Death Takes a Ride (The Cate Kinkaid Files Book #3): A Novel (31 page)

She tried to calm herself. Even though this felt like a fresh tidal wave of disaster, no bullets in the gun didn’t change anything. She hadn’t known how to shoot the gun before, when she thought it was loaded. Which also didn’t change what had to be done
now
.

“I need your cell phone!” she yelled at Andy.

“I don’t have it. We only have one. Lily has it.”

Cate scrambled to her feet and stumbled toward the outer office to use the landline. At the door she realized she still had the gun. She turned and pointed it back at Andy. He’d be
out of sight as soon as she stepped around the corner to the counter. “Don’t go anywhere!” she yelled. “Don’t even move!”

Don’t figure out that
this is your gun with no bullets.

She grabbed the H&B phone and punched in the numbers. When the operator at 911 answered, she gave what she realized even as she was speaking was a garbled version of what had happened. Gunfight. Injuries. Maybe a death. Send police and ambulance. The address. The woman wanted her to stay on the line, but Cate wasn’t going to wait here by the phone where she couldn’t see what Andy was doing. She slammed the phone down and ran back to the doorway.

In the movies, a guy with anything less than a fatal gunshot wound could do anything from battle werewolves to romance the heroine, but Andy wasn’t doing anything impressive. He was just lying sideways on the floor with a silvery bear ornament in one hand. An ooze of blood from his wound puddled behind him on the concrete.

“Put it down,” Cate commanded. She used a motion of the gun for emphasis. She wasn’t giving him any chance to deceive her into thinking he was helpless and then have him pull a surprise attack with the bear.

“I’ll bet you don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”

True. But she had lessons scheduled. That probably wouldn’t be a convincing point, however, even if the gun was loaded. Which it wasn’t. She bluffed it. “Try me.”

He set the bear on the floor. “None of this is how it looks,” he complained.

“I see a man who’s probably dead. Killed by a hood ornament in a box you knocked off the shelf.”

“A box
we
knocked off the shelf. You hit it too!”

Okay, if you wanted to get technical, true. She braced herself against a metal upright supporting the shelf they’d been
sitting on. Her arm was getting tired holding the heavy gun. It felt like a weak branch that might droop any minute. She’d never heard anything about this being a problem for criminals.

“We’ll let the police sort that out,” she said. “It shouldn’t take more than five minutes or so for them to get here.”

“Look, I know I’m not one of the good guys in your world.” Andy kept a wary eye on the gun. He might not think she knew how to use it, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Apparently he did, at least, think it was Halliday’s loaded gun. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen.

“Right. I don’t see any wardrobe of white hats.” Cate kept her eyes on Andy. At least, watching him, she didn’t have to look at Halliday’s body. With that ghoulish horn in his head. “I heard you were in on something big down in California.”

“That Tuffy jerk and his big mouth, right? So I was with some guys who robbed a gas station and killed a guy once. I didn’t know that’s what they were doing. I was just sitting in the car drinking a Dr Pepper.” He managed to sound unfairly victimized. “I got off with some time in juvie.”

Cate eased her elbow over to rest on the shelf, but she carefully didn’t change Andy’s view of looking down the shooting end of the gun. She hoped the hole in the barrel looked big as a cannon to him.

“Anyway, I didn’t come here tonight to kill Halliday. I just wanted my money. He said he had it.”

“What money? You didn’t bring the bike.”

Andy scrunched around on the concrete, apparently looking for a more comfortable position. Or maybe to get a few inches farther away from the horned body. “Halliday was supposed to give me some money to . . . uh . . . kind of forget something.”

“Forget what?”

“What I knew.”

That evasive statement was hardly informative, but Cate pulled a startling fact out of it. “You were blackmailing him?” The tip of the gun sagged. She yanked it up again.

“I figured fifty thousand wasn’t too much for me to keep quiet when he was willing to pay thirty thousand to have his partner killed.”

Startled and curious as she was at this claim, Cate shook her head. She didn’t want him muddling up her head with wild stories. “Save it for the police.”

“No, I need to tell
you
before the cops get here! Or you’ll give them some crazy story about me and Mace Jackson in some screwball conspiracy to shoot Blakely.”

