Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

I said, “Was mutilating Laura’s face part of what you paid Celeste to do?”

If I’d had any doubts that he was telling the truth about not being the killer, they were dispelled by the shock in his eyes.

“Mutilating her face?”

“Her face was so cut up that the deputy who found her body threw up. Think about that, Mr. Freuland. Think about how lovely Laura was, and how she looked when Celeste finished with her.”

A faint sheen of perspiration glistened on his forehead. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, that’s the problem with having somebody killed, isn’t it? You can’t control all the details of how they’ll do it.”

For a moment, we looked into each other’s eyes with the stark rawness that can only happen when one person is about to blow another person to smithereens. He may have paid Celeste to kill Laura, but we both knew he fully planned to kill me himself. I had to stall him, had to keep him talking until . . . until what? Until Pete wondered what was taking so long and came to investigate and got killed too? I couldn’t let that happen, but I wasn’t ready to give up.

I said, “You expected to find Celeste here tonight, didn’t you?”

“She thought she could outsmart me and take all the money for herself. We’d gone all through the plan, all she had to do was show up, tell Laura she’d come to visit, act friendly, like a sister, and then take her by surprise and punish her for what she’d done. The bitch spent the entire night here searching for the money but she couldn’t find it.”

Of course she didn’t. Celeste had never had a cat, and it wouldn’t have occurred to her that it was odd for a person to have forty pounds of cat food stored for one cat.

Now I knew who it was that Pete had seen. It had been Celeste, dressed in Laura’s clothes. That’s why Guidry had questioned him so closely about the time, because Laura had been killed hours earlier.

“I suppose you’ll kill her too, when she comes back?”

He gave me that smile again. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll be long gone when she shows up, and all she’ll find is your body.”

“The cops will think she killed me, and she’ll tell them it was you.”

He shook his head. “She can’t afford to implicate me because she knows I’ll tell them she killed her sister. And the police have no reason to believe she killed Laura. No, they’ll think the same person who killed Laura killed you, some unknown maniac.”

I had to agree that it was a fairly tight plan.

I had never imagined the end of my life happening this way. Even though my husband had died at thirty, and my child at three, I still thought of death as something that happened to old people, an inevitable closure to a long full life. But now here I was with a man who seemed determined to make my death as premature as Laura Halston’s.

I said, “Could you just tell me why? Why did you want Laura killed? And don’t tell me it was because of the money she took, or because she reported you to the feds. That would make you bitter, but it wouldn’t make you a killer.”

I didn’t need to ask why he planned to kill me. We both knew the answer to that.

For a long silent moment, I thought I might have gone too far, and that the next instant might be my last. But then Martin spoke in a tight voice.

“She treated me like a fish, reeling me in one minute and letting me flap at her feet, and then throwing me back.”

“Why? Because you were too little to keep?”

He wagged the gun at me like a head tut-tutting, and I bit my lower lip. I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut when a good line pops into my head.

“She liked keeping me on the hook. Wanted me to dangle there in case one of her other men got away. Then she’d have me in reserve. On ice, so to speak.”

I thought of how TV psychologists act, and drew my eyebrows together in a way I hoped looked sympathetic. “That must have been painful for you.”

He was too smart for that. Walking around the bar, he came toward me with the Glock pointed at my forehead. “It’s time to end this charade.”

I wish I could say I kept my cool, but I didn’t. My heart was hammering in my ears, and all I could think about was not letting him see how terrified I was. If this was going to be my last moment, I didn’t want it to end with my humiliation.

He was breathing heavily, gathering the will to pull the trigger.

In my head, I heard Todd’s voice. “Use your feminine weakness, Dixie. It’s your ultimate weapon.”

Like being hit by lightning, I got the meaning in a flash. Freuland’s need for power made him especially vulnerable to a helpless woman at his feet.

Rolling to the floor, I stretched on my back, put my hands over my face and blubbered that I didn’t want to die.

He came closer, his feet shuffling beside me. When he spoke, his voice oozed satisfaction.

“I see you understand the situation.”

I bobbed my chin up and down and bawled. “Uh-huh, I do.”

“I thought you would. You seem like a smart woman. Too bad you had to stumble onto the money.”

Crying louder, I spread my fingers and looked through them. The overhead fluorescents bathed us both in cold light.

Straddling me, he leaned over with the Glock aimed between my eyes. I opened my mouth wide and howled like a little kid.

At the same time, I jerked a knee to my chest and drove my foot into his big bull balls.

33

A.9mm Glock going off in an enclosed kitchen makes an extremely loud roar. So does a large man with badly bruised gonads. Dropping his gun, Freuland folded to the floor in a fetal position, and I scrabbled for the Glock.

Panting, I got to my feet. With my knees shaking so violently I had to lean on the counter for support, I covered Freuland with the Glock while I used my free hand to pull out my cell phone. Fingers trembling like a drunk’s, I punched in Guidry’s number. Mercifully, he answered on the first ring.

My voice seemed to have forgotten how to work. All it could do was make choking noises.

He said, “Dixie?”

I gasped, “I’m at Laura’s—”

That’s all I got out before several shrieks like banshee fury sounded in the living room, so loud that Guidry heard them.

Guidry said, “What? What’s happened?”

There was another scream, a curious thunking sound, then a sound like a heavy object hitting the floor with a dull thump. Then utter silence.

Guidry said, “Dixie?”

Freuland lay mewling and puking on the floor, out of commission for two or three minutes at least. But somebody else was in the house, possibly with accomplices outside.

Guidry’s voice rose. “Dixie? Answer me! Dixie!”

In the stillness, his voice was so loud it echoed.

Putting my lips close to the mouthpiece, I whispered, “Somebody’s here.”

Freuland retched and groaned. I pointed the Glock at him while I kept one eye on the bar where Leo’s supplies sat next to the sack containing a million dollars.

At the edge of the bar, a silver glint extended from behind the wall, then withdrew. My first thought was that it was a gun barrel. My second thought was that it was the blade of a knife. Then I realized what the shrieking sound had been—Celeste had stepped on Leo’s tail and they’d both screamed. I didn’t want to think about the implication of the thudding sound hitting the floor. I didn’t want to think about the implication of the tip of that knife blade, either, but the fact was that Celeste was in the house and she was slipping toward me with a knife in her hand.

Once again, I had been duped by one of the sisters. Celeste had made a big show of refusing the key the locksmith had made, and another big show of telling Guidry she was returning to Dallas. And all the time she’d known she could easily knock out a pane of glass and get in the house without the key. She had either expected Freuland to come looking for the money she hadn’t been able to find, or she’d thought she’d give it another search herself. In either case, she had made me a witness to the fact that she didn’t have a key, and she would have known that I would tell Guidry.