So someone had come in the house that day I talked to Rosetta.
Her grip tightened on the gun. “What does this key unlock? Vikki?”
“I swear, Dee, I don’t know. I’ve never seen that key before.”
I thought more about the gun in Delilah’s hand. Maybe she wasn’t so different from Peggy and Roz. How many women own guns, really? If she kept one around for safety purposes, maybe hers didn’t have any bullets either. Maybe I could figure it out with a little probing.
“Nice gun, Dee,” I said.
“Don’t change the subject,” she said. “The key. The key.”
“Is that a Ruger or a Smith and Wesson?”
She eyed me warily for a moment. “Smith and Wesson.”
“So you’re a gun enthusiast?”
“I hate guns,” she said. “But I’m a single woman and there have been a lot of break-ins in my neighborhood.”
So she did keep it to scare robbers away. Well, it was worth a shot, pun intended. I gave a little laugh. “My friends just bought guns, but they only use them to look scary. They don’t actually keep bullets in them.”
Without a second of hesitation, Delilah lifted her Smith and Wesson and shot at the ceiling. Her eyes never left mine.
Vikki screamed and covered her ears, cowering. So did Moyle.
I have to say, the ease with which she shot that gun while staring me down was a wee bit bone chilling. And I had a sudden need to use the facilities.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Vikki, my ears still ringing.
“You should’ve asked me,” she said. “I could’ve told you that she kept that thing loaded.”
“So if none of us knows what that key unlocks,” Moyle mused, “what’s your plan now?”
Delilah began to pace in front of us. “We sit here ‘til it comes to you.”
I raised my hand. “Delilah?”
“What?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Now, the fact of the matter was, I really did have to go to the bathroom. That gunshot scared it right out of me. But I hadn’t forgotten the time I’d been held hostage by a crazy lady and had used the bathroom ploy to plan an escape. Not that I had any real bright ideas for escaping yet. I had to go too badly to concentrate on much else, but I figured I could do some real thinking tucked safely in a bathroom without a gun staring me in the face.
“What do you have up your sleeve?” she demanded.
“Nothing, honest. You scared the you-know-what out of me when you fired that gun.”
“Me too,” said Moyle.
“No, it didn’t,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, it did. I have to go to the bathroom. Number two.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why don’t you just time travel back to twenty-five twenty-five and do your number two there?”
He laughed. “That’s funny. Number two in twenty-five twenty-five.” He laughed some more. “But it doesn’t work that way. Too complicated to explain.”
I’m sure it was.
“I have to go worse than he does,” I said. “Let me go first.” I shoved an elbow into Moyle’s side. He got the point.
“Let her go first,” he wheezed.
“I never said I was letting anyone go,” Delilah answered.
“Tell you what,” I said, “let me go, and when I’m done, and my mind isn’t so distracted with, you know, other things, then I’ll look more closely at that key and see if I can figure out what kind of lock it goes to.”
She moved closer and pointed the gun right at my forehead. “Why not look at it now?”
“See,” I said, “I’m going to be blunt because you’ve forced me to be: if I dump a load in my pants here on the couch, I’m likely to be a lot more distracted that I am now.”
Her face flushed red with anger. “Fine!” she shouted. “Everyone up!”
“I don’t have to go,” said Vikki.
“Up!” Delilah shouted.
With the door closed and my pants down, I scanned Vikki’s small guest bathroom looking for some tool, or weapon I could use to overcome Delilah the Delirious.
Sadly, the bathroom lacked weapons, potential or otherwise. I had one hand towel, a bathmat, and a plastic hand soap dispenser at my disposal. I inspected the hand towel. Too short to effectively wrap around Delilah’s neck and choke her. Maybe I could squirt soap in her eye. That seemed risky. And the bathmat was just bathmat. No amount of imagination could turn that into a self-defense mechanism.
Self-defense.
Hm.
Now, I hadn’t taken that self-defense class with Roz and Peggy, but they had told me about soft targets—soft spots on the body. Small amount of force, good amount of pain. That’s why Roz had boxed Red in the ears. She’d shown me several ways to attack the eyes, the ears, the throat and the groin. I was thinking I could go for Delilah’s throat. I wouldn’t know if I didn’t try, right? I finished my business, took a deep breath, and turned the doorknob.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Thank you, Dee,” I said, opening the door. “You don’t know how much better I feel.”
With a keen eye, I assessed the scene: Moyle was to my left standing against the wall, Vikki was standing next to him, and Delilah faced us, gun aimed and ready to pop anyone who tried something funny. I was about to try something, but hopefully it wouldn’t be funny. And hopefully it wouldn’t be deadly. I looked at the stairs behind Delilah, gasped and shouted, “Oh my, God!”
Yes. I really did that. And you know what? It worked.
I didn’t waste any time. The minute her head began to turn I pulled back my arm and got my knuckles ready for a hard jab to her throat. Then I prayed like mad that my unpracticed moves would prove skillful enough to bring her down.
