Double Cross (31 page)
He winced.
I rested the gun on my knee. “You were supposed to kill us, right?”
He nodded.
“Put a bullet in each of our heads, was that it?”
He nodded again.
“Then bury us somewhere out there?” I motioned toward the shattered back window.
He lowered his head. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you.”
“Yes.”
“Who is your boss?”
“We don’t have a boss. We were hired just for this job.”
“Look, we know you work for a gang. We know about the extortion ring. Now, tell me who’s in charge.”
He squinted up at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I waved the gun toward him. “We know all about how you guys operate and we know about the prostitution bust in Southlake.”
He grabbed his leg and grimaced. “Lady, I’m telling you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. We were hired to do this job. That’s all.”
I looked over my shoulder at Mom. She had stepped into the room and was staring down at Skinny Man.
I turned back to the giant. “Then who hired you?”
He moved his good hand in the direction of his front pocket. I pointed the gun at his chest, and he froze. “I’m just trying to get comfortable. It hurts.”
“You can get as comfortable as you want. Just keep your hands where I can see them. Now, you were about to tell me who hired you.”
He looked at me for a second, and I could tell he was debating which held the most danger for him, telling me who hired him or keeping quiet. I desperately wanted not to have to shoot him again, but I was beginning to wonder if he had an inverted learning curve. I pointed the gun at his good leg. “One—”
He held up his hand. “Stop! I’ll tell you.” He shook his head. “You are a crazy woman! Do you know that?”
With the gun still pointed at his leg, I arched one brow. “Last chance.”
He wiped his forehead with his good arm. Then he turned and nodded toward Mom. “Her husband.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
I THOUGHT ABOUT TAKING the giant back to town in the car. He needed a doctor, and we had no way to contact one. I had checked the car thoroughly for our purses and phones. They weren’t in it.
Eventually I decided he was simply too big to handle. So I marched him, both of us limping, into the family room and held the gun on him while Mom tied him to the cabinet with the same rope that had held her. While she worked at securing the knot, she stood as far away from him as possible, extending her hands as if she were handling a dead fish.
He was already getting woozy and couldn’t have been any more passive. At one point he even lifted his hands higher to give her an easier angle to tie them. I worried that Mom might not get the knots tight, but with his wounds and the weight of the cabinet looming over him, getting loose was likely to take more energy—and more ambition—than I figured he had left. Besides, even if he did get free, he would be easy to round up.
I told him to stay still and gave him a towel to press on his leg and a bottle of water from the refrigerator. Before we left, I promised I would send the police for him as soon as we got to town. He would suffer for a while, but it was a better deal than he had intended to offer Mom and me. We’d have been buried in the back by now.
I knew that if we stopped at a police station on the way into Dallas, we’d be answering questions until noon. I also knew that Stanley must have been expecting a call from his two jobbers to let him know they’d taken care of us. In fact, they might have already called him to tell him I got loose. He could be planning to catch the first flight that morning to somewhere far away. We needed to get to him as soon as possible.
Anyway, I had a better idea than the police. Once we found the highway, I figured out that we were about twenty miles south of Dallas. We drove nearly all the way to downtown on I-35E before we found a gas station with a dilapidated outside pay phone. I had taken all of the money from the giant’s pockets and wallet before we left the cabin. I dropped two of his quarters into the dented-up phone, which hung at a precarious angle from the brick wall of the station.
Standing in the haze of a yellow parking lot light, I swiveled my head as I punched in Michael’s number, checking out the area around me. I half expected someone to dash around the corner of the building and pull a gun. It had been that sort of night.
Michael is probably the only non-partying person in Dallas who would answer his cell phone at 2:30 a.m. on the second ring.
“Hello?” His voice was scratchy.
“It’s Taylor. Are you asleep?”
I heard shuffling and a click and could picture him sitting up in bed and flicking on the lamp. Now his voice was crisp and clear—the usual Michael. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
The concern in his voice was obvious. After what I’d been through, that was nice. I looked at my reflection in the station window. “I’m not half-bad—for someone who’s been knocked out, thrown in the trunk of a car, and taken to the country to be shot.”
“Don’t joke around. It’s 2:30 in the morning.”
“I’m not joking. I killed someone tonight, and I left another guy tied up in a cabin south of Dallas. They were hired to murder Mom and me.”
Now I heard lots of rustling. “I’m getting dressed. Where are you?”
“At a gas station next to downtown. Mom and I are okay. I’m a little bit beat up, but I’ll be fine.”
“Who beat you up?” That was a different voice—low and hard.
“Calm down, Michael. Fortunately I did most of the beating. It’s just that I ran into a window and some other things along the way.”
He chuckled. “They had no idea what they were getting into.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Listen, Mom’s husband hired the guys to kill us.”
“You’re kidding me. How do you know?”
“The one who’s still alive told us. We need to get over to Mom’s house in Southlake to pick up Stanley before he finds out things went bad.”
“Do you want me to call the Southlake police?”
“No need. Stanley will be easy enough to handle. Besides, I want to ask him a few questions before the cops take over. Is that okay with you?”
“Sure. It sounds like you earned the right to ask him a few.”
I gave him the directions to Mom’s, and we agreed to meet at her subdivision gate in Southlake in an hour.
As I sped past the dimly lit hulks of the Dallas skyline, I enjoyed the thought of what Michael would want to do to Stanley when he got a look at me. This was one time when I might have to be the moderating influence. What an interesting twist. First, though, Mom and I would stop at Simon’s house, which was on the way. I needed to get my feet cleaned up before they got infected. A pair of shoes wouldn’t hurt, either.
