Murder is the Pits (31 page)

Greasy reached in his waistband and pulled
out the gun. I didn’t know what kind it was, but it looked like a
cannon to me. He waved it in my face and nodded at the Indian.
“You’ve screwed up our plans, and we don’t like it one bit. Your
meddling has cost me millions.”

“Gee, I’m sorry. I only wanted to buy a
condo.”

“I warned you, and you wouldn’t listen.” He
glanced at the Indian and shook his head. “Only one thing I can
think of doing with a meddlesome bitch.” He raised the gun.

POW!

Greasy’s gun hand went limp, and he fell
into my arms. A moment later, I felt something wet and warm. BLOOD!
I stumbled backward, and Greasy fell flat on his face. Blood
spurted from a hole in his back. The limo driver floored the car,
clipped my VW trying to turn around, and spun away. The Indian was
no warrior. One look at the hole in his partner’s back, and the
Indian took off down the hall. I raced after him. He reached the
glass door in the great room and gave me the look of a caged
animal. He fumbled to open it.

“Noo-oo,” I shouted.

The Indian didn’t listen. He slid the door
aside and started across the deck, which promptly collapsed.

By this time, Guthrie had hobbled down from
his condo. Glock in hand, he had on nothing but boxer shorts
covered in red hearts, an obvious Valentine’s present from years
gone by. He hopped to the corner where the deck collapsed, flung
open the glass door, and pointed the Glock at the man tangled in a
mass of sand and wood.

“Make my day, and my friend, Mr. Glock’s.
One move and you’ll get it between the eyes.”

As Guthrie held the Indian at bay, I called
the police. For once, a patrol car was nearby. Two uniforms
arrived. One checked the body in the front door, while the
other—Heather Brooks—raced into the great room. Her lips tensed at
the sight of Guthrie’s shorts and boney legs, but she went into
action fast. “Call for medical,” Heather barked, as she headed back
out the front door and around the building to the deck. She
carefully picked her way down the sand slope to the Indian. Once
she had him, Guthrie flopped down on the sofa, spread eagle. “I
need a scotch,” he whimpered.

After all he’d done, a scotch was the least
I could do. I was handing him the drink—his legs still spread eagle
in his heart-covered boxers—when Penny Sue and Ruthie rushed
in.

“Wha—” Having negotiated a bunch of police
and stepped over a dead body, Penny Sue saw us. Her eyes were the
size of saucers. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

“It’s not what you think. Call Woody. Tell
him to get here quick. It has to do with his mother.”

For once, Penny Sue followed my directions,
then went to the kitchen and poured herself a scotch. “Geez, we
leave you for a minute and all hell breaks loose.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said, getting a
glass of wine. “I was making ice blocks when all of this happened.”
My hand shook so badly, more wine went on the floor than in the
glass. Ruthie finally took the bottle from me and poured some for
both of us.

“Ice. Lot’s of ice,” I said faintly.

By this time Woody had arrived. He frowned
at the sight of us drinking.

“Hey,” I said loudly. “We started drinking
after the commotion. Everyone was stone-cold sober when this came
down.” I considered giving Woody a hand gesture, but didn’t, since
I
was
a Southern woman. Yet, the urge was there, and strong.
“These are the guys who were using your mother,” I said
sternly.

Woody’s expression changed instantly. “What?
Who?”

“That’s your mother’s Indian they’re fishing
out of the collapsed deck. You know, her relative and friend? The
‘brother’ who gave her the mercury.”

Woody stomped out the front door and down
the sidewalk.

We sat drinking as paramedics scraped Greasy
from our doorway and extricated the Indian. Guthrie and I agreed we
were even. I had saved his life, and he had saved mine. Still, he
asked if he could stay with us if Hurricane Jeanne hit.

“If Timothy takes his mother, I have to come
here. I can’t stand that woman. She calls me Guppy and cheats at
Scrabble. Forget dictionaries, she’s right, the dictionary is
wrong. Yeah, like, she could write a dictionary.”

“Sure, you can stay with us,” I said
smiling. It wouldn’t seem like a hurricane without Guthrie.

It’s a real bummer when your home is a crime
scene. They rope it off, the neighbors stand around and gawk, and
it’s basically the pits. The police did allow me to take my car to
the shop (on Woody’s orders) with Penny Sue following.

