Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries)

by Diane Patterson

  He had a gun in his right hand. A Kel-tec P-32. Small, black and silver, and a real impediment to us finding an amicable solution. It had to go.

  I jumped off the bureau and kicked him hard, once, in the stomach. He tried to raise his right arm toward me. I reached out and slammed his hand up against the top of the handrail, bending his wrist backward against the wood.

  He wouldn’t let go.

  So I dug into the exposed flesh of his wrist with my thumbnails, using as much force as I could. If slashing his wrist was the only way to do it, then in through the tendons it was. It’s also a move that hurts like hell, the receiver slightly more than the giver.

  Sabo let out a series of expletives as his fingers eventually loosened their grip on the gun’s handle. I shoved the back of his hand against the handrail and used my fingers to tip the gun over the side of the railing.

  Whereupon he managed to kick me and I knocked backward into the wall, the back of my head slamming against the sheetrock. While I tried to regain my balance, he scrambled off the floor and rammed into me, his forearm against my throat.

  My head already hurt. So I slammed my forehead into his, shoving him back just enough that I got his arm off of me.

  He rushed me again and I leaned back, letting most of his momentum rush past me. Then I planted my legs and shoved forward, pushing him backward, toward the top of the stairs.

  He grabbed my arms and pulled me along with him.

  I slammed onto him, my elbows hitting his torso, and we slid down the staircase, me riding him like a kid riding a flattened box down a snowy hill. At the bottom, his head hit the landing first, and he used the leverage to throw me off of him and into the wall. I managed to avoid having my ear pinned between my skull and the base floor trim.

  He crawled off the bottom of the stairs and looked around the edge of the steps toward the kitchen.

  The gun. He was looking for the gun.

  Despite my deep need to take a breather or vomit again, I heaved myself up and launched myself over the side of the railing, landing on Sabo’s back. He crashed to the ground, me once again on top of him. On the one hand, this stopped his progress.

  On the other hand, I was certain the stitches in my side had opened up.

  And his hand was about three inches from the gun. His entire body stretched toward it, taking me along for the ride.

  I slammed my fist on the back of his wrist and then dug one of my thumbnails into his eye and pushed.

  “Just stop, okay? Stop. Moving. I will fucking kill you, here and now. Stop.”

  His body stopped moving, but it was a feint. Every quiver told me he was waiting for an opening.

  “Stand down.” I pushed my fingernail into his eye socket a tiny bit further. Blood from where I’d scraped my hand after my jump smeared across his cheek. “Bend your right arm back here. Come on, do it.”

  He couldn’t. His arm was shaking with adrenaline, which was only right and normal.

  I took my hand off his eye and pounded the back of his shoulder blade as hard as I could. Which shook him up enough that his arm dropped against the floor. Which gave me enough time to dive for the gun.

  I grabbed it, and somersaulted forward, and then I twisted around and onto my stomach. He was preparing to lunge at me.

  Aiming from my prone position, resting on my elbows, wasn’t ideal. But we were close enough that I’d take out a nice chunk of some part of him without much effort.

  “I know how to use this. Also, I have no philosophical objection either to you dying or me being the one to kill you. So sit yourself against that wall and stop moving.”

  It took eons for him to finally choose the side of the wise and decide I was serious. His body moved like it was made of sludge and he set himself up against the wall, staring at me. Waiting for me to throw down the gun and maybe burst into tears about how horrible all this violence was.

  Instead, I jackknifed my body, hips rising, legs drawing underneath, until I could get myself into a sitting position. The gun stayed trained on him the whole time. In case he thought I wasn’t serious.

  “We have somewhere between five and twenty minutes before Los Angeles’s finest get here.”

  A smirk ghosted across his lips.

  “You’re not going to get out of this one this time. I recently had a conversation with Detective Samuel Gruen. You know him, I believe. Anyhow. He’s kind of tired of your bullshit. You’re dragging down the name of the rest of the force, and given the problems the LAPD’s had recently, you get an A for effort.”

