Deadly Gamble

by Linda Lael Miller

  I backed through a flowerbed, hoping the Volvo and I were hidden from view in the shrubbery.

  The senator’s Jaguar purred to a stop on the other side of the gates. By electronic magic, they swung open.

  I gunned the engine the instant I thought there was enough space to pass through and shot past the Jag, flipping on my headlights as I streaked toward the road.

  Glancing into the rearview mirror, I saw the taillights of the Jag, still sitting in front of the open gates.

  After that, I didn’t look back again.

  If I had, I might have seen something important, but I wasn’t exactly in the zone when it came to taking sensible precautions. I just knew I needed to get out of there, fast.

  I headed straight for the cemetery. I’m not sure why—just some instinctive need to be close to Lillian, I guess. I wished she’d appear to me, the way Nick had, and answer all the questions she’d never been willing to deal with in life. All the while, I knew she wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to get that lucky.

  There were no gates at the graveyard. At the time, fresh from my break from Casa Larimer, I saw that as a good thing.

  I drove past my parents’ graves and pulled over a stone’s throw from Lillian’s. I shut off my headlights, and realized for the first time that the moon was nearly full. The cemetery was bathed in an eerie light, shot through with shadows of tombstones and the occasional cottonwood.

  I got out of the car, picked my way gingerly over the rocks at the side of the one-lane road, welcomed the cool softness of the grass.

  A mound of raw dirt marked Lillian’s final resting place. Greer had ordered an elaborate Italian marble headstone off the Internet, but it would have to be carved and then shipped all the way from Carerra. Maybe by the time it arrived, the grass would have grown in like a green blanket over Lillian. Her grave wouldn’t seem so anonymous then, so new and exposed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I killed them?” I asked.

  A night breeze played in the treetops, and I thought I heard the call of a mourning dove. Something else, too—maybe traffic out on the main highway.

  I knelt next to the grave, sat on my haunches.

  “You wanted to protect me. I understand that. But it didn’t work, because the one person I can’t run away from is myself.”

  Another sound came then, so faint that I wasn’t sure I’d heard it at all.

  I turned to look behind me, and saw nothing.

  “Boomer?” I asked hopefully. Maybe he lived on the premises. That was it. He’d seen me drive in and, being the caretaker, come to investigate. Kids liked to party in cemeteries, and vandalism was probably a factor, too.

  I turned back to the grave, and that was when I saw the figure standing on the other side.

  Definitely not Boomer.

  Moonlight caught on the barrel of a pistol.

  “Geoff?”

  Laughter. Female laughter, low and throaty.

  I wondered crazily if my brother had turned transvestite during his years in the joint, but the shape wasn’t right. It was familiar, though.

  Everything will look better in the morning.

  “Barbara?”

  She’d been wearing a dark scarf or a hat. Now, she pulled it off with her free hand, letting her blond hair show in the moonlight.

  “You remembered,” she said. “I knew it for sure when I saw you on television today. You remembered.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t remembered what happened the night my parents were killed, but now, facing what I knew would be my own death, the floodgates opened in a rush of crimson and black images, like a video tape on fast-forward.

  I was five again.

  It was an ordinary summer night.

  I was lying on the floor, on my stomach, coloring in a mermaid’s tail in a book full of pictures.

  Dad sat at his computer. He was so proud of that bulky, mysterious machine, and his big fingers made a comforting clicking sound as they tapped the keys.

  Somebody knocked at the front door of the trailer.

  “Get that, will you, kid?” Dad said, without looking away from the flickering blue words on the screen of his TRS-80.

  I laid down my crayon, got to my feet, and hurried to unlock the screen door. Aunt Barbara came in, put a gloved finger to her lips.

  I was a kid. I was delighted that there was a surprise afoot.

  I barely noticed when Geoff slipped in behind her.

  Dad didn’t turn around. “Who is it?” he asked.

  Aunt Barbara put her finger to her lips again. Reached into her black shoulder bag.

