by June Whyte
For a moment I lay there, my depleted lungs sucking in ragged breaths of air. Sweat ran from my forehead, stinging my eyes. When no crazed killer appeared, attempting to rearrange my neck at the correct angle so he could cut my throat, I cranked the top half of my body forward and sat up.
Ears alert for movement, I scanned the room. Although dimly lit, I could make out several oak coffins lining one wall, lids sealed and topped with brightly colored flowers. Their brass handles and trimmings winked in the muted light from the overhead fittings. And to add to the somber atmosphere, a cloying smell of violets hung in the air while soft music purred from a nearby speaker.
Other than that—the room was as still as the dead who occupied it.
“Lusty pair of lungs you’ve got there, Kat.”
As though hit by a switch, I flicked my head to the left and peered in the direction of the voice.
“My old man would not be pleased if he heard you shouting in his funeral parlor. When I was a kid he’d lock me in here for hours if I so much as sneezed amongst his precious dead.”
Dim lighting made it hard to see clearly, but I could just make out a familiar figure sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, arms folded, legs stretched out in front of him.
“Peter?” I croaked. Relief, and what felt like hours of yelling making my throat scratchy. “Oh, Peter, you darling man. You don’t know how happy I am to see you. Thank God you found me. Did you notice anyone suspicious hanging around outside? Sorry I couldn’t meet you down the road like we planned. I don’t know what happened but—”
Like a runaway bus slamming into a brick wall, my euphoria suddenly crashed and burned. I gulped and the sound echoed with a dry click in the back of my throat. For there, in Peter’s right hand was the gleam of a little silver gun. And the gun was pointed at me.
“Peter? What are you doing? How did—” My voice, even scratchier now, cracked on a high note.
Peter smiled at me. A weird spaced-out smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re an easy touch, you know, Kat. I rang from outside your house and within minutes you’d walked into my trap.” He shook his head and made a tutting sound with his tongue. “In fact, you are so naïve there’s no skill attached to tricking you at all. You need to wise up, question people’s motives, stop trying to be Miss Nice Girl all the time or one day something bad will happen to you.”
Huh? And a gun pointed at my head was a good thing?
He straightened the knot in his silk tie. “When you waltzed out of the house, alone, as instructed, it was merely a matter of hitting you over the head with a tire iron, bundling you under a blanket in the back of your car and driving to my father’s funeral parlor.” He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “Perfect location for getting rid of my final complication, don’t you think? It’s always so deadly quiet in here.” His mirthless laugh sent my heart into deep freeze. Dark spots danced before my eyes. And I thought I was in trouble inside the coffin? “As you can imagine,” Peter continued, “my father’s clients have never been very big on conversation.”
When I didn’t respond, Peter got to his feet, flicked an imaginary crease from his trousers, and strolled toward me. He came to a halt a couple of meters away beside a beautifully embossed mahogany coffin with crucifixes engraved in the wood.
“I’m sorry about this, Kat. I really like you and you’re a great trainer,” he went on shaking his head as though I were a naughty child, while using the nearby coffin as a back rest. “But you’ve been far too nosy. That idiot, Matthew Turner meant nothing to you, so why get involved? Why sniff around and complicate issues for me? If I’d known you were going to be such a pain in the butt, I would have finished you off when I eliminated Turner instead of allowing you to flounder around downstairs in the dark pressing your little music gizmo while I attended to business upstairs.”
“But why did you...?” Once again, I couldn’t go on. Speechless, I sat on a bed of pale blue satin topped with white lace and blinked up at him. Tire Man Pete—a murderer? My Tire Man Pete? Lucky and Lofty’s owner? It just didn’t compute.
“There was no way around it,” he went on, settling down for a cozy chat. “Turner had the brains of a headless chicken. Do you know, he actually thought he could blackmail me? Said he had an audio tape of me on the phone threatening to break his kneecaps if Queen of Egypt won. He even threatened to send the tape to the police if I didn’t give him a cut of the action. What a loser!”
His voice rose and I watched in horror as the man in front of me changed from the charming, well-spoken Peter Manning, I thought I knew, to an alien monster.
