The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  Hendricks, then. Where was he? He couldn’t have—

  She glimpsed movement to the right. Heard a muffled gasp. The chief, too. He saw it. He heard it. They exchanged glances and looked to the source in the precise second Hendricks burst from behind Lane’s armchair. Claudia stood and aimed. Suggs stood and aimed. But Hendricks was just as fast and jammed his .45 beneath the mayor’s chin, the muzzle of the gun sunk so deep that it looked like a magician’s trick, like any second it might come out the top of his head. Lane gurgled and shook violently, his eyes so wide they looked inhuman.

  “Drop your weapon!” Suggs screamed. “Do it now!”

  Blood ran from Hendricks’s right shoulder, his shooting arm, but he held the weapon steady in his left, this ex-Marine who understood pain—how to give it; how to receive it; how to weather any storm. His eyes flickered to Claudia.

  “Tell him not to be stupid,” he hissed. “Tell him!”

  “Shut up and drop it!” Suggs yelled. “Let Lane—”

  “Chief,” Claudia said, her voice quiet but urgent.

  “I’m not gonna negotiate on—”

  “Please!” She locked eyes with him and shook her head slightly. “Let’s all just settle down a minute, think this through.”

  “You better listen to her, Chief,” said Hendricks. He sneered at Suggs. “Fire on me and I’ll kill Lane, maybe have time to shoot Gloria, too.” His right arm spasmed and he flinched, but his gun didn’t waver from the mayor’s chin. He took a breath and said, “Ask her. She knows I’ll do it.”

  He wouldn’t hesitate. Not for a second. Claudia nodded reluctantly, calculating distance. Suggs was closer than her, but at an angle that put Addison in the same line of fire. She sat unblinking in her chair, so lifeless that if her eyes weren’t open she would appear dead. Claudia’s position gave her a shot that wouldn’t risk the young woman. The mayor, though—no matter who fired at Hendricks, Lane was in jeopardy. If Hendricks didn’t kill him first, a shot from her gun or the chief’s might. And then there was Manning. He might’ve fled at the sound of Suggs’s gun. Or he might be ready to spring from the hallway with his own gun.

  Claudia felt the skin on her neck tighten at the unknown behind her. “What do you propose, Hendricks?”

  “Put your weapons down. I use Lane to get to my car, then release him and go. Nobody has to—” Hendricks briefly shuddered. Sweat ran into his eyes. He blinked it away and licked his lips. “Nobody has to die.”

  “No way! No way!” Suggs settled deeper into his stance, gun held steady. “Let Lane go! Let’s end this!”

  “Not gonna happen! Now lose the weapons!”

  Neither man moved, but primal rage gripped them with an intensity that shook Claudia more than anything else. Her heart banged wildly. They had seconds to make this end. Inaction was a death sentence.

  Had Suggs come alone? She didn’t know, couldn’t ask, heard nothing but the moody strain of violins—Hendricks’s classical music still floating through the room as though the world had not tilted on its axis. Lane’s eyes pleaded with her.

  Think, think, think.

  They had to back Hendricks off. They could only do that if they diffused the moment.

  Or ratcheted it up.

  Her eyes flickered from Hendricks to Suggs, back again. Nothing had changed, except that Hendricks’s mouth twitched with the trace of a grim smile, and he pushed his .45 further into the mayor’s neck. He lived and died by making decisions. He was making one now. Claudia saw it in his eyes, knew it in her gut. She was out of time. They were out of time.

  She took a lungful of air, because she couldn’t recall ever screaming in her life and right now her life—all of their lives—might depend on her ability to do it convincingly. One chance. One more lungful of air, and . . .

  She shrieked, “Get down! The window! The window!”

  The first time she’d told Hendricks to look at the window, he’d laughed it off. It had been a mistake. This time he whirled instantly, aiming his .45 toward the newest danger, his attention off Lane for a nanosecond, and Lane, God love him, he scrunched into the armchair and never even saw the flame from Claudia’s gun.

  Suggs sprinted toward Hendricks so fast that he almost reached him before Hendricks collapsed completely. Claudia simultaneously scissored toward the hall and yelled, “Look out, Chief! Manning’s still—”

  “Stand down, Hershey! It’s okay. It’s all over. I brought company with me. The boys radioed they caught Manning outside a second before Hendricks drew on you and I fired. Dropped my damned portable outside, but I ’spect they’ll be burstin’ in here any second.” He stood and sucked in a shaky lungful of air. “The paramedics won’t be far behind, not that it’s gonna matter for this son of a bitch.” He toed Hendricks’s lifeless body, then holstered his sidearm and brushed glass crumbs from his shirt and pants. “Timely shot, Hershey. Good one, too.”

  The adrenaline after-burn was fading fast. Claudia gripped the wet bar for support, unable to respond. She watched Suggs freeing Lane and Addison. From beginning to end it had happened so fast—forty seconds? A minute? She could barely process events. She could barely find her voice.

