Grilled Cheese Murder: Book 4 in The Darling Deli Series (7 page)

“Are you finally waking up?”

Still feeling disoriented, Moira did her best to sit up. Her head was aching, both from where she had hit it on the car, and a duller, more insidious ache that was probably from whatever sickeningly sweet chemical had been on the cloth. The last few minutes—or had it been longer?—were just a disoriented jumble of memories to her. As if to add insult to injury, her stomach suddenly clenched with nausea. Biting the inside of her cheek in hopes that the pain would help her get back to normal quickly, she tried not to vomit as she looked around.

She was in a car parked in what looked like a campground. The lot was empty except for an ancient mobile home and a charcoal grill. The car smelled bad, like old shoes and stale cigar smoke. There were fast food wrappers crumpled to the floor. The tall man who was sitting in the driver’s seat nudged her.

“Get up already. I’ve been waiting around too long. Shouldn’t have hit your head; I think that knocked you out more than the chloroform did.”

“What… what’s going on?” she asked. She made the mistake of moving her head to her a better look at him, and the world spun.

“I got fed up with waiting. I need to find the kid, and you’re going to help. Come on.” He got out of the car and walked over to open her door, grabbing her and pulling her out of the vehicle by force. She tumbled unceremoniously to the ground, trying—and failing—to catch herself.

“I don’t know where he is,” she mumbled as she struggled to her feet. Her eyes darted to the forest that seemed to press in from all sides. Should she run? No… she could barely stand, and she knew her unsteady stomach would foil any escape attempt. Maybe he would let her just stand here and lean against the car for a while. No such luck.

“Don’t lie to me.” He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her towards the mobile home. “One of you has got to be hiding him. If it’s not you, then who is it? That blonde girl? The other guy that works at the deli? How about the private eye? One of them knows where the kid is; he doesn’t know anyone else here.”

“None of us have seen him, I promise,” Moira managed to gasp out. Her nausea was only increasing, but she didn’t want to risk making the man even more angry by vomiting. “Who are you? Why are you after Dante?”

“Let’s just say it’s a personal grudge. I spent eleven years in prison thanks to him,” the man sneered. “And his little traitor cousin thought he could warn him. I showed him though, didn’t I?”

He seemed to be talking to himself when he said this. He was staring off into space, his eyes wild and bloodshot, as if he was reliving the past all over again in that moment. Moira tripped, falling to her knees in the snow. Her arm was yanked out of her assailant’s grasp, but he didn’t seem to care.

“Even if you don’t know where the kid is hiding, you’ll still help me,” he was saying. “You can be another message for him, how would you like that? Maybe he’ll come out of hiding once I start killing his friends one by one.”

As her mind became clearer and the remnants of the chloroform’s chemical anesthesia faded, panic began to set in. The man seemed beyond reason. He was obviously off his rocker, and had proven himself to be dangerous. And while she was thinking more clearly now, her head was still pounding and she didn’t know whether she would be able to stand. Running still seemed out of the question. Even if she could make it to the trees, where would she go? They were probably a few miles outside of town, and she didn’t even have her coat on. Her cell phone must have been dropped when the man attacked her, and she was definitely not in any state to try to find her way back to civilization on her own.

Thinking of her cell phone brought her to her daughter and the fact that Candice had likely walked out of the back room to find her mother gone, having left behind her phone and car. What must she have thought? Hopefully Candice had noticed Moira’s absence quickly and had called the cops as soon as she could. She would just have to hope that someone was looking for her and fall back on her tried and true practice of stalling for as long as she could.

“What makes you think Dante is even still around?” she asked. “Wouldn’t be smarter for him to have left town as soon as he knew you were looking for him?”

“I saw his car a couple of times,” the man grunted. “Always while I was on foot, though. Oh, he’s around. He’s watching me. He has nowhere else to go, and he knows it. This is the end of the line.”

“You said you were in prison,” Moira began, casting about for anything that she could think of to try to change his mind. “It must have been horrible there. Is revenge really worth the risk of going back?”

“I got a one-way ticket to Mexico, sweets,” he told her with a dry laugh. “Just gotta finish up my business here first. Once he’s taken care of, I’m not gonna be sticking around to see what happens next, if you get my drift.” He frowned down at her, as if just suddenly realizing that she had fallen.

“Get up and go inside unless you want me to shoot you right here. I’m cold, I need a good warm coffee.” He reached for her and she shrank back, certain that if he got her inside the mobile home, she wouldn’t be coming back. Fear gave her strength, and she struggled to her feet, ignoring the way that the world seemed to spin around her head. Some part of her realized faintly that she could have a concussion. He had slammed her head against the car pretty hard. It looked like she was going to have to make a break for it. At least even if he did catch her, she would have tried to escape. Taking a deep breath, she did her best to push her throbbing head and the insistent nausea out of her mind. It was time to make her move.

It seemed like once she made her decision, everything happened at once. The man lunged at her, and she took off, stumbling and weaving her way across the snow-covered grass. She stumbled twice, but managed to keep her feet under her and keep going. Her kidnapper was hot on her heels, and already she could feel a stitch in her side. She wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long.

Suddenly, just as he was closing in on her, a familiar black car burst out of the trees. It skidded along the path, coming to a stop just behind the kidnapper’s vehicle. She changed course, heading back towards the cars, and heard her kidnapper swear behind her. Moments later, he bowled into her, sending her crashing down to the ground. She kicked out at him, but missed. Her second kick connected with his shoulder, but couldn’t put enough force behind it to hurt him. He seemed determined to finish what he had started, even though her rescuers were only moments away and were running to save her.