“And when I refused to cooperate, his bloody dog won and I lost fifty thousand dollars,” he snarled, saliva gathering at the corner of his lips. And then he took a deep breath, let it out slowly and smiled at me. “So, naturally I had to kill the guy. What did he expect? That I’d allow him to walk away and blab to the officials? It’s losers like Turner that give greyhound racing a bad name.”
Peter Manning was in cuckoo-land. Although his trigger finger remained tense and the silver gun stayed level with my chest, his voice was utterly calm. We could have been politely discussing the need for rain after a hot dry summer.
Mesmerized by the deadly black hole at the business end of the gun, I gulped down a knot of dried spit and attempted to kick-start my brain. “But why, Peter? Why would a respectable businessman like you go from managing a tire company to—to murder?”
With his free hand he fingered the snowy white handkerchief in his breast pocket and smiled benignly down at me. “Money of course. It’s alwaysabout money. My tire business was going bust and I needed a bankroll to get out of the country and start afresh.”
“Couldn’t you have asked your family for help?”
“Oh no.” His frown deepened and the alien monster appeared in his eyes again. “My father would never understand. He has very strict rules about gambling. When I was ten, he caught me betting five cents on a game of marbles and beat me so severely I couldn’t walk and then he shut me in the crematorium with a mattress and a bucket for two days to ‘repent my terrible sin.’ According to my father, gambling is a sin worse than murder.”
He frowned and paused, his fingers picking distractedly at the cuff on his sleeve. Finally, he rammed his fidgeting hand into his coat pocket and continued talking. “So, I decided I’d invested enough money in greyhound racing over the years and it was time the industry repaid me. I deserved it. People can die waiting for a lucky break to come their way, you know, so I decided to push the envelope.” His shrug was noncommittal. “It’s called making your own luck.”
“And murdering Matt and kidnapping Erin and beating up the starting-box steward—”
“All merely taking care of business.”
He pushed himself off the heavily embossed coffin and straightened up, his familiar figure a direct contrast to the lethal weapon in his right hand. The same hand that accidentally king-hit me the day he and Ben fought outside Ben’s kennel-house—what, three days ago—seemed more like a year. But how could Peter, my most generous owner, a man I’d known for five years, be standing here threatening me with a gun? It was impossible to get my head around. That is, until his trigger finger tightened and he lifted the gun and pointed it at a spot marked X, right between my eyes. Hell, this was real all right—this was totally fucking real. I let out a gasp as my heart, unable to batter its way out of my chest, flipped and dived somewhere in the vicinity of my toes.
I was going to die!
And then, for some strange reason, probably pants-wetting fear playing tricks with my mind, I thought, well, if Peter shoots me now, I’ll topple back into the coffin and be all ready for burial. No fuss. No complicated funeral arrangements. All taken care of.
Mother would be pleased.
And then another thought, much stronger than the first, came gate-crashing through the panic, elbowing the pathetic one out the way. What about my new relationship with Ben? If I meekly a
llowed Peter to drill a hole in my head, what about all the fantastic sex I’d miss out on? Hey, I’d waited two years for that thick-headed mate of mine to notice I had boobs and other interesting female bits and I was damned if I’d let some crackpot with a gun prevent me from finishing off what Ben and I had started in the front seat of his car.
If I could keep Peter talking, maybe his father, or one of his assistants, might drop into the parlor to tighten the screws in one of the coffins, or change the flowers, or whatever it is funeral directors and their subordinates do when they’re not burying people.
“So...Peter,” I said to him. “What happens when the police find out you lied to them about being in Melbourne for the Puppy Championships the night you killed Matt?”
Once again Peter’s smile didn’t match the emptiness in his eyes. “Ah, yes, my alibi. Foolproof. I was in another state arranging to buy Big Mistake for you to train—how could I have been in two places at once?”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about the police not knowing the truth, Peter.” I cautiously inched my left hand into my coat pocket. Peter was right. I was an easy touch. It was time I wised up and got rid of my Miss Nice Girl image. Stopped being naïve, trusting and so bloody nice. Peter hadn’t even bothered checking my pockets for weapons before he stashed me in the coffin. How insulting was that?
