Your Chariot Awaits (32 page)

“A couple of them. Some women's group gave me a little .22 as an award because they liked the Ed Montrose show. The other one was my dad's.”

Not exactly the modern, high-powered weaponry I'd hoped for, but a bullet's a bullet. “Can you shoot them?”

“I'm, uh, sure I can.”

That gave me an uneasy clue. “
Have
you shot them?”

“Well, no. Though I certainly know how to aim a gun and pull the trigger. I shot a lot of blanks on the show.”

Also not the level of expertise I'd hoped for, but just a gun in hand as threat should do it.

“Okay, here's my plan. You'll hide right behind that door from the kitchen out to the garage, with the door half open. If Elena shows up alone, I let her in. You listen, and if anything goes wrong, you and your gun come through the door like gangbusters. I remember you doing that, back in your Ed Montrose days.”

“Maybe Elena will have her own gun. Ed Montrose didn't have to contend with the possibility of a real gun blazing back at him.” He rubbed a finger across his chin. “Though it might work. But what if she isn't alone? What if the husband is with her?”

“Then we can figure they're up to something not conducive to my good health, and we could . . . not open the door to them.”

My thinking stalled there. Hiding and pretending not to be home when they rang the bell didn't really sound like a high-concept defense.

“Okay, Plan B.” Fitz said. “We wait out in the limo, curtains pulled except for a crack to see through. If Elena and her husband both show up, we let them get up to the door—” He broke off as if his thinking also stalled. “But what we need is to get them inside.”

“I could leave a note. ‘Come on in. I'll be back in a minute.' Then we can trap them inside!”

“Well, uh, actually, I was thinking that when they're inside, we simply drive off.”

“Drive off?” I considered the scenario with dismay. “It's not a particularly
heroic-
sounding plan.”

“You know the old saying. He who sleuths and runs away, lives to sleuth another day. You want to be a dead hero or a live sleuth?”

“Would Ed Montrose just sneak off?”

“Ed Montrose had very good script writers to save him. We're just muddling around on our own.”

True. “Then what? We just drive around until they go away?”

“No. We drive direct to the sheriff's station and tell them our suspicions, even if we don't have ironclad proof. They'll rush back out here and grab Donny with a loaded gun.”

I wasn't convinced it was a foolproof plan, and I doubted Fitz was either, but it appeared to be all we had to work with at the moment. Hopefully, Donny
wouldn't
be with Elena, and she'd have some meaningful information. Then I realized Fitz had something else on his mind.

“What's this deal about your being busy tomorrow night?” he asked. “Some big dancing-on-tabletops, swinging-from-chandeliers date?”

Nice of him to think so, but I had to admit the truth. “No, it's business. Mr. Findley at F&N has asked me to take him in the limo to a meeting with some executives at a place out in the woods northwest of town.”

“Seems like an odd place for meeting.”

“One of them has a vacation house out there. He calls it a cabin, but Findley figures it's some big, ritzy sort of place. He wants to impress them by arriving in the limo.”

Fitz's face brightened. “Hey, you aren't even actually
in
business yet, and already business is booming! Doesn't that tell you something?”

“And you're all eager to help me get going?”

“Of course.”

I went to the cleaning closet next to the door leading out to the garage and started digging out supplies. Scrub brush, carpet and upholstery cleaners, bucket, detergent, Lysol spray.

“What's all this?”

I handed him a bucket. “Just a little cleanup job in the limo, detective dear. Come along.”

35

W
e spent a couple of hours on the cleanup job, and I left all the limo doors open to let the upholstery and carpet air out. I junked both the chauffeur's uniform and the T-shirt I'd worn under it, but I still had the second uniform to wear for Mr. Findley's trip.

The next morning, he called me at the office to make sure I'd be there on time with the limo.

“What will you do while Mr. Findley's in the meeting?” Letty asked.

“I'll take a book. The dome light's enough to read by. Or maybe I'll get out and walk around the lake.”

