A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2) (34 page)

“Someone broke in and killed me with my own gun?” I said, barely able to squeeze the words out through my constricted throat. “No one will believe that.” But I knew it happened all the time. Guns were more likely to be used by a criminal on their owners rather than by their owners.

Armand smiled and shook his head as he cocked the hammer on the revolver. “I’m a lot smarter than that,” he said. “I’m picturing a gunfight. You and the intruder blasting away at each other and both of you ending up dead.” The implications of that escaped me, but not Bartlett.

“What?” Bartlett said, still aiming his gun at my head. “Intruder?” Alexandra?”

I was barely listening as they spoke. My vision had tunneled in on Armand’s finger, which was already squeezing down on the trigger. I took a firmer grip on the pry bar and set my feet, preparing to take a swing at the gun. It was then or never. Desperately, I whipped the pry bar out and swung it sidearm at Armand’s gun hand, but I missed completely.

My momentum spun me around in a half circle and the claw-end of the bar hit the wall, knocking loose a chunk of plaster.

As the pry bar hit the wall, Armand suddenly shifted the aim of the pistol.

“You really are an idiot,” he said to Bartlett then fired three times point blank into the big man’s chest.

Chapter 35

The three shots staggered
Bartlett, slamming him back into the front door with a meaty thud, knocking the gun from his hand. Blood bloomed on the chest of his dirty white t-shirt, but he didn’t go down. He roared like a gut-shot rhino, dropped his bullish head and charged straight at Armand.

Armand fired three more times, pumping bullet after bullet into Bartlett. The big man lurched with every impact, but he didn’t fall. He piled into Armand and the two of them hit the floor in a bloody pile, Armand buried under Bartlett’s huge, motionless bulk. As I stared down, frozen by fear, Armand wriggled and shoved, trying to free himself from the dead man’s weight, but he was trapped. He did, however, manage to jerk his gun hand free.

The pistol came up swiftly and I was staring straight down the barrel as he pulled the trigger.

I flinched as the gun went ‘click,’ the hammer falling on an empty cylinder. But that ‘click’ got me moving like it was the crack of a starter’s pistol. I stuffed the pry bar into my back pocket, lunged for the door, jerked it open, and fled out into the fog. Pain shot up my calf from my sprained ankle, but it didn’t slow me down. I pounded across the lawn - almost blind in the fog - cut around the flowerbeds, dodged to the left to miss a plum tree, and then my feet hit the asphalt of the narrow road.

A gunshot boomed behind me and a bullet whipped past my ear, inspiring my legs into an even higher gear. Obviously, Armand had managed to escape Bartlett’s grip and exit the house. I turned right and ran down the roadway, my eyes picking out the faded yellow stripe at its center, every other landmark obscured by the fog. The cold bit through my shirt and my breath plumed in front of my face. I had no idea where I was going - I was just running as far and as fast as I could.

“Get the car!” I heard Armand yell behind me.

I was fifty yards down the road by then, my breath coming in ragged gasps, my hands and knees pumping like an Olympic sprinter’s. The pain from my ankle was intense and the joint felt loose, almost detached. It threw me off balance with every running step. Desperately, I cut to the inside edge of the road, looking for someplace to hide.

The road that leads to Violet had been carved out of the mountainside by bulldozers and dynamite forty years before. It was basically just a narrow shelf, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. To my left the rocky slope rose almost vertically and was dotted with scraggly trees, tangled vines, and scrub brush. On my right, beyond the rusted guard rail, the slope was gradual for twenty feet before it dropped straight down to to a boulder-strewn arroyo one hundred feet below. There was no way I could climb the steep slope to my left, and the gentle portion of the slope on my right was only sparsely covered in trees.

With nowhere to hide, I kept running, praying to see Hunter’s headlights coming up the hill.

I made it another hundred yards, but by then my lungs were on fire. I had to stop to catch my breath. As soon as I did, I heard shoe leather slapping the pavement behind me. Far too close! I knew it was Armand. And he probably had Bartlett‘s gun now. Only the thickness of the fog was preventing him from gunning me down where I stood, but it would be only a matter of seconds before he was on top of me.

