“You’ve had other dreams come true,” I said desperately. As subtly as possible, I pinned the small, silver ribbon to my shirt. I wanted every single word to be crystal clear for the recorder, not muffled by my fingers.
“What? Baking?!” He threw his head back and laughed long and low and hard. “I told you, that was a cover.”
“Pretty elaborate cover,” Richard called through the door. “Surely you had to get some satisfaction out of your job.”
There was a long pause. “I guess I didn’t hate it,” Barry muttered.
“And you worked your way up to detective. That had to be a proud moment,” Richard added. “You’ve had a lot of successes, Barry.”
Barry’s chest puffed out with pride. “That’s true.”
“So why blemish your record?” Richard asked. “You don’t want to kill Marian.”
I felt my heart swell with love for Richard. Of course Barry didn’t want to kill me. Richard knew it. I knew it. Barry knew it too; he just needed some guidance through the whole mess. I silently prayed he’d allow Richard to be the voice of reason.
“Don’t I?” Barry asked, cutting his gaze from the door, to me, and back to the door. “I mean, what a way to get famous. Think of the headlines.”
“Hey, Barry!” It was Addison, also on the other side of the door. How long had she stood there, listening to this maniac talk? I also noted that she seemed unusually chipper considering the circumstances. “Listen,” she went on. “It sounds like there was a bit of a misunderstanding. But I work for Food Porn, too, remember? Marian and I would be happy to have you come in for a photo shoot for our next edition.”
Barry looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch!” Addison called. “We just need you to open the door. Let Marian out. Get rid of the whole hostage situation thing.”
“I can’t do that,” he called, stepping closer to me, the gun still aimed at my forehead. I silently cursed my mother’s genes for my unusually large forehead and wished that Barry would point the gun elsewhere. Then again, why would he? The only target larger than my forehead was my butt, and I was sitting on that. “How do I know you’re not lying?” he asked her.
“You have to trust me,” Addison responded.
“I don’t trust any of you,” Barry muttered quietly under his breath.
“Why?” she called.
His head snapped towards the door. “How did you hear that?”
“Uh…”
Barry turned back towards me and raised his gun again. “Answer me!” he screamed, just as his eyes locked onto the pin. His eyes widened and his mouth formed into a perfect “O.” Slowly, he stepped closer and closer until he was inches from my bosom, which was heaving with both fear and loathing, all generated by the man in front of me. Putting his mouth right up to the pin he said, “Of course.” He waved the gun in front of the pin. Violently, he reached forward and ripped it from my shirt, dropped it to the floor and crushed it under his heel. In the process of removing the pin, he also managed to rip part of my top away, revealing my brand new purple push-up bra. I was going to wear it to seduce James into a confession. Of course, now I could just use it to seduce him. Assuming I got out of here alive. I mentally slapped myself for thinking about sex. “Nice bra,” Barry told me. “Dr. Vick’s?”
“What gave it away?”
“I bought one that looked similar for an ex a few months ago from the place.”
“Oh. That was nice of you.”
“Barry!” Addison hollered. “Are you listening to me?”
Barry took a few steps closer to the door, but kept the gun trained on me. I tried leaning a bit to the left, then a bit to the right, but he kept adjusting his aim. “What did you say?” he asked her.
“I told you that I can make you famous. I can sensationalize your story for the Journal. You know I write for them. You’ve seen my stories. I’m good. Really, really good. I can tell people about how smart you are. About how you fooled all of us. Even the police.”
Barry’s eyes suddenly lit up. I could practically see the Hollywood stars spinning about inside of them. He lowered the gun and moved to open the door. At that moment, the window to my right exploded. I screamed and covered my ears, dropping from the couch to the floor. My front door flew open in a smattering of wood splintering and locks breaking. Somewhere, in the middle of it all, Barry was on his knees, howling in pain, clawing at the arm that was attached to the hand that was no longer holding a gun.
Suddenly, Mika was inside, pointing a handgun at Barry’s head. He kicked the gun that Barry had dropped across the length of the room and was telling him to put his hands on his head and to not move. Within seconds, my apartment filled with cops. They flooded into my living room, filtering into my kitchen and down the hallway to my bedroom, like ants covering an apple slice that a child dropped to the ground. It all happened so fast that I didn’t even realize that James, Rory and Addison were kneeling next to me. A gruff, older looking man who resembled a very stern Santa Claus was cuffing Barry. He looked just as I’d imagined, that old gruff Richard from Chicago. Perhaps a bit younger than I’d expected, but really, quite spot on. Then Mika was hauling Barry to his feet and handing him off to a police officer dressed in uniform.
