Chapter 26 #2
Her hand comes out of the tote, and there’s a gun in it, small and dark and pointed at my midsection.
The warm old woman is entirely gone. Her other hand dips back into the tote and comes out with a short black cylinder, and she threads it onto the barrel with the same unhurried care she uses on her reading glasses, like this too is simply part of the routine.
Of course the sensible tote has a silencer in it. I don’t see why not. Thirty years of never once being wrong means thirty years of never once being loud.
“You really should have stayed at the party, dear,” Pickles says gently. “Now we have a problem, you and I, and a great deal of very loud ocean.”
She’s not wrong. The waves are slapping against the shore as loud as thunder.
Spam Musubi takes one look at the menacing metal and loses her mind.
She explodes out of my arms, hits the black sand already barking, furious and far louder than eleven pounds calls for, snapping at Pickles’s ankles, darting and lunging at the woman as if the pooch were wearing a bulletproof fur coat.
Pickles staggers a half-step back, the gun swinging down toward the dog.
And the cavalry arrives just in time.
Out of the dark behind the tiki torches they come fast and silent.
Spam, the original, my favorite one-eared ginger menace, launches off a piece of driftwood with a yowl I will be hearing in my dreams for years to come, and behind him is the rest of the feline paw patrol, Coconut, Mango, and Mochi—four cats who stowed away in my van one time too many and have apparently been waiting all week for precisely this.
And just beyond them I spot an entire litany of glowing eyes in the dark as if they’ve summoned every cat on the island.
Okay fine, the chickens, roosters, and a few nosy geckos are hopping up on the rocks.
The cats hit Pickles like a rogue wave with claws.
Spam lands on her shoulder and commits. Mango goes for the arm with the gun.
Coconut and Mochi tangle her ankles while Spam Musubi gets a mouthful of cardigan.
Pickles shrieks and flails and the gun goes off once into the air with a crack that scatters birds for a mile.
I don’t think. I lunge. I hit her at the knees the way I’ve accidentally hit so many things on this island, except this time it’s on purpose, and we go down together into the cool black sand in a heap of cats and dog and fury.
The gun spins away into the dark.
Pickles is stronger than a woman her age has any right to be, all sharp elbows and rage, but I’ve got youth, gravity, and every cinnamon roll I’ve eaten since March on my side.
Plus, a ginger tomcat sitting on her head, which I have to assume any self-defense manual worth its salt would list as an advantage.
I scramble up onto her back and plant myself there like I’m about to ride a dolphin out to sea, pinning her face-down into the sand while she snarls out expletives that grandmother should not know.
“Stay down,” I pant. “You rigged the mango pageant, and who knows how many others. You literally killed over lip gloss and high heels! You’re a monster who—”
The sound of footfalls pounding down the sand garners my attention.
“EVERYBODY FREEZE!” a familiar deep voice cuts through the night, and I look back to see Koa tearing out of the dark with his weapon out and an expression I’ve never seen on him before.
Behind him half of Kauai’s finest pour onto the black sand in a flood of flashlights, and for one frozen moment everyone takes in the scene. A homicidal pageant coach face-down in the sand. Four cats. One cute pooch. And me, sitting on top of the menagerie like I planned it.
“She killed them,” I pant as Koa scoops me up and another officer handcuffs Pickles. “She confessed to killing both Vera and Flash.”
Koa pulls me in hard and fast, and I can feel both of our hearts hammering against one another. “Are you hurt?”
“Only emotionally.”
He exhales and his forehead drops to mine for the briefest second. “You scared ten years off my life.”
I look up at him from under my lashes. “That’s a shame. I had plans for those years.”
“Then we’d better not waste the ones I have left.” And he kisses me right there in front of the handcuffs, the officers, and a few very loud roosters.
“You’re a clever girl, Jinx,” Pickles says warmly, the grandmother sliding right back into place like she never left. Koa and I pull apart just in time to see her being hauled away. “I always said so. You’d have made a wonderful contestant.”
“I’d never have won,” I say. “I wouldn’t have paid you.”
Pickles gathers herself and gives me a small, serene, blood-chilling smile, the last thing she owns and the only thing she isn’t selling.
They walk her up the beach toward the spinning blue lights, and Spam the cat rides her shoulder the entire way, a tiny one-eared figurehead refusing to give up his prize all the way to the squad car. He’s such a showoff.
Koa pulls back and looks at me for a long moment. “I told you to stay at the party,” he says.
“You did.”
“Where it was bright. With people.”
“You did say that.”
“And instead, you walked into the dark, alone, to confront an armed killer.”
“In my defense,” I say, “I brought the dog.”
He closes his eyes for a moment, then pulls me into him, bandaged arm and all, and holds on a beat longer than a detective strictly should at a crime scene, and against the top of my head he says the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
“No promises,” I say into his chest. “But I’ll consider it.”
He tips my chin up and kisses me one more time, slow and certain, the kind of kiss that doesn’t care about the flashlights or the paperwork or the murderer currently being folded into a cruiser thirty feet away.
Somewhere in the back of my mind the ledger-keeping corner of my brain notes that I have now been kissed senseless at two separate crime scenes this week, and files it under personal growth.
Behind us, the pageant lights blaze on, the bay rolls in black and luminescent, and somewhere up the beach a one-eared cat is being pried off a murderer by two grown police officers and losing his mind about it.
Paradise.
It keeps trying to kill me, and I’m still not leaving.