I flattened myself against the wall, waiting for a plan to form.
“Ben knew it was you who broke in last January,” I heard Liz say. “He called me and asked me to take his orchid.” I peeked around the window frame as Liz moved into view. Blood trickled from a cut on her forehead and her body wavered like beach grass in the wind, but her voice was still defiant. “After that break-in, Ben didn’t feel it was safe to keep the black at the nursery. He figured he’d come home one day and find your men had come back.” She pointed to the black orchid, now sitting on a driftwood table. “It was out on the yacht when you and Digger came. You searched the whole damn house and didn’t think to look there.” She laughed, a harsh and bitter sound.
“Shut up,” Ethan ordered.
Her laughter was gone as quickly as it came. “Why’d you have to kill Ben?” Her voice wasn’t defiant anymore.
“An accident. Stay where you are,” Ethan said.
Liz hadn’t moved, so he was speaking to someone I couldn’t see. I hoped it was Clay.
But Liz wasn’t finished. She raised her arm and pointed at Ethan. “The last conversation I had with your mother was about you. She said you were a ‘greedy little bastard,’ just like your father.” She waved her finger. “You burned the nursery to hide the fact that you took your mother’s orchids.”
“Where’s Sherri?” Ethan asked.
I heard Clay’s voice say, “I told you. We had a blowup and she went back to Jacaranda.”
Clay was alive; it would all be fine now.
“Then who shot Devlin?” Ethan asked.
“I don’t know,” Clay said.
Ethan moved into view and raised his gun to Liz’s head. “One more time, where’s Sherri?”
The gun in my hands lifted. It was fixed on the middle of Ethan’s back. My finger tightened on the trigger. An arm snaked around my neck and lifted me off my feet. Someone swung me away from the windows like I was no more than a sack of potatoes as the gun bucked in my hands. My toes dangled above the deck, and my bullet dug harmlessly into the soffit.
“Put it down,” the man holding me said. Something hard and metal prodded my lower spine. “Now.” The barrel of a gun dug deeper into my back.
His fingers bit into my right arm, pulling it down and cutting off the circulation. “Put it down.” He pushed me forward at the waist. The big gun fell from my hand and onto the deck, and then he jerked me upright.
“Okay, over there.” He gave me a little shove away from him. “Move.”
Stepping delicately sideways so as not to surprise him in any way, I kept my eyes fixed on him.
He was a giant, older, sixties maybe, but still formidable. He picked the gun with the silencer up off the deck and motioned with his head. “Inside.”
I did as I was told, my mouth dry with fear.
Ethan was grinning with pleasure when we came through the door. “At last, the final member of our party.”
My eyes found Clay. His face was filled with yearning and regret.
I started towards him, but the man behind me grabbed my hair and pulled me back against him. “Stay.”
On the couch a man in his thirties was stretched out, a white towel soaked in blood wrapped around his thigh. He glared at me with hate in his eyes.
I almost apologized, but then I remembered that Silvio was dead and I soon would be.
The big man stepped around me and said, “This is all going wrong, boss. Let’s kill them and get out of here.”
Ethan’s eyes never left my face. “Not yet, Digger. We’ll clean this up and then we’ll go.” His gun was pointed at my chest. “You were the wild card, the one I couldn’t figure out. I knew you were there at the gas bar the minute I met you. I picked that pink flip-flop up by the water after we came up the canal. As soon as I met you, I knew it was yours and you’d been there, but I couldn’t figure out who you were buying for.”
He paused, perhaps waiting for me to respond, and then said, “I thought you might be working with Tito. He was Nina’s snitch.”
“It’s over, Ethan,” I said.
He laughed. He wasn’t frightened at all.
“You just shot one of your own men.”
“I shot him because I thought he was one of you.” Ethan made it sound like the most rational thing in the world.
“You screwed up big-time.” I was babbling like an idiot to keep him from shooting me. “There was that picture.”
His brows furrowed. “What picture?”
“The one of your Cadillac with Angie sitting in it. You shouldn’t have let Angie have her picture taken with the car. Did you know the newspapers used that picture when they reported Angie’s death?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It proves you were there and that you knew Angie.”
Confusion on his face.
“The girl at the gas bar, the same girl murdered over in Homestead, Angie Martinez. The newspaper article has a picture that shows Angie with your Caddy.”
He wasn’t indifferent now.
“That photo proves you were out near the nursery before Ben died. Her family will remember when it was taken.”
I had his full attention.
“So what?”
“Why would you go see Ben except for the black orchid?” I was trembling with anger and exhaustion. “You went back and killed Ben, and then you killed Tito because he saw it happen.”
He shrugged. “Tito’s dead. They can’t prove anything.”
“No? Shall we call the cops and see if that’s true?”
His gun rose to point squarely at my chest. “They’ll never hear about it because you’ll be dead.”
“The cops already know. I told them everything.”
Behind me, the man named Digger released me and stepped away.
“I sent an e-mail just before your guys arrived.” A silly kind of joy filled me until I remembered one brutal truth. No way was Ethan going to let me walk away from this. I was going to die. My legs could barely hold me up.
