A Berry Murderous Kitten_A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  I thought about texting Zoey or—gasp—even using my phone to call Zoey. But if I texted and I got a text back, I’d have no way of knowing who actually sent the text. And if I called Zoey and she answered, I’d have no way of knowing if she were pretending to be safe and okay… or if Max had a knife to her throat.

  The only way to know if she was safe was to go over there myself.

  I grabbed my coat, hopped around on one foot and then the other as I forced my sneakers on without untying and retying them, and then I grabbed my cell phone. I dialed 911, cursed, hung up, and dialed again.

  “What’s your emergency?” asked the emergency response operator.

  I didn’t know how to answer that. I think my best friend might be getting murdered by her ex-current boyfriend? No, I couldn’t see it happening. No, I didn’t know if he had a weapon.

  I imagined the police knocking down their door to discover them sitting on the floor eating the rest of the pizza. Anybody had access to that barn. It was abandoned, and in the middle of nowhere. Anyone could have stashed that car there, or it might not even be the same car. Doubts chased each other back and forth in my head.

  “Uh, I’ll call back,” I said and then clicked off. It was a small town, and the police weren’t far away. I could be over to Zoey’s practically in a matter of seconds. If there was a problem, I could call the police back. And if Max was still at Zoey’s and heard the police sirens, he might react badly. He was still in woo mode with Zoey. If he thought everything was fine, it was unlikely that he’d do anything to try to hurt her. But if he thought that the jig was up, there was no telling what he would do. It was best to head over there on my own.

  I was out the door a second later, skidding down the stairs. It was something of a controlled fall, but I was still on my feet when I reached the bottom, and I hit the door to the kitchen at a run.

  Out in the café Melanie was still studying, and I slowed to a brisk walk as I headed for the café’s front door.

  Melanie’s flawless brow scrunched together. My attempt at nonchalance wasn’t fooling her. “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Perfect. It’s all good.” My smile could have won in a competition for fakest-ever. I vowed to explain later, and hurried out the door.

  Chapter 28

  The cold night air hit me with a shock. I pulled my coat tighter around me, but it didn’t do any good. It felt as though the temperature had dropped ten degrees from when I’d gotten home.

  I had to get to Zoey before something happened to her. I’d left her alone with Max—a killer. I’d never be able to forgive myself if he hurt her.

  Surging forward, I intended to rush out into the street. The traffic would have to brake or swerve. I didn’t have time to wait for a path to clear. But two steps into my charge, I was intercepted with the hard brush of the shoulder as someone rushed in front of me. Their arm hooked mine, turned me and walked me down the sidewalk in the direction of the café’s side street. When I tried to yank away, the jab of something hard in my ribs made me oomph and stop my efforts. Whatever it had been had hurt, even through the padding of my coat and clothes.

  The person next to me was taller and stronger than me and wore a heavy winter coat with a large hood. I couldn’t see the person’s face. Leaning forward and twisting to look back, I gasped at whose face I saw. “Steph?”

  She didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at me. But I could see enough from my side angle to be absolutely certain that it was her.

  I twisted to see what she had sticking into my ribs and sucked in my breath. A gun. Point blank. If she shot, the bullet would rip through my insides. I imagined it tearing through my spine. My life, if I still had one, would be changed forever.

  “Steph, what are you doing?”

  “Shut up,” she hissed. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone. You had to keep picking at the scab, and that’s what Cam was, a scab. A worthless scab.”

  The café’s side street was coming up fast. Steph had us moving at the pace of a speed walker. I wanted to yank myself free but her hold on me was strong. I’d have to struggle pretty hard, and all the possible outcomes played through my head. But in the end, the thought of her finger on the gun’s trigger had me walking along with her, step for step. One jostle too hard and her trigger finger could tighten, the gun would go off, and I could be dead. So I kept walking… but that didn’t mean I couldn’t talk.

