Mother-Daughter Murder Night(95)

“Gave me no choice,” Scotty yelled back. He dumped the electrical equipment onto the tarp and switched off the music, dropping the decibel level into a zone where Lana’s ears were no longer in danger of bleeding.

“She knows,” Scotty said. “Told me she’d call the cops if I didn’t bring her to you.”

“And you just rolled over and handed her your keys?” Paul was still shouting. His face was red, and there was a line of sweat that stretched across his chest from one armpit to the other.

“Dude. The sheriffs are looking for you.”

“Paul, everything’s going to be fine,” Lana said.

“Oh, sure. We’re all hunky-mc’dory here.” He walked over and got right up in Lana’s face. She didn’t flinch.

“Gimme those.” Paul grabbed Scotty’s keys out of Lana’s hand. She offered no resistance, and Paul’s plan apparently ended there. He looked at the key ring in disgust and threw it onto the tarp. Then he kicked a box, causing the half-assembled jungle gym of PVC pipe to clatter to the ground.

“You done?” Lana held herself still, her face a blank wall, while Scotty scrambled across the room to set the rig back into place.

“Why. Are. You. Here.” Paul had switched to an imitation of a tough guy, gritting his teeth and standing straight, legs wide, arms folded across the line of sweat on his T-shirt. His gruff appearance was blunted by the box fan blowing in his face, ruffling his hair up like a child who’d woken in the middle of the night with a bad dream.

“You didn’t kill that young man,” Lana said. “Ricardo Cruz.”

“I’m listening.”

“I know who did.”

Paul said nothing.

“And I need your help to prove it.”

“Why should I help you?”

“Well, first of all, it’ll get the cops off your back. They think you did it.”

Paul waved that off. “I didn’t.”

“Right. That argument’s done you real well so far. Look, Paul, if you don’t help me, I’ll go to the cops. It’d be a twofer: I’d be turning in a lowlife murder suspect in hiding and an illegal marijuana operation.”

Paul glared at her. Sweat had started dripping down his shirt toward his navel.

“Oh, and Paul? These plants aren’t on your farm anymore. They aren’t property of an LLC you set up with an online form. They’re in the yacht club. A business owned entirely by your good friend Scotty here. I’m not sure how many laws or health code regulations you’re breaking . . . but I’m sure the sheriff’s department would be happy to illuminate us.”

Paul stared at Lana. Lana and Scotty stared at Paul.

After Paul thought about it for an unreasonably long time, he gave a tight nod. They shut the door on the musky wind tunnel and made an uneasy transition down the hall to the dining room. Paul led the way with the key ring, Lana behind him, Scotty in the rear, stopping by the bar to grab three glasses of water and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.

“How do we do this?” Paul asked as they settled at a table in the empty dining room.

Lana still wasn’t sure about that.

“First, tell me why you kept the bike,” she said.

Paul eyed her over the bottle of whiskey. “I thought you believed me.”

“I do. But this is a loose end. It’s one of the reasons the sheriffs are looking for you right now. I need to know.”

“I saw a bike cluttering the side of my shop. I took it inside. End of story.”

“When?”

Paul took a swallow from his glass, then looked up at the decorative fishing nets hanging from the ceiling. “It would have been Saturday. Late morning. The day before he was found.”

“Did you know it belonged to Ricardo Cruz?”

“No!”

“Do you have any idea how it got there?”

“No, but . . .” Paul looked reflective. “That Friday night, Scotty and I went out. With those chicks from Seaside, remember?”

Scotty grimaced. “You sang Nickelback at karaoke. Talk about a mood killer.”

“Yeah, well, anyway, I got back to the Shack about midnight. I was blitzed, so I crashed on the cot in the back. But then some weird sounds woke me up around two, three a.m. I thought raccoons were raiding the dumpsters again. Then on Saturday morning Jack mentioned the bike when she got here, and I went outside to check it out.”

“You think the bike was dumped in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe.” Paul shrugged. “It makes as much sense as any of this.”

“So Saturday morning you saw this mystery bike, which maybe was dropped on your doorstep in the middle of the night. And you took it inside.”

“I thought I was being a Good Samaritan, helping someone who’d come back for it later.”

Lana ran it through her head and gave one tight nod of satisfaction. “It fits.”

“What do you mean?” Scotty asked.

“The detectives told me this theory they had, that Paul killed Ricardo and then floated him down the slough and made a fake kayak tour booking to pin the death on whoever was leading the tours when, or just before, Ricardo was discovered. I didn’t think Paul was smart enough to come up with that. No offense,” she said, turning to him.