Unbinding Love: An Angela Panther Mystery Novella (The Angela Panther Mystery Series) (10 page)

“Do you have a weapon?” Mel asked.

I had exited the interstate and pulled onto a back road in a part of Atlanta I wasn’t familiar with, a part that didn’t appear all that friendly, either. “Seriously?” I wished the promise Jake made earlier to teach me to use a gun had already happened.

“Well, yeah.”

“Since when have I ever had a weapon?”

“Good point. But probably you should start carrying one.”

“I deal with the dead and weapons don’t work with them.”

“Tell that to those gang members who almost shot us. They were far from dead.”

“That’s different.”

“Not any different than what we’re heading into at the moment. If you’re gonna keep draggin’ me into dangerous situations, you really ought to carry.”

“I’m not
dragging
you into anything. You come voluntarily.”

She flicked her chin up. “That’s not the point.”

“If you’re so worried, maybe you should carry then.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Pepper spray doesn’t really count.”

“I’m not carrying pepper spray. Trust me, it’s much stronger than that.”

The thought of Mel carrying a gun scared the bejesus outta me. “Mel with a deadly weapon, that’s the last thing the world needs. You can’t even keep a vibrator in your purse without it falling out. Lord knows what you’d do with a gun.”

“One time,” she said. “One time it fell out, and you just can’t let that go.”

“One time is all it takes to burn that memory into my brain forever,” I said, thinking back to the day when her vibrator fell out of her purse and slid across the table in the police department interrogation room. I haven’t laughed so hard since. Just thinking about it brought tears to my eyes. I shook the memory from my minds eye and focused on the task at hand.

I turned left into an old warehouse district on the south side of Atlanta and pulled my car behind the second building on the right side of the first road. My mother said Bill Marx was watching the men in a few buildings up, but I didn’t want to get too close. “It’s up there.” I pointed to the building.

“We really need a weapon.”

I hated to admit it, but she was right. “Too late now.”

Two men walked out of the building with Bill floating behind them.

“There’s Bill,” I said.

“Wow, it’s like a scene from an old gangster movie. Look at those fedoras,” she said. “When did the Mexican Mafia start wearing fedoras?

“Maybe they’re not Mexican.” The fedoras flew off the men’s heads. “I think that was Bill’s doing.”

They got into a black sedan and headed out of the warehouse district.

“You gonna follow them?” Mel asked.

“Heck yeah.”

“We need Bill with us. Get him in here.”

Again with the conjuring spirit thing. “Bill, we know what’s going on. We’re here. We want to help, but we need you with us. Please.”

He appeared behind us, in the backseat.

“I didn’t mean to hurt Juan,” he said.

“We’ll talk about that later,” I told him. “How many people do you owe money to and how much?”

“It’s complicated.”

My blood pressure skyrocketed from normal to off the charts. “Your son doesn’t have time for this crap and neither do I. You killed your ex-wife, your child’s
mother,
for crying out loud. Now you either tell me everything so I can help you or…or…” I didn’t have an
or what
, but I hoped the anger in my voice was enough to stress the urgency of the situation.

“If I tell anyone, they’ll kill him.”

“Bill, newsflash, you’re dead. They’re not gonna know what you do and if we don’t do something, they’re going to kill him anyway. You gotta tell me so we can protect him.”

“Do you have the lock box?” he asked.

“Forget about the damn lock box, Bill!”

“I need that money. If I don’t get it they’ll—”

“I know what they’ll do but we won’t let them. We’ve got the police on our side. We just need you to tell us who they are and what you know, and let us help you. Please, Bill.”

He didn’t respond and when I turned around, he was gone. “Son of a beeswax.”

“What?” Mel asked.

“He’s gone.”

“Son of a bi—so what do we do now?”

“We keep following the fedoras and call Aaron.”

“I don’t think we need to do that.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She held up her cell and his picture flashed on the screen.

“Oh boy.”

She nodded and answered. “Hey, babe. You’re on speaker so you can yell at us both.”

And he did.

“Where’s the freaking lock box?”

I was surprised he didn’t drop the real f-bomb. “Aaron, Bill Marx killed his wife and Juan Garcia for the money in that box. He’s desperate to save his son. We need that box to strike a deal with the people he owes the cash to.”

“Where. Are. You.” His tone was so stiff the sentence wasn’t posed as a question.

“We’re—“

I interrupted her. “Going for cupcakes.”

“Angela, I’m only going to say this once. Whatever it is you’re doing, stop right now. Let us handle this. Do you understand? These people are dangerous. You’re not dealing with an average criminal. These people mean business.”

“You don’t want us going to get cupcakes? That’s kind of ridiculous, don’t you think? Oh, look, a tunnel. I think we’re going to lose you.”

We both made fake static sounds and Mel said, “Love ya, babe,” then clicked the disconnect button on her phone. “I’m so gonna pay for that later.”

I nodded. “Probably.”

We followed the fedoras for another several miles and into a parking garage near Turner Field, which wasn’t the greatest area, especially for two unarmed women following most likely well-armed criminals. I pulled into a spot a few rows down from where they parked, turned off my car, and waited.

“This doesn’t feel good,” Mel said.

I didn’t disagree. “Let’s just wait it out and see what happens. So far it doesn’t look like they’ve even got out of their car.”

Just then, one of the fedoras tapped on my window.

“Holy mother of God,” Mel said.

I didn’t open the window. “Yes?”

“Ma’am, please step out of the car,” One of the fedoras said.

