by Jessica Beck
“He did have time to tell me that they found blood at the scene. Mickey Wright was clearly hit by the shot. They followed the trail of blood through the woods, but it dead-ended at the road.”
“So, he made it back to his car,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t. They found it half a mile farther down the road, hidden in some trees. He never made it that far.”
“So, he carjacked somebody?” I asked.
“They think so, but they aren’t taking any chances. They’re still scouring the woods in case he doubled back. Stephen said that it wasn’t safe for us here.”
“He’s probably right,” I agreed. “Don’t worry. They’ll catch him.”
“I hope so,” Grace said as she headed to the diner. “In the meantime, we need to talk to Gladys. I’m not sure who I’d rather face at this moment, Trish or Mickey Wright.”
“I’m not, either.”
We got to the diner and found Trish Granger frantic, an odd state of mind for her normally. “Suzanne, Grace, when’s the last time you two spoke with Gladys?”
“We saw her outside the police station this morning. Trish, I swear, we didn’t say anything bad to her.”
I was all set to be attacked, but instead, Trish just said, “I’m not accusing either one of you of anything. She never showed up for her shift! Hilda had to stay on, and she’s not very happy about it. Me, I’m worried about Gladys’s safety. Where could she be?”
“I don’t have a clue,” I said. “She told the police chief she felt bad about what happened to Gray. She felt responsible, but she didn’t say anything about just taking off.”
“We need to find her,” Trish said. “She might be in trouble. I’m going with you.”
Or on the run, I thought, but I kept it to myself. I wondered if that visit to the police station was enough to set her off and send her packing. She’d been distraught. Had she decided to just leave town rather than face what had happened?
“You’re needed here,” I said as Trish started to leave her diner. “Grace and I will look for her.”
“We sure will,” Grace agreed.
“I should be out looking for her, too,” Trish protested.
“Tell you what. We’ll look on our own for an hour. If we don’t find her, you can close the diner and come with us. What do you say? That should at least get you through your lunch rush.” The place was packed, and I knew if she shuttered her doors now, she’d lose quite a bit of money, and maybe even some longtime customers.
“Okay. I guess that would be all right. Find her.”
“We’ll do our best,” I said. “Where does she live? We’ll check her place first.”
“I’ve already called there three times,” Trish said.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to pick up,” I suggested, not wanting to bring up the possibility that she was ignoring her boss while she prepared to leave town.
“Okay. She’s at 324 Grosscup, apartment number 6.”
I knew the complex. “Got it.”
“Call me the second you find anything out,” Trish demanded.
“I promise,” I said.
Once Grace and I were outside, she looked at me and asked, “Do you think she’s on the run?”
“I was just wondering the same thing,” I admitted. “She was pretty shaken earlier.”
“I think there’s a good chance when we get there, all of her stuff will be gone,” Grace said. “Trish is going to be heartbroken if Gladys leaves.”
“Let’s try not to jump to any conclusions,” I said.
“What do you know? Her car is still here,” I said as we pulled in beside it.
“Maybe she’s just not finished packing yet,” Grace said.
“If she’s planning to skip town, we need to stop her.”
“Because of Trish?” Grace asked me.
“That, and because we haven’t fully cleared her yet, either. She’s still got to be a suspect.” I walked up to the door of the apartment and rang the bell.
There was no response.
I rang again as Grace pounded on the door. “Open up, Gladys. We’re not leaving until we’ve talked to you.”
More ringing, more knocking, but still no response.
“Do I need to call Chief Grant and get him over here?” I asked. It was an idle threat. The police chief had enough on his hands at the moment, but I was hoping that Gladys wouldn’t know that.
“Don’t do that,” I heard her muffled voice say through the door.
“Let us in,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Then we’re calling Stephen,” Grace said.
After a moment’s hesitation, I heard Gladys remove the chain, and the door opened, but just a crack. “I can’t talk right now. You both need to go.” The woman looked terrified to see us. What was going on?
“All we need is two minutes,” I said. “You owe us at least that much.”
“I can’t,” she said, her eyes darting behind her. “I’m busy.”
Something was definitely going on. “Okay. Sorry to bother you.” We needed to get away from that apartment and call the police chief after all. Gladys was in trouble.
Evidently Grace missed Gladys’s panic.
Taking out her phone, she said loudly, “You’ve left us with no choice. I’m calling Stephen.”
“No, I don’t think you are,” Mickey Wright said as he showed himself from behind the door. There was a knife close enough to Gladys’s throat to kill her before we could stop him, even if we had a gun, which we didn’t. “Come on, ladies. It’s time we had a little chat.”
Chapter 21
We had no choice.
We did as we were told and stepped inside.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Gladys said. She was eerily calm, as though she’d accepted the fact that we were all going to die.
I wasn’t quite ready to give up yet, though.
