by Dale Mayer
He raised an eyebrow and said, “I did yell out that I was here.”
She stared at the door and back at him. “But I locked it.”
“Yeah,” he said in a dry tone. “With a heavy jiggle, the lock just seems to fall off.”
She groaned. “What’s the point of having locks if they don’t work?” She brushed the hair off her forehead and called out, “Blyth, coffee is here.”
Blyth, her purple hair bobbing, came over. “Good,” she said. “I need a shot of caffeine.” She took the closest cup from the tray and then boogied back to the corner, where she was setting up flowers on the main table.
“How are you guys doing?” Blaze asked.
“We’re almost done,” Camilla said, “but there’s that horrible feeling—you know?—that we’re forgetting something.”
He nodded. “Always.”
“Did you see the shepherd?”
“I did,” he said. “I also saw your intruder.”
“What?”
He nodded grimly. “And I talked to the deputy.” He looked over at Blyth. “Do you know Rodney Pratt?”
Blyth raised her head and nodded. “Deadbeat drug addict, a dropout of everything.”
“He’s the one throwing rocks, and he broke into Camilla’s house again very early this morning.”
Blyth turned to Camilla. “You didn’t tell me. What the hell’s going on with that guy?”
“Just now he turned a gun on me,” Blaze said calmly. “And he said he was hired to do the job.”
Camilla froze in place.
Blyth faced Blaze and stared at him. “I would never have thought he would go that far,” she said slowly. “Honestly, he’s like the kid who didn’t quite fit in. I’ve been at a couple parties where he was at—probably crashed in without an invite—but he was always an odd man out, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, just a complete misfit. And I know he was into drugs, and he was into, you know, stealing stuff to get more drugs, but I didn’t think he would do this.”
“No,” Blaze said. “But, if you think about it, it’s a natural progression. He seems to take pride in the fact he’s now going to be a ‘stone-cold killer,’ as he puts it. A hired hitman.”
Blyth shook her head. “What a loser.”
“The problem is, we now know who he is,” Blaze said, “so his career is about to be cut short.”
“You didn’t capture him?” Camilla asked. She saw the pained expression brush across his face. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“No, you should have,” he said. “I lost him in that damn thicket. I couldn’t figure out where he went, and then the deputy joined me. So he’s gone after Rodney, and I came here to make sure he wasn’t circling around to come back.”
“Why would he return here?” Blyth asked in confusion. “I don’t understand what’s behind any of this.”
“Neither do I,” Blaze said. “But we’ll make sure nothing else happens.” He looked over at Camilla. “You’re looking very stressed.”
She gave him a bright smile, chuckling. “A little more sleep would have helped,” she said. But she loved the wicked grin he gave her.
“Well, it’s hardly my fault alone,” he said in a teasing voice.
She flushed. “True enough,” she said. “Now you can give me a hand finishing this so we’re all ready for when the first guest arrives.”
She directed him to rearrange the furniture so it was laid out as per the map she had on her iPad. “This is their custom design,” she said, “so we must make sure it’s exactly as it’s meant to be.”
“Wow,” he said. “I hadn’t imagined people arranged weddings and receptions in this much detail.”
“Some people are micromanagers,” she said, “and some just want it to look pretty, and they don’t care what we do. In this case we’ve got both.” It took a good half hour of moving tables and chairs to get it set up with the tablecloths and then all the centerpieces and the place settings and the napkin-wrapped silverware.
“Oh, I left the special place cards in the car,” Camilla said, checking her big tote bag. “Let me get those.” She ran out to her Mustang and frowned. “Where did I put them, damn it?” She checked the glove box, in the front and back seats. She pinched the bridge of her nose for a long moment, trying to remember where she last saw them when she heard a voice.
She turned around to see Rodney Pratt with the box of special place cards. “These?”
“Yes,” she cried out with feigned relief. “I was looking for those.” She reached out a hand to grab them, but he pulled them away at the last moment and held them above his head.
