Skim Deep by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789091403
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2020-11-09T21:00:00+00:00

9.

Sherry backed up a step as the gun-wielding figures in black balaclavas, gloves, sweatshirts and jeans rushed into the suite, three of them, the last one hitting the light switch and sending them into darkness. A scream caught in her throat as Nolan, even closer to the door than she was, took a blow to the head with the swing of a gun-in-hand that dropped her husband to the red-carpeted floor. One of the two figures got behind her and a rough-gloved hand came around and covered her mouth and the metal snout of what had to be the automatic in his other hand jammed itself in her lower spine.

Nolan had been knocked to his knees, the assailant slipping behind him to tie her man’s hands in back by the wrists with rope, what appeared to be a foot-and-a-half length of clothesline, knotting it several times, tight. Nolan’s head was hanging though his body had not gone slack, so he was dazed but not unconscious.

The third man with a gun was supervising, silhouetted against dim outside lighting. He nodded to the one with his hand over her mouth and the gun in her back, who hauled her outside, into the night and prodded her toward the open rear doors of a black panel truck that was backed up into the stall of the room next door. She saw no one around and the brightly lighted nearby hotel provided the only illumination, as any other exterior lighting back here was, oddly, conveniently, off.

The guy with the hand over her mouth removed it, but the supervisor was there with a strip of duct tape, which he pasted over her mouth. Then her other arm was latched onto and she was lifted and tossed bodily into the panel truck, like a side of beef, and she slid onto the rough indoor-outdoor carpeting on its floor. She landed face down, her black dress up and over the back of her knees. One assailant scrambled up and in and quickly roped her hands behind her and tied her by the ankles as well.

Still on her stomach, her face turned toward the right, staring at a wheel covering in the vehicle’s black wall, she heard the thud behind her and knew what it was. Confirming that with a look over her shoulder, she saw Nolan, his mouth duct-taped, too, his eyes open but his apparent grogginess something tough to feign. Some blood was matted on the left side of his head.

A sheet of wood closed off the driver and passenger seat, making a cab out of it, and when the two rear doors—the only visible doors—shut, blackness enveloped them.

She heard the driver’s side door open and someone get in and shut it. Then the vehicle rumbled to life; the rider’s door opened and someone climbed in and shut it.

“I got everything on this end,” said a voice outside the panel truck.

Then they were moving.

She rolled toward Nolan, facing him, or would have been had there been any light at all.

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