Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4)

by Stephanie Caffrey

  Dan did the only sensible thing. He shot at me. But his hand must have been quavering so much that the only damage I sustained was when my eardrums absorbed the booming report. I looked behind me to see a crisp half inch hole in the middle of the wall.

  “A good start,” the guy in the doorway said wryly. Any gun battle would have more than a few misses, so even Dan’s missed shot had been productive. “Now finish it off,” he said, waving the gun at Dan.

  Dan was sweating now, white faced and still shaking. I wanted this over with, I finally admitted to myself. My thoughts had zoomed through all the stages of denial and come to accept my fate. All I wanted was a quick and painless death. Dan leveled the gun at my chest once more. I cringed and closed my eyes.

  The shot rang out, piercing the air, and I heard the sickening sound of the bullet ripping through human flesh. And then another shot, and then a third, and when I opened my eyes, the wiry little guy was jumping on Dan’s back with his arms around Dan’s neck. The guy in the doorway had slumped to the floor, his head making a loud thud as it crashed into the floor. Laura was wide-eyed, pawing ineffectively at the guy on her husband’s back. I ran over to the door and tried to wrest the handgun out of a dead man’s hand.

  His grip on that gun was amazingly tight, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t dead after all. Despite the pool of inky-red blood underneath him, the guy was powerful enough to flail around onto his stomach, and with all the strength of his core, he turned and pulled, wrenching the gun out of my grip. But I was standing on top of him, and my stripper’s legs were strong from years of pole dancing. I began by kicking him in the back of his head. His natural reaction was to cover his head with his hands, but that brought the gun out from underneath him. I began kicking at his gun hand, my bare toes banging into his wrist and fingers until finally he released what I wanted and cowered in a fetal position beneath me. He was losing strength, and fast.

  When I reached down to pick up the gun, more shots rang out.

  Laura had slumped backwards onto the kitchen table, both hands grabbing her left side where a dark-red stain appeared on her lavender shirt. The gunman was breathing heavily as he surveyed the room. His partner was down and out, he realized, and when he saw me holding his gun, he didn’t hesitate. The shot rang out, but not before Dan barreled into the man with all of his two hundred eighty pounds, knocking the man back into the countertop. He still had the gun, though, and trained it directly at Dan.

  I squeezed. The man looked confused for a second and realized that the shot had come from me. He grabbed at his chest. I squeezed again, hitting him right at the same spot, driving a hole through the center of his hand. He tried to raise the gun once more, but Dan was all over him now, his nearly three-hundred-pound frame thrusting the bad guy’s half-dead body to the floor. The gun slipped away, almost an afterthought.

  Dan stood up, huffing and puffing. “He’s dead,” he said. And then he rushed over to his wife who was looking increasingly pale. He held her head in his hands as she tried to support herself against the table.

  A thought occurred to me. “There was just an ambulance across the street,” I said. “Maybe they’re still there.”

  I ran out of the kitchen into the living room where the front door was. I never saw it coming.

  From my left side, someone jumped on top of me and started pulling wildly at my hair. The blow knocked the wind out of me, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. It was a sickening feeling, sucking at wind to no effect, barking like a seal all the while. And then it came back gradually, and I pulled at the hands that had made it their business to rip apart my scalp.

  They were not strong hands, I realized. The fingers had sharp nails, but they surrendered under my superior strength, and when I had wrested most of them off of my head, I backed myself hard into the wall, hoping to crush my assailant behind me. If I had weighed three hundred pounds, it would have worked, but I didn’t have enough momentum to make much of a difference. The hands held on. I tried again, harder this time, and I heard a little thunk and then a cry. It was an unmistakably feminine cry.

  I spun around to see that Dan had arrived, and he was taking us in with utter perplexity. My attacker had backed off for a second, breathing heavily and regrouping, but now she went after me again, a surprisingly strong thrust that pushed me halfway into the kitchen.

  “What are you doing here?” Dan asked.

