The Bad Always Die Twice (31 page)

“Nope. It would be better if you didn’t.”

“And you’re not, like, gonna steal anything?”

“I just want to have a look around.”

He glanced at her quickly, then back at the tickets. “Cops ask, I’ll say you broke in.”

That made no sense since there would be no forced entry, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. “Fine. They are for Saturday night, though. You work.”

“Screw work. Me and Buffy are gonna see Jack, Kobe, and the Lakers!”

Five minutes later, Nikki was alone in Ramirez’s personal office. She already knew her way around since she’d been there the week before with her mother. She sat in his chair behind his desk and looked over it. No appointment book. No bloody ice picks. Just the picture of him and his family and a pile of folders with nothing of interest inside.

Cursing was strictly forbidden by Victoria. Nice ladies didn’t resort to such base behavior, but Nikki was sorely tempted. She felt as if she were so close to a revelation, and yet . . . she still had nothing substantial.

With a sigh, she got out of his chair and walked along a row of cherry bookcases. She found nothing but books on various dull subjects such as tax law and entertainment law. She poked her head in an open doorway and spotted a large conference table. There was a door that apparently led to the hall. She was reaching for a light switch when she heard a male voice in the hall.

She almost called out to Teddy, then realized it wasn’t Teddy. But she knew the voice.

Holy hell! It was Ramirez!

Nikki did what any self-respecting amateur P.I. would do; she dropped to all fours.

The office door swung open, a woman giggled, and Ramirez walked in. Entangled in his arms was a woman Nikki had never seen before. Nikki crawled backwards into the dark conference room, praying they were too busy in their lip-lock to notice her.

As she crawled into the dark room, her bag fell off her shoulder and hit the floor. She froze, cringing.

Apparently, they were too busy for Ramirez to notice that the lights were on, even though he’d left them off, or that he had an audience.

Ramirez closed the door and pushed the young brunette up against it. She squealed, but it wasn’t from pain.

Another lip-lock. With tongue.

Nikki blushed and scooted back. It was definitely time to hit the road. She just prayed that the door she’d seen in the conference room led out into the hall.

Nikki saw the woman’s blouse flutter to the floor. There was another peal of giggles. The brunette appeared to be barely out of high school.

The Sound of Music
was beginning to sound better with every passing moment.

Nikki propelled herself further backward as Ramirez wrapped the woman in his arms and waltzed her to the leather couch. High heels went flying as he pushed her onto the leather cushions.

And Nikki had sat on that very couch . . .

She heard what had to be Ramirez’s pants drop.

Just as she backed out of view of the show that she feared would quickly drop from PG to X, she heard the door open again.

“Get out! Get out, you little bitch!” a woman shouted from the direction of the doorway.

Nikki froze. The giggler screamed.

“Get out,” the female intruder ordered. “Get out before I shoot one of those implants off!”

Nikki crawled forward again, dragging her Prada behind her like an old feedbag. She couldn’t help herself; she had to see who it was.

“Constance.” Ramirez was wide-eyed.

Nikki hovered on all fours in the dark conference room doorway.

The giggler was scrambling for her blouse and shoes. Ramirez was sitting up on the couch, straightening his tie, his pants around his ankles. In the doorway, Mrs. Ramirez sat in her wheelchair holding a handgun.

“Get out!” Mrs. Ramirez shouted, pointing the gun in the general direction of the bimbo.

The woman hopped on one foot and then the other to put on her shoes. Then, pressing her back to the wall, her blouse somewhat covering her lacy pink bra, she slipped behind Mrs. Ramirez and disappeared into the dark outer office.

“Constance, put that down. You’re being ridiculous.”

“
I’m
being ridiculous? You’re having sex with a sixteen-year-old on the couch I bought you for your birthday and
I’m
the one being ridiculous?”

“Give me the gun before you hurt yourself and we’ll talk.”

“I’m not the one who’s going to get hurt.” She rolled closer to him with a simple tap of the controller under her left hand. In her right hand, she still held the gun on him. “Every Wednesday night.”

“Every Wednesday night, what?” Ramirez sounded cool and controlled, but he looked scared.

“Women. You have a woman here every Wednesday night when you’re supposedly at your Rotary Club meeting. That’s what she told me.”

