Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

He collapsed back onto the grass, even whiter now. “He’s got your father.”

She couldn’t move. “Skinner?”

“I don’t know his name. Big guy.” Russ winced in agony. “Said your father’s in the car with him. I don’t think your father knew he coldcocked me.”

“I’ll call the police-”

“Get me my gun,” Russ said. “Dani-I can’t let your father…”

She found the gun under the juniper. “Tell me how to use it,” she said, kneeling back down next to him. “I’ll go. You wait for the police.”

Russ took the gun from her, released the safety and handed it back to her. “Point and pull the trigger. Keep your elbows bent.” He coughed, his eyes squinted against the pain. “Be ready for the kick. Small as you are, you’ll feel it.”

She thrust her cell phone at him. “You’re sure-”

“Go,” he said.

She was off, keeping the gun pointed at the ground. She concentrated on where her feet touched the brick path, the rhythm of her movements, the weight of the gun in her hand, her breathing.

Pop…

She cut off the thought before it could blossom and overwhelm her. Her father had to be all right. She wasn’t ready to lose him.

If she could simply distract Skinner until the police go there…

Listening hard, she heard nothing but birds and the sough of the wind in the trees. She ran through a small grove of pines, feeling the soft grass underfoot, slowing as she came up behind the pavilion where she suspected Quint had taken her father.

Suddenly she heard her father’s voice, and the rush of adrenaline was so enormous she thought her chest would burst.

He’s alive.

“You should see your face,” he was saying to Skinner. “It’s about the color of a good roasted red pepper. Keep this up, you’re going to have a stroke.”

Peering from behind thick branches of a pine tree, Dani saw Quint rising, a crowbar in one hand. “I ought to hit you over the head just for driving me crazy. You’re worse than the mosquitoes.”

No one, Dani thought, could be more maddening than her father.

She edged forward to the wrought-iron fence. The gate was on the opposite side, which helped give her the advantage of surprise. Skinner would be unlikely to expect an approach from that direction. But it didn’t permit her to cut off his exit. The gate had been left wide open.

Ducking under one more branch, she came out within a foot of the gate. She raised Russ’s gun. Elbows bent…be ready for the kick…point and pull the trigger…

Her father spotted her. She knew because he looked as if he was going to throw up.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said.

Skinner looked around at her, then laid his crowbar onto a massive shoulder like a fishing pole and laughed at her.

“I wouldn’t annoy her if I were you,” John said. He didn’t sound particularly terrified, but that was her father. Bravado in the face of any problem, no matter how serious.

“I don’t care what you’re doing here,” Dani said to Skinner. “Just let my father go.”

“You’re welcome to him.” He slung the crowbar off his shoulder and held it easily in one hand at his side. The amusement left his expression. He nodded to the fountain. “I found what I came to find.”

He turned his back to her and her gun and sauntered off toward the gate.

“Hey,” she said. “I have a gun pointed at you.”

He glanced back at her, his face red and dirty. “So?”

“So you nearly killed my hotel manager and then my security guard. And I’ll bet you landed my father here in the hospital.”

“Nope,” he said. “I didn’t do that one. The others-what can I say? Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”

“I’m not going to let you just walk out of here.”

“Dani,” her father said.

“Stay out of this, Pop.”

“Sweetheart,” Quint said, “you fire that thing, the only one who’s going to get hurt is you. It’s a forty-four. It’ll knock you on your pretty little ass.”

He continued through the gate.

Her father jumped between her and Skinner. “Dani, just let the bastard go.”

“Relax, Pop. I’m not going to do anything crazy.”

“You’re damn right you’re not,” Zeke said from behind her.

She swung around, and he snatched her gun before she could accidentally-or on purpose-shoot him, then caught her by the shoulder, steadying her. She didn’t protest. “Where did you come from?” she asked.

“The inn. Mattie and Nick heard from the hospital that John was gone-they’re frantic. Ira’s got someone with them. He’s ready to call out the National Guard.”

“What happened to your friend?” John asked, still on the bench on the other side of the fence. “I kept expecting him to swoop to my rescue at any moment. Unlike other members of my family, I’d happily turn my safety over to either one of you.”

“Sam was shot,” Zeke said, grim-faced.

Dani grabbed his wrist. “Will he be okay? What happened?”

“He’s fine, but later,” he said. “The police are on the way. Since this isn’t my show, I’d prefer not to stick around.” He pulled his wrist free and started around the pavilion. “By the way, Quint was bluffing. Your gun’s a thirty-eight. It has a kick, but it wouldn’t have knocked you on your pretty little ass. I would have. You don’t take on killers when you don’t have to.”

“I did have to.”

“Do you ever not argue back?”

She managed a smile. “Never.”

He grinned. “Good.”

Then he was gone.

“My, my,” her father said, eyeing her.

She frowned at him. “It’s not what you think.”

“Oh, I’m afraid it is.”

She would stand for no more of this. “What was Skinner after?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. He made a damn mess of your fountain, though.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet and walked to the edge of the circular brick path inside the pavilion and examined the area where Quint had been digging. “Oh, hell.”

“Pop?”

She lunged for the gate. Her father tried to stop her. But he was too weak, too shocked himself, and she pushed past him.

She saw the twisted, crumpled mess that was still recognizable as the straw hat her mother had had with her the night she disappeared twenty-five years ago.

The cream-colored Chandler house on North Broadway stood silent in the bright afternoon sun. With the watchman’s gun heavy in her hand, Dani stopped on the wide sidewalk and looked up at the sky, almost as if there should be a hot-air balloon floating overhead, carrying her smiling mother back to her, just like in The Wizard of Oz .

“Oh, Mama,” she whispered, fighting back tears.

She’d dragged her father from the pavilion back to the bottling plant, where Russ was holding his bandanna to his wounded head. By then, the police sirens were close. Russ had promised to see to her father and let her borrow his car. She’d driven straight to Millionaires’ Row.

Her aunt was in a wicker chair on the front porch, stroking a long-haired white cat in her lap. A pile of crumpled pink petunia blossoms lay scattered on the floor beside her. She wore one of her feminine, flowery dresses and smiled as Dani climbed the steps onto the wide, curving porch. “Hello, Danielle. What a pleasant surprise. Won’t you sit down.”

“Sure.”

But she sat not on a wicker chair next to her aunt, but on the railing, under a hanging basket of petunias.

“Is something wrong, Danielle? You look-My goodness, is that blood on your shirt?”

Russ’s blood. And maybe her father’s. She hadn’t noticed it until that moment. Zeke, too, had had bloodstains on his shirt. That hadn’t penetrated until he’d vanished into the woods.