Mistaken Identity
By Cordelia White
Chapter two ______________________________________________________________________ T
The inter-change with the woman at the quay had left Becky with a strange taste in her mouth. The tall good-looking woman had assumed that she was someone called Dr. Mia Lampton, or something like that, and was put out when she said she wasn’t. Annoyed even. Becky wondered what on earth her problem was. She hadn’t come here for this kind of thing. What she wanted was good uncomplicated rest. She made her way angrily towards the village centre.
Now this.
‘Come with us, please Dr. Lampton,’ the man said, pressing the gun into Becky’s ribs. ‘And no fuss. You never know when this thing might go off.’
Had Becky not been so frightened, she might have protested her innocence of the charge of being Dr. Lampton. But, instead, she let herself be led over meekly to a small van. Once there, she was thrust inside. There a young woman a few years her junior awaited her. Becky noted in horror that she had a ball of rope in one hand.
‘Hands behind your back, if you please, Dr. Lampton,’ the young woman said.
‘I’m not Dr. Lampton,’ Becky objected in a weak voice.
‘Oh, sure,’ the man said behind her. ‘Took you a while to think that one up, babe, didn’t it?’
He grabbed her hands and twisted them behind her back, holding them crossed. Then he tied them together.
‘Ouch,’ Becky groaned as the rope bit into her wrists.
A second later, Becky found herself half lowered, half pushed to the floor of the van. She could feel her heart pounding as she lay there helplessly, her breasts drilling into the steel beneath her. While the woman cinched the binding around her wrists, the man pressed down on Becky’s legs with one knee and began to pull off her boots and her woollen walking socks. As soon as he had finished, Becky felt her ankles encircled with rope. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she murmured as it the ankle rope was pulled tight.
They rolled Becky on to her back so that her weight was taken on her arms. "Let me go,’ she protested weakly.
‘Joe, make her shut the fuck up,’ the woman ordered.
‘Yes, Ms Baxter,’ he said affably. ‘I was just about to.’
Becky looked up and saw her balled-up socks coming towards her mouth. They were relatively clean. But she had just walked to town in them. She wretched as the wiry material was pushed between her lips and teeth so that it clogged her throat and pressed down on her tongue. Joe used a length of rag to tie it in place.
Becky coughed and spluttered through the woollen gag. The rag bit into the sides of her mouth. She tried twisting her hands one way, then the other; but nothing gave.
‘I want her secure,’ Ms Baxter ordered. ‘I don’t want her wriggling free and jumping me the moment you leave here.’
‘No, Ms Baxter,’ Joe Walker said to the young woman. He was less affable this time, as if his professionalism had been insulted.
Bad news though for Becky.
Joe sat Becky up and then pushed her legs up so that her knees were close to her chin. He then centered a length of rope on the backs of her knees and wound both ends around her body and back again. As soon as the rope encircled her twice, he pulled until her breasts were squashed against her thighs. Content with his efforts, he flipped her on to her left side. Then, he quickly secured her wrists to her ankles.
‘Happy, ma’am?’ he asked Ms Baxter.
Happy, Ms Baxter might have been; happy Rebecca Carpenter certainly wasn’t.
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D
ebra Sinclair may have looked like the archetypal dumb blonde, but she had nothing on Isla Lewis. Of course, like all archetypal dumb blondes, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, for example, she was not actually dumb. In fact, she had a college degree. But she hid it so well, it was very hard to notice. Whether Paul Lesalle had noticed was a moot point. Paul was completely uninterested in Isla’s mind. When he had decided to cheat on his wife, he had chosen her for only one reason: her body. And that body was currently draped over the expensive sofa in the expansive sitting room of Henry Sinclair Baxter.‘Another whisky, Lesalle?’ Henry Baxter asked of his younger visitor.
Paul Lesalle looked thoughtful for a moment.
‘Why not, old man?’ Paul replied. ‘After all, it’s superb stuff.’
Baxter poured Paul a large drink. ‘Yes, it’s twenty-four year old malt,’ he confided. ‘I have it imported especially.’ He turned his eyes towards the young woman sitting on the sofa. This contrasted with the surreptitious glances he had been giving her ever since her arrival. These were prompted not by the fact that her simple lilac-coloured dress had a hem line short enough to show most of her thighs. Baxter had already taken in every contour of her long, slender legs when he met the couple on the extensive forecourt at the front of the house. No, they were provoked by the way the neck line of her dress gaped slightly every time she leaned forward.
‘And you, Mrs Lesalle,’ he asked, ‘another gin?’
There was almost suppressed laughter from the woman.
‘Oh, I’m not Mrs Lesalle,’ she said giggling.
‘No, no, my wife couldn’t make it, Paul Lesalle explained. ‘But you did say bring a guest.’
