BALANCING ON THE center console, Julie gripped me by the chin, and then leaned on her other arm to force the back of my head into the leather upholstery while pinching my nose.
Holy crap! I couldn’t breathe.
This was happening.
An image of Emmy Lee lying in this same back seat flashed in my mind. Was this where her murder started and then they drove her to Crooked Lake to finish the job?
I was going to die. The only uncertainty was the location they would choose to finish me off.
Danny’s fingers clamped around my mouth, forcing it open.
Hot tears streamed from the corners of my eyes, comingling with the cold sweat at my temples as I sucked in some much-needed oxygen along with the two tablets he’d shoved in.
Before I could spit them out, Julie jammed a plastic bottle between my lips, flooding me with water.
“Swallow!” she yelled, forcing the bottle deeper until its contents streamed over my cheeks.
The next second, Danny’s rough hand replaced the bottle like they were a tag team experienced in delivering a one-two punch. He lifted my chin, forcing me to choke down the water in ragged gulps.
“Did she swallow the pills?” Birgit asked while I sputtered.
“Yeah.” Danny eased off my chest but I soon became aware of a different kind of pressure.
Blinking to clear my vision, several loops of rope squeezing my arms to my sides like a skinny boa constrictor came into focus.
The older woman stepped up to the car door. “Go. I can finish.”
Danny glanced back at me as he crawled out of the SUV. “Sorry you decided to stop by today.”
“No sorrier than I am,” I said, wishing that I could sit up and stop drowning in my tears.
He looked to his girlfriend. “Where do you want to meet?”
“I don’t know. It will need to be somewhere remote, maybe someplace with a lake.”
“Figure it out later!” Birgit yelled. “That garage door could go up any minute!”
Julie grabbed fistfuls of her hair as if she were ready to pull it out. “Don’t you think I know that?!”
“Your mom’s right.” Danny spoke calmly, in sharp contrast to his partners. “We can figure this out later, so let’s just meet at that Chinese restaurant again. She’s tied up and she’ll be sound asleep, so we’ll have some time to decide what to do with her.”
“Okay, fine!” Julie nodded like a bobblehead doll. “What about her car?”
“You’re gonna have to move it,” Birgit said. “Up a couple of blocks where Roman won’t see it.”
The three of them scattered from my vantage point in the back seat, and I tried to use the alone time to free my left arm. Just when the rope shifted a millimeter over my elbow, Birgit reappeared with a roll of duct tape.
Heaving a sigh, she applied a short strip to my mouth. “Like Danny said, I’m sorry to do this to you, but we’ve invested a lot of time and effort into making this wedding happen. And while no one was supposed to get hurt, sometimes that can’t be helped.” She patted me on the hand. “I’m sure you understand.”
I understood plenty. She wasn’t the least bit sorry. She just wanted her daughter to marry well and at all costs.
I glared at her, the tape muzzling my screams as I watched her deftly bind my ankles.
“Where are her keys?” Julie shrieked from the kitchen door.
Birgit searched my pockets. “They’re not on her.” Grabbing a loop of rope to pull me toward her, she ripped away the tape from my face. “What’d you do with your car keys?”
I smirked at her. “You seriously expect me to tell you?”
She shook me, ramming the back of my head into a seatbelt buckle. “Tell me right now! Or—”
“Or what, you’ll kill me? Yeah, there’s a new threat.”
Hissing, she slapped the tape back over my mouth and turned to her daughter. “She must have brought a purse with her. Find it!”
Good luck with that. I wasn’t even sure where my tote had landed.
And with the way my aching head was buzzing, I was beginning to think I might not retain consciousness long enough to hear if they found it.
Either I had hit my head harder than I’d thought, or whatever they forced down my throat had started to take effect.
Birgit cursed and slammed the car door.
I heard more buzzing, fainter this time. I clung to the hope that it wasn’t symptomatic of my fuzzy brain because it sounded like someone was pressing the buzzer at the gate.
Steve!
Closing my heavy eyelids, I listened for the sound of voices but could hear only my pulse pounding in my ears.
With each passing second the steady beat slowed.
No, no, no. Don’t fall asleep!
I banged the back of my head against the seatbelt buckle for a swift jolt of wake-up pain. My eyes flooded with red hot tears but at least they were wide-open.
Was I alone in the garage?
