Hell Bound: The Search for Jillian Ingalls

Chapter 2

“I’m ready,” she said, smiling slightly. “Thanks, Johnny. You were perfect.”

“You’re a very strange b***h, Jill. Anybody ever tell you that?”

“A few,” she said airily, with no apology in her voice.

Willis shook his head and walked up the steep pathway, leading her to the top of the hill, to the motel where they lived together. Jill clung to his arm, chattering idly about the weather. And, he didn’t have a single idea about what she was thinking, or why.

Like that was news, he thought.

***

Jill showered and dried her hair before going to bed in one of his old Vanderbilt University jerseys, a sure sign that sleep was the next thing on her mind. Willis pulled the sheet over them and spooned up behind her, luxuriating in the warm, sleek touch of her back, and the soft curve of her rump snuggled into his lap.

She pulled his hand off her breasts. “Don’t you ever get enough, honey?” The reproachful tone was of a mother berating a particularly stubborn child.

Willis hated being dismissed.

They lay still for a long time, and he listened to the storm lashing outside, and felt her breathing slow as she drifted off. When he was sure that she was asleep, he slipped out of bed and pulled his clothes back on.

Each motel room had a small covered screen porch leading to a shared deck. He took the chaise cushions outside and lit a cigar. It was almost two in the morning, and the leading edge of the storms had moved inland, leaving behind a steady, drumming downpour with no wind at all. The beach was empty, and the sea had been pounded flat by the cold, heartless rain. Willis sympathized.

Tending Jillian Ingles was the most exhausting thing he had ever done. The deep-seated kinkiness made her the most selfish woman of his experience. It was all about her, especially as he didn’t particularly enjoy his own role. She liked the humiliation of being forced to do things that she would ordinarily have never done, and he was the only one around to fix things to suit her. And he was beginning to dislike it, emphatically.

Willis had come to suspect that the arousal she felt let her stay aloof, emotionally speaking. There was no sense of shared experiences with Jill. She took her excitement down somewhere inside herself to play with—to a place he couldn’t go. The walls around that place were medieval in their implacable strength. Nobody got in there—nobody at all. He wondered what she did in there all by herself.

On the practical side, there was a more immediate risk to the games she wanted to play. They might choose the wrong guy. Married men on expense accounts and college kids on a lark were one thing, but, one day, somebody was going to call their bluff.

Willis wasn’t particularly worried about getting hurt. He carried his knife and a very nasty little Smith Wesson revolver with a two inch barrel and five high-velocity cartridges in its cylinder. To say he was expert with both weapons would be putting it very mildly, indeed. On top of that was an absolute wealth of practical hand-to-hand and martial arts training and experience. And, Willis thought wryly, he wasn’t a bad little dancer, either.

However, none of that made him a superman, or gave him the right to whomp up on some unsuspecting schmuck with more courage or outrage than brains. The real point was that Willis didn’t want to hurt anybody, especially when the only reason to do so was for Jill Ingalls to get off on the action. He could put a stop to it, of course. All he had to do was say no, for a change.

What a laugh.

The real problem was that it all seemed like such a dead end to Willis. Her nihilistic outlook stymied any possibility for meaningful growth between them, and he felt sometimes like he was drying up inside because of it. What he wanted to share was the beautiful, laughing girl, full of promise and passion. But, inevitably, the feckless dark place in her heart overshadowed what he really liked about her, which was the warmth and wit she had, her excitement with the life he knew, and the fine, unbridled s*x they shared on days when fine, unbridled s*x happened to be enough to blow her skirts up. What he got instead was a girl who dangled p***y in front of him like a carrot on a stick, and gave very little in return.

Willis smoked his cigar and thought about it for awhile, but the solo argument was pointless—mental m**********n with no payoff. Finally, he gave it up and pulled a beach towel off the rack beside the back door and covered himself against the damp night air. The cigar had gone out. He put it aside and went to sleep, with the same answers as always, none at all.

Jill brought him coffee at daylight.

“You’ll catch your death out here,” she said severely. “What’s the matter with you, Johnny? Sometimes I think you don’t have any sense at all.”

Willis stretched until his vertebrae cracked, and got stiffly to his feet. “How about you just get off my f*****g back,” he said wearily.

“I’m not on your back,” she said in the whining tone that always came out when she was trying to make amends. “Please, baby, I’m just trying to…”

“Oh, shut up, for Christ’s sake.”

He closed the bathroom door in her face, furious with her, and himself. When he got out of the shower, Jill was in her underwear, finishing her make-up. Her hefty breasts threatened to spill out of the narrow black bra as she leaned forward. Willis looked at the lovely ass, bared by her thong panties, and there wasn’t a mark on her. He swatted her a good one with the flat of his hand out of sheer frustrated spite, not playfully, meaning it to hurt.

“Ow!” She rubbed the sudden pink handprint. “Damn it, Johnny, you made me mess up my eyeliner.”

“It’s quarter till,” he said pointedly. She waited tables at Roland’s Café and Pub, just across the parking lot from their motel, and her shift started at seven.

“All right, all right,” she replied glumly, and slipped into her brown nylon uniform dress. “And where will you be today, while I’m busting my butt?”

