Murder Bites the Bullet: A Gertie Johnson Murder Mystery (2 page)
Read Murder Bites the Bullet: A Gertie Johnson Murder Mystery Online
Authors: Deb Baker
Thinking Fred was moments away from the catcher’s net, she smugly shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee, which was one of the few things she was still capable of handling. Although lately even her coffee has been God awful.
While Cora Mae superglued doll hair to my head, Kitty arrived with homemade doughnuts and a whopping cackle when she saw what we were up to. She stopped laughing though when she learned I’d almost been killed.
“I should have been there for you,” she said. “I’m going to have to resurrect my bodyguard role for this case.”
That was the last thing I wanted, so I decided to talk smart and play it cool so she wouldn’t think I needed her to bodyguard me. Kitty can be really annoying when she’s trying to watch over me. It cramps my style. “We did all right without you,” I said, “but next time we need a better plan going in. Getting shot at means our strategy could use some improvement.”
My friend Kitty is way overweight, and even in this day and age she still pincurls her hair and rarely combs it out. And she wears housedresses. Extra weight and housedresses don’t go together at all. We’ve caught more private glimpses of Kitty than any of us ever wanted to see.
Grandma sloshed coffee in the general vicinity of our coffee cups, about a quarter of the liquid landing where it was supposed to. I tried to take the pot from her to help, but she jerked it away, spilling even more. “I don’t need help in my own kitchen,” she said.
“It’s not your kitchen,” I said back, biting my tongue to keep from saying more and setting her off.
“We’ll see about that.” Grandma snapped her false teeth at me.
“What’s going on with you two?” Kitty wanted to know.
“Kitchen war,” I answered. “No big deal.”
Cora Mae glued another chunk to my head, and I felt a bolt of pain. “Ouch, Cora Mae, geez that hurt. Try not to glue over the raw parts.”
“Looks like Grandma is winning,” Kitty observed, watching my mother-in-law putter in the kitchen.
Before I could set Kitty right and let her know this was a small battle, not the whole war, my police scanner went off. We all piped down to listen. What we heard wasn’t good news.
The Trouble Busters wouldn’t be digging up any more dirt on Harry Aho. At this point, we could relinquish the shovel to the undertaker.
Because Harry Aho was dead as a doornail.
*
“Witnesses saw your truck parked next to Harry’s property right around the time he was shot,” Blaze said to me when we pulled up beside the Aho residence to check out the action. My son, who unfortunately happens to be the local sheriff, and I were standing at the front of my truck with Trouble Busters stenciled on both sides. As usual we weren’t on the same wavelength or even on the same page. For some unknown reason, he resents my interest in investigative work, and that’s putting it mildly.
“Want to explain what you were doing here?” he demanded.
Blaze glared at me while I quickly considered my options. In this business, we don’t rat out our clients. If Blaze knew I’d been within firing range because Chet Hanson had hired me, and that particular information got out around town, I’d never work again. Not that I’d had much actual paid employment yet. This was the first time we’d had a cash deposit, though, and I certainly wasn’t going to blow it.
“I was looking for a private place to pee,” I answered, staying professional.
“I found this behind the shooting range among the hay bales.” Blaze held up the fake detective badge I flashed to establish authority when I really didn’t have any, but needed to pretend. The badge must have fallen out of my pocket while I was belly crawling for my life.
“That isn’t mine,” I lied, watching a tuft of red doll hair come unstuck from my head. It floated to the ground.
“It looks awfully familiar.” Blaze watched the clump land between us.
He was perfectly aware that the badge belonged to me. I have only myself to blame for my current problems with my son. I let him work for me when he was on leave from duty with a serious medical condition. Blaze had a bad case of meningitis, which swelled his brain and made him unfit for police work. Once his brain went back to normal, which was pretty swollen even in its healthiest state, he remembered all the little tricks of my trade.
