by Kara Lennox
Loyalty like that wasn’t easy to find.
“Given who we had as role models, it’s a miracle either one of us ended up with a decent marriage. And it’s not too late for you, Mitch.”
“If I can beat a murder rap.” He paused, pinching off a brown leaf and burying it like Dwayne had done. “Yeah, if I beat this thing, I’m gonna try for what you have.”
“Parts of it are real good.” Dwayne sounded a little wistful. “You just have to learn to accept the parts that aren’t so perfect. No relationship is perfect.”
Mitch’s mother had said something similar, about her and Davy. Something about every relationship being about give-and-take, compromising here and there, picking your battles.
He suspected that if he wanted Beth, he was going to have to give up fighting. Could he do that?
The sound of a slamming door made him look up. Beth and Linda were returning from inside. He looked back down at the plant he’d been about to drop into a hole, but something registered in his mind as wrong, wrong, wrong.
He looked up again.
Linda had Beth in a headlock, a gun to her temple.
“Jesus!” Mitch sprang to his feet, grabbing the first thing he saw that could reasonably become a weapon—a small shovel.
“Oh, my God,” Dwayne murmured right behind Mitch.
Mitch’s instinct was to charge. He had to get to Beth—had to save her.
“Stop right there!” Linda commanded in a strangely guttural voice. “Do as I say.”
“Linda, what are you doing?” Dwayne nearly strangled on his words. “Let her go! Put the gun down, are you crazy?”
“She knows, Dwayne. About the lipstick.”
Mitch couldn’t help noticing that Linda had put on a fresh coat of a peachy-orange color on her lips. Was it the Youthful Coral Beth had mentioned? Had she seen the lipstick and made some sort of accusation?
Given Linda’s reaction, she had something to do with Larry’s death. Was that what Dwayne had suspected? Or had he known for sure?
“Linda,” Dwayne tried again. “Put the gun down. This is only going to make things worse. We had a plan, remember? We need to stick to it.”
“I’m not leaving this house!” Keeping her stranglehold on Beth, who appeared too terrified to move any muscle she didn’t have to, Linda dragged her victim closer. Mitch gauged how close he would have to get. He could knock the gun out of her hand with a high roundhouse kick. If he did it fast enough, she wouldn’t have time to react and pull the trigger.
But could he do it fast enough?
He didn’t know, and he couldn’t risk Beth’s life finding out.
“You killed Larry Montague,” Mitch said, hoping the exact right words would come to him, words that would convince Linda Bell that killing anyone else wouldn’t help her cause. “We were just waiting for the lab to confirm the match to your lipstick.”
“Honey, it’s over,” Dwayne tried one more time in a wheedling tone. “Please, baby, put down the gun. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Okay?” Linda screeched. “With both of us going to prison? I don’t think so. I busted my ass helping you cover up Robby Racine’s death. I lied for you all these years, and now you want to throw all that away?”
“There’s still—” Dwayne tried again, but his wife cut him off.
“We agreed that if the murder ever came to light, everyone would think your brother did it. But now you’re going soft on me, aren’t you?”
Dwayne glanced over at Mitch. “It was an accident.” He silently pled for understanding. “I was a rookie, and I was gonna be a hero, finding the stolen car and bringing the thief into custody. But Robby said he had a gun. I panicked…”
“Dwayne, just shut up!” Linda screamed.
“I thought he was going to shoot me. But when it was over, Robby was dead, and there was no other gun. I saw my career going in the toilet before it had even begun. So I called Linda to help me. I had an old gun of Daddy’s in my glove box, and I shot a couple of rounds into the shack, then planted the gun in the car. We sank the car and buried Robby, and I honestly thought that would be the end of it.
“And it was—until Robby’s body was found.”
“Great, just spill your guts,” Linda said, “and implicate me while you’re at it.”
“It’s over, Linda,” Dwayne said. “Just let Beth go, and give me the gun.” He inched toward his wife, his hand outstretched.
Suddenly Linda thrust Beth away from her, shoving her to the ground, hard. “Don’t you move!”
