Wicked Ways: Death at the DuMond (A Cozy Witch Mystery Book 1) (15 page)

Then he looked to the ground. His face twisted up. I could tell he was having second thoughts about climbing out onto the ledge. With us already out there, he had pretty good odds of accomplishing his mission without having to do a thing. 

“Why don’t you come back inside, and we can talk about things?” Nicoletti said.

We kept inching across the ledge. Zoe’s ankle rolled, and she lost her footing. Her high heel shoe plummeted to the ground and smacked the concrete. Zoe wouldn’t have been far behind, but she managed to grab the head of a gargoyle that adorned the building.

Zoe dangled in the air, her fingers clasped around the slick statue. Rain poured down in sheets. I crept to her as fast as I could. But there wasn’t much I could do.

Zoe kicked off her other heel. It spiraled down to the concrete. I held onto a window frame and reached my arm out to Zoe. Her wet fingers were sliding from the gargoyle. I grabbed the fabric of her dress and pulled her up. She swung her foot back onto the ledge and lifted herself back up.

“Thanks,” Zoe said, trying to catch her breath.

“You girls are going to get hurt out there,” Nicoletti said. “Come back inside.”

“Keep moving,” I said.

We scurried along the ledge. There was a section that had crumbled away, leaving a three foot gap. The building was over a hundred years old. I felt like this whole ledge could crumble away at any moment.

Nicoletti was getting frustrated. Still poking out through the window, his upper half was drenched from the rain. “Ladies, you’re gonna catch a cold.”

We weren’t coming back in, and he knew it. Since we hadn’t fallen yet, he was going to have to do things the hard way. But I could tell he still didn’t want to climb out onto the ledge.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a black, semi-automatic handgun. It had a silencer. Nicoletti closed one eye and squinted down the barrel with the other.

Zoe leapt across the chasm in the ledge. She almost lost her footing, but  recovered.

 Nicoletti’s fingers squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession.
 

Zip.
 

Zip.
 

Two 9 mm hollow point rounds ripped through the air. Both smashed the concrete next to my head and ricochetted away. Bits of blasted concrete and mortar pelted me in the face.

Nicoletti took aim again.

I leapt across the chasm. Only this time, the ledge disintegrated under my feet. I plummeted downward, grasping the jagged edge of the ledge with one hand. I was hanging on by my fingertips. What remained of the ledge was cracked and about to give way again. Then I made the mistake of looking down. My stomach turned in knots. I was dizzy with vertigo.

Nicoletti climbed out of the window onto the ledge.

Zoe kept inching toward the fire escape. She wasn’t coming back to help me.

My grip was slipping. The rain was still pounding down. I swung my free hand up and tried to latch onto the ledge. 

Nicoletti inched toward me. He was a big guy. Two-hundred-fifty pounds of solid muscle. Top-heavy. The tiny ledge was a very precarious place for him to be. His face was pale white, and he clung his back to the brick.

I hung there as he inched closer. It was all I could do to keep my grip. There was no way I could pull myself up. My only other option was to drop down to the next ledge on the floor below. But I would have to perfectly stick the landing. I was pretty sure that my downward momentum wouldn’t allow me to balance my landing on the ledge below. Even if I could hit it.

Zoe was almost at the fire escape.

Nicoletti shuffled his way down the ledge until he was standing almost right above me. He peered down his nose at me. I saw the big black barrel of his semi-automatic point straight at my head. 

“Just my luck. I get to kill two birds with one stone,” he chuckled.

CHAPTER 24

SOME THINGS DON’T make a good combination. Toothpaste and orange juice. Sauerkraut and ice cream. A 250 pound man and a century-old, crumbling ledge.

Nicoletti’s fat fingers squeezed the trigger just as the ledge gave way beneath him. I heard the bullet whiz past my ear. Then a few seconds later, I heard Nicoletti splat on the concrete.

 You know how sometimes when you order pizza, and the delivery driver just doesn’t care? And the cheese slides off the top? And the marinara and pepperoni splatter out everywhere? That’s kind of how Nicoletti looked on the pavement.

That’s how I was going to look if I didn’t do something fast. My fingers were starting to cramp up. I couldn’t hold onto the ledge much longer. If I could swing a few feet over, I might be able to land in the dumpster. But that was a big if. It was full of trash bags and looked cushy. It always seemed to work in the movies. 

But then I got to thinking about it. First, movies are fake. Second, people throw all kinds of things in dumpsters. Broken glass. Kitchen sinks. Old lumber with sharp nails. No way was I going to try and drop into a dumpster. Clearly, the pavement would be worse. Still, I wasn’t going to voluntarily let go of this ledge. But it was getting harder and harder to hold on.

I heard a window open above me. Mrs. Abbott poked her head out and looked around. I guess all the commotion had roused her from bed. I called up to her.

“Hannah, is that you?” Mrs. Abbott asked. “What are you doing out there?”

“Oh, you know. Just hanging out,” I said.

“Hold on, dear.” She disappeared into the apartment. She returned a few moments later and threw a lifeline down to me. She had tied several bedsheets together and anchored them against a bedpost.

 I grabbed the makeshift rope and twirled it around my arm. Then I climbed up and into her apartment. I collapsed on her floor, exhausted.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m better now. Thank you.” I rested on the floor for a few minutes and caught my breath.  

“Would you like some tea? Or something to eat?”

“No. I’m fine. Thank you.”

“How about a cupcake?” she said. “I made a new batch this afternoon.”

