“I’m not going to follow you anywhere,” the man said.
Vaughan shook her head in disbelief. She unhooked the set of cuffs attached to the back of her gun belt, rested one hand on a canister of pepper spray and the other on the grips of her pistol, ready to use whatever force was necessary if the guy tried to resist.
“Put your hands on the wall and spread your legs apart,” she said. “You’re under arrest for public intoxication and the destruction of county property.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Surprisingly, the man complied with Vaughan’s instructions without any argument. Maybe he thought jail wouldn’t be too bad for a while. A warm place to sleep and three hot meals every day. She felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t just let him go. In his present state, he was a danger to himself and to the community.
“You have some kind of injury?” Vaughan said.
There was a gauze dressing taped to the right side of his neck, a couple of inches above his collar bone, pink in the center where a small amount of blood had started to seep through.
“Don’t worry about it,” the man said.
Vaughan cuffed his wrists behind his back and patted him down. His pockets were empty. Nothing. Not even a gum wrapper. She led him to the diner’s parking lot, guided him into the back seat of her cruiser and shut the door.
A couple of years ago, the mayor had increased the budget for the police department, but other than the watch commander, there were still only eight full-time officers, four working days and four working nights. The twelve-hour shifts could be grueling sometimes, but as long as nobody was out sick or on vacation, the current staffing provided coverage around the clock, and everyone was able to take two consecutive days off every week.
There was usually one officer out on patrol, and one working the desk at the station. Today, the officer out on patrol-the one who’d relieved Vaughan at seven-was a man named Retro, and the officer on the desk was a woman named Ashton.
Technically, Vaughan was off duty, but she wasn’t going to bother calling Retro over to the diner on such a minor bust. She would take care of it herself. The commander had pre-authorized ten hours of overtime per week for every officer for such occasions, so no problem with that. And of course the extra money would come in handy.
Vaughan climbed into the driver’s seat, keyed the microphone on her radio and said, “Unit One to base.”
Ashton answered right away. “Go ahead Unit One.”
“Ten seventeen from Second Street with a ten ninety-five. PI and destruction of property. Caucasian male, no identification. Brown eyes, brown hair, approximately thirty-five years old. Cooperative, probably homeless.”
“Clear to transport, Unit One.”
“Ten four. Unit One over and out.”
Vaughan slid the microphone back into its clip. So much for having a nice breakfast and getting to bed by nine, she thought.
3
Hope was a small town, and the police station was only a few minutes from the diner.
Which meant Sozinho needed to work fast.
He waited until Officer Vaughan started the engine and pulled out onto Second Street, and then he opened his mouth and lifted his tongue and let the key fall to his lap. He raised his buttocks off the seat just enough for the shiny little notched cylinder to slide back to his fingertips, and then he pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and discreetly worked it around until he found the hole in the left handcuff.
He twisted the key clockwise, and the cuff popped open.
Which was quite a relief, since there had been at least a five percent chance that it wouldn’t.
Sozinho waited until Vaughan turned onto Old Slaughterhouse Road, a decaying thoroughfare with very little traffic, ready to make his move as they approached the abandoned meat processing plant. This was the most direct route from the diner to the police station, according to the man in the black leather jacket. Things might have been a bit more challenging if Vaughan had taken the long way around, but she didn’t. She hardly ever took the long way, the man in the black leather jacket had said, even though it was a much smoother ride. She liked the bumpy old short cut, which worked out beautifully for Sozinho.
“I’m sick,” he shouted. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“We’ll be there in a minute.”
“I’m not kidding. You want to spend the rest of the day cleaning vomit off the back seat?”
Vaughan eased over to the curb. She flipped the switch to activate the blue strobes on her light bar, climbed out and opened the back door.
“Hurry up,” she said.
Pretending that his wrists were still cuffed behind his back, Sozinho scooted to the edge of the seat and started dry heaving over the gutter, retching convincingly while Vaughan stood there with her hands on her hips looking down on him.
“We’re going to offer you treatment for your drinking problem,” she said. “Maybe you can turn your life around.”
A vehicle backfired a couple of blocks away. Probably a truck making a delivery over on First Street, where most of the town’s businesses were located.
It was the diversion Sozinho had been waiting for.
When Vaughan shifted her eyes in the direction of the disturbance, Sozinho clocked her in the jaw with a right uppercut. Her knees buckled and she collapsed forward into Sozinho’s arms. She reached for her pistol, but she was groggy and slow and Sozinho beat her to it. He tossed the gun on the floorboard where it was out of reach, and then he kicked off his left shoe and reached down and peeled off his sock, which had been soaked in chloroform.
He held the sock over Vaughan’s face until her muscles went slack, and then he cuffed her wrists and folded her into the back seat. All this in less than thirty seconds.
It was almost eight o’clock, and almost everyone in Hope was where they needed to be for the morning.
And hardly anyone ever used Old Slaughterhouse Road anyway.
No pedestrians, no cars driving by. Nobody had seen anything.
Sozinho went through Vaughan’s pockets and the compartments on her gun belt. He took her cell phone and a canister of pepper spray and an ID case and thirty-two dollars in cash. Knowing that the phone’s location could be tracked, he tossed it to the pavement and stomped on it, and then he grabbed the pistol from the floorboard and walked around and climbed into the driver’s seat. He switched the light bar off and put the car in gear and made a U-turn at the first intersection.
4
Retro got the call from Ashton at 8:07.
She called him on his cell phone instead of the police radio.
“I didn’t want this to go out over the airwaves yet,” she said.
Nervously.
Informally.
More like a friend-to-friend exchange instead of official police business, as if she suspected that something was very wrong but wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet.
“What’s going on?” Retro said.
“I need you to swing by the diner. Vaughan called and said she was on her way to the station with a subject in custody. That was twenty minutes ago, and she hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Why didn’t she call for backup?”
“It was nothing. Public intoxication and destruction of property. She said the guy was cooperative. What really worries me is that she’s not responding to my calls. I’ve tried the radio and her cell phone.”
“Did you get a description on the perp?”
“Yes. Caucasian with brown eyes and brown hair, approximately thirty-five years old. No ID.”