Hot Enough to Kill (36 page)

I shoved Dewayne's rifle under the fish trough and glanced at Leroy, who was holstering his own gun. He stood over Dewayne, staring down like he didn't really know what he should do, or either he was in shock himself.

"Go call for an ambulance, Leroy," I said, looking around for a towel or something to wrap around Dewayne's hand.

Leroy didn't move, so I figured I'd just get Dewayne situated and handle the job myself. I quizzed Dewayne about this, that and nothing just to keep him occupied while Mother took a towel she'd found somewhere and wrapped it around his hand. We managed to get him to stop wallowing around long enough to use his other hand to keep the towel in place.

"Now, you just keep pressure on it and you'll be just fine," Lucille said, standing and walking back toward her chair and purse.

I was proud that my mother was handling things so efficiently because I was still shaking like aspen trees in an autumn wind. I just hoped I didn't look as scared as I felt. "Leroy's going to go call the ambulance now, Dewayne," I said, standing. "I'll help him."

The distinctive metal click of a gun being readied to fire echoed across the bait room.

Instinctively, my head snapped toward my mother. She was back in her chair, but she didn't have anything in her hands, specifically her Little Lady. So if she didn't have the Glock out again, and Leroy was just standing there like a tree, then who had cocked a gun?

A loud thundering boom answered my thought. Dewayne Schuman jerked convulsively at my feet. Then I saw a gaping hole in his chest, which was slowly pooling with blood. "Oh, God."

My gaze darted around the room.

Lucille had spun around at the sound of the gun and was staring toward the front room, her back to the wall. Leroy's head had jerked up, his eyes locked in the same general direction as Mother's. I followed their frozen gazes and turned to stone where I stood.

In the doorway between the rooms was a dark-haired woman, pointing a huge handgun down at Dewayne. Susan Schuman Miller had just murdered her own brother.

"Stupid son of a bitch." She raised the gun, pointed it at me and laughed. "You had no idea."

No, hell no. I had no idea about anything, especially now.

"He was the worst one of them all. My own brother."

What was she talking about? A hundred questions zinged through my head, but not a word came to my quivering lips. I was sucking in little gasps of air and my whole body shaking, but damned if I could control either. This was it. The end. Adios.

Susan laughed. "Cat got your tongue, Jolene? A little surprised at this turn of events, I suppose." She turned toward Leroy. "Give me your gun, asshole."

Leroy did not move, only stared, eyes wide and face pale.

Susan sighed heavily and theatrically. "All right, let's try it again. Slide your right hand down to your hip, you stupid prick, lift up the hand grip on the gun in the holster and give the gun to me," she said, as if instructing an imbecile. "Twitch wrong, and you're dead."

Leroy looked dazed, but he did as she asked, floundering every now and then, but eventually he managed to hand Susan his pistol.

Susan stuffed Leroy's gun into the waistband of her jeans. "I was kind of hoping you'd screw up, not that I need a reason to shoot you. But, I'd also like to take my time and enjoy killing you."

Leroy's eyelids fluttered in a fast blink, but he still looked shell-shocked and was probably not going to be of much help, not that there was much he could do now anyway. What could any of us do?

I was trying to get my own petrified brain to function for a half a minute so I could think of exactly what was going on here. I had to keep my eyes on Susan and not on the floor. I had to not think about Dewayne or the blood spreading out from his body in thick pools. And I had to not stand here like an unmoving target. I had to do something.

Susan had shot her brother as if he were a snake in the grass, so we were all just one bullet away from being dead as well. Instantly, life became a highly precious commodity, and I started grasping for a straw that might preserve ours--even temporarily. Something clever would be nice. Panic did not spur my creative juices and the best I could think of was that sometimes killers liked to gloat about what they'd done.

"It's all starting to make sense now," I said, although it wasn't at all. "You were the brains behind the--"

"Everything, sweetcakes," Susan said proudly. "I'm the brains behind everything. The whole town liked to pretend I was invisible, which made it all the easier. I didn't waste too much time dabbling in politics, but I did like making little suggestions to the less brilliant types who thought they were in charge. Dumb arrogant assholes."

