by Gayle Roper
Tori! I should have known. I opened my mouth to tell her I wasn’t Tori when it crossed my mind that it might be better to pretend I was.
“Hey,” I said. “How you doing?” You can’t go wrong with a question that generic.
“I’m doing pretty good. So’s Vickie. She and Joey are sleeping in the office.” She gestured back toward the door she’d come through.
“Wonderful,” I said, though I hadn’t the vaguest idea who Vickie and Joey were.
The green door opened for a second time, and in walked Eddie Mancini holding a gun and escorting a man wearing a handsome navy silk shirt, gray dress slacks, and black tasseled loafers on sockless feet.
“So nice of you to join us, Luke,” said the woman. “Tori’s come just to see you.”
Luke. Tori’s loan shark. Good-looking guy, if you liked them Hollywood. As I studied him, he studied me. With a quirk of his lips, he gave a little nod of recognition, or maybe lack of recognition was more accurate.
Eddie wasn’t so discreet. “You idiots! You’ve brought the wrong woman!”
Tori sat absolutely still in the limo. She had no doubt that Tinksie was right: she was somehow responsible for all that was happening. Well, not the farce with the Great Danes, but everything else. For the life of her, though, she couldn’t figure out how. Or why.
One thing she was sure of. The men thought they had her, not her sister. Nothing else made sense. No one would want to grab pure-as-the-driven-snow Libby.
Tori clenched her jaw. It was so frustrating having her for a sister. No matter what you did, she did it better. No matter how nice you were, she was nicer. No matter how popular you were, people liked her more. You just couldn’t measure up no matter how hard you tried. So you stopped trying to measure up and started trying to one-up her. At that Tori was champ. Look at all her success with winning Chloe over. She paused. Maybe that was a bad example.
Tori knew beyond doubt that Libby loved her. She knew she worried about her. And she knew Libby prayed for her, something that felt very strange, sort of eerie and sci-fi-ish.
Perfect Libby. Now that Tori’d had time to think about things, she couldn’t believe she’d thought for a moment that Libby had taken the jewelry.
She gave an inward sigh. She guessed she loved Libby in spite of Lib driving her crazy, because how could you not love your twin? She certainly didn’t want anything terrible to happen to her. Or Drew.
As for Drew being taken, she felt sure he’d been grabbed because he’d been there. No hidden reasons. No dark motives. Just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was who he said he was, a college professor with a thing for Ben Franklin.
No, clearly she had been the intended victim. The question was, whose? Everything that had happened recently seemed to point to Luke or at least to his involvement. Mick. The puzzles. Her debt. The jewelry. But would he order her kidnapped? Shot with a Taser?
When she thought of him turning on her like that, she felt like throwing up. She swallowed convulsively and made a momentous choice. Even if Luke had turned on her, she wasn’t turning on him. She might find out she was foolish, blinded by love, but she would believe in him, at least until she knew what was going on. Then she’d decide whether to forgive him, hit him upside the head with a very stout stick, or turn him in to the cops. Her stomach settled a bit.
She surveyed her companions. Kids, old people, and Neanderthal Carl. No one in their right mind would chase bad guys with such a crew. So where were the cops? Sure, it had only been fifteen or twenty minutes since they’d piled into the limo, but shouldn’t someone be here by now?
If she were a Christian like Libby, this was when she’d be praying, “God, help me!”
Tinksie sat beside her, her head bobbing a bit with some minor palsy, her wrinkled brow furrowed deeply in her concentration on relaying details of the chase. The woman carried a gun! If you couldn’t trust little old ladies to be little old ladies, what was the world coming to?
And James, who seemed to be very comfortable holding it, used it to threaten people when he wasn’t issuing orders to Carl. James was a take-charge person. Look at his ordering everyone to bring food on the Fourth. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to trust her life to a little bald guy who seemed to think he was Jack Bauer. Or to be more age appropriate, Patton.
