Cops said domestic disputes were the most dangerous situations on earth. The only thing to do, Billie decided, was nothing. Anything she’d do now would be likely to make things worse.
Hold on and wait.
*
Emma fumed. What the hell was wrong with them all? Why wasn’t anybody doing something? How many signals did she have to send before Billie understood? If they banded together, worked in concert, they could take that little woman in two seconds flat. And they’d better, because she was beyond a talking cure. The woman didn’t understand English anymore. She’d gone over the edge she’d been tottering on, left the land of logic far behind, and now anything, for any reason—or none—could happen. They were in big trouble if they didn’t stop her now.
Emma had hoped David Vincent would calm his wife, had thought perhaps such displays were part of his marriage and that his god-awful super-calm tone had worked before, although personally, it drove Emma up the wall. But it hadn’t worked and now, David Vincent didn’t look like he had a clue as to what to do and it didn’t matter, because nothing save drugging her or knocking her unconscious would slow that woman down.
If the woman was sane, she’d take one look at that jerk of a girl, Marlena, and say “take him.” They deserved each other. What was she except big boobs and a sly, dim intelligence? “Walk away,” Emma wanted to tell his wife. Take him to the cleaners.
Only stop screaming. Even Emma couldn’t think through that shrill knife-sound and, added to it, Heather Wilson’s keening.
But if she and Billie, each on a side, rushed Jeannie Vincent, they could get her down before she remembered that gun she was carrying like a bunch of keys. They were behind her now, her attention elsewhere—she wouldn’t have a chance to shoot before they got her down.
Dear God, she thought, hearing herself. She sounded like one of the characters in the books her father listened to. She wondered if he’d be proud—or horrified—if he knew the situation she was in, or what she wanted to do. They’d talk about it next visit. She’d visit soon. If she lived through this, she’d take Caroline and the grandkids, too. Make peace all around.
Admit her truth wasn’t always the only truth.
If she lived.
She looked at Billie, sharply. Notice how we’re positioned. Act on it. The girl was so dense!
Billie seemed to feel Emma’s glance, and returned it. Emma nodded—the tiniest, most subtle of nods—toward Jeannie Vincent, then raised her eyebrows microscopically.
Billie looked from Emma to the screaming woman, then back, her brows contracted. She didn’t get it.
Emma repeated the motions, more boldly. Surely, even if David Vincent saw them, he’d want them to go forward. She didn’t have to be all that subtle.
And Billie shook her head, just barely, but nonetheless definitely. She held up her right index finger, signaling Emma to wait. Emma couldn’t believe it. Billie was saying “no.”
No to the only sane option, the only quick end to this, the only hope.
No!
If they got out of this alive, Emma was firing Billie August this afternoon.
In fact, she was firing her even if she had to do it from the grave.
*
Marlena didn’t know if people her age could have heart attacks, but she thought she was having one. She couldn’t breathe right and she could hear her own heartbeats. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “He isn’t—we aren’t—I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up!” his crazy wife screamed. Squinting her eyes, she aimed her gun at Marlena’s forehead.
Marlena could feel it. A hole waiting to happen, right above her nose. How could she have known his wife was crazy? It wasn’t fair and she was going to die because she hadn’t known. The spot between her eyebrows grew hot, a bull’s-eye waiting to be blown away.
She’d thought Emma Howe was going to do something. Marlena had seen her scope out the room, saw her eyes, the way she really looked at stuff, figuring things out. But all the old woman did was look. She was too feeble and old to do anything more. She must be waiting too, for somebody—who?—to save them.
It wasn’t going to be Heather, no surprise. She was as useless as always, bawling, as if this had anything to do with her! Even Mrs. Vincent couldn’t think her husband would fool around with Heather.
And David was a coward, and stupid, too. He wasn’t anything like what she’d thought, and she didn’t love him anymore. She didn’t even like him. Was he going to stand there until his wife shot Marlena dead?
Obviously, it was up to her to save herself. “Mrs. Vincent,” she said in her calmest, telephone-answering voice. “This is all a big mis—”
“I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear anything from your—”
“But you don’t understand, I only—”
And she shut up because everybody was making noise at once while the old lady did this weird wobble-headed thing again, and the blonde shook her head, and David said they should talk this over, and Heather sobbed about not being able to stand this and what was going on anyway and through it Jeannie Vincent let out her loudest scream ever—noise, no words, a scream so big it covered them all as she raised the gun and held it out straight, for real now, and she waved it back and forth, from her husband to Marlena. Marlena felt the space between her eyebrows go from hot to icy as the gun aimed at it.
Back and forth—David, Marlena, Gun. “I’ll kill you,” Jeannie Vincent screamed, finding words again. “I’ll kill you both! You ruined me, you lied to me, you shamed me and I’ll—”
“YES!” The old lady shouted it at the top of her lungs and Marlena heard it as a gunshot and could barely breathe.
