Priced to Kill

by Margaret Evans

  Not normally a paranoid individual, Laura did remember many of her father’s warnings when out and about alone. If it looks as if a car is following you, it probably isn’t, but there’s no harm done in playing it safe. Get the tag number and report it. For that she needed her phone to be fully charged.

  As she pulled into the carport behind the shop, she turned off the engine, unplugged the phone and picked up the sack with the gun. She pulled out the Glock, snapped in a clip from her black leather bag, made sure the safety was on, and tucked the gun and holster, and phone into the bag. She brought everything into the shop, ignoring the cat in the back room that was agitated and jumping about, and set her leather bag and the two library books on the counter, then strode to the front door to unlock it and flip the Closed sign to Open. Right on the stroke of ten o’clock.

  No sooner had she done this and turned to walk back to the counter, than the cat hissed at her, getting her attention, its tail and back hair raised, and she looked behind her to see a man entering the shop pulling a ski mask over his face. She fled behind the register and ducked down where she thought she would be safe. She slowly reached a hand up over the edge of the counter to grab her purse with the low-charged phone when he shouted at her.

  “I see you! Get up!”

  She stood slowly.

  He was dressed in worn, dirty jeans and a tee-shirt with food stains smeared across the Nike whoosh. The left shoulder seam was torn. She couldn’t see hair or features with the mask over his head, but the rest of him looked as if he had just climbed out of a Dumpster. He strode boldly to the register and demanded all her cash in a low voice.

  Laura stared dumbly at him, thinking it was a joke.

  “No speaky no Engleechy,” she said and then saw the fire in his eyes as he grew angry and realized it wasn’t a joke.

  “I have a gun. Give me all your cash.”

  She glanced beyond him and noticed he had flipped the door sign so that Closed was facing outward. She hadn’t heard a click and was betting he hadn’t locked it, hoping for a quick in-and-out and getaway. Her palms started sweating and the awareness of her surroundings grew sharper. The man said he had a gun but so far hadn’t displayed it. What had her father taught her?

  Think, Laura, think.

  “Are you trying to rob me? This is a thrift store. I don’t have much cash.”

  Keep them talking, distract them, but do everything they say. Staying unhurt and alive is the most important thing. Also delay them as long as possible. Try to get word to someone that you need help.

  He came around the side by the register.

  “I mean it! I have a gun and I won’t hesitate to use it. Hurry up! And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  She shoved her black bag out of his view behind the two library books and edged in front of the register, waving her hands nervously over the keys. Then she turned to look at him, trying to keep his attention on her face and moving hands, while her foot ran under the bottom edge of the counter, found the button and pushed upward, activating the silent alarm that would alert the police.

  Gratitude flooded her that she had allowed Connor to convince her to invest the extra cash in this second alarm button near her feet, just on the outside chance that she might one day have to keep her hands up or open the register and not be able to hit the silent alarm just under the edge of the counter. She hadn’t seen any evidence of a weapon yet, so she kept after the robber, trying to calm him, distract him and delay everything until the police could arrive.

  “You can have my cash, but it’s not much,” she said slowly.

  When he stared straight at her and yelled at her to hurry up again, something else happened.

  All of Aunt Rose’s self-defense classes for Laura kicked in and she saw her chance. She gave him a quick slice to the throat with her knuckles, and then as he choked and lost his focus, trying to breathe, she grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a vicious knee to the groin. The man crumpled to the ground as she spotted police vehicles with blinking lights out front. She was about to wave the police in when she saw her would-be robber reach in his pocket and pull out the promised gun. She grabbed her purse, pulled out her own weapon, slipped off the safety, aimed and fired.

  ten

  You’re not wearing a seatbelt,” Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick informed the teenager behind the wheel of a car that had been exceeding the speed limit on the outskirts of town by at least ten miles per hour. The boy looked more scared than defiant, a good sign.

  “I forgot. Sorry, I was in a hurry,” the boy responded, wondering if the cop was going to let him off the hook on the speeding part. His father would kill him if he got another ticket. Not to mention the points on his license and a hike in the insurance premium.

  Fitzpatrick returned to his vehicle and checked the driver’s record. He knew this kid and his family. Not good if he had another speeding ticket. But the law was the law, and he figured the boy might be a good candidate for the outreach intervention program. He’d skipped the “little children and other pedestrians” speech because he’d already given that to this kid once before. The program could help with that.

  He came back to the driver’s window.

  “No ticket on the speeding, but a warning for both the speeding and the seatbelt. And only if you show up at this meeting,” he finished, handing the driver the notice. “You don’t show up, or if you’re even late, you get automatic fines for both offenses and points on your license. One more strike and your license is suspended until you’re older. Eighteen if you’re lucky and get a good judge. Twenty-one if you’re not. Understand?”

  The boy nodded, taking the meeting notice from the officer, reading what it said, and signed the paper.

