Read Play Dead Online

Authors: Leslie O'kane

Tags: #Boulder, #Women Detectives, #colorado, #Mystery & Detective, #who-done-it, #General, #woman sleuth, #cozy mystery, #dogs, #Women Sleuths, #female sleuth, #Fiction, #Dog Trainers, #Boulder (Colo.)

Play Dead (33 page)

BOOK: Play Dead
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“Allida? Why are you so quiet?”

Damn! I had taken too long!

“She passed out,” Tracy lied. “Wake up!”
She made a slapping noise followed by a low groan.

It didn’t work. I could see little slits
of yellow below me. He’d turned on the lights in both the sound booth and his
own control room.

“Where is she?”

Tracy stayed mute.

He paused. “You little bitch! What is it
you think you’re going to accomplish?”

His voice was directly below. The knife
blade jabbed through the ceiling tile a foot ahead of my face. I gasped, then
inched forward.
Dear God!
I had no choice now but to try to drop down on
top of him. If I mistimed it, I’d impale myself on his knife!

Again, he punched his knife through a tile
centered right under my stomach. He pulled the knife back down.

“Now!” I hollered. Tracy’s scream was all
but ear-shattering, and I had the acoustic ceiling to muffle it. I kicked down
the two-foot-by-four-foot ceiling tile, which cracked over Joel’s head. He was
still standing. As I’d hoped, he had dropped the knife in an attempt to
scramble to the volume controls. Before he could react, I let myself drop the
four feet or so to his head.

My chin knocked into the top of his head,
and I saw stars, but managed to grab hold of his neck. We fell to the floor.

The amplified noise from the sound booth
in this tiny room was deafening. Tracy was screaming at Joel. Pavlov was
barking savagely.

Joel pushed me away and lunged for
something near my leg. I kicked blindly, and soon realized I’d sent the knife
skittering across the linoleum floor into the far corner.

“I’ll kill you!” Joel’s face and hair were
covered in dust and white plaster-like fragments from the shattered ceiling.
His eyes were crazed black holes. I lashed out, landing a punch to his trachea.
He grunted. I scooted out from under him.

Pavlov was trying to claw through the
glass window that separated us. If only Tracy were strong enough to lift her
into the crawl space!

Tracy screamed again at the sight of me.
Blood was everywhere, and I realized that the flesh under my chin had split.

I lunged toward the door of the sound
booth. Joel rose,
g
rabbed me, and threw me away from the door
with so much force that the back of my head smacked against the opposite wall.
He got his hands around my neck.

“Chair on table!” I hollered with what
could be my last breath.

Joel loosened his grip on me and turned to
look into the sound booth. I gasped for air and got a partial view into the
sound booth past Joel’s body.

Tracy was lifting a chair onto the table.

Joel released me, swung around, and banged
his fists on the glass. “No! Don’t, Tracy!”

Pavlov bounded up onto the table, the
chair, and disappeared into the crawl space. I threw open the door to the
hallway. If I could just get to the lobby, the police would see me.

Joel tackled me.

“Pavlov, attack!” She was not yet in
sight, and I’d taught her no such command. But Joel didn’t know that.

Joel scrambled to his feet. I grabbed hold
of his legs. Just then, Pavlov leapt down, landing on all fours. Joel fought to
shut the door while I tried to wedge myself in the doorway to keep it open.

Pavlov growled deep in her chest, her
teeth huge. Joel got an arm around my neck and pulled me against his chest to
use me as a shield.

I grabbed his arm and curled into a ball.
Pavlov lunged. Joel screamed in pain and released me. His fists pummeled Pavlov’s
back. Pavlov’s teeth were buried in Joel’s thigh.

I scrambled to my feet, raced to the sound
booth, and threw the bolt. Tracy burst out, sweating and panting. She stood
awestruck at the sight of Joel trying to fight off Pavlov.

Joel let out another scream of pain but
broke free. Joel staggered Pavlov with a cruel blow to the muzzle. The knife
was back in the control room. My head was throbbing. I felt dizzy, disoriented.
I didn’t have the strength to help Pavlov!

A high whine rose from the end of the
hall. Sage!

“Call nine-one-one!” I hollered. Blood was
gushing from my chin, but I ignored it and staggered in the direction of the
sound. I needed to get Sage out of his muzzle to help Pavlov with Joel.

I threw open the last door to the hallway.
Greg was lying on the floor, bound and gagged, Sage’s leash tied to a desk leg
beside him. I unbuckled Sage’s muzzle, freed him from his leash, and Sage
bounded out of the room. Tracy had followed me and snatched up the phone.

This was a waste of time, I now realized.
The police should be right outside the lobby. My head was throbbing and I was
starting to lose consciousness. We had to get past Joel and the dogs to get to
the lobby.

I staggered back into the hallway. Joel
Meyer was curled in the fetal position, Pavlov’s teeth sunk into his upper arm,
Sage snarling and barking.

“Police!” a man’s voice called just then.
Two officers burst into the hallway, just past Joel and the dogs.

“Pavlov! Cease!” I cried. My vision swam,
then everything went black.

The next thing I knew, I was outside,
staring up at a starless sky. I was on a gurney with a hard, plastic collar
around my neck, some sort of padding pressed tightly against my wounded chin.

