The Eleventh Hour

by Anina Collins

  “Okay, I’m sorry, Dominick. You’re right.”

  “I knew from the moment you moved here you’d be a problem. Then when it seemed like you were busy hiding out away from the world out here, I thought things would be okay. You see, Derek and the rest of my guys would never think for a second that I was up to something all those nights I was supposed to be on duty but I was nowhere to be found.”

  Alex nodded. “When you were at Geneva’s, right?”

  A low chuckle erupted from Dominick’s throat. “It’s not what you think, big city cop. I’m guessing you and Nancy Drew here think I killed her because we were sleeping together.”

  “That’s not why you strangled her?” Alex asked, clearly as confused as I was at hearing Geneva’s death hadn’t been a crime of passion.

  “No. Geneva got what she deserved because she was planning to do to me what she’d done to that idiot Jefferson Girard. Like I could ever be manipulated like that local yokel political clown.”

  Not understanding what he meant, I stupidly asked, “What are you talking about? Do you mean the business in Vermont?”

  He laughed again and pulled me tighter into him. “You are too clever for your own good sometimes, Poppy. You know that? But this time you only knew half the story. Too bad you’ll never know the whole story.”

  Alex’s eyes flashed fear for the first time since I’d known him and when he spoke, I knew he was struggling to keep calm. He didn’t sound like he always had when he spoke to me. There was a shakiness to his voice now.

  “You don’t have to do this, Dominick. There’s no point in killing her. Don’t…don’t do this.”

  Dominick said nothing to Alex’s suggestion, and then just when I thought all was lost, he pushed me hard toward my partner so I stumbled into his arms. Thinking he’d just made a huge mistake, I hurried to stand only to find Dominick’s gun now pointed right at Alex’s head.

  “Stay right where you are, big city. You’re right. There is a point in killing you, though. As popular as our little friend here is in Sunset Ridge, I doubt many people will believe her if she tries to say I held the two of you at gunpoint before putting a bullet in your head. You, on the other hand, your word might carry more weight.”

  I looked down at Alex and then back up at Dominick. “Nobody knows him in town, and they’d believe him before they’d believe me? Why?”

  “Now’s not really the time, Poppy,” Alex said in a tone that was a mix of fear and frustration.

  “Yes, it is,” I said as I looked down at him again and gave him a wink. What I was doing was a huge gamble, but when a crazy man had a gun at my partner’s head, all bets were off as to what would work to get us out of the situation.

  “Listen to him, Poppy. Now’s not the time.”

  I winked at Alex again and lifted my head to face Dominick. If I could buy us some time, maybe by some divine intervention or miracle, Derek would come back and find us being held by his brother.

  On the other hand, I might just anger the guy with the gun pointed at Alex. I couldn’t think like that now, though.

  “I want to know why anyone in Sunset Ridge would believe him over me. For God’s sake, I’ve lived here all my life. My family’s lived here for years. I write for the town’s newspaper, and you say the people in this town will believe him before me?”

  Dominick’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at me in confusion. “You aren’t really like the rest of us, Poppy. You’re already in your thirties, you’ve never been married, and you work for some two-bit version of Entertainment Tonight, so people think you’re a little weird.”

  I didn’t know which of those statements bothered me more—the slam about me being an unmarried woman in her early thirties or the implication that being gainfully employed, even if it was at a lame job, was a reason not to believe me.

  “You’re older than I am, and you aren’t married. Why does my not having a husband make me less credible?”

  “I guess you should have jumped on the chance to hook up with my brother way back when,” he said with a grin.

  “And as for my job at The Bottom Line, that should make me more believable, not less,” I argued, caught up in the moment and forgetting for a second that Dominick could pull the trigger anytime.

  “That’s your problem, Poppy. You’re always wanting to stick your nose in places where it doesn’t belong. Give a girl a college degree and she thinks she can do better than the police can.”

