The Last Temptation
Page 31
“You are more calculating than that,” Harry said. “You were telling me what you had learned. You came to the casino to goad me.”
“Here I thought I was being coy. You know, killing Eileen for Dewey was your undoing.”
Harry chuckled. “Even dead, Dewey wouldn’t want to be called Dewey. But you are wrong. I did not kill her for Bradley. I killed her for myself.”
“Why? She didn’t like your sushi?” I grunted in an effort to flex my stomach muscles harder.
Harry said, “You laugh, but I tell you I hated her. Bradley sent her to The Springs to heal their bad marriage. Bah! Of all the places on the fucking planet, he sends her to visit a friend of his. Me. His brother, who no one knows about.”
“Once Dewey started making mistakes, it was over for all of you.”
“I take care of me.”
“Did Eileen accuse you of being Bradley’s kin?”
His neck jerked. “The sly one told me I’d look like Bradley if my eyes were gray.”
“But they are, aren’t they?” I said. “Without contacts. Your family has distinctive features. Isn’t the high forehead why you wear a hat all the time?”
“It is my persona. Everybody sees a cartoon in me. Not a man. But Eileen, she pulls my hat off. It is over for her.”
Dartagnan reared up. “Son-of-a-bitch!”
Harry shifted his gaze to Dartagnan, but he kept the gun barrel on Lake’s heart. When he lowered the lantern to check Dartagnan’s bindings, I saw that Harry—with his wet hair flung back from his forehead—was indeed a whimsical imitation of his younger brother. But there was nothing funny about our circumstances. We’d planned on having the upper hand with two guns when he thought we would only have one. And no Dartagnan. If Lake and I were killed in this haunted place, it was our own ego that killed us.
Shake it off. I will not let this comic strip character kill us
Lake asked, “Was it coincidence that Eileen wasn’t sending Kinley back to Atlanta when you decided to kill her?”
Dartagnan let out a string of curses, and Harry slammed his shoe into Dartagnan’s side. I leaned right, lifting my left shoulder to loosen and raise my shirt. Harry said, “I didn’t know what the silly woman was going to do. Bradley asked me to keep an eye on her while Kinley was out here.”
“There was no man buying flowers in your shop,” I said.
Dartagnan yelled, “Fucking stone killer.”
Harry appeared to enjoy kicking Dartagnan. “You will know soon enough, dupe.”
My left hip pressed into Lake’s side, and, inch by inch, I rotated forward. Dartagnan continued to curse while Harry kicked him twice, three times, in the hip, giving me a chance to lower my left arm. Harry spoke while he swung his attention back to us. “I watched Arlo and Tess take the body to the desert. Good riddance to the wife, hello to the bimbo.”
“Then you called Whitney and told him what you’d done?”
“He went up like the flames. Voilà. Such a pussy. It was that club. The fucking Cloisters. It made his head soft.” Subtly, he took tiny steps toward Dartagnan’s head, like a cat sneaking up on a titmouse. “He went mad when I told him Kinley was missing.”
I inched my arm down while I said, “You needed to find and kill Kinley to make the authorities here think they’d gone into hiding, to disappear for the rest of their lives.”
“Bastard,” Dartagnan called out.
Harry swung the gun at Dartagnan’s head. “No, mon ami, I am not that.”
I thought Harry was going to fire. I said, “It was a race who would find her first, Bradley or you.”
Lake said, “Brotherly love.”
Dartagnan cried out again. “Bastard.”
Harry’s foot came down on Dartagnan’s back.
Dartagnan croaked out more curses while Harry tiptoed around Dartagnan’s head to get us in profile. The gun came close to my face, and he sang out, “Hands high, mademoiselle!”
My arms shot higher.
“Our time together is up,” he said. “See, what I am going to do is make it look like you two went looking for our friend here. Dartagnan was everybody’s idea of a bad guy, n’est-ce pas?”
Keeping my eyes straight ahead, off him, I said, “I believed Dartagnan killed Eileen and the PIs.”
“Yet you taunted me about the food I cooked.”
“I was joking. You would never poison your own food. Tess’s ring poisoned me.”
“And you, detective? Did you joke about robbing an armored car to pay for expensive wine?”
“No joke.”
“How could you be sure it was me?”
I looked at him, engaging his eyes. “Once I knew about Harry, I took a good look at you. You look more like Bradley than Dartagnan. To nail it, I saw the back end of your white car at the casino, the one in which you had delivered sushi to Eileen. You shot her and put it in the refrigerator.”
“Bah.” He stepped sideways, preparing to get behind us. It was quiet for strained moments. Had Harry finally finished talking?
And was Lake ready? Was I?
Instinct will let you know when to spring. The tension becomes unbearable.
We weren’t quite there yet.
Harry could have shot us dead in three seconds, but, no, he hadn’t finished talking. “It was an excellent last meal I prepared for you, wasn’t it? The condemned should always have a last meal.”
“Eileen never had a chance to eat her sushi.”
He sniffed, but the gun didn’t waver.
“And Larry and Bellan—did they get a chance to finish their last supper?”
“I would not prepare a supper for them.”
Dartagnan moaned.
The gun wavered when Harry looked at Dartagnan.
I felt Lake’s right elbow bend and lower. I reached higher, for the ceiling, shirt just covering the Glock’s butt.
“So what we have in this room,” Harry said, waving the gun with the bravado of a movie villain. “We have three people in a gunfight. Two against one. But Dartagnan, he is cunning, too. He gets the detective in the back before la mademoiselle can react. He gets mademoiselle in the shoulder, but she lives to get into a shoot-it-out with the gun that lays by his body now. Alas, all are killed.”
Lake asked, “Is the gun you’re holding the one that killed the PIs?”
“And it will be the gun Dartagnan kills you with.” He began his move behind Lake. “Please step forward, mademoiselle.” I stayed still, knowing it would make him angry. He shouted, “Do it now.”
I leaned forward, but didn’t move my feet.
“You will be heroes, getting the bad guy. Dead heroes.”
Dartagnan suddenly flopped like a fish out of water, catching Harry’s attention, his gun hand sinking floorward. “Stop, mon ami.”
That’s when Lake pulled the Glock from my waistband and shot Harry in his left ear.
About the Author
I grew up in Missouri, then moved south to join The Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff. I researched and edited the columns of humorist Lewis Grizzard and co-wrote a news column with another reporter for three years.
Lewis became my mentor, and when he passed away, I joined the newspapers’ Southern Task Force. As a reporter, I traveled the Tobacco Roads of Georgia, Virginia and Alabama, and the narrow, historic streets of New Orleans. I wrote about Natchez, Mississippi’s unique history, Florida’s diverse population, and the Outer Banks struggle to keep the Cape Hatteras light house from toppling into the sea. Also, I served on the National News Desk and on the City Desk’s City Life section.
Since I covered crime for the newspaper, I turned to crime fiction when I retired. In 2009, I won The Malice Domestic/St. Martin’s Minotaur Best First Traditional Novel Competition for The End Game, released by St. Martin’s Minotaur in 2010.
Real crime is sordid, with no romance or redeeming features. Justice often doesn’t prevail. Real people go back to miserable lives. In writing fiction, I can make the good guys win
ners and the bad guys get what they deserve.
Gerrie Ferris Finger
www.gerrieferrisfinger.com
The Moriah Dru / Richard Lake series
by Gerrie Ferris Finger
The End Game
The Last Temptation
The Devil Laughed
Murmurs of Insanity
Running with Wild Blood
American Nights
Wolf’s Clothing
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