One Chef!

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

“What’s going on? What are you doing?” the dim outline of Harold Merritt came up to Kate as she held their jailor’s arm hard against the edge of the inspection port.

A Shakespeare line about a poor player strutting the stage came to mind but she was still too drugged to place it. They must have been drugged for her not to be able to place the speech…Hamlet? Lear? She was reasonably sure it wasn’t Julius Caesar.

Harold was bending down to look out the open inspection door, mostly filled with the still whimpering man’s arm.

Kate spotted the appearance of a g*n barrel, protruding several inches through the inspection port into the shipping container.

The Macbeth line about “then was heard no more,” slammed into her consciousness.

She kicked Harold in the gut none too gently to knock him clear just as the g*n fired. Mere inches kept his curiosity from killing the cat.

The muzzle flash and the cannon-roar inside the dim metal container was such a brutal shock to the senses that she almost lost her grip.

Wild shot.

Next one wouldn’t be.

The i***t outside was screaming about the powder burns all up the arm she still had pinned.

Thankfully, he’d been dumb enough to reach the weapon through the opening. Despite being momentarily blinded by the muzzle flash, she estimated that the kick of the shot had probably slammed the g*n up against the top of the opening. Kate grabbed for the barrel, got it by chance on her first try and wrested it free.

Harold was cowering face-down on the mattress, covering his ears and cursing. She didn’t have that luxury. Keeping the pressure on the man’s arm, she reversed the g*n and stuck it in the man’s face.

She knew the revolver by feel, even though her vision was slow to re-adapt from the bright muzzle flash in the container’s dim interior. A long-barrel Smith & Wesson 29, Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum. What was it with little men and big guns? At least the VP’s mistress had understood the proper use of power with a neatly concealable 9mm Colt Defender.

“First, empty your pockets through the door,” she ordered the man. She didn’t wait for him to complain or refuse, just torqued his arm a bit more and he started right in on her command rather than risking dislocation of his elbow.

He whimpered. There might be others nearby enough to hear, but that couldn’t be helped at the moment. At least most of the report of the gunshot had been confined inside the container, as testified by the ringing in her ears.

With the barrel boring into his ear, he started working through his pockets. His hisses of pain said she’d probably hurt his other hand when she’d taken the g*n. But under the threat of imminent death, he started on the task.

A pen knife, a flashlight, his wallet, a walkie talkie, and, ka-ching, a cell phone.

“Now, open the door.”

“I can no reach,” his accent was thick, barely understandable. One of the Asian languages; she still hadn’t seen more of him than his arm and his g*n. The Asian languages were never her specialty.

“Who else knows?”

“Cook. I pay him extra to food. Him think for stowaway girlfriend.”

“If I let you go, can you open the door?”

“Maybe. Maybe. Yes.”

She shoved the barrel harder against his ear, “Open it.”