Taken: Day 4

Word Count: 24,085

Summary of Events:

Mitchell used the five dollars the young woman — whose name he learned was Dolly — had given him to have supper at the hotel restaurant before going to her room, as she'd invited him to do, and deciding to get some sleep, even though it was only seven at night. He was woken by her return at midnight and they talked a little bit before going to bed. Because he'd gotten the extra sleep before she arrived back Mitchell woke up sooner than Dolly, and so got out of bed and sat on one of the chairs in the room, thinking about his situation . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

His memory was pretty reliable, it always had been. He wasn’t typically quick to forget anything, which had made his comrades rather jealous of him on multiple occasions, as he’d remembered things for them that they otherwise would’ve forgotten, or had come in with the answer when they were confronted and couldn’t remember.

So if he didn’t recall having turned violent on Odessa then there was a very small chance it could have actually happened. That meant that he’d been set up.

That thought made his blood simmer hotly. But there was also the question of why.

Up until about a week ago Mitchell hadn’t ever set foot in the city of Los Angeles — forget the entire state of California — nor had he ever heard of Odessa Edgar. The furthest west in this country Mitchell had been in his life was to Abilene.

He’d grown up on a small farm outside of a small town barely eking out a living on drought-parched land. If Odessa Edgar’s father was a prominent businessman then he was a rich man who would have no business interacting with hand-to-mouth farmers, especially not a good thousand miles away in Texas.

From what he knew, he also didn’t have any acquaintances from his time in the Army that knew Odessa Edgar or her father — the closest was probably Perry, but that was purely because they lived in the same city; that didn’t mean they actually knew each other, even though he’d met Odessa at the event that had been put together in Perry’s honour.

Too, he and Perry were largely acquaintances. Yes, they’d ribbed each other and gotten under each other’s skin and knew each other well enough to call each other nicknames, but in the light of his friendship with Keith and his relationship to Major Bishop, his relationship with Perry was like looking at a lake: all that could be seen was the surface of the water.

There was a whole lot more to a lake than the surface, just like there was a whole lot more to people than just what they showed on the outside. His relationship with Major Bishop had been a bit more like being underwater, there was a lot more that could be seen down there, but it wasn’t necessarily the whole thing. His relationship with Keith had practically been like walking on the bottom, where all kinds of things could be seen.

As a result, Mitchell saw no reason whatsoever why Perry would want to do anything ill to him. They hardly knew each other, and besides, if this was Perry’s doing then how in the world had he convinced Odessa and her father to help him?

Mitchell needed to do some more digging and see what he could learn, and that started with going back to the other hotel. Surely he would be able to find some clues by snooping around, and by this time the police had to be gone.