He was too smart for that. Walking around the bar, he came toward me with the Glock pointed at my forehead. “It’s time to end this charade.”
I wish I could say I kept my cool, but I didn’t. My heart was hammering in my ears, and all I could think about was not letting him see how terrified I was. If this was going to be my last moment, I didn’t want it to end with my humiliation.
He was breathing heavily, gathering the will to pull the trigger.
In my head, I heard Todd’s voice. “Use your feminine weakness, Dixie. It’s your ultimate weapon.”
Like being hit by lightning, I got the meaning in a flash. Freuland’s need for power made him especially vulnerable to a helpless woman at his feet.
Rolling to the floor, I stretched on my back, put my hands over my face and blubbered that I didn’t want to die.
He came closer, his feet shuffling beside me. When he spoke, his voice oozed satisfaction.
“I see you understand the situation.”
I bobbed my chin up and down and bawled. “Uh-huh, I do.”
“I thought you would. You seem like a smart woman. Too bad you had to stumble onto the money.”
Crying louder, I spread my fingers and looked through them. The overhead fluorescents bathed us both in cold light.
Straddling me, he leaned over with the Glock aimed between my eyes. I opened my mouth wide and howled like a little kid.
At the same time, I jerked a knee to my chest and drove my foot into his big bull balls.
33
A.9mm Glock going off in an enclosed kitchen makes an extremely loud roar. So does a large man with badly bruised gonads. Dropping his gun, Freuland folded to the floor in a fetal position, and I scrabbled for the Glock.
Panting, I got to my feet. With my knees shaking so violently I had to lean on the counter for support, I covered Freuland with the Glock while I used my free hand to pull out my cell phone. Fingers trembling like a drunk’s, I punched in Guidry’s number. Mercifully, he answered on the first ring.
My voice seemed to have forgotten how to work. All it could do was make choking noises.
He said, “Dixie?”
I gasped, “I’m at Laura’s—”
That’s all I got out before several shrieks like banshee fury sounded in the living room, so loud that Guidry heard them.
Guidry said, “What? What’s happened?”
There was another scream, a curious thunking sound, then a sound like a heavy object hitting the floor with a dull thump. Then utter silence.
Guidry said, “Dixie?”
Freuland lay mewling and puking on the floor, out of commission for two or three minutes at least. But somebody else was in the house, possibly with accomplices outside.
Guidry’s voice rose. “Dixie? Answer me! Dixie!”
In the stillness, his voice was so loud it echoed.
Putting my lips close to the mouthpiece, I whispered, “Somebody’s here.”
Freuland retched and groaned. I pointed the Glock at him while I kept one eye on the bar where Leo’s supplies sat next to the sack containing a million dollars.
At the edge of the bar, a silver glint extended from behind the wall, then withdrew. My first thought was that it was a gun barrel. My second thought was that it was the blade of a knife. Then I realized what the shrieking sound had been—Celeste had stepped on Leo’s tail and they’d both screamed. I didn’t want to think about the implication of the thudding sound hitting the floor. I didn’t want to think about the implication of the tip of that knife blade, either, but the fact was that Celeste was in the house and she was slipping toward me with a knife in her hand.
Once again, I had been duped by one of the sisters. Celeste had made a big show of refusing the key the locksmith had made, and another big show of telling Guidry she was returning to Dallas. And all the time she’d known she could easily knock out a pane of glass and get in the house without the key. She had either expected Freuland to come looking for the money she hadn’t been able to find, or she’d thought she’d give it another search herself. In either case, she had made me a witness to the fact that she didn’t have a key, and she would have known that I would tell Guidry.
Guidry yelled, “Dixie! Talk to me!”
I put the phone on the counter because I needed both hands to hold the Glock. I had to watch Freuland, and I also had to be ready to stop Celeste. The knife blade reappeared, slowly edging forward. Bright, shiny, silver.
Guidry barked, “I’m on my way!”
The silver object went still, and Pete’s voice said, “Dixie?”
I swear I think my ears wiggled a little bit in disbelief.
“Pete?”
With saxophone in hand, Pete stepped behind the bar so I could get a good look at him. His fuzzy eyebrows were lowered like a mastiff’s, and his jaw was clenched in a way I’d never imagined Pete capable of. He didn’t look like a sweet octogenarian clown, he looked like a man who would as soon kill you as smile at you.
With a glance at Freuland groaning on the floor, he said, “Looks like you’ve got him under control.”
I picked up the phone. “It’s okay, it’s Pete. I thought it was Celeste Autrey, but it’s Pete.”
Looking like himself again, Pete said, “Celeste is in the living room.”
For the second time that evening, I was struck speechless. While I gaped at him, he said, “Don’t worry, she’s asleep.”
Oh, shit, it must have been Celeste’s body I heard hitting the floor.
Guidry said, “Talk to me!”
I said, “I’ve got Martin Freuland covered, and I need backup. Freuland came to get his money, and he tried to kill me. But he didn’t kill Laura, Celeste did.” Weakly, I added, “Celeste is here too.”
Guidry said, “I’m two minutes away, and some units are even closer.”
As he said it, a loud rapping sounded at the front door, and a voice yelled, “Sheriff’s Department!”
Pete sidled away and hollered, “Come on in!”
I heard a man say, “Sir, what’s going on here?”
I yelled, “Freuland’s in here!”
A deputy rounded the corner from the living room and in one sweep took in the bullet hole in the cabinet, the Glock in my hand, and Freuland’s agonized writhing.
Still quivering, I handed the gun to him and crossed my arms over my chest.
“This man tried to kill me with this gun. His aim went bad when I kicked him in the balls.”
The deputy winced. “Lieutenant Guidry is on his way.”
In the living room, the other deputy said, “Sir, what’s the story with the woman?”
Pete said, “Wait, I haven’t explained that to Dixie yet.”
He popped back into view behind the bar with his saxophone tucked under one arm and Leo cradled against his chest. Leo looked surprisingly contented.
“Dixie, I didn’t get a chance to tell you what happened with Celeste. I was on the way to my car to put my saxophone in there and I saw her cross the street from the hedge where the jogging trail is. For a minute I thought it was Laura, and then I remembered Laura was dead. That’s who I saw Tuesday morning! She looks like Laura when she’s got on all that jogging stuff. Anyway, she ran in behind the trees so I knew she was coming in here. I don’t trust that woman, and I didn’t like the idea of her coming in on you like that, so I came down to see what she was up to. The front door was open, and she just came in. When I got to the door, I could see her in the living room, and she had a big knife in her hand. She looked like she was planning something bad with that knife, so I snuck up on her real quiet.”
The deputy and I stared at him with big round eyes.
The deputy said, “And then?”
In the living room, Guidry’s voice barked a question, and we all looked toward the sound. He spoke a minute to the living room deputy and then came to stand beside Pete.
I turned to face him in all my snotty, tangled, smeared glory, and gave him a megawatt smile. I felt a little bit like a director of a play announcing the characters and their roles. There in Laura’s kitchen we had a big moaning man in a thousand-dollar suit rolling on the floor and clutching his genitals with both hands. We had two million dollars bundled in neat packages like Hershey’s chocolate bars. We had a long-tailed cat who had exacted feline revenge by tripping his owner’s killer. Last but by no means least, we had an octogenarian who had cold-cocked a killer with his saxophone. And we had me, girl pet sitter, size six, thank you very much, five-foot-three inches tall, who had just felled the big man in the suit.