I should have prayed harder.
Or practiced harder.
Because just as swiftly as my knuckles flew at her, Delilah had worked some kind of dark wizardry on me and womp! wump! thwat! I was on my back, out of air, and possibly blind in my left eye.
I gasped for a breath and rolled into a fetal position.
“Again,” Vikki said. “You should have asked me first. I would have told you she’s trained in jiu jitsu.”
I coughed. “Lesson learned. Run everything by Vikki.”
Somehow, Delilah had maintained magical control of her firearm during the deft jiu jitsu maneuver. “Now I don’t want to kill you...” she said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, deciding to finish her sentence, “and I don’t wanna be dead.” Even under the direst circumstances, I find myself quoting movies. Delilah set me up perfectly for the Danny Glover line from Silverado. It just tumbled out. And I managed an exceptional Danny Glover imitation, if I do say so myself. Even writhing on the floor in pain.
“Silverado,” Moyle said. “I love that movie.”
“Oh?” I asked. “You said you’d never seen a movie.” I looked up at Delilah. “Can I get up?”
“Next time I shoot.” She fired a shot on the floor right next to my foot.
“Okay, okay!” I screamed. “I won’t try anything else. I promise.”
“Help her up,” Delilah said to Moyle and Vikki.
For the next hour we sat on the couch while the flesh around my eye swelled. Delilah sat in a chair across from us, and for that hour all we did was stare at that flippin’ key. It was small, but not terribly so. And silver. It looked a little too large to be a key for a standard lock like you’d put on a locker for a self-storage unit, but quite honestly, that was the only idea I could come up with.
Vikki said she had no idea if Cecil had a self-storage unit or not, but suggested that Delilah call around to some local places and ask. Which she did. But they were all closed.<
br />
Now the thing is, I was pretty aware of how much time had passed, and I knew that my four friends and the A/C man had all arrived at my house and had been waiting for about twenty minutes, at least. I figured it was only a matter of time before they got suspicious that I’d followed my own clues. They would quickly make their way back here, angry and feeling betrayed.
Vikki, not knowing this, had been trying to talk Delilah into giving up.
“I told you,” Delilah said, “I’m in too deep. I killed a man, and I have hostages. My only way out is to kill you three and flee. Then no one knows I killed Cee Cee, but I’m still stuck with a stupid key that gets me absolutely nowhere.”
“But at least you won’t go to jail,” Moyle said.
“Really?” I asked. “Whose side are you on? You keep switching.”
He shrugged. “I’m getting tired. And I’m hungry.”
“You could plead insanity,” Vikki said. “It’s a very workable defense. I researched it. It works better for women than for men, and you’re likely to get released from the institution sooner. Your work situation sent you off the deep end—that’s how your lawyer would argue it.”
“I’m not insane,” she said.
I wanted to argue that point, but my throbbing eye socket was a constant reminder not to push Delilah Cleveland too far.
We all grew quiet again and stared at the key as it lay on the coffee table in the center of the room.
“Silverado,” Moyle whispered to me after a time.
“What?”
“You watch it much?”
“Enough,” I said, too distracted because I was listening for an angry knock on the door.
“Next time you watch it, look for me. I twisted once and wound up on the set. They were glad for my knowledge of the old west. They let me be an extra.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Did I hear a car drive up?
“I’m in the bar scene.”
“Okay,” I answered. I found humoring him worked best and kept him the quietest. Never mind there were probably ten or fifteen bar scenes in any western. Voices. I think I heard voices...
Ding-dong! And the sweet sound of the doorbell ringing.
Sadly, I was closest to Delilah. She jumped from her chair, grabbed hold of my t-shirt at the neck, and yanked me to the front door with her, telling Vikki and Moyle that I was a dead woman if they moved even a centimeter.
She didn’t like what she spied through the peephole. I could tell by the way she yelled “Shit, shit, shit!” in my ear and jammed the barrel of the gun into my back ribs.
“Don’t make a sound,” she said.
I blame curiosity for making me break her rule. “Who is it?” I whispered. I mean, I had assumed it was my four new weirdo friends, but her reaction didn’t seem to fit. Maybe it was my four new friends with a submachine gun. That would make more sense. Not that they’d have a submachine gun, but her reaction to the submachine gun.
Ding-dong! The doorbell sounded again. Delilah went from mildly crazed to downright hysterical. She yanked on my t-shirt again, spinning me and then pushing me toward the sliding glass doors. Vikki and Moyle were perched on the edge of the couch looking helpless.
“Open it!” she shouted at me. I didn’t argue.
Out on the deck, she pushed me with the gun while choking me with my own t-shirt twisted around my neck. She pushed me down the stairs that led to the path out to Vikki’s dock and boat.
I couldn’t see her face now since I was in front of her, but I imagined she was foaming at the mouth.
We were just a few feet from the dock when I heard a man’s voice shout from the deck. “Delilah Cleveland! Put your gun down! This is the police!”
The police? How did the police know to come?
