All Sales Fatal (33 page)

The strains of “Happy birthday, dear Sierra” drifted to me. The kids. I raised my head slightly. I couldn’t risk breaking out of here while the birthday party was still going on. Mike was armed and unstable, a loose cannon, with, as he’d pointed out, nothing to lose. I couldn’t endanger the children by busting down the door—if I even could—and staggering into the store while they were picking out hearts and voice boxes for their little dolphins and otters.

Ironically, the decision not to try anything
now
made me calmer, gave me the illusion that I had more time. I stayed on my knees and the unfamiliar posture made me think of praying. I hadn’t been to church in years, but Mom had insisted when Clint and I were little, and the Lord’s Prayer came back to me now as though I’d been saying it every day. When my knees started to ache, I struggled to my feet again
and turned so I was facing the door. Maybe I could kick it open once the partygoers were gone. My head throbbed at the thought, and I stayed very still for a moment until the sadist operating the skip loader in my skull settled down.

I practiced balancing on my weak leg and thrusting forward with my good leg, trying to aim my kick near the knob. After a few tries, I felt like I could hit the spot I needed to. Whether it would be enough to pop open the door was anybody’s guess. A new thought came to me. Maybe I should wait until I heard Mike approaching, until he opened the door, and kick out just before he pulled it wide. The door would smack into him, giving me a second or two—hopefully—to run for it.

Standing on both legs, to give my trembling weak leg a break, I listened. It seemed quieter out front. I couldn’t hear the piping voices of kids anymore. Had they gone? Was the shop empty of customers? My muscles tensed, and I flexed and pointed my right foot to ease a cramp in my calf. I held my breath so I’d have a better chance of hearing Mike approach.

In the event, I didn’t hear anything until the doorknob started to turn. Its metallic
snick
startled me, and I hastily gathered myself, sucking in a deep breath and putting most of my weight on my right leg. A knife’s edge of light cut the darkness, and I launched myself forward, propelling my leg with all the force I could muster. My heel thudded against the door and it smacked back. Light flooded in as Mike let out an “Unh” of pain. A shot nearly deafened me, and I figured he’d had his finger on the trigger and had tightened it reflexively when the door whacked into him.

Scrambling forward, I burst through the door. Mike rocked on his keister to my left, scrabbling for the gun he’d dropped. An empty soda bottle rolled nearby. The partition opened to my right, so I cut sharply toward it and plowed
forward, trying to keep my balance with my hands taped behind me. I rounded the end of the partition and the store stretched before me, empty of customers. I fixed on the door as though it were the entrance to the Promised Land, to Disneyworld, to Aladdin’s Cave. If I could just make it—

I ran, thumping my thigh painfully against a display ledge because I couldn’t balance very well. Jinking around a display of octopi, I risked a look back. Mike stood just this side of the partition, arms extended to aim the gun, legs braced, head bleeding. I dropped and rolled as he fired, finding myself up against the fluff machine. I scrabbled around it on my knees and watched as the next bullet exploded the machine’s glass walls in a burst of flying glass.

White fluff rained into the room, a soft, puffy snow spiked by glass shards.
Plink, plink, clink
the glass went as it landed. I wedged myself partially under the steel frame of the machine to keep the glass from slicing into my face. I could only hope it would obscure Mike’s aim. The motor pulsed above me. One corner of the duct tape across my mouth felt loose, and I scrubbed my face against the floor, trying to work it off. It curled up until one corner of my mouth was barely exposed. “Gi’ it u’, Mike,” I mumbled as loudly as I could, feeling the skin tear off my lips as the movement loosened the tape infinitesimally. “Gu’shots. Co’s on way.” I could’ve wept with the frustration of trying to make myself understood, of trying to make Mike understand the futility of what he was doing.

