Death Takes a Ride (The Cate Kinkaid Files Book #3): A Novel

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Someone tried to run me over. I think it was Halliday.”

  Cate remembered Lily saying something about a car almost hitting Andy near their apartment. Which didn’t mean Halliday was in it. Who could believe anything Andy said anyway?

  “Where’s your pickup? How come you hid it?”

  He yanked her head around to talk in her ear again. “Halliday told me to park around back. Which should of made me suspicious right then. I didn’t come to kill him—”

  She turned and whisper-growled in his ear. “You sent Halliday a threatening note. You brought a gun. You jumped out of the dark and attacked him!”

  He edged closer. Although there was no intimacy in the closeness. It was more like the clutch of a drowning man. His breath blew hot panic in her ear. “He pulled a gun on me as soon as I got here. Hearing you distracted him. He turned off the light so you wouldn’t see me. So I took a chance and jumped him!”

  “So where was your gun then?”

  “I had it jammed in the waistband of my jeans in the middle of my back. It got tangled up in my shirttail.”

  Gun jammed into the waistband of the small of the back. Right. That was where gun-toting guys in books always put them. Apparently Andy needed diagrams to get it right.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here!” Andy said. “Before he kills both of us!”

  Another squirm so she could hiss into his ear. “Halliday may be after you, but he’s not going to kill me!”

  “You think he’s going to let you stay alive after he kills me? He probably figures you already know what I know anyway.”

  But I don’t know anything! Not good words for a PI. “So what do you know?”

  She heard something. Her muscles went rigid again. No, it wasn’t what she heard. It was what she suddenly wasn’t hearing. Andy wasn’t hearing it too because he grabbed her ear.

  “The rain’s letting up.” More mustache in her ear. “He’ll hear us!”

  The rain was letting up, the machine-gun rattle slowing now to single-shot pings.

  “Why’d you stop shooting at him and climb up here?” she demanded in a whisper.

  “I ran out of bullets.”

  What kind of killer runs out of bullets?

  “I didn’t have money to buy any. We had to pay rent and Lily needed some laundry soap and garlic. Where’s your gun?”

  She didn’t bother with the incriminating response that she’d left it home because her shooting lessons didn’t start until Friday. The rain was definitely letting up. Now it was hitting the metal roof with only an occasional plunk.

  “Besides, I didn’t think he’d do this! I thought he’d just pay up.”

  Cate turned her head and ignored the pain of her nose bumping his head. “Pay for the bike?”

  “Shut up!” he whispered fiercely. “He’s doing something!”

  Something skittered on the concrete floor. Scuffling noises. The shelf vibrated as something banged against a lower shelf. Then Halliday’s voice.

  “Timmons! You hear that?” He whacked the lower shelf again. “I found your gun.” A bang and flash of gunfire followed. “They’ll probably give me a medal when I shoot you!”

  He apparently didn’t know Andy was up here because a metallic crash sounded from across the warehouse when Halliday’s bullet smashed into something there. But his shot had proved one thing. He was still armed. And willing to shoot even if he had to be doing serious damage to his warehouse.

  But if Halliday knew Andy was without a gun to shoot back now, why was he still shooting? Why wasn’t he calling 911 to get the police here?

  Cate opened her mouth to yell, “Don’t shoot, I’m up here,” but then it occurred to her that Halliday also wasn’t exactly calling out any warnings to her. That all along he’d been blasting away without any concern for her whereabouts.

  More noises from below, easily audible with the hammer of rain on roof diluted to that occasional ping now. Halliday was shuffling along the unit of shelves, feeling his way, not trying for stealth now. Something crashed off a shelf. New alarm shot through her. Even in the blackness, had he figured out where they were?

  No, the sounds of his shuffling footsteps went on by their hidden spot overhead. Then an oblong of light flared as he opened the door to the outer room.

  “What’s he doing?” Cate whispered frantically.

  She had her answer a moment later when the warehouse lights burst into full bloom. Halliday had found the switch he’d turned off earlier.

