A Berry Cunning Conman: A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 4)

by A. R. Winters

  I smiled, embracing his levity. “Sounds tempting, but I’d better pass.”

  He winked. “Prolly for the best. I use it to strip paint more than for drinkin’.” Then he shifted his attention. “Derek! How you doin’, buddy? I ain’t seen you around here much lately. You’re looking good.”

  Okay, now we knew that Jimmy was more than willing to lie—a blatant one at that. Derek looked awful. He looked like his organs were a day and a half from shutting down. His skin looked waxy, and his balance always seemed unsure.

  “Ain’t had any funds,” Derek said.

  “Funds? You don’t need no funds. Let me run back here and hook you up with somethin’.” He winked at me. “I gotta dip into my safe, so it’s gonna be a minute.”

  Jimmy disappeared inside his home, letting his screen door slam shut behind him.

  Derek waited two ticks of a clock, and then his hand was on my arm. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

  I balked. Taking Derek’s cue, I kept my voice to a whisper. “We haven’t finished talking to him.”

  “We gotta go,” Derek said. “Jimmy don’t give nothin’ away for free. We gotta go. Now.” Derek started down the stairs. He moved fast with a light step, not making much sound.

  Zoey and I followed suit and did the same.

  Zoey and I reached the car before Derek, and were getting in by the time Derek got his backseat car door open.

  The front door to Jimmy’s house burst open with a bang similar to when it had closed.

  “Hey! Where you guys think you’re goin’?” Jimmy called. He didn’t look happy. There was a pistol in his hand down by his thigh. At least he wasn’t pointing it at us.

  Zoey started the engine at the same time that Derek called back. “Kylie needs her insulin. We gotta hurry, but Zoey and I’ll come back.”

  Jimmy’s gun hand twitched, but he didn’t lift it. He looked right on the verge of doing so, though.

  Derek got in, and Zoey gave me my second near heart attack by backing down Jimmy’s drive instead of taking the time to turn around. Amazingly we made it to the bottom intact and mobile.

  Zoey backed up onto the road so that the nose of her car was pointing in the direction of the way out, and the gravel flew.

  I spent the first five minutes of our getaway checking the rear window to see if Jimmy might be coming after us, but when we emerged from the holler and got back on the paved, one-lane road, I breathed a sigh of relief and sank back into my seat.

  I was feeling guilty. I had just put Zoey and Derek into a heap of danger, and we’d walked away with nothing to show for it.

  “He knows who Officer Dill was working for,” Zoey said. “Everything about him changed when you asked about him knowing a drug dealer with a cop on payroll.”

  “I saw that, too.” But I didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t tell us who that drug dealer was. And, given that Jimmy knew the drug dealer who had had Officer Dill on payroll but hadn’t reacted to questions about Morgan’s death, Jimmy hadn’t known that the other drug dealer had offed Morgan—if that was in fact what had happened. Jimmy put it all together during our conversation, though. He knew who Morgan’s killer was.

  “Why would he want to kill us?” I asked suddenly. He’d come back out armed.

  “He didn’t want to kill us. He’d have done it right then. He’d have shot the car up,” Derek answered.

  “Then what did he want?” Zoey asked.

  “My guess?” Derek said, “He wanted to keep us there a spell.”

  “…Keep us there while he called the other dealer to show up?” I asked.

  “Or keep us there until he got word back from the other dealer about what to do with us. Kill us or wait.”

  I looked over at Zoey. What had I done? She was my best friend, and I was doing a really good job at almost getting us killed.

  But if I were being honest with myself, that wouldn’t actually be anything new. We’d had a bunch of people try to kill us, but no one who’d had much practice at it. I guessed that was the difference and why the situation I’d put Zoey in felt so wrong.

  Zoey was completely focused on taking the narrow road’s curves at mach speed. But saying this couldn’t wait.

  “I’m sorry, Zoey.”

  Zoey gave me a side-eye glance before refocusing completely on the road. “Uh-uh. You’ve made life fun again. Nothing here to feel sorry about.”

