A driveway led to a three-car garage, but Sloan motioned to the curb. “Park out here.”
I didn’t like the feeling that gave me, as if he might be setting us up for a quick getaway, but I did as he said. He got out, carrying the briefcase, and strode briskly toward the double front doors, a cocky tilt to his shoulders. Though he looked back once as if to make sure we were still at the curb.
I couldn’t see who opened the door, but after a moment’s pause it opened wider. Someone peered out and looked at us. Did the fact that he’d come in a limo help Sloan gain entry?
So there India and I sat and waited. I comforted myself with the thought that at least we weren’t robbing a bank or liquor store.
But overriding any feeling of comfort was the stronger feeling that if I were smart I’d zoom off into the night and leave Sloan Delaney stranded.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I had no idea what to expect when Sloan returned. Would he have some powerful piece of evidence about the killer stuffed in the briefcase? Or maybe even the killer in handcuffs, ready to be delivered to the authorities?
What we saw in less than five minutes was Sloan striding back toward the limo – no, more than striding. Trying hard not to break into a run while clutching the briefcase to his chest. Under the streetlights, his eyes had a running-through-the-jungle wildness.
He opened the rear door, ducked inside, and yelled, “Let’s go!”
“Now wait a minute. I think you should tell us—”
I jumped when his hand appeared in the open partition, fingers clamped around the handle of a gun.
“I said, let’s go.”
“What’d you do? Kill someone? Rob him—”
“I’ll pay you the rest of the triple-fee money when we get back to the marina. I don’t want to pay you off with a bullet. But if I have to—” His finger jittered in the neighborhood of the trigger.
Obviously not question-and-answer time. I slid the limo into the street.
“Don’t go back the way we came. Make it look like we’re heading somewhere else in case he looks out.”
Not using the route we’d come on was easy enough. Without making a U-turn, I couldn’t go directly back on the same street anyway. We wandered up and down a half dozen streets, and eventually I had to pull over and look at the cell-phone map again to get back on I-5. Gun still in hand, Sloan skittered from the partition to the side and rear windows while I figured out the route. Did he think we might be followed?
Even though we were by now on the tail end of rush hour, the traffic was still heavy. It kept moving, though sometimes at a slug-crawling pace. The gun came back to my ear whenever Sloan returned to the partition.
Finally I said, “Could you put that thing away? It’s hard to concentrate on driving with a gun at my head. A wreck won’t help your plans.” Whatever those plans were, a question which in itself was enough to make my palms sweat. He hadn’t been trying to sell the owners magazine subscriptions in that house. So what kind of plans did he have for us when we got back to Vigland?
He hesitated a few moments, but finally the gun disappeared. His nervousness didn’t. He went from window to window like a tiger with a bad case of itchy athlete’s paw.
“Do you have proof now of who killed Mary Beth?” I asked when he was back at the open partition.
“I know who killed her.”
“I think you mentioned yourself that knowing and proof aren’t the same thing.”
“We should go straight to the sheriff’s office,” India put in. “You can show the detective whatever you have.”
“Shut up, both of you. Just drive.”
We were somewhere in the Tacoma area when Sloan finally slumped to the seat at the rear of the limo, head down as if he were exhausted. India reached behind us and shut the partition. Sloan, instantly on guard, yanked it open just in time to hear the last word of what India said.
“What d’ya mean, followed?” he demanded. The gun had jumped into his hand again, like some robot toy action when a button is pushed.
“I think we’re being followed,” India repeated.
“By who? Cops? He wouldn’t dare send cops after me—” A dash to peer out the rear window. Back to ask India, “Followed by what?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been watching in the rear-view mirror, but it stays three or four cars back. Most of the time all I can see are headlights. But I got a couple of glimpses, and it’s no rent-a-wreck. Maybe a Mercedes.”
A limo-and-Mercedes chase. Can’t get much higher-class than that, can you? Though it had never been at the top of my bucket list.
“How could anyone follow us?” Sloan screeched. “We were lost ourselves for ten or fifteen minutes!”
“The driver probably figured we’d have to get on I-5 sooner or later. A limo isn’t exactly hard to pick out in traffic,” I pointed out. “Maybe you should have chosen something less high profile.”
“I needed a limo! He couldn’t kill me with a limo and driver waiting right outside for me!”
Ah-ha, so now we were into the real reason for the limo. We were Sloan’s insurance, his back-up safety system.
“And you figured he’d want to kill you?” India asked.
The gun was still in his hand, although the muzzle drooped, as if he were less certain what to do with it now. “I figured he might try to locate me later, but he’d be too late. I’ll be long gone. I didn’t think he’d follow—” An exit loomed ahead, and he waved the gun. “Turn off here. Quick! Now! We’ll ditch him!”
I managed to take the sloping exit, and at the bottom he yelled again. “Turn here. Now!”
I whipped the limo into the sharp turn that took us back under the freeway, then a couple more turns. I didn’t like being in the limo with Sloan and a gun, but I doubted that the alternative, having the guy who was chasing us catch up, was any better. India slammed against the door on the second hard turn. Sloan crashed to the floor. The gun hit the ceiling, then disappeared. The briefcase ricocheted like a steel ball in a pinball machine. And then, more like piñata than steel ball, it hit a wall and broke open.