I peered up the rocky slope on my left. It offered little cover and even less hope for escape, but it was better than the open road. I scanned the crumbling stone, looking for a gap, a crevice, a crack big enough to wedge myself into. I didn’t have to stay hidden for long - Hunter had to be on his way - but I had to hide fast. But there was nowhere I could conceal myself - just a steep cliff face with upper reaches lost in the fog.

In the distance I heard a car start, and I knew Alexandra was now behind the wheel of her Mercedes. And when she came down the road, her headlights - even in the dense fog - would spotlight me for Armand. I had to get off the road.

I went down the slope into the left-side ditch and followed it, stumbling through tall grass and over loose stones. A slow drizzle began and I felt rain on the back of my neck. The wind gusted stronger, chilling me to the marrow and slicing through the fog, clearing a line of sight that revealed a spot where the upward slope gentled a bit, though it was still very steep. The growth of trees was a little thicker as well, offering a chance of concealment. I grabbed the nearest tree’s lowest growing limb and dragged myself forward and up, placing my weight on my good ankle, but my foot slipped and I almost lost my balance and went over backward into the ditch. The rain was still just a drizzle, but the slope was getting slippery. It was only by grabbing onto the tree with both hands that I managed to stay erect. I steadied myself and took another step higher. And another.

That’s when the rock struck me in the back of the head.

Sheet lightning flashed across my brain and I was falling, tumbling backward. It seemed like several minutes before I struck the ground on my back, the loose rock stabbing and cutting into my flesh. My breath exploded from my lungs and my whole body went limp. The pain was incredible - almost more than I could bear – and I could feel blood on the back of my head where the rock had hit me. Somehow I managed to stay conscious, but it was a tentative thing. I rolled over on my knees and the lightning in my head flashed again. I slumped back down and lay still, my face in the wet grass. At that moment, I wanted to quit. To curl up into a ball and just go to sleep forever.

And I might have if Armand hadn’t jumped down into the ditch beside me and jerked me to my knees by the back of my collar.

“Come on,” he said impatiently, his tone suggesting vague annoyance, not a killing frenzy - the dispassionate indifference of a psychopath. He dragged me bodily through the grass to the edge of the road, stopped there and dropped me like a piece of old luggage. He turned his back on me to look up the road toward Violet.

I heard an engine revving, but through the fog and rain I couldn’t see the car. But I knew it was Alexandra.

“Come on,” Armand muttered as the engine roared, coming closer. And then I saw the yellow haze of her headlights, still indistinct in the fog.

For a moment I wondered why Armand hadn’t just shot me instead of throwing rocks at me, but then it dawned on me – Alexandra and Armand had not given up their plan to stage a home invasion. They were going to cart me back to my home and shoot me with Bartlett’s gun. Surprisingly, that thought did not terrify me. I was beyond fear of death or anything else. I was even beyond anger. My emotions had been overtaxed, deadened. I just wanted this to be over.

But, if I was going to die, I was going to do it on my own terms.

It took a superhuman effort to push myself to my feet and pull the pry bar from my back pocket. It was a struggle to even stand. I had been through so much. But it was about to end.

Armand heard me and turned, the gun coming up level with my bellybutton. The Mercedes was just a few hundred yards away by then. The glare of its headlights barely reached Armand and me through the thick fog and misting rain - creating an eerie yellow nimbus of light around us - but they were coming closer very quickly. Alexandra was driving much too fast. She’d be with us in seconds.

“Claire,” Armand began, like we were still on a first name basis. But I was done talking to him. I swung the claw-end of the pry bar at his skull with all the strength I had left.

I was slow, worn out, and desperate, and Armand was quick. He got his left forearm up in time to block the blow, but the claws of the bar sank into his flesh just as he pulled the pistol’s trigger.

The gunshot whipped past my ribs and ricocheted off the rocks behind me, his aim thrown off by my blow. Armand screamed and reeled backward, slipping on the asphalt, its oily surface turned slick by the rain. I went after him, swinging the bar again and again. I clipped his shoulder and then his wrist as I pursued him across the yellow stripe, but I was losing strength fast, and I wasn’t doing enough damage.

