The door was shut, and locked. Still, she checked it again. The deadbolt was case hardened steel, the doorframe was one and a quarter inch kiln dried white oak. It would take a lot more than one man to kick that door in.
For a few heartbeats she froze, certain she had heard a noise out in the hall. Was that a shuffling of feet? She strained to hear.
Nothing. She looked around the room for the umpteenth time, searching for any unusual undulations in the wallpaper that could possibly be a hidden, secret panel that allowed entry into the room. Her eyes scoured the ceiling and again did not find a slight recess that might indicate a cleverly disguised trapdoor.
What was it the Lieutenant had said to her? "Unless you hear my voice, do not open the door." She silently paced the floor, circling the small room while creating an imaginary obstacle course from the pattern in the well-worn rug.
It had been two days since she had entered the room. The smart tablet had entertained her for the first day, but now she only used it to check the newsfeed every ten minutes or so. Nothing out of the ordinary had been reported, just the usual gossip about celebrities, political posturing, senseless murders and far-away tragedies.
Not one word about the missing money, and not one word about the murdered men.
She lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Once more she replayed what she had seen, and what she had overheard.
Two men, young, brutishly large, both holding handguns. Standing in the rear of the small U-Haul, Behind them, stacked at least four feet high, were large canvas duffel bags. Duct tape wrapped around each one as if they were bandaged fingertips.
"How long is Kluge gonna be? He said we'd be on a plane for the Cayman's an hour ago. This is bull, man."
"How the hell should I know? He tells me as much as he tells you. We just got to wait patiently. I'll wait all night for a million. Not like I got anything else going on."
The two men shuffled nervously around the small area of the back of the box truck left for them to stand in. Both of them nervously looked around, the fading rays of the sun casting long shadows from the low shrubs and trees growing in the field.
Gail closed her eyes tight as she recalled laying out on the small wooden platform her father had built in the large oak tree when she was a young girl. She had revisited the platform on Saturday after she had argued with Billy, to get away from everybody and collect her thoughts.
When she had seen the two trucks coming from opposite directions down the road she had paid them no mind. She assumed they were just two more trucks taking produce to market, or delivering something or other to a farmer. No other reason for trucks to ever come this far out from the city.
When both trucks had pulled into the field not far from the large tree that concealed her platform, she watched as they slowly backed into each other.
Two men had gotten out of each truck and walked around to where the trucks had almost touched at the back. The rear doors were rolled up, and from one truck large canvas bags were taken and loaded onto the other.
Then two men had gotten back into the truck that had been emptied and drove off. The two men who had remained with the truck that was now full of the canvas bags stood on the ground in back of the truck for awhile, then clambered into the small space that was left in the rear of the truck and stood there.
From Gail's vantage point high in the tree she watched as the emptied truck had driven away from the field back the way it had come. She could still see the truck when it had disappeared from the view of the two men on the ground, and she saw it when it suddenly veered off the road and seemed to fall over on it's side.
She had also seen the figure of one man get out of a car that pulled up near the truck that was now on it's side, and watched as the figure walked up to the cab of the truck.
The men on the ground had heard the two far-away pop-pops of the small pistol the lone figure had used to dispatch the two men in the cab of the disabled truck, but had no idea they were gunshots. They also had no idea that the lone figure, the one known as Kluge, was still sitting in his car parked near the truck, smoking yet another cigarette while waiting for the sun to sink a little lower on the horizon.
But Gail knew.
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