And then we were in a money storm! A rain of greenbacks. A tornado of bills. Money whirling and dancing and flying like the inside of a wind machine. A couple of bills hit the windshield in front of me. One landed in my lap but I couldn’t look down. I was so startled by the money explosion that I almost hit a Fed Ex van angled at a curb. I managed to whip around the van, braked to avoid an oncoming car, then floorboarded the gas pedal to avoid another car zooming out of a side street.
Apparently oblivious to the traffic dangers, Sloan yelled, “Keep driving!” He snatched and grabbed at the flying bills, stuffing what he could back in the briefcase, then grabbing for more.
But without a gun to my head to reinforce the keep-driving order, I didn’t. I pulled over to the curb in the next block.
“Explanation time,” I said flatly.
“You want an explanation, or you want to live a little longer? Because if he catches up with us and kills me, he’s not going to leave you two alive as witnesses!”
Point well taken. I careened back into the street. At this point I didn’t figure it made a lot of difference where we went, just so we dodged that vehicle on our tail. So I just drove, making random turns, once cutting through an alley, another time dodging across a parking lot. After a dozen or so changes of direction I had no idea where we were, but India, gaze glued to the rear view mirror, offered the good news that no one seemed to be following us now.
Sloan was too busy scooping up money to worry about our location. How much was flying around back there? India grabbed one bill that flew our way. She held it under the dash light.
“A hundred,” she said.
If all those bills were hundreds, and I figured they were, I thought there could easily be a half-million on the loose back there.
I finally pulled to the curb under an overhanging tree, my hands so shaky and sweaty I could barely hold the steeri
ng wheel. I peered around. It wasn’t quite a slum area, but also not the kind of area where the family went out for an evening stroll. Up ahead, the door of a neon-lit bar opened, and a snatch of country-western music spilled into the street. The guy who staggered out looked in our direction and then pounded a palm to his forehead, as if trying to correct the limo image in his head, which he no doubt assumed surely couldn’t be right. I clicked the door locks fast. Now that we were stopped, Sloan stopped shoving money into the briefcase long enough to turn panicky.
“We can’t stop! We’ve got to keep going. Move!” He floundered around looking for the gun, but without it in his hand, my incentive for following orders was considerably reduced.
I could think of only one reason for all that money in a briefcase. “You know, if you’re blackmailing someone, this probably wasn’t a real smart way to do it. You should have arranged a neutral dropoff place for the money, not go to his home.”
“You’re an expert on blackmail? I should have come to you for diagrams on how to do it?”
“Your first blackmail scheme?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and I turned in the seat to look at him squarely. “It’s time you tell us what’s going on. What we’re up against here. Where did we go tonight? Who was in that house?”
Sloan hesitated, and I yanked the keys out of the ignition to show him we weren’t moving until he told us something.
“I went to see a guy named Mark Rulfson.”
He waited, as if the name should mean something. I couldn’t instantly place it, but it had a niggle of familiarity. Rulfson. Rulfson. Then I grabbed it. “The guy who’s running for the Senate?”
“That’s him. He killed Mary Beth.”
“Oh, come on. Why—”
“Because she knew something about him. Something she found out years ago when she was channeling down in California. Something that would wreck his Senate campaign if it came out.”
So this was why Mary Beth had such a big interest in politics. Nothing to do with commissioner-candidate Anderson McClay, and everything to do with senate-candidate Rulfson.
“Mary Beth was first in line with the blackmail, and you just jumped in to keep it going after she was dead?” India asked.
“He’s been paying her off, but she’d told him that for one big lump-sum payoff, that’d be the end of it, no more nickel-and-diming. But instead of paying her off, he killed her!”
Mary Beth’s big payoff, the money that was going to take her to the Caribbean. Blackmail. “She told you all this?”
“She couldn’t tell me he killed her—”
“But she did tell you about the blackmail?”
“No, I figured that out from what I found in her house. She had it all organized, a real bookkeeping system. Proof of what she was blackmailing him with, what he’d paid her in the past, how much this big payoff was going to be, his address and private phone number, everything.”
“So you decided to continue the blackmail and grab the big payoff for yourself,” India said.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it blackmail with me,” Sloan protested. A murderer is stalking us, and Sloan is arguing vocabulary. “I just, uh, offered to give him what Mary Beth had if he wanted to make it worth my while.”
“But you didn’t give him what she had, and that’s why he’s after you now?”
“I gave it to him.” Sloan sounded indignant. “But I guess he figured I knew too much, and would try to get more money from him later on. Which I wouldn’t,” he added almost righteously.
“Didn’t it occur to you that if he killed once, he could do it again?” I asked, incredulous that he thought this scheme would work on Rulfson.
“I figured I could grab the money, and get out.” As if it were a sudden inspiration he scrunched the fastener on the briefcase, apparently willing to ignore the loose bills still drifting around. “I still can. In fact—” He shoved the door open and lifted the briefcase in a goodbye salute. He smiled, a suddenly roguish smile that had probably quickened Mary Beth heartbeat at some point in the past. “You ladies take care now.”