  “She’ll destroy the church!” she shrieked, pointing at me. She had looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite put it all together until that moment. It was Lisa from one of our card-counting teams. She was the one who’d seemed so normal, almost in a June Cleaver sense. Husband, kids, conservative haircut. Now she was looking all over the place, half crazed, and then her eyes focused, and she darted for the countertop and grabbed a scary-looking butcher knife from a wooden knife block stand. She ignored the fact that a woman was dying on the kitchen table. Her focus was exclusively on me.

  She lunged at me, and I parried, but she kept herself between me and the other knives in the block. I wondered what Dan had done with the guns, but I couldn’t see them anywhere, and Dan didn’t seem to have either of them. I shot him a searching look as if to tell him to get his act together, but he seemed dumbfounded by the whole thing. Lisa came at me again, and I barely whirled out of the way, crashing into the countertop in front of the sink. That one was too close, I thought. My eyes scanned the room for the guns, but they must have been under the table. Dan kept darting his gaze between the two of us and his wife. Apparently, he was too stressed out to do anything useful to help.

  Lisa had me pegged against the counter in front of the sink. I discreetly dropped my left hand behind me to feel around, hoping for a knife or at least a fork, but my fingers promptly landed in a casserole of thick, room temperature goop, which had to be the four-day-old chicken casserole I’d stumbled into on my way in. Lisa was breathing heavily, weighing her next move. She knew that if she lunged for me, Dan would have an opening to either escape or try to tackle her.

  I sensed she’d made a decision to come after me, so I was out of time. My right hand reached down into the other sink and fumbled around. No knives. There was a hard, round surface, though, and I snuck a quick peek over my shoulder to see what it was. It had a handle. It would have to do.

  She came straight at me, a crazed look in her eyes, the knife held at an ominous angle towards my neck. I tried to stay still, to give her a clear target, like a matador luring a bull straight toward himself, and when she was so close that I could feel her breath, I pulled up with all my strength and hoisted the contents of the saucepan on her, sloshing the disgusting, moldy tomato sauce all across her face and neck a split second before she was at my throat. It didn’t stop her.

  She plunged the knife right at my throat, but apparently, the sauce had thrown her off enough that she managed only to graze the top of my shoulder. She was on me now with her full weight, smelling rank, a mixture of mold and garlic, pounding at me with her left hand, and trying to reach behind me to stab me in the back with the knife. Her mistake was getting too close.

  I tensed my unwholesomely strong leg muscles and then put my full strength behind the knee I leveled into her abdomen. The gasp that escaped her lungs was not unexpected. I had completely knocked the air out of her, and I pressed my advantage by twisting her right arm upwards and then bringing it down, hard, on the countertop. The knife fell out of her hand, sliding into the sink. She was done, I could tell, but I wasn’t in the mood to take any chances. I reached down and grabbed the knife and waved it at her.

  “Go sit at the table,” I ordered. She was still gasping for air, but she managed a small nod of her head and began shuffling over to the table. And that’s when things got even worse.

  “Drop it,” Dan said. He was pointing a gun directly at my throat.

  I dropped the knife and gulped.

  “We can end this on a positive note,” I said, trying to sound rational even though
my mind was spinning out of control. Again. Now it was my turn to start breathing heavily.

  “It has to be this way, Raven,” Dan said almost apologetically.

  “Why?” I asked instinctively. Even though a gun was pointed directly at me, I found myself genuinely curious.

  “Because it has to,” he said unhelpfully.

  “All this for the pastor?” I asked, incredulous. “He’s a crook, Dan, and I think you know that. He’s not worth killing for. And remember, he tried to have you murdered too!” This latter point had just popped into my head, and it seemed pretty compelling.

  Dan was shaking his head. “You don’t understand half of it, Raven.” The gun was still pointed at me, but his arm was wavering. Dan was not a killer, I remembered, and I kept thinking of some way to let him drop the gun without losing face. And then it came to me.

  “The money,” I said matter-of-factly.

  He cocked his head slightly. “What money?”