  Fitzpatrick waited for it all to sink in.

  The sixteen-year-old turned to him and thanked him.

  Connor tipped his head and waved him away. He hoped the kid would show up.

  The program was good and had an amazing success rate. Connor had gotten the idea from his “walk-a-mile” six-week tour of duty with the New York City PD. The kids, regardless of their offenses, whether missing seatbelts or reckless driving, watched a brief but stark video of bad car wrecks, no holds barred. Then they gave six hours of help in emergency rooms on both Friday and Saturday nights. It ended with a final meeting and a written pledge. The success rates were astounding. The far more serious DUIs were handled much the same way, except they got tickets and paid fines, as well. In the case of actual crashes and injuries, the guilty teenage drivers were involved in the rehab and repair process.

  Connor had participated in three different cities’ walk-a-miles as a rookie. The idea had come from a project his father and Laura’s had come up with to help police from small and medium-sized towns learn some of the techniques from the big cities for the same problems they all had. It also fostered a better understanding among the police from big cities of what their counterparts in small towns faced. Respect went up on both sides. He had gone to New York, San Francisco and Miami, considered Washington, D.C., as Laura was near there, but in the end had decided against it. He was interested in as much diversity as possible in his experience, and Washington was too similar to New York, plus it had all the security problems that came with being the nation’s capital. The practice caught on slowly nationwide, as rookies were thrown into the vortex of their work far too soon, in his view. But little by little, the number of towns and cities participating in the walk-a-mile program was growing across the country. Not one officer who had participated in the program regretted it, and both sides benefited from the experience.

  He thought about Laura’s question regarding the Cold Case Card No. 2. They were very near an arrest, but he couldn’t really talk about it with her. A multi-county team led by the R.F.P.D. was still building its case and setting up the sting. Harry shouldn’t have known about it, and he shouldn’t
have shared that knowledge with Laura. He wondered how many others knew something was up, although he knew that Harry and Laura were probably the two most closed-mouth folks in the town, outside of the police themselves. But all that meant was he could trust them. He didn’t know how many others knew and whom they had told. Secrecy at this point was crucial until they threw the net, turned on the lights, and snapped on the cuffs. They’d know in a few weeks if they’d been one hundred percent successful in catching a high profile murderer.

  He was sympathetic with Laura, given that her parents were still on Card No. 1. His own father had insisted on being the lead on the case and even though Connor had only been sixteen, he couldn’t forget that terrible time. Sometimes his dad didn’t come home for days, and his mother begged him and his older brother Ian to go downtown and bring him home, a task they never relished but always did. Connor recalled the one time they’d gone to get his father at 2:00 a.m., alone in his office, his head in his hands. He wiped away the tears, hoping his sons hadn’t seen them, but they had.

  Connor had been through the copious case notes on the Keene murders repeatedly over the years, spoken with state police and the Feds about the case. He was convinced there were things they just weren’t finding, connections they were missing. He hoped he would find them in his lifetime. For Laura’s sake.

  Just as Connor was returning to his SUV, the 10-86 armed robbery code came in on the car radio called out as a silent alarm. He recognized the address as Second Treasures. Not what he wanted to hear, but the one-zero-dash-eight-six got his attention. He responded immediately and turned on the lights without sirens except at intersections. Still a good ten minutes away, he would turn off the lights as he neared the scene because of the silent alarm.

  He had worried about security at her shop, especially last fall when she first opened. For the unique products she sold, folks that nobody knew came from towns up to fifteen miles away. At holiday time, there were always more people hanging around, some with evil intentions. In December, a murderer from another town, eager to stop Laura’s searching into his background and discovering his deadly secret, entered her store and kidnapped her. Nobody had noticed him, and it had taken a half dozen surveillance cameras and police to figure out who had taken her and where she was. It had not been a pleasant experience, but it had had a good ending.

  They didn’t get many armed robberies in Raging Ford, and other officers closer to the scene should all be there by now. He was only a couple of minutes behind everyone else and tempered his rising adrenaline with the thought that maybe she’d hit the button by accident. She would be embarrassed by the response, but he would be grateful it all worked and point that out to her.

  When he heard, “Shots fired,” he stopped thinking and started reacting, turned on the siren and sped down the final blocks to Laura’s shop.

  eleven

  About the same time Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick was responding to a silent alarm in Raging Ford, a well-worn and predictable conversation was taking place not too many miles away in Eagle Junction. Mary Weimer, estate agent extraordinaire as she considered herself, had been arranging sales of both valuable estate items and junk for over twenty years. She was used to people coming back to her office, asking about things that had been sold, perhaps by accident, trying to track down something that should have been kept in the family, especially if there’d been a family feud. When they showed up, she had ready answers as she had for the man currently in front of her.

  “We keep limited lists of items sold, sir. But once they’re sold, they’re sold. The money’s already been turned over to the respective estates. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do to help you.”

