Muzzled (25 page)

I threw myself down on my stomach and quickly wriggled to the top of the hill where I eased my head over the top and took in the scene below. If I was lucky enough to live through this nightmare, the scene below would keep me awake at night for years to come.

Gina, breathing heavily, was looking pleadingly up at Mick while Liz, hair plastered to her face, leant on her shovel and examined the toes of her boots. They both stood knee high in a newly dug hole. My stomach cramped. How much deeper did the hole have to be? Deep enough to bury six dogs? Or deep enough for six dogs and two humans?

Big Mick, his face impassive, long black coat making him look like the harbinger of Death stood, legs apart, gun steady, a few feet away. Where was the loving father who played ball, helped feed the triplets, kissed his kids goodnight? I didn’t know this man.

And I was fast running out of time.

Mick waved his gun in the air. “You’re wrong there, Gina. I
do
want to do this. Now shut up and save your breath for digging. Fair dinkum, you’re using that shovel like a bloody tooth pick. Put your back into it or I’ll shoot your mouthy friend and you’ll have to finish digging the hole on your own.”

“Well,” put in her mouthy friend, aka my brainless sister, “if you don’t like the way we’re digging, why don’t you dig the bloody hole yourself?”

A reluctant grin spread across Mick’s face. “You’ve got a bit of an attitude there, kiddo, but unfortunately for you, it’s slowing you down. Now, the way I see it, you have two choices—either put your back into it and dig the hole willingly, or I’ll put a bullet in your foot and you’ll be digging up your own blood.”

“Come on, Liz,” said Gina wiping sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her sweater. “Don’t antagonize the bastard. You’ll only make this more fun for him.”

The two bent to their task again and Mick regained his stance of legs apart, gun at the ready.

My stomach roiled. I knew as soon as the hole was deep enough Mick would shoot the dogs and order Gina and Liz to bury them.

And then what?

Okay, one thing at a time—first, I’d rescue the dogs.

I slid down the sand hill and approached the bus, praying the dogs wouldn’t bark and give me away. All okay. With the drug still in their system they didn’t seem to have the energy to do more than slobber on the window when they saw me coming.

Stanley was the first to greet me when I opened the door of the mini-bus. Staggering up from the back of the bus like a drunk, he cleaned my face with his tongue and then promptly fell over.

“Hi sweetie. Good to see you too,” I whispered, helping him to his feet and deciding to transfer the dogs to my car. If I let them loose in the scrub they might wander onto the road and become road-kill. Or cause an accident if a driver swerved to miss them. If I stashed them in my car, at least that would slow Big Mick down.

As I helped the dogs out of the bus, Attica the goat pushed past and launched himself at me.

“Hey!” I hissed trying to get out of his way. “Watch it buddy!”

Disregarding my whispered warning he butted me in the chest, grinned in satisfaction and then took off into the scrub.

Now
that
one I wasn’t worried about. Bloody Attica could look after himself.

Whatever drug Gina fed the six greyhounds to keep them quiet had also affected their coordination. But at last, after much manhandling, I managed to steer each dog across the sand to my car. Squeezing six fully grown greyhounds into a station wagon was a bit like packing sardines in a tin, but once inside, the dogs seemed happy enough to scrunch up and go back to sleep. At least five of them did. Stanley, after licking my face, turned in a tight circle then proceeded to sprawl out comfortably across the entire front seat of my car.

How could Mick even contemplate shooting these gorgeous animals?

Dogs settled, I scuttled back to the bus, intent on finding a weapon to defend myself against the enemy. Seemed like Gina wasn’t afraid of hold-ups or muggings as there was no knife—no gun—not even a sharp nail file to be found. All I could rustle up was a rusty tire iron. So with the rough steel pressed hard against the palm of my hand, I set off to climb the sand hill again.

Flat on my stomach, I peered over the crest of the hill. Oh! Uh! The hole was bigger now.
Much,
much, bigger
. The ticking clock was fast approaching zero hour. I wriggled forward. My plan was to inch down the hill and approach Mick from behind, belt him over the head with the tire iron, tie him up while he was unconscious, and then rescue Liz and Gina.