  Everything happened quickly after that.

  Barbara pulled a pistol out of the bag, walked over to my dad and shot him point-blank in the back of the head.

  Blood splattered everywhere.

  Droplets of crimson gleamed on the pages of my coloring book.

  Before I could scream, Mom rushed in, eyes wide with horrified alarm. She was wearing a green bathrobe, and her freshly washed hair was wrapped in a towel. She was on the nightshift at the truck stop that week. She liked working those hours, because the tips were better.

  Barbara turned, fired the gun again.

  A bright red wound opened in my mother’s throat. Her eyes, vibrant with fear only a moment before, widened in disbelief. She landed hard on the floor.

  Geoff moved Dad’s inert, bloody body and plucked the floppy disk from a slot in the side of the computer. He didn’t seem to mind the gore covering him, soaking his clothes.

  Barbara dropped the gun. She went to stand over Mom, put her foot on the body, gave it a cruel little shake.

  I tried to scream again, but no sound came out.

  “Where’s the kid?” she asked.

  I’d taken refuge behind Dad’s easy chair, without being aware of moving at all, but I knew they’d find me soon.

  “She probably ran out the door when you shot Ron-the-Moron,” Geoff said lightly. “Don’t sweat it. She’s five years old, and scared shitless. Nobody will believe a word she says anyway.”

  I heard a siren shrieking in the distance.

  I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  Was it inside the memory?

  Or was it on the road leading to the cemetery, where I was looking up the barrel of Barbara’s gun?

  It was a strange, schizophrenic sensation. My mind had literally split in two; I was in both the past and the present at the same time.

  “Why?” I croaked, and the word popped me back to my adult self.

  Barbara stood rigid on the other side of Lillian’s grave.

  “Why?” I repeated. I’d gone past elemental fear now, into a rage black enough to kill from. “Why did you kill my parents?”

  “Because they were going to ruin everything,” Barbara said tersely. “Your father had come across some incriminating paperwork and made copies of it.” The night lay silent and weighted around us. I guessed I’d heard the siren in the other place, the long-gone trailer where Barbara Larimer had murdered my mother and father.

  I lunged at her. The gun went off.

  If I’d been shot, I didn’t feel it.

  We struggled.

  I heard the siren again, closer now.

  Barbara was strong for a woman who used a wheelchair most of the time, but I was stronger. I was straddling Barbara, and my hands were around her throat. I let go long enough to retrieve the pistol with my right hand. I pressed it into her forehead.

  “Tell. Me. Why.”

  Barbara swallowed. Maybe she was hoping the cops were on the way. And when they got there, I’d be the one arrested. It would be her word against mine, and it was no great leap to predict the winner.

  I cocked the pistol, which was a gamble, because I didn’t know enough about guns to be sure it wouldn’t go off. At the time, I didn’t give a damn.

  “Trash,” she choked out, “all of you. Money, money, money—that was all any of you cared about! And now that criminal is blackmailing me—”

/>   “Geoff,” I said. My ears were ringing, and my vision blurred. My voice seemed to come from somewhere other than my own throat. “You must have paid him to take the blame for the killings. Then he wanted more. They always want more, don’t they, Auntie Barbara? Those nasty poor people?”

  I don’t know why, but suddenly, I snapped again. Just like that, I was back in the trailer.

  Geoff and Barbara were gone.

  I crept out from behind the easy chair, knelt beside my mother, tried to wake her up. When that failed, I threw myself on her, sobbing soundlessly. I came away bloody.

  I heard a noise. They were coming back, my brother and my aunt.

  They’d remembered the gun.

  They’d remembered me.

  They would shoot me, the same way they’d shot Mommy and Daddy.

  I half crawled, half scrambled to the middle of the floor, where the gun lay.

  Picked it up. I didn’t know how it worked.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice, coming from the front door.

  I dropped the gun for the second time, fled along a dark corridor, through the kitchen, onto the covered back porch. I opened the dryer and curled up inside it.