  “So that’s your problem with me? I’m smart and you feel inferior because of that?”

  Alex nudged my leg. “Now is not the time for this, Poppy.”

  I looked down and saw by the fear in his eyes he didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in my tactics. He had every right to worry, but I had to try something to keep Dominick from going through with killing both of us, and the one thing I knew about the Hampton brothers was they loved to talk.

  “Listen to him, Poppy. I have a gun pointed at his head. He understands what that means.”

  “Well, if you’re just going to shoot the two of us, at least explain why you did what you did. Why did you kill Geneva?”

  Slowly, his expression softened and a big smile spread across his face. “So that’s how you want to do it? Like they do in movies? Okay, Poppy. For old time’s sake since our families have been close for years, I’ll tell you why. And then I’m going to kill you both.”

  My heart clenched as he mentioned the closeness of our families. My father had no one else but me, and now Dominick wanted to take that away from him, someone who’d closed his bar during the football season and stood on the sidelines every Friday night to cheer him and Derek on.

  Well, if he thought I was just going to give in and be taken away from my father that easily, he had another thing coming. I didn’t know how, but I was going to get out of this alive, and I was going to be joined by Alex too.

  “Well, I’m all ears, as I’m sure my partner is. Tell us what we couldn’t figure out.”

  Dominick took a small step back while still keeping his gun pointed at Alex’s head and began his story. “You thought Geneva died because of some romantic thing between us, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, she and I were sleeping together, but we’d been doing that for years. We kept it pretty well hidden by meeting at a hotel in the next county, but then Geneva began insisting we meet at her house instead.”

  “Why? If you two didn’t want anyone to know, why take the chance that someone would see you?” Alex asked.

  Looking down at him, Dominick nodded. “See? This is a how men think. Females focus on nonsense like them not having the right lighting for doing their makeup at the hotel. I swear to God I wanted to kill her so many times when she was whining about that crap.”

  “Sounds like a match made in heaven,” I sniped.

  Dominick waved his gun toward Alex. “See? You know what I had to deal with. She’s the same way.”

  “Well, it’s our cross to bear,” Alex said somberly.

  Was he serious? I certainly hoped he was just playing along because if he wasn’t, I’d have something to say about it once we got out of this situation.

  “Can we get back to why you killed her and stop bashing on women for a moment?”

  Both men looked at me like I’d broken some unwritten rule, and I wondered if I’d pushed Dominick too far for once.

  “I was only speaking the truth. Geneva demanded we begin meeting at her house about four months ago, so since I really didn’t want to give up a good thing, if you know what I mean, I said okay, and we moved from a couple times a week at the hotel to a couple times a week at her house. Same time as always. Right around midnight.”

  “But this wasn’t just sex between you two, you said. Right?” I asked, still completely in the dark about what else Dominick and Geneva were doing together.

  “No. Sex was a nice benefit, but what we were doing was something even better. Geneva was blackmailing that dopey Jefferson Girard and we were shari
ng in the gains.”

  “Blackmailing him? About what? That thing in Vermont?” I asked.

  A low chuckle like a rumble exploded out of Dominick’s mouth and he threw his head back for just a moment before he caught himself and refocused on Alex and me. “No. That was nothing compared to what Girard was up to when he was in office. That thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the town, and our stupid council couldn’t figure out what was going on. We knew it was no use to tell them, so we took advantage of a situation and made a ton of green from that stooge.”

  From below me, I heard Alex ask, “Then why kill your partner in crime? The two of you were making money, so why stop now?”

  “I never wanted to stop, but leave to Geneva to ruin a perfectly good thing. I got to her house that night ready to hear how her last meeting went with Girard. Ever since he left office, she’d been having him meet her across town near Candy’s. She’d met with him to get another payment, but she didn’t want to talk about that. All she wanted to talk about was how unfair our agreement was. Like our sixty/forty agreement wasn’t good enough. I was the one who found out about his stealing. All she did was hold that damn thing in Vermont over his head.”

