Sink Trap (28 page)

When I looked in the back, Barry was flaked out, his head propped on his rolled-up jacket, snoozing in the sun.

I almost hated to wake him. But then he snored and I couldn’t stop a giggle. He sat up, his expression still sleepy, and looked around for the source of the noise.

“Nice nap?” I asked with mock innocence.

“You’re late,” he growled.

“Been standing here watching you sleep,” I countered. “You missed all the excitement.”

“Nothing exciting happened here.”

“Not here, at my house. Come on, let’s get to work. I’ll tell you the whole story.”

By the time I’d finished my tale of doggy woe, Barry was chuckling. “Don’t laugh,” I told him. “You get that Jack Russell for Paula, you’re going to have plenty of stories of your own. Jack Russells are high-energy dogs.”

“I know.” Barry shook his head. “But what Paula wants . . .”

“Paula gets,” I finished.

We went to work on the urinals. By midafternoon, I
could see that Barry was running down. He moved slowly and he was still favoring his right leg.

“Barry,” I said in my most innocent voice, “what did Dr. Cox say when you went to Immediate Care?”

There was a long pause, which answered the question I was
really
asking. Barry hadn’t gone to the doctor at all, despite his promises.

“I intended to go, Georgie. But I stopped at the office to get the paperwork, and the next thing I knew, it was after five.” He shrugged. “I was sure the doc had gone home already, so I figured I’d stop in the next morning, but then I got busy.”

It was my turn to glare at him. “You promised, Barry.” This was one of those more-brother-than-boss moments, and I propped my fists on my hips. “So when are you going to go?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll stop by after work. All right?”

I grinned at him and he gave me a sour look. “Bad enough I have a woman bossing me around at home,” he said. “This is what I get for letting one on the job.”

“And you’re Megan’s hero because of it.” I reminded him of his daughter’s pointed questions about why there were no women plumbers in his company.

The work on the urinals was complete. All that was left to do was clean up the job site. Barry’s rule.

“It’s almost five, Barry. Maybe you ought to go now, so you don’t miss the doctor.”

He opened his mouth, but I continued before he could speak. “I’ll even do the cleanup if you promise to go by the clinic. Deal?”

It was an offer too good to refuse, and we both knew it. Cleanup was always a chore, one nobody really wanted to do. And I was offering to do it all.

I was picking up tools and fitting them into the boxes when I heard Barry’s truck drive away. I smiled to myself. He was a great person to work for, but he was such a guy sometimes. Good thing he had Paula to look out for him.

As I worked, I thought about Barry’s accident. We’d
made a joke about the job being jinxed, but it had me spooked; especially after we found the bloody towel.

What if the stair hadn’t been an accident? Maybe someone really wanted to stop our work on the house; maybe they were afraid we would find exactly what we did find in the basement.

Maybe the cracked toilet wasn’t an accident, either.

I felt in my pocket for the scrap of paper I’d found before the dogs’ adventure. I had intended to take it to the sheriff, but Daisy and Buddha had foiled my clever plan.

I decided I would stop by the sheriff’s office after I finished cleaning up, and show him my clue. Then I could ask about the stairs. Maybe they had already looked at it, but it never hurt to ask, did it?

I heard a vehicle pull into the parking lot. Had Barry left too late to see the doctor? Or had he been to the clinic and back in the time it took me to clean up? I glanced at my beat-up watch. Had it really been that long?

The outside door opened and footsteps echoed through the empty warehouse.

“Still back here,” I called out, bending down to put the last of my tools in my toolbox. “What did you forget? Whatever it is, it could have waited ’til morning.”

“No,” a smooth voice said. “I don’t think it could have.”

chapter 22

The voice wasn’t Barry’s. It was Rick Gladstone’s.

“We saw your little car, and thought we’d stop in to say good-bye.”

Rick and Rachel stood in the door of the bathroom.

With a gun.

Pointed at me.

Rachel held the gun in her right hand. It wasn’t a very big gun, but at that instant it was the only thing I could see.

Her hand trembled slightly, and she wrapped her left hand around her right to steady her grip.

I stood up very slowly, my hands held out to my sides. I kept my face calm and didn’t speak.

I’d learned how to defend myself. But I also knew trying to disarm a nervous person with a gun was a good way to get yourself seriously killed. Especially when you were outnumbered, and your opponent had the element of surprise.

And I was surprised.

As I’d said to Barry a few days earlier, you choose your battles. I wasn’t ready to choose this one quite yet.

“Rachel.” Rick struggled to keep his voice level and smooth, but I could hear an edge of fear underneath. “How do we get rid of her?”

Anger flashed across Rachel’s face, and for a split second I thought she was going to pull the trigger.

“Well, we can’t just shoot her, can we? Not unless you’re prepared to dig up Martha and put them together.”

I had a sudden image of being thrown on top of Martha Tepper’s body. I shuddered, unable to help myself.

“Don’t worry, you’d already be dead,” Rachel said.

Somehow I didn’t find that very reassuring.

Rachel stood still for one long minute, clearly trying to formulate a plan. I realized that these two had come after me on impulse, without a clear idea of what they would do when they found me.

Sort of like a dog chasing a car, but with deadly consequences for the car.

I watched Rick watching Rachel, and realized that he was not in charge of this operation. I wondered if he had ever been in charge. Of anything.

Then again, Rachel didn’t seem like much of a leader.

“So,” I said, drawing her attention away from her planning, and back to me, “if you really plan to kill me, would you at least tell me why? I mean, I get that you two were stealing from Martha’s accounts. That was what this was all about, right?”