“Are you the police?” Mel asked. “Because we’ll need to see some form of identification first.”

The other fedora pulled his suit jacket to the side and flashed his gun.

“Oh, is this a game?” Mel asked.

I shot her a look and she smiled.

“You know that
you show me yours and I’ll show you mine
one?” she asked and pulled a gun from her purse, and wiggled it at fedora man number one.

“Holy crap,” I said.

She winked at me.

“’Cause I got me one of those cute little things too,” she said.

She pulled back the top of the gun, held it in her hands and aimed it right at the window. The two fedoras backed up but didn’t back down. They drew their guns, and when the first shot blasted through the window, I dropped down and screamed for my mother louder than I’d ever screamed before.

I heard the glass shatter onto the ground along with the loud thud of bodies slamming against concrete. When one of the men screamed
get the hell of me
and the other one shrieked a streak of curse words followed by
I’m hit, I’m hit
, I figured I was alive and it was Mel who’d fired, and that surprisingly, her shot made contact. I peeked over the edge of the car door and saw my mother hovering above them flicking her wrist.

“You don’t mess with my kid, ya hear?” She shook her finger at the men and their guns slid at least five feet across the ground. She kept her finger steadied on them, and they couldn’t move. I envied her celestial super powers.

The man on top made an effort to move and freaked when he couldn’t. “What the hell? Someone help me.”

I glanced back at Mel. “I think you hit one of them.”

She was still holding the gun, her eyes focused on it. “Holy crap. Did I? Aaron said I was a good shot but I didn’t believe him.”

“You okay?”

She nodded, but I saw her hands shaking.

“Put it down, Mel. The gun, put it down.”

She did.

“Get an ambulance, I’m hurt,” the man Mel had shot said. 

“He’s fine,” Ma said. “It ain’t nothin’ but a flesh wound. A little nip on the arm is all.”

I peered out the window. “Looks okay to me. The cops are on their way,” I lied. “They’ll get someone to take care of you.” I jumped out of the car on my good leg, grabbed one of the guns, and pointed it at the men, even though I had no clue what to do with them. I stood on the other side of my mother. Every bone in my body ached. “Who are you and why did you want us to get out of the car?”

The trapped on top man spoke. “You followed us. You tell us what you’re doing here first.”

“That’s not how this is gonna work,” I said. “You’re the one in trouble. You’ve got about five minutes to tell us what’s going on.”

He told me where I could go, and it wasn’t a nice place. 

“You wanna play it that way? Fine.” I glanced at my mother. “Do something.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Something to make them talk.”

Mel climbed out of the passenger side of the car, gimped over on her good leg, and held the gun at them. Her hands shook. “You want me to shoot you too? Tell us why you’re after us, buckos. Whadda ya want from us, huh?”

Buckos? I swallowed my laugh.

Ma didn’t. “Ah Madone, that ain’t gonna help.” She flung her hands in circles and the two men bounced up and down. The man with the injured arm squealed in pain when his arm slammed on the ground twice. I winced too. That had to hurt.

The man on top knew a boatload of swear words and liked to use them. I was pretty sure he’d invented a few of his own.

“You gonna talk now?” I asked. “Something other than swear words, I mean?”

Mel kept the gun pointed at them.

I wanted them to talk about Bill Marx, who had gone MIA again, of course, but they didn’t, so I finally did. “Fine, you don’t wanna say it, I will. You want the money in the lock box, don’t you? Well you can’t have it; it’s ours, so there.”

“We gotta get that money,” the man on top said.

“Yeah, I know, and if you don’t get it, you’re gonna kill his kid, right?”

“We ain’t gonna kill his kid, lady,” the man said.

“You’re not?”

“That ain’t us. That’s our boss. He’s already sent somebody to get the boy and his grandma. We’re just gettin’ the cash. The boy’s probably dead by now.”

That time the boatload of swear words came from me.

“I’m on it,” Ma said, and she took off.

“Whadda we do?” Mel asked.

The men realized they weren’t trapped anymore and shifted, moving toward standing.

“Uh oh,” I said.

“Uh oh is right,” Mel said.

She pointed the gun at the first man and told him to freeze or she’d shoot. He froze.

I raised my left leg and sent my foot soaring into his privates like a high school girl dumped by her boyfriend the night before her senior prom. He clutched his crotch and went back down, screaming. I raised my hands to the other guy. “You want some of this too?”

He held up his hand in surrender. “Don’t, please. My wife, she wants another kid.”

“Down to the ground, buddy,” Mel said. “Or I’ll shoot ‘em off.”

I kicked him with my bad foot. “
Manache
!” Swearing in Italian for me was rare, but it happened. I let out another stream of curse words. “For the love of Mike that hurt.”

I grabbed my son’s lacrosse head string from the back of my car and we tied the men’s hands together. The knots weren’t anything Boy Scout-esque but they were better than nothing. Mel sent Aaron a text and told him where to find them, and we jumped—or hopped—like injured bunnies back into the car and burned rubber out of there.

“I thought we were dead,” Mel said. “Where’s your mother?”

“She went to find Justin.”

“Dear God, I hope he’s not already dead.”

“I hope not too.”

“Where’re we goin’?”

“To Justin’s Grandmother’s house.”

“Damn it. Bill screwed with us, didn’t he?”

“I think so.”

“He wanted to get us off track on purpose. He wanted to make us think we were going to the people that were the bosses, didn’t he?” she asked. “Because he’s going to the bosses.”

“So he can kill them and save his son,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.

“Son of a beach ball.” I hit the gas harder.