Deadly Gamble (37 page)

I struggled.

The hands were strong—they gave a powerful wrench and I plunged to the floor, banging my right shoulder, still healing from the scissors wounds. Hyper-pain spiraled through me.

I still couldn't scream.

The hands released me, and the monster crawled out from under the bed, grinning.

Geoff.

I kicked violently, rolled onto my side, my knees—
get away, get away
—but he threw me down again.

“Bad dream, little sister?” he drawled.

“Help!” I whispered.

“All alone,” Geoff singsonged. “All, all alone.”

“Damn you,” I croaked, fighting again. “Let me go—what are you—?”

“I told you there was a way into your apartment,” Geoff said, in that same crazy, nursery-rhyme meter. “I
told
you.” He smiled vacuously. The lights were on, the dogs were barking and nobody was home. He put a finger to his lips, and I was reminded of Barbara, pretending there was some nice surprise in the offing when what she really planned was to pump bullets into the two people in the world I loved and needed most. “It's
under the bed,
” Geoff went on, almost conspiratorially. “A sort of crawl space. All you have to do is stand on the bar downstairs and push the vent grating out of the way, and there it is. The secret passage.”

I tried to squirm away, but he took another grip on my ankles, harder this time, his fingers biting deep into my flesh.

“I happened to be in the bar one night,” he droned on. “Right downstairs from you, Mary Jo—so close—so very close—and I noticed the vent.”

“Wh-why are you doing this?” I gasped. “What have I ever done to you?”

Geoff's blankly handsome face assumed an expression of perverse indulgence. “You were
born
,” he crooned. “My mother slept with that baboon—I heard them sometimes, in the night, and I wished they'd both die. Then I pretended it was only a bad dream. It worked—I could pretend she wasn't letting him touch her. Until you came along, that is. Mary Jo, the living proof.”

I started to tell him he was nuts, but since that was clearly established, it would have been redundant. If I was going to survive—and even though my chances weren't great, I fully intended to come out of the experience alive—I couldn't afford to waste my breath stating the obvious.

“Married people sleep together,” I said carefully. “They have babies.”

I tried to sit up and, to my surprise, he let me.

Geoff got out to his feet, covered in dust bunnies. He reached down, caught me by my sore arm, and yanked me upright.

“Not my mother,” he said, spitting the words into my face.

I decided to push him a little. It was an instinctual thing, not even a distant cousin to common sense. “You were there that night, in the trailer. The night of the murders. You didn't try to stop Barbara—you were in on the whole thing.”

Geoff smiled at the memory. From his expression, he might have been recalling a family picnic, or an especially good Christmas, instead of the savage slaying of his mother and stepfather.

“You didn't do it just for money—did you?”

His face changed, in an instant, to that of a hard-eyed, soulless predator, closing in on its prey. “Mom was going to send me away to some school,” he said. “She
called
it a school, but it was really a hospital. A place where they could help ‘boys like me.' That's what she said. ‘Boys like you.' Like I was some kind of freak.”

He'd shot a four-year-old's cat with a bow and arrow, and God knew what else he'd done, before and since.
Mom
had known, though. She'd probably had a list of atrocities running mercilessly through her head, things she'd tried to ignore, or explain away, and finally had to face. She'd thought the situation was serious enough that her son needed help.

“The hospital would have been better than prison, Geoff.”

“Prison,” Geoff rasped. “Do you know what Barbara paid me for going to that hellhole? Twenty-five thousand dollars. I was a kid. It sounded like
so much money
.”

“Why didn't you tell the police—or someone—what really happened?”

He grabbed my hair, on either side, and gave it a hard pull. The pain made my sinuses burn. “I told a counselor once, on the inside. I told him what they were doing to me in that place. And he laughed at me, Mary Jo.
He laughed
. After that, I didn't tell anybody anything!”

I closed my eyes, took a breath, girded myself to look into his face again. It was like being nose-to-nose with the devil.

“You look like her, you know. Mom, I mean,” Geoff mused.

I swallowed. “But I'm not Mom, Geoff,” I said, very quietly and very carefully. “I'm Mary Jo Mayhugh. I'm your half sister. And I never did anything to you.”

Geoff raised one eyebrow. “How shall I kill you?” he asked, in a tone more suited to someone reading a menu, deciding what to have for dinner. Red wine, or white? Fries, or mashed potatoes?

Bludgeoning, or strangling?

Decisions, decisions.

“First tell me why you killed Lillian,” I said.

He smiled again, and it was more terrible than I would ever have believed a smile could be. “Because she was old and sick and ugly. Because I
could
.”

“How many others have there been?” I pressed.

He shrugged, spreading his hands. “Who knows?” he asked merrily. “It's a rush, killing somebody. I like it.”

It's a rush.

I like it.

“Especially when it hurts a lot,” he added. “I like that best of all.”

I must have paled. The truth is, I wasn't all that scared of death itself, because I knew there was something beyond it. Nick and Chester were proof of that. On the other hand, I was
really
scared of the
way
I might die.

Trapped in a burning car, for instance.

The victim of some painful, incurable disease.

I stopped there, because I knew I was standing on the precipice of something a lot worse than either of those things.

“How many times did you visit Lillian before you killed her?”

“Once, twice, three times. I wanted her to be scared.”

