The Keys Are In It (Part Four)
Herein are several people whose lives at first do not seem connected. Their paths converge unexpectedly. This is Part Four.
Part Four
Sweat dripped from Blake Lefkowitz’s brow as he sat in the driver’s seat of his Mitsubishi Endeavor. The dashboard gleamed under its new protective coating and the windshield was bug-free. The breeze through the open windows was the only thing keeping him out there long enough to admire his handiwork.
He remembered the blinking high beams of an oncoming motorist on his way home from the airport the night before. Not written in any driver’s education materials, it was the universal symbol for any of several conditions. His headlights had been set to low beams and he had not seen any cops, so he figured it meant, “Hey, there’s something wrong with your lights.”
He turned the headlights on and observed their effect on the garage door. The left side shone brightly while the right remained dark, no matter the setting. Lone headlight still blazing, he turned the key to the “accessory on” position and worked the controls to slide up all the windows. The air conditioner roared to life.
The front passenger door swung open and a man Blake did not recognize leaped into the seat beside his. He brandished a large, black handgun. “Very slowly, get out of the vehicle and go with me inside the house. If you try to run, I will kill you.”
“What do you want with me?”
“No questions. Go now.”
“But I –”
The man smacked the gun against Blake’s head, just above his ear. “Stop talking and go inside the house.”
Reeling from the blow, Blake leaned over and opened the driver’s door. What usually was a simple hop from the seat to the driveway now took concentration. Hoping to avoid anything else from the gun, he carefully climbed down.
A quick peek back showed his attacker close behind, shoving the gun into his front jacket pocket. “Look straight ahead as if everything is fine, arms at your sides,” the stranger instructed. The air from the dashboard vents swept long, thick blond hair up over the man’s head, revealing closely shaved black hair underneath.
Although the company had told him this kind of thing could happen, his meager security training to that point had not prepared him for anything like this. Despite that, he was trying to notice anything that might help investigators. Blake detected no accent in the man’s speech. He could have been from Omaha, Oakland, or anywhere in between.
His annoying voice, however, would have kept him out of the news anchor’s chair.
Blake walked slowly along the sidewalk from the driveway to the front porch. He resisted the urge to feel the knot on his head.
“Now, stay very close. Go ahead. Open the door.”
Blake did and stepped inside. His dog, Mouse, bolted into the entryway barking loudly and heading straight for the doorway. Blake stood still and watched his tiny dog of three years, a Maltese with short bobbed hair, as it snarled and bared its teeth at the intruder.
The man backed up a step, still on the front porch. Blake turned and slammed the door and locked the bolt. He ran into the kitchen and ducked behind the island.
A new yellow note on the refrigerator, in his wife’s script, read, “Phone guy coming Tuesday.” Home phone not yet in service and his mobile phone sitting uselessly in the truck from which he had been forcibly removed, he was cut off from rescue.
Still squatting, he waddled to the back door and saw nobody through the dining nook bay window. He swept Mouse up, rushed out the door, and sprinted for the back fence.
“Stop!”
Blake didn’t and leaped head-first over the chest-high stone retaining wall into the dirt behind it, where the gap under the wooden fence looked big enough for an escape. The pickets splintered inches above his head, as if being shot, but he heard no gunfire. His attacker was using a silencer.
Growling, Mouse strained to break free from Blake’s arms. “Easy, boy,” Blake said.
The stone jutted just far enough above the high ground to provide cover as he rolled under the fence.
He was in a corn field. The neighborhood had been built on top of acres and acres of former farmland, but a few holdouts dotted the landscape. For this particular old-timer, he was glad.
Blake got to his feet and ran. The leaves lashed his arms as he tucked Mouse in like a running back with a football. Somehow his mind recalled a movie wherein the character repeatedly yelled, “Serpentine!” as he and his cohorts escaped on foot.
He laughed briefly, then cried as he zig-zagged his way through the corn. “This isn’t what I signed up for,” he whined.
(to be continued)
July 8th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Hmm…. so now we see why the truck was still running….
July 8th, 2008 at 8:08 am
What’s going to be really neat is how all these people actually come together. Sort of like the disparate story lines in Pulp Fiction. Except without the ball gags and sodomy. (Probably.)