Ruthie stayed at the condo with Guthrie, who
was close to falling down drunk, so Penny Sue and I had a chance to
talk.

“Do you suppose there’s any chance Guthrie
shot the Greaser in the back?” Penny Sue asked. “If Guthrie did it,
he was protecting you. I wonder if I should call Daddy.”

I ran my hand through my hair, which must
have been frightening, since I’d done it a lot in the last few
hours. “You know Guthrie. I don’t think he’d shoot anyone in the
back to kill them. Of course, it could have been an accident. Maybe
Guthrie was aiming for the guy’s thigh, and his bum knee gave
way.”

“I think he’d do that,” Penny Sue said. “Not
kill someone, but try to protect us.” She glanced at me across her
sunglasses. “Guthrie can be a pain in the butt, but he does like
us. He’d try to protect you.” Penny Sue picked up the car phone,
hit speed dial for Judge Daddy, and told him the story. The Judge
said he’d see what he could do, especially since the altercation
took place in
his
condo.

When we arrived home, only Ruthie and
Guthrie were there, and believe it or not, even Ruthie was
half-tanked. Timothy was on his way, since Guthrie had called him
at work and laid on scotch-laden dramatics. Penny Sue and I
immediately suggested that we warm some soup and make sandwiches.
There was also the matter of the hurricane provisions they’d
purchased. Needless to say, the ice in Penny Sue’s trunk had melted
by this time. Water droplets had probably followed us around town
like breadcrumbs.

While I prepared lunch for our traumatized,
drunken friends, Penny Sue brought in the groceries. I noticed an
incredible amount of toilet paper, water, chocolate, and wine.

Judge Daddy had contacts everywhere and
could quickly cut to the heart of a matter, since all of his
friends were high-level types with no time to waste. A few hours
later the judge called with the story.

Mob-types of the gambling persuasion were
trying to entice American Indians into casino prospects with
promises of vast riches. Since certified Indian tribes came under
Federal law, not state authority, if the Federal government
recognized a tribe, it could engage in gambling. Which is what
Pearl’s ‘friends’ had planned. They set out to buy up the
development with the idea of building a hotel and casino. According
to the Indian, Pearl’s so-called friend, he and his casino cohorts
did the research and knew Sea Dunes was the original territory of
the Surruques, an obscure tribe, of which Woody was the sole
survivor.

The casino group easily sucked Pearl into
the plan since she was half crazy and already thought she was a
princess. Once they purchased the development, the group figured
Woody would fall in line through greed or fear for his mother’s
safety.

That was the plan, the judge reported. A
bullet in the back of the Greaser convinced the Indian to sing like
a bird and disrupted the scheme. The slug came from a Russian 9 mm
Takarov, the same type of weapon that killed the man on the
balcony. That proved Guthrie didn’t kill Mr. Greasy. It also meant
the gang war was in high gear.

By one o’clock the Indian and Greaser were
long gone and Timothy had escorted Guthrie home for some clothes.
Ruthie had recovered from her morning libations and was glued to
the television. Penny Sue and I lounged on the sofa and tried to
catch our breath.

“This has been a heck of a few weeks,” Penny
Sue said. “What else could possibly happen?”

The words were hardly out of her mouth when
a loud rumble sounded on the beach, followed by a foghorn. We
exchanged deer-in-the-headlights glances. The horn blared again,
and Penny Sue bolted to the glass doors.

“Glory be. The cavalry has arrived!”

Ruthie and I raced to the window. Three
truckloads of sand and a bobcat sat idling in front of our condo.
Sonny Mallard and two men with shovels stood on the beach
inspecting the deck and shaking their heads.

“What happened here?” Sonny shouted,
pointing at the part of the porch that the Indian fell through.

“A long story,” Penny Sue yelled. “Think you
can shore it up?”

“That part needs a good carpenter. Best I
can do is push sand in front of it. That should give you some
protection from the tides.” Sonny waved to the trucks. One by one
they dumped their loads into huge piles and rumbled off.

“If there’s enough sand, push some under my
neighbor’s deck,” Penny Sue shouted.