“You don’t care about bringing Mary Beth’s killer to justice, do you?” I accused.
That made him hesitate, and I even saw a twinge of guilt on his face. But he shrugged it off. “First things first.” He lifted the briefcase again. “This comes first.”
“But you can’t just walk out. You’ve got a pickup and . . . and stuff back in Vigland,” I protested, though the minute I said the words I realized how irrelevant they were.
“I’ve got enough here to buy all the stuff I’ll ever need. You want that pickup, it’s yours!” He stepped out and instantly vanished into the shadows of an alleyway.
India and I looked at each other.
“Now what?” she asked, obviously as dumbfounded as I felt.
I considered the situation, and as I did so a weight eased off my shoulders. “We seem to have lost whoever was following us. We’re rid of Sloan. So we just go on home, tell Detective Molino about all this, and let him figure out what to do.”
India nodded agreement. “I wonder what Mary Beth had on this Rulfson guy?”
“We’re probably better off not knowing.” I started the engine and eased into the street.
A few potential roadblocks in my plan occurred to me. Rulfson, or his henchmen, didn’t know Sloan Delaney was no longer with us. They’d know that sooner or later we had to get back on I-5, and they might be waiting there for us. Rulfson also didn’t know but what we were in cahoots with Sloan and knew everything with which to blackmail him too. And, while we were a long way from knowing everything, and we certainly weren’t in cahoots with Sloan, we probably knew enough to drop an anchor on Rulfson’s Senate hopes if we chose to. Which might well qualify us for extermination. He undoubtedly had the license plate number of the limo and would have no trouble tracking us down later.
So at the top of our to-do list was get to Detective Molino with our information, and some leftover hundred dollar bills, as fast as possible.
Chapter Thirty-Three
But first we had to find our way back to I-5.
I drove up a few streets, then over. In the dark, my sense of direction was about as helpful as a noodle in a sword duel. I couldn’t orient myself with the streets showing up on my cell phone map, and we wandered up one street and down another, making turns at random. A dark car went by, boom of sound system rattling both my nerves and teeth fillings. Nerves further rattled when a hooded guy who looked way too much like those pictures of the Unabomber, stepped into the street and pounded a fist on the fender. Really discouraging was a point where I recognized the very bar near where we’d originally parked.
Lost in a Limo. Maybe I could write a country and western song?
And then there was a guy sitting on the curb under a street light a few blocks away, jacket torn, blood oozing from the side of his head. . .
I braked just before we reached him, startled by recognition. An unlovely – and cautious – part of me said, drive on by! The Christian part said, remember that old story about the good Samaritan. Reluctantly I stopped in front of him. India opened the door on her side.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I dunno.”
“What happened to you?”
Sloan lifted his head, expression dazed. “Couple of guys jumped me.”
I leaned across her. “We’ll take you to a hospital.”
“No! I just need to. . .” His words fizzled off as if he was indeed sure he needed to do something, but wasn’t sure what it was.
“Where’s the briefcase?” India asked.
“Gone.”
“Rulfson caught up with you and grabbed it?” she asked.
“Rulfson would of killed me dead. This was a couple a thugs in a black pickup.” His speech sounded thick but not disoriented. He put a hand along the uninjured side of his head and pushed, as if trying to put some internal dislocation back in place.
Two guys had seen a lone g
uy carrying an interesting looking briefcase, which Sloan had no doubt been clutching as if contained a fortune in hundred-dollar bills. Which it had. Easy target. Grab it and run. I didn’t exactly feel sorry for Sloan. Money acquired illegally, money lost illegally. I’d have to sort that out later. But right now—
“I think you need to see a doctor,” India said.
He touched the injured side of his head, then studied his blood-smeared fingers as if he couldn’t quite recognize what he was seeing.
“What’d they hit you with?” I asked.
“I dunno. Something one of ‘em grabbed out of the back of their pickup.” He had to use both hands to push himself up from the curb, but he made it to his feet. He stood there swaying, and we both jumped out of the limo. India reached him first and grabbed him on one side to steady him. I had to run around the limo, and then I grabbed his other arm.
We helped him into the limo. He lay back against the seat, eyes closed. I got a flashlight, and we inspected the wound. It looked messy, probably in need of stitches, but not deep.
“Don’t want a doctor,” he mumbled. “Leave me alone. Just take me back to my pickup.”
India was trying to pick some twigs out of the wound, and he raised an arm to bat her hand away. Some people don’t make it easy to be good Samaritans. I hoped it wasn’t too non-good-Samaritanish to hope he didn’t leave blood stains on the upholstery.
“We’ll decide about a doctor when we get back to Vigland,” I said. Though what I was thinking was, it’s straight to the emergency room for you.
I got a blanket out of the trunk and draped it over him. He’d already picked up a handful of bills from the seat and, apparently having learned nothing about the easy-come, easy-go of ill-gotten gains, was clutching them as if they were priceless treasures even as his head lolled back against the seat.
For Whom the Limo Rolls Page 25