The friend of James’s had turned to her as they sped across the Ben Franklin Bridge and introduced himself as if he were an old-world courtier, not an old guy in the middle of chasing kidnappers
“I know you must be Victoria,” he said with a charming smile. “I’ve met your lovely sister, and now I am delighted to finally meet you. I’m Andrew Melchior.” He held out his hand, giving her no choice but to bend forward, hunched over like Quasimodo, to shake it. “I was a good friend of your aunt’s.”
“Her significant other.” Tinksie beamed at Andrew. “Stella loved him most dearly.”
Andrew blinked rapidly a few times and nodded. “The feeling was mutual.”
So the beauty of the bedroom Tori was using wasn’t an old maid’s attempt to ease her loneliness as she had thought. Rather it was a love nest for Aunt Stella and the white-haired and goateed man now talking chase strategy with Carl. Could life get any more surprising?
She wondered whether she and Luke would get white haired together—if Luke wasn’t responsible for kidnapping Libby and thus headed to prison for untold years. Not that she ever planned to let herself get white hair, of course. But would they grow old together? Would he still be interested in her when she had wrinkles like Tinksie? Would she be interested in him when he got bald like James or developed saggy skin and knobby legs like Andrew?
The thought of them ending up that way made her shudder. Laser lipo and cosmetic surgery were invented for people like her and Luke.
But the main question persisted without answer: Had he arranged the kidnapping? Had the money or the jewelry become more important to him than she was?
She took a deep breath and counted slowly to ten, trying to stave off an anxiety attack.
“I’ll find them! Don’t you worry!” Carl was channeling James Bond, tailing the kidnappers as if he did it every day. “They can’t be too far ahead of us.”
Chloe and Jenna clung to each other, eyes on the empty road.
“There!” Tinksie pointed out the side window. “In that lot! I see the van.”
Carl hit the brakes and yanked the wheel. They all slid as far as their belts would allow as he went into a terrifying turn, the big car slewing into the parking lot with only a minor scrape against the chain-link fence surrounding the place. There were no signs to indicate what the large gray building with the boarded-up windows was.
They all climbed out and stood staring at the building, all except Chloe, who ran to the road and looked for any sign of the police.
“They’ll be here any minute, dear,” Tinksie said, her phone still glued to her ear.
“We need to reconnoiter,” James announced.
“Right,” Carl agreed and ran to the front door.
“Don’t!” James called, and Carl froze with his hand on the knob.
“I had something a bit more discreet in mind,” James said. “We need to see who’s here before we barge in.”
Barge in? Not in this life, Tori thought as she walked around the side of the building. There she saw a window whose board had come loose. It hung by one nail on its left side, and its weight and gravity had caused it to rotate ninety degrees. She sidled up to it, her back pressed against the wall. She peered in through the grime and saw a large garage bay with three huge trucks parked in it.
Standing by one of the trucks were Libby and Drew, hands bound. Near them were two men, one with a futuristic-looking gun in his hand. As she watched, a woman appeared.
Tori’s breath caught in her throat, and she blinked in stunned recognition. Then Eddie Mancini appeared. About him she not surprised. And he was with Luke. As she watched, Luke gave a brief nod to Libby, obviously
knowing she wasn’t Tori.
Eddie started screaming so loudly she could hear him out here. “You idiots! You’ve brought the wrong woman!”
Tori swore softly. She hated it when her conscience acted up.
She walked back around the corner, looking for her companions, ready to tell them she was going in. Alone. She found them huddled beside the limo, Tinksie talking into the phone.
She shrugged mentally. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. She grabbed the knob on the green door and pulled.
22
I WATCHED EDDIE, who was practically dancing in frustration.
“That’s not Tori!” he screamed.
“Sure it is,” the van driver said. “Blond, hazel eyes, real pretty. We got a picture.” He dragged a photo out of his chest pocket.
The woman walked over to me, her purple gauze big shirt billowing as she moved, and stared. I stared back, trying to be Tori-brazen.
“Ask Luke, Suzy!” Eddie pointed with his gun to Tori’s boyfriend. “He’ll tell you.”
Suzy, who appeared in charge of this mistaken-identity abduction, turned to Luke.
“It’s not Tori,” he said quietly.
