Free Missouri Loves Company (Rip Lane Book 1) by W.J. Costello Page B

Everybody lies. Men lie. Women lie. Children lie. Adults lie. You lie. I lie too.
    Everybody lies.
    But nobody likes to be lied to.
    Especially when it endangers your life. Especially when the lie comes from somebody you helped out. Especially.
    The Pottsland welcoming committee could have left me alone. Should have left me alone. They did not have to come after me. They did not have to try to kill me.
    Snuffing me out isn’t that easy. Fugitives have tried. Gangsters, mobsters, thugs. They tried. They failed.
    I don’t like it when people try. It makes me angry.
    I expect fugitives to try. But not cops. Cops are supposed to be good guys.
    The two Pottsland cops were not good guys. They were corrupt. Sadistic.
    They needed to be taught a lesson. One they would never forget. An Introduction to Ethics. Taught by Professor Rip Lane.
    Pottsland was just a town I had been passing through. I had not planned on stopping there, and I had certainly not planned on staying. But circumstances had changed that. People from Pottsland had changed that. They couldn’t let me be. They had to disrupt my life, bring chaos into my ordered existence, and irritate the hell out of me.
    I could have been enjoying my trip to Missouri. Could have been seeing the sights of St. Louis. Anheuser-Busch Brewery. Forest Park. Gateway Arch. Missouri Botanical Garden. St. Louis Zoo.
    These were the sights I had wanted to see. Not the Pottsland bus station, the Pottsland jail, and the inside of a car trunk.
    I can forgive and forget. Make an honest mistake, I can forgive you. Tell a small white lie, I can forgive you.
    Try to kill me?
    I’m coming after you.
    There could be no forgiveness for the four men who had tried to kill me. No forgiving. No forgetting. Only payback.
    But how to do it?
    The plan would come to me in time. I was sure of that.
    In the meantime I needed to find Anna. She was the key to understanding this whole mess. She would be able to explain everything that was going on. And I needed to understand everything if I wanted to put an end to it.
    I was tempted to hunt down my would-be killers and confront them directly. But I knew that revenge was best exacted by indirect methods. So I did not give into temptation.
    Anna was hiding somewhere. Hiding from the bad guys. She did not want to be found. I was going to find her anyway.
    I didn’t know her last name. I didn’t know her home address. There was a lot I didn’t know about Anna.
    What I did know was that she had a duffel bag. A black and red duffel bag with the St. Louis Cardinals logo on it. It was a big bag. She could have bought it anywhere. There were probably thousands of places in the world that sold that particular kind of bag.
    But Pottsland was where Anna had lived her entire life—if she had not been lying to me about that. And so Pottsland was probably where Anna had bought the duffel bag.
    It was where I needed to start looking.

CHAPTER 33
     
     
    I N THE CAMPGROUND office I scanned the yellow pages for sporting goods stores. I ran my finger down the listings. It didn’t run very far. There were only three sporting goods stores listed in Pottsland.
    Exiting the office, I ran into Lance. He seemed very excited.
    “What’s new, Lance.”
    “I phoned Mary.”
    “You talk to her?”
    “For two hours.”
    “And?”
    “She told me her husband died two years ago. Prostate cancer.”
    “Cancer’s a bitch.”
    “It is.”
    “What else Mary have to say?”
    “Said she was glad to hear from me. What got me choked up, she told me she kept my ring. I gave it to her when we were dating, and she kept it all these years.”
    “No kidding.”
    “She told me she was looking through her jewelry box one day, trying to find something to give her granddaughter, who was standing beside her at the time. The granddaughter reaches into the jewelry box and picks up my ring. She wanted it. But Mary told her she couldn’t have it. Told her she could have anything else she wanted in