Stuck In Lodi
The red-green paint on the cement-block walls had begun chipping and fading long before Amy entered the room. She sat down behind a plain gray desk, where a phone was shoved into her hands.
She immediately punched in Vince's number. Got his secretary. Punched in his cell phone. It rang off the hook. Waited through his voicemail system and was hung up on.
Finally got through on the third time. "Hello, you've reached the offices of Vince McMahon..."
She hung up, yearning for a cigarette with untold desperation.
***
"You keep him tied up! I don't want anyone trying to get him loose!"
"Yes, deputy!"
Lita rolled her eyes, but managed to paste on a smile when Charlie Cossaway entered his office.
"Couldn't get through to Hardy?"
"No, his phone's busy."
"Well, we'll be glad to get you anything you need; coffee, a doughnut..." He began to whisper. "I know a woman in the village that can make your baby troubles go away..."
Amy tried not to burst out laughing. "No, I'd like to keep the baby. He'll help me build character."
"Anything you say, miss."
She peered at him curiously. "Charlie, would you really do anything for me?"
"Anything for a Lady like you!"
"Let Kane go."
"Excuse me?"
"That's right; let him go, please."
"After all he did to you, you want to let him go?"
"I NEED for him to be let go."
He shook his head. "Sad, sad. That's got to be the brainwashing talking..."
"I'm not brainwashed."
"Just what a brainwashed person is taught to say!" He clicked his tongue in dismay. "Maybe some coffee will clean out your brain. I'll make it extra-strong."
Amy kept her feeble smile pasted on her face. When the deputy was out of sight, she leaned over his desk.
Triumphantly, she dug out the keys he had kept upon the desk.
***
Glenn felt an old, unknown hymn welling up in his lungs, but could not find the expression with which to sing it. The cell he had been placed in was small, littered with graffiti and stank of some unknown bodily fluid.
He contemplated writing his name in the grime, like a dying soldier at Antiock.
Amy's whisper cut through the darkness, startling him. To his astonishment, the lock turned.
"You didn't give him a somas, did you?"
She glared at him. "I know how to trick a man, Glenn," she pointed out. "Jeff still doesn't know that he's on his fifteenth ferret."
"Jeff is stupider than any man alive and..." His rant was interrupted by nails scratching his side.
"Just find a back door."
They walked, calmly, through the almost-deserted prison. They hit the back door with no problems, and were a safe distance from the prison before the alarm sounded.
Amy acted on instinct, jutting her leg out into traffic, screaming for a taxi. To Glenn's astonishment, one stopped.
They were a good ten miles from their destination when they realized they had forgotten their bags.