My Killer Vacation — Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19

Taylor

call the Barnstable police on our way to LisaI Stanley’s house and specifically ask for Wright, who is noticeably stunned when I explain that the mayor has broken into Lisa’s house and is most likely a murderer.

Thankfully, he doesn’t waste time reporting Lisa’s phone call to his superior and our belief that Oscar’s sister is in imminent danger. Possibly worse. By the time we skid to a stop in front of her house, there are sirens in the distance, but if they are coming from the station, they are probably more than five minutes away.

“We can’t wait. I’m going in,” Myles says, removing the gun from his jacket and checking the clip. “You’re going to drive to the end of the block, away from the house. Do you

hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“You hear meand you’ll do what I’m asking.”

I nod. I nod vigorously, but the walls of my throat are closing together at the thought of Myles going into a house with a murderer. He’s so big and indestructible, I’ve never really had cause to worry about him before. But I am now.

And I’m not one hundred percent sure I’ll be able to pull the car away and leave him to possibly get killed.

“Taylor.”

Can I lie? No, I can’t lie. Itwould be the most expedient way to reassure him so he can stop worrying about me and do his job, but I hate lying. So I won’t.

“I’m going to drive to the end of the block.” I lean across the console and kiss his mouth, adrenaline bringing my voice to a higher pitch than usual. “Away from the house.”

“Good.” He kisses me, too—twice—looking like he wants to say more. Instead, he shoves out of the car with a curse, rapping his knuckles on the roof once. “Climb into the driver’s seat.Go Taylor.”

“Okay.” My eyes are watering, hands shaking, but by the time Myles disappears around the side of the house, gun drawn, I manage to put the car in drive and pull away from the curb, Lisa’s house growing smaller and smaller in the rearview. There’s a pulse pounding in my ears and my stomach is folding in on itself. Oh my God. Oh my God. I don’t want to nose my way into any more murder investigations. I have officially gotten my fill. Is Myles all right? Yes. Yes, he knows what he’s doing. For all we know, the mayor is long gone, anyway. Or we misinterpreted the threat. Even if Rhonda Robinson is inside that house with the real murder weapon, ready to use it, I’m pretty sure a bullet would just bounce right off of Myles. Right?

Wrong. He’s a human man. Flesh and bone.

The odds of him and Lisa surviving are a lot stronger if they have help and the sirens still sound like they could be a good two or three miles away. I can help. I can do something. What did my parents always say about being scared? That it’s healthy? Yes. They used to say that anything worth doing inspires fear. Consider me inspired.

“I’m going to drive to the end of the block, away from the house,” I murmur shakily. As soon as I reach the stop sign, I whip a U-turn and floor it back in the direction of the house. “I didn’t say I would stay there.”

What would my parents say if they could see me right now? I spent the last hour making love in a church vestibule and now I’m gunning it down a residential block in the direction of a potential crime in progress, hoping to assist my bounty hunter lover. This might be shocking even by their standards. Oddly enough, though…I’m not really concerned at all with my parents’ opinion about what I’m doing. If they would think me brave or be pleasantly surprised to know I inherited some guts, after all. In that moment, I’m only concerned with howI feel about my actions. What my conscience is saying and what my

intuition is telling me.

I’ve been brave all along.

I just had to stop acceptingothers’ definition of it to know how much.

Parking the car in the exact same spot as before and leaving the car idling, I take stock of what I can see. All the blinds are drawn on the house. Various vehicles are parked all over the block, but I have no way of knowing if one of

them belongs to the mayor. There is no sign of Myles. My scalp prickles with cold at the last part. Where is he? Is he inside yet?

Mylesand Lisa are in potential danger. There has to be something I can do. I chew the inside of my cheek for a moment before rolling down the driver’s side window.

That’s when I hear the shouting coming from inside the house. Women’s voices. Two of them. One belongs to Lisa.

The other…I think it belongs to Rhonda Robinson, although she is not using the professional voice I’ve heard at press conferences.

It’s panicked and high pitched. And imploring.

“Please.Please. Listen to me. I did not kill your brother!”

“Like I said, I believe you! Just get out! The police are coming.”

“Don’t you understand? I can’t be interrogated by the police. There are eyes everywhere in this place. Nosy retirees and busybody mamas who would love nothing more than to knock me from my perch, and ohbelieve me, this would do it. Oh, this would definitely do it. The mayor being investigated for murder? Do you think my career wouldsurvive that?” Several seconds tick by, a murmuring of voices. “I have no way of knowing you’ll keep my name out of this. Why would you?”