Actually, I was looking forward to this . . . good money, much of it for just sitting-around time. Except the more I reflected on Elena's call, the more I thought she'd be coming alone and was onto something important. Maybe, if Mr. Findley's meeting didn't run too late, I'd call Elena when I got home and ask if she could come over then. No, wouldn't work, I realized in frustration. I still didn't have her number.

I grabbed a sandwich for supper, showered, and changed into the chauffeur's uniform. I was just pinning the waist to take up the slack when I heard a commotion outside. I peered out the window.

Moose! Moose on the loose and ripping into my daisy flower bed like a black-and-white digging machine. What was it with that dog and my daisies?

I dashed outside, yelling as I went. “Moose! Moose, you get out of there!”

Dirt flew. Flowers flew. Moose's spotted hind end stuck up in the air, his tail flashing back and forth like a white whip. Something hit me on the knee. I thought it was a rock and started to throw it back at Moose's rump. Then I stopped short. Not a rock. A small, black oblong, with a key chain attached.

Jerry's flash drive! I stared at it in astonishment. He must have lost it when I was chasing him with the shovel and he stumbled and fell in the flower bed. It had been hidden down in there all this time.

“Moose, you stop that! Bad dog!” Lola Sheerson came running down the street, yelling at the top of her lungs, her two kids following. She grabbed Moose's collar and yanked him out of the flower bed.

“Andi, I'm sorry. I don't know how he got out. We fix one place, and he finds or digs another.”

“Dad says we should've named him Howdy Ini,” the little boy said.

“Houdini?” I guessed.

“Yeah.”

Lola apologized again, then added, “You'll probably be glad to hear we're moving. Ol' Tom there will be so glad, he might even break down and smile.”

“Oh, Lola, I'll miss you. And Moose too.”

Tom Bolton was on his deck, scribbling in a notebook, no doubt making a log of Moose's infractions for the next time he called Animal Control.

“It won't be for a while yet. We'll try to keep Houdini here under control until we go. If the kids weren't so crazy about him . . .” She rolled her eyes suggestively.

I brushed dirt off the flash drive as I went inside. The piece of the puzzle about why Jerry had been in my limo that night had fallen into place. He'd discovered the flash drive was missing, and mistakenly thought he lost it in the limo when he and Joella were riding back there and I bumped them around. He'd come back to look for it and, not wanting to encounter me when he searched, parked some distance away so I wouldn't hear his car. And someone had followed him.

I still didn't know who that someone was, or why Jerry was killed
,
but I was certain whatever was on the flash drive would point an
aha!
finger at the guilty person.

And whoever had killed Jerry and stolen the computer equipment also knew the flash drive existed and was still looking for it. That was why my house had been broken into and searched. My earrings and my mother's old watch were just opportunistic thefts.
So, DDS Molino, I was right about that!

Now that flash drive with its incriminating information was right here in my hands. Another thought jolted me. Were Elena and Donny after this? Was that what the meeting tomorrow night was really about? And how far would they go to get it?

What to do with it? Get rid of it! I dashed inside. I'd put DDS Molino's card in my purse after that interview at the station. I found it and dialed his home number. Answering machine. I looked at my watch. No time to take the flash drive to the station and explain everything to someone else. I'd call Molino again when I got home. I hastily stuffed the flash drive under a sofa cushion.

In spite of the excitement, I arrived at Mr. Findley's house right on time. I was feeling rushed and frazzled, but I had my cap set at a jaunty angle and I'd decided on black heels, which I thought added a touch of sophistication to the uniform. Although I wouldn't be doing any hiking around the lake in them, of course.

Mr. Findley came out of the house as soon as I pulled into the circular driveway. Under different circumstances I'd have felt odd stepping out to open the door for a man, but the uniform put me in chauffeur mode. I gave it the full treatment.

“Your chariot awaits, sir.” I opened the door with a flourish.

“I really appreciate this, you know.” Mr. Findley paused with one foot inside the limo. He seemed a bit out of breath. “I just did a last-minute change of clothes. Amanda is complaining that I'm acting like a teenager on a first date, but I just don't know what to expect from this bunch.”

