Store-Crossed Lovers

Fiction by Michael Bracken

Hello, Callers! Thank you for being here.

This February, we’re featuring two tales of romance and criminal intent. First up is crime fiction legend Michael Bracken with a twisting tale of love and hostage negotiation in—where else?—Chicken Junction, Texas. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

Store-Crossed Lovers

When his cell phone rang Friday afternoon, Wilber Farley, manager of the Supermercado Hermanita in Chicken Junction, Texas, glanced at its screen. Upon seeing the endearing phrase with which he referred to his wife of twenty-three years, he answered, “Yes, dear?”

A gruff male voice replied, “I’m currently holding a gun to your wife’s forehead, Mr. Farley, so I want you to listen carefully.”

Wilber swallowed.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to hold the phone so your wife can talk to you.”

The next voice Wilber heard was Emma’s. She pleaded, “Do what he says, Wilber, please, please, please, do what he says.”

“Are you okay? Has he—?”

“She’s fine, Mr. Farley, and she will remain fine as long as you follow my instructions.”

“What do you want from me?”

Wilber listened carefully. The caller knew that Friday was payday for much of the town’s Hispanic community—Guatemalan, Honduran, Mexican, Panamanian, and others from south of the Rio Grande who came to America seeking a better life and instead wound up in West Texas working twelve-hour shifts for subsistence pay at Chicken Junction’s meat processing plant. Many of the unbanked illegals used the store to cash their paychecks and wire money home to relatives living in far worse conditions, and the Supermercado Hermanita’s safe was flush with a cash reserve timed to co-ordinate with the meat processing plant’s bi-weekly pay schedule.

After the call ended, Wilber emptied the safe and stacked bundles of cash atop his desk. Several minutes later his office door opened, and he was joined by a woman wearing square-toed cowboy boots, jeans, a black trench coat, sunglasses, and a black scarf pulled over her nose and mouth. A few loose strands of blond hair had escaped from beneath her black Stetson.

Neither spoke as he scooped the money into a pair of paper grocery bags with the store’s logo imprinted on them. He showed her the empty safe, hitched his pants up over his expansive belly, and returned to his seat behind the desk.

The woman hesitated a moment before grabbing the bags and walking out.

Butch Palmer heard his cell phone ding, and he looked down at the message. When he looked up at Emma Farley, he said, “We have the money.”

“I knew my husband would give it up,” Emma said as she climbed onto the king-size bed and lay on her side. “He’s just that stupid.”

Butch had brought nylon rope with him—rope he had purchased a week earlier at the Supermercado Hermanita Emma’s husband managed—and he hog-tied her. They had played this game several times during the many months they had been seeing each another, but they had usually been naked, and the rope had been part of their foreplay.

“You okay?” he asked. “Not too tight?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

Butch leaned forward and kissed her before he put the gag in her mouth. Then he called Wilber with Emma’s cell phone and said, “Thirty minutes, Mr. Farley—”

“My wife,” Wilber said, interrupting Butch. “Is she—?”

“She’s fine, Mr. Farley, and she will be as long as you do what we say. Thirty minutes. Don’t leave the store. Don’t call anyone. We’re watching.”

Butch disconnected the call, tossed the phone on the bed next to Emma, and said, “He was worried about you. Imagine that.”

He checked the knots again to ensure they weren’t too tight. Then he left Emma on the bed, made his way outside to his pickup truck, and drove away. He had rented a room at the Dixie Motel on the outskirts of Chicken Junction, and he headed there.

Sandwiched between the Dew Drop Inn and the Rodeo Bar and Grill, the Dixie Motel consisted of two buildings separated by an asphalt parking lot, and it had seen better days. One building housed the office and guest rooms one through six while the other housed the laundry and guest rooms seven through twelve. Tina Walker was waiting for Butch in room twelve, one eye on the muted television tuned to a local station.

As he pushed the door open, he asked, “You got it?”

She showed him the grocery bags.

Butch emptied them onto the bed and whistled. He had never seen so much money. “All those poor illegals won’t be able to cash their paychecks tonight.”

Tina asked, “What about the wife?”

“She’ll be okay,” Butch said. “I was careful with the knots.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I am,” he insisted. “What do you think I am, an idiot?”

Tina didn’t respond to his question. Instead, she glanced at her watch. “It’s been forty-five minutes.”

Butch said, “He should have checked on his little sweetie pie by now. Think he called the cops?”

“Of course he called the police,” Tina said. “Or he will soon.”

“Will soon?”

“From what you said about him, he probably drove straight home. He’ll call after he gets there and makes certain his wife is okay.”

“You think?”

Butch had counted all the money and was putting half in each of the Supermercado Hermanita shopping bags when Tina unmuted the television, startling him.

“—and found his wife dead,” said the dark-haired mid-day anchor. “Police are looking for this man”—Butch’s photo appeared onscreen, CCTV footage taken as he was approaching his pickup truck, license plate partially visible—“and his accomplice, the man who collected the ransom money at the grocery store.”

Tina spun on Butch, and their ensuing argument drowned out the television.

“They have your photograph? I thought you said there were no cameras at the house and none in the neighborhood.”

“There weren’t,” Butch insisted. “I went over everything last week.”

“It was a new camera? You didn’t think to check again before you went in?”

“I—”

Wilber had installed the camera the night before, and he was on the television sobbing as he told a reporter about it. “I—I had a feeling,” he sobbed. “It couldn’t stop my wife’s killer, but maybe it will help police find him.”

Butch grabbed the shopping bags. “We need to get out of here.”