“Are you okay?” Addison was asking me at an abnormally loud volume. She gripped my arm tightly and then shook me hard when I didn’t immediately respond. “Marian? Marian!”
I blinked. I couldn’t stop staring at the bizarre scene that was playing out in front of me. Barry was screaming for medical attention as the cop shoved him towards the door. “Police brutality!” Barry cried as he was recited his Miranda Rights. His angry face twisted as he turned to look at me one last time before he disappeared around the corner. “I’ll get you for this,” he swore with a growl.
Just then, Mr. Hanley peeked around the corner. “I can hear you loud and clear!” he complained. “Doesn’t even help much when I turn down the hearing aid. All this violence is shaking the whole building. Shame on you! Shame.” He turned and tottered back to his apartment next door.
Someone draped a blanket around my shoulders as someone else started firing questions off to me.
“Not right now,” Mika said, walking over and pushing the questioning offender aside. “Give her a few minutes.”
Two hours later, I sat on my couch, holding my third steaming mug of hot tea. James and Mika sat on either side, while Addison and Rory cooed over my empty mug and my blankets that apparently needed near constant fluffing.
As it turned out, Barry was one of the very few people in the police department who knew James as a private investigator. It was more due to the circumstances of their supposed friendship than anything else. Turns out that Barry had vented his frustration and even hatched his plan for the perfect murder in James’s presence, then laughed it off as a joke before requesting the money to back Yummy Tummy, Inc. James decided he’d do everything exactly as Barry requested, including leaving Barry’s name out of all the owner paperwork. That way, Barry’s fragile mental state didn’t break at a point where James didn’t have any proof beyond the crazy ramblings of someone who was clearly psychotic. He could keep an eye on Barry. He could also keep an eye on me — whom he admitted to developing quite a crush on over the years.
What James hadn’t counted on was me spotting him outside my apartment that day. He’d been doing a routine check on me. The same routine check he’d been doing every week since Yummy Tummy first opened its doors just about two months ago. He knew that once the business was officially in full swing, it was only a matter of time before Barry would set up the photo shoot. Barry, however, had been quite smart even going so far as to set up his plans from a throwaway phone so that the poisoned goodies couldn’t be tracked back to him. Still, when James found out that Alec was dead, he knew things were in motion that he couldn’t control from the outside. He needed someone that had an excuse to sniff around the studio. That individual c
ame in the form of Mika, James’s former partner at the PI firm. And, because the two had been so private with the cases they assisted with several years ago, no one had ever really dealt with Mika. He was the silent partner. Even Barry hadn’t known who Mika was.
Together, James and Mika decided that the best way to protect me was for Mika to score the modeling slot that came up following Alec’s untimely death. What neither of them had planned on was for Mika to fall for me in the process of the investigation.
Addison discovered that Barry had been guilty all along when she put her own plan into play. She’d written an article that basically made the police department look incredibly juvenile — a national laughingstock. When she met with the new Captain and threatened to run it, he claimed to have no idea what she was talking about. In truth, he didn’t. As far as he knew, I was simply off the grid, not accepting assignments. Barry had even kept the Captain and my dad from speaking, a task to be sure. The one thing Addison and the Captain realized their stories had in common was Barry and that’s when everything else began falling into place.
“Doing okay?” Addison asked me, checking my mug, which I’d hardly sipped.
“Yes,” I said as I handed her the mug. “I can’t have any more tea though. I’ll float away.”
She clucked like a mother hen, but took the mug from my hands and strode towards the kitchen. “Can I make you something to eat?”
“Not hungry,” I responded.
“You should eat something,” Mika encouraged.
“Not if she doesn’t feel like it,” James responded gently.
“Okay!” I said, forming my hands in a T for timeout. “What I feel like is having everyone go home.”
The room drew quiet. “You can’t be serious,” Addison said.
“Look,” I said with a sigh. “I appreciate what everyone here has done.”
“But?” Rory asked me.
“But Barry was caught.” I shrugged. “He’s spending the night in prison.”
“Your door is currently a toothpick,” Addison pointed out. It was true. The police had more or less destroyed my front door when they broke in following the sniper shot. The door hung loosely from the top hinge and swung back and forth, squeaking slightly when anyone so much as looked at it.