My eyes widened. I stared at her for a moment, contemplating the situation I found myself in. If Mrs. Abbott wanted me dead, why would she have helped me? I would have surely fallen within a few minutes had she not come to my rescue. I felt like I could rule her out as a suspect. At least, I was fairly confident she didn’t write the death threat. That had to come from Nicoletti.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” I said.

“Why, certainly, my dear.” She smiled.

“I know you weren’t with Zoe at the time of the murder.”

Her smile faded.

“Zoe told me.”

“I was here. By myself,” she said. “If I didn’t have an alibi, I was afraid someone might get the wrong impression.”

“Did you kill Mrs. DuMond?”

“No. I’m sorry to say, I didn’t.”

“Why are you sorry that you didn’t?”

“Because I didn’t have the satisfaction of doing it myself,” she said. “Trust me, I thought about it on many occasions. I even bought some poison. I was going to put it in the cupcakes.”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

“I was going to use ethylene glycol. It tastes sweet. I thought it might be a good mix for the cupcakes. But forensic experts are getting better about detecting those types of things. Then I thought about using aconite.”

“Wolf’s bane?”

“Yes. It’s mostly untraceable.” She smiled. “But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not because of any moral reason, mind you. Primarily because I don’t think I could handle doing the jail time. It just wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Why did you want to kill her?”

“I think it’s fairly obvious that she killed Roger.” Her eyes filled, and a tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away. “Roger was such a kind man. Warm and caring. He was just a beautiful person.”

She was talking about Mr. DuMond in a way that most people don’t talk about their former landlord. She was talking about her former lover.

“So you two were having an affair?”

“I guess that’s really no secret now, is it?” A second wave of tears streamed down her face.

“And Mrs. DuMond found out?”

“Yes. I don’t think she ever cared much for him. She didn’t look at it like I had stolen her husband. But more like I had stolen a piece of her property.” She sobbed for a moment. “It’s not like I can prove she killed him. But I know she did.”

“We should call the police.”

“You’re not going to have me arrested because I wanted to killer her?” Mrs. Abbott looked terrified.

“No. There’s a dead guy in the alleyway. We should probably do something about that.”

“Oh, right.”

It wasn’t long before the alley was buzzing with law enforcement. Flashing red, white, and blue LED lights flickered across the brick walls. Detective Gibbs wasn’t happy to see me.

“How come every time I turn around, you’re in the middle of something?” Gibbs said, scowling at me.

“Bad luck, I guess.”

I caught Gibbs up to speed on everything that had happened. 

“I’m going to need to talk to Zoe Alexander,” Gibbs said.

“She seems to have disappeared,” I said.

“This Nicoletti guy has known connections to the Giovanni crime family.”

“Are you starting to believe me now?”

Gibbs’s face tightened up. “I’m going to post an officer at your door round the clock. It seems like you’ve made the wrong people angry.” Gibbs sighed. “And I don’t want you leaving the apartment.”

“But—“

“—No
buts
. It’s getting too dangerous,” Gibbs said. “I want you to drop your so called investigation.”

I huffed and crossed my arms.

“It’s for your own good.”

CHAPTER 25

“WHY ARE YOU looking for me?” the man asked.

My wrists and ankles were tied to a chair.
 

Ropes are like snakes. You can charm them, if you know how. I tried a rope charming spell, but it only made things worse. The thick nylon ropes tightened. My hands were turning blue.

The room was dark. I couldn’t see the man’s face. I was still groggy from whatever chemical he used to sedate me. My vision was a little blurred.

A single, bare bulb hung from an overhead fixture. We were in an abandoned warehouse. The concrete floor was covered in dirt, grime, and debris. Rusted metal support beams ran up to the ceiling. Broken skylights cast dappled rays of moonlight into the desolate structure. It was cold and damp.

The last thing I remembered was walking up the stairwell to my apartment. Detective Gibbs said he was going to send an officer to stand guard after they wrapped up at the scene. I didn’t think anything would happen walking from the street up to my doorstep. I was wrong.

I stepped out of the stairwell and fumbled for my keys in front of my door. Someone grabbed me from behind. My mouth and nose were covered with a handkerchief that had a strong chemical odor. I blacked out. I woke up here. 

“Who are you?” I murmured.

“Call me Stryker. Big Slim said you were looking for me. Why?”

It took me a second to put it all together. “I need to ask you some questions.”

Stryker paced around the room. He wore a long trench coat and a hat. The brim was pulled down low.  

“I think you may have seen who killed Mrs. DuMond,” I said. “I don’t care about the jewelry you stole. I’m just trying to keep an innocent man out of jail.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I saw who did it. I saw you there, too, that night.”

“I knew someone else was in the garage. It was you, hiding behind the pillars, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t deny it. “I haven’t agreed to answer any questions yet,” he said.

“I told you, I don’t care about the jewelry.”

“You don’t know how much danger you’re in.”

“After tonight, I think I have a pretty good idea.” 

The man kept pacing about the room. He was nervous. But I couldn’t figure out why. If anyone should have been nervous, it was me. “Look, did you kidnap me for a reason? Cause if not, I’m really tired and I’d like to go home and go to bed.”

“I didn’t kidnap you,” he said.

I scoffed. “Oh, really? What do you call this, then?”

“Taking precautions.”

“Well, I am dangerous,” I said.

He paused for a moment. “I saw the old lady get killed.”

“And?”

“And it was amateur hour.”

“You mean, it wasn’t a professional hit?”

“It was supposed to be,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’m the one who was supposed to take the old lady out.”

My eyes widened. The hairs on the back of my neck stood tall. Now I was the one that was nervous. 

“Why were you going to kill her?”

“Because that kind of thing is my job. And I get paid very well.”