“Not soon enough for you,” he growled, apparently having no trouble understanding me. He trotted toward me, and I squirmed toward the far side of the fluff machine, wishing I had the use of my hands. “If it weren’t for you—”

He grabbed my foot with one hand and yanked. As I slid out from under the machine on my back, my hands trapped underneath me, I noted the fluff still spewing into the air,
the deranged fury twisting Mike’s face, and the barrel of the gun swinging around to aim at my head. I had time for only one instinctive movement. I thudded both my feet into Mike’s broken leg, rolling away from the gun as he howled and fell.

“Emma-Joy!” Grandpa’s voice sounded from the front of the store, strangely muffled.

Another shot rang out. The display window at the front of the store exploded outward in a geyser of glass, and screams sounded from the corridor. I hoped the bullet hadn’t hit anyone, especially not a kid. I also hoped whoever was out there was busy dialing 911.

Rolling over, I scootched away from Mike on my knees and right shoulder. When I reached a display table, I braced my shoulder against it and made it to my feet. Mike had staggered to his feet, too, two yards away from me. He stood awkwardly, putting no weight on the casted leg, which hung heavily from his hip. Blood dripped from his face and his hand, apparently cut by shards from the fluff machine. He swung the gun toward me and then toward the Easter Bunny charging him, head down, like a pass rusher determined to sack the quarterback.

“Nooo!” I shrieked, only it came out more like a gurgle through the duct tape. I launched myself at Mike. I slammed into him, hard, and we both fell. Even though his body cushioned my fall, it knocked the breath out of me, and I lay atop him as what seemed like hundreds of people flooded into the room. Mike didn’t struggle beneath me and I wondered if he was dead. That fear passed as the rapid beats of his heart tha-thumped under my ear and the rank smell of his body odor filled my nostrils.

“The Easter Bunny’s bleeding,” a child’s voice said as I blacked out.

Twenty-seven

I came to
in a hospital bed, head still aching, but like Skip Loader Guy had been demoted to driving a golf cart. I felt queasy but decided after a moment that I wasn’t going to throw up immediately. A window two feet from my bed showed darkness between the slats of the miniblinds, but I didn’t know if it was seven p.m., midnight, or four in the morning. Someone stood at the foot of the bed. My vision was blurry and I blinked several times, finally resolving the three Detective Hellands into one. The events at Make-a-Manatee came flooding back and I sat up, gasping, “Grandpa?”

Helland, more casually dressed than usual in a white shirt with cuffs rolled up and slacks the gray of a midwinter sky, pushed me back against the pillow, his hands on my shoulders surprisingly gentle. He smelled like lime aftershave and coffee. “Mr. Atherton is fine,” he said. “Man’s made of titanium, the doc says. Wachtel winged his shoulder.”

Relief gushed through me, making me feel weak.

“You’re basically fine, too,” he added. “You’ve got a concussion, which you probably figured out for yourself, and they want to keep you overnight for observation.”

No way was I staying overnight. I’d spent enough time in hospitals to max out my lifetime quota. I didn’t share that with Helland. “Wachtel?”

“In jail, singing like the proverbial canary. He says Woskowicz killed Celio Arriaga and William Silver shot Woskowicz.” His voice held a question.

I started to shake my head but thought better of it. I relayed everything Mike had told me when he planned to kill me.

Helland nodded as though I’d confirmed what he’d suspected. “We have a crime-scene team going over the Make-a-Manatee premises. Wachtel may think he’s cleaned up, but I’m betting we find hair or blood or something else that puts Arriaga in the back room. And we’ve already found traces of his blood on the wagon you pointed us toward. At the very least, we’ve got him for attempted murder of you and Mr. Atherton and for illegal weapons sales—we found twenty-six guns, ranging from a .22 to an AK-47, in a box of manatees in his storeroom.”

“Silver?”

Helland seemed to understand my question. “He hasn’t been apprehended yet, but if we put out word that we’re seeking his testimony against Wachtel, maybe he’ll come in. If what you’ve said is right—”

“It is,” I muttered irritably, licking my lips, which were rough and sore. I didn’t even want to think about what my hair looked like. A sudden thought made me glance down. Ugh. I was wearing one of those sacklike hospital gowns with snaps and ties that looked like it’d been washed and bleached twelve thousand times. How could a garment that displayed so much skin be so totally unsexy? Not, of course,
that I wanted to look attractive for Detective Helland, I told myself. Hitching the neckline a tad higher, I raised my gaze to Helland, who handed me a tube of lip balm, unasked.