Russell was there, black eye and all,
jogging alongside the gurney, watching me with a shocked, worried expression on
his heavily shadowed features.

“Where’d you come from?” I managed to
mumble.

“I was listening to the broadcast. I
recognized part of it from the other day. I called the police to tell them. I
wasn’t sure they believed me.”

“Miss?” one of the paramedics pushing the
gurney interrupted. “We need to put you in the ambulance now.”

“Wait!” I looked again at Russell. “Pavlov
and Sage. Are they...”

“They’re fine. I hear Pavlov saved your
life. You’re lucky you have her. I called your mom, and she’s meeting you at
the hospital.” He started to turn away, as forlorn as I’d ever seen him.

The paramedics started to lift me into the
ambulance. “Just a moment,” I cried to them, and they hesitated. “Russell?
Remember that date at Flagstaff House you asked me about for last Saturday?
Could I take a rain check, next week or so?”

I couldn’t tell if my words were
intelligible, till the smile on Russell’s wonderful face seemed to light up the
dark night.

A CONVERSATION WITH LESLIE O’KANE

Q. You began your career as a novelist
with mysteries about cartoonist/sleuth Molly Masters. What (or who) was your
inspiration for Molly?

 

A. After my first attempt at a mystery
(about a psychiatrist) was clearly not working, the leader of my critique group
suggested I think about creating a character who was closer to myself. I played
a game of “What if?” and asked myself what would have happened had I stuck to
my original major in college—art. I realized that, as the perennial
class-clown type, I would have become a cartoonist.

 

Q. What made you decide to create a second
series with a new heroine, Allie Babcock?

 

A. I had listened to an interview with a
pet psychologist who sometimes treats dogs that are depressed from such events
as a death of someone close to them. As a murder-mystery writer, that
immediately caught my interest. Everyone I ran the concept past—of a dog
psychologist whose furry clients lead her into murder
investigations—loved the idea.

 

Q. How is Allie different from Molly
Masters?

 

A. Unlike Molly, who is happily married
with two children, Allie is happily single, though she is not opposed to a
romantic involvement. She is much less likely than Molly to make wisecracks and
has a greater sense of dignity. Also, they differ in their
upbringing—Allie lost her father when she was very young, and she tends
to be more of a loner, sometimes more comfortable with dogs than with people.

 

Q. What inspired you to pursue a writing
career? Why mysteries? Did any authors particularly influence you?

 

A. My mother is an avid reader, and when I
was growing up, we made trips to the library every other week without fail,
giving me a lifelong appreciation of books. My first-grade teacher taught us
how to write the words “it” and “is” the first week of school, and I rushed
home and wrote a five-page tome, entitled “It Is,” that went: Is it? It is. Is
it? Is it? It is. It is... (My plots improved once I learned more words.)

Even as a kid, I loved mystery novels. At
one point I had just begun reading Agatha Christie’s
The ABC Murders
and
told my parents that I knew who did it—and stated the obvious clue that
led me to think so. My father said, “If you were writing a mystery, would you
start your book with a clue that revealed the murderer’s identity?” I realized
then that no, I wouldn’t, and I became forever fascinated by the art of mystery
writing.

 

Q. Dogs often play major roles in your
books. Do you have pets at home that are models for your fictional animals?

A. I have an adorable cocker spaniel and
often dog sit for a golden retriever and two more cocker spaniels. As a child,
I had a collie—and he was the inspiration for Sage in
Play Dead.

 

Q. Is it true that you were once taken
hostage in a robbery? Please tell us about that experience.

 

A. That took place during a particularly
rocky time in my life, when I was working in Boston as a cocktail waitress at
night to put myself through college by day. I was head waitress, and just
before two in the morning, I had to inform my coworkers that I’d just learned
we were scheduled for a “clean-up party”—a euphemism for slave labor
because the waitresses and bartenders had to clean the bar from top to bottom
for three hours, in exchange for which they got pizza and beer at five
a.m.
This enormous customer—he
looked like a former linebacker—overheard me and said that he was the
superintendent of the apartment building in which our bar was located;
consequently (so he reasoned) he was an employee, too, and could stay and
drink. I said no, that didn’t make him an employee and, furthermore, the bar
was closed and he’d have to leave.

Some fifteen minutes later, after we’d
locked up and begun cleaning, the French doors of the bar came flying open, and
there stood Enormous Customer with a rifle under one arm and a double-barrel
shotgun under the other. All I could think of at that moment was, “This guy is
taking missing last call wa-a-y too seriously!” And I started to laugh. He
smacked me with the shotgun and told me to quit laughing, but all humor had
already gone out of the situation.

The SWAT team arrived at last, and around
seven
a.m.
we got out of there.
Unfortunately, Enormous Customer was out of there too. He escaped when the
police ignored my observation that they’d only sealed the building, not the
entire block—and that all the roofs were attached. The guy was big but
not very bright; he was finally captured the next night following a brawl at
another bar, in which he cut off a man’s ear and then collapsed from
exhaustion. Hence my conclusion that writing about crimes is more enjoyable
than taking part in them.

 

*** To learn more
about the novels of Leslie O’Kane and Leslie Caine, please visit
Leslie Caine

BOOK: Play Dead
10.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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