Henry Baxter concealed his embarrassment - and his disapproval - rather well in the circumstances. ‘Of, course, Lesalle, of course,’ he said emolliently. ‘She’s most welcome.’
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G
ina Scott had been a deputy sheriff for nearly eighteen months. And she hated it. It was not just the small town and the small scale on which she had to operate - although that did have its drawbacks. It was hard to hone one’s forensic skills when the non-payment of an hotel bill passed as a major crime. And Gina, who came from a family in which all the men - although none of the women - were cops, and big-city cops at that, found this particularly galling. After her law degree everyone had expected her to become an attorney. When, instead, she opted to join the police, her whole family expected her to fail. Now, marooned in the local sheriff’s office, Gina found it hard to convince herself that she had not done exactly that.However, there was a worse problem. It began and ended with Sheriff Mike Wiseman and Deputy Keith Bligh. Wiseman and Bligh were sexist, bullying and probably corrupt. Gina knew it. She saw it every day. But the townsfolk remained - or chose to pretend to be - oblivious to it.
Right now Gina sat next to Bligh in one of the town’s four patrol cars. Like him she wore a tan deputy’s uniform, except that in her case, it had been pressed crisply.
‘You wearing a bra?’ Bligh had just asked her.
Gina tried to ignore him.
‘’Cus, ya know, ya not terribly large up top, but ya not small neither, and you know, we might have to do some runnin’ an’ I wouldn’t want you to bounce around so much ya tits slowed you down.’
Gina was just about to make some barbed retort about his absence of testicles when she saw the woman with the gun.
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A
manda Thornton was perhaps fifty yards away when the man had pushed Becky into the van. The mistaken identity had alarmed her. If this attractive young woman wasn’t Mia Lampton, where was she. There was no-one else to be seen at the quay. No-one that is who might fit Mia Lampton’s description. Amanda deciding not to wait, turned away and began to make her way back to her hotel. Had she kept walking she would have seen nothing. But at exactly the right moment - or from the alternative perspective the wrong moment - she turned to look back at the young woman she had met at the quay. She had expected to see her still milling around at the waterside. But instead she was being forced into the rear of a small gray van.Shit, Amanda muttered to herself, and drawing her gun from its holster at the small of her back, began running towards the van.
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M
organ Hastings sat in his car waiting for Joe’s return. As he watched his younger partner make then snatch and then usher Dr. Lampton across the road into the waiting van, Hastings had mixed thoughts. Morgan Hastings, who stood at six foot five in his socks and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, had worked for Henry Baxter for seven years and during that time had committed a whole host of crimes on his behalf. He drew the line, of course, at murder, and he refused to have anything to do with drugs or sex. But, there were very few other things Hastings hadn’t done or wouldn’t do. The idea of kidnapping a woman was, however, causing him considerable anxiety. Part of him wanted to have nothing to do with it. A crook he might be, but Morgan always thought of himself as a perfect gentleman; and gentleman did not go about kidnapping and then tying up women. If he needed any re-assuring on that score, the look of enthusiasm in Joe’s eyes, when the plan was hatched, offered ample confirmation. But, there was another part of him that wanted to go ahead; a part of him that he preferred to hide, but was now in the driving seat. It was that part of him that knew, immediately he saw the glamorous FBI agent heading towards the van, that he would have to take her too.______________________________________________________________________
A
manda Thornton had always been a good athlete. Even though she was holding a gun and wasn’t dressed in track gear, she covered the two hundred or so yards between her starting point and the van in a little over thirty seconds. As she ran, her practiced eye took in the scene ahead of her. To her right, she could see the rear doors of the van open once again and two figures emerge. To her left, she could see a maroon-coloured Mercedes facing the other direction. The man behind the wheel was so large, he appeared to fill the whole front seat. As she drew nearer, she concentrated on the two figures to the right. One, nearly as large as the man in the car, dwarfed the other. With fifty yards to go, she saw the smaller figure, a young woman, dressed in a fur-lined leather jacket and a short skirt, rush towards the front of the van and leap into the driver’s seat. With forty yards to go, she heard the engine fire. With thirty yards to go, she saw the man leap back into rear of the van and slam the door behind him. With twenty yards to go, she saw the man on the left throw open the door of the Mercedes. The glint as the metallic object in his right hand caught the autumn sun vaguely registered in her head as a gun. With the noise of the van door shutting echoing in her ears, Amanda dropped to one knee and raised her firearm. As the man to her left took aim, she swerved and trained her gun on him. He took evasive action, moving back to take cover inside the car. She swerved again, this time pointing her firearm back at the van. With any luck, she could take the rear tire out before it started moving. Lowering her sight, she took careful aim. As she began to squeeze the trigger, she felt the hard barrel of a gun press into the rear of her neck.‘Drop it,’ a female voice said.
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