“I was planning on it. Sand won’t do you any
good if the dune next door is scoured. Another couple of truckloads
are on the way.” Sonny swung onto the bobcat and started pushing
sand toward the deck. The men with shovels heaved the earth against
the condo’s foundation and spread it around the deck’s
supports.

“See,” Penny Sue said, beaming. “Just when
it seems things couldn’t get any worse, something good happens. I
think this means our luck’s changed.” She glanced at Ruthie, who’d
shifted her focus back to the television.

“I believe you’re right,” Ruthie said with a
smile—the first smile I’d seen in several hours. “It looks like
Jeanne’s going to land to our south, close to where Frances hit.
That means we’ll probably get Category 1 winds at the most.”

“So, you don’t think we need to evacuate?” I
asked, puzzled Ruthie hadn’t mentioned it earlier.

Ruthie cocked her head as if listening to an
unseen person. “No, we’ll be fine here.”

Our luck had changed, or so we thought.
Chris called to say the race had been rescheduled for Saturday,
October 2, under the lights. She’d also located the owner of an
abandoned racetrack in St. Augustine who agreed to let us use it
for practice, as long as we signed a liability release. Timothy’s
mother decided to weather the storm with his sister, so he and
Guthrie could stay together in Orlando. With sand piled under and
around our deck, we had our own private dune. And we had the key to
the Wilsons’ condo with its empty garage—a place for Penny Sue to
park her car.

Yes, life was good until eleven
PM
. Dressed in our pajamas, we huddled around the TV
for the tropical update. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We
would have slept a lot better if we’d simply gone to bed. We didn’t
like what we heard. Hurricane Jeanne was gaining strength, had
taken a northward jog, and its eye was expected to hit thirty miles
north of us in Daytona Beach on Sunday evening.

The telephone rang at eight
AM
. It was Max, Penny Sue’s PR friend in Atlanta. “All
the news outlets are descending on Daytona Beach. I’ve lined up a
spot for you with an ABC affiliate. It’s a background piece. Can
you meet them at eleven o’clock?”

Penny Sue gave us the thumbs-up. “Sure,
we’ll be there.”

“Wear your racing suits,” Max said. “I hear
Jim Cantore’s headed that way, too. I’ll see what I can do.” She
wrote down the address for our interview and gave him her cell
phone number in case Max could arrange something with the Weather
Channel. She hung up the phone, jumping up and down. “We’re on our
way.”

“Chris,” I exclaimed. “She has to be
there.”

Chris was as excited as we were, vowing to
close her store if she couldn’t find someone to fill in.

Three hours notice isn’t much time,
especially for Penny Sue. We wolfed down Raisin Bran, took showers,
and put on our gear. Two hours later—a record for Penny Sue—we were
in her Mercedes, headed for Daytona Beach. We arrived at the same
time Chris did and were met by Melanie, the production assistant.
The backdrop for the interview was a boarded-up store on the
waterfront with a blue tarp covering its roof.

“We’re starting with an interview of the
storeowners,” the perky young woman explained. “That will lay the
groundwork for your segment, because they’re going to talk about
the high deductibles—one for each storm—and how they haven’t been
able to get the old damage fixed. They’re also going to say that
their ten employees are out of work, and as much as they hate the
situation, they can’t afford to pay them. They’re afraid Jeanne
will wipe out what’s left of their store and thirty years of hard
work.” She consulted her clipboard. “You’re holding a charity race
to benefit people like this, right?”

“Yes,” Chris jumped in before Penny Sue had
a thought formed. “Donations from the race will help needy people
with their deductibles, as well as the many who are uninsured and
unemployed. We’ve put together a panel of respected community
leaders to review claims. All monies are being held and disbursed
by a major local bank. Every penny donated goes to the fund. New
Smyrna Speedway, which is hosting the event, has donated one
hundred percent of their time and expenses.”

Melanie nodded. “Good, be sure to mention
that.”

I noticed that Penny Sue’s eyes narrowed
slightly at Melanie’s direction to Chris.

“People are leery of these fundraisers,” the
young woman continued, “because so many charities use most of the
donations for their own expenses.”

“Yes,” Penny Sue jumped in, looking sidelong
at Chris. “We’re paying for these uniforms and all of our expenses.
Not one penny will come from the fund.”

“We think this spot may be picked up for the
national news. Do you have a toll free number people can call to
make donations?”