Page 37 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

For a long second, no one moved. Bobby, Nalini, Jethro, and I all stared at Larry. He stared back. His eyes were glassy. That bristly, dark hair made his skin look even sallower than usual under the inn’s lights. The gun in his hand was pointed somewhere between me and Bobby.

“Put the gun down,” Bobby said. “You’re under arrest.”

Larry laughed as he stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “Nice try.”

“Larry,” I said. “You’re making a big mistake. You don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“Don’t I?” Larry said. His eyes moved to Nalini, who was clutching Jethro’s hand, and he crooned, “Isn’t that sweet? I wondered if you two were knocking boots.”

“You can’t kill all of us and get away with it,” I said.

“I don’t know.” Larry smiled, and it was totally empty. “I don’t have a lot to live for, if you know what I mean.”

“But we’re not a threat to you,” I said. “And what does it matter anyway? Wasn’t that the whole point of your plan? That none of it mattered. You really are sick, aren’t you? And that’s why you decided—”

“That’s why I decided to put down that miserable son of a gun,” Larry said.

“Because it didn’t matter if—”

“Nothing mattered. Don’t you understand? Nothing mattered because I was going to die. I could walk up to him and shoot him in the street, and either way, I’d be dead in six months.”

“As a matter of fact, I do understand. That’s what I was trying to explain—”

“And I did,” Larry said. “I walked right up and shot him. All those years Mal thought he was so much better than everyone else. All the years he thought he’d gotten away with it.

Using people up and throwing them away. Stealing their hopes and dreams without any consequences.

You should have seen the look on his face when I took out the gun; he thought it was a joke. ”

“I don’t understand,” Bobby said. “Why did you want Mal dead?”

Larry offered that empty smile again.

I thought about Indira and Mal. About Sparkie and Mal. About Jethro’s mom and Mal. About the parade of women Mal had taken advantage of. And I remembered something Talmage had said. And something Larry himself had told me. Maybe, I wondered, because some part of him had wanted me to know.

“That restaurant,” I said. “You knew Sparkie from a restaurant you’d both worked at.

That’s what you told me. And Talmage told me the restaurant folded and the chef killed herself.

But the restaurant didn’t just fold, did it?

Mal ran his first few restaurants into the ground; Sparkie told me that.

And Indira mentioned a rumor about Mal, about how a young chef had killed herself.

You didn’t just work at that restaurant, did you? The chef was—”

“She was my girlfriend.”

I said a few words under my breath you wouldn’t hear from Julia Child.

“Right,” I said. “You—”

“I loved her. Girlfriend makes it sound casual, but it wasn’t casual.

I loved Paisleigh more than anyone I’ve ever met.

And that restaurant was her dream. You don’t know what it’s like to get to spend every day with the person you love.

To wake up together. To go to work together.

To build a dream together. And then, one day, some spoiled child comes along and takes it away from you simply because he can.

Mal didn’t need the money. He did it because he wanted it, and what he wanted, he took. ”

“And then Paisleigh died.”

“It took me a long time not to blame her,” Larry said.

“I was so angry.” The hand holding the gun was starting to tremble, and he wiped his free hand on his shirt.

“Then I realized who was really to blame. After that, it was easier to be angry. I spent years hating Mal. Wishing he’d have something horrible happen to him.

That he’d lose everything. But he never did.

He kept doing what he’d always done, trampling through people’s lives without any care for the consequences.

I told you that when I got the diagnosis, it didn’t seem to mean anything.

I went back to work. But then they told me they were canceling the show, and they had that idea for a finale episode, and then it was real.

For a couple of days, I couldn’t even get out of bed.

And then I thought about Paisleigh. About what she would have done.

And I realized this was a gift. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing.”

“Not even killing Mal.”

“He deserved it!” Larry reined in his shout, but he gestured wildly with the gun, and Bobby put a hand on my shoulder like he might shove me to the floor.

“He deserved to die. He deserved to go down like an animal in that filthy alley. That wasn’t the original plan. The original plan was…well, subtler.”

