Eight minutes later he tripped on a root, tried to regain his balance, but fell on his butt and found himself staring up at the moonlit treehouse in the old sycamore. The tree was only a yard or so from the long brick drive and less than twenty yards from the inn itself. Overby guessed that the treehouse was fairly new and at least fourteen feet above the ground. Six 2 x4s, each two feet long, had been nailed to the tree’s thick trunk at two-foot intervals to provide a crude ladder.
The treehouse itself wasn’t a house at all but merely a platform in the form of a trapezoid that had been wedged into the sycamore’s first crotch. Its floor was about six feet long by four to five feet wide. The support frame was more 2 X 4s; its flooring, 1x10 pine planks. It was obviously a place far too dangerous for kids, and Overby, who had never had a treehouse, wondered if Colleen Cullen had built it—or had had it built—because she’d never had one either.
Just before 9 P.M., a black Ford sedan sped up the brick drive, stopped, then backed into the fan-shaped parking area as if positioning itself for a getaway. Overby watched from the treehouse as Georgia Blue, illuminated by moon and porch lights, slipped out on the passenger side. She held a revolver with both hands and made a quick visual sweep of everything in front of her. Quincy Durant got out on the driver’s side, a pistol in his right hand, the blue $8.95-plus-tax Voodoo, Ltd. —201
moneybag in his left. Durant hurried to the nine steps that led up to the inn’s wraparound porch.
Georgia Blue, walking backwards, followed Durant—her eyes and weapon raking everything to his rear. When Durant reached the bottom step he stopped and said something over his shoulder that Overby couldn’t hear. Durant then waited for Blue’s back to touch his.
Overby nodded his approval.
Durant took his time going up the steps. Georgia Blue, her back still to him, went up even more slowly, placing both feet on each step before moving up to the next riser. After they reached the front door, Durant rang the bell. A moment later every light bulb in every room on every floor of the old three-story mansion was ablaze. Overby, from his treehouse perch, liked Colleen Cullen’s decision to light up the whole place all at once with the master power switch. Yet he wondered how she’d managed to keep the front porch lights on but everything else dark and decided to ask her.
Durant tried the front door. It opened and he went in. Georgia Blue backed in slowly, her pistol still in its two-handed grip and moving from side to side in a sixty-degree arc. After the inn’s front door closed behind them, Otherguy Overby looked at his digital watch. The time was 8:59:33.
A familiar voice drifted down to them from the staircase. “Y’all are on time at least.”
Durant and Blue looked up to find Colleen Cullen on the halfway-up landing and beginning her descent to the foyer with the sawed-off shotgun in the crook of her right arm. Her left hand trailed the banister. Durant thought it was an effective, even graceful entrance despite the shotgun and the black jeans and the black cotton sweater and the black athletic shoes with the high tops that had to be laced up.
“We’re the first?” Georgia Blue asked.
“Just did my outside rounds,” Cullen said. “Nobody out there but rabbits and raccoons.”
“Where will we be?” Georgia Blue said.
“Be right where you were before—in the parlor,” Cullen said, turned and led them toward the closed sliding doors.
When they reached them, Durant said, “You first, Colleen.” She shrugged, shoved the left door back into its recess and went into the parlor followed by Durant, then Georgia Blue. Once all three were in the room and heading for the big round oak table where some drinks had been laid on, a man’s voice behind them barked an order. “Hold it!”
Durant and Blue stopped immediately. But Colleen Cullen whirled around to aim her sawed-off shotgun not at the intruder, but at Durant and Blue.
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“Do something with your hands,” Cullen said.
Durant dropped the blue moneybag to the oak floor and raised his hands shoulder height. Georgia Blue merely held her arms and hands away from her body.
“Man behind you’s got an Uzi,” Colleen Cullen said. “You gotta know what that is.” Her eyes flicked to Georgia Blue. “Now here’s what you do, Slim. First, use two fingers of your left hand and pull up your front shirttail. Then use two fingers of your right hand to pull your piece out from between your tummy and your panties and lay it in my left hand.”
Blue did as instructed. As the .38 revolver was deposited in Cullen’s left hand, she gave it a quick glance of recognition and said, “Looks like I get to sell you one more time, sweet thing.”
She shoved the revolver down into her own left rear pants pocket, then turned herself and the shotgun slightly toward Durant. “Same thing, Mr. Tan Man. Two fingers only.”
“Mind if I use a thumb?” Durant said as he carefully took the revolver from his hip pocket, placed it on Cullen’s palm, smiled and said, “Get a better offer, Colleen?”
“Sure did.”
“How much better?”
“Too much for you to top it.”
“Too late to try?”
“Way too late,” she said. “Now I’m gonna turn around and go lay these pieces on the table and I expect you all to stay put on account of the Uzi back there. When I get rid of these, then we’ll get down to—
well, whatever it is we’re gonna get down to.”
Cullen turned and walked six steps toward the big round oak table.
Just as she began her seventh step there was a short burst of automatic fire. Durant guessed four rounds but changed his mind when only three rounds pierced Cullen’s black sweater just above her waistline and about where her spine was.
The rounds slammed her forward and her legs collapsed first.
Before she reached the floor both barrels of the shotgun fired and tore two joined holes in the oak. The holes reminded Durant of a fat solid-black 8 that had fallen on its face.
Durant didn’t move. But Georgia Blue did. She sighed first, turned, went to the nearest straight chair, sat down, crossed her right ankle over her left knee, used the knee to support her elbow, then cupped her chin in her palm, glared at someone other than Durant, then said,
“That was a stupid fucking thing to do.”
“One less witness,” said the man who had ordered them to “Hold it.”
“You can’t kill everybody off,” she said. “First the limo driver. Then the two Goodison twits up in what—Oxnard? And now Colleen. It’s dumb.”
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“Only one to go,” he said. “And you can do him.”
“Why me?”
“To earn your money and share the liability, why else?”
“I don’t think she’ll do it,” Durant said.
“Whyever not?” the man said.
“There’s nothing in it for her.”
“Three hundred thousand dollars isn’t nothing.”
“The blue bag at my feet,” Durant said.
“The moneybag?”
“The moneybag,” Durant agreed. “Except there’s no money in it.
Just magazines. Old copies of Architectural Digest mostly.”
“You’re lying, of course.”
“Take a look.”
“Lying or not, I’m afraid Georgia will still have to kill you as a kind of—what shall we call it—penance?”