  “He didn’t even kill her sister. Did you know that?” I asked.

  He sneered and shot me a look of disgust. “Yeah. She did that to her own sister. If Girard wasn’t guilty of other things, he probably would have stood up to her and stopped everything we were doing. He had too much to hide, though, so we took advantage of that. Not that Geneva did much other than harp on him. I did all the work finding out what he’d been up to.”

  Dominick stopped for a moment and then sighed. “I didn’t go there planning to kill her that night. I just wanted to enjoy a night with her like we always did. Why couldn’t she just be happy with that? Why did she have to get greedy?”

  “That’s the kind of person she was, Dominick,” I said, not so much supporting him as trying to keep him talking by explaining the reality of who Geneva really was. “She walked around town lording her wealth over everyone all the time. It’s why she was hated by so many people.”

  He sighed again, this time even deeper. “Yeah. If only she could have been happy with the forty percent she was getting. I wasn’t cheating her out of anything she deserved.”

  “Did she threaten to tell someone if you didn’t agree?” Alex asked as I sensed Dominick was beginning to crack under the strain of telling us what had happened.

  Shoulders sagging, he nodded. “Yeah. I got there and she launched into me immediately. Not even a hello kiss. No, she wanted to know why she was getting so much less even though she had to do all the work. I tried to calm her down. I took her in my arms like always and kissed her, but she wouldn’t stop talking about how she deserved at least a fifty/fifty split or more.”

  He shook his head and frowned. Looking down at Alex, I searched his eyes for any sign he knew how to get us out of this since I’d kept Dominick talking all this time to no avail. Derek hadn’t returned, and it didn’t look like he would in time to save us from what his brother had planned.

  “If it was an accident, maybe the district attorney won’t press murder charges,” Alex suggested.

  Dominick’s frown grew deeper. “No, it was murder. She wouldn’t stop. She pushed me away and poked me over and over in the chest while she harped on about wanting more and how she held my career in her hands. And then something inside me snapped. I spun her around and with that scarf she had hung around her neck, I choked her. She stopped talking, but her arms flailed all over the place as she fought me. It was no use. And then before I knew it, she was dead weight in my arms and I let her go and she slid down onto the floor.”

  “Did you take her rings?” I asked, baffled why he would since he hadn’t gone there to rob her.

  Dominick grimaced. “I always hated those rings. Do you know how many times she smacked me in the face with them? Talk about killing the mood. She owed me for all the grief she’d caused me, so yeah, I took them.”

  “How did you find out Alicia Jenkins was going to talk to me? I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “I’d seen you following Girard and wanted to see what you knew. I saw you go to her grandmother’s house and figured it wasn’t her who would have seen me going into Geneva’s. But Alicia was a different story. I waited for her to come home, knowing her grandmother had already gone upstairs after I saw the lights go on up on the second floor, and I knew as soon as I saw Alicia that she’d seen me that night.”

  “I thought she was going to tell me it was the mayor who she saw that night going into Geneva’s,” I said in a low voice, feeling the guilt over Alicia’s death press on me again.

  “If only you hadn’t poked your nose around in things that were none of your business. I’ve been telling you that for years, Poppy, but you never listen and my brother lets you get involved even though I forbid him too. It’s going to break his heart when you’re gone. For that, I do feel bad.”

  “Well, thanks, Dominick. But why not just let us live? You can take your money you got from the mayor and go anywhere you want. Alex and I swear we won’t tell a soul about this.”

  Dominick grinned and shook his head. “Not going to happen, Poppy, but nice try. No, this is where it ends for you and your cop friend. It’s too bad that you didn’t listen, but then again, you never have been the type to do as you’re told. Maybe if you had…”

  Behind him, the door suddenly flew open and there stood Derek with his gun pointed directly at his brother. “Put the gun down and back away from them, Dom!”