“You need to get out of here,” Tina insisted. She leveled a semi-automatic pistol at him. “Put the bags down and go.”

“But—”

“They catch you with the money, you’re toast,” she said. “They don’t know me. They don’t have a description of me. They aren’t looking for me. So, I’ll take the money and meet you in San Antonio, just like we planned to do if we were separated.”

Butch looked at the money. He looked at the gun. He looked at the money again.

“You killed her!” Emma shouted. “You weren’t supposed to kill her.”

“I didn’t,” Butch insisted. He had planned to double-cross Tina, take the money and meet Emma in El Paso after she dumped her husband, and he had not made contingency plans. “She was fine when I left. Her husband must have—”

“Go!” Tina shouted. “Go now or I’ll shoot you and leave your body here for the cops to find.”

Butch took one last look at the shopping bags filled with cash. Then he walked out to his truck and drove away.

A few minutes later, Tina used a burner phone to call the local police. She told the 911 operator that she had seen a pickup truck matching the description of the one she’d seen on the news earlier, and she told the operator which direction it had been headed.

Butch had rented the room at the Dixie Motel, and Tina had parked her car in the Dew Drop Inn’s lot next door, so there was no obvious connection between her and the room. After ending the call, she grabbed the money bags, tossed the motel room key onto the center of the bed, and put the bags into the trunk of her car. Two days earlier, she had rented a room at the six-room motel in Quarryville, and she drove directly there.

She had left the room a mess, and she had left one of her suitcases open and a few of her things strewn about when she’d left early that morning. The bed had been made, the towels replaced, and her things neatly placed atop her suitcase. A quick examination confirmed that nothing was missing, so she transferred the cash into a brown leather satchel. Then she showered, changed clothes, and took a stroll along Main Street.

Anchored by a Texaco and a Dairy Queen at one end and by the Quarryville Smokehouse at the other, Main Street had returned to life after many years. Though some of the storefronts were still boarded up, a pawnshop, an antiques shop, and an art gallery saw a modest stream of visitors, and two other buildings were in the process of renovation. She ate dinner at the smokehouse and returned to her room to wait.

She was watching an airborne pickup truck on the ten o’clock news when her second burner phone rang.

“Is that him?” Wilber Farley asked.

“Idiot tried to run from the police.”

Dashcam from one of the pursuing law enforcement vehicles caught the moment Butch’s truck hit the spike strips, he lost control, and it broke through a bridge’s guardrail. According to the newscaster, he had not survived the landing in the dry creek bed below.

“That works out well for us, doesn’t it?”

Tina didn’t answer Wilber’s question. Instead, she asked one of her own. “What about you? Any problems with the police?”

Wilber assured her that everything had gone according to plan. “They seemed convinced that the kidnapper killed Emma either intentionally or unintentionally due to the way she was tied up.”

“And me?”

“I told them a man collected the money. They have no reason to think otherwise.”

Wilber Farley ended the call and smiled. Everything had gone according to Tina’s plan—maybe even better. Her dead partner would be blamed for his wife’s death, police were looking for the dead man’s male partner, and Wilber felt confident they had no reason to suspect he had tightened the noose around his wife’s neck when he found her trussed up on the bed.

Because his home was a crime scene, Wilber had taken a room on the second floor of the new Holiday Inn, and he had a restless night.

The next morning, he used the burner phone a second time. When Tina answered, he said, “I need to see you.”

“San Antonio,” she said. “Two weeks from now.”

“No,” Wilber insisted. Money from the robbery of the Supermercado Hermanita was only icing on the cake for Wilber. The quarter-million-dollar life insurance policy he carried on his wife was more than double his share of the robbery proceeds. He hadn’t told Tina about the insurance policy, and he wasn’t planning to. What he needed to do was ensure that she disappeared. “Now. Before you leave.”

“Don’t you trust me?” she asked. “Hasn’t everything gone as I said it would?”

Tina paced the motel room as they spoke, her burner phone pressed to her ear. Everything had gone according to plan, but Wilber had grown nervous. Though she reassured him, he worried she would not be in San Antonio when he arrived, and he was right. She had no intention of ever seeing him again.

But if he was nervous, the Chicken Junction police would wonder why. She needed to calm Wilber, so she agreed to meet later that afternoon at an abandoned quarry.

Because she planned to leave Texas after the meeting, she packed everything in her car and drove to the quarry, her semi-automatic hidden under a scarf on her lap. Wilber was leaning against his car when she arrived, and she pulled to a stop next to him. Before she could open her door, he leaned into her open window and said, “I want my money now.”

“Police find you with it, they’ll tie you to the robbery, and that’ll lead them to me.” Her hand was in her lap, under the scarf.

“Don’t worry about me.” Wilber reached through the open window and grabbed Tina’s shoulder, squeezing with more intent than actual strength. “I can take care of myself. So, give me my money before I drag you out of that car and dump your ass in the quarry.”

Tina leveled her semi-automatic at him. “No.”

Wilber released his grip on her shoulder and stepped back.

“You know they’re looking for a man, don’t you?” she said.

A moment later she eliminated the last loose end.

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Michael Bracken is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction, and advertising copy. An Edgar Award nominee and Shamus Award nominee, he has received multiple awards for copywriting, three Derringer Awards for short fiction, and the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction. In 2024, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his contributions to Texas literature. The author of several books and almost 1,300 short stories, he has edited or co-edited thirty-three crime fiction anthologies, including three nominated for Anthony Awards, and provides editorial services to book and periodical publishers. Learn more at crimefictionwriter.com.