  “Owen was paying you off, wasn’t he? That’s what those five-thousand-dollar wire transfers were every month.”

  He frowned, seeming angry now. “Who told you about that?”

  Lisa, who’d found her way to the table, perked up.

  “Your pastor told me,” I lied. I didn’t want Dan to know I’d been snooping around in his bank account.

  Dan slumped, dropping his arm a bit so that the gun was pointed at my abdomen. I didn’t think he’d pull the trigger, but I wasn’t willing to wager my intestines on it at the moment, so while Dan tried to figure things out, I crouched down and grabbed the knife and hid behind the island.

  That proved a mistake.

  “Get up!” Dan roared. He couldn’t see me, but it would only take him two or three steps to find me. I guessed which way he’d come and then crawled in the opposite direction. It was a lucky guess. I managed to sneak up behind him, and I carved at his leg with the knife, eliciting a surprised shriek of pain from Dan. I jumped up and brought the knife down on his right wrist, causing the gun to slip out. I was much faster than he was, and he was bleeding in two places, so it was no trouble to grab the gun.

  I took three or four steps back and surveyed the room. Dan was his usual huffing-and-puffing self, fumbling around at the countertop to find a clean towel. Laura was still pale and was splayed halfway across the kitchen table, but I could see she was still breathing, her eyes following everything that had happened. Lisa, spattered with red sauce, had shrunk into herself. All eyes were on me.

  I held the gun on them with my right hand and fished out my phone. Somehow, I managed to dial 9-1-1 with my left thumb. When the dispatcher answered, I said we needed several squad cars and a couple ambulances. And then I hung up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  As a general rule, when the police arrive and find you holding a loaded handgun in a room with two dead bodies, there will be some ‘splainin’ to do. And probably a little extra if you’ve somehow managed to come out of the whole thing mostly unscathed.

  The police, quite reasonably I thought, believed the explaining should take place at the police station instead of a nasty kitchen full of rotting food. They also, just as reasonably, treated me like a murderer. I didn’t even mind when they cuffed me behind my back and led me to the rear of one of the squad cars, where the officer took great care to make sure I didn’t bump my head on the way in. I was just happy there were no cameras around. The others met a similar fate, hauled away in separate squad cars. Half the neighborhood had turned out to watch the spectacle.

  Fast forward an hour and a half, and the officers had uncuffed me and even provided me with some surprisingly good coffee to soften up the rock-hard muffin I’d politely been picking away at. At first, they were upset that I wasn’t confessing, but since I was telling them the kind of story no one would ever make up, they began to soften even more than a week-old muffin dunked in hot coffee.

  “Take a look at this,” I said, pulling out a piece of paper from my back pocket. I slid it across the table.

  “What am I looking at here?” asked the detective in charge, a pudgy bulldog of a man with hangdog jowls and a bald pate that was sorely in need of a fresh shave.

  “Every month, these two are getting five grand from a mysterious source. I guessed that it was the Reverend,” I said, “and they didn’t correct me.”

  “He’s paying them off. But why?” he asked, slurping loudly at his coffee.

  “Same as me, I guess. He probably assaulted her, too, but they were willing to be bought off. I wasn’t, by the way.” I added.

  Detective Johansen raised an eyebrow, surveying my disheveled appearance. “I gathered that,” he muttered. He was rolling the idea around in his mind. “Husband doesn’t work,” he muttered. “Needs the money. Makes sense.”

  “He doesn’t work?” I asked.

  “Nope. Told us he’s been unemployed for a couple years now.”

  I nodded, chastised. That was something I should have figured out for myself. “No wonder he needed that money,” I muttered. “When I accused Owen, I was threatening their steady stream of income.”

  “I’ll take this,” he said, picking up the bank statement. “Once you write all this up, you’re free to go.” He passed me a small typewriter and a stack of forms.

  “Should I include this muffin in my report?” I asked innocently.