  Stunned for just a moment at how quickly things had changed, Dominick turned around and laughed. “Go home, Derek. We’ll talk when I get done here. Don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want you to get hurt when you don’t have to.”

  Alex scrambled to his feet and ran into the kitchen as I followed him and ducked behind the island. Grabbing his gun, he pointed it at Dominick as the two brothers stood facing off against one another.

  “You killed two people, big brother. I can’t let you kill anyone else. Don’t do this and force me to do something I don’t want to do.”

  “You won’t do anything, Derek. The only reason you got to be a cop in this town is because of me. Without my help, you’d still just be a wannabe, and wannabes don’t pull it out in clutch situations. Go home before you get hurt.”

  Dominick turned to face us and pointed the gun directly at me. “First you, and then him. I’ll make it look like a murder-suicide by an unstable man who’s never recovered from the death of his wife years before. Yeah, I know all about you, big city cop. Derek told me everything. Nobody will question the chief of police and I’ll get away scot-free.”

  What happened next felt like the world had changed to slow motion speed. Derek yelled for him to put down his gun, and then all I heard were shots. I fell to the ground and covered my head until the horrible noise of bullets exploding out of the guns stopped. Next to me, I saw Alex standing there with his gun still pointing toward Dominick.

  “What happened?” I asked, terrified if I looked toward the living room that I’d see both Hampton brothers shot.

  “Are you okay, Poppy?” Alex asked as he helped me to my feet.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. What about you?”

  Alex nodded. “I’m fine.”

  Sadness gripped my heart at my next question. “What about them?”

  He looked over at where they’d stood just a minute before, and I followed his gaze to see Derek crouched next to his brother on the floor. “We both shot at the same time, so I don’t know who got him,” he said quietly.

  I ran over to where Dominick lay bleeding from his chest and hated the look of pure anguish I saw on Derek’s face. “Is he going to be okay?”

  Shaking his head, Derek struggled to hold back his tears. “No.”

  Dominick’s eyes fixed on his brother as he tried to speak one last time, but it was no use. He took his final breath and then without
another sound left us. Derek gently closed those eyes that looked so much like his and hung his head.

  “I so wanted to be wrong about what I thought.”

  I put my arm around his shoulder and squeezed him to me. “Thank you for saving us. I didn’t know if you’d come back, but I had to hope you would.”

  “After the computer tech guy at the station told me the reports had been tampered with, I had him do a complete check of the records. He called me when I got back to my office and told me dozens of calls had been deleted from the system. I called Dominick and saw his phone’s GPS said he was back here, and I knew something was wrong. Too much didn’t make sense unless it was him behind Alicia’s murder, and that only happened because he needed to keep her quiet about whatever she knew he’d done.”

  Alex touched my shoulder and I saw the sadness in his eyes. Neither one of us had wanted things with Dominick to end like this.

  “Are you two going to be okay? It’s hard to lose someone you love, and I know you cared for him too, Poppy.”

  “Yeah,” I said as I gave Derek’s shoulder another squeeze. “We Sunset Ridge people are tough.”

  I looked back at the man lying on the ground in a pool of blood and decided I didn’t want to think of Dominick Hampton that way for the rest of my life. I wanted to remember him as that teenage boy who stood up to those bullies giving his brother and me a hard time.

  To remember him as the good guy we’d always thought he was.

  Chapter Twenty

  Three days later, I sat in my comfy chair with a book still recovering from my first time being involved in a shooting. Movies and television had always made it look like seeing someone shot wasn’t a big deal, but in person, the entire thing shook me to my core. One minute Dominick was standing right in front of me breathing and talking, and then the next, he was gone and all that was left of him were our memories.

  I hadn’t cried yet, even after three whole days, but I knew it would come eventually. I’d known him my entire life, and now he wasn’t in the world anymore. No matter what he turned out to be, it still pressed on my heart that he wouldn’t be chastising me for sticking my nose into his police business ever again.