Once we were in the apartment and the door was deadbolted again, I could see the massive bandage on Mickey Wright’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Spare me your concern,” he said, wincing a little as he moved. He clearly wasn’t doing very well, but I still wasn’t sure we could overpower him without one of us getting hurt, even with his injury. We were going to have to bide our time and wait for the perfect opportunity to strike.
“How did you manage to get here?” I asked him.
“I drove out to Gray’s place,” Gladys said. “After we spoke with the chief, I needed to be near him. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I felt so bad about what I’d done that I couldn’t take it. I was sitting in my car near the entrance to his place when he suddenly appeared.”
That made Wright chuckle a little, which led to another wince from him. “I couldn’t have asked for better timing. As we were driving off, the cops set up a roadblock just behind us.”
“What are you going to do with us?” Grace asked, starting to edge away from me. Was she going to make a move now? We didn’t have anything to fight back with, and if we tried something now, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that one of us was going to get hurt, or worse.
“Get back over there with your buddy,” he said as he lunged a little toward Gladys with the knife. The message was clear. If we tried anything, the cook was going to be the first one to die.
Grace quickly moved beside me again as she mouthed the word, “sorry.” I shrugged. We were stuck, and we knew it.
“Grace asked you what your plan was. Do you even have one, or are we going to sit here until someone else wonders what happened to us?”
Wright frowned. “We’ll hide here until it’s dark, and then you three are going to be my hostages. Now shut up and let me think.” He turned to Glady
s. “I need some coffee.”
“Sorry. All I’ve got is tea,” she said.
He frowned in disgust. “I guess it will do. Go make us some.”
As she started to walk away, he said, “Hold on a second. You. Come over here.”
He was gesturing to Grace, but I stepped forward instead. If he was going to switch hostages, he was going to use me instead of my best friend.
“Not you. You.”
Grace did as she was told, and all I could do was watch. Maybe that was better anyway. Wright only needed one of us to use as leverage in case he got stopped on the road, and Gladys and I would be more trouble than we were worth. No doubt he’d kill us first, but if it meant that Grace had a fighting chance, I was willing to sacrifice both of us for it.
We weren’t anywhere near that stage yet.
As Gladys made her way into the kitchen, Wright told her, “If you do anything stupid, both of your friends are dead. Do you understand?”
“I do,” she said.
As she busied herself making tea, I asked, “Why did you kill Gray so fast? Clearly you didn’t find the money. It seemed kind of hasty to me.”
Wright shook his head in disgust. “I didn’t kill him! Do you think I’d be that stupid? After I found the cash, maybe, but I was as surprised as anyone else that he was already dead when I got there.”
The criminal had no reason to lie to us, and besides, his logic matched ours. Mickey Wright was a lot of things, but he was no fool. “How did you find Gray in the first place? He hid himself so well.”
Mickey laughed. “The fool sent me a letter asking me for forgiveness, if you can believe it. He was going to turn himself in after that idiot Bloomfield published his stupid little book about what we’d done. Gary was in love, if you can believe that. With her,” he added as he gestured to Gladys in the other room. “Worse yet, he said that he wasn’t going to keep any of the money; he was going to give it to charity, some garden club. I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I headed straight here.”
Gladys must have been listening in from the kitchen. “I can’t believe how wrong I was about him. He really did love me, and someone killed him before I could tell him that I loved him, too.”
“That money is still out there somewhere,” Wright said with resignation in his voice, “but at this point, I’m cutting my losses. Whoever finds it is welcome to it. I just want to get out and never come back.”
“The tea’s ready,” she said.
“Got any sugar?” he asked her as she brought out the tray and set it down.
“It’s already been added,” she said. One cup’s handle was pointed toward Mickey Wright, while the other three were all pointed away. When I caught Gladys’s eye, she glanced strongly down for a moment before looking quickly away.
Had she doctored his mug with something? As she reached for a mug to hand to him, Wright said, “Not you. You, donut lady. Give me one of those mugs. She’s not going to try to poison us all.”
He was being clever, but Gladys might have outsmarted him. I grabbed the mug with its handle pointing toward our captor and handed it to him.
He wouldn’t take it, though.
“Take a sip first,” he ordered.
“Do you want me to drink your tea?” I asked, wondering just what Gladys had put in it.
“Not all of it, but you need to take a healthy swallow,” he said.
I did as I was told, leaving it in my mouth for a moment and then silently letting the liquid back into the cup. Hopefully whatever it was wouldn’t hurt me too much, but if it saved the two other women, I would accept that as a worthwhile sacrifice. It was acidic, and I wondered if that was the tea, or what she’d dosed it with.
Wright watched me for a few moments, and then, apparently satisfied that it hadn’t been poisoned, he downed his in three quick swallows. “That’s some nasty tea, lady. What was it?”
“It’s my personal blend,” she said. “I know for most folks that it’s a little bitter, but that’s the way I like it.”