Like the fake badge. And the Glock I’d taken from his house during his mental health issues. And the illegal stun gun, which I told him I’d thrown away. And a few other things he shouldn’t have been informed about if he was just going to turn around and use them against me at every opportunity. He could be a real ingrate, my son.
Being the sheriff’s mother isn’t the easiest job in the world.
“How was Harry killed?” I wanted to know.
“You need to stop listening to that damn scanner. Can’t you be like other women your age and bake a cake or something?”
Before I could reply to that outrageous and chauvinistic statement, Cora Mae stuck one black spike-heeled foot out of the open truck door. Her toes were painted blood red. She wore a cute ring on her right middle toe and a gold ankle bracelet.
Several of Blaze’s deputies rushed over to help her with her dramatic exit from the vehicle. Cora Mae tends to attract male attention. She looks great for her age, which is three years younger than me, making her sixty-three. She favors the color black and wears it well, especially with her signature Wonderbra. Men don’t even care that she’s been dubbed the Black Widow for burying more than her fair share of husbands. She’s not a quitter and is always on the lookout for a new one.
Kitty crawled out next. Nobody hung around to help her. Even though because of her plus size thighs and the fact that her housedress was stuck to the seat, she wasn’t exactly concealing her…um…assets too well. Right now she was giving me a full-blown view of her underpants.
She’s smart though, and those online law classes she takes are paying off for our business. “Don’t answer any more questions,” she advised me, still struggling to get out of the truck. The sight of her wasn’t pretty at the moment. Not one bit.
I jammed my Blublocker sunglasses on the top of my head, so I could glare at my son for that baking comment. “I’m exactly like other women my age! We can bake a cake
and
have a life. Sometimes I wonder how you grew up to be this way.”
I didn’t mention that I’d been temporarily displaced from my own kitchen and couldn’t make a cake even if I wanted to.
“What were you doing over here?” he demanded again, apparently not having heard my quick thinking excuse about needing privacy.
Kitty was finally upright on the ground. She pounded on the hood of my truck to get my attention. It worked. “That’s the question I don’t want you to answer,” she said. “Don’t tell him what you were doing here until we consult.”
“I already told him I was taking care of nature.”
“Behind a firing range hay bale?” Blaze got all red. He needs to watch his blood pressure better. I tell him that constantly.
“I didn’t notice where I was until it was too late.”
Kitty gripped my head with both hands, then slapped a hand over my mouth, and turned to Blaze. “No more questions.”
Cora Mae, as usual, wasn’t helping out at all. I saw her in a circle of deputies. So did Blaze. He marched off to assign duties to his loitering, ogling men. “Stay put,” he shouted back at me.
“First he takes the Glock away,” I griped to Kitty after she released me. “Now the badge. He’s making my job almost impossible. Here I am, trying to make an honest living…”
“I’ll file paperwork to get it back,” Kitty interrupted my monologue before I got very far into it. “In the meantime, are we out of a job now that Harry is dead?”
I sighed and gave it some thought. “Well, we
were
hired to shut down the range.”
“And we accomplished that. In a roundabout way,” Kitty said. “So we should be paid in full, right?”
“Somehow I doubt that’s going to happen.”
By now some of the shooters were coming our way down the driveway. I assumed they had been questioned and had won their freedom, at least for the time being.
“What happened?” I said to each of them, but all I got were shrugs and don’t knows. Blaze was playing this one closer to his hairy chest than usual, probably threatening serious consequences if they talked to anyone.
A stretcher came next, guided by two emergency technicians. I didn’t have to look under the cover to know it was Harry Aho, and he was headed for his final resting place.
“What happened up there?” I asked the medical guys, but before either of them could say a word, Blaze had me by the arm and was hauling me off for more questioning.
He’d ask one thing.
Then Kitty would tell me not to answer.
Then I’d asked something.
Blaze would counter with another question.
When we were all done, neither of us had any more information than we’d started with.
