Preston, Douglas - Crooked River by Preston Douglas

Author:Preston, Douglas [Preston, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-02-04T06:00:00+00:00

35

SMITHBACK LAY ON his mattress, staring at the ceiling. Bugs were crawling on it, and he watched their progress without interest.

The first couple of days he’d been locked up in here, he could think of nothing but escape. He’d thought of everything—breaking down the door; trying to reach the ridiculously high, ridiculously small window; yanking at the shotgun that appeared when they tossed in food, in hopes of pulling the thug in with it and overpowering him—yet nothing even remotely likely had suggested itself. But now, after his little “talk” with Bighead, he could do little but lie on the rude bed and hope for sleep. It was as if the hulking bastard and his fearsome threats had beaten all hope out of him.

Once again he cursed his own habit of sudden travel with no notice to his friends or colleagues. What the hell was Kraski doing? Calling the cops? No, the son of a bitch was probably just bitching and moaning about his absence. Maybe he’d sent out a couple of co-reporters to sniff around. Useless bastards, they couldn’t empty piss out of a boot.

At first he thought the gang boss had ruptured his internal organs. But today, his gut felt a hell of a lot better than it had the day before. And his eye, too, was clearly less swollen.

Of course, none of this mattered in the long run. He knew now that it was just a matter of time before they killed him. I’m going to ask around. See if maybe you speak a little truth. Then I’ll come back and break you in. Somehow, instead of motivating him to escape, Bighead’s words had filled him with despair.

There had been no sign of the motherfucker for a day now. Smithback still didn’t know exactly what the hell was going on, but as best he could tell from the talk he heard through the door, it had to do with a shipment of drugs, cocaine, that had gone missing on the Arizona border, somehow involving trucks with their numbers painted out. And Bighead seemed to be on the hook for it. Smithback felt certain that all this was the reason the bastard was away so much of the time—trying to mitigate the damage and figure out what had gone wrong.

On top of that, more people had been coming around and talking to his two jailers. It seemed Bighead had put word out about a reward for information. One of them had been an old rummy, his voice slurred through the closed door. But he only spoke English. He demanded to talk to Bighead and he also had something to say about trucks, ten-wheelers with large drums bolted to the drivers’ fenders, payloads covered in canvas. The guards had told him to come back later, when the boss was around. The rummy apparently thought they were giving him the brush-off, because he talked loudly about these trucks seen going into a place named Tate’s Hole or Tate’s Hall.

Smithback’s unpleasant interview with Bighead had had another unexpected result.

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