “To the mountains.”

And here they were. The mountains. Drawing closer. Hovering. Enormous, dark, ragged under a lowering sun.