  Why hadn’t he turned it on before this so he could see to shoot Andy, if that’s what he wanted to do? Because then Andy could see to shoot him, of course.

  So why, now that Andy was unarmed, wasn’t Halliday talking on the phone, calling the police?

  Nothing was adding up here.

  “Get down!” Andy’s whisper was as frantic as her own.

  Cate squirmed back between the protective boxes she’d been hiding behind before Andy invaded her territory.

  Too late. Halliday had spotted them. Or at least he’d spotted Andy. Something blasted right between her feet. She stared in astonishment at the hole that had erupted in the shelf, ragged edges flaring.

  “Hey!” she yelped. “I’m up here!”

  Two more shots blasted through the metal shelf. One punched a hole behind her. Her presence obviously was no deterrent.

  Andy’s howl told her where the other bullet had hit. He grabbed his backside and rocked back and forth on his other hip. Another shot blasted upward on the other side of him. He scrambled awkwardly toward Cate, one hand still on his backside.

  For the first time, the possibility that should have been obvious all along became news-flash real to her. Halliday was on a killer rampage. Andy might not come out of this alive. She might not either. Why?

  Two more shots. One hit the underside of the box to her right.

  She and Andy slammed into the box on her left at the same time as they tried to get away. The box skidded, wavered, tilted … and tumbled off the shelf. A strange thudding sound as it hit something below, instantly followed by metallic crashes on the concrete floor. Then Andy lost his balance and tumbled too. She had a last vision of the bottom of his boots facing the roof. A muffled thud, then more unidentifiable noises.

  Cate froze, waiting for another upward blast of bullets.

  Finally, fearfully, she peered over the edge of the shelf. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Two legs? No, four. Andy sprawled atop a lumpy cardboard box. Legs sticking out from under the box. Metallic shapes scatted on the floor all around them. One darker shape was a gun.

  Were both Andy and Halliday dead now? Blood seeped through Andy’s jeans torn by the bullet that had ripped through the shelf and into his backside. The legs below the cardboard box lay motionless.

  “Andy?” It came out a croak.

  A groan, a jerk of leg, a fling of hand, a shake of head.

  Like a puppet slowly awakening. Would Andy spot that gun and go for it?

  Cate wasn’t sure what she could do with the gun if she got to it first. But she could keep Andy from getting it.

  She scrambled along the shelf, unmindful now of knocking anything off. Another box fell, then one of those car parts—a fender, maybe?—stored on the upper shelf clattered to the concrete below. She scuttled down the ladder, took a few wild steps, and fell on the gun, covering it with her body.

  And found herself face-to-face with that weird clown/witch she’d seen when Shirley was cataloguing the hood ornaments brought down from Salem. It was that box of hood ornaments that had fallen.

  She got a hand on the gun, squirmed around to a sitting position, and pointed the gun toward the fallen figures on the concrete. The hood ornaments littered the floor around the bodies, like frivolous decorations around a grisly tableau. She wasn’t sure what to do with the gun, but she put a finger on the trigger. Would it go off if she squeezed? Or was there some kind of safety thing on it?

  Andy dragged himself off the squashe
d box and the figure trapped below it. He staggered to his feet and grabbed a shelf for support. An ability to stand meant that even if he’d been shot, apparently no essential bones had been hit. But Halliday under the box … Halliday wasn’t moving at all.

  She had to call 911 … now! Her phone must be on the floor here somewhere. She frantically tried to search the floor with her eyes while also keeping her gaze on Andy. She kept the gun in her outstretched hands.

  Old oil stains on the floor. A goldish figure of a dolphin hood ornament that had bounced all the way to the door. No cell phone.

  “Pull that box off Halliday,” she commanded.

  “I’m shot!”

  “You’ll be shot worse if you don’t do what I say!”

  Andy stumbled to the cardboard and yanked it off the motionless figure. Cate stared at the macabre sight in paralyzed horror. One end of the silver steer horns hood ornament protruded from Halliday’s forehead. The other side was buried deep in his head. It gave him a ghastly unicorn-man look. Or was it a horned-demon look? His eyes stared sightlessly upward.