He laughed. “Too bad you can’t get them then, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t really matter. Everybody at the head table knows who they are,” she joked. She looked at him and said, “What I really want to know is what the hell you’re doing breaking into my house in the middle of the night.” She also hoped Blaze had heard their voices. She was speaking decibels louder than normal. When she watched Blaze’s head appear in the front window, she realized he knew exactly what was going on. And then he disappeared. Emboldened by knowing she wasn’t alone, she said, “We’ve never had a problem before, so why now?”
“You’re after somebody you shouldn’t be,” he jeered. “And you should know you’re not allowed to do that.”
Now she was really confused. Casually she leaned against the side of her Mustang, crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” she announced. “Is this about me, or is this about Blaze?”
“See? You’re not so stupid,” he said. “This is about both of you.”
“So somebody who loves Blaze, or somebody who hates Blaze?”
He chuckled. “And yet, you don’t ask the same question about yourself.”
Her stomach sank, and then finally she started to get it. “Maybe you should tell me who hired you. Or am I supposed to already know?”
“If you understood your family, you would.”
And that was the confirmation she needed. “My whole family hates me. My sisters and my mother.”
“Bingo,” Pratt said with a cackle. “At least one of them. But which one?”
She already knew. She studied his eyes, the glazed-over, bright, almost maniacal look to them, and realized he was high on drugs. “You need help,” she said. “Why don’t you get some therapy, help yourself get off these drugs?”
“Why would I do that?” he said. “I’m liking life. I like it just fine the way it is.”
She shook her head. “You can’t possibly. I know your self-esteem is rock bottom. You fear that nobody loves you and that everybody hates you and that they mock and laugh at you behind your back.”
The maniacal laughter fled, replaced by this cold darkness that made her shiver. He said, “Do you really think I give a shit what happens to you?”
“No,” she said ever-so-quietly. “But do you care for the person who hired you to do this?”
“Probably more than I ever cared about anybody else, yes,” he said, “but it’s not enough. I’d shoot her just as quickly as I’m going to shoot you.”
But he didn’t produce a gun. She frowned. “Do you have a gun?”
He smiled and pulled a weapon from his belt.
“Shit,” she whispered. “I guess I shouldn’t have asked that question, huh?”
“Nope, you shouldn’t have,” he said. “I wasn’t going to pull it out right away, but, as long as you saw me as harmless, your lovely little boyfriend around here wouldn’t feel threatened either.”
“He already knows you’re two steps away from being completely crocked in the head,” she snapped.
This time Rodney cocked the gun and pointed it straight at her. “Take it back,” he snapped.
“Take what back?” she asked. In fact, she had said lots of things which she probably shouldn’t have but wasn’t sure which one was bothering him.
“I’m not crazy,
” he said. “Don’t call me crazy.”
“No, you’re not crazy,” she said with a bravado she didn’t feel. “You’re sane enough to understand what you’re doing is wrong, but you haven’t necessarily made any sense by throwing a rock or two or coming into my house in the night. And, of course, you ran away and left your gun at the last scene, so I’m not sure what the hell’s going on here.” In fact, she wondered if it wasn’t just the drugs. Or something else completely. Like a complete disassociation from the things he was doing. Maybe he was schizophrenic. She didn’t know, and right now she wasn’t too worried about a label. “Are you off your medications?”
He stiffened. “I’m not taking them,” he roared. “They’re not good for me. I don’t like them. I don’t like how they make me feel.”
“Right, because now you feel powerful, right?”
“Damn right I do,” he said with a sneer.
“But only as long as you’ve got a weapon,” she said. “Without it, you’re nothing.”
He stared at her in astonishment. “I’m the one with the weapon. You’re the one supposed to be cowering in fear.”
In truth, the fear made her belly quake and her toes curl. But, with Blaze sneaking up behind Rodney, she was much less worried about that than the ensuing conflict. “No,” she said, “because the gun isn’t anything to be afraid of in the right hands.”
