“I ran out to my car but they chased after me!” he told Mike Fenster, his eyes so wide they looked like they were bugging out of his head. “They chased me all through town! They’re gonna be here any second! AnysecondAny secondAnysecond!”
“Then lock the door, dipshit!” Mike Fenster shouted. “You know how much product we have on the premises! If they catch us with this much meth, we’re all going down!”
“Don’t wanna go to prison!” Dweebo moaned.
“You better let us go first,” Christine told Mike Fenster. “You let Jenny and me go and…and we’ll tell them you ran off in the other direction.” She was hoping that Mike Fenster would be desperate enough to buy it, but she was quickly disappointed.
“You’re a lying bitch—you’d give me up in a heartbeat!” he snarled. “You’d—”
Just at that moment there was the sound of sirens coming up the drive followed by footsteps on the rickety front porch and a pounding on the front door. Clancy, who had just finished locking it, jumped away, a wide-eyed look of wild paranoia on his skinny, unshaven face.
“It’s the cops, Mike,” he gasped. “Ohmygod—the cops! The cops are here! They’rehereThey’rehereThey’rehere!”
“Shut the fuck up you numbnuts!” Mike snarled. “If you’ll shut up, maybe they’ll just go away!”
But his hopes were in vain because the next minute Christine heard Sheriff Wainright’s voice shouting,
“Clancy Fenster, come out with your hands up! We know it was you who robbed the drugstore. Come on out, now—I mean it!”
Mike turned to his brother, his beady eyes furious.
“You robbed it? You was only s’posed to shoplift, you idiot!”
“I know but I saw her open the drawer and they had a lotta cash in the register!” Clancy whined. “It was too much to pass up, Mike! Look—I got it with me here!” he opened his winter coat and showed that the inside pocket was bulging with cash.
“You dipshit! You got all the evidence right here on you!” Mike raved at him. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Christine didn’t know what the middle Fenster brother had been thinking but what she was thinking was that it was clear Sheriff Wainright still hadn’t gotten her message. He had no idea that she and Jenny were being held captive.
“Sheriff Wainright, help!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “It’s me, Christine Conway. The Fensters have me and Jenny Albright in here and they’ve got us tied up and they’re threatening to—”
But at that point, Mike Fenster strode across the room and slapped a dirty, tattooed hand over her mouth. Christine promptly bit him. The drug dealer yelped like a scalded dog and yanked his hand away.
“Help!” she shouted again, before he slapped her face so hard she nearly fell off the rickety chair.
“Christine and Jenny Albright?” Wainright called through the aluminum door.
“Yes, Jenny and I are both in here! Get us out!” Christine shouted back.
“I swear to god, you cunt, shut your fuckin’ mouth!” Mike Fenster snarled at her. He strode across to the table where Dweebo had laid down her shot gun. Picking it up, he pointed it at Christine’s face. “One more word and I blow your fuckin’ head off!”
Christine clamped her lips shut as she stared down the barrel her own gun. A shot at this range would turn her head into red mist—she knew when to be quiet.
But at least she had let the Sheriff know that she and Jenny were in here. Hopefully he would find some way to get them out.
Indeed, she could hear him talking to someone—probably Deputy McCall—in a low voice outside.
“What we got here,” he muttered, “Is a hostage situation.”
Mike Fenster’s face broke into that crazy grin again.
“That’s right—hostages! We got us some hostages right here—bargaining chips!”
Inwardly, Christine groaned. She wasn’t sure this idea would have occurred to the strung-out drug dealer on his own. Sheriff Wainright had just made the situation much worse and more dangerous for herself and Jenny.
She wished she dared to try and talk the younger Fenster brothers into releasing them—or at least releasing Jenny. But with the shotgun pointed at her face, she didn’t dare say a word. She just sat there, her face aching and her stomach twisted into a knot.
There was nothing she could do but wait.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Something was wrong—Roarn could smell it.
Christine wasn’t in the cabin and when he followed her scent—which he would know anywhere by now—it went in a wrong direction. Instead of going down the hill to where she parked her vehicle, it continued up the hill to the ridge where the anus neighbors lived. But why would she go up there? She disliked them very much and always avoided them as much as possible. It seemed wrong for her to break her pattern and go seek them out.
Roarn frowned as he scented the air. There were other smells too—the scent of the bad neighbors as well as two other human males he couldn’t identify. What was going on? Was Christine up there with all those human males? If so, was she in danger?