Literally Murder (A Black Cat Bookshop Mystery) (23 page)

Ricko, meanwhile, was pulling up to the dock.

“You must be the mama,” he exclaimed with a smile, pointing to Nattie. “Don’t be worrying. We take care of this.”

Once the captain had wrapped the line around the ladder again to hold the boat steady, Jake hopped into it as lightly as Hamlet. “Let’s get out of here.”

The young man obliged, loosing the line and then pulling back the throttle so that the vessel nearly leaped from the water. Nattie and Darla stared after them in varying degrees of outrage.

“I can’t believe my own daughter left me behind like that,” Nattie cried as she set Hamlet down and handed Darla the leash. “Besides, I bet I know where old Millie is going.”

“Where?”

Nattie gave a smug nod. “There’s a private launch right before you turn up the New River. You can’t find it unless you know where to look, because it’s hidden by mangroves. When we worked on the water taxi, some of the kids would pull in there for a little recreation, if you know what I mean. I bet she’ll jump out there and walk down to Las Olas to catch a cab.”

“Well, then let’s hop in the Mini Cooper and get there before she does,” Darla urged her.

Nattie grimaced and shook her head. “We can’t. That rotten old biddy stole my car keys from me. I think she’s still got them in her pocket. We’re stuck here.”

“Maybe not,” Darla exclaimed as she heard a sudden loud honking from the front gate. “Come on, I think plan B just pulled up!”

She hesitated, however, as she recalled Billy and Alicia. The former still lay upon the manicured lawn where she and Jake had dropped him, face peacefully pointed to the afternoon sun. While he didn’t appear to be in any physical distress, he apparently wasn’t going to be waking up anytime soon, either.

“Nattie, Alicia should be fine in the house, but we can’t just leave Billy here.”

“Eh, sure we can.”

The old woman trotted over to the pergola and came back bearing one of those personal-sized beach umbrellas designed to clip onto the back of a chair. She popped it open and set it on the grass beside Billy, shading his face.

“There. Now he won’t get sunburned. C’mon, Darla—let’s go!”

With Hamlet galloping alongside her, Darla rushed around the side of the house past the garage and Nattie’s hostage Mini. She could see a familiar cab sitting in front of the gate, horn still blaring.

“Tino!” Darla shouted, waving. “We’re okay, but we need a ride!”

Letting up on the horn, the cabbie jumped out and rushed to the gate.

“Glad you’re still alive,” he called, clinging to the pickets like he was a prisoner. “When you didn’t answer my phone call, I got worried and called Ana.”

“Good,” Darla panted out as she reached the gate. “Now you need to call her back and tell her Mildred Fischer admitted to killing Ted Stein, and that she’s escaping on a boat down the Intracoastal. But first, we need you to drive us to where Nattie thinks Mildred is headed, just in case she outsmarts Jake and Ricko.”

Nattie, meanwhile, had pressed the button to open the gate. Then, catching a glimpse of Tino, she frowned.

“That’s the guy who yelled at me at the airport,” she declared to Darla, bottom lip now sticking out at a mutinous angle. “I’m not getting into no cab with him.”

“Hey, she was the one parking illegally,” Tino protested in turn. “She deserved to be yelled at.”

“Tino,” Darla clipped out, “age trumps right in cases like this. Now apologize to Nattie so that we can get going.”

She thought for a panicked moment that the cabbie was going to refuse, but then he gave a determined nod. “You’re right. I should have been polite to an old lady. I’m sorry I yelled.”

“Old lady,” Nattie muttered, but to Darla’s relief she gave a grudging nod of acceptance. “C’mon, let’s get going.”

Hamlet took the lead, leaping into the open cab door, followed by Darla and Nattie. Tino climbed back in, too, and slammed the cab door after him.

“All right,
chica
,” he said as he pulled out onto the shaded street and handed Darla his cell. “You talk to
mi prima
and tell her what’s going on. And,
Tia
—Auntie,” he added to Nattie, who sat in the front seat with him, “you tell me where we’re going.”

Tino’s phone was already dialing as Darla put it to her ear. A moment later, she heard what she presumed was Garcia’s irritated voice on the other end.

“Darn it, Tino, I already told you I’d drive out there.”

“Uh, Officer Garcia?”

“Who is this? Where’s Tino?”