“That’s what
who
told you?”

“I don’t know who she was. She didn’t give me her name when she called me. Does it matter? She was right. She said you were a cheat.”

“Constance—”

She thrust the gun toward him, tears welling in her eyes. “She was right about the cheating. That means she was right about the rest, doesn’t it?”

“What rest?”

“A thief and a murderer,” she choked.

Nikki trembled. She needed to get out of here. She needed to call the police.

“Constance, I don’t know what—”

“Shut up!” Mrs. Ramirez shouted. “Shut up. For once I’m going to speak and you’re going to shut up. It wasn’t enough for you to help Rex March stage that plane crash. Make people think he died. What he was paying you wasn’t enough. You had to steal from him, didn’t you?”

“Constance, no. Please—”

“I told you to shut up!” She rolled closer. She was a pretty woman, with dark hair and gorgeous dark eyes. “Shut up this second or I’ll shoot you, Alex, I swear I will. You stole from Rex and when he came back from wherever the hell he’d been and demanded his money, you killed him.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” Ramirez rose from the couch and the next thing Nikki knew, the gun went off. It was so loud that time stood still for a second. Then the reality of the situation bombarded her.

She heard Alex scream and fall to his knees, grasping his leg. The room smelled of gunpowder.

“Get up again and I’ll shoot the other leg,” Mrs. Ramirez threatened.

Now Nikki was scared. Where was Teddy? She scooted back and fumbled in her bag for her phone. She had to call the police!

But what if they heard her on the phone? Would Mrs. Ramirez shoot her, too?

Nikki was breathing hard, so scared she couldn’t think. But she had to think.

What would Victoria do in this situation?

She’d get help. It wasn’t safe to speak aloud, but what if she could get to a landline? If she dialed 911, they’d trace the call.

Her heart pounding, her gaze fixed on the Ramirezes in the other room, she got up into a crouching position and began to run her hands along the conference table. Surely there was a phone somewhere.

“I didn’t do it,” Ramirez groaned. “I did help him stage the plane crash. I did take more than my share from his bank account, but I swear on my son’s life, I didn’t kill Rex.”

“You swear on your son’s life, but not your daughter’s!”

“Constance. You’re not making any sense. Listen—”

“You expect me to believe you didn’t kill him? When you lied about everything else? About our whole life together?”

Nikki’s foot hit some sort of console behind her and she spun around, feeling her way over its top. A phone! Her hands shook as she sat down, her back to the console, and fumbled with the phone, trying to be as quiet as possible.

“I didn’t kill him. I swear I didn’t.” Ramirez was breaking now. He was crying.

Nikki lifted the receiver, dialed 911 and cringed as the phone beeped. She watched the doorway, but the Ramirezes hadn’t heard it. She put the phone on the floor, her heart pounding so hard that she could barely catch her breath.

“I swear. I swear I didn’t kill him. He . . . he was already dead, Constance.”

“What do you mean, he was already dead?”

Nikki crawled back toward the doorway.

“In the parking lot,” Ramirez moaned. “She killed him in my parking lot. All I did was get rid of the body. I swear. I called Loco.”

“You called my cousin and got him involved in a murder?” she screamed.

“Not a murder. No, no. I just needed to get the body out of my parking lot. I called Loco and he took care of it. He borrowed a buddy’s refrigerator truck. He left Rex’s body in Jessica Martin’s apartment.”

Nikki couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had so badly wanted to believe Tiffany was innocent. But Ramirez’s story made sense.

“Why?” Mrs. Ramirez begged. “Why, if you were innocent, didn’t you just call the police?”

“I did it for us, baby. For you and our son and our daughter. If the police had found him dead in my parking lot, they’d have investigated me. They might have found out I was in on Rex’s staged death. They would have found out I was embezzling money from him. I could have gone to jail, baby.”

Nikki felt like she was sitting in the dark watching a movie. But the pain she heard in Mrs. Ramirez’s voice was too real to be fiction.

“Why that woman’s apartment, Alex? Why would you put Rex’s body in that innocent girl’s apartment? Why would you try to frame her?”

“I wasn’t framing her,” he scoffed, his voice turning bitter, despite the obvious agony he was in. “I was just removing the trash she left in my parking lot.”