Suddenly the full glare of the Mercedes’ headlights ripped through the fog, spotlighting us in the middle of the road. The car was almost on top of us, just thirty feet away and moving fast.

Armand and I both looked up, blinded by the lights as the car hurtled straight at us. In his haste to escape, Armand lunged toward me. He hit me in the chest and knocked me sprawling into the far lane. His feet slid from under him on the wet asphalt and he fell directly into the path of the car.

Alexandra stomped the brakes, but she was going much too fast to stop in time. The car’s tires screamed one barking yelp before they lost their grip completely on the wet surface. The Mercedes went sideways, the rear end fishtailing, then the anti-lock brakes kicked in and it straightened out, but it was still at an angle to the curve and heading straight at Armand.

Armand jumped up and tried to dodge the car, but there was no time. The Mercedes’ bumper clipped him off at the knees and flipped him up onto the hood. His face impacted the windshield and he bounced back down the hood. In desperation he managed to grab one of the windshield wipers and haul himself back up, hanging on for dear life, the pistol still in his hand.

The Mercedes smashed into the guardrail at thirty miles an hour. The railing was as old as the highway, more a warning than a barrier. The big car went through the guard rail like it was made of coat hangers, barely slowing. It bounced across the gentle grade, clipping through the small trees, its brake lights blazing red as it headed for the cliff with Armand still clinging to the wiper blade, looking straight back at me across the roof of the car. And he hadn’t given up on killing me. He raised the pistol and flame blossomed from the barrel as the Mercedes reached the edge of the slope and hurtled over the cliff, out into the darkness.

Instinctively, I ducked, but the bullet came nowhere near me. I looked back up just in time to see the car’s taillights disappearing over the edge. For a long moment after that I could hear the engine roaring as it fell, before the car hit the bottom of the crevasse with a metallic, crunching crash followed a split second later by an explosion that ripped the night apart and painted the fog red and gold.

As fire crackled on the slope far below, I slumped back against the wet pavement, the fine rain pelting my face.

Chapter 36

Six weeks after the
deaths of Armand and Alexandra, on
a chilly Saturday afternoon, Hunter Drake stopped by Violet Vineyard to update me on the investigation into the murders and the massive wine fraud Armand and Blake had committed.

I had seen Hunter only sporadically since he had picked me up off the side of the road that night and rushed me to the hospital. He had been busy with the investigation of the deaths and the fraud, while I had been virtually trapped in my own home for three of those weeks as I was besieged by reporters from around the country. Thankfully, Hunter had provided a deputy to shoo them away and they eventually got tired of wasting their time and moved on.

Samson had spent most of that time in the hospital, but he had finally recovered enough from his gunshot wound to escort the bodies of his daughter and grandson back to Greece for burial just a week before Hunter’s visit. Though I doubted Samson would ever fully recover from the psychological damage their betrayal had caused, I hoped he would hurry back to Violet and we would all manage to put the deaths and betrayals behind us and find a way back to happier times.

In the meantime, I was keeping myself busy by bottling the 2012 cabernet.

To help with the bottling, I had hired a crew of graduate students from UC Davis who worked cheap - if you didn’t add up the cost of the wine they drank and the vast amounts of food they consumed - and who brought a youthful energy and eagerness to the process that had reinvigorated me and given me hope for the future of small winemakers like myself. 

I was manning the bottle filler - which seemed intent on completely drenching me in wine - when Hunter ducked through the cellar door. He had to weave a path through stacks of filled cardboard wine crates piled around the now empty fermentation tanks.

I yelled over the racket of the ancient bottling line at Tammy - the brightest and best of the grad students – to take over at the filler, then wiped my sticky hands on my jeans and pointed Hunter at the door.

“You look busy,” he said as he followed me across the lawn to the patio where I dropped into a chair with a groan.