“Whatever,” he said. “Go on, you might as well serve them, too,” Wright ordered me, and I gave each woman a cup, and then I took one for myself. “Now settle in. We’re going to be here a while.”
After ten minutes of near silence, I saw Wright shake his head, as though he were trying to stay awake. I felt a little sluggish myself, and I hadn’t even swallowed any of it, at least not on purpose.
“Move over to the couch.” He gestured to Grace and then pointed to Gladys and me. “You two need to sit down on the floor.” His words were slurring a little. Had he even noticed? We did as we were told, and it took everything in me not to stare at him as whatever Gladys had used began to take effect. He kept nodding off, fighting it, shaking his head, and then nodding off again.
I heard something hit the floor, and when I looked over, I saw the knife there.
Mickey Wright began to softly snore.
As Grace grabbed the knife, I asked Gladys, “What was in that? Am I going to die?”
“It was just my sleep meds,” she said. “You might get a little drowsy, but you should be okay.”
“How about him?” I asked.
“He got enough to knock a horse off its feet,” she said with a small smile.
“Still, maybe we should tie him up anyway,” I suggested.
“There’s some rope by the back door. I keep all kinds of things in a bucket out there that I might find a use for later.”
“I’d say this qualifies,” Grace said as she went to retrieve it.
“That was brilliant,” I told Gladys.
“What, dosing his tea?”
“That, and pointing the mug handles the way you did,” I said. I was starting to feel bad about thinking Gladys had killed her boyfriend. “I’m sorry about everything.”
“I should be apologizing to you. I can’t believe I put you both in harm’s way.”
“What could you do? You tried to warn us, but it took us too long to get it.”
“At least it’s over now,” she said.
“What’s keeping Grace?” I asked. “How long does it take to grab some rope?”
“It’s not the rope that slowed her down,” Barry Vance said as he led Grace back out into the living room. “She ran into a little trouble along the way.” He had a gun, and it was pointing straight at my best friend’s back.
It seemed that we’d dodged one bad man, but we had one more to deal with before we were home free.
I just hoped we managed to succeed again, though the odds probably weren’t in our favor this time.
Chapter 22
“You read the letter of apology Gray wrote to Mickey, didn’t you?” I asked him as he led Grace into the room.
“It’s amazing what a little steam will do to the glue on the back of an envelope,” he said with a twisted grin. “I’m just glad some folks still use the regular old mail to communicate.”
“How did you know to check Gray’s outgoing mail, or do you snoop around in everyone’s business?” Gladys asked him. The fight had gone out of her. She’d bested one foe already, and it appeared that was her limit. Now she was in some kind of stupor, almost like a standing coma. Clearly, it was going to be up to Grace and me to handle this one.
“I’ve suspected he was up to something for years,” he said, “but I was never able to prove anything. I knew he wasn’t who he said he was, but that didn’t make it easy to figure out what he was really hiding. And then he made a mistake.”
“Trying to atone for his past sins,” Gladys said.
Barry grinned again. “Kind of bit him in the end, didn’t it? I heard a stranger was in town asking around about him, so I knew that I had to act quickly. When I threatened Gray, he offered me a briefcase full of cash if I’d just leave him al
one.”
“Why didn’t you just do as he asked?” Gladys asked, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“You’re kidding, right? He would have told the police the second I left,” Barry said. “Besides, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for him to track me down. I had to do something, but I had to make it look as though that guy did it, not me,” he said as he gestured down at the sleeping Mickey Wright, who had stopped snoring and now looked dead. How much sedative had Gladys used?
“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,” I told him. I wasn’t just trying to stall him. I really wanted to know.
“I was on my way out of town when I spotted Gladys driving erratically. As I got a closer look, I saw someone had a knife to her throat from the backseat.”
“So you followed her home so you could help her? Forgive me, but you don’t strike me as a good-Samaritan type.”
“I’m not,” Barry said. “I knew who it had to be kidnapping her. If Wright was still alive, the police might figure out that I took the money, but if he were dead, and I planted a bit of the cash on him for good measure, then I’d be home free. I waited outside for him to take care of you three so there would be no witnesses, but you ended up killing him for me. What I didn’t know was whether he told you anything or not before you whacked him, and I couldn’t take that chance.” He nudged Mickey with his foot.
To his surprise, the unconscious man moaned a little.
Barry looked at us, the surprise painted on his face. “You didn’t kill him?”
“No, we just knocked him out,” I said.
“Then maybe somebody should go ahead and tie him up with that rope. After all, I can’t watch all of you.”
“Fine,” I said. “Give it to me, Grace.”
I took the rope from her hands, and I knelt down to tie the thief’s wrists together. Where was that knife he’d tried to use against us? I couldn’t see it close by, so it wouldn’t do me any good. I intentionally botched tying Mickey Wright’s hands together and made it clear to Barry as well.