Revenge is Sweet (A Samantha Church Mystery) (5 page)

“Why didn’t you just kill us the other night when you had the chance?” Wilson asked, narrowing his eyes. “You could’ve made your getaway and never been caught. Now you’re going to face all kinds of charges, including kidnapping.”

The look on Juan’s face registered little worry about
being caught
.

“Who said anything about being caught?” Juan laughed. The harshness of it made Wilson stir uneasily in his chair.

“Of course we could have done away with you and Samantha Christine the other night. Right there in the parking lot. Very, very easily.” Juan pressed the nozzle of his weapon hard against Wilson’s temple. “Boom, one shot and that’d be it. In fact, I could’ve put a bullet right through the center of your skulls and you both would’ve been dead before you hit the ground.”

Juan shouldered the automatic and retrieved his cigarettes. He offered the pack to Wilson, who shook his head. Juan lit another cigarette and slipped the pack back in his coat pocket. He thought a moment before continuing. “I must admit that it would’ve given me great satisfaction watching the both of you fall dead to the ground. It would have been fast and painless, or relatively painless. But don’t you think, Mr. Cole, that it would have been rather boring?”

“Boring?” Wilson said.

“Yes, boring,” Juan replied. “Over and done with, just like that.”

Juan snapped his fingers. “No, no,” he continued. “This will be so much more fun. By the time we are done with Samantha Christine, she’ll wish to shit that she had been shot that night. In fact, Mr. Cole, we’re going to lead her right here to us. And then …” Juan pushed his jacket aside, exposing the butt of the automatic. “And then, we’ll see, maybe I’ll shoot her myself.”

Juan paused long enough to allow his words to have the desired effect.

“You’re not going to just kill her are you?” Wilson asked, remembering Sam’s suspicions about being followed. He should have trusted her instincts.

Juan looked around the small room and then at Wilson. “It might be hard for you to imagine, Mr. Cole, just how much money I made in this little room. We had quite a little operation going here until Samantha’s
bitch of a sister started nosing around. I couldn’t have her messing things up, so we had to put the dog down ...”

Juan’s voice trailed off and he had a smirk on his face that Wilson wanted to slap off. “She was easier to get rid of than I thought. I must admit, however, that Samantha had more fight in her than even I had given her credit for. I was certain she would wilt at the first sign of our threats, but she surprised me.”

Wilson snorted. “What’d you expect? You murdered her sister.”

“
Yeah but she still hasn’t gotten the message has she? I’ll be ready for her this time,” Juan replied coldly, ignoring his comment. “As I said, when we get through with her, she’ll wish she’d died in the parking lot.”

Juan took a long drag on his cigarette. The smoke was giving Wilson a headache. “Is there anything else I can get for you, Mr. Cole, to make your stay here a little more comfortable? It may be a few days before Samantha arrives, allowing me the pleasure of her company.”

Wilson didn’t answer. He wanted to burst out of these handcuffs, grab Juan by the neck and strangle him. “Another bottle of water and a little more food would be nice,” Wilson said, his voice an even, measured tone.

Juan took a long drag on his cigarette. “That can be arranged.”

Juan nodded at Fuzz Face, who left the room. He returned moments later with a twelve-ounce bottle of water and a burrito in a package and set them on the floor, just beyond Wilson’s reach. Juan turned around and headed for the door. He stopped just before leaving and turned to look at Wilson, his pencil fingers resting casually on the doorframe. “My people have always feared my anger, Mr. Cole. They have always treaded lightly around me. They didn’t want to risk my wrath. It’s not a pleasant sight. That I can assure you, but you and the reporter have done more than provoke my anger and she will pay dearly. And you, Mr. Cole …” His voice trailed off into an empty laugh. “You will have the pleasure of watching what will happen to her.”

Juan turned and left without another word. Fuzz Face removed his 9mm and trained it on Wilson as one of the twins removed the handcuffs.