  “Steph, why did you dump Cam’s body in front of the café?” I was going to do my best to keep her engaged. If she had something to say that she wanted me to hear, she’d wait until I’d heard it before she killed me. In every movie I’d ever seen, everyone stopped talking before they pulled the trigger.

  “I didn’t dump his body in front of the café. That was never part of the plan.”

  We reached the corner of the side street and turned to walk toward the café’s back parking lot. Through the café’s large windows, I could see Melanie with her head bent over her books, studying. I wanted to call out to her, to bang on the windows, to do anything to alert her to my situation. But I hesitated, and the opportunity slipped away. The windows fell behind us rather than beside us.

  “If you didn’t dump his body, then who did?”

  “I hired someone, you freakin’ idiot. He was showboating by dumping Cam in front of the café. I told him to make Cam disappear, not put him on display.”

  A cold chill ran through me that had nothing to do with the bitterly cold night air.

  “But why?” I had to keep her talking. We were almost to the back of the building.

  We reached the building’s edge and Steph stopped us so that she could look both ways. The parking lots behind the buildings were empty.

  She gave me a hard shove, and I stumbled out in front of her. “Walk,” she ordered.

  “No.” I turned to face her, stood my ground and did my best to hide the fact that my knees were knocking together in fright. Hopefully she’d think it was because of the cold. “I want to know why you killed Cam.”

  Steph lifted the gun at the end of her fully extended arm and pointed it directly at my face.

  “Walk,” she ordered again. “Stay close to the wall.”

  This time I obeyed, but I didn’t turn my back on her. Instead I stayed facing her and walked backward. If she wanted to shoot me, she’d have to look at me while she did it. She’d have to look me in the eyes. I was a human being with feelings, hopes and dreams, and I wouldn’t let her pretend otherwise. I was hoping that it would make her lose her nerve—that she wouldn’t go through with it. After all, she hadn’t had the nerve to kill Cam herself. She’d hired someone. I had to do my best to make it so she couldn’t pull that trigger and snuff out a life. Only the hardest-hearted people could do such a thing. I had to make her remember that she wasn’t one of those people.

  “Why did you kill Cam?” I asked again, determined to wiggle past her defensive barriers by empathizing with her reasoning. She’d told us about the drugs, but maybe there was something more.

  “He found out I killed my mom.”

  Oh snap.

  My stomach dropped, and I felt nauseous. She’d killed her mom. If she could do that, it’d be nothing to her to kill me. My feet turned to lead, making every step more difficult, but I kept walking backward and did my best to stay standing on my increasingly shaky legs.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Your mom died in the house fire. Are you saying that you started it yourself?” That didn’t add up. Steph’s house burned down after Cam was already dead. That meant that Steph’s mom was still alive when Cam died and that Steph killing her mom couldn’t be what Cam had learned about her. It couldn’t be the reason why she killed Cam.

  “I killed her four years ago… Stop there.”

  She didn’t even sound upset. Her voice was even and strong, very matter-of-fact. She was going to have no problem pulling the trigger, even with me looking at her.

  That made my heart ache. I was fi
lled with grief for the loss of everything new and good in my life. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was part of a community. I had a place in the world with people who cared about me. And I was about to lose it all.

  I stopped, just as she’d told me to do. I was right next to the café’s dumpster.

  “Get in,” she ordered.

  I looked from Steph to the huge metal bin. It was ten feet wide and taller than I was.

  “I can’t get in,” I said. “I can’t jump that high.”

  “Figure it out or I’ll shoot you in the stomach and knees and leave you here to die. Slowly.”

  I’m not ashamed to say I started looking in earnest for a way to get inside that dumpster. The light was dim and the dumpster was dark, so it blended in with the night. It took some feeling around, but I found some welded loops that I could only assume were put there to be used for footholds. Having found them, though, I didn’t rush. I took an exaggerated amount of time and even slipped twice on purpose. Through it all, the aim of Steph’s gun never wavered.