Suzy studied me some more, a look of dawning awareness moving across her face. She took several steps back as if I had a bad case of bubonic plague. “He’s right! It’s not! Tori’s more vivid!”
Funny how even as I feared for my life, I could take offense. I really was tired of being the bland twin.
“She never told me she had a twin!” Suzy went on. “She delivered one of mine, and she never told me she was one!” Obviously this whole situation had become Tori’s fault. Fat lot of good that did Drew and me.
Luke slipped his hands in his pants pockets, the picture of casual, and looked at the infuriated Suzy. “Kidnapping is a federal crime, you know. It’s bad enough that you grabbed me, but you compounded the situation by bringing Libby and”—he stopped and indicated Drew—“across state lines.”
Suzy smirked. “I wouldn’t let a minor thing like kidnapping distress you, Henley.”
Minor thing? My heart constricted. There weren’t too many crimes considered worse.
Luke continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “You thought Tori would be your bargaining chip for whatever it is you hope to get from me. I’ve tried to think what I’ve got that you might want, what it is that could possibly be worth the risks you’ve taken. Or perhaps it’s something I’ve done?”
“Does the name Joe Bennetton ring any bells?” Suzy asked, her eyes cold, her voice hard.
“Joe Bennetton?” Luke flicked a nonexistent piece of lint off the sleeve of his shirt. “The guy who killed himself rather than honor his debts?”
Suzy seemed ready to explode, her face red, her eyes wild. “Joe Bennetton was my brother! And you murdered him!”
Luke looked mildly interested in the news. I, on the other hand, was fascinated, distracted only by a vague sawing noise behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Drew running his bound hands back and forth, back and forth over a sharp piece of metal where an area of the rear fender on one of the refuse trucks had rusted through.
“Turn around,” he hissed, his eyes firmly fixed on Suzy and Luke. “Be interested in what’s going on. Don’t attract any attention our way.”
I swung back thinking, dull and pedantic? No way. How about intelligent and creative!
Luke’s voice was lazy as he asked Suzy, “Am I the one who forced Joe to gamble? Am I the one who told him to keep at it until he lost everything he owned? Am I the one who told him to go to a loan shark and enter into a debt he never planned on repaying? Am I the one who put the rope around his neck and knocked the chair out from under him? I think not.”
“‘When in doubt, don’t,’” Drew muttered. “B. Franklin, printer.”
He was the one who said that? I’d heard it lots of times in church when warned about bad behaviors, but I hadn’t known the origin. How would a confirmed deist feel about his adage being co-opted by the church?
Suzy was vibrating with rage. “You’re the one who kept pressuring him, the one who sent men to scare him, the one who demanded he pay up or else!”
“When you take money from someone like me, you are desperate. I can deal with desperate. It keeps me solvent. But if you come to me without considering the consequences of nonpayment, you are a fool, an idiot.”
Suzy ran at Luke, but Eddie stepped in her way. “Don’t get close to him! He’s too wily.”
Suzy was clearly struggling for control, but she stepped back. “I found him, Henley. I walked into my house, and there he was, hanging from the crossbeam in the great room. I knew I would somehow make you pay. Then the cops told us that he hadn’t died right away. His neck hadn’t broken. He slowly strangled. That’s when I knew that not only would you pay, but so would someone you loved.”
Eddie, Bud, and the driver were as mesmerized by Suzy and Luke as I was, though Eddie was aware enough to keep his gun pointed at Luke. When Drew moved behind me and whispered in my ear, they didn’t notice.
“Step slowly to the side and then behind me,” he instructed. “I’ll block you as you get your hands free.”
“Are you…?”
“I am.”
Hope bloomed once again, fragile and alluring.
“So,” Luke said, “you plan to what? Kill us?” He indicated Drew, me, and himself. “And that will make it all better?”
“It will make it even!” Suzy screamed.
“Killing me and two totally uninvolved strangers will make it even? Huh.” He frowned like he had to think about that one.
“We didn’t know they’d be uninvolved strangers.” Suzy looked at Drew and me, resentment clear on her face. “It was supposed to be Tori.”