“Get up and stand against that wall,” Fuzz Face ordered and pointed with his gun to the back of the room. Wilson did as he was told. He watched as they took the chair and left the room, closing the door behind them. He could hear sounds of the door being locked and footsteps retreating into the distance.

Anger and the thought of Juan hurting Sam surged through Wilson like a live wire. He hurdled himself hard at the door and hit it with a heavy thud. The force from the impact knocked him back and off his feet. He lost his balance, stumbled and fell to the cement floor.

The last of the daylight was fading when Sam left the newspaper and headed toward Wilson’s Accord. The raw wind that had pushed her into the office that morning had died down, the bare trees surrounding the parking lot, still as a photograph. Sam had purposely parked in the front of the building when she came to work this morning, avoiding the back parking lot and what had happened there.

Each step was an effort. It took all her energy to put one foot in front of the other. She was so certain that she would have heard something from Wilson’s kidnappers before the end of the workday. Her heart would start to race every time Anne buzzed her with a phone call, or she’d check for new e-mails. Each time her hopes were destroyed. Calls with comments from the mayor and the city’s planning director about what would soon turn into another controversial housing development didn’t excite her. Spam e-mails about weight loss and erasing debt, she deleted.

She felt heartened that Nick Weeks and Anne Misner had kept their words and had said nothing to the staff. At least for now everyone else still thought that Wilson was enjoying himself in sunny Mexico.

Sam caught sight of Wilson’s vanity license plate before she got inside the car.

Page 68

She had often wondered what it meant. Certain there had to be some significance, she would ask Wilson when she found him.

She wanted to drive home, avoiding Sixth Avenue westbound, but heard on the police scanner just before leaving the office that there had been a multi-car accident near the Kipling Parkway exit. Traffic had backed up to the Wadsworth Boulevard exit, the one Sam used. The last thing Sam heard on the scanner was that a motorist had been thrown from the vehicle and had landed fifteen feet from the hood of the car.

She knew she should have grabbed a reporter’s notebook and headed out to cover the accident. She thought of Rey Estrada and the first time she heard his voice on the phone. She heard the hesitancy in his vo
ice, his unwillingness, at first, to help her continue Robin’s investigation. Seeing mangled bodies on the roadway, however, wasn’t how Sam wanted to end her day. It had been bad enough waiting to hear from Wilson’s kidnappers. Instead she hoped the staff photographer had heard about the accident on the police scanner in his car and was on his way to the scene.

She’d call the police department and get the full report in the morning. That was one advantage
of working at a weekly. The Grandview Perspective published only on Fridays. At the Denver Post, she’d have to file the story before going home. Now Sam wouldn’t have to write anything before Wednesday. And when she did write it, she would have to use a second or third day lead. By the time it appeared in the Perspective the accident would be old news. The city and the people in it would already have moved on to different tragedies.

The thought of being able to wait a day before having to file the story relieved her. She just wasn’t ready to cover the scene of a traffic accident. Sadness pulled at her as she thought of Rey again and the day he was killed. She had only known him a short time, and she could not believe how much she had come to care about him and be so affected by his death.

She could picture him, young, tall and standing straight. She could see him in his safety orange vest directing traffic. His left arm extended straight out, palm up, holding traffic in that direction to a standstill, while motioning rapidly to the traffic with his right hand to move through the intersection. She stopped her thoughts there. She would not allow herself to think of how he died.

Instead she drove the Accord slowly along West 20
th
Avenue that paralleled Sixth Avenue, going where she knew she should not be headed. She had gone there so often that she navigated the streets without thinking. She drove along a quiet tree-lined 20
th
Avenue, before turning onto winding Glen-Garry Street. She drove until she reached the last house on the corner, coming to a stop before she got to the white-clapboard, two-storey home that sat back from the street on a half-acre plot.

The ‘for-sale’ sign went up almost immediately after Jonathan’s death and the house sold in four days. The garage door was up and Sam could see stacks of moving boxes inside. She wondered about the family
who had moved in and thought of her own that had unraveled somewhere along the way because she couldn’t be trusted with a drink in her hand.