*
Nothing. They could have had her down and disarmed by now if Billie weren’t an idiot! What the hell was inside that jerking head, what the hell was that finger business?
The madwoman had remembered her gun and what it could do and she was seconds from using it. They’d lost the moment and Emma had no partner, no nothing. She had to do it herself, then.
“You don’t want to do this, Jeannie,” David Vincent said. “You don’t want to go to jail. What about the children?”
“Did you think about the children when you—”
“I never, I swear, it isn’t—”
Emma shifted her muscles. She didn’t want Jeannie Vincent noticing or hearing anything.
“No!” Billie whispered. “Wait one minute, I—”
“You son of a bitch I’ll make us both dead and I’ll see you in hell!”
“Are you out of your mind?” Emma screamed as she lunged. And she realized that Billie, sputtering and still shaking her head, still saying “no!” had nonetheless mirrored her motions.
Jeannie Vincent fell, Emma on one side, Billie the other. Emma had a partner.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Billie,” Emma lied. “Get the gun!”
*
Billie had banged her left elbow onto the ground. Pain rocketed up her arm.
Emma was half under Jeannie Vincent, struggling to get up and keep the woman down at the same time. Billie reached for the gun but missed as a weight dropped onto her back, forcing the air out of her lungs. David Vincent had hurled himself onto the pile.
“Get off—What are you—!” Emma shouted as Jeannie writhed and screamed from within the body sandwich.
God. Billie’s arm was in agony and her back felt broken from the pressure of his knee, but she got hold of the woman’s gun before he could get it, shifted her hip to lessen his weight and fell back again, deafened by a blast she felt in her fillings, in the back of her skull.
The weight on her back lifted.
Jeannie Vincent lay flat, groaning in a low, constant tone.
The girl at the back of the room finally stopped wailing and the sudden silence felt as if it might smother them. Billie could hear their breathing and hers, raspy, hard, fast.
The girl at the back of the room started up again. “He has a gun! He kil
led his wife!”
Emma and Billie let go of her at the same time. Blood covered half her linen shirt.
*
The platinum blonde stood at the doorway, screaming and pointing at Jeannie Vincent and pulling at her own hair.
“Stop him!” Emma shouted, with one quick glance at Billie. David Vincent was crawling away from his wife’s bleeding body, bracing himself to stand back up, the gun—his gun, because Billie had his wife’s—in his hand.
“I had to—” he said, crouching. “You saw what she was going to— She would have—” Without a word or signal that Billie could have described, she knew, and she grabbed one of his legs while Emma grabbed the other and both pulled straight back.
David Vincent splatted down, onto his chin and chest, mid-explanation.
Billie beamed at Emma. They’d done it—something—the right thing.
Emma stomped on his hand until it released the gun. “Don’t move,” she said, sitting down on him.
The platinum blonde reanimated, leaping onto Emma and pummeling her. “Leave him alone! Didn’t you just see? He saved my life! What’s wrong with you? Leave him alone!”
Billie grabbed Jeannie’s gun from where it had fallen, then didn’t know what to do with it, so she pounded Marlena’s hand with it. The girl pulled back with a yowl.
“Call the police!” Emma shouted in the direction of the girl cowering behind the desk. “Heather, now! Call them! We need an ambulance, too!”
“Emma, I already—” Billie was stopped by Marlena’s nails, clawing her face, her arm, her hand holding the gun.
“No police!” Vincent shouted. “No police!”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Self-defense.” His words were muffled, because his head was being held flat on the floor, one cheek squashed.
“Who cares why?” Emma said gruffly.
The moaning grew weaker.
Billie smacked Marlena’s hand off with the gun again, then held it, pointed at her, and Marlena grew quiet, her face pale against her scarlet lipstick.
Billie felt a rush. If she had to—if she wanted to—she could shoot this girl. She could shoot Vincent. Anyone. Everyone. Nobody could hurt her because she had a gun.
She heard herself and recoiled.
“Police! Call!” Emma shouted again from the tangle of arms and legs and bodies. Marlena grabbed—Emma caught—Billie pushed—Vincent twisted—Heather cried—Jeannie moaned. Emma punched—Marlena scratched—Billie pulled—Vincent bit—Heather sobbed.
“Give me the gun or hold him down and I’ll call, dammit!” Emma shouted, and one second later, she shouted again: “Billie August, you’re fired!” But even as she screamed that out, and through the grunts and curses and sobs and shouts—a siren, a screech of brakes.
“There’s a gun,” Emma shouted as they entered, her knee still on David Vincent’s forearm and her other hand holding Marlena at bay.
“Down! Put the gun down. Slowly!”
They were shouting at Billie. “She means that—”
“Down! Now!”
She put the gun on the floor. “He shot his wife.” Let the complicated rest of what he’d done wait a few minutes. Jeannie Vincent looked gray-skinned and barely conscious, her moans sporadic and ominously soft.