“Oh, you can bet it’s in the right hands,” he said, once again with that cold dark character showing through. “I’m definitely the right one.”
“No, you’re still that foolish little boy inside who was always being mocked for not doing anything right and for saying the wrong things all the time. The misfit child.”
The person in front of her shifted again.
She marveled, wondering if he had multiple personalities. She had no clue, but she’d never seen anything like it as he started to cry.
“You shouldn’t be so mean to me,” he said. “You shouldn’t be.”
Almost instantly the blank-face persona returned, roaring, “You shouldn’t be talking to him. He’s just a sniveling little coward.”
She blinked at the speed in which the personalities shifted. But she knew this was the dangerous one. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was just thinking about how hard your childhood must have been.”
“Doesn’t matter how hard it was,” he snapped. “It’s made me who I am.”
She nodded.
He lifted his gun hand higher. “I have a message for you.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, her gaze on the gun in his hand. She was prepared to drop and crawl to the other side of the vehicle, but Blaze was less than three feet behind Rodney now.
“She says welcome to hell.” And he pointed the gun at her face, cocking the trigger.
Blaze jumped Rodney from behind, the shot firing harmlessly into the air as Blaze knocked Rodney to the ground and pinned him flat. Blaze looked over at Camilla. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “You got to him in time,” she said. She wrapped her arms around her waist and whispered, “It’s my sister. My sister Fran put him up to this.” She bent down beside Pratt. “Why would Franny want to do this?”
Rodney mumbled something, but she couldn’t hear clearly. Blaze lifted his prisoner’s head, and she said, “What did you say?”
“It’s because of him,” the kid answered. “Franny said, if she can’t have him, you can’t either.”
“That makes no sense,” Blaze said. “That was ten years ago.”
“Franny has a very long memory,” Rodney explained, “and is very short on forgiveness. You wouldn’t give her what she wanted, so no way you’re getting her sister either. And, if she can stick it to her sister at the same time, … even better.”
Both statements were almost contradictory. The motivations almost as equally confused as the man in front of her. Camilla stepped back, turned toward Blaze and said, “This is unbelievable. I thought it was because of you.”
“And I thought maybe it had to do with you,” he said.
And together they said, “But instead it was both of us.”
“We need to get him out of here before the wedding party arrives,” Camilla said.
She pulled out her phone, but Blaze said, “Hang on. Use my phone and call the deputy.”
As soon as she got that call in, she said to Blaze, “We need to move Rodney away from the front of the center. People will start arriving any time.”
Blaze helped Rodney to his feet, and, pinning his wrists against his back, moved him toward the back of the building.
Camilla glanced around, seeing the first of the wedding vehicles come toward them.
“Hurry up and get him out of here,” she said. “I want to make sure that nothing—nothing—else goes wrong.” And she ran back inside. She called to Blyth, “They’re here.”
“Hurry up, hurry up.” Together, the two women went through the last of the boxes, packing up and cleaning up the rest of the garbage, moving it all into the kitchen, then some to the storeroom. Out one of the rear windows, she could see Blaze still holding on to the young man over the railing out back. And that was probably as good as she could get right now. And then came more sounds of laughter and vehicle doors.
She quickly opened up both of the front doors and then disappeared into the back. The best of all organizers were there but not there. While she had to make sure the reception was perfect, she wasn’t to be seen doing anything about it. Right now, she’d just stay in the back and make sure things ran smoothly. She stepped out onto the deck and said to Blaze, “They’re all here now. Caterers have set up the food and are ready to start at our signal.”
“Good. I told the deputy to drive around to the back so he’s not seen. I can keep this guy by my truck, away from curious eyes.”
Just then a vehicle did come creeping around the corner. And, sure enough, it was Henry. The deputy got out and took one look at the kid and the weapon Blaze had picked up. Henry said, “We need to get him down to the station.”
“I’m coming with you,” Blaze said. “I want to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere. You don’t have a cage in the back.”
