Finders Keepers Losers Die (32 page)

He chuckled. "I always liked you. If it
weren't for Will…"

Thank God for Will. "Can I have some of
that? It'll help with the pain."

He checked the level in the bottle. "Sure."
He put it to my lips and some of it spilled down my chin. Actually,
most of it did. I hate whiskey. I spluttered and he pulled the
bottle away.

"So you going to let me go?" I held up my
cuffed hands. "These are killing me."

"If you're a good girl and get nice and
drunk, I might." Did he mean I'd be easier to manage if I were
intoxicated?

He leaned forward and gave me another drink.
He didn't seem to notice when most of it dribbled out of my
mouth.

"So you knew Will when he was a cop? Is that
why he gave you the job?"

He barked out a laugh. "Yeah, I knew him. He
put away my brother."

My eyebrows shot up. "Really?"

He nodded. "He was innocent. Of that
crime."

"Which crime?"

"Assault. He was at a bar when a brawl broke
out. Because he had a history and the cops knew him, he was
arrested and found guilty." He sneered. "Knight beat the crap out
of him first, of course."

"What was his history?"

"Drugs. He made a fortune." He sounded like
he admired his brother, or envied him. "But when he went down, his
family suffered. I had to take over the business, but…" He
shrugged. "Drugs weren't my thing."

"Armed robbery was?"

"Look." He leaned forward and wagged a
finger at me. "It's like this. The banks have loads of money. What
I stole…well, the moms and dads don't suffer. It's not really their
money anymore. No one's harmed in the end."

A bit like insurance fraud.

Sigh
. Goodbye Manolos. If I lived,
I'd return them and buy something more sensible, and more like what
was actually destroyed in the fire.

"I could have been a good thief," Carl
mused. "If only I hadn't chosen the wrong partner. Scarletti was
too slow and too dumb. But I've got to hand it to him, he knew when
to keep his mouth shut."

I studied the man sitting opposite me. He
still looked like the same old Carl, like the boy next door with
his short blond hair, clean shaved face, crystal blue eyes, and
athletic body. The sort of man mothers wanted their daughters to
marry. He sounded educated. He looked dependable. But the façade
slipped a little with every mouthful of Jack Daniels.

"So why work for Will if you don't like him?
I don't get it. Why not cut your losses and clear out of town?"

"Cut my losses? No fucking way. We worked
hard to get that money. And Lou got it into a safety deposit box
with the whole of Renford looking for him."

"And shortly after that, my dad arrested
Lou," I said, catching on. "But Lou promised to retrieve the money
once he got out. You had one key each and you wrote down the number
and took half each. That way neither of you could take the money
and run."

He nodded. "But he wanted to wait a while
once he got out. He told me it was because the cops would be
watching and we had to lie low."

"When you visited him in jail."

"Yeah, but it had nothing to do with the
cops. Turns out it was his wife he was trying to keep it from."

"So what's Will's agency got to do with
this? Why are you working there?"

"Ah, it's beautiful, isn't it, the way
things work out? I get a job working for the company started by the
man who put away my partner, and I get to work for the man who put
away my brother. Will had a job opening and I needed to do
something to wait out Lou's sentence. Lucky for me he was too busy
to check out my references properly. Although I faked them pretty
good."

I screwed up my nose but it hurt like mad.
"So you did it out of spite."

"Of course I did it out of spite." He
laughed. "It appealed to my sense of humor to work for the right
side of the law and for the guy who ruined me. Call it symmetry."
He had another drink. "But I like it now. Will leaves me to work
alone and I get to spy on people for a living. The money's not
great but it's better than unemployment benefits."

"What about robbery?"

"Not for me, Cat. The job with Lou taught me
that. I couldn't spend twelve years locked up." He grinned like a
schoolboy. "But I couldn't resist lifting a few dollars from the
petty cash tin. Thanks to Tanya, it was easy. She was just as lazy
as you, but ten times dumber."

I groaned. "Now I feel bad for accusing
her."

"Don't. She hates you."

No shit.