*
“He gave me a ticket for driving without a driver’s license,” I said as my partners and I stood by the truck. “Just because my temporary permit expired and I haven’t had time to renew it. Can you believe him?”
Blaze and I have an ongoing dispute regarding my driving credentials. Because I only started driving recently, I don’t feel I should have to go take a test like I’m some kind of kid. He disagrees, but of course he would, being a cop and all.
“You failed the written exam,” Kitty pointed out to me.
“Only twice. And then I passed and got my temps. That proves I’m perfectly capable behind the wheel.” Which was sort of a lie. But I was improving all the time.
“You should have taken the driving part of the test when you had a chance,” Cora Mae said, sounding all righteous. “You might have to start all over from square one.”
“Blaze is still watching us,” Kitty warned. “I’ll have to drive.”
That was the worst possible news, but Cora Mae didn’t have a license either and Blaze knew it. So we were stuck with Hotrod Harriet, at least until we were out of his sight.
It was hot and humid outside. My truck’s air conditioning was on the blink, so we had to drive with the windows down. G-forces plastered me to the seatback, causing the rest of the doll hair to come loose in one big chunk. It whipped around inside the truck before blowing out the window.
Cora Mae should get a refund on that worthless superglue she’d used.
“We’ll have to come up with a better hair repair idea,” she said, her eyes wide while she watched the scenery flash past.
“Slow down,” I hollered to Kitty, but the words were lost out the window.
By some stroke of incredible good fortune we survived to pull into my driveway. Since I’d been pinpointed inside Blaze’s crime tape area, Kitty went off to attend to legal schmegal stuff regarding what she called my potential involvement in the murder of Harry Aho. Big deal, I tried to tell her. I had a legitimate reason for being there.
George was still out back repairing the sauna, so I scampered for the house to cover my hairless head. I wasn’t quite quick enough.
Here he came, looking hot and sexy in a white T-shirt, tight jeans, and wearing his cowboy hat with the rattlesnake wrapped around the brim. I turned to give him my good side. Fred came loping our way, too. The guineas must have been taking a nap, because they weren’t in sight.
“I can’t talk to you right now,” I said to George, keeping my bald side hidden. Right then Cora Mae handed me a scarf and I quickly tied it under my chin. What a friend! “Or maybe I do have time for a quick conversation,” I said, backtracking now that I had coverage.
“I thought we might take a sauna together,” George said. “I’ve finished repairing the hole you made in the side of it.”
Cora Mae squealed. “Now what did she do?”
“Hit the gas instead of the brake,” George answered, before bear-mauling me. “That’s my woman. She keeps me busy and on my toes. What are the Trouble Busters up to today?”
“Harry Aho’s dead,” I told him, noticing Grandma Johnson standing in the doorway behind the screen door, listening in. “I don’t have a single detail yet, other than he was shot and killed. And I only know that because Blaze grilled me like I was to blame.”
“I knew it!” Grandma shouted. “I’m living with a murderess!”
Not yet she wasn’t. But that could change any minute.
“Weren’t you working a case against Harry?” George asked me. “Didn’t you have a paying client?”
“We did, but I’m still wading through the logistics now that Harry’s dead.”
George is the only one outside of the Trouble Busters who knows the names of my clients. I trust George completely. Like now, when he didn’t even mention names because of Grandma, who has a big mouth, and we all know it.
“Who would kill Harry Aho?” Cora Mae asked.
“A Hanson,” George said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I agreed, giving him a grin.
I love that about George. We connect at a higher level than a lot of couples. Sometimes we don’t even have to talk at all because we know exactly what the other one is thinking. Too bad Grandma Johnson lives with me. Otherwise I’d ask George to move in, live in sin, and enjoy every minute of it.
“We’ll get together later,” I said to George, with a little smooch. “I’m not done working yet. Cora Mae, let’s take a ride over to visit with our client.”
“You better not be late for supper again,” Grandma said, shaking a bony finger at me. “Next time, I’m not holding a plate for you, and you can just go to bed hungry.”