  “How could you kill your mom?” I wasn’t able to keep the accusation from my voice.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Steph said. “My mom really did have Alzheimer’s. It turned her into someone else. She wasn’t the same person anymore… The woman who had raised me died two years before her body did. And I tried. I really tried. I did everything to get through to her. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. So I crushed up her sleeping pills and then”—her voice cracked—“I put a pillow over her face. She never felt a thing. Wasn’t scared. She was fine. Better than fine. Once she was dead, she was free. I am not a bad person.”

  I stopped and looked at her from where I stood perched near the top of the dumpster. I had to. She was making an argument for herself as being a decent human being while she was forcing me to climb into a trash bin where, I was sure, she planned to shoot me. And she’d arranged for someone to kill Cam.

  I considered pointing out the obvious, that maybe she wasn’t as good a person as she liked to think she was, but I decided to err on the side of wanting to live for a few seconds longer. She didn’t need any additional incentive to shoot me dead.

  Despite all my efforts to go slowly, I had reached the top of the dumpster.

  “Get in,” she said, wagging the gun at me for emphasis.

  Time to ramp up my efforts to distract her. I put one leg over the lip of the dumpster and perched. “How long ago did that happen, that you ended her life?” I didn’t want to say murdered. I didn’t want to trigger any emotions she might have attached to that thought.

  Steph’s weight shifted from one foot to the other like she was uncomfortable with the question. I was surprised when she answered it. “Three years ago.”

  “That’s a long time. How did you preserve her body for them to find something in the house fire?”

  “Shut up and get in the dumpster.”

  “You’re going to kill me. Don’t you want to unburden yourself to someone? Don’t you want to tell your story to someone?”

  Steph cleared her throat before she spoke, and when she did speak, it was almost a mumble. “I kept her in a chest freezer.”

  “You froze her…” I wondered if the coroner would catch the damage that must have done to her skin. On top of that, there wouldn’t have been any smoke inhalation from the house fire to sear her lungs. Even if Steph never got charged for my murder, I was pretty sure that her mother’s murder was going to come back on her. “So she was dead for three years and nobody but you knew. That had to have been a terrible secret to carry around with you. What about her Social Security checks? What about her home health care nurse? What about her doctors? Didn’t anyone question her disappearance?”

  “I cashed her checks, fired the home care nurse and told her I was going with private care, and told her doctor that I was taking her to someone new. Now, get in the dumpster!”

  If I got in that dumpster, it’d be the last thing I ever did. So I stalled. I faced her growing anger and kept asking questions. That I was so scared that I was about to pee myself didn’t matter.

  “If I wanted to have someone killed, I wouldn’t begin to know how or where to hire someone. How’d you do it?”

  Steph looked mad enough to throw her gun at me, let alone shoot it.

  I played it cool and stayed calm and laid back. I wanted to put her at ease. “I’m going to die. Indulge me. Please. When will you get the chance to tell anyone ever again?”

  “The dark web. I hired someone off the dark web.” She glanced around her as if making sure no one was listening. Whoever she’d hired, it was someone even she was afraid of. “They told me not to tell anyone. I think they’re local.”

  “What did they say would happen if you told?”

  Her gaze refocused on me. “The same thing that’s happening to you.”

  I gulped.

  “Get. In.”

  My time was up. Steph’s gun was steady as she held it pointed at me. My need to keep stalling was strong, even if it was for only a few seconds more before being killed. But I was pretty sure she’d shoot me in the head if I delayed any longer, so I got in.

  Angling down slowly, I let one foot drop to the level of the trash inside. It didn’t hold me, though. Instead, it shifted and my leg sank deeper and deeper into the mounds of plastic encased trash before I stopped sinking. It left me nearly doing a split standing up, with one heel hanging on the lip of the dumpster. Taking it off and letting it join the rest of me down in the trash felt like taking the final step off the end of a pirate’s plank with my arms and hands tied and lashed to an anchor.

  I was going to die. In the trash. At least it was cold. I wouldn’t decay too much before they found me.

