Лори Касс - Gone With The Whisker

“We need time to hide their bodies, then.” Luke shifted the gun from one hand to the other. “Do you think we need to kill them somewhere else?”

Courtney frowned. “That’s a good question.”

I thought it was a horrible question, but I was fairly sure my opinion didn’t count, so I kept quiet. A better question would have been when had Rafe headed home? Or would anyone think to read the houseboat’s whiteboard? I’d written an itemized list— Brown’s Road, King’s raspberries, Lighthouse Park —but did anyone other than my mother know that’s where I wrote my whereabouts? I couldn’t think, couldn’t remember.

My mind whizzed at a million miles an hour. There had to be a way out of this. I had to think of something. I had to get Kate away from these two. I had to get her safe.

“Got an idea.” Courtney dusted off her hands as if she’d handled something dirty. “Keep them here a minute.”

“You going to put the delivery together?” Luke asked. “Because you’re right, we need to get moving. Last time we were late out there, he said if we did it again, he’d find another supplier.”

Courtney sighed. “I know. Well, I have one idea, but do you have any?”

“One idea is better than none, right, babe?” He grinned at her.

Thieves/killers/black marketeers who internally managed their enterprise through collaboration and cooperation? Who knew? But that meant my first instinct, to figure out a way to divide and conquer, wasn’t going to be easy. I needed another plan, and I needed one fast, because I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to care for any of Courtney’s ideas.

“Distract him,” Kate whispered.

I frowned, but before I could turn my head to whisper a puzzled reply, she’d slipped out of my grasp.

“Hey!” Luke yelled.

“Kate, no!” I called.

Instead of paying attention to her aunt or the guy with the gun, she launched herself at Courtney, arms out, fists flying.

Luke took one step, lifted a hand, and yanked her backward by the hair. “Stupid kid,” he said, disgustedly. “What did you think you were doing?”

“Trying to escape,” she said through gritted teeth. “What did it look like?”

Courtney glared. “Like you were trying to earn yourself a faster death. Luke, hang on to her. I’ll be right back.” She marched to the shed and pulled a key out of her shorts pocket. One click, and the padlock dropped open.

Kate shot me a look. “Why didn’t you—”

“Shut up.” Luke, who was holding my niece by the neck with one hand and pointing the gun at me with the other, rattled Kate hard enough to make my own teeth hurt. “I don’t want to hear a word out of you. Like ever.”

He smiled, and that’s when I was certain that Luke Cagan had shot and killed Rex Stuhler. Whether it was Luke or Courtney who’d killed Nicole Price, I didn’t know, but if Luke had killed once, what was there to stop him from killing again?

Well, nothing except a vertically efficient librarian and her contrary niece.

“A very determined librarian,” I murmured.

“You either,” Luke growled, pointing the gun between my eyes.

Having a gun aimed at me had happened once or twice before, but that familiarity did not decrease my heart rate. Or loosen my suddenly tight throat. Or stop my forehead from sweating.

I nodded and, as the gun dropped, started to breathe again.

“This will work.” Courtney came out of the shed and showed him a handful of twine. “Do the kid first, then her,” she said, nodding at me. Either she didn’t remember our names, or was already demoting us to non-name status. Neither possibility boded well.

Luke gave her the gun, which she handled with unfortunate familiarity. So much for my short-lived plan of shoving her to the ground while simultaneously grabbing the gun away from her. Anyone that at ease with a firearm would almost certainly have the impulse to hang on to the thing.

“How tight?” he asked, shoving Kate around and hauling her hands behind her back.

Courtney shrugged. “All I care about is they can’t get loose.”

“Works for me.” He wrapped the twine around Kate’s wrists, pulled it hard enough to make her gasp—and grinned.

Which was when I started to hate him. This was not a calm, detached hatred. No, this was more the Captain Ahab and the Great White Whale kind of hatred, the kind that could consume you.

“You will regret that,” I said quietly, making it less a vow and more a personal goal.

Courtney narrowed her eyes and used the gun to gesture at me. “Tie her hands next, I want to make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.” A pause. “And get it good and tight. She’s smart and I don’t trust her.”

I felt myself twirled around and did what I could to flex my hands, to make them bulgy and muscle-y, but I was pretty sure my efforts didn’t make any difference.

“Oh, hey, look at this,” Luke said as I felt my cell phone sliding out of my shorts pocket. “Forgot to look in their pockets.” He tossed the expensive rectangle on the ground and, with one heel, smashed it to tiny bits. “Check the kid.”

Courtney eyed Kate’s pockets. “She doesn’t have room in there for half a sheet of Kleenex.”

I didn’t know where Kate’s phone was, but having them look for it wouldn’t be good. “She doesn’t have one,” I said. “I took it away from her last week when she didn’t make curfew.”

Courtney snorted. “Curfew? I moved out of my mom’s house because she made me come home by midnight.”

“Now what?” Luke asked. “Tie them to a tree?”

“We’re going to use the shed,” Courtney said.

“But you said—”

“Yeah, I know what I said. We can take care of that, though. I’ll show you.”

The two of them walked over to the shed. Kate looked at me with wide eyes and a white face. “Aunt Minnie—”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. She’s not the only one with ideas.” This was true. I had lots of ideas. None of them useful at this particular point in time, but Kate didn’t need to know that.

“Let’s go.” Courtney returned and prodded me in the back. “Into the shed.”

“You realize,” I said conversationally, “that I’m friends with the entire sheriff’s department, including the sheriff. They won’t stop looking until they find me.”

“Much good it’ll do them.” Luke laughed.

“Shh,” Courtney hissed. “Don’t engage, okay? Inside,” she said, and gave me a shove.

I stumbled forward, losing my balance in the process and tumbling toward the dirt floor. As I fell, I managed to rotate and hit the ground hip-first. This was surprisingly painful and I oofed a grunt of pain as I landed.

“Aunt Minnie, are you okay?” Kate awkwardly knelt next to me.

Luke kicked my legs to the side. “Shut up and lie down. No, you here and you here. Oh, for crying out loud . . .”

He dragged me to one side. Dragged Kate’s feet around. Rolled me over. Rolled Kate around.

The entire thing was an exercise in frustration and humiliation, and I could tell that my face was aflame with fury. At the end of it, Kate and I wound up tied together with more twine, my nose touching her knees and her nose up against my ankles.

“Done,” Courtney said, dusting her hands again, a mannerism I was finding very annoying. “This has taken way too long. We’re going to be late.”

Luke stepped over the top of the Minnie-Kate assemblage and, from the sounds of it, started grabbing pill bottles. “They’ve reopened that county highway already, so we don’t have to take the detour. We’ll be fine.”

Bottles went into whispery plastic bags. They crossed the shed and slammed the door, causing motes of dust to drift down through the small slats of sunlight. We heard the click of the padlock, and just before their footsteps faded away, we heard Luke ask, “When do you think we should come back to finish the job?”