  “You all right?” Suggs asked.

  She cleared her throat. “I think so. You okay?”

  “You’re standin.’ The bad guy’s down. Yeah, I’m good.”

  With the gag removed from his mouth, Lane’s teeth rattled like castanets. He would be incapable of coherent speech for a while, maybe for the first time in his life. Addison made no effort to speak at all. The femme fatale had shriveled to a lifeless doll. Suggs murmured reassurances to them both. A second later three uniformed officers burst into the room, guns drawn. He barked orders at them, then told one of them to fetch blankets for Lane and Addison. He looked at Claudia, asked her if she wanted one, too.

  She shook her head, then said, “You know, I was starting to wonder if you’d ever get here.”

  “I was starting to wonder if you’d ever notice me through the window.”

  “I thought you were lightning.”

  “Nah. Fast as it, though.”

  “Faster.” She declined an officer’s offer to bring her some water. Nothing would sit well in her stomach for a while. “So the radios are working okay again?”

  Suggs waggled a hand back and forth. “They’ve been on and off all day. Communications were down when Richardson came out to check on you. Took him nearly an hour to manage his way back to the station. He was water-logged and scared witless because he couldn’t figure out if he should be worried about you or not. I wouldn’t know to be worried, either, except for the bandanna he brought back with him.”

  “Bandanna?”

  “He found it stuck against a tree, wondered was it maybe yours.”

  The festival bandanna had been in her car. Claudia pictured it caught on her jeans, maybe snagged on a pocket rivet and dragged into the storm when she bolted from the Imperial to check license plates.

  Suggs grinned crookedly. “Apparently you impressed on him the value of details. I think he’d of brought the mailbox back if it’d looked bent to him.”

  “Richardson,” she said softly. “Wow.” And then she sank to the floor, dimly aware that her hands stung from minute glass cuts and that the gash on her head had begun bleeding again. She wished she had accepted the water. She half wished she hadn’t spilled the rest of her wine.

  Suggs looked at her. “Hey, you gonna help, or what?”

  She thought “or what,” but wobbled to her feet and got back to work.

  Chapter 37

  The instructions had obviously been translated from some other language and when Claudia scanned them she laughed out loud. But that was before she fully understood that “some assembly required” meant chipped nails, nicked knuckles and forfeiture of an entire morning, at least if what you’d purchased was a gas grill. She surveyed the parts on her lawn and vowed that in the future she’d pay the assembly fee for anything larger than a toaster o
ven.

  The sun made the repair work on her head itch maddeningly. She had anticipated stitches, but no, the ER doctor had used some kind of waxy substance to close the wound from Hendricks’s gun. Over time it would comb out with her hairbrush, kind of like dandruff, he had informed her. She probed the wound gingerly, feeling a slight crust at its edges, but no evidence that unseemly flecks threatened. Good. No doubt Tom Dixon could handle a few flakes, but it wasn’t the visual she cared to present on his first visit over. Neither was an unassembled grill, for which he was bringing steaks. She put her hands on her hips and cursed the pieces, which sprawled across the lawn like junkyard debris.

  “Nice talk, Hershey.”

  She turned at the chief’s voice and reminded him she was on vacation, just three days into a two-week stretch.

  “So does that mean I should go, let you read the latest developments in tomorrow’s paper?”

  “Not a chance. Pull up a grill lid and sit.”

  “Hell of a project to be startin’ so late,” he muttered, his eyes scanning the grill parts. “It’s hotter than . . . wait a minute.”

  Claudia saw his gaze on her feet and swore again, this time silently.

  “Hershey, is that nail polish I see on your toes. It is, isn’t it. Son of a gun.”

  “It’s . . . more like a protective coating than polish per se.”

  “Per se.”

  She sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Well, I like it.”

  She braced for a punch line, but instead he snatched the grill instructions off the ground and squinted at the tiny text. Then he looked at her work so far. “You got the damned heat shield all wrong, Hershey. It’s not gonna fit to the support brackets that way. Give me a Phillips Head.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Come on, I don’t have all day.”

  She handed him the screwdriver. “Morons write the instructions, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you see about puttin’ the wheels on the base while I fix this. We can talk while we work.”

  Claudia fetched some iced tea from the house, then bent to the task with Suggs. He told her some details she’d already learned from furtive conversations with Carella, her ally against the chief’s order that she “relax, damn it, and think about anything except the job.” So she knew that Moody came through with enough of Santiago’s personal effects for a DNA match, and she knew that Tinnerman’s body had been unearthed from beneath Hemmer’s patio. Manning hadn’t thought to remove the building inspector’s wallet; no one worried about a positive ID.

  But Suggs had a few surprises. Kitner wasn’t dead; never knew he’d been targeted. Farina couldn’t be bothered, although he was happy to tell Hendricks later that he had. They went out on Hendricks’s yacht to talk about that and other matters. Farina never made it back. The expectation that his body would be recovered from the Atlantic Ocean was nil.