I sighed. “I’ll just drape a curtain over it until management gets here.”
“You can stay with us,” Rory offered. Clearly he meant himself and Addison. It was still weird that they were a couple. They were just so — different. From the looks on James’s and Mika’s faces, I could tell that they thought the same thing.
“I appreciate that, but I want to stay here,” I told him, curling my feet under my body.
Mika began to speak, but I put my hand over his mouth. “Alone,” I said, meeting his gaze. “Please.”
The four of them looked at one another warily but eventually began to gather their things, slowly making their way to the door. Addison and Rory walked out first, Addison shooting me a worried puppy-eyed face as Rory practically dragged her to the elevator. James followed after them, with Mika hot on his heels.
Once everyone had gone, I took a lightweight dark-colored sheet and draped it across my front door. I’d already contacted my landlord to tell him what had happened. While he seemed incredibly skeptical of my story, he’d promised to get everything replaced as soon as possible. In this building that meant, “I’ll get to it when I get to it.” I thanked my lucky stars that my killer was off the streets.
Later, when I was curled up on the couch, my gun beside me, tucked loosely behind a pillow, a Hershey bar in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other, there was a light knock on the wall outside of my front “door.” “Come in,” I called, not really caring who it was as I eyed my weapon. I still didn’t have a clue how to shoot it, but I didn’t think that, that would really matter to whomever saw it.
I heard two sets of footsteps and felt my heart rate pick up ever so slightly. Dropping my candy bar, I went to reach for my gun. When I looked up, however, it was none other than James and Mika. “I thought I told you both to go home,” I joked good-naturedly, willing my racing heart to slow. Like that was even possible now. “And despite what you may have heard, I am not that kind of girl.” They both smiled but said nothing. I decided to draw it out of them. “What can I do for you?”
They eyed each other nervously in a “you go,” “no, you go,” sort of way. Finally, Mika cleared his throat. “We both like you,” he told me.
“But you were friends first,” I answered. “I get it.” It wasn’t like I imagined either of them having interest in me in the first place. No harm, no foul. Hearing it was really just going to ruin my night. Because, you know, being held at gunpoint in your own apartment didn’t damper an evening or anything.
“We are friends,” James supplied. “However, we were wondering how you felt about dating.”
I was quiet for a few seconds while that question sank in. “Dating?” I squeaked.
“Yes,” Mika responded. “Both of us.”
I looked from one to the other, then back to the first. Was I hallucinating? Had I been dropped in the middle of a dream? Perhaps I really was dead and had just imagined the whole entire rescue. “Have you both thought about this? Reasonably?”
“Yes,” they answered in unison.
For a moment I was speechless. When I pinched myself and felt it, I knew I was living reality. “I’m not a competition,” I told them, unsure. “If anyone gets screwed over in this scenario, I don’t want it to be me.”
“I think that, that’s something we have in common,” Mika answered with a smile, looking to James.
I nodded, thoughtful. “Can I think about it?”
The two looked at each other. This clearly wasn’t the answer they’d expected, but they shrugged. I took a moment of pleasure from being able to restrain myself. “Sure. Just let us know what you decide,” James told me.
“Goodnight,” Mika added, walking towards the door.
“Goodnight,” I said to them with a little wave.
They disappeared behind the sheet and I heard their steps echoing down the hallway to the stairwell. Taking a bite from my Hershey bar and slugging it down with a sip of wine, I zoned out watching the television for all of 30 seconds before I threw off my blankets and went barreling down the hallway in my flannel pajamas and pig slippers. I didn’t even care how crazy I looked in that moment. You wouldn’t have either. Trust me.
“Wait!” I cried, just as the door to the stairwell slammed shut. It reopened quickly and the two men poked their heads around it to look at me in anticipation. My heart pattered slightly faster as I took in just how attractive they both were. I truly didn’t understand where my sudden stroke of luck had come from, but I wasn’t about to let it slip past.
“I’ve thought about it,” I told them with a devilish grin. “Who is free tomorrow night?”
Allison Janda is a writer with New York Times bestseller dreams. She currently resides in Nebraska with her two dogs, one of which acts more like a cat.
Visit her today (or tomorrow, if you’re in a hurry right now) at:
AllisonJanda.com
@AllisonJanda
Facebook.com/AllisonJJanda
Allison Janda - Marian Moyer 01 - Sex, Murder & Killer Cupcakes Page 18