“What do you mean?”
“Lofty’s ex-trainer rang me tonight. While I was talking to him he let slip that you’d left Melbourne before the final of the Puppy Championship. He could do the same when the police contact him.”
“What? That stupid idiot!” Peter’s top lip curled back in a snarl, the beast threatening to resurface. “Christ! The world is full of morons. I gave Brett Tregenza enough money to buy him and his bloody family, an all-expenses paid trip to the Bahamas in return for that alibi. All he had to do was swear to the police, or anyone who contacted him, that I didn’t leave until the morning after the big race. How difficult was that?”
“And what about the kidnappers?”
“Dickheads! I contracted the pair of them to convince a pig-headed steward to see things my way and they didn’t even think to cover their faces.” He sighed as though he’d hired his employees from a two-bit incompetent job-hiring agency and was close to striking the agency off his Christmas card list. “And tell me, Kat, who in their right mind would stash a kid at a piggery? I guess that’s how you found the brat…heard the pigs in the background over the phone. Am I right?”
I nodded and put on this, poor-you, finding-good-crooks-these-days-must-be-the-pits expression to keep him talking. By now I had my left hand hooked around the can of hair spray and had started to wriggle the fingers of my right hand into the cold slots of my knuckle-duster.
“Nothing’s going to plan.” His face twisted into a spoilt, little-boy pout as he raked a hand through his hair, rumpling the ultra smooth coiffure. “I had to book my flight to Spain two weeks earlier than originally planned because of you.” His laser glare settled on the X between my eyes. “You’ve caused me a great deal of inconvenience, Katrina. I needed one final windfall and instead, lost a shitload of money at the track tonight. Why couldn’t you stop that big ugly dog of mine from winning?”
“What? And miss out on your congratulations? You know me, Peter—always trying to please my owners.” I bared my teeth and carefully edged the can from my pocket. Damn. He wasn’t close enough. A shot of hair spray to the eyes from this distance would only make him smell nice.
Of course my sarcasm sailed straight over Peter’s head. He frowned, his thick eyebrows just about meeting over the deep creases on his forehead. I could almost see the chaotic thoughts leaping back and forth in his head.
“I have to leave for the airport now,” he told me. “It’s only a matter of time before the cops pick up those moronic losers. And of course to save their own pathetic skins they’ll sing like canaries.”
I watched his trigger finger whiten and sent another quick SOS to the Universe. “If you’re leaving anyway, Peter why bother killing me?”
“You know too much. I’ll be out of the country before the Spagnetti brothers are caught, but it’s too risky to keep you alive.” He took another two steps closer and gave me a hurt look like a father having to spank a child for her own good. “It’s nothing personal.”
“Maybe not to you—but believe me Peter, it is to me.”
“I’ll even give you a choice,” he went on in his sanctimonious fatherly voice. “I can pull this lever and send you and the coffin straight to the crematorium. Or I can shoot you first and then pull the lever. Either way, I’m afraid you’ll be a pile of ashes by the time I’m settling into a comfortable first-class seat on my way to Spain.”
Holy Catfish! All the wires in Peter’s brain had blown apart. He planned to burn me to a crisp in his father’s crematorium. And what’s more, he didn’t care whether I was dead or alive at the time.
Goodbye Miss Nice Girl!
Hello Bombshell Chick!
Muscles tensed, a hungry spider eying a fly hovering over her web, I watched Peter take one more step closer. Come on baby…Come to Mama!And then he took another step and his hand reached out for the pivotal lever that would drop me and my silk lined coffin into the fires of Hell.
No way, Jose!
With a battle cry worthy of a charging Aussie Anzac, I drew out my super-size can of extra-strong-hold hair spray, took aim, and hit the trigger.
“Take that you chest-stabbing, kid-stealing, dog-killing, son of a bush-pig!”
“Aaaaggh!” Peter grabbed at his eyes while obscenities, ranker than two-week-old garbage, spewed from his mouth. I felt the zingfrom a stray bullet whistle past my ear as I leapt from the coffin and brought my second weapon into play. When I’d spotted the gleaming brass knuckle-duster at a church fete’s Bring and Buy sale and counted out five dollar coins for the pleasant-faced lady dressed in pale blue polyester who was running the stall, I knew my purchase would come in handy one day.
