Hammered Read online

  Things were getting out of hand, at least in Taz’s opinion. Pushing up on the four thick legs supporting the hefty frame, Taz was a grand Tom. Muscular with a wide chest, he’d been a successful hunter/gatherer before turning in the Fighting-for-Survival badge and exchanging it for one that read “Couch-Potato.”

  The feline padded across the bamboo floors, letting out a game-changing yawn before jumping into his hoomanz lap. Another cleaning ritual began—one that could last ten seconds or twelve days. These tongue baths could commence at any time of the day or night. He purred, looking up lazily as his tongue protruded from between his lips in a classic “blep” position.

  It was his subtle way of ending the loud discussion raging between the two combatants. After all, this was his territory—

  Not theirs.

  “As I was saying, I didn’t notice that stain on humanity, but thank you for reminding me that Eunice was there also,” Sam responded, but more quietly now that she had her furbaby in her lap. The mind wild with fantasies of throttling her friend kept itself busy while her fingers dug in behind Taz’s ears and went to work.

  “Also? Did you just say also? Then you’re admitting you did notice Detective Hunk?”

  “It would take unprecedented conjecture to get that out of what I said, and further, I admit no such thing,” she replied as she continued tending to the needs of the feline that had two thousand one hundred and twenty-nine candid shots posted on Instagram—and ten times that many followers.

  “And besides, I already stated that his name is Detective Death,” she reiterated in a whisper as she picked up her fork.

  Since one of her hands was doling out scratches and the bitchfest had quieted down, Taz had won. He batted her hand away and gave it a dominating bite for good measure. He jumped off and headed upstairs so he could reacquaint himself with the down comforter.

  “Detective Death doesn’t suit him at all,” Lyddie remarked. “But your giving him a nickname means you noticed!” her friend shot back.

  “If you mean noticed that he’s an egotistical, heartless, pompous meanie, then, yes, I noticed.”

  “Like I said … your type.”

  There was that grin back in place. Lyddie reached for the pan set in the center of the table and removed a muffin. She buttered it as Sam did a slow burn.

  “My type are men with big hearts and tons of compassion. Looks are secondary.”

  “Ha!” Lyddie blasted. “You’re a liar, liar, pants on fire, and you know it!” she said in a sing-song manner. The blonde bombshell took a bite.

  “I so wish I had poisoned those.”

  Her voice menacing, Sam’s eyes had narrowed to slits.

  “You don’t mean that,” her friend chastised. “You would have done it a long time ago if you were serious.”

  Her friend did know her.

  “As they say, ‘It’s never too late.’ And you are wrong about Detective Death. If you must know, I noticed his partner Detective Petrovich. Now there is a Siberian winter I wouldn’t mind getting snowbound in.”

  A sour expression spoilt the styling her friend had going on.

  “The blonde? Are you trying to tell me you’re interested in a man with blonde hair? Hardy har har har!” she belted out before going back to gnawing on the corn muffin.

  “It’s not the hair. It’s the eyes, the mouth, that jaw, and those six-packs doing a merengue under his shirt. Now that is one fine good-looking man—which is not important to me—not!” she emphasized with a thrust of her head.

  “Ssssuuuuurrre … uh-huh!”

  Lyddie twisted one of the many rings decorating her fingers and gave her shorty caftan a tug down to mid-thigh. Her gams being one of her best features, she made the most of the asset every chance she got.

  “It’s sad that I need to point this out, but I obviously had other things on my mind. You must be projecting to think I was checking out prospective bedmates in the midst of an interrogation. And in case you still don’t get it, I was under duress.”

  “Oh, that you were!” Lyddie cackled.

  “All that revenue flushed down the toilet,” the coffee shop owner lamented. “I mean, I do have a reserve fund for temporary emergencies, but really, I did not allow for my business being nuked by a corpse.”

  “You should have thought of that before you—”

  “Before I what? Before I what, Lyddie? Don’t you dare tell me that you think I killed Doris Cunningham! She obviously tripped and hit her head. That hole in the floor could have swallowed an elephant.”

