Jump the Gun Read Online Free

of the hotel shops. I came out of the store to suddenly feel a very real gun stuck in my back. It was Jake—whom I have never seen before in my life—and he said to come with him, because ‘my friend’ was in trouble. I said, ‘What friend is that?’ He didn’t say any more until he brought me to this room. He frisked me, took my phone, and told me to shut up and sit down. I was locked in here until he came and got me and paraded me in front of you as you were making your ill-timed escape.”
    Mickey was tense, so I forgave his put-down of my courageous escape attempt.
    Mickey took a breath. “I asked again, when he came to get me, ‘What friend is in trouble?’ This time he laughed. ‘Beatrice Starkey, your Las Vegas date, man. Like you don’t know that.’ Okay? Beatrice? So you tell me what the fuck is going on here, Annabelle! Or, excuse me, I mean Beatrice! Jake seems to know you, but apparently, I don’t!”
    This stopped me cold. I was as confused as Jane Eyre when she’s about to marry Mr. Rochester and his brother-in-law stops the wedding. I stared at Mickey. I think my mouth was open.
    â€œWell?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œYou don’t know?”
    â€œBeatrice is my first name and Annabelle is my middle name. But I have no idea how Jake knows my first name. He did call me Bea when he kidnapped me, now that I think about it.” I inhaled. “I go by Annabelle Starkey and hardly anyone calls me Bea, except my parents. I prefer Annabelle over Beatrice. Annabelle conjures up visions of a Southern beauty, with hoop skirts and lots of mysteries underneath them, but Beatrice sounds like a jolly fat aunt who puts happy faces made out of chocolate chips on her oatmeal cookies.”
    Mickey wrinkled his forehead. “So now I am someone without any peapods of intelligence, who is supposed to believe that Jake knows you, but you don’t know him.”
    â€œMickey, I really don’t know.” I managed a little smile. “But I think you probably have lots of peapods.”
    â€œYou do, do you.”
    â€œYes, I do.”
    â€œAnd you really don’t know what’s going on.”
    â€œI really don’t. I’ve never seen this guy before.”
    Mickey got up from the table and started pacing around the room. He opened the refrigerator and slammed it shut again. He rattled the doorknob, even though he knew it was locked. He muttered something that sounded like “Beatrice Annabelle Starkey, Beatrice Annabelle Starkey, Beatrice Annabelle…”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.”
    I sat and wondered if I ever had seen Jake anywhere before, if I had ever seen a gun before, if I had ever done something so horrendous that people would kill me for it, if I had ever dated someone who had used my social security number to order arms for Al Qaeda, if I really shouldn’t have gotten snippy with the woman at the grocery store check-out counter three Tuesdays before when she was talking to her friend instead of checking my groceries —maybe she was married to Jake—if my employer was a front for the mob (after all, I never was privy to sales figures and it was a privately owned company, and my boss always wore really expensive Italian-made shoes), if my father had finally and secretly realized his childhood dream of becoming an international spy and his enemies were trying to get at him through his family members, if government agents had intercepted that email I sent to Mom a few years ago when I proposed that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be exiled to a remote island and forced to watch “Judge Judy” reruns for the rest of their miserable lives.
    â€œMickey, did he say anything else? Was he with anyone?”
    â€œWhen he took me he was alone. The gun had a silencer. He said Beatrice was in trouble. He brought me here. I said, wait a minute, who was he, why were we in