“Thanks,” I said, startled. I slicked the soothing balm over my cracked lips as Helland continued.

“If you’re right, all Silver’s guilty of are the gun-related charges. I’m sure the DA could offer him a deal that would make it worth his while to turn himself in.”

“Aggie,” I said.

He nodded. “We’ve already been in touch with her and suggested that if she can get hold of her brother, she’d be doing him a favor to relay our message.”

“I want to go home,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I twitched the sheet over them when I realized the hospital gown didn’t cover my knee. My head swam, feeling a bit like a tilted fishbowl where the water sloshes to one side, but the disconcerting sensation subsided after a moment of stillness.

“You and me both, Emma-Joy,” Grandpa Atherton said from the doorway. Helland moved aside to make room for him by my bed.

“Grandpa!” I held out my arms, relief sending tears down my face.

“What’s with the waterworks, missy?” Grandpa asked, giving me a one-armed hug.

“When I heard the Easter Bunny was bleeding, I thought he’d killed you,” I said. “How did you know?”

Grandpa settled himself on the side of my bed. He was wearing a robe that looked like something Cary Grant would have tossed on for a tryst with a lady friend, and his white hair was slicked straight back from his forehead. He was paler than usual and had his arm in a sling, but other than that, he seemed fine, the twinkle in his blue eyes reassuring me that he was truly okay.

“I was doing my bunny shtick downstairs when I heard the shots. Someone tried to say they were backfires, but I knew better. I dumped a tyke off my lap, ran upstairs—those bunny feet are not made for sprinting, I’ll tell you—and saw people pointing toward Make-a-Manatee. When I got to the door and saw that man firing at you, well, I did what I could. No one shoots at my favorite granddaughter and gets away with it.”

“You got shot,” I said.

“Pooh. It’s nothing,” he said. “Why, you should see the scar on my hip from a firefight in Liberia back in—well, I can’t mention the details, but believe you me, Emma-Joy, this little nick in my shoulder is hardly worth thinking about.”

“I’ll bet you were something in your agency days, sir,” Helland observed, wry admiration in his smile. Leaning against the wall, arms folded over his chest with the fluorescent lights glinting on his blond hair, he looked disturbingly handsome. I tore my gaze away, blaming the painkillers for the unfamiliar tingles zipping through me.

“Still am, young man,” Grandpa said tartly. “Now, about us breaking out of here, Emma-Joy—”

A commotion in the hall brought all our heads toward the door. The twitterings and gasps I’d heard all my life filtered into the room. “Oh no,” I said, turning accusing eyes on Grandpa. “You didn’t tell—”

Ethan swept into the room, followed by my mother and what must have been every female doctor, nurse, orderly, and ambulatory patient in the hospital. His famous smile was conspicuously absent and worry clouded his eyes.

“EJ!” He came toward me, arms outstretched, but stopped short. “Can I hug you without hurting you?” he asked, an unfamiliar note of uncertainty in his voice.

Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded and gave myself over to my daddy’s hug.

“Ethan Jarrett is your father?” Helland asked incredulously.

Mom, used to dealing with adoring fans, had shooed them out in a way that left no hard feelings. I don’t know how she does that. She, too, came over to give me a hug and then glared at Grandpa Atherton.

“Dad, if you had anything to do with getting EJ into this… I trusted you to take care of her when she moved out here after—”

“He saved my life,” I interrupted her. “I got him into it.”

“Oh.” Mom burst into tears.

Perhaps afraid he’d be drawn into our group hug, Helland said we could formalize my statement in a day or two and excused himself. I didn’t blame him. The Ferris family was hard to cope with one member at a time; more than two of us in a room at once should require a fireworks permit.