  Sabo stared at me, panting.

  I knew what he was going to do, a second before he did it. He gave off some involuntary signal, whatever it was. Did he flex his fingers? Did his eyes flash to the side for a second? Lick his lips? He did something, and my brain translated that into: he’s going to go for it.

  He lurched his body forward, and I aimed at the stained-glass lamp that stood by the coat closet, maybe six inches in front of where his left hand would land. Maybe five inches. Anne’s uncle had given her the lamp as a housewarming gift. I pulled the trigger. The stained-glass lamp exploded. So did the drywall behind it. Sabo cowered, protecting himself from the spray of glass and plaster.

  The Kel-tec had nice handling. Good choice on his part. Loud, though.

  I swung the gun back to his face.

  He scrambled back to the wall opposite.

  “I know how to use these things.” My feet pushed me backward until my back hit the doorframe of the entrance into the kitchen. “Your death is not a moral issue for me, you moron. In fact, the smart money says I would be helping humanity in my own tiny way. So we’re going to sit here, and, while we sit here, you’re going to explain a few things. Like what the hell you’re doing here at Anne’s house.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I have the gun,” I said slowly.

  The sound of his jaw grinding shut was audible in the foyer.

  “You held a gun at my friend Anne. That makes me want to hurt you in delicate places. Talk and keep going until I tell you that you can stop.”

  He laughed and shook his head.

  I aimed the gun at his foot. “I not only can cripple you for life, I will. So talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Why did you kill Courtney?”

  “I didn’t kill her! I loved her!” His voice was hoarse with desperation. “She was everything to me.”

  “Funny way of showing it.”

  His whole body shook like he was a rag doll in the grip of an invisible giant. “Sometimes she made me crazy. But I loved her. And she came back. She came back to me and now she’s dead.”

  “So why did you kill her?”

  “I didn’t, you stupid bitch!” he yelled again, his eyes wide as he stared at me. “She came back to me and we were going to be a family together. She was going to be on TV again and we would have our family.”

  “So who did kill her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” Sabo yelled. “I’ll kill whoever did it, I swear to God.”

  “Maybe Hitchcock did it.”

  Sabo muttered under his breath. “That stupid prick.”

  “Can’t be that stupid. You do business with him.”

  “He knows his shit about money. He didn’t know anything about Courtney.”

  I wondered what Sabo truly knew about Courtney. “He drove her to the motel that afternoon.”

  The look on his face was tragic and amusing all at once. “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t. She wouldn’t have—”

  I nodded. “She left her purse and keys in my car and didn’t even notice until I called her about it. He took her to her motel room. What do you think happened?”

  “She loves me!” he screamed.

  “Did you know Hitchcock was paying her off, Roger?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “She lied to him, said it was his. I didn’t care. Easy money. More for both of us.”

  “Said what was his?”

&nb
sp; “The baby,” Sabo said. “It wasn’t. It was mine. My family. And she was back.”

  Was that the reason Courtney had left Los Angeles after the show ended? She’d had a baby and told a couple of men the baby was theirs and collected money from all of them.

  And with my attention elsewhere for a fraction of a second, Sabo moved.

  He jumped up and flung himself at me, knocking me back against the wall. His knee pinned the gun and my hand to the floor. Then he pulled his fist back and hit me hard.

  In the side.

  Where he’d stabbed me a few days ago.

  Oh, Ares the magnificent, I thought, please let the endorphins kick in before I pass out from the pain.

  I managed to bring my other hand up and sock him in the side, which moved him just enough for me to get my knee up underneath and kick him back. He launched himself toward me again. I brought the gun up and held it with both hands. As he landed, I jammed the gun up under his jaw, hard, into the esophagus. It dug into the soft tissue and he started choking. Right over me. He had bad breath.

