Page 24 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)

For that first instant, as my eyes adjusted, the darkness felt absolute.

This time—gratifyingly— Bobby grabbed me .

Then, by degrees, I could see again. The forklift had a rudimentary dashboard with a few lights. And a pale glow from the opposite end of the warehouse told me the roll-up door was still open. A battery-powered emergency EXIT sign glowed red in the distance, but the other lights that should have come on—similar emergency lights, which should have had their own backup batteries—didn’t. Either CPF was old enough that they’d never installed them, or they’d cheaped out, or—

Muzzle flash lit up the gloom.

A fraction of a second later, the gunshot cracked the air. Metal chimed—the bullet striking one of the shelving units, I thought.

Bobby forced me down behind the forklift. Another shot rang out, and this time, the clang of metal on metal was louder, closer. And then we couldn’t hear anything because of the stupid forklift. I had a pretty good idea who was out there, but I wasn’t sure. Not yet. And with the engine rumbling next to us, I couldn’t tell if the shooter was walking toward us, or if they were fleeing, or—

“Run,” Bobby said in my ear.

He grabbed my arm and towed me after him. He moved in that same low, crouching lope that I’d seen earlier; my own attempt at it was more of a stumbling please-God-don’t-let-me-fall, and it was all I could do to stay on my feet. Our movement must have given us away, because the clap of another shot echoed through the warehouse. Then Bobby tugged me around the end of the shelving unit, and he straightened up and began to run full out.

As I have mentioned before, Bobby is fast.

I am… less fast.

The dark was oppressive, but there was enough light for me to make out shapes: the bulky outlines of the metal shelving, the silhouettes of boxes and crates. Ahead of us was the far wall of the warehouse, which we were approaching too quickly for my liking. Sooner or later, we were going to have to turn down one of the aisles of shelving and try to make our way back toward the loading docks. My brain kept conjuring one image: a gun range. Have you ever been to a gun range? It’s basically one big, long aisle. And I knew as soon as Bobby and I tried to make our way down one of them, we’d be perfect targets.

Bobby must have had the same idea, because when we reached the far side of the warehouse, he pushed me up against the shelves and did this weird, feinting move—running out into view, as though he were about to turn down the aisle, and then darting back behind the cover of the shelving unit.

A gun barked. And about six inches from where Bobby had been standing, a bullet ripped the corner off a wooden crate. A puff of air hit my face, and a moment later, a sickening wave of heat rolled through me as I realized how close the bullet had come.

Somehow, Bobby sounded impossibly calm as he called, “This is Deputy Mai with the Ridge County Sheriff’s Office. Drop your gun right now!”

Nothing.

“I’m armed,” Bobby said into that silence, “and backup is on the way. Put your weapon down and get on the floor.”

Still nothing.

“The best thing you can do is surrender.”

The empty air seemed to ring in my ears.

“We’re pinned down,” Bobby said in a low, frustrated voice.

I nodded, and then I remembered how dark it was.

But Bobby must have picked out enough of the gesture, because he said, “We just have to wait for the sheriff.”

Down the aisle, a sneaker scuffed concrete—barely a whisper, like someone trying to move silently.

“She’s not going to wait for the sheriff,” I said. And then an absolutely terrible idea occurred to me. I tried to come up with something else. Nothing came. I forced myself to say, “I’ll keep her talking. You circle around and get the drop on her.”

“No—”

“Bobby, she’s panicking. She’s not going to put up a fight if you can catch her from behind.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“If you don’t go, you’ll have to deal with a shootout instead. Is that better?”

His face was lost in the shadows, but the strain distorted his breathing.

“Go,” I whispered. “I’ll be okay.”

“Once she’s halfway down the aisle, I want you to start backing up. If she makes a move, run.”

“Go,” I said again. “Go.”

He gripped my shoulder. And then he slipped away, hurrying down the next aisle.

To cover the sounds of his movement, I raised my voice and called, “Andrea, right?”

The soft, scuffing steps stopped.

“That’s your name, isn’t it?”

Nothing.