She turned the gun on Dwayne and pulled the trigger.
PAIN RADIATED FROM Beth’s shoulder and her head felt as though it had been split in two, and for one crazy moment she thought she was the one who’d been shot. But then she saw a red circle blossomed on Dwayne’s shirt.
“Linda, honey…” Dwayne collapsed, and Linda slowly turned the gun and pointed it at Mitch. Beth swallowed the urge to scream, fearing any sound she made might cause the unbalanced woman to twitch. All she could do was watch, helpless.
Mitch had crouched in preparation to launch an attack, but now he froze, probably realizing that martial arts were no match for a loaded gun in the hands of someone who fully intended to use it.
“You killed Larry?” Mitch asked.
That’s good, Beth thought. Keep her talking.
“He was there that night. He was trying to blackmail us. I couldn’t let him do that. I didn’t want to kill him…” A single tear coursed down her cheek. Still, though she was obviously distraught, her hand was steady, her gaze never wavering.
“I’m sorry, Dwayne.” Linda started to sob. “But better the widow of a hero than the wife of a disgraced cop.”
“Linda, give it up,” Mitch said. “Please. By now, the neighbors heard the gunshot. They’ll be calling the police.”
“You’re probably right.” She sniffed back her tears. “So this is how it’s gonna go down. You and Dwayne got into a terrible argument. You pulled a gun and shot at Dwayne. You missed the first time, hitting Beth by accident, but the second shot hit Dwayne. Dwayne made a grab for the gun. You struggled, and it went off accidentally, fatally wounding Mitch. I saw the whole thing from the porch.”
The woman was a monster! Beth tried to think of some way to stop her. But Linda had a gun. How could Beth and Mitch argue with a gun?
Beth should say something. Reason with her. But she was so terrified, she couldn’t even formulate words. And maybe it was better if she said nothing. Right now, Linda discounted Beth as a threat. Who would be afraid of a small-statured woman cowering on the ground with an injured shoulder?
That was when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Dwayne…it was Dwayne moving his hand, one inch at a time. He wasn’t dead.
Did he have a gun? He probably didn’t carry one around to do yard work. His hand closed over the blade of the shovel, which Mitch had dropped on Linda’s command. Did Dwayne have enough strength left to do anything useful with the shovel?
Dwayne pushed the shovel toward Beth, and that was when Beth realized that if anyone was going to use the shovel, she would have to. Three people’s lives hung in the balance, and she didn’t have much time to act. She could see the wheels turning in Linda’s mind, visualizing the scenario she would tell the police, calculating how to shoot Mitch and Beth in a way that would match up with her story.
Seconds. Beth had only a few seconds to act.
Courage surged through her, fueled by her anger at this woman’s savagery, her utter disregard for anyone’s well-being but her own. Well, Linda had made a critical error when she’d pointed that gun at the man Beth loved.
It’s over, bitch.
In one fluid motion, Beth grabbed the shovel, surged to her feet and swung that shovel in a wide arc toward Linda’s head. Linda had time only to turn, eyes wide with surprise, before the shovel made contact with a sickening thwack.
At the same time, Mitch made his move. His right foot seemed to
blur as it circled through the air and made contact with the gun in Linda’s hand, knocking it a good twenty feet away.
Linda went down, but Beth didn’t stop there. She leaped on top of the woman and, utterly untrained in how to subdue someone, simply lay down on top of her with her arms and legs spread wide so she couldn’t wiggle out.
Mitch went for the gun. And though he never did anything awkwardly, he held the gun as if it were a snake and pointed it at Linda.
“You move a muscle and I’ll shoot you through the head,” he informed her in a steely voice. With his left hand he reached into his pocket for his cell phone.
Beth wanted to go help Dwayne, but she didn’t dare move. If she let Linda up, the woman might realize Mitch would never shoot her, and flee. Thankfully, Linda stopped struggling.
“Officer down,” Mitch said into his phone. Nothing brought the police faster than those two words. He rattled off the address and a rather garbled version of what had just happened.