  “Her skull was bashed,” came the confident reply.

  “And you know that because—”

  “Because of Eunice—natch. She knows someone in the coroner’s office.”

  Sam’s eyes squeezed shut. Eunice had a canary in every cage.

  “That doesn’t mean the murder links to me.”

  “Well, you did know her and … what was she doing there?” she asked before treating herself to another bite of the muffin Sam had baked for herself.

  “You expect me to know?” she replied, patting at the eyes red from crying. “I came in to open up. All I’d planned on doing was accept Clementine’s deliveries and let Mr. Connors check the floor.”

  “The floor … you’re using that excuse again?”

  The smirk widened to galactic.

  “Yes! It’s the one I’ve been talking about all evening. You remember the trouble with the plank coming loose?”

  “Right, right, right, right, right,” Lyddie mumbled. “Do you have more meatloaf because I am starving and—”

  “No! And you’re not allowed to forage in the fridge. I forbid it! I am completely pissed at you, Lyddie. All I did today was sit there and wish you were with me. I figured you’d be the one person who knew I couldn’t possibly be involved, but here you are accusing me of offing Doris, a woman I hardly knew. Well, outside of occasionally ordering take-out for the gang at Bliss Happy Homes.”

  “Isn’t using Bliss and Happy redundant? They mean the same thing, no?”

  “Random, Lyddie! Totally, inexorably random! Bliss is the woman’s name, so why you’d even ask such a ridiculous question is beyond me! Especially when you just accused me of murder!”

  Re-crossing her legs, Lyddie checked out the new shade of polish going on with her toenails.

  “I didn’t accuse you. And let’s face it, we’re all capable of murder if the right buttons are pushed and I’m just going to look to see if you have any of that ice cream you always buy from the specialty—”

  “Don’t you dare!” she barked as the chime on her cell went off.

  “Okay, okay,” Lyddie replied, holding up one palm in surrender. “I suppose she could have just fallen and conked her head. See? Maybe I don’t think you killed her. Maybe I think you’re guilty of manslaughter in not correcting the hazardous environment.”

  “As soon as I answer this, I’m so gonna show you just how hazardous an environment can be!” she snapped. “Hello?” she answered, putting on a polished tone. Her friend commemorated the mood shift with a roll of her eyes.

  “Ms. Powell? Detective Jennings here.”

  Why hadn’t she checked the caller ID?

  WHY?

  “Hello, Detective Death-ings …. I mean, Jennings,” she said, correcting herself and wrapping her right arm around her waist. Her jaw tightened in response to the unanticipated interruption.

  “Sorry to call so late, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Know what?” she answered as her friend rose to her feet. “NO ICE CREAM! F-O-R-B-I-D!” she mouthed.

  A pink tongue shot out, showing what her friend thought of being admonished. She walked to the couch instead. Striking a pose, the girl in turquoise homed in on the only end of the conversation she could overhear.

  “That you’re eliminated from our list of suspects. The hammer with your fingerprints on it was determined not to be the weapon that struck the fatal blow.”

  “Th-then �
� she was murdered by a hammer?”

  “Yes. A hammer that was struck several times against the back of her head.”

  “B-but I told you about how my prints got on the hammer. After I bent down, I moved it out of the way without thinking. I shouldn’t have done it, but it was an honest mistake. It was four thirty in the morning, for God’s sake!”

  “You picked up the hammer and moved it? What is wrong with you?” her friend mouthed, returning the favor. Using her hand, Lyddie mimed pulling a trigger and putting a bullet through her head. She then pointed at Sam.

  Sam’s face erupted into a dingo glare. It was one the feral animals used before launching a lethal attack.

  “Save it,” Jennings interjected, cutting her off. “You could have moved the hammer to St. Croix and it wouldn’t matter. The head is the wrong diameter, and none of the other tools found at the scene match either. Plus, the blows were struck by a righty. You lucked out, Ms. Powell. But the warning about leaving town still applies because we have a few more questions about the floor.”

