Page 38 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

“God, I couldn’t believe it,” Larry said.

“I knew as soon as she came out of the inn that she’d found it—it was the way she walked, like she’d robbed a bank.

If a deputy had seen her, he probably would have arrested her on the spot and made my life a whole lot easier.

I followed her back to that big old house, and I watched her go into her little flat, and I waited to see if she’d come out again.

When she didn’t, I knew she’d kept the gun.

She was trying to find a place to hide it.

So, I called the sheriff’s office with an anonymous tip. ”

“When did Sparkie contact you?” I asked.

“The next day. She said she knew what I’d done and that we needed to talk.

I knew what that meant. I knew she wanted money.

I told her I’d only talk in person, and she made a big deal about how it had to be somewhere with other people around.

She always thought she was so smart, and she was sure nothing bad could happen to her if we met in public.

” He gave me an unexpectedly curious look. “How’d I mess up?”

“Telling me she saw Jethro getting in her purse.”

Larry sighed and shook his head.

“I should have seen it earlier,” I said. “But I was fixated on the idea that someone had tried to poison me and that I’d only survived because Nalini had delivered my food to the wrong person.”

“Oh my God!” Nalini said.

“That was my ego. And to be fair, you’d planned it well.

Everyone told me that Sparkie hadn’t touched anything while she’d been with you.

Nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. Not until you left.

The only thing she ate were my fish and chips, and so it seemed like it had to be someone with access to the kitchen—Talmage, who was angry at me, or Nalini, who had been acting so suspiciously, or Jethro, who had been lurking and spying on me through the window. ”

“I wasn’t lurking,” Jethro protested, but he subsided when I gave him a look.

“If it wasn’t the food,” Bobby asked, “what was it? How did it get transferred to me?”

“It was her—” I began.

“Her lip balm,” Larry said over me.

More of those not-so-Julia-Child words.

“Tetrodotoxin can enter through abraded or damaged skin,” I said.

Larry nodded. “She was so particular about that lip balm. It wasn’t hard to find the brand she liked, mix in something special, and swap it in her bag when she wasn’t looking.”

“She poisoned herself,” I said. “And by the time it happened, you were long gone and in the clear.”

“I kept thinking I made a mistake telling you that.” Larry sighed again. “But I thought you needed a nudge. What about the rest of it? How’d you figure it out?”

“Sparkie took a picture of you after the shooting,” I said. “Your coat was wet, but—”

“But your shoes were dry!” Nalini bounced on her toes. “I knew something was weird about that picture. I just figured it out!”

Bobby gave me an evaluating glance, like he wondered if I was going to have a stroke.

“Not just dry,” I managed to choke out. “Clean. I was in that alley, remember? My shoes were filthy after only taking a few steps.”

“I figured if anyone saw the grime,” Larry said, “they’d know where I’d been. I wiped my shoes down before I came back inside—I guess a little too well.”

Downstairs, Peggy Lee was still singing. It was “Take a Little Time to Smile.” I wondered if Peggy Lee would have been so cheerful if someone had held her at gunpoint.

“Now,” Larry said, “what are we going to do with you?”

“You’re going to walk out of this room,” Bobby said, “and you’re going to get in your car and drive as fast as you can and try to get away from here. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll make it across the border.”

Larry nodded as though that all made perfect sense, but then he said, “I don’t think so.

That music is pretty loud, and this gun doesn’t make all that much noise.

I think it’ll be the culmination of a tragic series of events.

A certain local snoop will have gone to the Rock On Inn to confront Mal’s true killer.

The killer will be dangerous when cornered.

And then, after shooting the local snoop and the snoop’s boyfriend, he’ll kill his little girlfriend and himself. And that will be the end of the story.”

Down the hall, Cheri-Ann’s vacuum came to life with a muffled roar—honestly, it sounded like a jet engine.

God bless her, I thought with horrified wonder.

She’s so desperate for the next hot bit of gossip that she’s pretending to vacuum.

(Although how she expected to hear us over the World’s Loudest Vacuum, patent pending, I had no idea.) Maybe she’d be a witness when Larry killed us. Maybe she’d call the sheriff.

“That won’t work,” Bobby said.

“I guess I’ll find out,” Larry said. “You won’t be around to see, though.”

Panic crystallized my thoughts. I wasn’t going to die here in this historical mashup of a hotel.

I certainly wasn’t going to die standing .

(The horror.) And I wasn’t going to let Bobby die either.

I did a quick scan of the room, looking for some way out of this—anything.

I could knock over the lamps, create a distraction.

But I wasn’t standing close to them, and Larry would probably shoot me before I had a chance.

I could pull Bobby down to the floor, and we could hide behind the bed, but that would only buy us a few seconds, and that left Nalini and Jethro to be Larry’s first victims. The best thing to do in a situation like this was attack, but I was too far from Larry.

Then my eyes fell on the dresser, and the knick-knacks posed atop it: a truly hideous seahorse with crystal eyes; a rhinestone turtle; an enameled toad riding a skateboard.

The sound of the vacuum grew louder as Cheri-Ann worked her way toward us.

Larry’s lips were parted. His fingers flexed around the grip of the gun.