  “I … think he’s dead.” Andy’s legs went weak, and he plopped limply to the floor.

  Cate slid over to Halliday and frantically felt for a pulse. She also felt a sickening sense of déjà vu. She’d done this before, felt a dead person’s throat for a pulse.

  And found now what she’d found then. Nothing. She tried the wrist at his side. Same results.

  No, no, maybe not! She was no expert. Maybe he was just unconscious, knocked out by the blow of the hood ornament.

  Then she spotted something else. The handle of a gun sticking out from under Halliday’s hip. He’d fallen on his gun when the silvery horns hit him. Which meant the gun she was holding was Andy’s. With no bullets. Her palms went slick around the handle. She might as well be holding Octavia’s toy mouse.

  She tried to calm herself. Even though this felt like a fresh tidal wave of disaster, no bullets in the gun didn’t change anything. She hadn’t known how to shoot the gun before, when she thought it was loaded. Which also didn’t change what had to be done now.

  “I need your cell phone!” she yelled at Andy.

  “I don’t have it. We only have one. Lily has it.”

  Cate scrambled to her feet and stumbled toward the outer office to use the landline. At the door she realized she still had the gun. She turned and pointed it back at Andy. He’d be out of sight as soon as she stepped around the corner to the counter. “Don’t go anywhere!” she yelled. “Don’t even move!”

  Don’t figure out that this is your gun with no bullets.

  She grabbed the H&B phone and punched in the numbers. When the operator at 911 answered, she gave what she realized even as she was speaking was a garbled version of what had happened. Gunfight. Injuries. Maybe a death. Send police and ambulance. The address. The woman wanted her to stay on the line, but Cate wasn’t going to wait here by the phone where she couldn’t see what Andy was doing. She slammed the phone down and ran back to the doorway.

  In the movies, a guy with anything less than a fatal gunshot wound could do anything from battle werewolves to romance the heroine, but Andy wasn’t doing anything impressive. He was just lying sideways on the floor with a silvery bear ornament in one hand. An ooze of blood from his wound puddled behind him on the concrete.

  “Put it down,” Cate commanded. She used a motion of the gun for emphasis. She wasn’t giving him any chance to deceive her into thinking he was helpless and then have him pull a surprise attack with the bear.

  “I’ll bet you don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”

  True. But she had lessons scheduled. That probably wouldn’t be a convincing point, however, even if the gun was loaded. Which it wasn’t. She bluffed it. “Try me.”

  He set the bear on the floor. “None of this is how it looks,” he complained.

  “I see a man who’s probably dead. Killed by a hood ornament in a box you knocked off the shelf.”

  “A box we knocked off the shelf. You hit it too!”

  Okay, if you wanted to get technical, true. She braced herself against a metal upright supporting the shelf they’d been sitting on. Her arm was getting tired holding the heavy gun. It felt like a weak branch that might droop any minute. She’d never heard anything about this being a problem for criminals.

  “We’ll let the police sort that out,” she said. “It shouldn’t take more than five minutes or so for them to get here.”

  “Look, I know I’m not one of the good guys in your world.” Andy kept a wary eye on the gun. He might not think she knew how to use it, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Apparently he did, at least, think it was Halliday’s loaded gun. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen.

  “Right. I don’t see any wardrobe of white hats.” Cate kept her eyes on Andy. At least, watching him, she didn’t have to look at Halliday’s body. With that ghoulish horn in his head. “I heard you were in on something big down in California.”

  “That Tuffy jerk and his big mouth, right? So I was with some guys who robbed a gas station and killed a guy once. I didn’t know that’s what they were doing. I was just sitting in the car drinking a Dr Pepper.” He managed to sound unfairly victimized. “I got off with some time in juvie.”

  Cate eased her elbow over to rest on the shelf, but she carefully didn’t change Andy’s view of looking down the shooting end of the gun. She hoped the hole in the barrel looked big as a cannon to him.

  “Anyway, I didn’t come here tonight to kill Halliday. I just wanted my money. He said he had it.”

  “What money? You didn’t bring the bike.”