  God, I loved her.

  We rounded the corner and came face to face with an enormous truck barreling down on us. It was so big that it could have eaten Zoey’s car as a snack.

  The truck was at best thirty feet away. It was speeding, Zoey was speeding, and there wasn’t any road shoulder to work with.

  Zoey slammed on her brakes, but the truck appeared to speed up.

  I screamed and threw my arms over my face, sure that I was about to eat the grill of that truck, but instead I got thrown into the tumble cycle of a washing machine.

  Zoey’s car was off the road and doing a forward skid as it rolled down a steep embankment. It came to rest on its driver’s side but at a slanted angle. The front windshield was gone, and tiny pebbles of glass filled the car. It was in my hair and clothes, but it didn’t have sharp edges.

  “Zoey… Zoey!” She was slouched against her door, and she wasn’t moving.

  I reached a hand toward her but was afraid to touch her. If she was alive and had a broken neck or a broken back, moving her at all could make her injuries so much worse.

  She groaned, then moved on her own, and I almost fainted with relief.

  “Zoey!”

  “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out,” she groaned. “You alive?”

  “I’m alive.” My seatbelt was holding me in place, but I did my best to twist so that I could see into the back seat. “Derek?”

  His body looked like a crumpled pile of rags. There was a heavy trickle of blood from a gash on his forehead. His head was higher than the rest of his body, so it wasn’t gravity pulling the blood from him. It was getting pumped out by his heart. He was alive, but unconscious.

  “Truck ran us off on purpose. Gotta get out of car,” Zoey groggily mumbled. “Not safe here.”

  She was right.

  I positioned my foot against the dashboard near the steering wheel, then released my seatbelt and pushed open my car door. I started to climb up and out, but the shift of my weight teetered the car’s balance and it came crashing down onto all four tires.

  There was no time for me to pull myself back inside the car. I had to go with it, and ended up on the ground several feet away from the car.

  Inside the car, Zoey had her seatbelt off and was trying to open her car door, but it was jammed. I gave her a hand with sliding out the passenger side door.

  Derek was still in the back seat. I could see his chest moving to take shallow breaths, but other than that, he wasn’t moving.

  The embankment we’d rolled down was a fifteen foot drop. I couldn’t see anyone up on the road.

  “Do you think whoever it is has gone on?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Zoey said as she dug her cell phone out of her back pocket. “It’s not busted, but no signal. We got to get up to the road. We’re in a dead spot down here.”

  I flinched at her choice of words, then I looked at the steep hill. It was going to require a foot and hand climb.

  I stepped my way over uneven ground, falling to one hand at one point, but eventually making it to the top of the hill. Zoey was close behind. Together, we crawled our way up the embankment of dead weeds and early spring grass. My foot slipped and I skidded down a few feet, but I steadied, got my footing, and continued my crawl to the top.

  I stood up a second behind Zoey, just in time to come face to face with the business end of a gun. “Owen?”

  If anyone had tracked us down ready to shoot us, I had thought it would be Jimmy. But instead it was Morgan’s former boss from the shoe store. He was wearing an identical outfit to what we’d seen h
im wearing in Sole Support, dark khaki pants and a long sleeve shirt. His hair was reddish blond, and his face was ruddy. Everything was the same except for his size. He seemed to have grown, to have gotten bigger and more sinister. His eyes glinted with a remorseless meanness I hadn’t spotted before.

  “The death tourists,” he said. “I should have known it was you when Jimmy called. I told the idiot to keep you there.”

  “You’re a drug dealer?” I asked. I’d pegged him for a hot head, but I had not pegged him for a criminal mastermind.

  “Duh… You think that shoe store could stay in business on its own? I give unofficial discounts left and right to keep customers coming in. It’s how I launder the money. Keeps me looking like a respectable businessman—which is what I am and what I’ll continue to be.”

  The last was said like a threat rather than a statement.

  “Now get a move on.” He wagged the end of the pistol in the direction his truck had been traveling. “I’m parked around the curve. We’re going to go for a ride.”