Nikki held her breath, her ears ringing as she realized what Ramirez was about to say. No . . .

“What are you talking about?” the woman in the wheelchair demanded.

“It was Jessica Martin who killed Rex in my parking lot, Constance. I saw her drive away in her green BMW.”

Chapter 26

T
ears filled Nikki’s eyes. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Jessica hadn’t killed Rex. Ramirez was a liar and a cheat. Why would she believe
anything
he said?

“The woman accused?” Mrs. Ramirez was saying. “She actually did it?”

“She did it, I swear.” Ramirez crumpled over, gripping his leg. His leg was covered with blood. It was seeping into the carpet in front of him.

Mrs. Ramirez raised the gun again.

“Connie, please. I’m telling the truth.” Tears ran down Ramirez’s cheeks. “Don’t shoot me. I swear to God I’m telling the truth. You can talk to Loco. He’ll confirm my story. I didn’t kill Rex March.”

Mrs. Ramirez rolled her wheelchair closer to her husband. “You stupid bastard! I don’t care about Rex March,” she shouted at him. “I’m not going to kill you over him.” She rubbed her teary face on her shoulder while keeping the pistol steady. “I’m going to kill you because I warned you that if you cheated on me again, I would.”

He tried to back away from her, slide left or right, but there was nowhere to go. She had him pinned against the couch.

“You can’t kill me,” he blubbered. “You’ll never get away with it. You’ll stand trial and go to jail and our children will be without a mother
or
a father.”

It was when Mrs. Ramirez laughed that Nikki realized she was
really
going to do it. Until that moment, Nikki had assumed she was just an angry wife. Not a vengeful one.

“I’ll never do a day of jail time. No jury will convict me, Alex. Not for killing the cheating, lying, thieving husband who put me in this wheelchair.”

The look on Mrs. Ramirez’s face made Nikki scramble to her feet. She knew she should stay out of sight until the police arrived, but she couldn’t let the woman kill her husband. No matter how much he deserved it.

“Mrs. Ramirez, no!” Nikki stepped into the room.

Startled, Mrs. Ramirez swung the gun around and pointed it at Nikki.

Nikki raised her shaky hands. Her heart was pounding so hard in her ears that she could barely speak. “Put the gun down,” she managed. “Let him go to jail for what he’s done; let him suffer. He’s not worth killing.”

Slowly, Mrs. Ramirez lowered the gun, and for an instant Nikki thought she had given in. Ramirez had got up on the couch and was sliding down to the far end. Then, without warning, his wife swung the pistol around and pulled the trigger.

The gun fired and Alex Ramirez’s body fell back against the couch under the impact of the bullet. From the size of the hole in his head, Nikki knew he was dead before he slumped over.

Nikki heard the gun hit the floor and she slowly turned to look at the woman in the wheelchair. Her eyes were dry, now. She sat there staring at her dead husband, his brains splattered on the leather couch.

Sirens screamed in the distance.

The office door flew open and Teddy rushed in. “What the hell is going on here? I just went down the street for a pack of—” Ramirez’s dead body caught his attention.

Teddy gagged and looked away.

Nikki moved toward the door, as dazed by Ramirez’s accusation as by his death. Could Jessica
really
have killed Rex?

“Teddy,” she said, feeling as though she were moving and speaking in slow motion. She gripped his shoulder. “I need you to hold yourself together. Are you going to be sick?”

He shook his head.

“Good, because I need you to wait here with Mrs. Ramirez for the police.” She paused. The sirens were getting louder. “Tell me something.” She slowly lifted her gaze to meet his. The bag on her shoulder felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “The car you saw speed away that night. The BMW. Could it have been green?”

“I . . . I thought it was blue,” he said, his voice gravelly. “But it was dark and I just saw it for a second.”

“Was it an old, beat-up blue BMW or a new green one?”

He thought for a second. “It was new,” he said softly. “Definitely a new one. It had one of those little fin antennas.”

Nikki’s brain was suddenly bombarded with a million thoughts. A green BMW. Jessica’s secret affair with Rex. After Edith’s party, Jessica said she went home. She said Pete could vouch for her. But she hadn’t gone straight home.... Nikki recalled the conversation she and Jessica had had just before Jessica left. Jessica was hungry; she was going for a burger where she always went. In & Out.