“Conspiracy is beginning to sound likely.”

He looked at the bizarrely horned body. “But it wasn’t like that! And there wasn’t anybody to send him any threatening note. He must have sent it to himself.”

“Sent it
himself
? That’s crazy.”

“He wanted it to look like somebody who was part of a plan to kill Kane Blakely was after him too. So nobody’d start getting suspicious of
him
.”

“But he hired me to find out who sent the note.”

Andy considered that briefly. “He knew you couldn’t find anything. It was just more of his plan to make himself look like a next victim.”

“You’re making all this up!”

“I wish I were.” Andy sounded unexpectedly doleful. He glanced at Halliday again. “I wish it were all some big ol’ bad dream.”

Cate strained to hear the sound of sirens coming. Like Halliday’s pulse, nothing.

“Okay, you listen to me, because this is what happened. I
came in here a while back and tried to sell my old Indian bike to Halliday, right?” Andy talked fiercely and fast, so fast the words almost ran together. Apparently, he was afraid police might arrive before he could get them out.

Cate was in no big hurry. She braced her tiring arm with her other hand. “But Halliday thought it might be stolen and didn’t want it.”

Andy snorted. “He knew it was probably stolen. He could see the old numbers had been filed off. But I didn’t steal it. Some guy gave me the bike when he couldn’t pay me some money he owed. But what Halliday wanted to pay for it was downright robbery.”

“He said he checked and the bike
wasn’t
stolen.”

“That’s the trouble with you! You believed everything Halliday said. After you found me, he told you he’d never talked to me. Right?” Andy didn’t wait for an answer. “Big lie. He talked to me, all right. Because he figured on killing me. That’s why he wanted you to find me! So he could kill me!”

“So I should believe a blackmailer instead of a respected business owner?”

Andy didn’t argue that detail. “Halliday didn’t shoot Mace in self-defense. He had killing him planned right from the start. Except it was
me
he planned to kill that night, not Mace.”

“How could it have been you?”

“Do you have to keep pointing that gun at me?”

“Yes.”

Andy heaved an injured sigh. “Okay, it was like this. Halliday figured I was a crook when I was first came in here. He could tell the bike was probably stolen. I’d been smoking pot, and maybe he could smell that too.”

Not exactly impeccable character references.

“So he looked me up a little while later—”

“He couldn’t find you. That’s why he hired me.”

“Shut up and listen. He found me at that trailer park. He tap-danced around what he’d come for for a while to see how I’d feel about doing something . . . not legal. I figured he had in mind stealing a car or bike or something, and I made it plain I was up for most anything if the money was right.”

“Of course.”

“So then he said there was thirty thousand in it for me. And to get it, I’d bust in here that particular night, shoot the guy who
wasn’t
Halliday, and grab the money. Which would be my payment for—”

“Killing Blakely!”

“So I said yeah, I’d do it.”

“Why would Halliday want his partner dead?”

“How should I know? You think I should have asked him to give me a notarized statement that Blakely was a danger to society or something?” Andy didn’t wait for an answer to the facetious question. “I just figured it was a good way Lily and me could buy a trailer and move to Nevada or somewhere. Before her brother convinced her I’m a scumbag.”

If the name fits, wear it. “Did you tell Lily?”

“No way. She’d have gone into orbit. But then, I had second thoughts. I mean, I’ve done some, you know, not too legal stuff, but I’ve never
killed
anyone. And I didn’t want to.”

“So you, what? Got Mace Jackson to do it with a deal that you’d split the money?”

“No! I was just telling Mace about it. He always thought I was kind of a dumb punk, and here I was, being asked to be a hit man.”

“You wanted to look like a big shot to him.”

“I guess.” Andy shifted uncomfortably on the floor, but he
didn’t lose sight of the gun in her hands. “But then I said I wasn’t going to do it, and he started bugging me for details. Finally he offered me two hundred bucks for the information.” Andy looked down. “So I took it.”

“You sold Blakely’s life for two hundred dollars.”

Andy apparently chose to ignore that ugly fact. “But Halliday hadn’t let me in on the
full
plan. After his hired gun kills his partner, he kills the killer. Wraps it all up in a neat little package. Killer is dead and no one knows anything and Halliday’s a hero for offing the bad guy.”

