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A Doll's Odyssey
Part Eleven
LVII. The Golden Rule
LVII. The Golden Rule
Sunday, August 29, 1999, Port Hope, Michigan
"Whoa!," Dolly rasped, pulling up short and raising her hands, palms at shoulder level and flat toward Marlene. "There's no need for this..." she began. The gun looked ugly from this angle.
It was a pump action, single-barrel, 12-gauge. At such a short range, the spreading pellets from the gun's cartridges would put a significant hole in Dolly's lovely carcass, which, for obvious reasons. the little doll would prefer to avoid if at all possible.
The large woman said, "I don't have any reason to doubt that or believe that. But it's pretty plain that you're more than you seem to be, and I haven't survived all these years by ignoring my paranoia. If you are what you say you are, everything's fine. We can complete our transaction and you can go on your way with my apologies." All sweet reasonableness.
"And if I'm not?" Dolly said, her voice dropping a half octave to rumble in her chest.
"Well, then nobody knows you're here, do they?" The implied threat hung in the air between them. Dolly waited a few beats then made a snap judgment. She'd spin the tale that had been rolling around in the back of her mind.
"Whatever makes you think that? Ever hear of remote surveillance? They can watch you from so far away that there's no way you could ever tell. If my guys were to set up a listening post a couple of miles away, you'd never know it. But my backup could be just over the next hill or on their way in here right now. You'd be really smart to let me go."
Marlene raised the shotgun and snugged the butt into her shoulder. She tracked the gun rightward, trying to bear on Dolly. Dolly could see what was coming, Dietrich had done with dithering and would shoot as soon as she had a clear target.
Dolly feinted to the left, watching the gun tracking her--lagging her movement by just a hair--then to the right. Marlene apparently expected her to go back leftward, because she started to swing the gun around in the opposite direction. At that moment, when the muzzle of the shotgun no longer covered her, Dolly attacked.
She dived to the floor under the gun barrel, somersaulting below the angle at which Marlene could depress the muzzle, and curled her body into a tight tuck roll.
The shotgun went off overhead. The round missed her completely. In the confined space of the range shed, the explosion was deafening. The rattling impact of the individual shot pellets against the rafters and roofing of the structure was muffled by the effect of the gun blast on Dolly's hearing.
Instead of working the pump action with the gun held at her shoulder, Marlene made the mistake of lowering the gun from her shoulder to eject the spent cartridge and chamber the next one.
Who knows why she did it? Maybe she wasn't strong enough. It is an awkward position and the action demands a good deal of arm strength. Marlene was a large-bodied woman, but, it seems, possessed little in the way of muscle tone. Whatever her reason, it took her a good second-and-a-half longer to get the next round chambered than it should have. And of course, Dolly took full advantage of the time lag.
Dolly, contrasted with the big middle-aged woman with dewlap biceps, was an extraordinary physical specimen, in excellent condition at the best of times and, even in extremis as she was at that moment, far superior physically to most of the population at large.
At just the right point in her roll, she launched her body up off the floor by pressing down with her shoulders and throwing her legs upward. Even before Marlene had the gun down and in a position where she could exert the proper leverage with her arms to work the action, Dolly's heels hit the big woman on either side of her jawbone with all the force in the little redhead's spring-steel-muscled body. The jaw closed with a hollow snap and the light went out in the big woman's eyes.
Dolly followed through after the blow, rolling away from the shotgun as it fell from Marlene's nerveless fingers, then once she regained her feet, bounding forward for a one-handed catch of the gun just before it hit the ground.
Holding it in her left hand, her fingers wrapped around the pump handle, she whipped the weapon around, shaking it violently one time up and then down to work the action, then spinning the butt of the stock up and under her arm, taking the grip in her right hand and slipping her right forefinger through the trigger guard.
Marlene's body kept its feet for a second by virtue of its inertia. But as the muscles of the legs relaxed, the whole structure of bone and muscle began to collapse like the controlled demolition of a skyscraper as seen in slow motion. She toppled, slowly at first, then more rapidly, with growing momentum. By the time she hit the floor, she was falling at a good clip and her head slammed into the concrete with a crack that even made Dolly wince and mutter, "Ouch!"
Breathing hard after the brief period of intense and explosive action, she stalked around the woman's supine form in a cat-footed circle, half-crouched, wholly alert, the gun held steady and on point, her nerves on a hair trigger, watching closely for signs of consciousness.
Finally, she knelt by Marlene's side and pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the woman's temple. She stretched out a hand toward the other's face to peel back an eyelid. All that was visible of the eye was the white, bloodshot sclera. Marlene's eyes were rolled back in her head. Still not a guarantee she was unconscious, but better than nothing.
Dolly let go a breath she didn't know she'd been holding and stood up, backing away from the other woman, her thoughts running fast and furious on what to do next... how to play the hand from here.
First things first. Now that the big woman was immobilized, Dolly wanted to make sure she stayed that way, even if she regained consciousness. Rummaging around, she found a roll of silver duct tape.
"Ah, duct tape," she said with a mischievous gleam in her eye. "Like the Force, it has a dark side and a light side, and it holds the universe together." She chuckled to herself with evil merriment as she proceeded to bind the woman hand and foot with the stuff.
As the breath of her laughter crossed a certain point in her trachea, a rasping tickle in the back of her throat made her cough. Just once. But she could tell from the sensations in her windpipe that something was coming on--cold, allergy, whatever, it promised to be a royal pain in the neck.