Easy.

A couple of feet down the slope, doubts crept in and my plan started to crumble around the edges. Mick was a lot taller than me. Even if I did manage to get behind him without him noticing, would my arm be long enough to reach high enough and bring the tire iron down hard enough to knock him out?

Oh God. And what if he spotted the loose sand shimmering down the hill every time I moved?

Damn. This wasn’t going to work. I stopped, snatched a reassuring breath and went searching for my inner strength, screaming in my head at the Universe to get his/her butt out here and give me a helping hand.

“You’ll never get away with this, you piece of dog’s shit.” That was my sister, taking a rest from digging, but not from aggravating the man with the gun.

“Ah, but I will.” The man with the gun twisted his mouth into a semblance of a smile. Reminded me of a fat snake with the gastro virus. “In fact, I reckon that hole is large enough now to start eliminating the evidence.”

“Nooo!” yelled Gina. “Don’t shoot the dogs, Mick. They won’t talk. I’ll send them to an interstate GAP program. No-one will ever know.”

“Except you and the mouthy one.”

His words hung in the air. Implying what?

Oh God, it was time for action. Now or never. I quickly pushed myself into a crouching position and slithered out from behind the covering bushes ready to continue my descent.

Didn’t see the rabbit hole.

Didn’t mean to lose my balance.

And with a shriek of dismay, went tumbling head over turkey down the hill.

When I finally lifted my nose from the sand and gazed upward, three pair of wide startled eyes greeted me.

But it was the black eyes of the killer that made me want to vomit.

28

I spat the sand from my mouth, gingerly touched my right eye which felt like it had come in contact with a rock the size of Uluru, and sat up. My head ached. And when I moved my legs, a searing pain shot through my right ankle. Great. Just when I might be called on to run for my life—I’d sprained my freakin’ ankle.

“Nice of you to drop in, Katrina.” Mick’s voice, colder than steel, conveyed exactly how welcome I was at his little hole-digging ceremony.

“Where in heavens did you spring from?” Gina bent to help me to my feet but one Rottweiler snarl from the man with the gun had her backing off in a hurry.

I dragged my eyes away from Mick and Gina and stared at Liz. My little sister. Face smeared with sweat and dirt, the hem of her long colorful skirt torn, hands bleeding from digging, she stared back at me as though I was a gourmet ice cream and she wanted to eat me in one big swallow.

Finally, she dropped her eyes to her feet and sighed. “Hi, Kat.”

“Hi, Kat?” I snapped. Suddenly the hurt of Liz’s rejection overflowed, pushing aside the fear of the man with the gun. “That all you can say after six years of avoiding me?”

“Well, what do you
want
me to say?”

“Damn it, Liz. I’m your sister—once your best friend and protector—and yet after Dad died you took off and left me to cope with Ma on my own.”

“You know what she was like with me, Kat. With Daddy gone—I couldn’t cope. I had to get away.”

“Okay, so what about now?” I demanded. “Gina lives a few blocks from me and yet you couldn’t pick up the phone—or say—drop around to
see
me—let me know you weren’t lying dead in a gutter somewhere.”

She shrugged one shoulder and her face closed down. “I didn’t contact you, Kat, because I knew this was how you’d carry on.”

I let out a gasp of disbelief. “I
carry on
as you call it, because—”

“
Enough
!” yelled Mick, spittle flying from his mouth. “Jesus, it was trouble enough having the Mouthy One in my ear every five minutes—now I have her freakin’ sister too. Kat McKinley, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I followed you.”

“Oh, did you now? Can’t say I’m surprised though,” he said, eyes shooting daggers at me—every one razor sharp and itching to slice me into tiny bite-sized pieces. “You’re always poking your nose in where it’s not wanted. Reckon you’re some bloody great sleuth, don’t you? A girly Sherlock Holmes?” He lifted his lip in a sneer as I tried to push to my knees and let out a yelp of pain. “Well, you’re not. You’re nothing but a freakin’ snoop.”

