Caramel Crush

by Jenn McKinlay

  “No, I’m . . . I just think it would be best—”

  “You’re afraid,” Mel said. “I forgot how terrified of ghosts you are.”

  “No, I’m not,” he argued. “Because there is no such thing as ghosts.”

  It sounded like an oft-repeated affirmation and Mel wondered how that was working out for him. She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but his hands had felt clammy when he grabbed her arm and his breathing was quick, as if he was nervous.

  “No, there isn’t,” she agreed.

  Mel knew Ray was going to be her brother-in-law and she didn’t want to have any tension in the family, but honestly the urge to slap him was overriding her naturally nice disposition. Butch Bordow was right there! Within confessing distance! All they had to do was play this right.

  “Yeah, Stan, how you doing?” Ray said.

  Mel knew it was her uncle on the phone. He and Ray shared a respectful distrust for each other that they had maintained ever since Uncle Stan arrested Ray for the first time when he was sixteen. It was a vandalism charge, not a big deal, but it had set the tone for their ongoing relationship.

  “Yeah, I’m behaving, I guess,” Ray said. “Here’s the thing; I’m with Mel.”

  There was a pause and Mel could hear Uncle Stan speaking harshly, but she couldn’t make out what he said.

  “No!” Ray denied. He gave Mel an apologetic look and then turned to look out the window. “She’s Joe’s girl. What kind of an amoral bastard do you think I am?”

  There was another pause.

  “Now is that nice?” Ray asked. “I could have left you out of the loop on this, big man, but I didn’t and you know how I feel about the Five-O.”

  While he was trash talking with Uncle Stan, Mel saw her chance. She bolted out of the car and ran for the warehouse. She was going to talk to Butch Bordow if it was the last thing she did.

  Twenty-five

  “Mel!”

  She heard Ray’s shout. She ignored it. She dashed across the dark parking lot and ducked up against the building, clinging to the shadows in case there were security cameras watching her approach.

  She heard a car door slam and knew that Ray was following her. She suspected Uncle Stan would now be on his way as well, probably calling Joe en route. If she was going to talk to Butch, it had to be now.

  She reached for the side door Butch had slipped through, fully expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t. She eased it open and slipped inside.

  The darkness slammed up against her as if it had been dropped over her head like a thick blanket. She knew she was in the warehouse but it was so dark, she couldn’t make out any shapes and her sense of spatial relations was gone, baby, gone.

  She reached out with her hands, trying to feel her way along the wall, hoping her eyes would adjust to the dark before something popped out of the shadows to clobber her. She shuffled her feet. Her fingers tapped metal shelves and she used them to guide herself farther into the room.

  She wondered if she should call out Butch’s name. After all, he was expecting to meet someone, wasn’t he?

  She figured she could wait until her eyes adjusted and she could see where she was. In the meantime, she’d just keep moving steadily across the floor until she arrived at the offices. Mel pressed forward, hoping she hadn’t gotten it wrong and was headed in the right direction.

  She moved down two more shelves and into a small alcove, when a hand clamped over her mouth while another grabbed her arm. She immediately began to thrash and kick.

  “Ow, damn it, Mel, it’s me, Ray,” a voice hissed. “I’m letting go, don’t scream.”

  “Why are you grabbing me?” she snapped as soon as his hand lifted off of her mouth.

  “To drag you out of here,” he said. “The police are on their way. We’ve done all we can do here.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “We’ve done nothing. We need a confession at the very least.”

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Ray grabbed Mel’s arm and dragged her to the ground. He covered both of their heads with his arms and Mel had to shove him off so she could get enough air to breathe.

  Ray let loose a string of curses and then began to rant under his breath. “Great, now Bordow is shooting at us! I knew we shouldn’t have come in here. I knew it. Didn’t I tell you, didn’t I?”

  “Shh,” Mel hushed him. “We don’t know where he is and if he is shooting at us, he sure has a crappy aim.”

  “Let’s just go out the way we came in,” Ray said. “We can meet the police outside.”