  My back slammed hard into the ground, and I was in the graveyard again, only this time, Barbara was on top, and the barrel of the pistol dug hard into the base of my throat.

  “I should have killed you then, you little bitch,” she said. “I should have killed you then!”

  “Barbara.” Again, a man’s voice. I fought not to slip back into the past, where another part of my psyche was huddled, mute with terror, in that dryer.

  But this was a different voice. A familiar one.

  “Barbara, put down the gun.”

  I struggled.

  Barbara pulled the trigger.

  A click. A roar.

  The two sounds intermingled.

  I waited to swallow a bullet. To die the way my mother probably had, full of a frenzied desire to live, strangling on her own blood.

  Barbara toppled to one side.

  I lay still, gasping.

  I could be alive. I could be dead.

  I wasn’t sure which.

  Joseph loomed over me. “Are you all right?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  He retrieved Barbara’s gun, tossed it away. Crouched to check her pulse.

  “Mojo,” Joseph said. “Say something.”

  “Is—is she dead?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Are you hurt?”

  I ran a mental scan. The results were encouraging. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Did I just hear a siren?”

  “No,” he answered.

  I sat up. I was instantly dizzy, and rested my forehead on my knees, struggling to stay conscious.

  “Barbara Larimer killed my parents.” That weird, disjointed sensation came over me again. I wondered if there had been physical evidence to link her to the crime. Maybe, in some dusty box, forgotten in some evidence room, there were fibers, or hair samples. Back in 1983, forensic science as we know it was pretty new, and DNA analysis was considered speculative, and therefore inadmissible in court.

  I heard a crackling sound, realized it was a radio. “Backup,” Joseph said.

  “Roger that,” someone replied. “We’re rolling.”

  “Are you going to shoot me?”

  “I’d love to,” Joseph replied, “but I can’t think of an excuse right now. Being stupid and impulsive, alas, does not constitute just cause.” He flipped open a wallet, and a federal-looking badge gleamed golden in the moonlight. “DEA,” he said.

  My mouth dropped open. “Drug Enforcement?”

  “Yeah. We’ve been after the senator for years. You damn near blew about a decade of hard work tonight.”

  I stared at him. “You’ve been investigating Clive? But it was Barbara who—”

  “Your uncle ran a big-time cocaine operation, between Mexico and the U.S., back in his salad days. My predecessors suspected him, even then, but they couldn’t come up with any proof. When he married Barbara, she thought he was a prosperous businessman. Needless to say, she was not happy when she found out the real source of his money. Scourge on the family name, you know.” He looked down at Barbara’s dead body, and he seemed so detached that I got scared all over again. I was alone in a cemetery with this man, and he’d just shot a woman. So what if he’d flashed a badge? They’re easy to get. “Your dad evidently got the bright idea to tap Clive for enough to buy his own tire store,” he went on. “Barbara didn’t want the scandal, let alone the expense, so she offed him.”

  I fought back a swell of nausea. “Isn’t there a statute of limitations on drug running?” I asked. I was in shock, and having a hard time tracking. No choice but to play catch-up.

  Joseph nodded. “Yes, but some people connected with the operation turned up dead from very unnatural causes, and that kept the case viable.”

  I grappled with that for a few seconds. Then my attention shifted back to Barbara. “Don’t people like her usually hire hit men?”

  “That would have been an even bigger risk, for somebody like Mrs. Larimer. Cactus Bend is a small town, and people talk. After we found some random notes and cancelled checks—some of which were your uncle’s—the theory emerged that she’d hired your brother to take the rap. Most likely, once he’d spent what she gave him, he wanted more.”

  I heard cars racing up the cemetery road. Blinked in the glare of the oncoming headlights. It was my turn to nod. “She told me Geoff was blackmailing her,” I said. My breath caught as the implications of what Joseph had just said sank in. Clive had written some of the checks. “Are you saying my uncle knew Barbara had killed my parents? He knew it all the time, and covered it up?”