The facts of what had happened that night lined up with Andy’s scenario.

“Except Halliday was all shook up after he shot the guy and it wasn’t me,” Andy said. “Because now he knows there’s someone running around who knows the whole story. The truth. And that someone is
me
.”

Cate reluctantly rearranged the facts she had. She felt squeamish about accusing a dead man of lying, when he couldn’t defend himself, but if she viewed those facts from a different perspective . . .

Blakely gambled. Heavily. It was a good guess he’d asked Halliday for the loan to pay off either a gambling debt or a loan shark debt he’d taken out to pay off a gambling debt. Earlier, there was an audit of the Salem records. Had Halliday had it done because he suspected his partner of embezzling company funds to finance his gambling? And found embezzling was the reason the Salem H&B was so unprofitable?

Halliday could have made that into a criminal case and probably sent Blakely to jail. Which wouldn’t bring back the embezzled money and would be very bad publicity for H&B.

So Halliday had figured out a different solution. Get rid of Blakely. His death would take care of everything neatly.
No more financial pitfalls with a partner who was gambling and embezzling. With the bonus of getting back at the man he thought had helped his ex-wife escape him, and the huge bonus of a half-million-dollar insurance payoff for the company.

Plus the neat twist that no one would ever know because he’d dispose of the killer. In self-defense. No loose ends.

A win-win situation.

Halliday had even arranged for a witness to his self-defense tactic. His first choice had been loyal Radine, but Shirley had made an acceptable last-minute substitute.

No wonder Halliday had yanked that ski mask off the killer’s face! He was expecting Andy, but he could tell the dead man’s big, muscular build was all wrong for the wiry little guy he’d hired to do this. So then he had to find and get rid of that guy who knew the original plan. But Andy and Lily had moved, and Halliday couldn’t find them.

Enter helpful Assistant Private Investigator Cate Kinkaid.

“So, see, I just kind of got caught up in . . . all this. I’m no killer,” Andy added righteously.

“Just a blackmailer.”

“Not a killer,” he repeated stubbornly.

“I’d also guess, even if you weren’t in on the actual killing that night, there may be some legal technicalities about selling a robbery-murder scheme to a buddy.”

“A good lawyer can figure out stuff like that.”

“You also didn’t think things through very well,” Cate pointed out. “Thinking Halliday would meet you here and just meekly hand over a bundle of money. He’d already hired one man killed and killed another himself.”

“A stupid guy with a bullet in his butt, that’s me,” Andy agreed morosely.

I couldn’t have said it
better myself.

This left a few loose ends. That fire at the hospital. Coincidence, or Halliday’s attempt to get to Blakely, since he wasn’t dead yet? Halliday’s story about someone trying to run him down in the parking lot. Another lie, or creative inspiration for trying to do the same thing to Andy?

A riff of guitar music made them both jump.

Andy started to say something, and Cate yelled, “Be quiet!”

She pinpointed the location this time. It was coming from under the next shelf over. She let go of the shelf she was leaning against and moved the gun in a slow arc to keep it aimed at Andy as she unsteadily inched her way across the aisle.

She knelt beside the bottom shelf and ran her hand in an arc under it. Except something moved. She yelped and yanked her hand back. Mouse? Lizard? Snake? Spider?

But she needed that phone.

She felt in her pocket, found a tissue, and wrapped it around her hand. It didn’t feel like much protection. There was probably a reason armored vests weren’t made out of tissue paper. The phone was still tinkling.

She lay down on the floor and swept her hand farther under the shelf. The phone skittered out. She floundered after it and finally snatched it up. Still working! She took a moment to look at the caller identification.

“Mitch!”

“Cate? You sound funny.”

She squirmed around until she was sitting instead of sprawled flat on the floor.

“Is something wrong? Are you okay? Where are you?” The questions shot out like word bullets as Mitch’s sixth sense apparently kicked into gear. “What are you doing?”

“I’m, uh, waiting for the police.”

“Are you okay?”

Cate took a moment to inspect her extremities. Her adrenaline was running so hot she realized she might not have felt it even if she’d been shot. But she didn’t see any blood or holes anywhere.