The Big Kitty (26 page)

She stopped at the entrance to the living room, afraid that Mike was in cardiac distress again. Then she realized her father was pale with anger, not illness, as he sat clutching a piece of paper. “Call that jackass Barnstable—he should still be at the office.”

“What’s the problem, Dad?”

“He accused you of stealing!” Mike burst out. “The idiot wanted your cell number—apparently he couldn’t find it. I told him to go to hell!”

Sunny began to get worried. Ollie the Barnacle had not been happy with some of the stuff she’d done in the last week. Frankly, her job didn’t look all that secure right now, and Mike’s lack of diplomacy wasn’t helping Sunny’s cause.

She dialed the office number. Ollie picked up on the second ring. “Who is this?”

Before Sunny even got her whole name out, he growled, “Where’s the goddamn cash box?”

Sunny blinked. This was his big problem? “I took it home for the weekend. Mr. Richer gave me a large cash deposit—you can check with him. I didn’t think it was safe—”

“I don’t care what you think!” her boss interrupted. “You bring that box back here right now! And if there’s anything missing, even a penny, you’ll be looking for a new job.”

He slammed the phone down. Sunny was tempted to do the same.

Well, he’ll look pretty stupid when he finds out we’re several hundred bucks to the good,
she thought. Had Ollie
been drinking? God knew he didn’t always wear his wealth gracefully. He could act like a spoiled child if he didn’t get his way. She frowned, remembering the conversation with Will about the possibility of Ollie being a suspect in Ada’s murder.
For someone who’s supposed to be rich, he sure sounded awfully worried about the cash box
.

Sunny bit her lip. If he’d learned that Richer wasn’t going to invest in any of his schemes, that disappointment, coupled with the embarrassment of discovering that one of his properties housed a meth lab and burned to the ground, might make his temper even more uncertain than usual.
And I get to be the one he takes it out on,
Sunny silently complained.

“It’s just a misunderstanding, Dad,” she told Mike. “But I’ve got to go into the office and straighten things out. Be back as soon as I can.”

Sunny went upstairs, got the cash box, and climbed into her dad’s truck. She’d gone about half a mile before she remembered her promise to call Will if she was going out alone.

Just as she reached for her cell phone, an SUV came roaring up behind her. Sunny pulled aside to let the maniac driver pass. But as the SUV came abreast of her, the passengerside window rolled down. A guy leaned out, his mullet streaming in the breeze.

Sunny immediately recognized Fatso from the brawl at O’Dowd’s. The shotgun in his hands needed no introduction.

Oh, my God!
A quick tromp on the gas pedal, and Sunny’s pickup shot ahead before Fatso could get a shot off.

She heard confused shouting behind her, quickly
drowned out by engine noise as the SUV accelerated after her. It grew larger and larger in Sunny’s rearview mirror as she zigzagged from lane to lane, trying to keep them from pulling beside her again.

The SUV got right behind her and rammed her rear bumper, sending her fishtailing along the road. Sunny had to grip the wheel with both hands, her phone dropping into the well beneath her feet.

Wonderful,
she thought.
I can’t outrun them, and I can’t call for help.

All she could do was hang on and hope she could control the speeding truck. If those guys made her spin out, that would be the end. She’d seen the look in Fatso’s eyes. He fully intended to use that shotgun on her.

A second smack on her bumper jarred her, but she was prepared now. Sunny’s hopes rose as the SUV shrank in her mirror briefly, but then it came at her again—the driver had just pulled back for a little more running room.

Then, up ahead, she saw her only chance: an old shortcut. Sunny hadn’t taken that rutted, disused road since she was in high school. It wasn’t even much of a shortcut, but bouncing along between the ruts was about the closest thing local teenagers had had to an amusement park ride.

The shortcut angled off from the road, and Sunny hit it at full throttle. Despite the fact that her dad had always dinned into her the importance of using her turn signals, for once Sunny was willing to be a bad driver if it didn’t give those goons behind her any warning about what she planned. The pickup bounded into the air and landed with a shock strong enough to shake her fillings loose.

If I make it through this, I guess I’m going to owe Dad for a new wheel alignment,
she thought.