  That’s when I heard something scurry and scramble at the other end of the bin. I was in the company of mice or rats, and the silver lining I’d been reaching for faded away. Steph was going to kill me, and then the vermin were going to make a snack of my face.

  “Steph, can’t we talk about this?” I could hear her climbing up the dumpster’s side. Then her head appeared over the top, dark and shadowy, and I wondered if death always looked that way. It had for Cam. Now for me.

  Steph’s arm arched over the top and pointed at me. She had the gun in her hand.

  I no longer had anything to lose. I lunged with my arms stretched over my head, reaching for the instrument of death held in her hand.

  The gun went off, and I screamed. The bullet ricocheted inside the heavy metal container, and I dove head first into nearly week-old trash. The sound of the gunfire within the confined space was deafening. The sound of the bullet zinging around was worse. The metal bin rang like a bell, glass shattered, and then nothing.

  A voice sounded in the night, one that was not mine and was not Steph’s.

  “Get away from her!”

  “Zoey!” I whispered.

  Steph’s arm and head disappeared from the top of the trash bin.

  “Run, Zoey! Steph’s got a gun! She hired someone to kill Cam!”

  I wanted Zoey to run more than I wanted her to stay and try to save me. If she ran, there was a chance she’d live, and now she was armed with the truth. What had happened to Cam would finally come to light, and Zoey would be saved. She’d no longer be a suspect.

  Shots rang out.

  “No! Leave her alone!” I yelled, but they were words and words alone. Impotent.

  I wasn’t hurt. All my limbs worked. I was alive and able. I decided to work with my strengths, and those were all the strengths that I had left.

  I patted down the bags, then began tearing into them. I did a mental inventory of everything that had been thrown away in the last week.

  Ewwww… found the spaghetti.

  Burnt toast.

  Soggy cake.

  Ewwww! Spoiled, smelly, slimy spaghetti! Doing my best not to gag and retch, I scooped up a bunch of it in my hand.

  Standing on tiptoes on top of the shiftin
g garbage, I was just able to see over the edge at what was happening outside of the dumpster. Steph was a few feet away, pointing her gun at a sprinting Zoey. Zoey was near the far end of the parking lot running in zigzags. She was fast. She moved like someone was chasing her, always an inch away from grabbing her.

  “Stop running!” Steph screamed.

  I lobbed a handful of the rotten, stinky spaghetti at Steph’s head. Direct hit!

  She did a slow turn with her shoulders hunched as the slimy spaghetti dripped off her head onto the rest of her. Her face was twisted in rage and her eyes looked possessed.

  “You!” she snarled before pointing the gun at the dumpster and unloading five or six bullets in quick succession.

  I scooped up another handful of rancid spaghetti and waited for a pause in the gunfire. If I survived, I’d have to scour my hand with Ajax.

  The bullets stopped and I stood on tippy toes as I lobbed another handful of spaghetti at Steph. Bullseye! Right in her face!

  Steph sucked in a sharp breath, and I saw some of the spaghetti get pulled into her mouth. That’s when the retching started—by her, not me—big, gagging, coughing, bent-over-with-body-shaking retching. It was awful. I actually felt bad for Steph.

  That’s when I spotted Zoey barreling straight toward Steph. Zoey was going to ram her!

  “No!” Zoey didn’t know that Steph was covered in the equivalent of toxic waste. There was nothing I could do to stop their bodies crashing together. But some of the spaghetti must have gotten in Zoey’s mouth but, with Steph forgotten, she rolled off the older woman and started doing some retching of her own. Both women were completely incapacitated.

  I slipped and slid as I climbed out of the dumpster. I got to the ground in the most expedient fashion I could—that is to say that I fell. Landing flat on my back, all of the wind was knocked out of me.

  Wheezing, I rolled onto my stomach and did a G.I. Jane-style belly crawl toward the gun that Steph had wielded. It was lying on the ground, five feet from me and two feet from her. She spotted what I was doing and lunged for it, but stopped short to projectile vomit whatever food she’d eaten that day all over the gun.