  The junior cop sniffed, stifling a laugh. Johansen fixed him with a don’t encourage her kind of look. I guessed he had worked with smartass private eyes before, and apparently found it universally distasteful. I winked at the other cop. It would probably get him in trouble, but I’m certain it made his day.

  *

  It was even worse than I’d feared. The hospital told me that Carlos had checked out just hours before I arrived to visit, and when I drove over to his apartment, I knew with one-hundred-percent certainty that she was there catering to his every whim and all in all treating him like an overgrown baby. Which is exactly what he needed at the moment.

  I hesitated outside, wondering if I should even bother. My appearance would naturally create some stress and might even wake him up, and I didn’t want to give her even more ammunition to use against me. But I was there, so I knocked softly at the door.

  When the peephole darkened, I swear I could hear a loud, melodramatic sigh through the door. There was a long pause which made me think she wouldn’t even open it, but then it opened as far as the chain would allow, and her upset face appeared.

  “Go away!” she hissed. “He’s not seeing visitors.”

  I had planned to be as nice as possible, but with her, I just couldn’t fake it. “You’re not his wife, you know. You don’t control who comes and goes. This is his house!”

  She made some kind of gesture at me with her fingers and cursed in Spanish, and then the door slammed shut. There wasn’t anything I could do. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and there was no denying she had possession of Carlos.

  I tried to cheer myself by the fact that he was at home now, which must have meant he was on the mend. But it was no use. Even if he was getting better, he was with her. And what made it worse was that I had fallen into the oldest trap in the book. He’d been throwing himself at me for years, and I’d always managed to brush him off. But now that he was with somebody else, I wanted to be with him. Stupid jealousy, that’s all it was. Is all life like high school, I wondered?

  It was early evening, and I was polishing off some bratwurst and sauerkraut when the phone rang. It was Alex. Rather shyly, he invited me over to his house for dinner.

  “We had so much fun the last time,” I said, “how could I turn you down?”

  He cooked. I protested that I’d already eaten, but it was no use, especially since he’d sautéed two duck breasts and made mushroom risotto which he’d paired with a bottle of pinot noir from Oregon. He wasn’t shy about refilling my glass.

  “Are you trying to get me drunk?” I asked, hoping the answer was yes.

  He held up the
bottle which by now was empty. “What do you think?”

  And then he grabbed my hand and led me down to the basement wine cellar, something I had missed on my first visit. It was a deep vault-like refrigerator set to a cool fifty-five degrees, except instead of being fridge-sized, it was the size of a bedroom. It was stuffed to the gills with almost every slot filled and case after case stacked up on the floor. I wasn’t sure if it was the amazing wine or the fact that Alex had a cellar stuffed with amazing wine, but I was getting a fantastic vibe about Alex. He was so intensely pleasant to be with, a man who talked about more than sports, and yet, he also radiated a kind of power that was not attributable only to his wealth. The vibe had been building all evening, but right there in the coolness of the wine cellar, it flooded over me, and at that moment, I knew I needed the warmth of his body against me.

  He needed it too. He grabbed me and pulled me close, and then with almost unrestrained abandon, he lifted me up and pressed me against the wall, and after a few minutes of intense passion, he let me down, and we both made our way quickly upstairs to his bedroom.

  The next morning, I kissed Alex good-bye and headed out to my car, which was parked in front. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed movement, and by the time I had spun around, I saw him, camera in hand, snapping my photo. It was the little man the cops had picked up a few nights earlier. The turd. And then I remembered Alex’s paranoia, his worry that his wife had hired people to follow him. It all made sense now. The wife was going to get a few choice photos of a fake-boobed floozy leaving her husband’s house, and she’d use that as leverage in their divorce proceedings. But that wasn’t going to happen on my watch.

  I dropped my bag and sprinted at the man, who was taken aback. He paused for a second and then ran into Alex’s backyard, which was a mistake. I was wearing my cross-trainers, and I had something inside me that the turd lacked—the knowledge that I was protecting my man. I closed on him like a cheetah on a gazelle and then pounced on him, grabbing him around the neck.