Suddenly, in one flashing instant, I understood the three Tarot cards Lillian had given me that day in the nursing home. I gave myself a mental slap on the forehead; everything I'd read in
The Damn Fools Guide to Tarot
suddenly jelled.

The Queen of Pentacles. Pentacles meant money, and worldly success, among other things, and of course the queen indicated a woman in midlife or later.

Barbara Larimer.

Lillian had been afraid of my uncle, too. I remembered her reaction that day, when he showed up at the nursing home.

Hope stirred in me. Maybe Lillian
hadn't
believed I was guilty.

Maybe she'd been trying to protect me from deadly relatives.

It was possible that Mom had confided in her, way back when, about Clive's drug-running operation.

Then there was the Page of Cups. A young man, standing on the shore, pondering a chalice with a fish flopped inside. Cups usually deal with human emotion—in this case, the distorted emotions of a maniac. Geoff had gone to prison in California—Lillian had loved the beaches there—and she would have remembered him as a sixteen-year-old.

She'd been trying to warn me about Geoff. And trying to save herself, because by the time she gave me those cards, he'd visited her at least once.

As for the third card, Death—well, that was a nobrainer.

Lillian had wanted me to know that both our lives were in danger.

“Oh, Lillian,” I said softly. “Lillian.”

“Shut up!” Geoff shouted, and backhanded me so suddenly and with such force that I crashed into the wall next to the bathroom door. I tasted blood on my lower lip.

I watched, sick with dread, as my brother pulled a roll of duct tape from the pocket of his dusty coat. Next came a brand-new box cutter, still in the blister pack.

I began to get some idea of his specific plans for me, and I bolted for the door, screaming. I made it as far as the living room.

Geoff was right behind me, and he caught me hard by the back of my hair and hurled me down again, all the way to the floor. This time, I fell so hard, I couldn't catch my breath.

I knew when I did, I'd have no problem screaming again.

No problem at all.

But who was going to hear me?

Bad-Ass Bert's was closed until further notice, and therefore empty.

My sisters were dealing with an “incident.”

Tucker was busy searching for his daughter's lost classmate.

I was totally screwed.

I got to my hands and knees, tried to scramble away, launch myself onto my feet.

But Geoff slammed me back to the floor again, even harder than before, and I struck my head. Saw stars. The drive-through hamburger I'd eaten on the way out of Cactus Bend hit the back of my throat in a glob. I was on my stomach now, and Geoff pulled my wrists together behind my back. I heard the sound of tape peeling off the roll.

My heart hammered.

And then I saw shoes.

Nick's
shoes.

Like he was going to be of any help, I thought. I was the only one who could see him.

I turned my head, looked up at my ex-husband's ghost.

“Not to worry,” he said.

Not to worry?

I was alone with a psychopath who intended to swathe me in duct tape and cut me up—slowly—with a box cutter. And I wasn't supposed to worry?

Geoff shoved me onto my side.

I stared up at Nick. He'd probably come to escort me to the train station, but the time before my ticket got punched could be a real bitch to get through. At the moment, I was a candidate for a segment on
Forensic Files
. I'd be the one with the chalk outline drawn around her mutilated body.

The rest of the room receded. All I saw was Nick, standing there in his dapper burial suit, raising both hands like claws and making a face.

Geoff must have seen something entirely different, because he let out a bloodcurdling shriek and dropped to his knees.

I screamed too—I guess it was pent-up fear, or maybe I was just getting into the spirit of the thing.

Nick stepped over me, still doing the Frankenstein bit.

If it hadn't been for the predicament I was in, I would have thought it was funny. I mean, it was the kind of thing you do when you're a kid, playing monster in the backyard.

Geoff screamed again, from some primal, subhuman place inside himself, and rocked on his knees, covering his head with both hands.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

“Don't break my concentration,” Nick replied.

The outside door crashed against the wall.

Geoff didn't even seem to hear it. He was still screaming.

“The boyfriend's here,” Nick said, with a little sigh.

Tucker boiled into the room like muddy floodwaters taking out a levee. He slammed Geoff's face to the floor, jammed a knee in the middle of his back and handcuffed him, all in one long, fluid motion.

I gotta say, I was impressed.

You didn't learn stuff like
that
in a
Damn Fool's Guide
.

“How did you know?” I asked.

Tucker pulled the duct tape off my wrists. It stung, but it was the kind of pain that calls for celebration. It was
I-am-alive
pain. “I heard you scream,” he said.

“Your hero,” said Nick, folding his arms.

“You're a hero, too,” I told him, and I meant it.

“Is he here again?” Tucker wanted to know. “Your dead ex-husband?”

He still had his knee in Geoff's back, and my brother the serial killer was sobbing now, like a terrified kid.

“Yes,” I said. Apparently, I had seen one Nick, but Geoff had seen entirely another. And just as Chester had used up his vital forces to save me from Heather, Nick had spent some serious ghost-juice putting on enough of a horror show to scare a homicidal maniac into blithering submission. “He's here.” I paused, and my voice got small. “But not for long, right, Nick?”

“Right,” he said softly.

Tears filled my eyes. “Thanks,” I said.

He gave a little salute. I thought he'd say something corny, like, “I've got a train to catch,” but he didn't.