The judge had given Jonathan custody of April when they divorced because she wasn’t responsible enough to continue to raise her.

“Until you can convince me, Mrs. Church, that you can be grown-up enough to raise your daughter, she shall not be in your custody. What kind of influence can you be to a 9-year-old if you’re drunk all the time?”

‘Doesn’t mean that I don’t love her,’ Sam had wanted to shout
at the judge during the court proceedings. Instead she just stared at him solemnly, her hands clasps tightly in front of her.

Jonathan and April kept the house and Sam had rented an apartment less than five miles away. Some nights following their divorce, Sam would drive by after work, but she wouldn’t go to the door. April had become so upset with her mother that it made Jonathan angry when Sam stopped by unannounced.

Of course, she couldn’t blame them.

Sam tried not
to think of the night following the custody hearing when she stopped by without calling and managed to make a complete fool of herself. Sam stared at the new family’s moving boxes in her old garage, trying to keep her mind off that night, but she couldn’t help it, the scene played out vividly before her.

Jonathan and April weren’t home when Sam arrived, so she parked on the street by the driveway and waited for them. She stayed in the car,
a bottle of Jack Daniels nestled between her legs. She had a buzz as she drove to the house, and now, in the nearly hour that had passed, she was totally sloshed. She knew it, but kept drinking anyway. Sam sat up straight when she saw Jonathan and April pull into the driveway. She noticed that the neighbor girl from down the street was also with them.

As soon as April got out of the backseat, Sam s
tumbled out of her Mustang, clutching the bottle in one hand, and a shopping bag in the other. She staggered toward them, trying to talk to April. “April … I love you … Mommie loves you, look what I got for you…” Sam tried not to stutter, but she couldn’t help it, the booze had full control of her now. She stopped and tried to pull something from the bag she carried. “Look, sweetie! Mommie bought you a pair of tennis shoes … your … fav-” Sam stumbled and began to lose her balance. She caught herself before she fell, but not before drenching April’s new shoes in whiskey.

A
pril and the neighbor girl turned to dash into the garage, but as April ran by Sam, she dropped the shoes and the bottle and grabbed her by the wrist. “Come home with me, sweetie! Mommie misses you so, so much!”

“Leave me alone!” April yelled
, and tears welled in her eyes as she tried to free herself from her mother’s grasp. Jonathan stepped in and pulled Sam’s hand off April’s wrist. “Will you please get a hold of yourself,” he asked in a voice that remained calm and collected, trying not to cause anymore of a scene than Sam had already created.

Sam couldn’t help herself and
, as if her actions were not her own, started slapping at Jonathan while screaming over and over, “I’m her mother! I love her and I have a right to be here, too!”

The neighbor girl
reached for April’s hand and they ran together through the garage and into the house. Sam stopped yelling at Jonathan as soon as the door to the house slammed shut.

“Get your bottle and leave, please,” Jonathan said,
as his shape retreated into the garage.

Sam watched
him disappear into the house. She stared numbly at the house for what seemed a long time, then she turned and started to walk toward her Mustang. She stumbled over the white tennis shoes stained the amber color of the whiskey. Sam looked at them for a moment before bending down to pick up the shoes and the now empty bottle of Jack Daniels, almost falling over in the process. As she stuffed both back in the bag, she felt someone watching her and knew immediately it was the busybody neighbor across the street. Sure enough, there she was, standing with her arms folded tightly across her chest, watching Sam, who felt a stinging heat of embarrassment begin to rise in her chest.

“What the hell
are you looking at?!” Sam yelled at the neighbor, who watched Sam a minute more, shaking her head in disgust before she went in her front door. Sam stood in silence until it was broken by the sounds of her garage door closing. She walked slowly to her car, the bag in her hand and her embarrassment turning to regret as she realized what she has just done.