  Andy scrunched around on the concrete, apparently looking for a more comfortable position. Or maybe to get a few inches farther away from the horned body. “Halliday was supposed to give me some money to … uh … kind of forget something.”

  “Forget what?”

  “What I knew.”

  That evasive statement was hardly informative, but Cate pulled a startling fact out of it. “You were blackmailing him?” The tip of the gun sagged. She yanked it up again.

  “I figured fifty thousand wasn’t too much for me to keep quiet when he was willing to pay thirty thousand to have his partner killed.”

  Startled and curious as she was at this claim, Cate shook her head. She didn’t want him muddling up her head with wild stories. “Save it for the police.”

  “No, I need to tell you before the cops get here! Or you’ll give them some crazy story about me and Mace Jackson in some screwball conspiracy to shoot Blakely.”

  “Conspiracy is beginning to sound likely.”

  He looked at the bizarrely horned body. “But it wasn’t like that! And there wasn’t anybody to send him any threatening note. He must have sent it to himself.”

  “Sent it himself? That’s crazy.”

  “He wanted it to look like somebody who was part of a plan to kill Kane Blakely was after him too. So nobody’d start getting suspicious of him.”

  “But he hired me to find out who sent the note.”

  Andy considered that briefly. “He knew you couldn’t find anything. It was just more of his plan to make himself look like a next victim.”

  “You’re making all this up!”

  “I wish I were.” Andy sounded unexpectedly doleful. He glanced at Halliday again. “I wish it were all some big ol’ bad dream.”

  Cate strained to hear the sound of sirens coming. Like Halliday’s pulse, nothing.

  “Okay, you listen to me, because this is what happened. I came in here a while back and tried to sell my old Indian bike to Halliday, right?” Andy talked fiercely and fast, so fast the words almost ran together. Apparently, he was afraid police might arrive before he could get them out.

  Cate was in no big hurry. She braced her tiring arm with her other hand. “But Halliday thought it might be stolen and didn’t want it.”

  Andy snorted. “He knew it was probably stolen. He could see the old numbers had been fi
led off. But I didn’t steal it. Some guy gave me the bike when he couldn’t pay me some money he owed. But what Halliday wanted to pay for it was downright robbery.”

  “He said he checked and the bike wasn’t stolen.”

  “That’s the trouble with you! You believed everything Halliday said. After you found me, he told you he’d never talked to me. Right?” Andy didn’t wait for an answer. “Big lie. He talked to me, all right. Because he figured on killing me. That’s why he wanted you to find me! So he could kill me!”

  “So I should believe a blackmailer instead of a respected business owner?”

  Andy didn’t argue that detail. “Halliday didn’t shoot Mace in self-defense. He had killing him planned right from the start. Except it was me he planned to kill that night, not Mace.”

  “How could it have been you?”

  “Do you have to keep pointing that gun at me?”

  “Yes.”

  Andy heaved an injured sigh. “Okay, it was like this. Halliday figured I was a crook when I was first came in here. He could tell the bike was probably stolen. I’d been smoking pot, and maybe he could smell that too.”

  Not exactly impeccable character references.

  “So he looked me up a little while later—”

  “He couldn’t find you. That’s why he hired me.”

  “Shut up and listen. He found me at that trailer park. He tap-danced around what he’d come for for a while to see how I’d feel about doing something … not legal. I figured he had in mind stealing a car or bike or something, and I made it plain I was up for most anything if the money was right.”

  “Of course.”

  “So then he said there was thirty thousand in it for me. And to get it, I’d bust in here that particular night, shoot the guy who wasn’t Halliday, and grab the money. Which would be my payment for—”

  “Killing Blakely!”

  “So I said yeah, I’d do it.”

  “Why would Halliday want his partner dead?”

  “How should I know? You think I should have asked him to give me a notarized statement that Blakely was a danger to society or something?” Andy didn’t wait for an answer to the facetious question. “I just figured it was a good way Lily and me could buy a trailer and move to Nevada or somewhere. Before her brother convinced her I’m a scumbag.”