  “The floor? What about it?”

  “I’m not the one that found a dead body, Ms. Powell, so I get to ask the questions.”

  Click.

  “The bastardo hung up on me!” she shouted, discarding the cell to the side. “And when I asked about the floor, he said, ‘I’m not the one that found the body, Ms. Powell.’ It should be ‘who’ found the body … who and not that!”

  “He did? Maybe it’s the sexual tension between you two that’s confusing him or maybe he’s not the grammar Nazi you are and—”

  “There is nothing sexual going on!” she yelped before charging her friend and snatching her by the arm. Sam yanked her off the couch, dragging her to the dining room table and pushing her into a chair.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Lyddie remarked. “But what was that about a hammer? Why on earth would you pick up that hammer unless you did hit Doris over the head and were trying to cover it by pretending you’re a jerk?”

  “I’m not a jerk.”

  “Even my nephew knows not to touch evidence at a murder scene and he’s seven. Wait,” she said, popping up. “Let me call him and ask.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, and you were right … it was a murder,” Sam said.

  “Told you. Eunice is never wrong.”

  “As I was saying,” she growled. “I’m eliminated from suspicion. The hammer wasn’t the murder weapon, and the blows were struck by a righty.”

  “You could have switched hands,” came the retort. “And what is this about the floor?”

  “Oh, dear God! You and your bingo brain! The floor is where you’re going to end up if you don’t get out of here! I can’t take you even in the best of times, but with you prattling on and on about things you know nothing about … well, you’ve got to go!“

  Shoving the silvery metallic sandals her friend kicked off upon arrival at her domain at Lyddie’s bare-naked feet, she ran and opened the front door.

  “Cheesh! I’m only asking the questions any curious person would,” her friend said, fitting her feet back into the sling-backs.

  “Curious person, yes, but friend? No! No friend would ever do what you’re doing to me, Lyddie. You’re a lost cause.”

  Right now it was hard to imagine the callous person in front of her was the same girl who stood up for her in ninth grade.

  “Does this mean you don’t want me at your shop tomorrow? You need at least three baristas.”

  “Not anymore! When this gets around town, I’ll be drinking coffee alone,” she wailed, slamming the door in her friend’s face and leaving her on the doorstep.

  Letting out a cry of agony, she stomped up the stairs, finding Taz snuggled on her bed. Pulling off her shoes, she hopped on top of the comforter and cradled him in her arms.

  “Taz, I don’t know what I would do without you, baby,” she whispered before starting to cry.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I’m ruined!”

  The proclamation uttered through sobs, the twenty-eight-year-old grabbed another handful of tissues and mopped her cheeks in the same way she’d been doing for the past two hours.

  “You don’t know that,” Lyddie replied, laying a comforting hand on Sam’s shoulder.

  “YES, I DO!”

  The rebuttal sharp, it was shouted in Sam’s office at work. JAC’s was where Sam was holed up while waiting for Quentin Barrows. He and his band of renegade criminals were scheduled to show up and fix the floor that should have been repaired correctly the first-time around.

  Bastardos!

  Bastardo was the only word she remembered from her high school Spanish class, but, ironically, it was the one that came in most handy.

  “Look at it this way,” the woman shimmering in ombre pink started. “Any criminal defense attorney will tell you that it’s much easier to get a client off for murder than to win a civil suit.”

  Sam paused long enough to throw her most damning look.

  “Where? Where do you get these things from, Lyddie?”

  “From my extensive friendlist communications. I’m the social butterfly and you’re the media recluse.”

  “I’m hardly that. I’m not the cloistered-in-the-basement psycho that you’re making me out to be, and because of the wild over-exaggeration, it makes everything you say suspect.”

  “Nope, you’re the only suspect around here!”

  She’d walked into that one.

  It was why she let the below-the-belt shot go.

  A knock at the back door.

  “Probably Mr. Barrows,” Sam stated in a matter-of-fact tonality.