  “Okay,” Mel whispered. The gunfire was a game changer. Her voice was shaky and she had the feeling that coming into the warehouse had not been one of her better ideas. “Lead the way.”

  Ray turned and stayed crouched down as he moved through the dark warehouse. Mel followed him. They’d only gone a few feet when bullets blasted over their heads, exploding into the concrete above them, spraying them with chunks of cement.

  “Run for it!” Ray shouted.

  She heard him take off running and she tried to follow as he twisted and turned through the big metal shelves, but Mel miscalculated and slammed into a shelving unit. The impact knocked her to her knees. She braced to hit the hard floor but instead she landed on something soft.

  She went to push up with her hands and felt the solid warmth of a body beneath her hands. Mel clamped her lips together to keep from screaming. She quickly ran her hands over the body. The person wasn’t wearing leather, so it wasn’t Ray.

  She felt the rise and fall of the chest. No boobs, definitely male, and he was breathing. She felt something hard in his shirt pocket, and she reached in and pulled out his phone.

  Excellent! She didn’t dare turn it on for fear that if Butch Bordow saw any light, he might shoot his gun in her direction. Instead, she scurried forward away from the body. If she could find some cover, she’d be able to check the phone and see who the unconscious person was.

  On hands and knees, she made her way down one aisle and then turned into another. She paused, listening. She didn’t hear Ray. There were no more gunshots. She hit the button to turn on the phone.

  The home display picture was an old one of a beautiful woman who had the same features and dark hair as Suzanne Bordow. Mel had seen this picture on a phone before at the Triple Fork when she’d taken it off Butch so the bartender could call his daughter to pick him up. Her heart hammered in her chest. This was Butch Bordow’s phone.

  Hot damn. That meant the body she had just fallen on had been Butch Bordow. Had he been shooting at them and knocked himself out? There was no privacy block on the phone and Mel went right to his texts. She saw that the one from Ray to meet them hadn’t been read yet, but the one before that, sent from his daughter Suzanne, had, and it asked him to meet her here to talk this evening.

  Mel felt her heart thump hard in her chest. Had Suzanne been the one to fire the gun just now? And if so, had she been aiming at Mel and Ray or her father?

  A door slammed at the end of the warehouse, and Mel jumped and dropped the phone with a clatter. She quickly snatched it up from the floor, pressing it against her stomach to hide its glow. She pressed herself back into the shelves, trying to hide. The sound of voices, agitated voices, reached her and she held her breath.

  Were they looking for her? Was it the police, coming to help? Or was it Suzanne, looking for her father?

  Mel knew a bit of police protocol from her uncle. There was no way they were going to just enter a building where shots had been fired. They’d be outside, waiting to see what unfolded and trying to strategize how best to enter without turning it into a bloodbath or a hostage situation.

  Oh, man, had Ray gotten out, or was he hiding somewhere else in the warehouse? Mel fervently hoped he’d gotten out. She could never live with herself if something happened to Ray because he’d been comi
ng in to save her.

  “This was not part of the deal.”

  It was a man’s voice. The level of agitation was high but even so, Mel knew that voice. It was Tyson Ballinger and he sounded furious. She glanced at the phone and even though she couldn’t see where Tyson was, she hit the video record button, hoping to get audio on their conversation.

  “Don’t be stupid.” Now it was a woman’s voice. She didn’t sound agitated; she sounded furious. “The deal is for you to do whatever I tell you to do and right now I’m telling you to find my father and finish him off.”

  Suzanne! Mel blocked her mouth with her fist to keep from crying out. Suzanne was berating Tyson for not killing her father.

  “No, I’m not a killer,” Tyson said.

  “Oh, stop it!” Suzanne said. She sounded irritated. “Don’t even think you’re on a higher moral ground than me. You straight-up rob people of their businesses and then shrug when they commit suicide. If that’s not murder, I don’t know what is.”

  “At least I didn’t bash my brother’s skull in,” he said.