If I was frightened, Ethan looked like he’d swallowed something nasty. He was doing the calculations and trying to decide if technology was somehow going to mess him up. He didn’t see Digger edging towards the hall with his gun covering Ethan. Digger knew it was over.
Ethan was concentrating on me, working out his story. “I’ll tell them I went over to talk to Ben a week before the fire. I stopped at the gas bar and a girl asked to have a picture taken with the car. No big deal.”
“Horseshit!” Liz roared. “You never went near him before the night of the fire. He would have told me. It could only have been the day Ben died. And you never drove that thing unless you felt you were sticking it to Ben. Do you honestly think he cared that you had it?” Her chin went up and she cackled in disgust and triumph. “He called it your pink pacifier.” Liz was out of control. Perhaps she didn’t realize he was going to kill us, or maybe she just didn’t care. She surged towards him, shoulders back and up on her toes like a boxer, bouncing in outrage. “You were no good back when you were a kid and you still aren’t.” She jabbed a finger at him. “Your mother knew just what you were.”
“Don’t,” Clay said and pulled her away. Stepping in front of Liz with his hands raised, Clay said, “Get away now, Ethan, while you still can. It’s over.”
“Boss,” the injured man said, pushing himself off the couch and trying to stand, “Digger’s going. We’ve got to get out of here too.”
Ethan turned as Digger ducked into a bedroom and disappeared.
Clay said, “Can’t you see you’ve lost, Ethan?”
Ethan said, “And so have you.” His gun exploded. A red flower of blood marred Clay’s crisp blue shirt with the cuffs turned neatly back.
My hand scrambled to my pocket and the Beretta.
The sound o
f the helicopter filled the room. Ethan pivoted. Gun raised, he stared down the hall in the direction of the helipad.
That’s when I shot Ethan in the back. The bullet hit him high in the left shoulder, but it didn’t take him down. He gave a startled grunt and staggered forward. And then he slowly turned on me.
I stepped backwards with the Beretta held out in front of me.
He looked down at the small exit wound on the front of his shirt. Confusion flooded his face and he said, “I thought you’d be easy.”
“You thought wrong,” I said and shot him again.
Ethan’s eyes opened wide and he stumbled backwards. Then he sat down hard on the floor and fell back against a chair, still staring at me.
I took a deep breath and tightened my finger on the trigger, ready to shoot him a third time. The front of his shirt turned red. He didn’t move.
I ran to Clay.
Clay whispered, “Sorry, Sherri . . . mistake.” Blood pulsed from his open lips. His eyes fluttered closed. His body went limp.
I lifted him in my arms. Frightening animal sounds of grief; I didn’t realize they came from me.
CHAPTER 41
I have no memory of the next few hours. It was Liz who called in the police, leaving me in the house while she went down to the boat.
She told me that she tried to take Clay’s body away from me when she returned, but I wouldn’t release him. She said that when the sound of the first emergency helicopter filled the house, I struggled to carry Clay out of the house. By then my mind had gone somewhere else. It took a long time for it to come back.
It came back to a mess. The man I’d shot clarified much of my story in exchange for a lighter sentence. Digger Jackson and the pilot were found. Digger told the police that Ethan had killed all those people not only for a black orchid, but also for his mother’s orchid collection, which he stole before burning down his brother’s nursery. The cops had a hard time believing the story. How could anyone understand? Greed and obsession make no sense to normal people.
One day when we were in the bar and talking about progress, Ethan had said, “Once things start rolling there’s no going back.” That’s pretty much what had happened when he went out to Osceola Nursery. Events just spun out of control.
I’ve had lots of time to count the ways I could have changed things. But even if I’d told the cops the little I knew as soon as I was out of the swamp, I doubt it would have made a difference to the outcome. Ethan always thought I had the orchid. He would never have believed that my being there was just an accident.
All and all, it feels most times like there was no one right thing, no act that would have left me without regrets. But there’s one thing I could have changed. Deep in the night, I admit to myself that Clay would be alive if I hadn’t stayed for that final martini.
It was the Sunset and its strange family of misfits, people who had accidently washed up on the same beach, who helped me heal.
Life became as simple as someone saying, “The sun’s going down. Looks like it’s going to be a good one. Let’s take a drink outside and watch it.”
Seeing the dying sun explode across the sky, and trusting it would come back in the morning, helped me believe that life would get better.
The End
PHYLLIS SMALLMAN’s first novel, Margarita Nights, won the inaugural Unhanged Arthur award from the Crime Writers of Canada after being shortlisted for the Debut Dagger in the UK and the Malice Domestic in the US. Her writing has appeared in both Spinetingler Magazine and Omnimystery Magazine. The Florida Writers Association awarded Champagne for Buzzards a silver medal for the best mystery, and her fifth book, Highball Exit, won an IPPY award in 2013. The Sherri Travis mystery series was one of six chosen by Good Morning America for a summer read in 2010.
Before turning to a life of crime, Smallman was a potter. She divides her time between a beach in Florida and an island in the Salish Sea.
Visit her website at www.phyllissmallman.com.
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