When everyone shifted their gazes our way, I froze. I was one step behind Drew but at least two steps from that piece of metal. I probably looked scared to death, but hopefully they’d assume the fear was over my impending demise, not over getting caught before I was free.
Drew stood with his hands behind him as if still bound. I was the only one who could see the blood flowing from the gashes he’d gotten as he worked to slice the tape, the crimson liquid dripping from his fingertips.
“So killing Tori was supposed to make me get all upset?” Luke drew the attention back to himself, and I wondered if he realized what Drew and I were about.
“You love her,” Suzy said.
“I do?”
“I’ve seen you two together. I’ve seen the way you look at her.”
Luke’s eyes hardened. “You’ve been spying on me? On us?”
“You’ve got to know your enemy to know his weakness,” Eddie said.
Yikes, Eddie. Keep your mouth shut. Using the word enemy in reference to Luke didn’t seem like a wise thing to me.
“And Tori’s your weakness,” Suzy said smugly.
“Then I guess I’m glad you got the wrong woman.” He smiled.
Thanks a lot, I thought as I began rubbing my wrists over the piece of metal on the fender. I flinched as I caught the side of my hand on a ragged edge. The metal sliced into my flesh, and I felt the gush of warm blood.
“But the right woman’s here,” came a voice as the front door flew open. Tori stormed in, looking glorious in her anger. “Nobody hurts Libby without dealing with me.”
Chloe looked up just in time to see Aunt Tori disappear into the gray building.
“Aunt Tori, no! Wait!”
She ran toward the door, an automatic response because she wasn’t certain what she could do.
“Stop her, Carl,” Mr. Mowery called, and Carl grabbed Chloe’s arm, pulling her to a halt.
Chloe felt desperate as she tried to free herself. “My mom and my aunt are in there!”
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Mowery said. “So sad. But that doesn’t mean we’ll let the kidnappers harm any of them.” She smiled sweetly, all her wrinkles dancing on her face.
She reported the latest new
s to the dispatcher, then listened. “ETA five to ten minutes,” she told the circle in the parking lot, and Chloe’s heart sank. That was forever!
Mrs. Mowery looked at her husband, who nodded decisively.
“We’re going in,” Mrs. Mowery told 911 and flipped her phone shut. She dropped it in her purse, then pulled out her handgun and handed it to Mr. Mowery. Chloe watched in horrified fascination as he fiddled with it.
“Putting a bullet in the chamber,” he explained. “Now I want you girls to stay out here and wait for the cops. We’ll go in and see what we can do for Drew, Libby, and Tori.”
Mrs. Mowery reached inside her bag again and pulled out a cylinder that she handed to Jenna. “Pepper spray. If someone runs out, push down here and aim for the eyes.”
She reached back in the bag and pulled out something about the size of a big old cell phone. She slapped it in Chloe’s hand. “It’s a stun gun. Turn it on, and if any of them comes near you, just touch him with it for a few seconds. He’ll collapse.”
Chloe glanced at the device in her hand, then at Jenna who seemed as bemused and scared as Chloe felt.
Back in the purse Mrs. Mowery went. This time she pulled out a wicked-looking knife.
“Where’s the sheath?” Mr. Mowery asked. “I told you to keep it in the sheath.”
“It’s in the purse. I don’t want it at the moment, James.” She set her purse on the ground. “Don’t let me forget that when we leave.”
Chloe blinked as Carl and Mr. Melchior suddenly began swinging baseball bats.
“I always carry a couple,” Carl explained when he saw her staring. “I drive some very wealthy people, and I want to be able to protect them. I can’t carry a gun, though, because of my record. So I carry these.”
“Stack up behind me,” Mr. Mowery ordered. “Carl, Andrew, Tinksie. Remember, if you don’t get closer than twenty feet to those men, they can’t hit you with the Taser.”
Chloe’s stomach was jumping all over the place, and her palms were so wet she could barely hold on to her pink stun gun. “You can’t just go barging in there! They might be dangerous!”