Sam closed her eyes, wondering if she would ever be able to erase that memory. She took one more long look at the house.
There was no reason to come by here anymore. Jonathan was gone and Sam would have to do everything she could now to get her daughter back from his mother. She never liked calling that woman a grandmother to her daughter. Sam had, at least, taken the first step. The AA meetings were hard and an embarrassment to her, but she was going. And it would be a month soon since she had taken her last drink.

She looked at
her old house, watching as several people came and went from the garage into the house carrying boxes. It was 6:30 p.m. when Sam headed back to 20
th
Avenue and drove to Clancy’s Pub on West 38
th
Avenue, Wilson’s favorite hangout. He had first taken her there to celebrate after their big story hit the newsstand. She remembered that he ordered his favorite, a beef sausage sandwich (otherwise known as a Clancy’s Pride ‘N Joy) potato salad and an iced tea. Tonight, she downed a burger and fries with a cup of strong black coffee, trying not to think of those tennis shoes she had purchased for April, the ones she ended up throwing in the trash. And she couldn’t help feeling guilty every time she took a bite from her juicy burger. She wondered, hoped, that if Wilson was still alive, the kidnappers were feeding him.

By the time Sam reached her apartment, clouds had covered the sky, light with the look of snow. The cold air felt thin against her skin as she trudged from the mailboxes to her front door.
“Here Morrison, here kitty, kitty,” Sam called as soon as she stepped inside her apartment.

A black ball of fur
, tail high in the air, came trotting down the hallway toward her. She felt him softly rubbing against her ankles. She smiled and picked the cat up and gave him a vigorous scratch beneath his chin. He purred loudly, obviously content.

Sam had never been big on cats, but when Robin died, she couldn’t let anything happen to Morrison, who Robin had named after her favorite Irish singer, Van Morrison. Sam took the cat home and she was surprised at how quickly he had grown on her.

Sam checked his water bowl, still plenty there, but his food dish was empty. She hadn’t been in her apartment since being kidnapped. The first thing she had said to Howard when she woke in the hospital that morning was, “Morrison must be starving.” Howard came over the weekend and had been here again this morning, but Morrison had eaten every morsel.

She retrieved a can of cat food from the cabinet. Morrison pressed himself in and around her legs, meowing with excitement as she prepared his dinner. With Morrison eating, Sam went to her bedroom and changed into blue jeans and a faded blue and green flannel shirt. She kept Robin’s favorite brown Izod sweater hanging on the doorknob to her closet. She picked it up, closed her eyes and held it to her face. Robin’s scent was fading now that Sam had been wearing it so much, but still of hint of her sister’s sweet fragrance lingered.

She headed toward the bathroom and flicked on the light. She hesitated a moment before looking in the mirror. When she did, she saw that her blue eyes looked as flat as a gray November day. The dark circles beneath them reminded her of how little she slept at night. She rubbed at the circles as if that would make them disappear. She leaned a little closer turning her head this way and that. She had been trying to ignore the tiny traces of laugh lines starting to form around her eyes, but try as she might, they were there looking back at her. She felt every bit of her thirty-two years. Her blonde hair would be ash now had she not kept it colored. It had been that way since April was born.

She had lost none of the weight she had gained since her divorce. It showed beneath her chin, a constant reminder. She pressed firmly a couple of times using the back of her hand, but it didn’t help. Sam remembered her promise to Robin shortly before her death that she would start getting in shape after the first of the year. It was her New Year’s Resolution. Robin was determined to help her lose weight. Sam knew that even if she had half her sister’s determination, she’d be able to shed these extra pounds. She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth without looking at herself again in the mirror.

Morrison was cleaning his paws happily when Sam returned to the kitchen. She scooped him into her arms and went to the big chair in the living room, trying to ignore the pangs of loneliness that had set in the moment she walked into her apartment.

She looked around the room, feeling empty, feeling the room beginning to close in
around her. She had been here just over a year, but had never done much to make the place her home.