Funny. I'd never had such an in-depth
conversation with Carl before. We'd exchanged words, but never
really talked. But having a deep and meaningful didn't change the
fact he was an asshole with a few screws loose.

"So what happened to your brother and his
family?"
Keep him talking, just keep him talking.

"Huh?" He rubbed his eyes and blinked at me.
"Oh, he got out and ran off with his parole officer. His wife
married an insurance salesman and now they're rolling in it. The
kids even go to a good school."

So the moral of the story is, crime does
pay, but only if it's not your crime
. "Give me another
drink."

He held the bottle to my lips and I coughed
as whisky hit the back of my throat.

"This would be easier if you unlocked the
cuffs," I said.

"Nice try, Cat, but no can do. Keep
drinking." He belched loudly and patted his stomach.

"Okay by me." I drank again. "But you might
as well satisfy my curiosity since you've gone this far."

"Curiosity killed Cat." He giggled so hard
he nearly fell off his chair.

"Why did you kill Lou if you needed his
key?"

His laughter died. "That was a bit
premature. When I saw Roberta at the office, I guessed she was
really after the money. It was a piece of luck that she found my
business card among Lou's stuff. Anyway, after I saw her, I went to
Lou to get him to hurry up and get the money out before she got to
it through you.

"But he tricked me. He didn't trust me. He
thought I didn't want to split the money and I was going to
double-cross him. So he lied about where the key was and I killed
him before I checked it out." He shrugged. "He was right. I did
want to double-cross him. I found out that safety deposit boxes
with two signatories only need the signature of one of the parties
if the other dies. But I needed both keys and the entire box
number, obviously. Anyway, turns out the key and number weren't
where he said."

He pointed the bottle at me. "Do you know,
he thought you were involved? He thought you were my girlfriend
because we worked together. Then when Roberta came to you, he was
convinced we were all trying to dupe him. Just goes to show what a
stupid bastard he was. The world's a smarter place without
him."

"But Roberta didn't specifically want
me
. She only came to Knights when she found the old
Sinclair's business card in Lou's things, like you said."

"Yeah, but he didn't know that."

"So that was your card, not Dad's?"

"Will hadn't got around to changing them
until a couple months after I started. I visited Lou in jail and
left it for him so he knew how to contact me in case he decided the
money was too hot in the deposit box and wanted me to go get it.
Wishful thinking."

"So you told him about Roberta hiring me.
That's why he started following me! Before he died, I thought I saw
his car outside the office."

Carl nodded. "Yep. He thought you were the
weakest link."

"But later, when you saw I'd found the box,
why didn't you come after it then? Why follow me around?" I shook
my head which didn't help ease the ache. "I don't get it."

He rolled his eyes. "Come on, Cat, you're
smarter than that." He waited but I said nothing. "Okay, I'll
explain. Yes, I knew you'd found the box and was almost certain the
key and number were in there. But, you see," he pointed the middle
finger of the hand that held the bottle at me, "I didn't know which
bank to look in. I was hoping you'd find that out for me. Since you
had a link to Roberta, I thought she'd tell you."

"But you didn't want me to give her the
number. In fact, you encouraged me to hand it over to you." I
remembered all the times he'd offered to help, and all the times
he'd tried to scare me into giving it up to him—the fire, the near
hit-and-run. "Why?"

"I wanted you to give the key to me, not
Roberta. I only wanted you to get the bank details out of her. And
I tried to help you because I thought two heads were better than
one. I thought scaring you might encourage you to come to me, trust
me."

"Guess you don't know me as well as you
thought."

He looked at me for a long time then said,
"What
you
don't know is, I convinced Will many times not to
take you off the case." He stretched out his legs and put one arm
behind his head, leaning back into it. "Ah, he'll be cursing
himself when he finds out I was the danger all along."

Out of instinct, I tried the bonds again. No
use. "I really will give you the number," I said. "I love Mom and
Gina. I don't want them hurt. I know you'll follow through on your
threat, Carl. I've learned that much today."

Our gazes locked for a beat before I looked
away. I couldn't stare him down. His eyes were too clear and
colorless, like shallow pools over hard, rocky ground.