  She looked ready to move on to another customer even though there wasn’t one in her office.

  “Do you have a list of the items you sold from this estate?” the man asked politely, showing Weimer a piece of paper on which he had written a name. He had the look of a hopeful relative who wasn’t ready to give up.

  The estate agent looked at him. He was clean-cut, nicely dressed, and well-spoken. He avoided her eyes, but when he looked at her, his disarming smile caught her off guard. She patted her hair, convinced she was not too old for him. You never knew who came across your doorstep, you never knew what fate had in store for you, she thought. Maybe this was one of those serendipity things.

  “Well, we are sorry for your loss, but we’re not responsible for items that come from estates. When they’re given to us, they’re ours to sell or do whatever we’re told to do. If we’re instructed to give them away, we do so; if we’re told to throw them out, we do so. We sell items, for those items we’re instructed to sell, in bigger batches from multiple estates to draw a larger crowd. We tag each item to make sure that if something’s sold, the proceeds go to the family. Everything else that doesn’t sell goes to charity at which point we give a value and list of donated items on the charity’s receipt card back to the family so they can deduct it on their taxes.”

  “I know, but I’m hoping we can locate a quilt. My mother made it, and now she’s bedridden, and she asked about it. I told you I think what happened was that a caregiver of my dying wife didn’t understand what was going on, thought it was something old and worn out, and she gave it away. It’s actually a family heirloom. Anything you can do to help us is much appreciated. We’re sorry to put you to all this trouble.”

  “Well, this is all very unusual, but I can at least show you a list of the inventory we had.”

  He studied the well-worn list, the seventh list he had read in the past two days. Hope was waning, but his pulse quickened the minute he saw a log cabin designed quilt halfway down the list.

  “This might be it!” he said, pointing to the item on her list. “Do you know who bought it?”

  “There’s no way to prove this is the quilt you’re looking for.” Weimer was now getting vibes from the man that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “But it says ‘log cabin’ and that’s the pattern we’re looking for. I remember the materials that were used. I’d know it if I saw it.” He was thinking he would never forget the pattern of that quilt as long as he lived, even after he found and destroyed it.

  “There are a lot of variations on the log cabin pattern, as well as different fabrics. You do realize that even if this is the one that belonged to your mother, if it was sold to an individual, I can’t give you the person’s name. It’s confidential. And all sales are final, but I could reach out to that person by telephone and speak to them about it. It would be up to them as the new, legal owner whether or not they wanted to sell it back to you. I can tell you if it was sold to a company or a second hand store and give you the store’s name. Hang on. Let me look this one up.”

  In the five minutes it took the agent to look up the information on her computer, the man texted his girlfriend that they might have found it. He wasn’t disappointed with the answer from the agent.

  Thankfully, it was not an individual; it was a store. In fact, it was a thrift shop that was located in Raging Ford, just a dozen or so miles away. The agent didn’t give him the name of the store, only that it was a thrift shop, but she did indicate the town was small and the store shouldn’t be too hard to find. She remembered the store had recently opened and the owner had bought a number of items from her estate sales in the past few months and she made a mental note to contact the owner and give her a heads up.

  The pair drove off, smiling, and thinking how lucky they were that one of them already had a connection in Raging Ford.

  One of them was also thinking that they were on the right track and hopefully would have this resolved very soon, and the other, that maybe the money didn’t have to be split two ways after all.

  twelve

  Patrol cars with flashing lights were parked at various angles in front of Second Treasures, blocking the street in both directions. Heads peeked out o
f doors and around curtains in windows, only to be waved back by the officers emerging cautiously from those police vehicles. One officer motioned for the second one to go around to the alley in the back, and then the other two slowly approached the front door from either side. At the gunshots within, they charged their way into the shop.

  As soon as Laura saw the cops enter, she put her hands up in the air, still holding her father’s Glock, also aimed upward. She let it loose, so it fell from her hand but hung from her thumb.

  “He pulled a gun and tried to rob me,” she said, never taking her eyes off the man on the ground. “I just shot the gun out of his hand.”

  Once the officers assessed the situation and pulled out cuffs, one of them contacted the officer guarding the alley behind the shop.

  “You have a permit for this, Ms. Keene, right? This is the weapon you just picked up from the station this morning?” one of the cops asked.

  She nodded, grateful for his familiar face. “In my wallet in my purse,” and she pointed to the counter, leaving her hands in the air.

  Just then Connor rushed into the shop. Officer Sam Larsen finished cuffing the robber who suddenly got very vocal.

  “You could have killed me!” He hurled at Laura. “I think you shattered my windpipe! I’m going to press charges of assault!”

  She stared him down as Larsen asked the robber if he could breathe.

  “Yes, but she could have killed me. She’s dangerous!”

  Connor stepped between them, looked Laura over, saw she was okay and turned to Corporal Mauricio Sanchez.