“The police are never going to believe you,” Linda said, her voice muffled by Beth’s shoulder pressing against it. “If Dwayne is dead, and you’re the one holding the gun—”
“And you’re the one with gunshot residue on her hand,” Beth said. “Nice try.” She was amazed she could string words together. She’d just hit someone in the head with a shovel. A human being. In the head. With a shovel.
Thank God Linda was at least conscious and talking. She could just as easily be dead. Beth hadn’t given her just a little tap; the blow had vibrated all the way through Beth’s body, and her hands hurt like they’d been hit with a hammer.
It seemed like forever until the cops arrived, but probably only two or three minutes passed. Finally, though, Beth heard sirens. She could feel it when the cops actually arrived, feel their eyes on her, but she didn’t see them.
“Sir, lay down your weapon and put your hands behind your head.”
“He means you,” Beth said to Mitch. “Just do it—we’ll sort it out later.”
Mitch lay the gun gently on the grass, then slowly stood and put his hands at the back of his neck, as instructed. Then she saw cops—lots of cops, all over the place. Every cop on duty for twenty miles must have responded to the call.
She didn’t move until two pairs of hands, one on each arm, pulled her to her feet. She yelped at the pain in her shoulder.
“Are you okay, miss?”
“Hey, I’m the one who’s hurt,” Linda said. “That crazy bitch hit me in the head with a shovel.”
“Because she shot her husband, and she was going to kill us, too!” Beth babbled. “Do a GSR test on her, on all of us. She’s the only one who did any shooting.”
“In self-defense!” Linda cried, sounding panicked now. “It was an accident. She hit me in the head with a shovel. I was trying to shoot her and I hit my husband instead!”
Her tears appeared genuine, and Beth felt stirrings of a new panic. What if they didn’t believe her and Mitch? Mitch was a murder suspect, she was part of his defense team. What if they didn’t do the proper tests? A small-town police force sometimes made mistakes.
Two other cops had gone to help Dwayne. One was using some kind of pack to apply pressure to the chest wound. The scene was chaotic as officers shouted to each other, calling for paramedics, securing the scene and overexcited at being so close to an attempted murder. Stuff like this didn’t happen in sleepy Coot’s Bayou very often.
Then a new voice joined the babble of excited cops and crackling police radios. “My wife…shot me.” It was Dwayne.
“What?” one of the cops asked, leaning down and putting his ear close to Dwayne’s mouth. “What did you say?”
Dwayne’s voice was barely above a whisper, and each labored breath sounded as if it might be his last. “Linda shot me… No accident… She killed Larry… I killed Robby… Mitch and Beth…innocent…” His eyes closed, and he went silent.
It was a deathbed confession, which she and at least three cops could attest to, and in the legal world, it was golden. Admissible in court whether Dwayne survived or not because clearly he thought he was dying.
Mitch was home free.
But she didn’t want Dwayne to die. “Can’t you do something?” Beth asked.
“Paramedics are on the way,” the cop who appeared to be in charge said, then added, “Let her go.”
It took a moment for Beth to realize she was wearing handcuffs. She hadn’t even been aware. Moments later, her wrists were freed. And as the adrenaline in her body ebbed away, the pain in her shoulder was like a knife.
She wanted to find Mitch. The cops had moved him out of her line of vision. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Dwayne, either. He wasn’t moving. Was he dead? But when the paramedics arrived, they worked on him for a while, then loaded him up and took him away on a stretcher, pale and still. That meant he was still alive. If he were dead, they would leave him at the scene, and he would fall under the venue of the crime scene investigators and the medical examiner.
“Ms. McClelland?” Lieutenant Addlestein addressed her. “Could you come over here, please?” He treated her gently, guiding her to the patio where he sat her down in a chair. She felt dazed, stupid, and it wasn’t until one of the paramedics came to check her out that she realized she was bleeding from her elbow where she’d hit the ground. She’d gotten blood all over her clothes.
“Tell me what hurts,” the handsome young paramedic asked, as if she were five years old.
