Death by Chocolate (2 page)

“But she won’t give it to
me,” Rodney tried to explain. He’d already whacked the woman on the head with
his own gun. She’d screamed bloody murder, but she still wouldn’t surrender the
diamond on her finger.

“Then shoot her! Goddamn
it, we ain’t got all day here!”

Rodney looked at Ferris
hard, trying to see if he meant it. They’d already said they wouldn’t shoot
anybody, except a cop.

He could tell Ferris meant
it. Ferris had that same look in his eye that he’d had the night he cut Franky
Caruso’s nose off with a broken beer bottle in a bar fight.

“You shoot that bitch or I
will.... and then I’ll shoot you, too, you faggot! See if I ever pull another
job with you.”

Rodney felt his blood boil,
his face flush red. He felt like he was ten years old again and Ferris was his
big cousin, shaming him, making him feel weak and small. He hated that. He
hated that more than anything.

He’d show Ferris. He’s show
everybody on the eleven o’clock news.

Shoving his .357 magnum
against the woman’s cheek, he screamed, “Give me the fuckin’ ring, woman, or
I’ll blow your brains out. Right now!”

In some dark corner of his
mind, Rodney heard himself hoping that she’d refuse. He’d shoot her there and
then and the whole world would see; they’d all be watching on TV and—

The door opened right
behind him and Rodney spun around to see an old lady and old man toddling in.
The woman wore a bright flowery dress and was shuffling along with a walker.
The guy was stooped over and moved slow and stiff, like he’d just pooped his
pants.

Great, that was just what
they needed. A couple more knuckleheads to contend with.... a couple that
probably didn’t have a dime between them.

“Hey, you two,” Rodney
shouted at them. “Get over there with the others and put your hands up.”

The woman took several
halting steps toward him. “Eh? What did you say? Sorry, but I’m a mite deaf in
both ears.”

“What’s the matter?” asked
her decrepit companion as he moved closer to Ferris. “Is the bank closed or
something? We thought it was open this time of day.”

“You picked the wrong time
to go banking, you old fart,” Ferris said as he swaggered over to the man and
waved his gun in his face. Ferris swaggered everywhere, Rodney thought, with a
gagging feeling in his throat. Ferris got a lot of girls with his tight jeans
and wife-beater shirts that showed his muscles and that damned swagger of his.

Rodney would have loved to
wear shirts like that, but he had too many pimples on his back and not enough biceps
to pull off the look.

He glanced up at the camera
and wished for a moment that he’d worn something nicer than his tie-dyed
T-shirt with a hole in the front where his chest hairs stuck out.

The gal in the flowered
dress with the walker came right up next to him and looked him up and down,
like his grandma had before he’d left for school each morning when he’d been a
kid. And like Grandma Flynn, she had a disapproving scowl on her face.

“What do you think you’re
doing there, son?” she said. ‘You shouldn’t go waving a gun around like that.
It might be loaded. You could put somebody’s eye out with that thing.”

Ferris gouged the guy in
the ribs with his gun. Hard. The old man stood up a little straighten ‘You and
your wife better get over there with everybody else before we kill you both,”
Ferris told him.

Yeah,” Rodney said, feeling
a surge of power that he’d never felt before in all of his twenty-two years.
‘Yeah, you’d better do what you’re told or I’ll shoot you... just like I’m
gonna shoot this stupid bitch over here who doesn’t wanna give me her ring.”

He turned away from the
grandma and returned his attention to the young woman with the big, sparkly
ring on her finger. “I’m tired of waiting around for you,” he said. “I think
I’ll just go ahead and blow you away. That way everybody here will know that
we—er.... that is—I mean business.”

He glanced over at Ferris.
Ferris had a stupid little grin on his face, a grin that meant he didn’t think
Rodney had the balls to do it. Yeah, well, he’d soon see....

