Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (27 page)

I craned my neck to look up at him. “Am I over the balcony?”

“What?”

“The balcony. Is it below me?”

He looked down. “Yes.”

I pushed myself backward off the edge and dropped. My feet hit the balcony and then I careened backward into the wrought-iron railing, which hurt, although the railing didn’t make the top ten list of hurts I’d given myself in the past ten minutes.

Once on my feet, I pulled up my shirt to check for bleeding. The bandage had held, so if I was bleeding it was all internal. That thought seemed worth heaving up the sole contents of my stomach, which was about half of my whiskey sour. Then I looked back at the bearded neighbor and made the universal sign for “phone call,” meaning “Call the damn police already, if you’re going to.”

If the balcony door turned out to be locked, I was going to kill Anne. If she wasn’t dead already.

It was locked, but it wasn’t a tough lock to crack. The door used the type of lock that assumed people weren’t flying squirrels. I slid the door open and slipped into Anne’s darkened bedroom.
 

It was easy enough to make out where Roger Sabo and Anne were in the house: his voice was clearly coming from downstairs, the living room. He was yelling, “What was that? What was that?” and she was crying, “I don’t know!” Then she added, “Maybe it’s a raccoon! Or a rat! I have a roof rat!”
 

“Let’s see this rat.”
 

Anne shrieked and something fell over. He’d obviously grabbed her roughly, and he was probably marching her in front of him as a shield.

I picked up the dark green ceramic lamp off of Anne’s bedside table and ripped its lampshade off. Then I stood in the tight wedge behind the open door and the wall, watching through the crack in the door opening. The only thing visible was a tiny bit of the landing where the stairs ended, right outside Anne’s bedroom. As soon as Sabo and Anne reached the top of the stairs, I was going to have somewhere between three and five seconds to separate them, turn his attention toward me, get the gun he undoubtedly had, and maybe strangle him with the cord of the lamp.

Anne would know to get the hell out of the way, right?

Anne’s foot and the shadow of her body were visible through the crack in the doorway, and then the toe of one of Sabo’s sneakers. He was right behind her. He pushed her forward through the door, which opened further, pressing into me.
 

Anne’s shadow indicated she was on the other side of the doorknob. I could hear her panicked breathing.
 

Close enough.

I reached around the edge of the door and grabbed the hem of her t-shirt. She screamed and fell forward, giving me the perfect angle to rear back and kick her out of the way. She went flying toward her bureau.
 

Sabo started yelling and I slammed the door. The door definitely hit him, because it hit something solid and I had to push.

I risked a glance at Anne, who was staring at me like I was the one who’d been holding her hostage. She just lay there, like she was winded from the kick I’d given her. I jerked my head toward the closet and then hopped onto Anne’s lowboy dresser.
 

After a certain point, people really need to learn to fight for themselves.

From the sounds behind me, Anne was crawling, probably into her closet. Which was her best option, under the circumstances.

The door flew open and I used the base of the lamp as a bludgeon to Sabo’s face. He raised his arm to ward it off, but it was too late. I struck him right across the cheekbone and he flew backward into the balustrade at the top of the staircase, knocking his head against one of the balusters.
 

He had a gun in his right hand. A Kel-tec P-32. Small, black and silver, and a real impediment to us finding an amicable solution. It had to go.

I jumped off the bureau and kicked him hard, once, in the stomach. He tried to raise his right arm toward me. I reached out and slammed his hand up against the top of the handrail, bending his wrist backward against the wood.

He wouldn’t let go.

So I dug into the exposed flesh of his wrist with my thumbnails, using as much force as I could. If slashing his wrist was the only way to do it, then in through the tendons it was. It’s also a move that hurts like hell, the receiver slightly more than the giver.

Sabo let out a series of expletives as his fingers eventually loosened their grip on the gun’s handle. I shoved the back of his hand against the handrail and used my fingers to tip the gun over the side of the railing.