“I’m okay,” she insisted. “Where’s Mitch? What happened to Mitch?”
“He’s fine,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sure you know the drill. We take your statements separately.”
“But you know he didn’t do anything wrong. You heard Dwayne?”
“Yes, ma’am. If you could just tell me what happened?”
Pulling her scattered thoughts together, she told her story, starting with her suspicions about Dwayne, and Mitch’s insistence that they talk to his brother and find out what was going on. She moved on to what her lab had uncovered about the lipstick stain, and spotting that specific brand of lipstick in Linda’s bathroom.
“I guess I said or did something to give myself away,” Beth said, feeling guilty over that part. Raleigh, or any of the Project Justice investigators, would have handled that moment a lot better than she had.
“It’s okay. You did fine.”
She moved on to the more difficult parts, about Linda assaulting her, and the fact she was such an easy hostage. “I couldn’t do anything to stop her, even before she had a weapon,” Beth said. “I remember clawing at her arm— Oh! You have to take fingernail scrapings.”
Addlestein made a note. “We’ll do all that at the hospital.” He looked at her neck and jaw. “I expect you’ll have bruises, too. And that shoulder will need X-rays.”
She’d thought she was hiding her injuries, hoping to avoid the hospital. The longer this took, the longer it would be before she could see Mitch. She had so much to say, so much to tell him.
“I hit Linda in the head with a shovel,” Beth said miserably. “She said she was going to kill us all, and I didn’t see any other way.”
Addlestein actually smiled. “You probably saved three lives today. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Shouting from behind her made Beth turn her head. “Enough, all right? You can take all the statements you want in five minutes.” Mitch, with two uniforms trailing behind him, strode toward Beth. Neither of the cops was brave enough to try to physically detain him.
Beth came out of her chair. “Mitch!”
He pulled her to him and enveloped her in a crushing hug that set her shoulder on fire again, but she didn’t care. “Beth. Oh, honey. You scared me half to death.”
“I’m sorry. I gave away the game—”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
“I’m such a wimp.”
“What are you talking about? What you did was amazing. Where did you find the courage?”
“
I don’t know. I knew she was going to shoot you, I knew it was only seconds away, and I just did it. I didn’t really think about it. I mean, where did that violence come from? I’ve never hit anyone, ever.”
“Helluva way to start.”
She pulled back to look at him. “You actually approve of what I did?”
“If there’d been any other way to stop Linda, then, no. Of course I couldn’t approve. But you did what you had to do, and I’m nothing but proud of you. Not just proud—in awe of your courage. And your brilliance in figuring out who really killed Larry.”
Beth was still processing this new, weird reality—that under the right circumstances, she could be a violent person. Murderously, lethally violent. It made Mitch’s bout with a bale of hay pale by comparison. Even his cage fighting—that was just a sport. A competitive sport with willing participants, with rules and a referee and safety precautions. It wasn’t like anybody in a cage fight got to use a shovel.
“I’ve been so stupid,” she said on a sob.
“Don’t, Beth. You’re the smartest person I know.”
“Smart in the lab, maybe. Stupid when it comes to relationships. I judged you, all sanctimonious, thinking I was somehow better because I never was violent—”
“Beth, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I love you and yet I pushed you away for something so trivial—”
“It’s not trivial if you’re afraid of me.”
“But I’m not. Maybe I was a little bit afraid because I had this picture of you as gentle and sweet, but I understand so much more now.”
“I am gentle and sweet. With you. Always. Give me a chance to prove that. I still think you deserve better than me, but I’m gonna be selfish and insist that you take me anyway.”
“I’ll take you if you’ll take a dangerous Shovel Woman. But you’ll have to promise me one thing.”
“You want me to stop cage fighting? I could do that.”
“No, that’s not it at all! I want you to teach me to defend myself. It was pathetic, how easily Linda controlled me. She didn’t even break a sweat.”
“Deal.” He started to kiss her, but stilled just before their lips made contact. Beth gradually became aware that a third party had never left their conversation.