  We didn’t move right away, and Owen pulled back his huge fist in preparation to hit me.

  I threw my hands up. “Okay!”

  Zoey and I did a side shuffle so that we were standing on the road instead of on the edge of the embankment. Zoey walked facing forward, and I walked next to Zoey, facing Owen.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If you were going to kill us, why not just kill us right here, right now?”

  Maybe it wasn’t the smartest question to ask of the person pointing a gun at my face, but I wanted to know his plans. If he was planning on feeding us feet first through a wood chipper, I’d much rather him pull the trigger and get it over with.

  “I got a buyer up north. You two look healthy. It’ll add a good penny to my quarterly earnings.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Sex slaves?” I exclaimed.

  “No!” Owen said with a look of disgust on his face. “What kind of man do you take me for? I got a sister, you know.”

  “Then what? House maids?”

  “Don’t be dim. Organs, woman. You’re a walking flesh bag of organs.” Then a curious look crossed his face. “What blood type are you?”

  I hesitated but the nozzle of the gun getting closer to my face was good incentive to talk. “O neg.”

  His brows lifted, and he looked pleased. “Good! Very good. I heard there’s a lady he’s got needing a face transplant. You might be just the ticket.”

  My stomach did its best to climb its way up my throat. I seriously thought I might get sick. That’s when I spotted Derek cresting the top of the embankment several feet behind Owen. That gash in his head was gushing. He was blinking like he might pass back out at any second. And he had the complexion of someone who’d died two days ago.

  I decided to buy the boy some time.

  I stopped fighting my stomach’s desire to hurl, and I bent over and wretched. I wretched so hard that I fell to my hands and knees.

  With vomit still on my chin, I looked up at a stunned Owen. He was holding his breath, and his cheeks were puffed out. He looked like he was doing his best to not hurl right there in the middle of the road with me. That’s when the loop of Derek’s belt slipped over Owen’s head. With a fierce yank of his arm, with more strength than I thought he had in him, Derek pulled his belt tight.

  Owen reared back. He dropped the gun as both his hands reached for his neck. His fingers were bent like claws, and his nails scraped red welts on the skin of his neck.

  When Owen fell backward, he fell right on top of Derek, but that probably helped Derek more than hinder him. Derek held onto the tail end of that leather belt with both his hands and pulled back with all the strength that his body and gravity gave him.

  I was still down on all fours, doing my best to get my stomach to stop trying to convulsively heave. My big focus was just breathing. Of course, I was sure that was Owen’s big focus too.

  Zoey lunged for the dropped gun. Her foot slipped in my vomit, she fell back onto me, and I fell face forward into all the contents that had recently been in my stomach.

  I lost the fight and wretched some more. Thankfully that didn’t get in Zoey’s way of pushing herself up off of me and getting that gun. And it was just in time. Derek had passed out, and Owen’s clawing fingers finally gave him the slack he needed from the belt to take a huge, gasping breath.

  Rolling off of Derek, Owen coughed and dry heaved. When he stopped, he looked up at Zoey standing over him with the gun.

  “Shoot me,” he said.

  “No,” Zoey said. “I like to watch a man slow-rot.”

  The jig was up. Owen would go down for Morgan’s murder, money laundering, drug dealing, bribing a police officer, and attempted black market organ trading, just to name a few of his crimes.

  Today was a good day—even if I was covered in my own vomit.

  It took us ten minutes to get a call put through to 9-1-1 without the signal dropping. It took another fifteen minutes for the police to come and five minutes more for the ambulance to arrive.

  The paramedics were more intense than I’d ever seen them when they lay their eyes on Derek and got to work. Within minutes, they had him pronounced still alive, on a stretcher and inside the ambulance.

  I had to hold back a tear of thanks. If Derek survived long enough, he was finally going to get some of the help he so very, very desperately needed. Without ever meaning to, Owen had probably saved Derek’s life.