The truck jounced over the ruts, flinging her against her seat belt until she was sure she’d have bruises. Sunny braked, forced to lose speed if she wanted to keep control. She grimaced as the front wheel dropped suddenly with a head-rattling bang.
Maybe I’ll have to throw in new shocks, too.

Her mirror had been knocked askew, so she didn’t get a full view of the pursuing SUV. But she saw it take that same punishing dip that she’d just gone through.

Besides the rattling bang of protesting car parts clashing together, she also heard a lower, sharper
boom!
ring through the air.

Behind her, she saw the SUV slew erratically back and forth, finally jouncing to a stop. Sunny continued on her wild ride, content to see her attackers diminishing in the mirror.

She finally hooked up with a county road about a half mile away, well out of Fatso’s shooting range, and brought her truck to a stop. Her whole body shook as she groped around under the seat for her phone.

Sunny finally got her fingers around it, got it open, and called Will. As soon as he answered, she spewed out, all in a rush: “I had to go in to the office—urgent call—and two guys came up and tried to shoot me—”

“Sunny!” he interrupted. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the southern end of the old shortcut.” It used to have a name—what was it? “Ridge Road—that’s what we used to call it. Do you remember it?” she said into her phone. “Look, I really have to get to the office. Barnstable
is going to fire me if I don’t turn up. The SUV that chased me looks to be stuck out there. They had a shotgun, and I think it went off—”

“Sunny, are you okay? You sound—”

“No, I’m not okay,” she answered, cutting him off. “Somebody tried to shoot me with a shotgun.” Sunny wasn’t sure she could deal with that right now. What she could deal with was reaching the office and saving her job.

“You can’t just drive off, Sunny.” Will sounded every inch a cop now. “And you’ve got to call 911.”

“No, I’ve got to get in to work.
You
call 911.” Getting angry did one thing—it steadied Sunny’s nerves and hands. She started up the truck and drove down into town and the MAX office.

*

She arrived to
find Oliver Barnstable sitting behind her desk like a judge ready to pass sentence. “About time,” he said, ostentatiously looking at his watch.

Sunny put the box in front of him and handed him the key.

Ollie the Barnacle unlocked and flipped open the lid, then gawked. Bouncing around in the cab of the truck had left bills, change, and receipts scattered all over the box. But he could still see the sheaf of hundreds at the top of the pile.

“Er—ah,” he said.

“Maybe I lived in New York too long, but the bank had closed, and that seemed like too much money to leave in an office that’s this open to the street. That’s what I did with the last big cash infusion.” Sunny tried hard to keep
her voice calm. “I keep a running tally of income and outgo, so it should be easy enough to check.”

“Um.” Ollie’s round, florid face was even redder than usual. “I can see that’s probably not necessary. It’s just—finding it gone after a rather difficult week—”

Excuses, but not an apology,
she thought.
You really are a prince among men, Ollie.

The opening door interrupted Barnstable’s self-serving speech. “We’re closed,” he called, without even looking at the visitor.

Sunny turned around to recognize one of the constables she’d seen driving past the office in the last few days.

“Ms. Coolidge, I have to take you to headquarters,” the cop said.

That got Ollie’s attention. He goggled when he saw the uniform. “Oh, now what the hell is this?”

The constable ignored Barnstable, concentrating on Sunny as he spoke. “We have a report that you left the scene of a crime. The sheriff would like to question you.”

“What crime?” Ollie’s question almost came out as a moan.

“Attempted murder,” Sunny told him.

The constable spoke at the same time, but his answer was shorter.

“Murder.”

“Murder?” Sunny echoed
weakly. Then her voice got louder. “What are you talking about? I’m fine.”

The constable looked as if he’d just taken a big, healthy mouthful of spoiled milk.

He probably wasn’t supposed to give that away,
Sunny thought. But who got killed? Then she remembered the boom of the shotgun going off. She’d thought the SUV had gotten damaged. But what if it was the driver? That mental image made her queasy and weak in the knees.

The young man took her by the arm and tried to recover his authority. “You have to accompany me now, ma’am.”

Sunny turned stricken eyes to Ollie Barnstable, who stared at her with something between amazement and fright. “Don’t call my dad!” she begged. “This would just about kill him!”

