Али Брэндон - Double Booked For Death

“No!” Darla gasped and shut her eyes, certain a repeat of last night’s deadly accident was imminent. Sure enough, horns blatted, and more than one set of brakes squealed. When a few more seconds passed and she didn’t hear the impact of steel against human flesh, however, she assumed he must have made it across the street safely.

She sighed and opened her eyes again, only to find herself nose to nose with the same policeman who’d just given her a parking ticket.

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, lady. I told you if you didn’t move your friend’s car, I was gonna slap a boot on it and call a tow truck. Well, you didn’t, so I am.”

“Wait!” she told him, urgently pointing down the street. “Here he comes . . . and he has the suspect.”

For the Lone Protester, looking tiny and defeated, was indeed walking between Reese and Jake. Leaving her to stand alongside the Mercedes, Officer Hallonquist—she’d finally gotten a good look at the name pinned to his uniform—hurried to join them.

The four halted a short distance from her. She saw Jake speak to Reese for a few moments before breaking away to head back in Darla’s direction. The two men remained where they were, the girl between them as they conferred. A moment later, they hustled the girl into Hallonquist’s patrol car, which was double-parked a few cars from Darla, and then climbed in after her. The car took off down the street, presumably headed to the nearest precinct.

Jake, meanwhile, had made it back to the Mercedes. She grinned and thrust a fist at Darla for the obligatory bump.

“Good work, Nancy,” she exclaimed as their knuckles collided. “You were right about your Lone Protester, whose name is Janie, by the way. She admitted right off that she was the one holding up the anti-Valerie signs. Of course, she denied shoving her into the street to be squashed like a bug, but she agreed to go in for questioning. We’ll let Reese worry about getting a confession out of her.”

Rather than joining Jake’s moment of triumph, however, Darla felt herself gripped by a nagging sense of guilt. Anyone who’d had a hand in killing someone else deserved prison time, at the very least; still, the girl looked awfully young to go to jail for the next twenty-odd years. And something about her defeated air seemed unlike the attitude one would expect of a brazen murderer. Could the girl’s claim of innocence be legitimate?

Jake seemed not to notice Darla’s dismay. Instead, after ruefully snagging her abandoned phone from the rear of the Mercedes, she hopped into the front seat, furtively massaging her bad leg while pretending to do an after-workout stretch. “Jeez, I didn’t realize how much I missed the old running-down-a-perp routine,” she exclaimed as Darla slid behind the wheel. Snatching the citation Darla still clutched, she added, “I’ll see that Reese takes care of this. Your friend Officer Hallonquist won’t mind, not after he’s had the chance to help collar a murderer.”

“Alleged murderer,” Darla sourly corrected as she turned the key. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say until someone is actually convicted?”

Jake waved away such trivialities, though she gave Darla a keen look. “So what’s got your panties in a twist, kid? I thought you’d be thrilled that Hamlet and you have a knack for detecting.”

“I am.”

Darla pulled out into traffic again and turned Maybelle back toward Brooklyn. “What was going on inside the coffee shop?” she asked instead, deciding she needed to wait until she was alone to contemplate the other topic. “Unless it’s a heck of a lot bigger than it looks, you should have been in and out of there in a couple of minutes.”

“Yeah, the kid behind the counter played us, I think. He claimed your girl had been in the shop but had to leave to find an ATM, and that she’d be back any minute. It sounded kinda fishy to me, but it was all we had, so we decided to wait it out for a while. Good thing you were keeping an eye on things from here.”

“So much for street smarts,” Darla muttered, recalling how Jake had praised Reese’s innate instincts the day before. Apparently, his intuition had taken a vacation this afternoon. “What happens to Janie now? I guess she’s under arrest?”

“Not at this point. Like I said, right now she’s going in for questioning. We’ll see what happens after that. And who knows, maybe they won’t find anything to charge her with after all.”

The remainder of the trip back to the brownstone focused on whether or not Darla would be open for business as usual in the morning. “It wouldn’t be fair for James to lose a day’s pay,” she finally decided. “Besides, if we get the kind of sales tomorrow that I had in just a few hours today, I can’t afford not to be open.”

“Business is business, kid,” Jake agreed. “And you know that if the situation had been reversed, Valerie Baylor darn sure wouldn’t have taken a day off touring out of respect for you.”

Darla swung by the brownstone first before heading to the garage, telling Jake she was worried about how things were going at the Valerie shrine. In truth, she was more concerned about her friend. She’d noticed the older woman still massaging her bum leg when she thought Darla wasn’t looking her way. The impromptu sprint outside the coffeehouse hadn’t done her any good, and Darla didn’t want her to walk back from the garage while still in obvious pain.

She’d halfway expected Jake to protest this special treatment, but she agreed to have Darla drop her off outside the building. As they approached their block, they could see that the shrine had continued to grow exponentially in their short absence. Now only a narrow strip of sidewalk remained for pedestrians to pass by, and the tribute’s length almost reached the antique shop. The shrine had become a gawking hazard for drivers as well, with most of them slowing as to stare in amazement at the profusion of candles and flowers. Pretty soon, the city would have to send some sort of traffic control down to keep things moving . . . that, or assign a front-end loader to clear it all away!

Darla took advantage of the confusion by pulling right up to the store’s curb. “I’ll be back in a few,” she told Jake.

She waited until the other woman climbed out, and then pulled back into Monday afternoon traffic. A few minutes later, she had situated Maybelle in her usual spot in the parking garage and was headed back to the brownstone on foot.

Normally, the walk would have been a pleasant one. The weather was fine, and the handful of crazies who wandered her neighborhood had apparently decided to stay inside for the duration. But Darla couldn’t stop thinking about Valerie Baylor and the Lone Protester—Janie—who might well be responsible for the author’s death.

More unsettling than that, however, was a selfish concern. Though she had tried at the time to dismiss it, she couldn’t help but worry that Robert and Sunny’s threatened boycott might come to pass. Chances were the teens had several hundred so-called friends each on their respective pages, meaning it wouldn’t be hard for them to drum up a few dozen people to march around just for the fun of it. It was hard work keeping a bookstore afloat these days. Should too many people jump on their emo bandwagon, Pettistone’s Fine Books might meet much the same fate as Valerie.

Jake was waiting for her on the stoop, seated on the concrete steps leading up to the quaint wood and glass door. She apparently had been talking on her cell, for she snapped her phone shut at Darla’s approach.

“That was Reese,” she announced. “Seems Janie sang like a canary. Problem is, she only knew one verse.”

“What do you mean?”

“She admits to the whole protest routine, but she said someone paid her to do it. And she swears she wasn’t the one who tossed your author under the bus . . . er, church van. She claims she ditched her sign in the alley and left the scene almost half an hour before the accident, and had no idea what happened until she saw the news story online.”