“I—”

“But this time, Katrina,” he broke in, his voice like chalk on a blackboard, “you stuck your nose into
my
business.” Two black holes of death stared chillingly back at me as Mick’s gun shifted closer, his finger quivering on the trigger. “And
that
means I can’t let you walk away from here.”

I stared at the gun, mesmerized. I was going to die, yet my throat was suddenly too dry, too closed over with fear to do what all fictional heroines always do in mystery novels—keep the bad guy talking. Hell, my throat was too dry to even gulp.

But not so, Gina’s. “For God’s sake, Mick, stop this nonsense and come to your senses before it’s too late. Think of your family.”

Mick gave a mirthless laugh. “This
is
about my family, Gina. The bookmaking business isn’t what it used to be and I’ve had a long run of losses. How do you feed a wife and seven kids when there’s no money coming in? Beg on the streets?”

“But you don’t want to add
murder
to your list of crimes.”

His laugh was off-key, almost over the edge. “Who do you think did away with Jack Lantana, that idiot with the fashion sense of a 60s rock groupie?” Mick gave another hysterical laugh—but at least his gun shifted away from me which meant I could start breathing again. “Did you know, Lantana demanded a bigger cut of the profits? As if. Hell, I did the world a favor when I took him out. The decrepit old guy had the brain capacity of a lump of wood.”

“And what about Scott?” Liz edged forward. “You tried to kill him too, didn’t you?”

“His own fault. Scott overheard me talking to my mate, Garry Smart, so he had to go. In between races, Garry slipped a little something into Scott’s drink and then offered to help him to his car when he started feeling dizzy.” Mick turned his head in my direction and snarled. “It was a fool-proof plan too. Would have worked—except Sleuth Girl here stuck her nose in—
again.
”

I sent him the sweetest smile I could dredge up under the circumstances. “That’s okay, Mick. Anyone in a similar situation would have done the same thing.”

The snarl changed to a roar.

“So, Garry was involved in attempted murder?” Gina’s voice grated against her throat, each word forced through gritted teeth.

Mick tutted. “Gina, your boyfriend has been in this up to his foul-smelling armpits since the beginning.”

“The pathetic little creep.” Gina let out a sigh. “And he isn’t my boyfriend—he’s my stepbrother. Ever since he came into my life at fifteen, he’s been trouble. Got let out of jail a couple of months ago and came whining to me for help.”

“And helping him was your first mistake,” said Mick. “The whole scam was Garry’s idea in the first place. He owed me fifty thousand dollars in gambling debts and couldn’t pay, so the Slow Dog scam was a way out for him.”

“I’m just as pathetic for believing him. He swore on his mother’s grave that he was trying to go straight. Said some guy had forced him to steal greyhounds and would kill him if he refused. I told him I’d dob him in unless he brought the dogs to me so I could hide them and eventually get them into GAP homes.”

“And that decision landed you right smack in the middle of the scam.”

While Gina continued to distract Mick, I transferred my weight to my hands and pushed upwards, attempting to stand. Wrong move. Immediately the nose of the gun swung around and pressed against my left temple. I froze, still kneeling in the sand, the pain in my ankle making me want to cry.

In my peripheral vision I could see Liz, shovel half-raised, inching forward.

But so could Mick.

His eyes never leaving my face, he dug the gun harder into my head. “If your mouthy sister takes one more step, we’ll see daylight through the hole in your head, Katrina. And of course there’ll be a matching hole in hers too. Which of course will only leave Gina and me to get rid of the dogs. Still, no big deal. I’m tired of playing games and don’t need all this irritation.”

Gina threw her shovel in the hole and stood, head up, shoulders back. “Shoot my friends, Mick, and you may as well shoot me too because I’m not going to lift a finger to help you harm the dogs.”

The gun moved slowly in Gina’s direction. “In that case, I’ll shoot you first.”