“Surfing, maybe.”

Jill’s laugh was sour.

Willis pulled on jeans and took a second cup of coffee out onto the back deck, where he could smoke another cigar and watch the ocean. Jill came out after awhile with her purse over her shoulder.

“Your Daddy smokes cigars,” she said. “I always loved the smell.”

“Fuck him,” he replied equably.

“I did.” She gave him a flat stare. “He’s twice the man you are.”

“And who would know better?”

Willis covered the gut punch of her offhand cruelty with a tone of silky indifference. Her face tightened into an ugly mask. She turned abruptly away, slamming the door behind her, leaving him to grapple with a faint, guilty sense of relief.

***

When she didn’t come home after work that afternoon, Willis shrugged it off, figuring that she was still mad at him. By midnight, however, he was getting worried. She didn’t show up for work at all, the next day. He hung out by the phone on Friday with no word, and then gave it up and went looking for her. Nothing. He took the Harley and backtracked to every beach and wayside campsite they had ever visited. No one had seen her, and she never called.

Four days went by.

Tuesday, as he was dragging home from yet another fruitless, haunted search for some sight of that gorgeous flag of red hair, he stopped in the motel office to check the mail. He and Jill had only been in town for a couple of weeks, so there wasn’t much point, but, having a mailbox gave Willis a sense of being grounded. It said home, somehow. Jill thought he was funny, considering that everything they owned would fit into one smallish duffle bag. Willis didn’t care. He’d been a gypsy too long.

There was an envelope addressed to him in the box with a return address in Maine. Willis didn’t know anybody in Maine. He looked at it idly, too tired to concentrate. And then he looked on the back. A note had been scrawled there in blue ink. The handwriting was very familiar.

Johnny,

You really have to let me go, baby. It’s for the best.

Love, J.

He opened the envelope with shaking fingers, trying to catch his breath with a chest that had suddenly gone taut with…well, he didn’t know what; rage, trepidation, shock, fear…some of each, maybe, and too much to contend with all at once. He unfolded the single sheet of paper and read the letter that ended life as he knew it.

***

Dunn Associates, Inc.

PO Box 12229

Owls Head, ME

L. John Willis,

AKA Johnny Gold

C/o Beckman’s Lodge, Apt. 129

Highway 101

Newport Beach, CA

Dear Sir,

Pursuant to our contract #0006267, and Michigan bench warrant # MI-219980A420, please be advised that Jillian Beth Ingalls has been apprehended by representatives of this office and taken into custody. For your information, the detainee is charged on public record with renege and default of a legally binding service contract. She will be remitted to the custody of state police officials or returned to the contract holder for disposition, whichever is deemed more fitting.

You are being notified directly of this action at the behest of the detainee and concurrence of the complainant as reassurance that the prisoner Jillian Beth Ingalls is secure and undamaged. Furthermore, the undersigned, as a licensed and bonded agent, guarantees safe passage and proper guardianship of said detainee.

Based on client-agent privilege, this office is precluded from sharing further details. Any attempt to elicit such information is not only prohibited by law, but will be actively discouraged. Such inquiries may, instead, be addressed directly to the complainant, should you wish to pursue the matter further. We are instructed to advise you, however, that this will be unwelcome, and may well result in punitive action, due in no small part to your incontestable culpability in the detainee’s alleged contractual default.

If we may otherwise be of service, please feel free to contact our offices.

Best Regards,

Logan Dunn

***

The words tore at Willis’s heart. Why would Jill say it was for the best? He thought about that for maybe ten seconds and reached for the telephone to dial the bail bondsman’s office number in Maine. He got a recorded message, and ranted for a minute, and then hung up and called his father in Michigan, who would almost certainly be the complainant alluded to in the letter. There was no answer there, either. The exercise provided no detectable relief.

“All right, you motherfuckers,” he said grimly, and dialed one more number.

He had partied too much over the years not to know a bail bondsman or two. One of them, an enormous Chicano named Enrique Diaz, had offices in Fullerton, just a few miles up the road. Willis couldn’t quite keep the outrage out of his voice.

“Calm down,” Diaz said sharply. “Anger will not help you, my young friend. Now, I will make some inquiries. Come to the office. We can talk when you get here. Some matters are best not discussed on the phone.”

Thirty minutes later, Willis parked his Harley and went into the bail bondsman’s cluttered office. Diaz came around the desk with his hand out, voice booming with joviality. “¡Ola, jeffe! I’m so glad to see you again.” He was a big man; broad in the chest and shoulders. “Would you like some coffee? A drink?”

“Not just at the moment.” Willis passed the letter across the desk. “As I said, Enrique, this is all I have to go on.”

“Well, to work, then.” Diaz read with growing disapproval on his handsome, mobile face, and finally tossed the paper onto his desk. “This is a very dirty business, my friend, make no mistake about that. Since speaking with you on the telephone, I have made a small investigation of this name…this Logan Dunn. He is, as you may have guessed, a legitimate service provider who specializes in runaways of a very particular type.” Diaz tapped the letter and looked seriously at Willis. “I must ask this of you, John. Do you understand the real meaning of this phrase, “service contract,” in such a context?”