  Joseph gave me a pitying look. “We matched several of the blackmail payments to some of Larimer’s private accounts.”

  I absorbed that. Shifted emotional gears again. “He’s a senator. Why didn’t the opposition ever dig up any of this stuff?”

  “Until he decided to run for governor, Larimer was just another member of just another state legislature. Governors have a habit of running for the presidency, though, so the heat would have been on sooner or later.”

  “It’s been twenty-three years since the murders,” I said bitterly. “You sure took your sweet time wrapping this up.”

  “We didn’t have a lot to go on at first,” Joseph answered easily. “It took a while to get the official ball rolling, and even longer for me to be hired by the senator, then win his trust so he’d let me work as his bodyguard and personal assistant. When you showed up, I thought you were going to screw it all up for sure.”

  “That explains the rude remarks.”

  “Sorry,” Joseph said.

  Two cars screeched to a stop on the road, parking at angles behind the Volvo and a compact SUV. Imagine my surprise when Tucker got out of one of them, and made a beeline for us.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” Tucker answered. “Since I’ve got a badge and you don’t, I win.”

  Joseph and the other man conferred over Barbara’s body. A police car swept in, lights whirling.

  Tucker looked strange, standing in the red-and-blue flash.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “And you don’t have a badge, you damn liar.”

  He grinned, squatted beside me, pulled something from the pocket of his shirt. I saw my second fed shield of the evening.

  I squinted at it. Very convincing, but I was still wary.

  “Tucker Darroch,” Tucker said. “DEA.”

  I glanced at Joseph, who was busy with crime-scene stuff. Shifted my gaze back to Tucker. I probably looked skeptical.

  “Right,” I said.

  Tucker helped me to my feet. Unfortunately, my legs had gone to sleep, and I folded like a rag doll. He caught me.

  “You lied to me,” I said.

  “I told you I
worked Narcotics,” Tucker said, lifting me into his arms. “Close enough. And I really was with Scottsdale P.D.—once.”

  More cop cars screamed up the road.

  Tucker sat me sideways in the front seat of the Volvo.

  “You’re going to have to tell this story a lot of times,” he said, squatting to look up at me, “so if you don’t want to explain what you’re doing here, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe, I’ll understand.”

  I sighed. Where to begin?

  I started with the night Barbara Larimer shot my parents.

  Tucker listened without interruption, never looking away from my face.

  Cops came and went.

  Federal agents came and went.

  “Aren’t they going to remove the body?” I finally asked, when it was almost dawn and I was exhausted from giving my long, involved account. By then, Tucker had transferred me to a government car and wrapped me in a blanket. Boomer had arrived on the scene, and he brought us each a cup of coffee.

  “It’s a crime scene, Moje,” Tucker said quietly. “Pictures have to be taken, and somebody from the M.E.’s office will need to sign off before anything can be disturbed.”

  “Barbara would have shot me,” I said, though Tucker and I had been over that ground before. “She pulled the trigger. She actually pulled the trigger. The thing must have jammed.”

  Tucker stroked my hair. “It’s all over, babe.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were DEA?” I swallowed, and answered my own question. “Because you were investigating Bert.”

  Tucker looked away, looked back, said nothing.

  “That’s why you spent so much time hanging out at the bar.”

  Still nothing.

  I pressed on. “Why would Bert have trusted you in the first place? It doesn’t make sense. I can’t see him as a drug dealer, and even if he was, he thought you were in Narcotics. He’d have been stupid to open up to you.”

  “I wasn’t investigating Bert. I was after the people who stabbed him, and beat the hell out of Sheila.”

  “But—”

  “We made it look like I was on the take,” Tucker said reluctantly. “That’s why they trusted me. They operated out of the bar. Bert suspected it for a long time, but he wasn’t sure what to do. Things finally got too hot, and he called us.”

  “Did you get them? The guys who hurt Bert and Sheila, I mean?”