Mr. Findley was now wearing a dark gray suit, pale blue shirt, and burgundy tie.

“You look very nice.”

Although he'd overdone the cologne or aftershave lotion, and he was going to be out of place if everyone else was roughing it in jeans and boots.

“Okay, let's get this show on the road.” He settled in the rear seat and consulted a scrap of paper. “There's a two-lane highway going west out of Vigland to a little place called Bogg's Junction, but we don't have to go that far. About twenty miles out of town, watch for a gravel road to the right. There should be a sign that says Ryland Road.”

Those directions were easy enough to follow, and traffic on the country road was light. I drove along feeling very chauffeurish, though I wished I could open the window. I wondered if the thickness of bulletproof glass prevented the windows from opening, or if that had been some special requirement of paranoid Uncle Ned.

The temperature wasn't high, but a faint scent of the cleansers lingered. Along with Mr. Findley's industrial-strength cologne.

Ryland Road was rough and potholed, with washboard sections that made Secret View Lane look cushiony. The country-side was rough and hilly, some of it logged over but much still heavily forested. Mr. Findley's face appeared in the space where the partition between us was open.

“When we're about seven or eight miles out here, it says to watch for a three-way fork in the road. It won't have a sign, but there's a big madrone tree with a peculiar gnarled trunk. Take the middle fork. Then it's several miles up that road.”

I'd showed him how to use the intercom system to talk to me, but apparently he preferred the yell-in-your-ear system.

The road after the forks got worse. In fact, it looked as if the main road had ended at the fork, and these were just seldom-used branches angling off it. The road was dirt, rutted and uneven, barely wide enough for a single vehicle. I thought maybe Mr. Delgrade had been telling the truth: maybe his vacation place
was
just a shack out here in the boondocks. Slanting evening sunshine hit only the tops of the trees, and below them, everything was in shadows. I didn't like the way branches and drooping vines brushed and scraped the sides and top of the limo.

“Are you sure this is the right road?” I asked after a couple of miles. It was beginning to look like not much more than an old logging road. In spite of the deep ruts, none of the tracks appeared recent. The ground was hilly, the dirt road rough bedrock in places but marshy and squishy in others.

“This is what the directions say.”

“Are you okay, Mr. Findley?” I asked after we slogged through a deep mudhole.

“I'm beginning to think I should have worn something other than this suit.”

We're on a road that could double as a mud-wrestling tank, and Mr. Findley is worried about the correctness of his attire. I should have doubled the hourly price I'd quoted him. How much did a limo wash job cost?

Apparently he was now having doubts of his own, because he finally said, “If we don't find the cabin in another mile or so, we'll turn around and go back.”

Maybe we would and maybe we wouldn't. The limo is not your turn-on-a-dime vehicle, and I hadn't seen any place yet where I could scrunch it around.

Then I spotted something in the road up ahead. The light was so dim I couldn't make it out clearly. I braked and switched on the headlights. Two somethings, actually, I realized as they moved closer. Bear? Bigfoot?

No, two human figures. But not human faces . . .

Ski masks, I realized with a jolt. Black ski masks, making the figures look like earless, two-legged snakes.

Not good. Nice, friendly country folk do not go around wearing ski masks. And carrying guns.

“Mr. Findley, l-look!”

His face appeared in the partition. “Oh, no! Who are they? Hunters?”

“I don't think hunters hunt with handguns or cover their faces with ski masks. I think we'd better get out of here.” I shoved the gear lever into reverse and jammed my foot on the gas, but we were right in the middle of another mudhole, and all my effort did was make the tires spin and spit clods of mud like ol' Moose digging at warp speed.

“Something's wrong here,” Mr. Findley said, which struck me as a big understatement—like
I smell smoke
when your hair is on fire. “I'm calling 911. Stay calm.”

I figured we were in a dead zone for cell phones for sure, but a minute later I heard him talking. He leaned through the opening again.

“They're sending someone. But it's probably going to take a while to get anyone way out here. We'll have to play it by ear until then.”