Whereupon he managed to kick me and I knocked backward into the wall, the back of my head slamming against the sheetrock. While I tried to regain my balance, he scrambled off the floor and rammed into me, his forearm against my throat.
 

My head already hurt. So I slammed my forehead into his, shoving him back just enough that I got his arm off of me.
 

He rushed me again and I leaned back, letting most of his momentum rush past me. Then I planted my legs and shoved forward, pushing him backward, toward the top of the stairs.

He grabbed my arms and pulled me along with him.

I slammed onto him, my elbows hitting his torso, and we slid down the staircase, me riding him like a kid riding a flattened box down a snowy hill. At the bottom, his head hit the landing first, and he used the leverage to throw me off of him and into the wall. I managed to avoid having my ear pinned between my skull and the base floor trim.

He crawled off the bottom of the stairs and looked around the edge of the steps toward the kitchen.

The gun. He was looking for the gun.

Despite my deep need to take a breather or vomit again, I heaved myself up and launched myself over the side of the railing, landing on Sabo’s back. He crashed to the ground, me once again on top of him. On the one hand, this stopped his progress.
 

On the other hand, I was certain the stitches in my side had opened up.

And his hand was about three inches from the gun. His entire body stretched toward it, taking me along for the ride.

I slammed my fist on the back of his wrist and then dug one of my thumbnails into his eye and pushed.

“Just stop, okay? Stop. Moving. I will fucking kill you, here and now. Stop.”
 

His body stopped moving, but it was a feint. Every quiver told me he was waiting for an opening.

“Stand down.” I pushed my fingernail into his eye socket a tiny bit further. Blood from where I’d scraped my hand after my jump smeared across his cheek. “Bend your right arm back here. Come on, do it.”
 

He couldn’t. His arm was shaking with adrenaline, which was only right and normal.
 

I took my hand off his eye and pounded the back of his shoulder blade as hard as I could. Which shook him up enough that his arm dropped against the floor. Which gave me enough time to dive for the gun.

I grabbed it, and somersaulted forward, and then I twisted around and onto my stomach. He was preparing to lunge at me.
 

Aiming from my prone position, resting on my elbows, wasn’t ideal. But we were close enough that I’d take out a nice chunk of some part of him without much effort.

“I know how to use this. Also, I have no philosophical objection either to you dying or me being the one to kill you. So sit yourself against that wall and stop moving.”
 

It took eons for him to finally choose the side of the wise and decide I was serious. His body moved like it was made of sludge and he set himself up against the wall, staring at me. Waiting for me to throw down the gun and maybe burst into tears about how horrible all this violence was.
 

Instead, I jackknifed my body, hips rising, legs drawing underneath, until I could get myself into a sitting position. The gun stayed trained on him the whole time. In case he thought I wasn’t serious.

“We have somewhere between five and twenty minutes before Los Angeles’s finest get here.”
 

A smirk ghosted across his lips.

“You’re not going to get out of this one this time. I recently had a conversation with Detective Samuel Gruen. You know him, I believe. Anyhow. He’s kind of tired of your bullshit. You’re dragging down the name of the rest of the force, and given the problems the LAPD’s had recently, you get an A for effort.”

Sabo stared at me, panting.
 

I knew what he was going to do, a second before he did it. He gave off some involuntary signal, whatever it was. Did he flex his fingers? Did his eyes flash to the side for a second? Lick his lips? He did something, and my brain translated that into:
he’s going to go for it
.
 

He lurched his body forward, and I aimed at the stained-glass lamp that stood by the coat closet, maybe six inches in front of where his left hand would land. Maybe five inches. Anne’s uncle had given her the lamp as a housewarming gift. I pulled the trigger. The stained-glass lamp exploded. So did the drywall behind it. Sabo cowered, protecting himself from the spray of glass and plaster.

The Kel-tec had nice handling. Good choice on his part. Loud, though.

I swung the gun back to his face.

He scrambled back to the wall opposite.
 