Making casual conversation with murderers was one of those life skills you can’t put on a resume. But it was, apparently, my thing , as the kids say, and since every second bought Bobby more time, I opened my mouth and let the brilliant dialogue flow.

“That was a smart move, the way you played it the other day with me and Millie in the office,” I said. “Risky. You almost pulled it off.”

Silence.

“You’ve made a lot of smart moves,” I said. “What happened? How did it go wrong?”

(Okay, maybe not so brilliant.)

Another of those whispery scuffs moved in my direction.

“Did she catch you stealing?” I asked.

“I wasn’t stealing.”

I’d heard that voice before, on the day Millie and I had visited CPF. It belonged to the woman who had impersonated Luz Hernandez—Andrea, her daughter, the one Paul had told us was always getting into fights with her mom.

“What was it then?” I asked. “A misunderstanding?”

“She always blamed me for everything,” Andrea said. “She always thought I was doing something wrong. The envelope tore . It wasn’t my fault.”

It wasn’t difficult to imagine what had happened: Paul had told us that Luz was hard on everyone, even her daughter. One day, Luz had stumbled on Andrea with a package she’d opened. A package from Japan. Only instead of something valuable or cool, it was a quirky gay manga, and it was absolutely worthless.

“But your mom didn’t—”

“She didn’t believe me. She wouldn’t even let me explain.”

“Right, I was getting to that part—”

“She went crazy. She dragged me into her office. She was screaming. She was always screaming. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ and ‘How stupid are you?’ and ‘I’m not cleaning up another of your messes.’ I didn’t—” Andrea’s voice skipped a beat. “I didn’t have to put up with that. I tried to leave, and—and she grabbed me. She was hurting me.” Disbelief hollowed out the final words. The empty span of seconds that followed felt cracked, broken open. And then, with a kind of anesthetized calm, Andrea said, “I was defending myself.”

Something small, I thought. A utility knife, maybe. A hammer or a wrench. “And then you had to—”

“It’s all her fault,” Andrea said, voice warbling like she might cry. “She ruins everything. The package was like that when I found it. I tried to tell her, and she wouldn’t listen, and she grabbed me, and then she was just lying there.”

“But you’re smart,” I said. “You came up with a plan. The warehouse staff was overworked and spread too thin. You knew where you could hide the body. Only for a few days until you knew you could get rid of it safely. On Christmas Eve. After everyone went home, when the big rush to get everything delivered was finally over. But you had to move quickly, so you—”

“I put the scissors in the open envelope. They can test for blood, you know. Even if you wipe it off. Mom and I watch Forensic Files .”

“Okay, well, that was going to be my big—you know what? It doesn’t matter. It actually wasn’t that bad an idea: hide the weapon in plain sight while you moved your mom’s body. Then, you could figure out how to get rid of the scissors. The door from her office to the warehouse meant you just had to wait for an opportunity, and then you put her on a pallet and stashed her high on the shelves. But when you came back—”

“Someone took it,” Andrea said. That note of plaintive disbelief made the words nasal again. “They took the envelope.”

“Yeah, I know, I was about to say that.” I drew a breath. “That’s why—”

“That’s why I had to steal it back.”

I said a few words that would have made Mrs. Claus run for a bar of soap. “Why can’t anybody in this town let me finish a dang sentence?”

(I didn’t exactly say dang .)

“Mom had been talking about Paul all week. I knew she’d fired him because she thought he was stealing. A couple of customers had shown her the footage from their doorbell cameras, with somebody in a Santa costume taking their deliveries. And I remembered the address on the package, the one with the scissors. Mom says I have the best memory of anybody she knows.”

It was hard to reconcile the almost childlike confidence of that last statement—and the disorienting slips into the present tense—with the same woman who had coldly and clinically covered up all traces of a murder. In my mind, I could still see her on her hands and knees, trying to get stains out of the carpet. Not Cherry Coke, I thought. The overturned can of soda had been another part of the ruse.

Another of those soft, scraping steps came from the aisle.