"Tell me where the key and number are," he
said again.

I shook my head then closed my eyes against
the nausea the movement produced. When I opened them again, he was
smiling at me.

"You're drunk," he said.

I hiccoughed. "Just a teensy, tiny, incy,
wincy widdle bit. Listen," I said, trying on a drunken yet serious
face. "Showing you is my insurance. Besides." I looked around the
cabin. "This place is scary and it's getting dark."

"Little pussy Cat is 'fraid of the dark." He
giggled.

I giggled too, biting back the pain in my
cheek.

He stood and stumbled toward me. He fished
the key out of his pocket and undid one of the cuffs. I threaded it
through the bar and he re-locked it around my wrist again before I
had a chance to stand. He jerked me up by the cuffs. I winced as
pain spiked.

"So who's more drunk?" he asked. "You or
me?"

"Don't you mean you, me or your twin?"

He snorted a laugh. "I must be drunker."

"But I'm seeing double."

"I'm seeing triple."

"You win."

We walked together out the door to the car.
Darkness had fallen and the trees seemed to lurk like sinister
figures on the perimeter, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. I
wondered if anyone knew about the cabin. Maybe Carl had mentioned
it to Will and he was on his way. No, better yet, he was hiding
behind one of the trees with a S.W.A.T. team.

But no one jumped out and rescued me. Carl
shoved me into the driver's seat, withholding the keys until he
slipped into the passenger seat. I buckled up my seat belt and
drove slowly along the path. I leaned over the steering wheel but
the car still hit a few pot holes and swerved into the bushes. It
wasn't easy with my hands unable to part more than a few inches and
my senses dulled by pain.

"Jeez, Cat, don't kill us."

"At ten miles an hour?"

He rested his gun on his thigh, pointed at
me. Occasionally he rubbed his eyes or took another drink from the
bottle. He didn't offer me any more. We drove in silence as I
slowly back-tracked to the main highway.

Even as we drove further away from the
cabin, I still held hopes that Will would find me. But by the time
I hit the highway, I knew I was completely alone. I felt it. If I
was going to get away, I had to do it on my own.

But I had no idea how to escape or even
where to drive to. Eventually, I had to stop somewhere. Then I'd
have to tell Carl the truth.

And if he was angry at me last time, he'd be
downright furious when he learned I'd lied to him again.

CHAPTER 18

When the glow of Renford appeared on the
horizon, I knew I didn't have much time before Carl found out the
truth and I became his next victim. I had to do something.

He was a depressing drunk. Some people get
friendly and exuberant when they have too much to drink—Gina and I
fell into that category—and others close down the shutters and see
the world as their enemy. That was Carl. He sat round-shouldered
and morose beside me, as if his only friend was the bottle in his
lap.

Until he finished it. He threw it out the
window and it smashed on the side of the road. He turned the volume
of the radio up but it didn't fill the tightly strung silence
between us.

I was all too aware of the gun resting on
his knee and the drunken twitch of his limbs. At one point I
thought—hoped—he'd fallen asleep, but no such luck.

Occasionally he made a threat like "You
better not be lying to me again, Cat." But mostly he said nothing,
just watched me. At first I thought he stared because he was
worried I'd jump out of the moving vehicle, but then I realized he
was too calm. He simply watched and said nothing.

I couldn't stand it any longer. I screwed up
my face and placed a hand to my stomach. "Oh," I moaned.

He ignored me.

I pressed my abdomen again. "Oh, God." I
bent over the steering wheel. "Ohhh."

"Stop bullshitting me, Cat, you're
fine."

I shook my head but that really did make it
hurt and my stomach lurched as a result. "I think I'm going to be
sick."

"Go on then."

It was a challenge. You know how I love
those.

I'd learned how to cry on demand and act
dead, but being sick on cue wasn't a skill I'd mastered. I had to
improvise.

I pressed my sore cheek and nearly fainted
at the slicing pain. Nausea followed. I groaned and lost
concentration. When Carl grabbed the wheel, I realized I'd swerved
into the next lane.