“The tetrodotoxin you’d prepared. You knew all about tetrodotoxin because—”

“Because that’s the kind of thing you have to know in my job.”

“Okay, at this point, it’s not even about me. Interrupting is rude on general principles, and I, for one, am standing up for a more civilized society.”

Larry didn’t even bother responding. “I interviewed a chef one time who was renowned for preparing pufferfish. I knew how dangerous it could be. It’s hard to prepare pufferfish well.

” A grim smile crossed his mouth. “It’s not hard to prepare it poorly.

It would have been written off as something natural, I thought.

And I’d find somewhere beautiful on the beach. And then I’d be with Paisleigh.”

So casually I almost missed it, Bobby slid his free hand into his pocket. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because I saw him.” Larry shook his head with a kind of dazed disbelief. “I saw him in that stupid restaurant. I saw him with her—” The barrel of the gun swung toward Nalini. “And I saw him with that boy. With his son .”

“How’d you know Jethro was his son?” I asked.

“I took one look at him.” He indicated Jethro.

“And then I heard Talmage lose her mind, and I knew Mal was doing it all again. I’d brought the gun as a backup.

Two guns, actually.” A weak smile. “ Mise en place and all that. I couldn’t even think.

It was the injustice of it all: that this man who had done so much evil could stand here with a pretty young woman chasing after him, with the son he’d never had time for, with another woman who had trusted him and who was now about to lose everything because of him.

And he was going to get away with it again.

” Strain distorted his voice. “I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know .” Another, longer silence opened in the flow of words, but when he spoke again, his voice was still taut with emotion.

“I walked right up to him, and I said, ‘This is for Paisleigh.’ He started to smile. And that was it.”

Bobby’s fingers were moving inside his pocket—placing a call blindly on his phone, I suspected.

“But then Indira stumbled on you,” I said. “She had a gun, and she fired a shot, and you had to run. You had to hide the gun, and you knew the police would search the area, so you picked a spot where no one would think to look—”

“You buried it!” Jethro shouted.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” I asked. I took a breath. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Yes, you—”

“Oh my God,” Nalini said. “Jethro, you’re so smart. You really are a detective!”

“Seriously? He’s so smart? I’m in the middle of explaining—”

“That’s why you had that scratch on your hand,” Jethro said. “And why the landscaping was all messed up. From where you hid the gun!”

I made a sound only dogs could hear.

“I didn’t have time to make it look perfect,” Larry said, “but I lucked out. The sheriff and her deputies were too focused on Indira; she had a gun, and it had recently been fired.”

“And once the scene had cleared,” I said, “You went back. You retrieved the gun. And you planted it—”

“I planted it here, in this room,” Larry said.

“I was still in shock. I’d gone up to a man, right out in public, and shot him.

And I’d walked away from it. I stood in the dining room at that restaurant, listening to everyone else talk about what had happened, and it was like waking up.

I didn’t have to go find a spot on the beach and die.

I didn’t have to do anything but walk away.

I could spend the next six months enjoying my life.

I could travel. I could spend those six months eating good food and drinking good scotch, and everything would be so much sweeter because Mal had finally paid for what he’d done.

Because I’d done that; I’d made him pay.

” Larry took a breath. “But I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t know what kind of gun Indira had.

I didn’t know if they’d think she was capable of killing him.

All I knew was that I didn’t want to go to prison.

And I didn’t want to die. And so I needed someone else to take the fall.

Mal made it easy; he’d given me a built-in suspect: his secret son, who’d disappeared during the murder.

Even Talmage didn’t know who Jethro really was; I could tell from how she talked to him.

It was perfect. So, I waited for an opportunity, and Jethro gave it to me.

He emptied his pockets on the bar; he was looking for cash because he wanted a drink. The key card was right there.”

“But it didn’t work out the way you thought,” I said. “You were going to call the sheriff’s office after Jethro came home. Instead, though, Indira came. And she went into Jethro’s room.”