And today was the day.
Kapow! Before Peter could blink the spray from his eyes, I swung my brass-covered fist and let him have it fair and square on the point of his chin. He gave me this bemused duh look, as if to say, hey, that wasn’t part of my master plan, and then his eyes crossed, glazed over, and finally, with a low moan, he dropped to the canvas.
31
“Oooooh!I reckon that must’ve hurt!”
I flicked a startled glance over my shoulder. Ben, his gorgeous face screwed into an exaggerated grimace, sauntered across the room toward me. Behind him, Scuzz, nose rings vibrating with every snort, tattooed muscles tense and ready for action, filled the open doorway.
Oh, what a beautiful sight. Relief kicked in and with it came the urge to break down and bawl, throw my arms around the A team and let them kiss and cuddle the horrors of the past fifteen minutes away. Instead, I dug deep and dredged up a cocky grin. “Hi there, boys,” I trilled giving them a two-finger wave to complement my new Bombshell Chick persona. “Drop off for a couple of pints at the pub on the way here, did you?”
Scuzz hooted. “Good one Katrina. I told Lover Boy you could take care yourself.” His lips quirked as he angled his massive head in Ben’s direction. “But of course the cowboy was too busy wailing and cursing and stamping his feet to listen to me.”
“We heard you take off,” explained Ben, “but couldn’t follow because your car was gone, my car was in the garage at home and the tires on Scuzz’s hog had been conveniently slashed.”
Scuzz growled deep into his ginger beard. “And whoever messed with my wheels is going to pay big time. Anyway, next thing, your man has his head under your next door neighbor’s dash, hot-wiring his SUV. And when I protested, as any normal law-abiding citizen would under the circumstances, he informed me it would take too long to wake the guy up and ask for his keys.”
“I was worried about you, babe.” Ben’s arms circled my shoulders hugging me to him. I let my head rest on the warm solidne
ss of his chest and breathed in his outdoorsy smell as though it was nectar.
“Worrying is good,” I told him and sniffed.
“We’d have been here sooner,” Ben went on, smoothing my hair from my eyes with rough, work calloused hands. Hands that felt better than any suit-wearing lawyer, businessman, male model’s wishy-washy softness. “But by the time I’d convinced Mr. Concerned Citizen that the guy next door wouldn’t mind if we borrowed his wheels,” Ben said scowling at Scuzz, “your car had disappeared from sight. We’ve been driving all over the neighborhood searching for it.”
“During which time, Lover Boy has been growing more and more frenzied,” added Scuzz.
“And we were just getting ready to call the fuzz, when we spotted your station wagon parked outside, of all places, Manning’s Funeral Parlor.”
I reached up and kissed Ben gently on the lips before pulling away and pretending interest in my untied shoelace. If I stayed in the warmth of Ben’s arms a moment longer, I’d crack up, and maybe cry. And bang, there would go my new Bombshell Chick image.
A low moaning sound, eerie in the presence of so many dead bodies, echoed across the room.
“What’s that?” Scuzz shot away from the coffin he’d been leaning on, so quickly he almost left his shadow behind. “Was that the guy on the floor or did it come from...”
Peter let out another groan.
“Damn,” I said. “I mustn’t have hit him hard enough.”
Scuzz, a relieved smile playing at the corners of his mouth, tramped across the floor to check on Peter. Coffins and flowers shook in his wake. While Scuzz held both bandaged hands in the air and neatly bopped Peter on the head with his elbow, sending him instantly back to dreamland, Ben picked up the silver gun from the floor and emptied the bullets into his pocket.
“Looks like a Beretta,” observed Ben. He twirled the gun on his finger a couple of times and then turned to me. “I can see you have everything under control here Kat, but can you please tell uswhat the hell’s going on? Why’d you take off without waking us? What the blazes are you doing at Manning’s Funeral Parlor? Who owns this gun? And why is it necessary to keep Peter in a constant state of unconsciousness?”
