Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(84)

“Did you?” Paul glared at him. “Victor Maitland? The villain from the old eighties movie Beverly Hills Cop? Then you’re an even bigger chump than I am, because you could have looked up the name when she first called to make the appointment, you idiot, but you didn’t. I got it right away, but I still didn’t walk out the door, like I should have. Now she’s got both of us.” Paul turned to face me, then sighed when he saw what I’d retrieved from the sports bag. “Oh, great. There’s no bunny outfit in there, is there?”

“Sadly for you, no.” I leveled the .22 Hornet at them. “Jimmy, get your hands away from that phone, or I’ll put a bullet in your chest.”

“You do and they’ll hear the shot next door and call the cops.”

Delgado didn’t sound like a fawning photographer anymore. He sounded more like a man who might once have killed a terrified little girl. Because she didn’t understand his own suffering, of course. I was sure now that must be how he rationalized it to himself.

“I don’t care,” I said, taking careful aim. He had a black T-shirt on—to go with the theme of the place—with a yellow smiley face in the middle. It was easy to center the target. “It will be worth going to jail to kill you.”

“Suze,” Paul said. He, like Delgado, had his hands in the air. “Think about this. They have the death penalty here in California. Do you really want to go to the chair for murdering a guy whose only crime is taking really bad pictures?”

“Hey,” Delgado said, sounding offended. “I’ve won a lot of awards.”

“Seriously, dude?” Paul looked disgusted. “From who, your mom?”

“Paul.” I kicked the bag. “Stop it. There are some cuffs in here. Get them out and put them on him.”

Paul lowered his hands, looking relieved. “Oh, shit. I thought you were mad at me, too.”

“Oh, I’m mad at you, Paul,” I said, keeping the rifle level at them both. “But I need your help right now. So get out those handcuffs.”

“Fine.” Paul bent to dig through the sports bag with ill grace. “But if you think this is how it’s going to be when we’re married, Suze, with me helping you out with your crazy ghost do-gooding missions, you’re high.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Paul,” I said. “I still might shoot you, considering the mood I’m in, and I can’t promise it will be only to maim. So try to stay on my good side, okay?”

He dug more energetically through the sports bag. “I get it. You’re mad about the thing with Jesse. Maybe I went too far. I can call off the demo. It’ll cost me, but I can do it. But guns, Suze? And”—he pulled a taser from the sports bag and blanched—“these things? Really?”

Delgado, meanwhile, had his own worries.

“Who sent you?” he barked at me gruffly. “If it’s about the money, you can tell Ricky I got it.”

“It wasn’t Ricky. I don’t know any Ricky. It was Lucia Martinez.” I kept the rifle trained at the center of his smiley face T-shirt. “Remember her, Jimmy? She went to Sacred Trinity.”

Delgado actually looked a little relieved. Whoever Ricky was, he was more scared of him than he was of the memory of what he’d done to Lucia. He lowered his hands slightly.

“But that was an accident. Everyone knows that was only an accident.”

I gritted my teeth. “If I hear the word accident one more time . . . there’s a witness that says otherwise.”

Delgado looked confused. “Witness? What witness?”

“A witness who told me exactly how you killed her. How you purposefully spooked Lucia’s horse, then chased after her through the Del Monte Forest and how, when you caught up with her, you pulled her down from her horse and tossed her headfirst into a creek.”

“No.” Delgado’s color had risen in the bright studio lights. His face was now the color of his work-reddened knuckles. “None of that is true.”

“It’s all true,” I said. “I told you, there’s a witness.”

“There isn’t!” he roared, leaping from his chair just as Paul was coming toward him with the handcuffs. “There wasn’t any witness! No one else was there!”

I grinned at him smugly. “Except you, right? That’s how you’re so sure.”

Delgado, realizing he’d just confessed to murder, launched himself from behind the desk. I’d known he was going to make a move—trapped rats always do, eventually. Even tame ones, like Romeo, will attack if they feel threatened enough.

But Delgado’s mistake was that he went for Paul, not for me. Leaping out from behind the desk, he threw a brawny arm around the younger man’s throat and cried, “Stay back! Stay back, or I swear to God I’ll snap his neck.”

Paul was pretty unhappy about this turn of events. “Um, Suze?” he croaked. “I think he means it.”

“Hold still, Paul.” I strode calmly toward them, the rifle raised.

“Wh-what are you doing?” Delgado cried. “I said stay back!”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “He said stay back, Suze.”

“Duck, Paul,” I said, and when I’d closed the distance between us to about a yard, I swung the gun around like a baseball bat, hitting Delgado in the side of the head. He staggered, then slowly went down, though it took a couple more blows to convince him to stay there.