“You don’t want to do that,
son,” said the old woman behind him. “And I’ll give you three good reasons...”
Rodney turned and was somewhat surprised to see that she wasn’t looking at him;
she was talking to him, but she was looking at the guy she’d come in with. The
guy was looking back at her kind of funny. Like they had some sort of secret
between them.

But Rodney couldn’t
immediately figure out what it might be, so—like most things Rodney couldn’t
understand—he ignored it.

“One,” the woman was saying,
“when they catch you, you’ll be charged with murder instead of just plain ol’
bank robbing.”

“They ain’t gonna catch
us.” But Rodney wasn’t as sure as he had been when they’d walked in. There was
that camera in the corner, and there they were with their faces hanging out—no
masks or pantyhose—plain as day.

“And two....” She fixed him
with eyes that were star-tlingly blue. They cut through him like icy knives and
made him feel sick and small, just like he had a second before Grandma had
whacked him with Grandpa’s big leather belt. “It’s just wrong,” she said, “and
if you do something as wrong as killing somebody, you’ll pay a really big price
for it.”

“Shut her up!” Ferris
yelled at the guy. “Shut your old lady up before I blow her head off.”

The man’s face changed; it
actually twisted into some sort of an angry grin. And all of a sudden, it
occurred to Rodney that—except for the gray hair and the baggy clothes—he
didn’t look all that old, or weak.

“What was that you were
saying, honey?” the guy asked the woman with the walker.

“I was saying.... I have
three good reasons why you shouldn’t be doing this...”

Time seemed to slow down
for Rodney. It was a moment he would play over and over again in his mind for
years to come and remember every detail: the young woman who wouldn’t give up
her engagement ring, softly sobbing behind him, the bank employees and other
customers shaking and pale in a tight circle behind the counter, the gal with
the walker, moving still closer to him, talking....

“Three reasons, and all of
them good ones. Like I said: One, they’ll give you the needle when they catch
up with you. Two, it’s just wrong, and three—”

Rodney didn’t know what hit
him. At least, not at first. Later, much later, they would realize it was the
old lady’s walker.

But at the time it was just
a blur of silver, the gun flying out of his hand, an awful pain across his
face, and the taste and feel of warm blood gushing out of his nose and down the
back of his throat as he fell backward to the cold marble floor.

He was only dimly aware of
a scuffle on the other side of the room. Ferris’s cry of pain. The dull thud as
Big Cool Swaggering Cousin Ferris hit the floor, too.

Rodney felt the weight of
somebody on him, mashing the air out of him. Somebody heavy. Strong hands
grabbed his shoulders and flipped him over onto his belly. His bloody nose
smacked against the floor, and for a moment he saw red and white stars of pain
flashing through his head. The same somebody twisted his hands behind him,
yanking his shoulders and elbows half out of their joints.

In the corner of his eye he
could see just enough bright yellow and pink flowers to realize.... it was
Grandma!

He could hear Ferris
yelling, “What? What the hell? What do you think you’re doing, Pops?”

“Arresting you, numskull.
And don’t call me Pops or I’ll put these cuffs around your neck instead of your
wrists and cinch ‘em down good and tight.”

“Got another pair of
cuffs?” he heard the woman on top of him say.

“Nope.”

“Here’s some duct tape,”
said a male voice from the crowd behind the counter. “Will that do?”

“Sure. Just wind it around
here if you don’t mind.”

Rodney heard the rip of the
tape, saw some brightly polished black shoes appear an inch or so from his
forehead. And some gray pinstriped trouser legs.

The bank manager had been
wearing a pinstriped suit, he recalled, as the gravity of his situation began
to press down upon him.... along with the grandma’s knees in the small of his
back. The old gal had thrown him around like she was some sort of sumo wrestler
or something.

Shit, Rodney thought. It’s
all on camera.

By tomorrow the whole
country, everybody he knew or would ever know, would have seen his disgrace:
Old lady and old man take out desperate bank robbers with nothin’ but a fuckin’
walker. Film at eleven.

Savannah sat on her sofa,
pen and tablet in hand, jotting down notes furiously as she stared at the
television screen, determined to miss nothing.