  Mel’s ears began to buzz and she could barely hear their next words over the thudding of her heart, which seemed to echo through her body like the beat of a bass drum keeping time to her terror. She had no doubt that if Suzanne found her, she was dead.

  “He was a worthless womanizing son of a bitch,” she said. “I did that fiancée of his a favor by getting rid of him. Instead of bitching about jail time, she should be thanking me.”

  “For getting her sent to prison? Not likely,” he said.

  “When this company goes public, your investment is going to be worth a hundred times what you put in,” Suzanne said. “Surely one man’s sad, drunken life is worth less than that. Shoot him and I’ll know you’re on board with me.”

  “I’m not a killer,” he said. He sounded like he was having a hard time standing up to her.

  Mel inched forward, trying to see around the shelves. If she could just get some video of them, she’d have all she needed as proof. In the darkness, she had no idea how she was going to pull that off.

  “Help me find him,” Suzanne’s voice said. “Then we can decide who gets to pull the trigger.”

  “Hold up,” Tyson said. “I have an idea.”

  Mel strained to hear what he said next but he wasn’t talking. She could hear him tapping on his phone and Suzanne let out an impatient huff of breath. She tried to guess how far away they were and figured they were several shelves over from her. That meant they weren’t sure where Butch was. She hoped he came to and got the heck out of there before they found him, because she had no idea how she was going to save them both.

  All of a sudden the phone in her hand lit up and started to blare the ringtone “Love Will Keep Us Together,” by Captain and Tennille.

  “Ah!” Mel jumped up, smacked her head on the shelf above her, and doubled over as she frantically tried to mute the phone.

  “Over there!” Suzanne shouted.

  The sound of running feet headed in her direction forced Mel out of her hiding spot and back into the aisle. She dashed around the shelving unit, not knowing which way to turn, when all of a sudden the lights in the warehouse snapped on.

  She was standing directly in front of the same portable ball pit where all of this had begun. She couldn’t help but stare at it. It only relaxed her a smidge to realize it was a different ball pit, all clean and shiny with no dead body. At least, for a moment she felt better, then her heart dropped into her stomach when she saw that standing on the other side was Suzanne, and she had a gun pointed right at Mel.

  “Stop,” Suzanne said.

  Mel held her hands up as if in surrender, but instead the video camera on Butch’s phone was still going. So long as Suzanne didn’t shoot her right away, Mel might be able to verify the information she’d overheard. With any luck, Ray was out there and would save her before Suzanne started blasting holes in her.

  “What are you doing here?” Tyson asked. He looked at her as if she was too stupid to live—not the first person to do that—and then said, “I told you to butt out of this.”

  “Butch and I were supposed to have a meeting,” Mel said. “He knows. He knows everything.”

  Suzanne threw her head back and guffawed as if Mel had said the funniest thing she had ever heard.

  “Please, the only thing my father knows is how to maintain his buzz for days at a time,” she said. “He’s been like that ever since my mother died—a complete waste of space just like my brother. I’m the one who runs this company, not them. It thrives on my blood, sweat, and tears, and how do you think they wanted to repay me? They thought this would be a great time to sell it.”

  Mel didn’t move, afraid that if she drew too deep of a breath, Suzanne might just shoot for the heck of it. Still, there were questions that needed answers.

  “You keep two sets of books, don’t you?”

  Suzanne tipped her head to the side. Mel swallowed, wondering if that knowledge was going to get her shot.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I own a business, I get it,” Mel said. She got nothing. If it weren’t for Tate she’d be clueless, but Suzanne didn’t know that. “One set is for losses—that’s what your brother and father got to see, right? The other is for investors—that’s what Tyson here got to see. Correct?”

  Tyson glared at her, but Suzanne looked impressed. “You’re not as dumb as the blond hair would lead one to believe.”

  “Low blow,” Mel said.

  “Yeah, I let Mike and Dad think the business was in trouble,” she said. “I didn’t think they’d care. When Mike said he was going to marry Diane as she had money and we could use her marketing savvy to bolster the business, I figured shacking up with her would keep him out of my way, and it did for a while, but then Mike got wind of Dad’s gambling and wanted to sell the business to bail him out. I couldn’t tell him we were doing well. He’d want a cut of it and I’d worked too hard to make it successful to let him just swoop in and take it.”