“Actually, this is Darla Pettistone . . . the lady with the black cat who went missing? Tino’s driving, so he wanted me to explain what was going on.”

“Hold it,” Garcia cut her short. “I thought I was on my way to find you and your friends at Billy Pope’s home, and now you’re driving off somewhere?”

“Well, things got a little, uh, tense back at the house.”

While Tino whipped down side streets and slid through yellow lights, Darla clung to the grab strap on the door and gave Garcia a rundown of everything that had happened after Officer Johnston texted the picture that had turned out to be of Mildred to Jake’s phone.

Garcia listened in silence until Darla got to the part about a pistol-toting Mildred hopping into a boat and being chased by Jake and the Haitian captain. Then she said in a terse voice, “Hang on.”

Darla assumed she put the phone down, for all she heard was a few moments of muffled radio communication before the officer finally came back on the line again.

“Okay, we’ve got paramedics heading out to Mr. Pope’s place to check him and his daughter out, and I’ve got the sheriff’s department sending out a boat to try to intercept the suspect, not that we have much of a description of the vessel to go on. You say Ms. Martelli has the suspect in sight?”

“She did, but that was fifteen, twenty minutes ago. I haven’t talked to her since.” Darla paused and pulled out her own phone, pressing Jake’s speed dial key. “Hang on, I’ll try calling her.”

But either Jake wasn’t getting reception on the water, or else, more likely, she couldn’t hear her phone ringing over the boat’s engine, for the call went to voice mail.

“I can’t get hold of her,” Darla said. “But Nattie—Mrs. Martelli—is pretty sure Mrs. Fischer will be heading for a private launch she knows about. That’s where Tino is taking us now.”

She gave Garcia the cross-street information that Nattie had shared with Tino. The officer repeated the address, and then said, “I’m turning around and heading that way. You tell Tino he is not to approach an armed suspect. That goes for you two ladies, too. You stay out of sight and wait for the PD to get there. Understood?”

“Don’t worry. All we’re going to do is keep an eye on her until the police show up,” Darla said, though she rather suspected that Nattie had visions of wrestling the gun from Mildred’s hand and making a citizen’s arrest. Her job would be to make certain Nattie made no such attempt.

Darla handed the phone back to Tino and gave Hamlet a nervous pat. He’d been remarkably calm through all of this, she realized. Was he confident that all would be well . . . or was he lulling them all into a false sense of security before he pounced? Tightening her grip on his lead—the cat had already seen his share of excitement over the past few days—she peered out the taxi window. From the change in skyline, it was apparent that they were nearing the Waterview Hotel, where everything had started.

“Stop—turn there!” Nattie shouted all at once, pointing at what looked like an alley.

Tino turned down what proved to be a narrow, sloping drive barely wide enough for two cars the size of his taxi to pass, and edged by almost impenetrable rows of tropical foliage. Through the windshield, Darla could glimpse a tangle of vines, coconut palms, mangrove trees, and lapping water. Near the launch site, the drive broadened into a roundabout where drivers pulling boat trailers could circle around and position themselves to back down the ramp. A couple of trucks with empty trailers hitched to them had already disgorged their vessels and were parked around at the far edges of the roundabout, half-hidden in the foliage.

Tino whipped the cab around and slid into an open spot behind one of the trailers.

“Good,” Nattie said with an approving clap of her hands. “Mildred will have to tie off down there in the mangroves and walk back up the ramp. She’ll probably go right past the cab and never even notice it. C’mon, let’s go down to the water and see if we can see the runabout.”

She hopped out before Darla could say anything. Tino grinned and glanced back her. “Guess we’re getting out here.”

Darla hesitated. On the one hand, if they all stayed huddled in the taxi and Mildred spotted them, they’d be trapped in the vehicle. On the other hand, skulking about the boat ramp could have its own set of dangers.

“Is it safe to be down there?” she asked Tino, suddenly more nervous about the local fauna than a retiree with a pistol. “Aren’t there supposed to be alligators?”

“Don’t worry. The water’s too brackish here for them. But you might want to keep your eyes peeled for snakes.”

Which was almost enough to keep Darla in the cab, trap or no trap. But gritting her teeth, she lifted Hamlet into her arms and slid out from the back of the taxi. She started down the ramp, glad she had on her walking shoes instead of sandals. The stone ramp was littered with pine needles and the occasional palm frond and even a couple of fallen coconuts. Nattie was ahead of her, already crouched behind a tangle of broad leaves. peering anxiously across the water.

