If Hooks Could Kill - By Betty Hechtman Page 0,109
somewhere. She argued that when my credit card expired and she’d taken over the payments for the locker, the contents really became hers. We argued some more and then she pulled out her trump card.” He gestured toward the leaded glass lamp sticking out of a box. “She’d taken it home with her, too, with the idea of selling it. When she was trying to gauge the value, she found out some information about the lamp that could have caused me a lot of problems. She wanted to make a deal. I stop hassling her about the coins and she’d put the lamp back in the locker and never say a word about it. But that would leave me vulnerable. Any time she wanted to she could blackmail me again.” There was a moment of silence as Stone collected himself.
“I’d brought along a gun from the storage locker as a last resort. I thought it might encourage her to give up the coins if she balked.” He didn’t finish, but the obvious finale was that he’d shot his sister because she knew too much. He said he grabbed the lamp and left.
Did he think I was going to be sympathetic when he complained that the cab hadn’t waited like it was supposed to and he’d had to walk to Ventura and find one parked in front of Le Grande Fromage? He grumbled that he’d searched the house over and over for the coins and not found them. Then he heard people in the bookstore talking about having a box of his sister’s crochet pieces. Stealing them was easy. Everyone was finding a seat waiting for him to speak. He just shoved everything in his backpack. The shoplifter kids had been a convenient distraction, including the mess they’d made in the yarn area.
He let out an annoyed snort. “What a wasted effort. I don’t even know why my sister bothered hiding the coins behind those flowers. I got barely one thousand dollars for selling all of them. What had happened to the really valuable ones? I went through that house again. I looked on her computer and could tell she had never sold them or a Rolex watch I knew was missing from the storage locker. I’d almost given up, when I heard your friend talking.”
We’d come full circle and it was making me uneasy. I had a whole list of questions like where the coins had come from and why keep them in a storage locker? What about the Rolex? Questions would stall him and give me time to think of an escape, but before I could ask the first question I heard a ripping sound as he tore a piece of duct tape off one of the boxes and slapped it across my mouth.
He loosened the hold on my arms for an instant, but then I felt him wrapping some kind of rope around them all the way up to my elbows.
This wasn’t good. Not good at all.
My feet were still free and I made a move toward the door. He’d only pulled it down partway. Could I push it up with my foot and escape?
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. I saw the lantern light reflect off of something metal in his hand. “I was afraid you might not want to part with that packet of stuff, so I borrowed my brother-in-law’s gun. This could work out quite well. Dan’s fingerprints are all over his gun.” I could see that Stone had gloves on now. “So when I shoot you, that detective will finally have some hard evidence against Dan. And I can get on with my life.”
Stone must have seen me glancing toward the boxes of stuff and figured what I was thinking. “The gun I shot my sister with is long gone. Once I realized someone had been in the locker, I knew it wasn’t safe to leave it there, so I gave it a watery send-off from my surfboard.”
He looked around at the interior. “I think I’ve taken care of everything. Let’s see, where shall we do this?”
I was frantically looking for some way to escape when I heard the door rumble up.
“Molly, are you in there?” a voice called. In the split second it took me to turn, Stone was next to me and had the gun against my temple. As the door lifted all the way, Barry started to walk into the unit. “I saw your car,” he began, and then his eyes