By the time we got to Simon’s, I had learned that driving twenty miles with two pistols in the waistband of my panties was a uniquely uncomfortable experience. With each bump and turn in the road, the gun grips rubbed me a little bit more raw. As soon as I pulled down the driveway to the back of my house and stopped, I lifted my skirt, pulled the guns out, and put them in the glove box.
When I got out of the car and stood on the pavement, my muscles screamed, but not nearly as loud as my feet. I lifted one foot with my hand. It was a sticky mess of dried blood and dirt. I cartwheeled my shoulder and quickly determined that was unwise. I would have to get by with as little movement as possible for a while.
As Mom got out of the passenger side, I motioned for her to follow me while I limped to the backyard gate. Once through the gate, I stopped. The porch lights were off, and the house blocked the light from the street. I waited a few seconds to give my eyes a chance to adjust. Then I edged my way around the back corner of the pool, got down on my knees, and groped in the landscaping. Within a few seconds, I was holding the buried house key.
Mom and I moved up the porch steps together. I fumbled in the dark to get the key in the lock. When I turned the knob, I looked over my shoulder at Mom. “We need to be quiet. If Kacey’s here, we don’t want to scare her to death.”
“It’s nearly 3:00 o’clock in the morning. Where else would she be?”
“She’s been staying at the sorority house during finals.” I pushed open the door.
Mom walked past me into the family room. I eased the door closed behind us. “I hope none of the neighbors has insomnia,” I whispered. “I can imagine what they’d think if they saw me now.”
Mom smiled.
I pointed to a chair. “Why don’t you have a seat? I’ll wash myself off and throw on a pair of jeans and some shoes. Here, let me turn on a light for you.” I was reaching for the switch when the lamp on the end table next to the fireplace flicked on.
Stanley was sitting in a wing chair with one hand on the lamp. In his other hand was his short-barreled .38 revolver.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
“GREAT TIMING. I JUST got here myself.” Stanley motioned with his gun to the wing chair opposite him. “Why don’t you sit down?” The gun shook in his hand as he raised it. He ran a finger under the collar of his black mock turtleneck. The lamp shade angled the light downward, illuminating his chest and arm and gun, but leaving his face in the dark, creating an eerie illusion of a headless gunman.
By anyone’s standards I’d been through a lot for one night. I was tired and sore and ready to wring Stanley’s scrawny little neck even before he emerged from the shadows of my own family room with a gun in his hand. Now, watching his limp-wristed handling of the revolver, I was tempted to just walk over, slap him, and take it away. Despite his trembling hand, though, it was still a .38. It could put a hole in my head the size of a golf ball. This was no time to do something stupid.
“How did you get in our house?”
“I’m a chemical engineer. When you know a little bit about chemicals, it’s amazing what you can do to a seemingly solid thing like a window frame.”
“How did you beat the alarm?”
“Stop asking questions and sit.”
As I walked to the chair, I surveyed the immediate area for something that could serve as a weapon or a shield or both. The only items within reach were a five-by-seven picture frame, a magazine, and the end table lamp that matched the one next to Stanley. The picture frame was my best bet. At least I could frisbee it and distract him if I had to. That would be desperation. I wasn’t there yet, but I kept it in mind.
As I sat, I looked back at Mom. She hadn’t moved. “Sit down on the couch, Mom. He wouldn’t dare shoot us here. He’d wake the whole neighborhood. The police would be on him before he got out the back door.” I wanted to be sure he hadn’t overlooked that point, just in case he was even more of an idiot than I thought.
Before she could respond, he motioned to her. “No, Hil. You come over here by me. You’re not the problem; you’re part of the solution.”
I had a sinking feeling that things were about to get complicated.
Mom moved her eyes from him to me and then back to him. She blinked several times but didn’t move.
“Does that make me the problem?” I said.
He pointed the revolver in my general direction. Although I really didn’t believe he would shoot me there in the house, he was waving the gun around like a Fourth of July flag. The hammer was cocked, and I had no confidence in his ability to handle the weapon so cavalierly without accidentally firing it. As the gun bobbed and slid, I shifted my weight in my chair, in a sort of weird choreograph designed to keep my vital parts out of the line of fire. I hoped he would get settled soon. Each time I moved, a new part of my body ached.
“Yes, I hate to say it, but you are the problem.” He nodded toward Mom. “When you come over here, honey, would you please bring me one of those throw pillows from the couch?”
“Honey? How can you call her honey? You hired someone to kill her.”
He shook his head. “Not true. They had strict instructions not to harm Hil. As I said, you’re the problem.”
Mom had bent over to pick up a pillow. When she heard what he said, she straightened her back. She turned to face us, and her eyes brightened.
I didn’t like where this was going. “We’re not buying that,” I said. I glanced at Mom, hoping for a sign that she agreed. “Your boys told us that you hired them to kill us both.”
Mom held up a finger. “Actually, dear, they never said that.”
I threw up my hands. “What? You heard the big guy tell me they were going to put a bullet in our heads and bury us out back.”
She closed her eyes, as if picturing the scene in her mind. “No . . . that’s not exactly correct. You asked him if they had planned to put a bullet in your head, and he said yes. He didn’t say anything about me. They could easily have killed me as soon as they got me to the cabin, but they didn’t.”
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