There is just a hint of movement on the left side of the house. It’s Myles with his back to the wall, peering into the side window, gun pointed at the ground between his feet.

My wild rush of relief to see him still unharmed is quickly marred by his dark expression when he notices me sitting

in the parked car. Teeth gritted, he jerks his chin down the

road. “Go, Taylor,” he mouths. “Now.”

There’s a loud crash inside the house.

Myles jerks backward, then slowly peers inside, but I can tell he’s also watching me out of the corner of his eye.

I’m distracting him. I can see that now. As much as I want to help, the best thing I can do in this moment is get my butt back to the end of the block and flag down the police.

Putting my car into drive, I start to edge away from the curb.

The front door of the house flies open. Rhonda Robinson comes running down the steps, a knife in her hand. Aknife?

Considering the way Oscar Stanley was murdered, I expected a gun, but I don’t have time to consider this now.

She’s running toward a black sedan, which is parked at an angle and partially blocking the driveway of Lisa’s neighbor. Clearly she parked in a hurry and she was definitely rushing again now. Trying to make a run for it before the cops arrive?

Myles steps out from the shadow of the house, gun trained on Rhonda.

“Stop where you are, Rhonda. Get down on the ground.”

The mayor jerks around with an expression of shocked dread. She starts to go down on one knee and Myles

approaches slowly.

“Hands behind your head. Do it.”

Another, louder siren is added to the cacophony of sound and it seems to spook Rhonda. She springs back up and sprints for her vehicle, knife in one hand, keys in the other.

My eyes search the rearview, praying for red and white lights.Where are the police?

It feels like we’ve been waiting on them for an hour, when in reality, it has probably only been three or four minutes. Too long, though. Rhonda is going to get away— and she is clearly the murderer. Her name is on the property records, along with Oscar Stanley. She was profiting off vacation rentals while lying to voters about eradicating rental homes from Cape Cod. Her motive was to keep Oscar silent. Those threatening notes, written by Oscar, were intended for the mayor. She was on the verge of being outed. Her motive is rock solid.

Meaning she’s the one who threw a buoy through my window.

The one who bashed me in the head with a book.

She killed a man. Someone’s brother. If that happened to Jude, wouldn’t I want someone to intervene so she could be brought to justice?

Am I just going to let her drive away or am I going to do something?

She could be on her way to do something drastic. Or hurt another person.

When she hops into her sedan and the engine roars to life, I make a decision. Out of the corner of my eye, I sense Myles running in my direction. He must guess what I’m

planning because he belts out my name.

I’ll apologize for scaring him later.

I lay my foot down on the gas, whip my car across the street and skid sideways in front of the mayor’s vehicle, blocking her from leaving. Frantically, she glances back

over her shoulder, but the neighbor’s car is preventing her from reversing. The sirens are very close now. A quarter mile maybe. So many of them. Myles pounds a fist on the roof of Rhonda’s car, ordering her to step out of the vehicle with her hands up, but she’s not listening. She’s looking right at me, screaming at me to move. Thank God she only has a knife or I’m certain she would have already fired a bullet through my windshield in her desperation. I’ve never seen anguish like this, up close and personal, and in those minutes that pass while the sirens approach, sympathy wells inside of me, despite everything she’s done.

All at once, the fight goes out of the mayor and she deflates, her head falling back against the seat. Tears roll down her cheeks and she puts her hands up, palms facing out. Police cars squeal to a stop around us, Myles is shouting directions to them. An explanation of what’s going on, leading with the fact that I’m not a threat. But I can barely hear any of it over the rapping of my heart. It pounds in my ear drums and my fingertips. I breathe in and out to try and get it back under control, but I’m still vibrating head to toe when Myles yanks open the driver’s side door and pulls me out, crushing me against his chest.

“Are you out of your mind, Taylor?” He squeezes me, dragging me away from the scene of the mayor being handcuffed, blocking me with his back. Up ahead, Lisa stumbles out of the house and drops down onto the steps, hands over her mouth. She doesn’t appear to be injured, just in shock. “My God,” Myles growls into my hair. “What were youthinking?”

My response is partially muffled by his shoulder. “Stop shouting at me.”

“I’ll shout all I want. Youlied to me. I asked you to stay down the block.”

“No, you asked me todrive to the end of the block. And I did.”

I definitely didn’t pick the right moment for semantics.

With a laugh totally devoid of humor, he pulls away slowly—and I can tell right away this isn’t his usual bad temper. I shook him up. Badly. He’s white as a ghost, sweat soaking the front of his shirt. “She could have had another weapon in the car, Taylor. Or on her person. We would have apprehended her eventually. Lisa was safe. You didn’t have to put yourself atrisk.”