“We’ve been at it since 6:00 this morning,” I replied. I glanced at my watch and frowned – it was almost 1:00PM. “And I still have to make lunch for that pack of wolves.”

“You love it,” he said with a lopsided grin.

I grinned back. “Yes, I do. What brings you up here? Want to pitch in? We could use another strong back.”

“I wish I could,” Hunter replied, and he actually sounded like he meant it. “I have an interview with Bartlett at 2:00.”

That knocked the grin off my face. “I can’t believe that ape survived six bullet wounds.”

“Barely,” Hunter replied. “But I’m glad he did. He’s helped clear up a lot of things. Which is why I’m here; since you pretty much solved the case singlehandedly, I figured you’d want to know how the investigation is progressing.”

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, wondering if I really wanted to hear any of what Hunter had to say. In the end, I decided that I did. I opened my eyes.

“Just tell me that goon, Bartlett, is going to spend the rest of his life behind bars and I’ll be satisfied.”

Hunter shook his head. “I can’t guarantee that, Claire. The FBI and Interpol are handling the case now, and Bartlett has a lot to offer. I
can
guarantee that he will be a very old man before he ever sees another bottle of wine.”

That didn’t make me happy, but I took it in stride. “Good enough,” I said. “So what has he told you?”

“A lot. It seems Armand had been counterfeiting wine for more than twenty years. The feds have an army of forensic accountants going through Armand’s books right now. All the stories about how he made millions at his winery in Argentina were just that - stories. It looks like the business was just a front to cover for the money he was making counterfeiting wine. The grapes he grew, according to the experts, are barely good enough to make jelly.”

I already knew most of that from the nightly news. Sadly, the fraud Armand had perpetrated had come to overshadow the murders he had committed here in Napa. Collectors and auction houses around the world were reeling as the accusations - and sometimes the fists - flew back and forth. And it wasn’t just the big auction houses that had taken the hit. I knew of two winemakers here in Napa who had filed bankruptcy in the last month, their entire uninsured stock of wine having been destroyed by the fire at Star Crossed.

“I feel bad about Jorge,” Hunter said. “And Angela.”

“Why did he kill Jorge?” I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to be sure.

“Bartlett says Jorge saw Armand leave the cellar after killing Dimitri. That’s why Armand planted the knife in Jorge’s truck. And then Jorge tried to blackmail Armand. Bartlett admits he was the one who killed Jorge, but he claims Armand murdered Angela. We’ll never know the truth of that.”

“And when I started pushing Blake, they decided to drown me.”

“I think it was your phone call to Gavin’s Fine Wine and Spirits that did it,” Hunter said. “Gavin has lawyered up, but it seems pretty obvious he was in on the scheme from the beginning.”

It made sense. I nodded but made no reply. Words would not bring back the dead. We sat there in silence for a long moment before Hunter reached across the table and took my hand. His grip was warm and dry and somehow comforting.

I let my eyes drift off across the Valley below. Fall was almost over. The trees dotting the rocky slope that fell away from my perch had lost their leaves and the ground had gone fallow. A tracery of fog drifted through the dormant vines of my vineyard, casting everything in gray. I shivered and squeezed Hunter’s hand tightly.

“Think we can start over?” he asked.

“I hope so,” I replied.

Another long moment passed before he said, “I have to go, Claire.”

We stood, but he didn’t release my hand. We walked that way, hand in hand, down the path to the cellar where the clatter of the bottling line echoed through the open door. He kissed me there, a chaste but touching brush of the lips, and turned back to his truck.

I was ducking through the doorway when his voice stopped me.

“I love you, Claire,” he said.

I turned back to face him, speechless. I wanted to reply in kind, but the words would not come. I had barely come to grips with the idea of being a divorcee after decades of a loveless marriage; it was far too early for declarations of love.

“I mean it,” he said, looking me straight in the eye, searching for something that I wasn’t sure was there. Not yet, anyway.

“If that’s true,” I replied, “be back here at six.”

He grinned. “For dinner?”

“You wish,” I said with a laugh as I turned and ducked through the door. “Second shift on the bottle filler starts at six. You have to work for your supper around here.”