She watched as the three of them disappeared. And then she turned around and went on with her day. But her heart was lighter, and the tone of her world was so much easier to deal with.
And to say things went off without a hitch wasn’t exactly true, but everything was minor. The food was perfect and on time; the speeches were great; the laughter and champagne flowed; and her friend Lizzie glowed. As Camilla stood in the back when the dancing started, she jolted in surprise as arms came around her. She turned to see Blaze, studying the group. He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “So, if we go outside, will you dance with me?”
With a soft giggle, she nodded. He led her out through the back door to the patio, where nobody else could see them, and she slid her arms up around his neck. And together they danced to the music.
“You know it’ll get ugly now, right?” she whispered.
He held her close and said, “Only if we let it.”
“My sister …”
“She hired somebody to kill you, and she’ll say she didn’t do anything like that. But the deputy has already found her text messages on Pratt’s phone,” he said, holding her tight, comforting her. “So, yes, your sister will be charged with murder for hire or attempted murder or whatever and may be brought back here to stand trial. I don’t know.”
“He never did shoot me though.”
“No, he didn’t, but he fired and the gun was grabbed. And let’s not forget he attacked the sheriff.” When the music stopped, he stepped out of her embrace, dropped a kiss on her temple and said, “I’ll go visit with the shepherd, get some more food into her. Then I’ll come back. You should be done by when?”
She gave him a one-arm shrug. “It’ll be hours yet.”
“Perfect,” he said, and he walked away.
For Blaze, it had been a long d
ay but a fruitful one. They had caught Camilla’s intruder, and the responsible sister in California was being picked up for her part in this murder for hire. He didn’t bother telling Camilla that. But they’d already issued a warrant for her arrest, and it would get very ugly and very public. It was pretty hard not to when it was sister pitted against sister.
And it seemed like none of this had anything to do with his mother’s accident. This wasn’t Lily’s doing here with Camilla, not directly anyway, and most likely Lily didn’t have her hand in his mother’s death either.
Blaze parked his truck where he’d last seen the shepherd and then headed with a bag of treats into the woods. He sat down, the sun dropping lower in the sky behind him. It was a beautiful day, around midafternoon, and his heart felt pretty damn light as he sat here with a dog treat, waiting for the shepherd.
Only about six feet away, he heard a sound and twisted to see her coming his way. “Hi, Solo,” he said, his voice gentle. This time he got a bit of a tail wag. She ate the treat and then eyed the bag in his hand. He picked out one and tossed it at her. She caught it midair and gulped it back. “What about dog food? Did you eat the rest of it today?”
She gave a bit of a whine.
He held out a treat in his hand and said, “Come and get it. I haven’t hurt you. You’ve been fine the whole time around me. Come and get it.”
Tentatively she walked forward, and then she stopped, frozen.
He had a collar and a leash with him. At her fearful pose, he dropped them onto the ground, then held up the leash and said, “You know what this is. I can’t deal with you if I can’t get to work with you,” he said, “and, for that, we must have trust.”
Even though he held onto the leash, she took another step closer, and he tossed her the treat. She gulped it down, and he pulled out another one and held it out for her. This time she came several feet toward him. And he tossed the treat to her and then held out another one. At this point, she reached forward and took it from his hand. He held out another treat with his right hand, while holding out his left, getting her permission to touch her.
She sniffed his fingers and his hand and the treat but nervously accepted it and his touch. Gently he stroked her under her chin, the back of her ears making no sudden movements, just letting her get used to the feel of his hand. She leaned into him ever-so-slightly. Her gaze hesitant, cautious, but there—a glimpse of hope in her eyes, hope that maybe, maybe her life would be better. He pulled out yet another treat and, holding it near him, made her come even closer into his personal space. She came obediently without a problem. He knew she’d had a lot of training. He gently stroked behind her ears and down her head. And, while she ate, he slipped the collar around her neck and clamped it in place.