Scrunching closer to the edge of the seat, I swung my feet forward, hooking them under the front passenger seat and slowly managed to pull myself up to a sitting position. The garage light had been switched off, but once my vision cleared I could readily see that I had been left alone.
I needed to make some noise—do something to let Steve know I was here. And since my brain felt like it was being invaded by an army of cotton balls, I needed to do it fast.
This SUV surely had an alarm system. Could I do something to set it off?
I didn’t know, but as my weary eyes tried to focus on the steering wheel, my heart soared.
I knew I could do the next best thing.
And I started rocking. Back and forth, and back and forth until finally I had enough forward momentum to propel myself off my ass and into the space between the front seats. My knees banged into the back of the center console, but I didn’t care as long as I could reach my target in the middle of the steering wheel.
I strained to reach it. Crap! I couldn’t stretch out long enough to get my chin near it. But maybe if I used my legs to push off the back seat….
A second later, the top of my head hurt almost as much as the back of it. My ears, too, because a very loud horn was blaring.
This position was also killing my back, but as long as that horn kept blasting it was a good pain. And it would help me stay awake.
Although it was probably okay for me to close my eyes now. Because it was becoming impossible to focus, not that I had anything to look at besides a steering wheel. Or think about for that matter.
Couldn’t think.
Stupid brain cotton dulling my senses.
I didn’t hear the horn anymore.
Did it stop working, or did the cotton move to my ears?
Leaning in, I pressed against the padded center of the steering wheel, but nothing happened. Worse, it seemed to be pushing back.
“Char.”
And it was calling my name.
“Char?”
No, Steve was calling my name.
He eased me into the back seat. “Char! Can you hear me? This is gonna hurt a little.”
I cracked open a lid just in time to see a blurry hand rip the tape from my mouth. “Ow!”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m just really sleepy. They gave me something.”
“Okay, baby, I’m gonna take you to the hospital.”
I rested my head against his chest as he untied me. “Did you get them?”
“Yep, we’ve taken both of them into custody.”
Both? That jarred me awake like a slap to the face. “There’s a guy—the one that gave Emmy Lee the drugs. Danny. Red pickup. Waiting at Chan’s.”
Steve kissed my forehead. “I’ll be right back. I’m gonna send a unit to pick him up.”
“Okay, I’ll just rest my eyes for a minute.”
But it didn’t take even that long for the lights to go out.
* * *
“Well, good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Steve said, when I padded into his kitchen around six the next morning.
I smelled coffee brewing, but when I squinted my bleary eyes at his coffee pot it appeared empty. “I sure hope you’re making coffee over there because my eyes don’t seem to work anymore.”
“They pumped your stomach, so it shouldn’t be the effects of the sedatives they gave you.”
It wasn’t. I’d tossed and turned half the night, having nightmares about Danny forcing pills down Emmy Lee’s throat. And then sometime during the night I traded places with her in that hotel room, only to wake up crying, my skin crawling with real and imagined memories of Danny’s hands clutching at my face.
Dang, but my tear ducts had been working overtime lately.
I eased myself into a chair at his kitchen table. “No, it’s not because of a drug hangover. I’m just tired and a little sore from using my body as a battering ram yesterday.”
Steve’s lips curled into a glimmer of a smile. “You were using your head.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed the lump that I had to show for it.
“But not entirely, so let’s discuss what you should have done.”
I steeled myself for another call nine-one-one lecture.
“You should have written that addendum like we talked about and handed it over to Shondra, and not gone out poking around on your own.”
“It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment idea.”
“Well, it almost became a get-yourself-killed idea,” he said, raising his voice.
“It never would have escalated into that if my mother hadn’t decided to call me when she did.”
The tic above Steve’s jawline counted down the number of seconds I had to reconsider my answer.
“I only went into that yard to get another witness statement for Shondra. I had no idea that gardener was the guy we’d been looking for. If I had I never would have—”
“I know, but you’ve got to be more careful. I almost didn’t pick up when I saw that call from your mother.”
I smiled at him when he brought me a cup of coffee. “I’m very glad you did.”
“Me, too, although she kept on calling—me, Frankie, nine-one-one dispatch—even after I told her you weren’t hurt.” He winced. “I may have said some bad words to her when she demanded to see you while you were sleeping. I let her in so that she’d calm down and go away, but when you leave here, go show your mom that you’re okay.”
“I will. I was told to take the day off, so if you don’t mind, I’ll hang around here until she wakes up.”
