Free Escape Route (Murder Off-Screen Book 1) by GA VanDruff Page A

with the Oscars last Sunday, dredging everything up—one hallucination every twelve months is permissible. Almost required, not to put too fine a point on it.
    I drove off in search of an abandoned building.
    Which turned out to be right around the next bend.
    Not so much a building as a forlorn, foreclosed two-story house with a barn in the back.
    “Hello-o-o, Herbert Mercer.” According to Aunt B, his mother died last April in this sad, little house, and rather than take the trouble to fix it up with his five-thousand dollar inheritance, Herbie flew to Vegas, lost every red cent in two hands of black jack, broke the dealer’s jaw and went to jail.
    If the bank had staked signs in the yard, they were gone. But from here, I could see the right-side door of the barn was open a foot.
    I followed the driveway to the back of the house, pulled up close to the disintegrating back porch and parked. The rental tucked in neatly, out of view of the road. Traffic on Mercer Neck amounts to about one car an hour, but if that one car was Oakley Beach’s only squad car, it was the slammer for me.
    Not that Oakley Beach has an actual slammer. Our combo office-slash-jail is a ten-by-fifteen-foot addition to Nilly’s house equipped with an iron hitching post bolted to the floor, next to a bench bolted to the floor.
    I popped the trunk, lifted my bike out and leaned it against the back porch.
    The barn was a barn. The barn you see on any farm, in any TV show about America. Classic, worn, red paint, brighter at the eaves, fading out like a watercolor painting to the stone foundation. The boards were unevenly spaced. Keeps the air moving. Keeps hay from rotting.
    The doors were heavy and crooked. I leaned my back against the splintering wood, dug my heels into the dirt for traction, and pushed and heaved until they stood wide open so I could gauge what I was dealing with.
    The plank floor was solid. By that I mean, it didn’t cave in with my one-hundred-seventeen-pound-frame jumping up and down on it. I kicked at stray lumps of straw—or hay—who can tell the difference, and didn’t slice my foot on hidden sickles or scythes. No John Deeres taking up valuable real estate.
    I dashed back to my out-of-state plunder, cupped my ears and listened hard. Sparrows were my only witnesses, chirping to each other about the fine weather.
    The barn fit the car like a glove. I slipped the key ring under the driver’s side floor mat and reset both wood doors exactly as I found them.
    Five minutes later, my knees pumped up and down at a furious pace, like an adult on a child’s bicycle because that’s exactly what this was. Twenty-six-year-old Jaqie pedaling like a wild woman on twelve-year-old Jaqie’s pink-and-chrome getaway bike.

CHAPTER 18
     
     
    It didn’t matter in the least that I could not talk when I arrived at Dumford’s Marina. While Uncle Frank recited the speech he’d been crafting, I took the opportunity to glance around the immediate area for an oxygen canister. When that produced no results, I went to my Zen place to regulate my breathing and lower my blood pressure which was so high, I couldn’t hear most of Uncle Frank’s diatribe for the blood pounding in my ears.
    Ed had pried my cramped fingers off the handlebars after I bobbled into the parking lot, and moved the grotesque bicycle under the eaves near the marina’s front door. That eliminated any hope someone might steal the thing.
    “Now, you and this idiot,”—pronounced “idjit” in this circumstance—“take my truck and head to Bub’s and pick up six cans of WD-40.”
    I caught the keys in mid-toss and turned a three-sixty. Dumford’s Marina was the marina in a hundred-mile radius. The main building was the size of an airport hangar. Dozens of boats were cradled over the ten acres of prime waterfront that also offers fifteen docks for rent. Dell’s crane would make short work of stepping Ovation’s mast. Mumford’s had it all.
    “Uncle Frank,