It had to be now.

As I readied myself to grab one of the trinkets, though, the door opened. And Indira stepped into the room.

I had a single moment when I thought she might do something—jump on Larry, or smash him on the back of the head. But if that was her plan, she was too slow. Larry spun around, swinging the gun toward her. I could see his face in profile. He stared, the tension in his face slackening for a moment.

“Indira, run—” I tried.

But she pushed the door shut behind her.

Larry gave a roller-coaster laugh. “What are you doing here?”

“Stopping you,” Indira said.

Out in the hall, the vacuum bumped a baseboard. It whined as it caught something—a snag in the carpet, maybe. Cheri-Ann thumped it around a few times.

Nobody moved.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Larry said. “Don’t tell me you care what happened to Mal. Not after everything he put you through.”

“Of course I care about what happened to Mal,” Indira said. Her voice was calm and even, but she had her hands clenched at her sides, and she held herself like she was made out of barbed wire. “He was a human being. No matter what he’d done, you didn’t have the right to kill him.”

“I didn’t have the right? I didn’t?” That roller-coaster laugh rose and fell again.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Mal took everything from you.

He ruined your life. And he did it to so many other people—he did it to Paisleigh.

I loved her, and he killed her!” Larry pressed his free hand to his back without seeming to realize it.

“He did it to Sparkie, he did it to this kid—”

“He didn’t ruin my life!” Jethro shouted.

“—and he would have done it to Talmage.” Larry waved the gun at Indira, but Indira simply clenched her fists tighter and stared back at him. “Don’t give me that moral high ground act. You hated him as much as I did.”

Cheri-Ann’s vacuum bumped along in the hallway outside. I had this vision of her opening the door “Just to check on you, dear,” and vacuuming around us while Larry pumped us full of lead.

God, she’d be dining out on that story for a year .

“I did hate him,” Indira said. “I hated him for a long time. And for even longer, I grieved. I hid inside that grief. And I let that grief isolate me, because I thought it would be easier to be alone with my hurt. And I’m sorry, Larry.

I’m sorry for what you lost. I’m sorry that you’re still carrying that hurt.

And I’m so sorry that you were alone with it for so long. ”

“I don’t need you to be sorry.”

“Do you know what I learned?” Indira asked. “What I learned is that being alone doesn’t make it any easier to grieve. It doesn’t make your pain sacred. All it does is make you lonely. But I’m not alone anymore, Larry. And I’m not going to let you hurt my friends.”

For a moment, he stared at her as though the words hadn’t made sense.

And then a sneer hooked his lip. He made a sound that might have been a laugh.

And then he gestured with the gun for Indira to join the rest of us.

“Nice speech. Unfortunately, I’m the one with the gun.

They took yours, remember? Get over there. ”

Indira looked at me, and for a moment, our eyes met.

Listen: I know.

I know I’ve gone on and on about this.

I know it’s probably all in my head. (Maybe.)

But here’s the thing: if you’d been there, if you’d felt—the way I did—every hair on your body stand up straight like lightning was about to strike, maybe you’d believe, too, that in some way, Indira really was magic.

Because right then, with goose bumps breaking out all over me, feeling like someone had stuffed me into the microwave and set it to zap , I knew.

I knew what Indira wanted me to do.

I even thought I heard her say, Now .

I snatched up that hideous seahorse with the crystal eyes, shouted, “Hey! Over here!” and hurled it at Larry.

The seahorse missed him by about three feet.

Larry started to turn—the reaction was automatic more than anything, the natural human impulse to, well, look.

And then Indira cast a spell on him.

I swear to God, that’s what it looked like. She stepped forward, opened one fist so that her hand was lying flat, and blew some sort of dust off her palm. The dust rose in a cloud and flew at Larry’s face. He drew back instinctively. And then he coughed.

“What the—”

He started to say one of those words that happy little seahorses don’t say, but Indira spoke over him. “Do you know something else?” she asked. “How did you put it, Larry? It’s not hard to prepare pufferfish poorly.”

It took about two seconds for Larry’s breathing to change. Already it sounded thin and shrill. He pawed at his face. “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

He must have had some degree of clarity still because he dropped the gun and rushed toward the bathroom.

Bobby clotheslined him.

Here’s the thing about Bobby: he’s my short king.

(He absolutely hates that term, but do you know who hates it even more?

Keme.) And I have to remind myself of that fact sometimes when Bobby tells me ice cream isn’t the fourth food group or yes, you have to wash the towels in the bathroom every week.

But Bobby is also built entirely out of muscle, bone, and boyish good looks.

Larry ran straight into Bobby’s outstretched arm.

The force of the impact knocked Larry backward.

Larry’s feet went up into the air, and he hit the floor on his back.

Everyone in the room heard the air whoosh out of his lungs.

Indira stooped, collected Larry’s gun, and drew down on the gasping man. Her face was unreadable.

(Cheri-Ann was still vacuuming.)

“Indira,” I said and held up a hand.

“Put it down,” Bobby barked.

With a look at each of us as though we were crazy, Indira pressed something on the gun—the safety, my frazzled brain suggested—and handed it to Bobby.