  “Or Detective Hot. That was your nickname for him, no?”

  Another dirty look selected from her vast repertoire supplied an answer. She took a moment to glance at herself in the mirror while another was spent attempting to make herself presentable, running her hands through her thick, shoulder-length hair. The fringe of bangs that her hairdresser Hildy had talked her into getting weren’t happening today. While they usually highlighted her eyes in an unimaginably flattering way—today?

  They were arrows directing spectators to the red streaks running amok in her eyeballs.

  But since Barrows was a part of the reason why she’d been hysterically bawling her eyes out all night, she felt no need to hide the pain. Let him face what he did and let guilt eat his soul alive.

  “Look,” Lyddie resumed. “You may not like what I have to say, but I guarantee if Doris had tripped and not been murdered, her family would have sued you for gajillions and you’d be paying up your wazoo for the rest of your life.”

  The fire inside Lyddie was fanned and burning as brightly as the day in the schoolyard. Before Sam knew it, an image of Lyddie showing up on the metaphoric white horse flashed through her mind. It left Sam to reconcile the harpy who wouldn’t shut up with the hero who took on the school bully and won.

  “Does it really make a difference how I go bankrupt?” Sam fired back. “It’s inevitable at this point.”

  Without pausing to hear a reply, she rushed into the hallway and opened the door. There was the owner of WE DO FLOORS with his three inept worker bees.

  “Good mornin’, Ms. Powell. I don’t know what went wrong, but I came to personally make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  An apology after-the-fact was hardly going to undo anything.

  “This is not acceptable, Mr. Barrows, and very perplexing to boot. Those three men,” she said, pointing accusingly, “were pounding nails into that piece of wood for hours.”

  The called-out employees hurried by her, aiming for looking meek and competent at the same time.

  “Ms. Powell, houses are built with less effort. I swear on my great-grandmother Mabel’s grave, may she rest in peace, that the job was golden.”

  So sayeth Brad Travers, one of the inept handymen. He’d been the lead on the job, so was it any wonder he defended the work done? No. The only wonder was why he’d drawn his great-great-grand
mama into this mess. His two accomplices in the crime of slipshoddiness nodded in agreement as they unburdened themselves of their toolkits and studied the source of her complaint.

  “With all due respect to Mabel,” she responded, “the floorboard came loose two days after you fixed it, Mr. Travers. That hardly attests to a job well done.”

  Her arms folded over her chest as Lyddie followed suit in a show of solidarity not seen since Paul McCartney made a guest appearance on The Simpsons to champion Lisa’s switch to veganism. Shamed, the carpenter bent down on one knee for a closer inspection.

  “What the …. this isn’t how we left it …” Travers mumbled before blurting, “Somebody’s tampered with this because this is not our work!”

  Barrows peered over his trusted employee’s shoulder. It was no time to be relying on someone’s word without seeing it for himself.

  “Nobody tampered with anything!” Sam fired back. “You did a bad job—period! You should know civil cases are tough to win … tougher than if you’re charged with murder!”

  Lyddie caught Sam’s eye before nodding knowingly.

  Mouthing “I told you so,” Sam shoved a palm over her own face and ignored the self-serving accolade. Her friend was now invisible and did not exist as far as the shop owner was concerned.

  “I need this fixed!”

  Said with more force than necessary, she couldn’t help the outburst. With hands a’shaking, she issued herself a mental directive to calm the hell down.

  Where was the girl who could handle anything? Where was the girl who was going to conquer the world? That was what she’d promised herself after witnessing Lyddie that day. She told herself that if Lyddie could summon up that kind of courage that she could too. Because of the bravery shown, she was convinced she was capable of accomplishing anything she set her mind to.

  “Please.”

  She added the magic word in a refined breath.

  There.

  She’d satisfied her mother’s paradigm of always being polite.

  Another knock on the back door brought her face-to-face with Rudy Connors. Funny, she’d never actually seen smoke coming out of anyone’s ears before.