Doggone Dead (15 page)

I settled back into our blanket, sitting with my knees up to my chin.

“Where’s Maggie going?” Leo asked.

“She’s off to the dump to have a one-on-one with Charlie Loper.”

“The dump? You think he could have picked someplace that smells better than that.”

The boys now sat in front of us, echoing the crowd with the obligatory oohs and ahhs that came with each display of pyrotechnics.

“So, you really thought you saw a shooter?” Leo asked placing his hands around my waist. “Hey, where’s the bulletproof vest?”

“Shhh, I told my dad I was wearing it tonight. I just couldn’t put it back on after the last time. I thought I was going to sweat to death in that thing. Whoever is shooting at me can’t seem to hit the side of a barn anyway, so why wear it?”

“Well, I can’t complain,” Leo said, “but Betsy, I just wish you’d be more careful.”

“Leo, nothing’s going to happen. You and my dad both need to relax.”

Leo’s body stiffened. “It’s pretty tough when you keep calling me and telling me you’ve been shot at or you found yet another dead body lying around here in Pecan Bayou, the unofficial murder capital of Texas.”

“To be fair, I didn’t call you the last couple of times.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Your picture was all over the Internet. My bad on that one.”

“Leo, I don’t need you to come down here and be my knight in shining armor. I’m doing just fine. You have enough stuff going on in your own life.”

“What are you trying to say?” The boys turned from their sky gazing and uttered a sibilant “Shhh!”

“Sorry,” I said in a whisper. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say, it’s just that I feel...” I glanced over to Danny’s blanket. His cooler was there, but he was nowhere near.

“Where’s Danny?” I said.

Leo looked back. “He was sitting right there.”

“This can’t be good,” I rose from the blanket.

“Maybe he went to use the men’s room,” Leo said. “I’ll check for him there.”

“I’ll get my dad looking with the rest of the guys from the police. Boys, you stay here and do
not
move an inch. Do you hear me?” They both looked up at me wide-eyed. “Yes, ma’am.”

We split up, going different directions. Leo headed for the outdoor restrooms in the park, and I started looking into the different crowds of people to see if Danny might have joined one of them. If Allison was still around with her friend, he might have wandered over to talk to them. Dad, who had really wanted to take this night off, stood on the edge of the crowd talking with George and pointing up at the sky.

“Dad, we’ve lost Danny.”

“When did you see him last?”

“He was sitting right over there. Aunt Maggie went off with Howard to the dump to talk to Charlie Loper.”

My dad sighed and ran his hands through his graying hair. “And this is why my own family causes me more problems than any other family in the city of Pecan Bayou.” He put his hand on George’s shoulder ready to issue orders.

“George, you start scanning the crowd and see if he joined someone else on their blanket. Get Elena on it, too. I’ll check out the cars in the parking lot.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“Betsy, you need to get back to your son before I have to go out looking for him, too. I’ve got enough on my plate without trying to keep you out of danger.”

I gulped. “Really? You’re sending me back to the blanket?”

“I certainly am.”

I trudged back over to the boys, obediently watching three starbursts of red, white and blue.

“You got told to sit here too, huh, Mom?” Zach said, patting my back.

“You heard that?”

“Sure. You might be a mom, but to grandpa you’re still his kid.”

“I suppose,” I said.

“Did they find Danny?” Tyler asked.

“Not yet.”

“Maybe he’s doing his special favor for his special friend,” Zach said, then sucked down the insides of a juice box.

“What special favor?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Zach, this could be important. Just what did Danny tell you?”

“He said that he had to go and do a special favor for a special friend, and only he could do it.”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“I thought you knew.”

“How would I know? Is there anything else you would like to tell me?”

“Um, he asked me to lend him your keys. He needed to get something out of your car.”

“My car?” I jumped up and turned around, pointing my finger back at the boys. “Don’t move!” I demanded.

I ran to my car, now situated between many others parked in the grass. I squeezed into my side of the car and looked to see if Danny was sleeping in the backseat. I turned on the dome light, but the back seat was empty. A few stray papers and a leftover fast food bag were strewn on the floor. The box from Libby’s house was still in the front seat. The contents of the box looked like it had been searched through in a hurry.  Hunter Grayson’s book of poetry was no longer there. Was that what Danny had been after as a favor to his ‘special friend’? I noticed a smell in the car that hadn’t been there before. It was an overwhelming smell of men’s cologne. Who was the special friend anyway? I remembered Coop Bonnet whispering to him just a little while ago. I was touched by his demonstration of caring toward my cousin, but his sudden kindness seemed out of place now.