Delilah froze, but only tightened her grip on my t-shirt collar. I tried to put my own fingers between my throat and the collar to get some air into my lungs before I passed out.
“I said, put your weapon down!” the policeman shouted again.
I couldn’t help but think that this was the exact reason that cops should patrol in groups of four or five. Maybe even six. Six cops in a minivan so at times like this, see, Delilah could have been surrounded instead of just being yelled at by one lousy uniform from twenty feet away on a deck. Is that really too much to ask as a citizen?
The ground was starting to wobble under my feet and my vision tunneled. I gasped and gurgled and tried to beg for Delilah to loosen her grip, but all that came out was a sound that reminded me of Indiana Jones coughing up a hairball.
My knees buckled. I knew the end was near. My vision was narrowing to a pinpoint.
Then I thought I heard a woman’s voice.
No.
No, it was two women’s voices. From the bushes on the bank of the lake came two of the most beautiful women’s voices I’d ever heard.
Peggy said, “My gun is bigger than yours, lady.”
And Roz said, “Mess with my friend, you mess with me!”
Delilah didn’t release her hold on me. I gasped for air.
Somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, I remembered telling her my friends carried guns without ammunition.
The end was near.
I attempted to claw at Delilah’s arm, but was too weak.
The bushes rustled violently.
I fought to hang on. I had girls to raise. A husband to love. A dog to...
Wait.
Where was Puddles?
Pandemonium erupted from the thicket. A din of poodle yaps and duck quacks filled the air.
“Duck!” someone shouted.
A shot was fired.
The shirt collar constricting my throat loosened.
My face hit the ground and the blackness took over.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Puddles was unscathed, but the duck took a shot to the wing. Animal control arrived and bandaged him up. He’d survive, the nice man said. He just needed a little time to mend. I was grateful for that duck. He buzzed Delilah on his flight from the bushes, causing her to release her grip on the collar of my shirt. The duck who’d dunked me eventually saved my life.
The cop was furious with Roz and Peggy for taking matters into their own hands, but he had enough on his plate with Delilah that he mostly just grumbled and gave them angry cop eyes every time he saw them.
I was busy returning to the conscious world on Vikki’s couch.
“He said he’s considering charging us with impeding justice,” Peggy said. “We didn’t impede justice. We’re the ones who called the police in the first place. And that nutcase might have killed you if we’d waited around for him to tackle her with his shouting.” She rolled her eyes. “This is the police,” she mocked in a baby voice. “Put your weapon down. Sheesh. He needs to take our self-defense class and learn a few things.”
“Why did you call the police anyway?” I asked.
Roz rubbed at her wrist. “There were five people waiting for you on your front step for over twenty minutes. I decided to see what was up. The minute that Russian lady opened her mouth I knew you were in trouble.”
“She’s Slovakian,” I corrected. “You call her anything else and she’ll hiss on you.”
“I called the police and told the dispatcher that I was afraid my friend was in trouble. She wasn’t very helpful until I told her your name, then she said she’d send a patrol car immediately. I called Peggy and we rushed over. We got here just after the police car.”
“It’s good to know my name gets things done,” I said, rubbing my raw neck.
I looked around for Moyle. “Where is Moyle?” I asked Vikki.
“Outside,” she said, handing me a cup of tea with honey. “With the others.”
“They�
�re here?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Peggy said. “They’re here, alright. So, is there really a winning lottery ticket?” she asked.
I shrugged. Ah, the honey felt good on my throat going down. “Cecil told Delilah there was. Only, we still don’t know where. All we have is a key.”
“There he is,” Vikki said, as Moyle stepped into the living room.
He picked the key up from the coffee table. “Finally I can say it,” he said. “I know what this key unlocks,” he said.
I bolted upright. My head swam and my swollen eye throbbed. “You knew all along?”
He nodded. “Sure I did.”
“She almost killed me. Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Nah. I knew you don’t die today. We were safe.”
That was not at all reassuring.
“This is the key to his bike locker at the Peach Tree metro park and ride,” he said.
“He had a bike?” Vikki asked.
“Not anymore. It was stolen. He was very proud when he rented the locker. He showed me the key the last time I saw him. We joked because it’s locker number twenty-five and I’m from the year twenty-five twenty-five.” He smiled proudly.
Roz and Peggy exchanged glances.
“I’ve never seen a bike locker,” I said. “Is it weatherproof? Could he hide the ticket there safely?”
“Oh, sure,” Moyle said, nodding. “Definitely.”
Vikki looked nervous. “What if we really find the ticket and it’s the winner? We just saw what people do for money.”
“Peggy,” I said, “did I hear that you have your gun with you?”
“She’s here,” Peggy patted her quilted purse.
“Me too,” said Roz.
“I think I have a safe way to handle this,” I told Vikki.
“I don’t have any ideas,” she said. “So I’ll go with yours.”
Dead Man Stalking (Barbara Marr Murder Mystery Series Book 5) Page 12