  All of that happened while I was being handcuffed by a gloating and maniacally happy Det. Gregson. He had me down on the road again, thankfully this time not in my own vomit. His knee was pressing so hard into my lower back that it was hard not to pee myself, and I was tempted to let loose with it. I wanted to see if I’d be riding back in his car first, but I suspected it would be a black and white squad car instead. It wouldn’t be right to put a poor uniformed officer through something like that just because their lead detective had a gleeful aneurysm every time he got the opportunity to charge me with something. Anything.

  Zoey had walked off down the road, and I was afraid that she might be in a state of shock. I wanted someone to go check on her.

  “Can someone—”

  “I recommend you shut your whore mouth,” Gregson hissed. “We’re doing this right.” And he proceeded to start reciting the Miranda warning. “You have a right to remain silent…”

  It didn’t matter if I had a right to remain silent or not! That little comment he hissed into my ear had me seeing red. It was a good thing he had me handcuffed because he would otherwise need to be digging his family jewels out of his scrotum.

  “Call for you,” Zoey said from somewhere outside of my limited field of vision.

  “Get that phone away from me,” Gregson said before barking the order, “Someone get this woman away from me!”

  A uniformed officer materialized next to Zoey, though all I could see of him was his shined shoes. “Sir,” he said, “there’s a call for you. It’s Chief Mackey.”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Gregson bellowed.

  I twisted my neck so that I could see up the uniformed officer’s body. He had Zoey’s phone at his ear. He looked young, but he looked undeterred by Gregson’s tantrum-esque behavior.

  “Yes, sir,” the uniformed officer said into the phone with a nod. “Yes, sir,” he said again. He extended the phone to Gregson. “Sir, Chief Mackey says that if you refuse to take this call that you will be placed on immediate indefinite suspension… without pay.”

  Gregson didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t move either. Then he reached for the phone. He put it to his ear. “Yes, sir.” I could barely make out the sound of an irate, raised voice coming through the phone’s tiny speaker. Then Gregson ground out the words, “Yessss, sirrrr.”

  Gregson handed the phone back to Zoey and immediately went to work unlocking my handcuffs.

  Zoey bent into my field of vision and gave me a wink. I put together what she’d done. She’d
given a yank on whatever leverage she had on the Chief to get him to call Gregson back into line.

  I smiled, closed my eyes, and rested my cheek against the rough asphalt.

  God, I loved that girl.

  Chapter 28

  I woke up with a vibration on my chest and a tickle on my nose. I opened my lids to see the prettiest gold-green eyes staring back at me. Sage was purring happily and had the tip of her cool nose touching mine.

  It had been a few tired and sore days since surviving the tumble cycle of Zoey’s car. When I’d come home that night, I was bruised, exhausted and sore, and sweet little Sage must have sensed what I’d been through. Ever since she’d attached herself to me like velcro.

  “Come on, little girl. Let’s get our day started.”

  She followed me to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub while I showered. I tripped over her three times while trying to get dressed. And when I went down to the café’s kitchen, she rode on my shoulder like a mascot. Her front paws were hooked over my shoulder, the nails of her back paws dug into my shirt on my back, and her whiskers tickled my ear as she hummed and cat-chirped her happy tune of squeaks and half meows.

  She was talking to me. I knew it. Now I just had to figure out what she was saying. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with what kind of special treat she wanted to have today. With all that there was to choose from in the café, she usually got something. A little yogurt. A pinch off a meatball. A flake of salmon.

  But none of that seemed to matter as soon as I opened the door into the café’s kitchen. A mouthwatering aroma flooded over me, and a humming other than Sage’s reached my ears.

  “Brenda!” I exclaimed at the same time that Sage launched herself off me to run to her. Her loyalty was as fickle as her palate.

  “Get over here, child,” Brenda said, leaving what she was doing to give me a big, snuggly hug. It was the best.

  All around me on the stainless steel countertops was delectable, incredible food.

  Brenda must have been here working for hours! It was so good to have her back!

  “Brenda, how’s your grandma?”