Thirty-Six and a Half Motives
Page 24

“Nah,” Sam Teagen said, his khaki-covered legs staying in place. “He was too distracted. Why do you think Malcolm has a guy at her office?”
“The bigger question is why did he help her take down Simmons? That’s what she wants to find out.”
“She ain’t payin’ us enough to deal with this shit,” Teagen said. “I’ve already taken more chances than I would have liked.”
“You’ve got that damn straight.”
They were silent for a moment, then the sandpaper-voiced guy said, “I don’t plan on spending all night in this shack.”
“It’s not like we have other options.”
“Hell, yeah, we do. We could climb down to the fire escape and hang out in the apartment below us.”
“She won’t like that,” Teagen growled.
“She’s not the one dodging police and sheriff’s deputies on the whims of a psychopath. We’ll tell her we didn’t have a choice.”
“She’ll want to know why we didn’t hide out here in the shed.”
I heard some more clinking of metal and plastic and realized they were reloading their guns.
“Tell her the police followed us up here. Hell, maybe we should burn the shed down.”
My breath caught, and I could feel the tension radiating from the other side of the phone line.
“I suspect there’s only one way out,” Skeeter whispered.
The answer was obvious, not that I could respond.
“We ain’t burnin’ shit, idiot,” Teagen said, and it sounded like he whacked the other guy in the back of the head. “Why would we want to call more attention to the fact that we’re here in this block of buildings? Not to mention the ammo would explode.” He paused. “Maybe we should head down to the apartment, though.”
“No, listen. They’re getting too close. We need to torch anything that even hints we’re part of this.”
“Huh . . .” Teagen murmured. “You might be right.”
“Rose, you listen to me,” Skeeter said. His voice rumbled in my head.
The other guy groaned. “She’s not gonna be happy that we didn’t get Rose Gardner. And Simmons is likely to kill us. We need to destroy everything linking us to her. Then it’s her word against ours.”
Skeeter continued with his instructions, adding, “You be prepared to shoot them.”
My hand squeezed the handle of my gun.
“Yeah,” Teagen said. “But where could Rose be? She couldn’t have gone out the front . . .” He cursed. “I bet she was hiding in the apartment on the second floor of her building.”
“But the door to the roof was unlocked.”
“She probably did that to trick us. Dammit. We have to go back. If she hasn’t gotten away already.”
“What about burning the shack?”
“Let’s wait until we check out that apartment. Then we’ll torch it and hang out downstairs until we can escape in all the confusion.
The door opened and they both left, grumbling about what a pain in the ass I was.
“Are they gone?” Skeeter asked.
“Yeah.” I pushed out a big breath and leaned forward, my heart beating so hard it hurt.
“Give them thirty seconds. Then crack the door. Watch them until they disappear back into your building.”
“Then what?” I crawled out from under the table, thankful I could see what I was doing since they hadn’t bothered to turn off the light. “I’m stuck on this roof.”
“No, you can use the same fire escape they’re planning to use, but you’ll have to hurry.”
When I cracked open the door, they were only halfway across the rooftops. I turned my attention to the interior of the room. The walls were lined with guns, but that didn’t catch me off guard nearly as much as what was laying on top of the table.
I gasped.
“What?” Skeeter asked.
“All the evidence Neely Kate and I found in Kate Simmons’s apartment was moved here.” I flipped through a stack of documents and found Mason’s case files.
“So?”
“So?” I asked in disbelief. “This proves Kate’s involved.”
“We’ve got Teagen and dipshit to prove that. You need to get the hell out of there before they come back.”
I started rifling through the files and opened a folder at random. I was surprised to see a photo of an older African-American woman clipped to one side of the folder. A paper clipped to the other side read Roberta Miller. What did that have to do with Mason? As I looked over the paper, which listed her information in bullet points, I recognized the El Dorado, Arkansas, address of one of her previous employers. This woman didn’t have anything to do with Mason.
This was a file on Joe’s childhood housekeeper.
 
 
Chapter 10
 
 
“What are you doin’, Rose?” Skeeter’s voice pierced my ear.
“I’m looking in a file.” The El Dorado address was the home of Joe’s parents. Roberta had been Joe’s housekeeper when he was a kid. He’d loved her like a grandmother, and it had devastated him when she’d up and left.
“You don’t have time to look in a file. Get the hell out of there!”
I noticed a brown duffel bag on the floor, and without thinking, I grabbed the handles and dumped the heavy contents onto the floor. Guns and ammo spilled into the corner. I only hoped Teagen and his friend would be in too big of a hurry to burn the place to notice, but then I realized that what I was about to do would be more noticeable.
“There are a whole lot of guns in here, Skeeter,” I said, stuffing Roberta’s file into the bag, along with as many other files as I could grab.
“We heard that Gentry was moving guns into town, but we never could figure out where he was hiding them. No one would ever think to look there. How many do you see?”
“I just dumped ten or so out on the floor, but they’re hanging on all the walls. I see at least fifty out in the open. And then all the boxes.”
“Gentry,” he confirmed. “Now get the hell out of there.”
I crammed the last file into the bag, then struggled to zip it shut. When I picked it up, I groaned at the weight of it. How was I going to get it down the fire escape?