“I know how to use these things.” My feet pushed me backward until my back hit the doorframe of the entrance into the kitchen. “Your death is not a moral issue for me, you moron. In fact, the smart money says I would be helping humanity in my own tiny way. So we’re going to sit here, and, while we sit here, you’re going to explain a few things. Like what the hell you’re doing here at Anne’s house.”

“Fuck off.”
 

“I have the gun,” I said slowly.

The sound of his jaw grinding shut was audible in the foyer.

“You held a gun at my friend Anne. That makes me want to hurt you in delicate places. Talk and keep going until I tell you that you can stop.”
 

He laughed and shook his head.
 

I aimed the gun at his foot. “I not only can cripple you for life, I will. So talk.”
 

“About what?”

“Why did you kill Courtney?”

“I didn’t kill her! I loved her!” His voice was hoarse with desperation. “She was everything to me.”
 

“Funny way of showing it.”
 

His whole body shook like he was a rag doll in the grip of an invisible giant. “Sometimes she made me crazy. But I loved her. And she came back. She came back to me and now she’s dead.”
 

“So why did you kill her?”

“I didn’t, you stupid bitch!” he yelled again, his eyes wide as he stared at me. “She came back to me and we were going to be a family together. She was going to be on TV again and we would have our family.”
 

“So who did kill her?” I asked.
 

“I don’t know!” Sabo yelled. “I’ll kill whoever did it, I swear to God.”
 

“Maybe Hitchcock did it.”

Sabo muttered under his breath. “That stupid prick.”

“Can’t be that stupid. You do business with him.”

“He knows his shit about money. He didn’t know anything about Courtney.”

I wondered what Sabo truly knew about Courtney. “He drove her to the motel that afternoon.”

The look on his face was tragic and amusing all at once. “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t. She wouldn’t have—”

I nodded. “She left her purse and keys in my car and didn’t even notice until I called her about it. He took her to her motel room. What do you think happened?”

“She loves me!” he screamed.
 

“Did you know Hitchcock was paying her off, Roger?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “She lied to him, said it was his. I didn’t care. Easy money. More for both of us.”

“Said what was his?”
 

“The baby,” Sabo said. “It wasn’t. It was mine. My family. And she was back.”
 

Was that the reason Courtney had left Los Angeles after the show ended? She’d had a baby and told a couple of men the baby was theirs and collected money from all of them.
 

And with my attention elsewhere for a fraction of a second, Sabo moved.

He jumped up and flung himself at me, knocking me back against the wall. His knee pinned the gun and my hand to the floor. Then he pulled his fist back and hit me hard.
 

In the side.
 

Where he’d stabbed me a few days ago.
 

Oh, Ares the magnificent, I thought,
please
let the endorphins kick in before I pass out from the pain.

I managed to bring my other hand up and sock him in the side, which moved him just enough for me to get my knee up underneath and kick him back. He launched himself toward me again. I brought the gun up and held it with both hands. As he landed, I jammed the gun up under his jaw, hard, into the esophagus. It dug into the soft tissue and he started choking. Right over me. He had bad breath.
 

“We can make this look like self-defense,” I said. “I’ll be the ‘self’ in that arrangement. You, on the other hand, will be dead.”

I had to tell myself to wait for him to make the choice. I was mildly worried at how badly I wanted him to choose wrongly.

When I was sixteen, I killed someone. Since then, I had let another person die—to be fair, he’d been trying to kill me, so it had been him or me and I’d chosen me. And on other occasions—too many other occasions—I’d watched people die. Not once did I fling myself forward to try to save them.

Life and death. There are no takebacks if something goes wrong.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Nod if you’d like to proceed with dying. Oh, you can’t nod. Move any muscle at all and that’s how we’ll do it.”
 

He stayed absolutely still. The feeling of disappointment worried me briefly.

“Okay, good. Get off of me, and sit in that corner.”

He crawled backward, still trying to cough away the bruise I’d left on his throat. The gun had left a red, angry imprint on his skin.