  “Damned good thing I nailed Hendricks and not Manning,” said Suggs. “If Hendricks was still alive he wouldn’t give us nothin’ but a load of lawyers that’d make the O.J. trial look like kids’ play. But Manning can’t shut up. He knows the state attorney’s office has him solid for Santiago and Tinnerman, so he’s givin’ up everything on his stepdaddy, lookin’ for a break in sentencing. Between his statement, the stuff Hemmer stashed away, and what you figured out, the state’s already callin’ it the case of the century. These days that’s what they call every case with more’n one body.”

  “They giving Manning murder two?”

  “Probably. But he faces a boatload of other charges and won’t see the light of day for a long, long time. Maybe never. Give me a hand here for a second.”

  Claudia helped the chief wrestle the control panel onto the heat shield, then held it while he tightened screws. He grunted approvingly, then took a long drink of his iced tea.

  “You ever get your A/C fixed?” he asked.

  She nodded. “They came on time, made a lot of noise, and charged me three-hundred dollars. But it’s cool inside.”

  “Good.”

  The sun shined brightly from a cloudless blue sky, its presence so commanding that to imagine it vanquished by an even greater force seemed preposterous. But Claudia knew she would never again trust it fully. It had turned traitor, eclipsed her judgment, drawn her into jeopardy . . .

  If only.

  She looked at Suggs, fumbling with a baggie of flat washers. “I could’ve got them all killed,” she said quietly.

  “Damn packaging,” he said, using a fingernail to pry staples from the top. He paused and caught her eye. “Hershey, there’s a couple ways to look at things. If you hadn’t gone out to Manning’s place when you did, at least two more people would damned sure be dead today. So you went and it turned out all right. On the other hand, if it were me, I guess I’d do a little head check to see if my motives were pure as the head on a fresh beer. Then you know what I’d do? I’d let it go, because Hershey, you think way too much for your own good.” He tore at the package with his teeth, then grunted with satisfaction when it opened.

  “I’m just grateful that—”

  “Did you know Hendricks was an FBI target? Short-listed by the IRS, too. One way or another they’d been lookin’ at him for years. Possible racketeering, fraud, tax evasion. But no one could never get close enough to pull together an indictment. I talked to one agent said he’d never met such a smug bastard.”

  Claudia pushed aside her personal torment. There would be time for recrimination later. There always was.

  “Yeah,” Suggs said, “his problem with Manning wasn’t just that Manning screwed up with Willow Whisper. Turns out that he’d had an affair with Gloria Addison before his stepson did. Gave her lots of nice things, but she left him for Manning, which Hendricks wasn’t supposed to find out.”

  “Except that would’ve been too good for Farina not to pass along.”

  “You got it. Addison met both of ’em in the Miami law office where she temped. It’s where Hendricks and Manning took care of legal matters.”

  “I wondered. I never could quite tie all the threads from Addison to everyone else. How’s she doing now?”

  “Not good. She’s either in some kind of catatonic state or she’s fakin’ one good.”

  “Lane?”

  Suggs snorted. “I don’t think he should look for Christmas cards from the people who used to suck up to him. But probably no one’s gonna get him on more than misfeasance in office. Ambitious as he was, it doesn’t appear like he really knew what was happening with Willow Whisper and no one can prove he’s the one who snuck in and stole files from the building department. Meanwhile, the deputy mayor’s stepped in to take his place for now. He’s about twelve years old, but I get along with him all right.”

  Claudia smiled. She thought about sharing her opinion on the deputy mayor, but Suggs had his face back in the instruction sheet, muttering something about an air shutter and the valve orifice. The latter brought to mind a joke he would probably appreciate, but Claudia thought sharing it with Sydney later might be more appropriate. Hard to tell with the chief. Hard to tell with Sydney, for that matter. Her relationships with both of them were still evolving, and maybe that’s the way it always would be. Then again, so what? She had air conditioning in the house, and family and friends to share it with. She looked at her watch. In a few more hours, maybe one more. Obviously she wasn’t ready to share that with the chief yet, but boy-howdy, the thought of a cowboy coming over was enough to tweak the playful side she didn’t let loose very often. She looked at Suggs. He was really into the grill now, cursing it with some of the same words he’d badgered her about using. What the hell. She interrupted him and told the joke.

  – THE END –

  Laura Belgrave is a writer turned editor turned writer again, whose career path has taken her from the “murder and mayhem” side of the newspaper business to the gentle corridors of the children’s book publishing industry. Now a happy freelancer, she r
esides in South Florida with her husband and three neurotic cats. View Laura’s video welcome.

  The Claudia Hershey

  Mystery Series

  In the Spirit of Murder

  Quietly Dead

  Deadly Associations

  More to come