Rachel’s mouth clamped shut, her bottom lip caught between her small teeth. She was determined not to talk, not to give away anything.

But Rick wanted to defend himself.

“It wasn’t like that.” The whine I had heard before surfaced, and I forced myself not to show the revulsion and contempt I felt.

“It wasn’t?” I said.

“No! We didn’t steal anything. We borrowed some money from one of the trust accounts. Just to take care of
some office bills. We would eventually have billed her for it anyway. We just got the money a little early.”

“And Martha objected?” I asked.

“We only took what she promised us,” Rachel cut in, her voice harsh. “We were having trouble, were about to lose our house. The old biddy said she’d help us out. Then she started talking about that charity housing project and how maybe she ought to give the money to them.”

“But she’d already promised us,” Rick whined, “and she had plenty. She wouldn’t even have missed it if she hadn’t gotten the idea in her head to move.”

“We really were going to pay her back. We even signed a note,” Rachel said. “But she wouldn’t believe us.”

“Why not?” I said. I just wanted to keep them talking instead of shooting, until I could figure out a way to get out of the warehouse.

Rick launched into a long explanation about how they had been getting shortchanged by Martha for years, and they had been forced to pad their bills and siphon funds from Martha’s trust accounts.

“It was her own fault,” Rachel snarled. “If she hadn’t been so cheap, we could have worked it all out. But she insisted that we had to turn ourselves in even after we signed the note to pay some of it back.

“For what?” she exploded. “For taking what should have been ours in the first place? Just because she was rich, Miss High-and-Mighty Martha Tepper, did that give her the right to treat us like dirt? To make us lose our house and our business?” Her voice rose with indignation. “To make us go to
jail
?”

Maybe I had pushed her too far. She was trembling, and the gun clenched in her fists was waving around the room as though looking for any random target.

“This is your own fault, you know.” She waved the gun, the barrel still pointing at the middle of my chest. “If you had just left things alone, we could have taken care of the situation. But
nooo
. Not you! You had to keep poking
around the house, and talking to that stupid housekeeper, and running to the sheriff every five minutes.”

I didn’t see any advantage in pointing out how wrong she was, so I kept my mouth shut.

“We tried to warn you,” she continued. “That first night? With the truck? You didn’t get the message. Then the missing tools. We hoped you’d stop getting into things at the house. I even fixed the toilet so it would break and you would have to stop work, but you didn’t. And we tried to fix the basement stairs to keep you out of there, too, until we’d had a chance to get rid of some things.”

I thought about the truck that had tried to run me off the road. Had Rachel been driving, or Rick? My money was on Rachel. Not that it mattered.

I wondered if there had been more than the bag we found. It was possible there were other things, either in the walls or stashed in one of the crates or boxes that were in storage.

Rachel seemed to be working herself up, building her justification for taking the next step.

Which, I was very much afraid, would be firing a bullet in my direction.

Rick apparently had the same thought. He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and steadied the gun, the barrel pointing toward the floor.

“It was an accident,” Rick said, back on the defensive. “We only meant to scare her into signing a note for another loan, giving us the money we needed. I took that stupid old brooch and told her she could have it back when she signed the note. We still planned to pay it back, not like we were trying to rob her or anything. But she kept telling us we had to go to the police, had to give ourselves up. Like we’d done something really bad. I threw the brooch in the sink. Just so she would know we were serious. Rachel
told
her to sign but she wouldn’t. She said she was going to the police if we didn’t, and then she started to walk out.” He patted his wife’s shoulder, pulling her against his chest as though to comfort her.

I relaxed a fraction. For the first time since they had entered the room, the gun was no longer pointed directly at me.

I wasn’t ready to move, but now I at least had a chance.

“We were just trying to stop her.” His voice was choked with regret, though whether over the shooting of Miss Tepper or over getting caught, I wasn’t sure.

I was voting for getting caught. He didn’t seem like the type of guy to have much compassion for anyone that wasn’t him.

“We worked too hard to get where we were,” Rachel said, as though that justified everything they had done. “Did you know I put Rick through law school?”

The abrupt change of subject reminded me of one of Sue’s roller-coaster conversations.

If Sue was a homicidal maniac, holding me at gunpoint.

I hoped Sue was taking good care of the dogs. If I didn’t get out of here, she was going to inherit a couple Airedales instead of getting that Great Dane she’d been thinking about.

The thought that I might never see Daisy and Buddha again tore at my heart. The two of them had helped me through the roughest time of my life, and I owed them a lot.

No way were they going to be left orphans. And no way was I going to let myself get taken out by someone who whined as much as these two losers.

The time had come to choose my battle.

I judged the distance between me and the Gladstones. They were several feet away, but I was already standing. I had never tried any martial arts moves in steel-toed boots, but I was about to find out if I could.

I couldn’t move directly toward them. All either one of them would have to do was raise the gun and fire. At close range, moving toward the gun—like I said, you could get seriously dead.

I tensed, and mentally chose my spot, aiming for the wall a few feet beyond Rick Gladstone.

Go time.

I bounced once and tumbled toward Rick. He jumped and pulled at the gun, but by the time he managed to swing it around toward me, I was behind him. I landed awkwardly in the heavy boots and bounced off the wall.

My shoulder thudded into the door of the one toilet stall and it swung wildly, metal clanging against metal. The noise reverberated off the tile and concrete of the bathroom, sending echoes vibrating through the room.