I tried to recall if I had heard the bass tones of the muffler on Coop’s Corvette. With all of the sounds of the fireworks it could have easily blended in. Glancing back at the boys on the blanket, I searched the crowd. If Danny’s life was in danger, he wouldn’t even know it until it was too late. I turned back toward the car and in the distance picked up just a tiny red glow across the park. Somebody was over in the gazebo. It had to be Coop.  I shut my car door and started sprinting in the dark toward the glowing red light. The closer I got to Coop, the stronger the scent of the repugnant cologne, mixed with cigarette smoke, filled my nose.

“Betsy! Betsy!” I heard Danny’s voice clearly through the darkness.

“Betsy, Betsy,” Coop said, imitating Danny’s speech impediment, his arms flailing at his sides.

“Hi Betsy!” Danny, oblivious to the situation, sounded happy to see me.

Suddenly upon them, I stopped short, gasping for breath. I tried to sound calm. “Hi Danny. Are you and Mr. Coop okay?”

“Yes, Betsy. He’s my special friend.”

“I see – and is he the one you did the favor for?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I got the book for him. He likes to read.”

I smirked at Coop, now feeling even more than disgust for him. I grabbed Danny by the arm. “Well now he has it, so let’s leave him alone to catch up on his reading.”

“Cousin Betsy. He can’t read in the dark,” Danny said.

“That’s right,” said Coop. “I can’t read in the dark, and besides, what’s your hurry? You coming over here couldn’t have worked out better.”

“Are you finally going to try to shoot me and actually hit me?” I said. “Is that it? You’ve been shooting at me all this time, just for that stupid book?”

Coop grabbed Danny’s other arm and yanked him back toward him. Danny struggled to release himself from Coop’s hold.

“Let him go.” I reached out, attempting to pull his hand off of Danny. Coop dropped the book and backhanded me on the cheek, knocking me to the floor of the gazebo.

“Back off, bitch,” he said as I sat on the ground rubbing my jaw.

“Stop it,” Danny said. “Betsy, I want to go home now.”

I rose again and plowed into Coop headlong.

“Enough!” A female voice came out of the darkness just as Coop’s rebuff of my force landed me back on the ground.

From out of the shadows, Allison Emory stepped into the light. “Man, Betsy – you don’t give up, do you?” She picked up Hunter Grayson’s notebook from the ground. In her other hand was a glistening golden Colt revolver pointed directly at me.

She gestured to Danny with the gun. “Let him go, Coop.”

Coop complied and pushed Danny toward me. I stood up and put my arm around his  trembling shoulders.

“Thank you, Allison. You keep him here, and I’ll go get the police.” I turned with Danny to go but noticed that Allison had put her arms around Coop and was pulling his head down to kiss him on the lips. She pulled back from their embrace, and a slow grin spread across her face. The golden Colt was again pointed directly at me.

“Your father messed everything up for us, you know,” she said. “Him and his badass cop routine. He thought he was so cool because he found a little pot on Coop. Ooh-wee, big narcotics haul in the city of Pecan Bayou. Your old man didn’t know the half of it.”

“I guess he didn’t,” I replied. “However, I was starting to figure it out.”

“What do you know?” Coop said.

“I know that if I were to take a really close look at that shed out at the farm, I’d find a whole lot more than watermelons. I’m guessing you and your father have quite a successful farm, both legally and illegally. That’s why the Bonnets only let people in certain sections. It’s also why they won’t let Libby Loper visit her father’s grave.”

“Just where would we be doing this? Between the watermelons and the grapes?” Coop snorted, laughing at his own joke.

“Nope, between the trees in the wooded area that skirts your fields,” I said. “You’ve got pot plants all through the trees. So many of them that you guard the area at night. I spotted your hammock out there. Seems like an awfully strange place to want to chow down on fast food and take a nap, don’t you think? It does seem like a good place to post a guard, though, just in case the wrong people were to wander into your other crop.”

“You don’t know nothin’.”

“I know about the pot, but what I don’t know about is Hunter Grayson’s notebook. What made it so valuable to you?”

“You think you’re pretty smart. But then again, so did Grayson. He writes in his little book. ‘In the glen there is a secret, one I cannot, will not tell.’ Bonnet Farm was the secret he would not tell – for money that is. He showed up every month to collect his rent for Miss Libby. Old British hippy with his little gray ponytail. He found out we were growing pot and insisted on more rent money and a steady supply of weed to help him to ‘forget’.”