  “We can make this look like self-defense,” I said. “I’ll be the ‘self’ in that arrangement. You, on the other hand, will be dead.”

  I had to tell myself to wait for him to make the choice. I was mildly worried at how badly I wanted him to choose wrongly.

  When I was sixteen, I killed someone. Since then, I had let another person die—to be fair, he’d been trying to kill me, so it had been him or me and I’d chosen me. And on other occasions—too many other occasions—I’d watched people die. Not once did I fling myself forward to try to save them.

  Life and death. There are no takebacks if something goes wrong.

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “Nod if you’d like to proceed with dying. Oh, you can’t nod. Move any muscle at all and that’s how we’ll do it.”

  He stayed absolutely still. The feeling of disappointment worried me briefly.

  “Okay, good. Get off of me, and sit in that corner.”

  He crawled backward, still trying to cough away the bruise I’d left on his throat. The gun had left a red, angry imprint on his skin.

  As I slowly rose to my feet in front of him, I whispered, “Don’t even breathe hard.”

  The front door shook with violent banging.

  The cavalry was here.

  I wondered if Gruen was with them.

  “Please don’t shoot!” I yelled, with as much waver in my voice as I could manage. “Oh God, please don’t shoot!”

  Sabo was staring at me, his mouth open.

  “Was that good?” I whispered. “Was I believable? Don’t fucking move.”

  I threw the gun into Anne’s living room and then opened the door to two uniformed police officers who had their guns drawn. I put up my hands, bloody palms out, showing they were empty. I ducked, submissive, and crouched away from the one coming through first.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here!” I yelled. “He’s there, he’s there!”

  “This bitch is crazy!” Sabo yelled.

  I looked at him and raised one eyebrow. Then I painted on a look of terror when I turned back to the cop. “He tried to kill us! His gun’s in there!” I waggled my arm at the living room—and suddenly it was everything I had to keep my arm in the air. Every muscle hurt. At the moment I wasn’t quite sure how I was standing, let alone pointing things out. “I threw it in there! He was going to kill us.”

  “Who else is here?” one of the cops asked.

  “Anne. Her name’s Anne. This is her house. She’s upstairs. Check on her! Check on her, please!”

  The cop put his hand on the stair railing and then looked up. “Is that her?”

  Anne was leaning over the railing by her bedroom and looking down at us.

  No.

  She was staring at me.

  Like she’d never seen me before.

  “Yes, that’s her,” I said.

  * * *

  Nathaniel Ross didn’t talk to me. He didn’t even look at me. And I knew the drill: don’t talk to anyone.

  From the moment he showed up and assured the officer in charge that any questions would have to be directed toward his office and not toward his client, any time he appeared to be looking at me, he was in fact focused on a spot over my shoulder. I put my hand out toward him and he shook me off. Even the lieutenant in charge of the operation seemed to notice Nathaniel’s hostility.

  But he kept me out of police custody anyhow, despite what he clearly wanted to do. He seemed to be calculating how hard it was to kill someone and dump their body in the desert.

  While Nathaniel did legal-fu on various officers, I tried to talk to Anne, who was holed up in the master bedroom upstairs. Every time I asked to visit her, the police came between us. To be more exact, they didn’t intervene so much as provide a convenient excuse for Anne not to talk to me. While Nathaniel shot me glares, Anne refused to meet my gaze at all. Every time I approached her she turned her back and huddled away from me.

  I stayed downstairs, in the living room.

  Nathaniel talked to the lieutenant in charge. He had to do that an awful lot whenever I was involved in things, it seemed. When the lieutenant left to take a call, I sidled up to Nathaniel.

  “Where’s Anne going?” I asked.

  “Her parents’ house,” he told me.

  Anne’s parents were rich. She wasn’t very close to them, despite letting them help her buy this house. This lovely house that I’d put a bullet into. No wonder she wasn’t meeting my eyes.

  “I thought maybe she’d come with me.”