I can’t argue with what he’s telling me. He’s right. What causes me to fight might be my spiked adrenaline or the humiliation of being yelled at for trying to help—no, Idid help. Whatever the reason, I can’t bring myself to back down. Maybe I’m fighting for more than just being right. It feels like I’m fighting for us. What we could be together. “I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else do the hard thing. I’ve been doing that my whole life.”

“This is about your parents again.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Jesus.”

Now it’smy temper that’s building. And it hurts. It hurts to have him bring up my parents and their influence on my choices when I’ve just learned to overcome the impact.

When I confided those things to him with so much trust.

“No, actually it’s not about them anymore. It’s about me.

It’s about participating in my own life instead of hiding—”

“Sometimes, Taylor…” He plants his hands on his hips, his upper lip curling. Hesitating. “Maybe it’s better to hide.”

“That’s what you’re doing,” I whisper. “Hiding. Running away from what happened in Boston with the kidnapping.”

“So what if I am?” He’s shutting himself off. Lights are going out. Exits are being sealed. It’s like watching a brick and mortar wall being built in fast motion capture. “I like it that way. The way it was before I accepted this job. Ilike having no connection to a case. Not getting in so deep that every failure is personal. Not having to worry that someone I care about could get taken or traumatized. Or having her fucking head blown off.Willingly.”

“Don’t group me in with what happened in Boston.”

He grinds a fist into the opposite palm, knuckles white, grooves deepening around his mouth. “I will group you in, Taylor. I can’t help it. You’re pain waiting to happen and I’m not going to be a sitting duck. I can’t fucking do it.”

“Myles—”

“What do you think a relationship between us would look like, anyway?” His expression is hard now. Closed off.

Intuition tells me he’s about to put the final nail in the coffin and there is nothing I can do to stop him. I put myself in danger and he’s not equipped to deal with that kind of trauma. That lack of control. I brought his worst fear to him on a silver platter and he’s lashing out. There’s nothing I can do about it. “Maybe you’ll come on the road with me, half pint, and we can hunt down bad guys together. Make a cool handshake and bring your students along on stakeout field trips.”

My throat starts to burn, along with the backs of my eyes. “I know you just want to push me away. I know that’s what you’re doing.”

“You should have waited at the end of the block,” he blurts, swiping sweat from his forehead. Pacing away and coming back. Opening his mouth and closing it. Silence.

So much silence.

“Maybe I made a mistake blocking the mayor in with my car when I didn’t know if the threat was serious. Okay?

Maybe it was a mistake. But even if I’d gone and waited at the end of the block like a good little soldier, there would have been a next time. A time for you to feel vulnerable—if we tried to make this work. In the future, I’d have gotten a flat tire on the side of a dark road without you. Or maybe I’d finally get the courage to go skydiving with Jude—”

The look of absolute horror he gives me would be funny if this conversation wasn’t so excruciating.

“And you’d remember I’m a liability. A threat to the emotionless life you’re so determined to lead. And you’d push me away. Best to do it now before things get too complicated, right? Get it over with?”

I take a step closer to him and his jaw bunches, fingers flexing at his sides. Almost like he’s scared I’ll touch him and he’ll crumble. Maybe he would. Maybe he’d apologize for his harsh words and we’d kiss and go home together, but our root issues would still exist.

“There is nothing emotionless about guilt,” I continue, doing my best to keep my voice even. “About the way you’re punishing yourself. Terrible things happen sometimes, but you can’t avoid the high of happiness or joy,

because you’re too afraid of falling from a great height.

Maybe I learned some of that lesson myself since we met. I just…” This is getting too hard. Standing so close to him and not walking into his arms, having that warmth permeate me when I need it the most. “You never made me any promises, Myles. Even if you wanted to. So I hereby absolve you of any guilt where I’m concerned. Okay? That being said…” Chin up, I look him right in the eye. “It’s your

loss, bounty hunter.”

“Taylor,” he rasps.

Turning on a heel, I walk away. I leave him behind me, literally and figuratively, because I don’t have another choice. I won’t get more attached when he’s made it clear that he’s an island in the middle of the ocean. Unreachable.

A loner that commits to no one. My dream is to have the opposite. A warm, committed relationship where it’s a given that we are in every adventure, every tragedy, together. No questions asked. Myles wants the road—and he never made any bones about it—so my only option is to give my statement to the police, go home and embark on day one of mending my broken heart.