I wasn’t sure how long it had been since Bobby left, but the sounds of Andrea’s steps were definitely getting closer. Halfway down the aisle? More? I tried to catch a glimpse of her between the crates and boxes, but I didn’t have a clear line of sight.

Bobby would have told me to run.

What if he needed more time, though? What if I scampered off to save my hide, and that was the exact moment Bobby needed cover, and she turned and saw him and—

I forced myself to keep talking. “After that, you had to make sure Paul took the fall. You knew people would figure out eventually what had happened to your mom. Did you tell people she left on vacation? Or maybe you even got on her computer and sent an email. But sooner or later, someone was going to get suspicious. So, you needed a suspect. And who would be better than someone she recently fired, someone she’d accused of theft, someone who might have gotten into an argument with her, someone like—”

“Paul.”

“Jiminy Christmas.”

(Again, not exactly .)

“It was all going to work out. When I got the scissors back, I knew that guy would see the Santa suit and think it was the same person who’d stolen all the other packages. And when I called Paul, I told him I knew who’d been taking the packages, and he said he could meet me at the storage unit. I just had to—” The sudden break in her speech, the emptiness where the words should have been, hinted at a capacity for brutal, savage violence that existed somewhere below the level of thought. “I’d already put some of Mom’s money in his trunk; she always said you should keep cash on hand for an emergency. Then I’d leave the package with the scissors. And everything could go back to normal.”

I understood the words. I understood what they meant at a literal level. I even understood her need to believe them. And, at the same time, it felt like my brain couldn’t quite wrap itself around the willful self-deception, the monomaniacal fantasy.

In a different, harder tone, she said, “Everything’s going to go back to normal.”

And then quick steps moved toward me.

In my mind, this part of the plan was going to be easy—there’s nothing quite like a gun to transform someone whose motto is lying down is the new sitting into a champion track-and-fielder. Reality, however, didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I rose from my crouch, turned, and started to run around the shelving into the next aisle. But time slowed down, and everything took longer than I had imagined. I was still reaching out a hand to grab one of the shelving supports, planning to use it to swing myself into the next aisle, when Andrea came around the corner.

She was only a shadow. And the gun was just another blob of shadow that came up toward me.

The lights clicked on.

For a moment, I was blinded. Then, my vision cleared. Andrea had bags under her eyes, and her hair was flat and greasy. I recognized, in a more extreme form, the same signs of someone pushing themselves too hard that I’d seen in Bobby. A little too late, I realized that if I could see Andrea, she could see me. Her eyes narrowed, and she swept the gun toward me. It was chrome, and light rode the metal like a wave.

And then Paul shouted, “Bobby, look out! She’s got a gun!”

Andrea whipped around and squeezed off a shot. The clap of the gunfire was deafening this close.

My entire body drew tight around a single, panicked thought: Bobby.

I didn’t even think about it; I gathered myself to tackle Andrea.

But instead, a rattling clack echoed through the warehouse. Andrea took a staggering step back. She dropped the gun, and it clattered against the floor, but I only barely heard it because at the same time, Andrea’s hand flew to her face, and she screamed, “My eye!”

For a single, dazed moment, I thought I was dreaming. This had to be a dream. Or a dissociative break. Or—or because I’d seen A Christmas Story too many times.

Somehow, it got even stranger. Hurried footsteps raced toward me, and then Millie stepped out from behind the shelving unit. Keme was at her side, and he kicked Andrea’s gun away. Ryan followed them. He was carrying one of his stupid airsoft rifles like he was part of Seal Team Six, and the best way to describe his expression was when a boy becomes a man crossed with Mom, did you see what I did? Paul, only a few steps behind, looked crushingly jealous.

Bobby emerged a moment later, and the best way to describe the look on his face was that he looked how I felt—which was like I’d stepped out of one nightmare and into the John Hughes version of The Bourne Identity .

Nobody said anything. Well, except Andrea, who was still screaming, “My eye! My eye!”

Millie stared at Andrea, considering her, apparently unmoved by all the noise. (Big surprise.)

And then Millie punched her in the face.