  “Shut up, Suzanne,” Tyson growled.

  “So you had Tyson kill him,” Mel said. She ignored the furious look Tyson sent her.

  “No, I didn’t. I brought Tyson in for business, not killing.” Suzanne jerked her head at him.

  That’s when it clicked in Mel’s head. “RR Ty, one of the private companies that bought in.” She looked at Tyson. “That’s you. RR Ty. Railroad Ty.”

  He shrugged. She had seen him at the train park; there wasn’t much use denying that the small company was his.

  “Ty let my father rack up gambling debts, which, unbeknownst to Dad and Mike, I paid off to Tyson in ownership percentages of the company. I figured if Tyson owned a bigger stake in the company than the two of them but not as much as me, my brother and father wouldn’t be able to sell it. I didn’t expect my father to panic and convince my brother to try and sell it out from under me so quickly, however.”

  She gave Tyson an irritated look. “You were too scary and you freaked my dad out.”

  He raised his hands in the air as if to ask, What do you want from me?

  “They made their move before Tyson owned a larger portion of the company than they did, making their combined ownership greater than ours.” She gestured between her and Tyson. “That’s why they both had to go. Given that my brother was a lying, cheating dirtbag, it was natural that suspicion would fall on his fiancée.”

  “So if Tyson was just the money, then it was you. You killed your brother,” Mel said. She tried to make it sound as if she was just trying to understand; meanwhile, she was freaking out. Where was Ray? Uncle Stan? Heck, she’d even take grumpy, after-her-man Detective Tara.

  “Duh,” Suzanne said. “I didn’t plan it. He had a hissy fit about the business and insisted we were selling. He didn’t care because he was marrying moneybags. I lost
my temper and the next thing I knew I’d crushed his head with one of those cheesy faux pedestals. Luckily we were next to the ball pit, and I could roll him right in. I thought I could make it look like an accident, but then you showed up with those stupid cupcakes and ruined everything.”

  Mel was breathing through her nose, trying to keep her sudden bout of nausea at bay.

  “But what’s done is done. His fiancée is still the prime suspect, and I just have a few loose ends to tie up. So where did you get my father’s phone?” Suzanne demanded.

  “I found it,” Mel said. She had no doubt she was one of those loose ends. It was not a comforting realization.

  “Where?” Suzanne said.

  Mel tilted her chin up. If she told them where Bordow was, they’d kill her and then him. She had to lie.

  “On the floor, back there. He must have dropped it.” Mel gestured toward the back of the warehouse. Then she gave Suzanne a hard stare. “It has a nice record feature on it.”

  “Give it to me,” Suzanne said. Her eyes went wide and she sounded nervous.

  Mel glanced at Tyson. The phone proved he had nothing to do with the murder. If Mel lost that evidence, if Suzanne destroyed it, he was screwed. Mel wondered if he could read this on her face or if he was in too deep to care.

  “I said, give it to me,” Suzanne demanded.

  “You want it?” Mel asked. “Go get it.”

  With that she whipped it into the ball pit as hard as she could.

  “No!” Suzanne cried.

  She turned toward the pit, and Mel ran. First she dashed past the faux pedestals, knocking them over behind her as she went. If Suzanne or Tyson followed, she was not going to make it easy for them.

  Behind her, Mel heard a yelp and a scream. She ducked down and scurried across two rows until she was able to see the ball pit from a shielded vantage point. Both Tyson and Suzanne were in the pit searching for the phone. Suzanne had dropped her gun in the process, and just as she dove down into the balls to look for the phone, five Scottsdale police officers appeared around the edge of the pit, all pointing their weapons at Tyson and Suzanne. When she surfaced it was to find Detective Tara Martinez waiting with a pair of handcuffs, which she snapped around Suzanne’s wrists before Suzanne could dive away from her.