“Well, of course they do. They want to travel a lot.”
“Instead of kicking you out of their home, they do it to get away from you,” Addie snapped. “You aren’t even adult enough to move out and to support yourself.”
“Of course I could move out, but why would I? I mean, I’d have to pay rent and other bills, plus look after myself and cook.” She snorted. “Until I can afford to have maids, I’ll stay home,” she said. At the word maids, the gunman stared at her in shock.
Tucker nodded. “Isn’t she something?”
“Jesus,” Rural said, “I pity the poor bastard who hooks up with you.”
She glared at him, her voice like ice when she said, “I make their lives wonderful,” she said. “But I’m looking for one who’s wealthy enough. Some of them have been close, just not quite enough there yet. I don’t intend to work for a living,” she said with a sneer, glaring at Addie. “That’s for the lowlife laborers.”
“Well, it’s certainly for the everyday Joe,” Tucker said with a note of amusement. Something was just so farcical about this whole mess. … He shifted to one side and realized that the dog hadn’t let her gaze off the sister. He reached down and whispered to Bernie, “It’s okay. She won’t hurt you anymore.”
“Hell yes, I will,” she said. “This guy’ll shoot the two of you. Then I’ll beat the shit out of the dog,” she said, “and maybe, maybe then, when I’m tired, I’ll let him shoot it.”
Addie looked at the gunman. “So do you take orders from mentally ill women, like her?”
The gunman shook his head. “Hell no,” he said, “that’s the last thing I’ll do. Besides, I don’t shoot dogs, and obviously this dog’s got more smarts than you have.” He sneered, looking right at Addie’s sister.
Bernie bounded to her feet again, raced over, and smacked him hard across the face. Instantly the gunman pushed her back, resuming some of his feistiness, but he’d lost his momentum amid all the psycho drama going on here. Tucker was already on Rural; Tucker had a hand against his throat, pinning him, as he grabbed the gunman’s wrist, slammed it against the wall behind him, so that the gun couldn’t shoot anyone. Hearing the growling behind him, Tucker turned to see the dog, sitting on her butt, glaring and growling at Bernie, the sister.
She looked at the dog, sneered, and kicked her.
“Don’t do that,” he warned her. “That dog answers to me now, not you.”
“I don’t give a shit,” she said, rising to join the fray. “Give me that goddamn gun.” And she tried to wrestle it away from Tucker. What was going on was ludicrous; he wanted to punch the hell out of her and knock her out as it was. Addie grabbed her sister, pulling her out of the scenario, and forced her into the chair.
“Now stay there, damn it,” Addie said. “You can’t even see the seriousness of this situation.”
“Well, I see what I want to see,” she said, “and I see a gun that would take care of the job right now. There isn’t even a law,” she said, “that would charge me for this. The dog has already attacked me. Now it’s glaring and growling at me,” she said. “So I could get away with it, and it would not be a big deal.”
Tucker, now holding the gun, pushed Rural into another chair.
The gunman stared at Tucker and then at Addie. “She’s really not all there, is she?”
“She hates the dog, and she hates people, and, if she ever got good enough to start killing people, we’d have a serial killer on our hands like you wouldn’t believe,” Tucker muttered. “I’ve seen the type too many times in the military.”
The gunman swore. “I don’t want anything to do with her,” he said. “She’s damn scary.”
“And, if you were smart,” Tucker said, “you would fess up to the cops, tell them exactly what your role was in all this and that you were just trying to protect yourself,” he said. “What you’re doing now will just get you locked up in jail with the key thrown away.”
“I can’t do jail time,” he said.
“You can and will do jail time,” he said, “and you’ll still have your life at the end of the day.”
“Says you,” he said. “You have no idea what it’s like for guys like me in jail.”
“Well, I’m just a little sorry about that, but you should have thought about that before you killed your partner. Anything else was forgivable, but murder? Not so much.”
At that, the gunman started to react. “It can’t be. I can’t go to jail,” he cried out, reaching for the gun. And he wrestled with the strength only a full-on panic could bring.
Tucker was forced to use a hard uppercut to clip his chin, knocking him out. He removed the gun from his hand, immediately emptied the chamber, and put the gun into his back pocket. Then he shoved the bullets into the other pocket and pulled out his phone and quickly called the detective.
Addie looked a little more shell-shocked, but she stood firm, keeping her sister in her seat.
“Yeah, you need to come, and you need to come now,” he said. “I’ve got your escaped prisoner. At this point, either he’ll try to escape to avoid arrest by taking that bullet that he was hoping for earlier or he’ll try shooting his way out of arrest. I have disarmed him at the moment, but things are still volatile.”
He pocketed his phone, quickly searched the unconscious gunman to make sure no more weapons were on him, then looked at Addie. “Got anything to tie him up with?”
She raced into the kitchen and came back with zap straps.
He quickly pulled several together and strapped the gunman’s hands and feet together. “The detective will be here soon,” he said. He turned to look at Bernie, the sister. “Now what do we do with her?”
“I don’t know,” Addie said. “What does anybody do with her?”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Bernie said. “I’ll still get that damn dog killed.”
“No,” he said. “You’re not.”
She smiled. “Oh, yes,” she said. “When you’re not expecting it, I’ll make sure it’s dead.”
He stared at her, wondering how he could possibly even think of leaving this woman alive. “It’s too bad the gunman didn’t shoot you,” he said. He could feel Addie staring at him. He looked at her and said, “Sorry, but it’s how I feel.”
“No,” Addie said, “I get it. I felt that way a lot in my life, but she’s still somebody I have to deal with.”
“Sure but not this way,” he said. “She’s a threat, keeping a target on our backs.”
“Too damn bad,” Bernie said. “Because that’s what I am, and I’m never going away. I’m like this virus that’ll sit here and infect you.”
“Well, you’d like to do that to people,” he said, “but I’m sure we can charge you with something. After all, you did lie and waste police resources and try to cheat the system, all out of misguided hatred for an animal that did nothing to you.” Then he gave her a lethal grin. “I vote for institutionalizing you. You’ll have orderlies all around you, kinda like maids but different.”