"Made them think they were having real ideas for themselves. They felt smart and I got what I wanted." She laughed, a very evil and unfunny laugh as she looked right at me. "People are so easy to manipulate."

The chilling laugh shuddered through me. This woman had jumped off the deep edge long ago. Worse, she was proud of it. I had to do something, but what?

Susan kicked a foot out at Dewayne and wiggled his shoulder with her tennis shoe. "Of course, some of them are just too stupid to do what they're told, so here I am again, having to take care of things myself."

What did she mean by that? Had she also told her own brother to hang himself? Oh, God, this whole thing was something I would never have imagined--and couldn't even begin to piece together now. I hadn't really thought much about Susan in the whole scheme of things, except to feel sorry for her. Great judge of character I am. Well, I could either berate myself until she killed me, or I could do something. Keeping her talking seemed a good option, so I grabbed the first thought that whizzed by. "That was really clever of you to throw everybody off the track by pretending to be at odds with the mayor."

"Who was pretending? The bastard was out to get us--and the money. Stupid Dewayne just couldn't seem to grasp that concept. Bennett was ignorant, arrogant and greedy, but I guess we see who came out on that deal."

I guess we did. The pieces were falling into place. "So why shoot Jerry?" I asked, knowing the answer before she said a word.

"Amy, of course."

"Get rid of the competition?"

She laughed, a wholly evil laugh. "Something like that. He thinks he's perfect, Amy thinks he's perfect, hell, even you think he's perfect, but he's not. And he's surely not invincible, I proved that quite well." She chuckled again and then shrugged. "Oh, I guess if you really must know it was mostly just convenient. BigJohn had stirred up so much trouble that it was only a matter of time until Jerry got wise to the whole deal. He was supposed to be my second shot. The first was for Granny." She nodded toward Lucille. "I suspected she had the money, even if she didn't know it, and I couldn't very well find it with deputies crawling all over the place. I needed her gone."

Gone, as in dead. The woman was fully and completely deranged. "If you knew the money was at the cabin--and somebody had to put that hideaway box in the bathroom--why didn't you just go get it?"

"He put that box in," she said, kicking her brother again. "I didn't know a damn thing about it until today. He'd been doing entirely too much thinking for himself lately, and that's not healthy."

Okay, I sort of got why she was out to get revenge on the town for not treating her the way she wanted, but there were more twists and turns that just didn't fit. "So why did you shoot at me and Leroy?"

Susan laughed, and this time she sounded sincerely amused. "Actually, sweetcakes, I thought you were your mother. How's that for a kick in the teeth?"

The jab hit its mark--and it was a very low one.
Okay, Jolene
, I told myself,
there are worse things than being mistaken for your mother--like death--so suck it up and stay focused.

I chanced a look at my mother, and what I saw did not help me suck up anything. Lucille had pure terror written across her pale skin. It was one thing to deal with a known idiot, like Leroy or Dewayne, but Lucille knew serious trouble when she saw it. Susan Schuman Miller was smart and ruthless, and it was scaring the daylights out of my mother.

Lucille pressed her long-nailed fingers against her lips and stared, trying to hold back tears. "You killed BigJohn." Tears puddle in her eyes. "I don't care what anybody says, he really did care about me, and you killed him."

"Don't get yourself too worked up, Granny. Bennett's first concern was always for himself. He never even noticed your key missing from his cabinet."

Lucille pressed her fingers to her mouth harder, but a sob slipped out anyway.

"That wasn't the best part, though. I think the most fun I had was seeing what happened when the gun found its way back home. Everybody thought that slut carving was a zinger at Granny." Susan nodded at me and winked. "But we know better, don't we, Jolene?"

Well, we did now. My father's favorite shotgun had been carved up as a slur against me? Not my mother, but me? Why? Some convoluted thing to do with Jerry and Amy no doubt. I didn't much care to hear the screwed-up reasoning behind it, because obviously Susan Schuman was seriously screwed up.

Then again, at the moment, so was I. A man was dead in front of me, his blood spreading out across the floor, and I was doing everything I could not to look down at it. I was teetering on the edge of a meltdown the likes of which I had no reference for. I had to get control of myself. I had to not think about him--or that I was one finger twitch away from being there with him. I had to focus my petrified brain on what she might do next--and how I could stop her. How, dammit, how?