  “Yeah. That’s not in the plans.”

  I nodded. Anne was avoiding me as hard as she could. “Let’s go.”

  “Where’s your car?” Nathaniel asked.

  I began to lift my arm to point to the general vicinity of the blue French Normandy house that loomed over Anne’s backyard, but my arm seemed strangely loath to cooperate. I shook my head. “A couple of streets away.”

  The most unfortunate thing about Anne’s property was that there was only one way out of it: from the front and onto the street.

  Nathaniel peered out through the living-room curtains to the cameras that had been set up on the street outside. “Let’s see if we can get out of here without getting on TV.”

  “Isn’t your raison d’être to be on TV?” I joked.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. Then he yanked me by the arm—which hurt—and pushed me into the tiny powder room, which was characterized by floral everything: sunflowers on the wallpaper, flowers in the vase on the toilet tank cover, a series of flowers lacquered on wooden plaques that lined the wall by the light switch. The mirror on the medicine cabinet revealed what everyone else had been looking at: I looked like shit. The cut at my hairline had opened. I had a scrape on my temple. I probably had a few bruises working their way to the surface on my throat and shoulders.

  He wadded up a handful of tissue and ran it under the faucet. He lightly dabbed my forehead. I winced. He opened the medicine cabinet. It was empty. “Okay, let’s see if you’re bleeding anywhere else.”

  “I always knew you wanted to get my clothes off.” I gripped the hem of my shirt and tried to pull up, but my back muscles spasmed. I couldn’t lift my hands more than an inch.

  “Relax,” he said, and he pushed my hands down to my sides. Then he slowly pulled my shirt up to my breasts before turning me around. Checking me on all sides. An awkward activity made worse because of how small the powder room was. Every time I brushed up against him I winced.

  He gently lowered the hem of my shirt. “You have to go to a doctor,” he said.

  “All they’re going to do is give me Vicodin,” I said. “And while I appreciate that sentiment mightily, I already have some at home.”

  “You could have internal—”

  “I probably would have lost consciousness already. I’m also certain I didn’t break or fracture anything.”

  “You can barely move right now.”

  I s
hrugged. “Because the adrenaline’s worn off.”

  He turned my head from side to side, checking me over again. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Anne was in danger.”

  “And your first move is to break into her house and confront the guy? A guy with a gun?”

  “I didn’t know for certain there was a problem.”

  His grin didn’t indicate much amusement. “This is me, Drusilla. Come on. You knew better than to use the front door.”

  “I’m very observant.”

  He stared at me. He gave me that vibe I sometimes get from Stevie, where she’s computing the 4096 possible responses and needs to pick from amongst the two or three best ones. “Next time, call the police and walk away.”

  “She would have been dead by the time they got here.”

  “You could have got yourself killed. You could have got her killed. Or you could have killed him. Are you fucking stupid or something?” He slammed his hand against the wall and the entire series of lacquered flowers lifted and dropped in unison. “You have a death wish.”

  I thought about that.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I’ll save you the sob story about my poor unhappy childhood and point out that not only did I save Anne’s life, I kicked that son of a bitch’s ass. He gets no more Get Out of Jail Free cards.”

  Nathaniel leaned toward me. “Courtney’s still dead, and nothing you can do will change that.”

  “This wasn’t about her! It was about Anne!”

  “Everyone’s best guess is Sabo killed Courtney. And no matter what you do or you don’t do, she’s still dead.”

  I suddenly realized I was crying. When had that started? “He didn’t. He didn’t kill her. I don’t know who did, but he didn’t.”

  “Okay, he didn’t do it. Who cares? It’s none of your concern. Do you get that? None of your business. Sabo isn’t suing you for assault anymore. You don’t need to worry about him or Courtney or any of these people, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.”

  We finally left the powder room and Nathaniel took me into the living room. Through the windows we could see a couple of cameramen. Usually that sight has Angelenos come running.