Allison stepped further into the light and took Danny by the elbow. “That’s why we had to make him forget permanently.” As she lifted it toward us, her pink Hello Kitty watched sparkled in the light. I knew then that it had been the sparkle I kept seeing. “When that old fool Simmons started hollering about Charlie Loper, it was just so much easier,” she said. “You got in the way, finding the only proof of our arrangement, and I had to take you out. We broke into the museum and stole Charlie Loper’s guns and then just let the town do the talking.”

“You had to take me out? Why not have Coop do it?”

“Because Coop, although good for some things,” she smiled knowingly, “is a piss-poor shot. Growing up in Texas and attending the finest schools, you can bet my daddy made sure I spent some time at the shooting range. Just part of a good Texas education.”

I was still confused as to why a girl with all of the advantages she had received in life would pair up with someone like Coop. Coop was at the other end of the economic spectrum, the kind of boy you didn’t want to introduce to your parents. It seemed that Allison had the classic bad-boy crush, and it had driven her to murder.

“Allison, you have everything you could ever want,” I said. “Why would you risk it all with a man like Coop?”

“That’s what you think. That’s what everybody thinks,” she said. “Sure, I had money, schools, vacations, stuff ...but I never had a mom and dad who would take the time to be with me. They were always off somewhere, or if they were home, they sent me off somewhere. I had the best childhood money could buy, but my parents weren’t parents. They were what I called my principal investors.”

“And you saw great parenting in the Bonnets?”

“What I saw was a family that stuck together, no matter what. Clay Bonnet would kill for his son. My dad would never do anything like that.”

“What about Dr. Springer? Was she in on it too?” I asked.

“No and yes. I told her we’d play a joke on the town and dress like Charlie Loper at the pet parade. Everyone was so nervous anyway, so I told her it was a way to calm the town down. It was all going to be a big joke and then we’d come out in our costumes and award the winner. It made a great cover for me to get a chance to take a shot at you in broad daylight. Then I let Coop here take the shot instead, and he hit Noodles the poodle.”

“I told you the gun wouldn’t fire right from that far,” he whined.

“Man, was Dr. Springer surprised. She stepped out, just like we planned, but when she saw everyone down there running from the attack, she turned and ran. I have to say, killing her was harder than I thought it would be. I mean, look at all those poor animals who have to find a new doctor. Pretty thoughtless of me, don’t you think? I caught up with her back at the office. That’s where I shot her.”

“So you thought the town would think that she was playing the ghost of Charlie Loper, but it didn’t last.”

“Coop and I moved her body behind Earl’s during the night. She became our cover.” I nodded, realizing Allison and Coop didn’t know Dr. Springer was still alive.

“Betsy, can we go home now?” Danny asked. He leaned over to Allison, who was still holding the Colt 45.

“You’re not supposed to play with guns, Allison,” he said. “They hurt people, you know.”

“Oh, yes I do very much, Danny. But don’t worry. I’ve learned that with this old gun, from this distance I’m a pretty good shot. You won’t feel a thing.”

Danny shifted on his feet and started pulling my arm. Allison lifted her arm to shoot, and I decided maybe Danny had a pretty good idea. I pulled him to the wood floor of the gazebo to get him out of the line of fire – no easy task for someone who outweighed me. As we hit the ground I heard a scream, and I looked up to see Allison holding on to her arm and dropping the pistol to the ground as she slipped down the steps. Blood was gushing out of her wrist.

On the other side of the gazebo, Clay Bonnet held a Glock semi-automatic pistol.

“You stupid girl. You had to go and save us. Don’t you understand? This here’s a family operation – and you ain’t a part of the family.”

“Shut up, daddy,” Coop said as he held Allison in his arms. “Allison’s going to be my wife. You got no call to speak to her that way.”

“She’s a murdering, scheming woman, Coop, and she’s the one who’s gonna end up putting us all in jail.”

I pulled Danny out of the gazebo. I was sure Clay Bonnet’s next bullet would be for me, but he didn’t shoot.

He swerved with his gun pointed in our direction. “Stop right there, Happy Hinter,” he said. “I might be a drug dealer, but I sure as hell don’t murder people.”

I drew in a breath, feeling my heart pound in my chest. I would have to strike that off my list of assumptions. Not all drug dealers are murderers. Not all drug dealers are murderers.