His dark eyes brightened. “Maybe I’ll hang around with you.”
“You’re not going in?”
“Not right away. It was a pretty long day yesterday.”
“Because it took so long for me to be able to give a statement?”
Steve touched my hand. “Not your fault that you needed some time, but I had to have your statement so that I could sort through who did what and write the affidavits for the assault and abduction charges.”
“What about charging them with Emmy Lee’s murder?”
“You gave Jim Pearson enough information for him to request charges and search warrants.”
“Good.” Maybe he would be able to find Emmy Lee’s day-timer and sample case, and use them as evidence.
“He’s still questioning them, but I bet they’ll get booked into County later today,” Steve said with a nod.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Does Vernon know?”
“I went over and talked to him after I got you tucked in for the night.”
Sipping my coffee, I tried to fill in the gaps in my memory. “What about Roman? Didn’t you say something about him coming home at a good time to open the gate? Is that how you got in?”
“Heck, no. When no one answered the buzzer at the gate, I went around to the back of the house and found the women trying to make a run for your car. The younger one had your big bag in her hand, so I parked them in the back of a patrol car until I could find you and determine exactly what we were dealing with. Which was when Roman pulled up in his Porsche.” Steve grinned. “He was really pissed off about the racket you were making in his garage, by the way.”
“Yeah, well, I’d say I was sorry, but…. How’d he take the news about Juliette…Julie and Birgit not being who they said they were?”
“He was even more pissed about that—pretty much what you’d expect after being deceived by people you put your trust in. But he seemed the most upset about Michelle.”
Michelle? “Who?”
“Michelle Sandmeyer—Birgit’s real name. He’s really ticked about needing to hire someone else to take care of his mother.”
No surprise there. Losing Birgit/Michelle as a caregiver presented a major disruption to his routine. “What about the baby? Roman thought he was going to be a dad.”
“No baby. It was all a sweetheart scam cooked up by Michelle after they ran out of money from the last con they ran. Julie, the daughter, admitted as much when she tried to get a plea deal.”
“Criminy. At least he found out before that Valentine’s Day wedding happened.” No sooner than the words leaked out of my mouth I cringed. It hadn’t been my intention to bring up the subject of Valentine’s Day in front of Steve.
“Oh yeah, it’s February fourteenth.”
I forced a smile. “So it is.”
“Would you like your present now or later?”
I stared at him in disbelief. “You bought me a Valentine’s present?”
“Yep. Something I think you can use.”
A car vacuum accessory?
“Maybe you could even make some use of it this morning.” He pushed back from the table. “I’ll go get it.”
Steve disappeared into the living room and came back holding a gift-wrapped box the size of a four-slice toaster topped with a big red bow. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Chow Mein,” he said, handing it to me.
“I haven’t had a chance to get you anything.” Nor had I intended to. “Although I do plan on baking you a pie later.”
“You’d better. You owe me that pie. Dinner, too.” Sitting down next to me, he pointed at the box. “Are you going to open that or not?”
Savoring the moment, I carefully untied the bow.
He vented a weary breath. “You are such a girl. Just open it.”
“Fine!” I tossed the bow aside, ripped off the paper, revealing a box containing a salon-quality hair dryer.
I reached out and kissed him. “Thank you. I love it.” I already had a hair dryer, but not nearly as nice as this one.
“Want to try it out?” He took my hand and pulled me out of my seat.
“Okay.” Why not?
He led me to his master bath and opened the bottom drawer. “I emptied this out to make some space for you. Thought you might want to keep it there.”
Oh! It was for here. “You remembered that I needed one the other night.”
The laugh lines at the corners of Steve’s eyes crinkled as he held my gaze. “Of course. What’d you think?”
“Never mind. I obviously haven’t had enough coffee.”
I started to head back to the kitchen, and he grabbed the sleeve of the over-sized flannel robe I’d found in his closet.
“Where’re you going? I thought we were going to try out your present.”
I cocked my head. “My hair’s not wet right now.”
He opened the shower door and turned on the water. “I have a remedy for that. If you’re lucky I’ll even wash it for you.”
Oh, boy! Was I ever feeling lucky.
THE END
Thank you for reading You Can’t Go Gnome Again. I hope you enjoyed spending time with Char, Steve, and the Duke’s Cafe gang. To help other readers discover this book, I’d be very grateful if you’d post a short review at the site where you bought You Can’t Go Gnome Again.
Thanks so much for your support!