For his part, Hamlet apparently was ready to hop into action, too, for he began to squirm in Darla’s arms. “Fine,” she muttered as she put him down. “You get swallowed whole by a python and see if I care.”

“Psst!” Nattie called, and motioned her and Hamlet over. “I think I see the runabout headed this way. And look, she’s slowing it down.”

She looked in the direction Nattie pointed. Sure enough, there was the sleek craft with a silver-haired pilot at the wheel. Darla shook her head and gave Nattie an admiring look. It was obvious where Jake had inherited her knack for solving crimes. For all her endearing if annoying habits, the old woman was—what had Jake called Detective Martinez?—quite the smart cookie.

That, or she simply knew how to think like a criminal.

Tino was trotting down the ramp toward them, putting his phone back into one of his cargo shorts’ oversized pockets.

“Hey, I just called Ana again,” he told Darla as he crouched beside them. “She’s still about five minutes away, but she’s trying to get someone here now. What do you think we should do in the meantime—jump the old lady when she gets off the boat?”

Darla shook her head and pulled out her own phone.

“We can’t risk it; she’s got a gun. And you and I need to make sure Nattie doesn’t do anything crazy, like try to confront her. I say we hide and wait for her to walk up the ramp. If we’re lucky, the cops will get here before she reaches the street and stop her. But if not, we can hop back in the cab and follow her, and she’ll never notice.”

Swiftly, she dialed Jake again. This time, the PI answered, her voice barely audible.

“Where are you? Can you see Mildred’s boat?” Darla asked without preamble.

“We’re just passing that mansion with the red, white, and blue guest house . . . remember, the one we saw on the water taxi tour?” Jake said over the sound of Ricko’s dual outboards and the splashing of water. “And I can still see Mildred’s runabout, though she’s a few minutes ahead of us.”

Then, her tone growing suspicious, she added, “Why?”

“We want to make sure you don’t lose Mildred when she tries to ditch the boat. She’s headed toward a private launch ramp not far from where you can cut off the Intracoastal and head up the New River. The launch is behind a big clump of mangroves between two of the houses.”

“And you know this because . . . ?”

“Because we’re hiding behind that clump of mangroves, watching Mildred steer her boat in our direction.”

She winced and held the phone away from her ear as Jake let loose with a few bad words that might have shocked even Ricko.

“What are you doing there?” the PI demanded when the first curse storm had passed. “You’re supposed to be at Billy Pope’s place!”

“Yes, but Nattie was sure she knew where Mildred was headed, so we had Tino drive us over here. We figured we could intercept her in case she got away from you. And don’t worry, Officer Garcia and the other cops are on the way. We’re just going to keep an eye on Mildred until they get here. Sorry—gotta go!”

Darla hung up before Jake could continue exercising her vocabulary and then turned her attention to the water. Even to her untrained eye it looked like Mildred was bringing in the small craft a little faster than was safe.

She said as much to Tino, who agreed.

“Unless she throttles it down, she’s going to tear up that boat the minute she hits the ramp. If you don’t want to be hit by flying shrapnel, we’d better ditch plan A and go take cover in the cab.”

That was enough to convince Darla. Wrapping Hamlet’s leash securely about her wrist, she grabbed Nattie’s sleeve and tugged the protesting old woman back up the ramp.

“You can watch her crash from the taxi,” Darla told her. “Now, come on. We need to get out of sight. You keep forgetting she’s armed.”

“Eh, she probably couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with that peashooter,” Nattie said with a snort. Still, she climbed into the backseat of the cab alongside Darla and then joined her, kneeling onto the floor mats and carefully peering over the top edge of the door.

Unfortunately, their view of the launch was blocked by the wall of greenery, so that any witnessing of a crash would be limited to the audio. To that end, Tino turned the key and rolled down the taxi’s windows partway. They heard the sound of the runabout’s engine growing louder as Mildred drew nearer, and then a sudden silence as she cut the engine. Then came the sound of water lapping at the concrete launch as another boat’s wake preceded hers.

All at once, Darla heard an alarming scrape and thud as the runabout hit the ramp and presumably skidded up onto the concrete.