I heard Mother sniffling and sucking in little crying gasps, and when I turned to look at her, my heart just broke. Lucille Jackson had tears running down her face and looked absolutely scared to death. I couldn't let her just stand there like that.

"Here, Mother," I said, stepping toward Lucille. "Let me get you a tissue from your purse."

"Hey, there, sweetcakes. I'm not ready to shoot you just yet, so don't make me," Susan said, following me with the gun. "Get away from her."

Susan stood about six feet away from me, and I stood between mother and Susan--and the gun. Mother was semi-protected, but the odds were good that the bullet would keep right on going through me and into her. Gory thought, but true. I didn't have much of a plan, but I knew I had to do something--even if it was wrong. And I had to do it now. Right now.

Leroy was still up against the fish trough, about the same distance away, although I wasn't sure what significance that held. With my back to Susan, I couldn't see what she was doing, or much of what Leroy was doing, but I hoped he was paying attention and might have a jolt of both instinct and ingenuity to help out when I needed it. This was right up there with the pigs sprouting wings theory, but hope springs eternal.

I said, "Either shoot me now or let me get my mother a tissue." I moved my hand toward the purse. "I'm not going to just stand here and not help her. She's an old woman and you're upsetting her. She has a heart condition besides." It was pure bravado talking, but I didn't have anything to lose. I glanced into Mother's face to see if her hackles had raised over my comments, particularly the old woman part. They hadn't. In fact, I didn't even think she'd heard me. And that was a very bad sign.

"Hurry up then," Susan said matter-of-factly. "Clean your sniveling selves up, but knock off the whining. I just hate whiny women."

From the corner of my eye, I could see Leroy watching me. He knew as well as anybody what was in the purse that sat in the chair next to Lucille. What he didn't know was whether I was going to swing it or pull a gun from it. I didn't know either.

Leroy no longer had a gun, so I couldn't expect him to do much, except realize that something was about to happen.

I made eye contact with him, looked down at the purse then kind of jerked my head toward Susan. The gesture wasn't terribly clear, but at least he knew I was about to do something.

"I really hadn't expected you all to show up here together for me," Susan said amicably. "It is rather convenient, but it also rather muddies things up a bit, which is why you're still alive. I will, of course, have to kill you, but that's not as easy as it sounds. These things have to work out logically."

Logic was the last thing I was worried about. I did not look around, but knew she was eyeing us one by one, trying to work out a believable chain of events.

She laughed. "So many choices. Tying up a neat knot in three murders and a suicide is going to take some doing. If I'd just shot Dewayne in the head, this would all be a piece of cake--my bad. As it is, I can't very well just shoot you all here and expect the cops to figure out how you killed one another." She sighed heavily. "I surely do hate doing these things on the spur of the moment. I'm much more effective when I have some time to plan."

While Susan congratulated herself on her intelligence and unfortunate circumstances, I dug in Mother's purse and got the tissue like I'd said I would and wiped away Lucille's tears. It shook me more than I wanted to admit to see my hard-nosed mother so stricken. But then we very well might be dead in the next two minutes, so I was flying free and loose on the emotional thing. "I love you, Mom."

She blinked a little, tears spilling out from the effort, and sniffed, a ragged sobbing thing. She couldn't talk, but she nodded a "me too."

Okay, I'd had enough. Giving Susan time to work out a suitable plan for our murders wasn't going to help anything. If she was going to shoot us, she was going to have to do it on the fly. I had no doubt she would, but I also realized that nobody was going to show up to save us, so that seemed to leave any saving business up to me.

I knew before I did anything that somebody was going to get shot--Susan was going to pull the trigger. But if I did something now, we had a chance that not everyone would die as she'd promised. There was no way I could get the Glock out of the case and ready to fire before Susan shot me dead. So, I did the next best thing. I transferred the tissue to my left hand and dabbed Mother's eyes again. With my right hand, I reached down, grabbed the handle of the purse, spun around and flung it toward Susan as hard as I could.