She bent over at the hip to wrap the silver tape around her captive's wrists and ankles. She took a few minutes at it and could feel the blood rushing to her head. When she straightened upon completing the task, a wave of dizziness made her stagger for an instant.
"Whoo!" she exclaimed. "That's something new! Wonder what brought that on?"
Pushing aside the unwelcome thought that she might be coming down with a viral infection or something, she squatted next to Marlene's recumbent form and inspected her closely.
The woman was a little over six feet tall and, Dolly estimated, would go nearly three hundred pounds. She was wearing men's camo pants and a red hooded pullover sweatshirt. Her feet were shod in Red Wing work boots. The sweatshirt had ridden up to show a bit of her flabby, pasty-white belly and a white undergarment. Probably a tee shirt, but it was hard to say for sure, and Dolly didn't want to paw the woman's body to find out if she didn't have to. The mere thought of it made her shudder.
The sweatshirt had a kangaroo pocket in the front and there were curious lumps in it. Thinking that this didn't exactly qualify as pawing, Dolly wormed her hand into the pocket and extracted:
A man's biker wallet. Set aside to be inspected later;
And a set of keys with two power-lock remotes on them. She pointed both of them at the front door of the building and pressed a button. One of them operated the garage door. When Dolly pressed the button, a motor hummed overhead and the door began to descend. Dolly pressed the button again to no avail, then pressed the other button and it stopped, then reversed.
"OK. So we have a garage door remote. What's the other one?" She looked at it more closely and saw the word "Jeep" debossed into the plastic case. Not only that, but it was familiar to her from her handling of the remote for Drummond's Laredo. "So somebody around here has a Jeep. Somebody who likes Ms. Dietrich well enough to give her a set of keys of her very own."
Sure enough, on the ring was an ignition key with the Chrysler pentacrystal debossed into one side of the plastic boot and the Jeep logo on the other.
"Now," Dolly said didactically to herself, "that could mean that we might get a visitor any moment, so time is of the essence." She stepped around behind the counter and stood the shotgun against the back wall. Then she picked up the Glock from the counter pad and looked at it thoughtfully.
"Do you suppose," she asked herself, "Would Ms. Dietrich's stock run to a less... trendy weapon?" She put the Glock back on the counter and roamed about the shed for a few moments, looking at cases and displays. There were locked cabinets all over the place.
But right there in the main display case was what she was looking for. On a purple cushion, given pride of place--albeit on a lower shelf--was a Heckler & Koch 9mm Universal Service Pistol (Tactical). The same model Dolly carried as a TATAS and for personal protection since her elevation to the OOD.
Of course the case was locked, but resort to Marlene's ring of keys solved that problem and soon the greedily acquisitive doll was stooped behind the case, reaching toward the pistol with a gleam in her eye. "Come to Mama, you little beauty."
As she took the gun into her strong, long-fingered hand, she felt the crisis and pain that had, over the last few days, accreted on her emotional skin like layers of grime just slough away. The gun felt like an extension of her hand, fitting warm and comforting into her world view of Dolly in charge of things. She was Th' Doll, standing tall and armed to the teeth. Strutting proud and randy to the core.
"'Patience my ass,' said one vulture to another," she muttered with a wicked grin, "'I wanna kill something.'" Not that she really did, but the bleak humor of the dark joke suited her current mood.
She got busily to work locating ammunition and spare magazines for the gun and loading the clips. Then she found a cardboard carton of cheap cowhide holsters and hastily selected one that would do. Not brilliantly, but adequately. There was probably one made especially for the gun lying around somewhere, but it could be anywhere, and finding it might take more time than she had. In any case, it couldn't touch her custom-made and custom-fitted tooled cabretta holsters, (that had probably been vaporized when her car blew up).
The holster went inside the waistband of her borrowed jeans and the spare magazines into the pockets of the web belt. She came back around the counter and strode down the length of the shed to the firing line, where she found a pair of ear protectors and put them on. There was a target already set up at about fifty feet away, and she chose to shoot at it.
Assuming a balanced, bent-legged stance and two-handed grip as she had been taught, she squeezed off several rounds, satisfying herself that the weapon was operative. Then she went back to the counter and found a pistol rod, some patches, and a bottle of Hoppe's No. 9.
She quickly unloaded the weapon, field stripped and cleaned it, and had it reassembled in a little under ninety seconds. Reloading the magazine, she slid it into the pistol's butt, pressing it home with a reassuring click. Jacking the first round into the chamber, she slid the clip back out and pressed another round into the top of it. That gave her thirteen in the clip and one in the chamber for a total of fourteen rounds, plus all of the clips she had at her belt. She felt like she was loaded for bear.
Armed and satisfied with her armament, Dolly moved onto the next task. She scooped up Dietrich's wallet from the floor and--while she was kneeling on the concrete--checked her captive. Still out, solid pulse, breathing OK. She could be left for a few minutes. Standing once again, Dolly paused and instant. A thought occurred to her. She found the duct tape and plastered a strip of it across the woman's mouth.
"Can't have you chewing through the tape on your wrists, now can we?" she explained.
Then she stood and strolled out of the range shed, ransacking the wallet as she went.
Next: LVIII. Reach out and touch someone | Previous: LVI. Barter