Luckily he either didn’t have a weapon, or hadn’t thought to get it out. He clawed at her, struggling to try to reach her throat, but she was able to get her feet up and kick him away. If he’d had a knife or a gun, she would be dead by now, and she was very aware of that fact.

After what seemed like an eternity but was really only a few seconds, David and Dante reached them. The private detective grabbed the blond man by his shoulders and yanked him off of her. All of the fight seemed to go out of him for a moment until he saw Dante, and then his face twisted into a vicious expression of hatred and anger. David seemed to expect it, and instead of trying to hold him back, he shoved him forward so that the man did a face plant in the snow. In a flash, he handcuffed him and pocketed the key. Then he turned to Moira and helped her up, wrapping her in a warm hug as soon as he saw that she wasn’t seriously hurt.

“You found Dante,” she said once he had released her. “How did you know I was here?”

“My cousin told me Stephan was staying at a campsite near town,” Dante said. “That’s what I’ve been doing these last few days. Looking for him. This was the only campsite I hadn’t checked yet.”

“We took a chance,” David told her. “While the police were doing things the slow way, we came here.”

“I’m glad you did,” Moira said. “Tell me everything. Why was this guy after him? Why did he kill his cousin? What’s going on?”

“Later,” David said. “First, we’ve got to take Stephan to the police station and get your employee’s name cleared. Everything else can wait.”

* * *

It took them hours to explain everything to the police. The three of them had a separate portion of the story to tell and they were questioned separately. At first it seemed like Dante would have to stay behind bars at least for the night until they could get a lawyer to figure things out. Somehow—by that point, Moira was beyond exhausted and was still battling a headache—David managed to convince the police that he would watch Dante and bring him back in the morning. By the time they left the station it was late, but she didn’t want to go home without hearing the full story. Since David and Dante both seemed to be willing, she called up Candice and Darrin and asked them to meet her at the deli.

Once she had made five cups of coffee and Darrin had dragged an old space heater out of the back to make the chilly front room bearable, she turned to Dante, who was looking at the broken window with a guilty expression.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she began.

“Thanks. I’m glad you are too. I never wanted any of you to get hurt.”

“I know. And I know you’re probably exhausted… but I think we all need to hear at least the gist of what happened. How about you start with the guy that kidnapped me?”

“That was Stephan,” he said. “It’s a long story… but the short version is that some of my family—my aunt and uncle—got in over their heads with some really bad guys. I was pretty young when it happened, but I know that there was a lot of money involved, and drugs.” He paused, taking a sip of his coffee and closing his eyes as he remembered. “I guess my aunt and uncle owed the drug dealers some pretty significant funds and tried to back out. As punishment, this gang sent someone to punish them. Since dead men don’t pay, instead of killing my uncle and my aunt, he targeted their family—my parents. I watched them get killed when I was ten.”

Candice and Darrin looked shocked and Moira said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Dante,. You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.”

“No, I should,” he said. “I think it’s good to talk about it after not telling anyone for so long.” He took a deep breath. “Obviously, the cops showed up, and a lot of confusing stuff happened. I ended up testifying in court, and I managed to identify the man who killed my parents. He made some sort of plea bargain—in exchange for giving up the other people in his gang, he got a shorter sentence. After that, I went into foster care and ended up moving a few towns away.”

“How did you end up here?” she asked. “And how did you manage to fudge the background checks? David found out that you used to have a different last name.”

“Oh, that.” He gave a slightly embarrassed grimace. “Well, once I heard that Stephan was getting out of prison soon, I took my life savings and got a fake ID—nothing fancy, it was probably a really terrible job in fact. The guy I went to was pretty shady. I just wanted to make it harder for Stephan to track me down. I had a feeling he’d be pretty mad at me for getting him sent to prison, so I ran. I came here because my parents had once rented a cabin in the area when I was younger, and I liked it. I probably should have chosen somewhere I’d never been to, but I fell in love with this place.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” David asked. “And how was your cousin involved in all of this?”

“I guess my cousin sort of got sucked into the same sort of life that my aunt and uncle lived,” Dante said. “I never really heard from him much until he showed up at my door in a panic, telling me to run because Stephan was coming to kill me. A moment later Stephan himself showed up. He called my cousin a traitor and shot him. I was lucky to escape. And as for the police…” He shrugged. “That’s not how I grew up. For my family, the police were the bad guys.”

“I hope you don’t think that anymore,” the private investigator said.

“No sir, I don’t.” her employee replied. “I’m just grateful that they gave me a chance to tell my story.”

“Thanks for repeating it to us,” Moira said, offering him a gentle smile. “I know it can’t have been easy.”

“Thanks for giving me a chance, Ms. D.” He stood up and looked around at the deli. “I’ll miss this place, and I’ll miss all of you guys.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked with a frown.

“Well, I’m fired, aren’t I?” he said. “Because of me, the deli got broken into and you got attacked.”

“Of course you’re not fired. Right, Mom?” Candice interjected.

“Of course not,” Moira said firmly. “This is your home. And now that Stephan is behind bars—this time for good—hopefully you’ll be able to have a normal life here.”

Darrin, Candice, and David all raised their voices, talking over one another to convince Dante to stay. The deli owner smiled to herself as she watched them. They all had their own troubles and busy lives but when it was important, they always managed to be there for each other. She couldn’t imagine a better set of friends to have.