The Other Lady Vanishes by Amanda Quick

Author:Amanda Quick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

The most dangerous time in a blackmail operation was the moment when the transaction took place, Thelma Leggett thought.

It was two o’clock in the morning. She stood inside a deserted hot dog stand, Zolanda’s pistol in one hand, and watched the darkened ticket booth at the entrance of the old seaside amusement park.

The park had closed a few years earlier, one more victim of the lousy economy. It had never been as grand as the boardwalk amusement park farther up the coast in Santa Cruz, but when she was a kid, it had seemed like a magical place. Tonight the moonlight shone down on the hulking skeletons of the great wheel and the roller coaster. The rides and arcades that lined the old midway were now deserted ruins. The wooden boardwalk was rotting into the sand.

She had chosen the ticket booth for the drop point because she knew the territory. When she was a little girl, her mother had often taken her to the amusement park in the summer when they came to the small town to visit her uncle. Tonight she had left her car parked a couple of blocks away on a dark side street where it was unlikely to be noticed. She had spotted the opening in the fence at the back of the park that morning when she had set out to choose a safe location for the payoff.

She and Zolanda had developed a variety of secure payoff strategies. The ticket booth had the single most important advantage that they had considered necessary for success in the extortion business—it could be observed from a safe distance. The old hot dog stand in which she stood was just one of a sprawling jumble of tumbledown shacks and arcades that littered the grounds of the amusement park.

A car cruised slowly past the sagging gates at the front of the park. It was the first vehicle to drive down the street in the nearly two hours that she had been waiting. Arriving early to ensure that there were no surprises was another important element of the payoff procedure.

Her nerves, already strained to the breaking point, threatened to shatter. She had collected blackmail payments before but always in Los Angeles, a city that was big enough to allow her to remain hidden.

Tonight was different. It was very possible that tonight she was doing business with a killer.

She could have used a couple of cups of the Enlightenment tea that Adelaide Brockton had concocted for Zolanda. Luckily she had a bottle of whiskey waiting back at the cabin.

A sedan stopped at the end of the street, did a U-turn, and drove back to the entrance of the amusement park. The driver brought the vehicle to a halt a short distance away. A figure wearing a trench coat with the collar pulled up and a hat angled low to conceal the profile got out from behind the wheel.

Thelma’s pulse skittered with excitement. Her first solo extortion payoff was going like clockwork. She didn’t count the deal that she had done with Conrad Massey yesterday.

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