“Yeah, right!” C. D. hollered. “How do you explain what happened on the boat the other night? How’d I get that gash on the back of my head?”
More footsteps, and Gabe stopped again. “He’s been trying to blackmail me. Calling me repeatedly. I agreed to meet with him, but once we got on the boat, he started threatening me, waving that gun of his around. He’d been drinking. When I refused to give him any money, he shot at me! He missed, and that’s when I hit him with the beer bottle and took off for the dock. He could have killed me.”
Brooke glanced over at C. D. He’d admitted to taking potshots at park service rangers, so why wouldn’t he have shot at a lawyer he suspected of defrauding him?
“Brooke?” Gabe shouted. “Talk to me. Are you okay? C. D., you just let her go. She’s not involved in this. Let her go, and you and I will settle our differences.”
She felt C. D.’s fingers dig into the flesh of her upper arm. He released her for a moment, pulling his revolver from the holster.
“I’m fine, Gabe!”
“Shut up, damn you.” C. D. jerked her backward. “Don’t you know he’s a liar?” She flinched as his sour breath sounded hot and low in her ear. “Tell him to get out of here. Get out, and then I’ll let you go.”
“He says if you go away, he’ll let me go,” Brooke called.
“He’s lying!” Gabe yelled back. “If he means what he says, he’ll let you walk down these stairs and leave with me.”
Gabe’s voice echoed in the stairwell. They heard his footsteps, sensed him coming closer.
“Don’t you come up here!” C. D. yelled. His rheumy, red-rimmed eyes darted around the room. His hands shook badly as he tried to slot bullets into the pistol’s chamber. Brooke had the sense that he was coming unglued before her eyes, the raw nervous energy sizzling through every cell of his body.
Agonizing seconds passed, each one marked with the sound of Gabe’s inexorable upward climb.
Brooke’s eyes were riveted on the old man. Right now, he was focused on Gabe, but in his hyper-paranoid state, he might turn the gun on her at any moment. She mentally measured the distance to the stairs, tried to calibrate the trajectory of bullet to human bone and blood—hers, Gabe’s, C. D.’s. She had to do something to pause this nightmare, but she felt paralyzed. Finally, she inched away from him, pressing her back against the wall, trying to slide out of his sight line.
In the next second, the footsteps accelerated. Gabe was running. He burst onto the stair landing, a black pistol aimed directly at C. D.’s head. Startled, the old man scrabbled backward, firing wildly, his bullets ricocheting off the ceiling. Gabe leveled the gun, his finger on the trigger.
“No!” Brooke screamed, lunging toward Gabe, who fired.
The gunshot roared, echoing and bouncing off the brick walls, louder than anything Brooke had ever before experienced. She screamed and watched in horror as C. D. dropped his gun and fell to the floor, howling in pain. He writhed on the floor, blood pooling from his shoulder.
“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.” Gabe grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the stairwell.
Brooke pulled away and knelt beside C. D., whose face was already ashen. “We can’t leave him like this.” She grabbed a T-shirt from the mound of C. D.’s clothing and clamped it against the shoulder wound, which burbled blood.
“Leave him,” Gabe barked. “The bastard tried to kill me twice.”
“No. He’ll bleed to death. He’s a crazy, sick old man. I can’t leave him like this.” Brooke looked up at Gabe. The warm, caring, courtly barrister had vanished, and in his place was this cold-eyed killer, ready to exact vengeance from anyone who crossed him.
“He killed Josephine,” Gabe said calmly. “He would have killed you too if it hadn’t been for me. Why do you think he lured you up here? You’re what’s standing between him and Josephine’s money.”
“No!” C. D. growled, trying in vain to sit up. “I never.”
Brooke pressed down on the wound, and C. D. moaned. She shook her head. “I don’t believe that. He could have killed me before you got here. He wouldn’t hurt me. He’s bleeding badly. You’ve got to go for help, Gabe. I’ll stay here with C. D., but you’ve got to get help.”
Gabe’s face as he stood over her was twisted with fury. “I tell you, he’s dangerous. And I’m not leaving you here with him. Let’s go,” he said abruptly, waving the gun at her.
“No,” Brooke reached for another shirt to stanch the flow of blood.
“Now, goddamn it!” Gabe slapped her hard with the flat of his hand, so hard her ears were ringing, so hard the band of his thick class ring cut a gash in her cheek. Stunned, she felt the warm trickle of blood down her face. He grabbed her arm and began dragging her toward the stairwell. He stepped off the landing and onto the next step, intent on bending her to his will.
Brooke looked down, and suddenly the endless, dizzying nautilus shell staircase spun beneath her feet. “No!” she screamed as the panic seized her and swallowed her whole. “Leave me alone.” She fell to the floor and grasped the iron handrail with both hands.
Gabe grasped her by the ankle, and she instinctively kicked out, catching him square in the gut. His face registered a momentary flash of shock before he toppled backward, down and down and down, the sickening thud of his falling body echoing in the brick stairwell.
*
Time stopped. She was conscious of crawling to C. D.’s side, of wadding up another shirt, pressing it to his shoulder. The old man was deathly quiet, his breathing shallow.
She reached for her cell phone. She had only half a bar. She tapped the number for the house phone at Shellhaven, but before the call could connect, the phone went dead. She had to go for help before C. D. bled to death. She tried to stand, but the floor swam beneath her feet.
“Brooke! Brooke!” Two distinct women’s voices floated up from below. “Are you up there? Are you okay?”
“I’m here,” she managed. “We need help.”
Their footsteps pounded on the wooden steps, pausing only when they’d reached the lawyer’s body, corkscrewed across the stairwell, his head resting at an unnatural angle.
“Oh my God!” Lizzie gasped.
Another moment and they were both on the landing, surveying the carnage before them—the blood, the forgotten pistol, and a barely conscious old man and his makeshift nurse, who was softly weeping.
“Get help,” Brooke croaked. “He’s been shot, and he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“The sheriff is on the way,” Lizzie said.
Felicia gently pried Brooke’s hands from C. D.’s shoulder. “Let me do this,” she said. She gingerly lifted the shirt, blanching at the sight. “The bleeding seems to have stopped.”
“Gabe,” Brooke said, her throat dry. “Is he…”
“Dead?”
Lizzie and Felicia exchanged a look that confirmed Brooke’s worst fears.
“I killed him,” Brooke whispered. “I did this. After he shot C. D., Gabe was trying to get me to leave. But I couldn’t leave C. D. And then, I looked down, and the stairs.” She shuddered. “Dizzy. I nearly blacked out. I couldn’t move. The nausea. He hit me. And then he started to drag me down those stairs. I just couldn’t. I could feel myself falling. So I kicked him.” She was weeping again. “I kicked him, and he fell backward, down the stairs. I didn’t mean to, but I killed him.”
“Hush.” Felicia wrapped her arms around Brooke. “Don’t talk.”
They heard cars approaching. Lizzie looked out the windows. “Sheriff’s here. He’s got a deputy and Shug with him. I’d better go down there and tell them we need a stretcher, for C. D.”
“And a body bag for Gabe Wynant,” Felicia said.
“They’ll arrest me for murder. I’m going to prison. And Henry. My Henry…” Brooke buried her face in her hands.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Felicia said. “It was self-defense, right, Lizzie?”
Lizzie paused at the stair landing. “That’s right.” Her voice was matter of fact. “Gabe shot C. D. in cold blood. And he would have shot you too. He had the gun to your head, you were afraid for your life. You kicked at him, and he fell backwards.” She nodded at Felicia. “Right?”
“End of story,” Felicia agreed.