“Gourmet Network again?”
Tammy Hart asked as she bounced across Savannah’s living room to the desk in the
corner that served as “Control Central” for the Moonlight Magnolia Detective
Agency. Not that there was any business to speak of that needed controlling at
the moment.

“Yeah. Shhhh....” Savannah
said, scribbling ingredients and instructions for the Queen of Chocolate’s
latest creation: Deep Dark Chocolate Passion Layer Cake. “I gotta get this
down. I’m going to make it for you guys tonight when the boys come over for the
weekly briefing.”

“They’re not coming for the
briefing,” Tammy said as she pulled her long, straight blond hair back with a
scrunchy and sat down at the desk. “It would only take a second to ‘brief’ them
on the phone. ‘Nothing’s happening. No clients. Not a one.’ End of briefing.
They’re coming over for the chocolate.”

“Of course they are. That’s
why I’m having the briefing.... an excuse to bake something chocolate. At this
point in my life, it’s my foremost fleshly delight.”

Tammy threw the switch on
the computer and, once it had booted up, began to enter the accounts, brief as
they were. That was one thing Savannah loved about her: Tammy assisted, even
when there was nothing to assist with. And that quality nearly made up for the
fact that Tammy was young, energetic, bouncy, and thin as a runway model.

“This time, I swear, I’m
going to get it right,” Savannah said. “No more disasters like that Triple
Chocolate Soufflé that turned out more like pudding. I’m going to do it exactly
the way the Queen of Chocolate does, and it’ll be a culinary triumph.”

“Famous last words,” Tammy
muttered.

“This sucks.” Savannah
looked down at the slice of cake on her plate and around the table at her
faithful friends, who had gathered to discuss the non-details of the detective
agency—which Savannah owned, but they all participated in from time to time—and
to sample her latest experiment.

“It isn’t that bad,
Savannah,” Ryan Stone said—always kind, always breathtakingly gorgeous as he
graced the end of her table radiating “tall, dark, and handsome.”

“It’s tasty.... if a
tad.... chewy,” added John Gibson, Ryan’s life partner who always sat to his
right and sipped Earl Grey tea in that quiet, dignified manner that only
British aristocracy could achieve. About fifteen years older than Ryan, John
sported a full head of snowy white hair and a luxurious silver mustache. He was
the only man Savannah had ever known who actually wore tweed hunting jackets in
California. And his genteel English accent gave her shivers. John, too, was
kind.

Dirk wasn’t.

“No,” he said as he shoved
yet another forkful into his mouth, “overcooked steak is chewy. This is just
plain tough.”

“Well, I don’t see you
turning it down,” Savannah said, grabbing the plate out from under his nose.
“If you don’t like it, don’t feel obliged to—”

He snatched it back. “Hey,
gimme that. Food’s food.”

“Especially if it’s free,”
Tammy grumbled, making an adolescent “little sister” face at Dirk. “That’s your
number one criteria, isn’t it, when critiquing a dish?”

“It helps,” Dirk said,
munching heartily.

Savannah dropped her fork
onto her plate. ‘That does it. My jaws are tired. It’s going into the garbage.”

“Maybe you oughta stick
with pecan pie or peach cobbler,” Dirk volunteered. “Something more in keeping
with your Georgia heritage. Hey, don’t throw that out. I’ll take it home with
me.”

Savannah stepped into the
kitchen, got the coffeepot, and set about refilling everyone’s cups.... except
John’s. He had his own Dresden teapot and cozy at hand.

“Speaking of the Lady
Eleanor, the Queen of Chocolate,” John said, “occasionally our paths cross, as
they did last evening at a benefit held at the Stardust Ballroom. She mentioned
that she’s in need of a personal security expert, and I recommended you,
Savannah. I hope you don’t mind.”

The playful twinkle in his
eyes told her that he knew she wouldn’t mind. Mind? Mind?

“Really? I mean.... Lady...
Eleanor... bodyguard... me?”