“You the one called this in?” the cop asked Emma.
“Me? No. Somebody on the street must have—”
“I did,” Billie said. “I’m the one who called.”
Emma glared, looked ready to wash Billie’s mouth out with soap for lying.
“Before I came in.”
“How could you have…” Emma let the sentence wander off.
Billie inhaled deeply, let her mind register that the police were here, David Vincent in handcuffs, paramedics working on his wife, and the danger over. “A hunch,” she finally answered. “A bad feeling about how she was behaving outside. We PIs, we develop a sixth sense.”
Emma didn’t smile, didn’t react.
“Okay,” Billie said. “I was a pro. Or getting to be one, but I was just fired.” She waited. Took a deep breath. Waited some more. “Okay, look—Jeannie Vincent’s behavior made me nervous, but I also had a rock-solid fallback that would make a police visit worthwhile, even if nothing had happened here. Something you don’t know about yet, Emma.”
Emma’s expression moved across incredulity, amusement—Emma’s version of it, at least—to confusion, interest, and, upon being told there was something she didn’t know, incredulity again, with annoyance added to it.
“You could have let me know,” Emma said.
“What? I’m going to—it’s complicated and long and I wanted—”
“You could have let me know you’d already called the police!”
“I tried, but you—”
Emma turned her back and took a step toward the desks.
“Emma?”
The older woman turned. Billie pointed at David Vincent, now handcuffed. She spoke softly. “He’s a wild-animal smuggler. Tracy was part of it for a while, then wanted out. He killed her. She made a tape explaining it all. I have it.”
Emma’s expression was so unfamiliar, Billie couldn’t translate it. Interest? Possibly…respect?
“Am I still fired?” Billie asked.
Emma waved the idea away, and then she turned again and walked back to where the brown-haired girl still cowered.
She hadn’t exactly done back flips over Billie’s cleverness.
But for five seconds she’d looked close to impressed. That was something.
*
Emma had nearly forgotten why she’d come here. She hadn’t driven down to witness a face-off between the Vincents or to find out about Tracy Lester’s death. She’d come here to tell Heather Wilson, once and for all, the truth.
“Stop sniveling,” she told the young woman. “It doesn’t help anything except your enemies. You want to be strong, girl. You are strong and nothing bad happened to you. It’s a stupid job, anyway, so losing it isn’t a bad thing, either.”
Heather sniffled, looked around at the paramedics and police and nodded.
“Pay attention to me, now. We had a date. Do you still want coffee? I think you could use it.” She herself wouldn’t mind going back to the quiet café where people let you sit and think in peace.
The girl blew her nose and shook herself like a young animal. “No,” Heather whispered. “No coffee. I’m okay. I was so scared. God, the screaming was enough, but then, the gun—the guns and the blood!”
“Do you feel calm enough to hear me now? Or should we wait for another time?”
“You found out about my mother?” Despite what she’d just been through, the thought of her birth mother brightened her expression. Emma could almost read the glorious images filling the girl’s mind, the collected fantasies of Heather Wilson, and none remotely close to the truth. None of a negligent, drugged mother murdering her entire family. If she’d thought today’s shooting was horrible…
And none of her fantasies had been about a teenager sacrificing her youth, her plans, and most of her life for the sake of a child she loved.
“Tell me, please,” Heather said.
Emma cleared her throat and looked toward the ceiling. She walked the girl farther back into the storage area, away from the organized chaos of the outer office. She put her hand gently on the girl’s arm. “Sometimes it hurts, or isn’t what you wanted to hear, but the truth is always best. Do you agree?”
“I…I guess so.” Heather’s voice had shrunk and was unsure.
“Well, the truth is I did my very best, but I couldn’t find your birth mother.”
Heather’s expectant smile faded. She took a deep breath and then another.
Emma put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Listen to me. This is also the truth. You’re going to be okay. You’re like your mother—the one you know. The one you have. You’re strong, the way she is, and you’ll get your footing again and be fine. Trust me. Good strong
women run in your family.”
“You really couldn’t find her?” Heather whispered.
“I really couldn’t,” Emma said.
The truth was: It wasn’t a lie.
*
“Let’s go hear the tape,” Emma said. “And have a drink. How’s that sound?”
Amazing. A friendly gesture? Tacit approval? “Good to both,” she said.
“How’s your arm? You’re holding it funny.”
“Not so good. I really slammed it. But I’m sure it’s not broken.”
Emma nodded approval. A broken bone would probably have offended her. “So you told her—Heather—about her mother?” Billie asked.
“Not exactly,” Emma said. “Not really. I told her…what I’d learned.”
Billie didn’t understand, but it didn’t bother her. She didn’t have to understand everything, all at once.
They crossed the street together. Her arm felt a little better already.
Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2) Page 29