Sunny clung to the hope that they’d quickly resolve this mess and she’d catch a little rest after the events of the early morning and the late afternoon. But that hope quickly died when she arrived at the police station. The place looked even busier than on her last visit, and it only got more so as people in state police uniforms appeared. Apparently a killing received a full-court press.

Then she got to sit down in an interrogation room with Sheriff Nesbit and a guy in a rumpled suit who turned out to be Lieutenant Wainwright, a state police homicide investigator.

For the next couple of hours, it wasn’t so much good cop/bad cop as tough cop/furious cop.

“What the hell was the big idea of leaving the scene?” Nesbit demanded.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay around where their car stopped,” Sunny replied with complete honesty. “Not when I saw one of them trying to aim a shotgun at me earlier.”

“But why didn’t you stay put after you’d gotten safely away and reported the crime?” Wainwright asked.

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Sunny admitted. “My boss told me I had to get to the office for an urgent meeting or he’d fire me, so I was freaked out even before I saw the guy with the gun.” She shrugged helplessly, looking at the men. “I need the job.”

She glanced over at Nesbit. “Besides, I had no idea there had been a murder! When I made the other reports, it always just ended up in me wasting—uh, spending—a lot of time on them and then being told that whatever happened wasn’t really a crime.”

The sheriff swelled up so much, Sunny was afraid he was going to explode.

“What other reports?” Wainwright asked as Nesbit sputtered.

“I’ll send for the files,” the sheriff said shortly. He went to the door while Sunny happily outlined for Wainwright some of the things that had happened since she started looking into Ada Spruance’s death.

The state police investigator listened, nodded, and then asked, “Do you own a gun, Ms. Coolidge? Have you ever handled one?”

Sunny stared at him. “No.”

“Do we have your permission to search your car for any weapons?”

Sunny began to wonder if this was the time when she should start talking about a lawyer. But she gave her permission.

“She could have tossed it anywhere between the shortcut and reaching town,” Nesbit growled.

Sunny stared back and forth between the two lawmen. “What’s going on?” she said. “The only gun I know about is the shotgun one of those guys was carrying. I thought I heard it go off when they hit a major bump—”

“It did,” Wainwright told her. “Wrecked the SUV’s transmission and did quite a job on the driver’s right ankle. He was a small-time Portsmouth thug named Eddie Deever.”

“He bled to death?” Sunny asked, horrified.

“The constable dispatched to the scene found two men dead, both with bullet holes in their heads,” Nesbit said. “Probably nine millimeter.”

“And you think I shot them?” Sunny’s voice rose to an indignant squeak.

“They match the descriptions you gave of two men involved in an altercation while you were recently in a known criminal hangout,” Nesbit said.

“I was in O’Dowd’s trying to talk to Gordie Spruance—you remember, the guy who got killed the next day? I think those two staged a fight to distract me while somebody else dumped a handful of pills in my drink!” she replied heatedly.

Both of them glanced at Lieutenant Wainwright and shut up.

“It raises an interesting question,” Wainwright said. “The kill shots were at very close range. Deever’s usual partner in crime, Vernon Galt, was the other person in the car. As you reported, he had a shotgun.”

He looked at Nesbit, gesturing to Sunny. “If they’d been chasing this young woman with the intent of killing her, I don’t think they’d have let her come that close with a weapon.”

The sheriff didn’t have anything to say to that, so Wainwright went on. “The fact that Galt let the shooter get so close suggests that he considered that person to be a friend.”

Wainwright turned back to Sunny. “This young woman already gave a description of the two to the police in another complaint—that doesn’t make her look like a friend.”

Nesbit looked like a kid who’d just seen all his Christmas gifts go up in flames. For one bright moment, he must have thought he could get a quick solution to a murder case and get rid of a political thorn in his side at the same time.

Instead, he obviously faced a lot more work. There was
no way for him to pass off these two most recent murders as “accidents,” and there went Elmet County’s so-called spotless crime record.

Wainwright assumed the lead in the interrogation, taking Sunny through the whole chain of events. Along the way, he asked Sunny a number of questions she couldn’t answer—for instance, had she noticed the SUV following her before the attack?