Page 60 of A Lifetime in 30 Days
They all yelled, and when Vanna and Granny didn’t move at first, they did when the officers grew closer, putting the guns in their face. Granny dropped the pepper spray, and Frito turned to bark at the next person he thought was endangering his owner. Vanna dropped the gun she was holding.
“This isn’t my gun!” she shouted. “It was theirs, but he dropped it, so I picked it up.”
The officer closest to her shouted again, “Get your hands up!”
Frito went full on hysterical—or beyond that, because Vanna would swear the dog had barked more in this last half hour than he had his entire life. She moved quickly and picked him up. The last thing she wanted was for these cops to shoot her grandmother’s dog. Because one thing she knew for sure about some police officers: if they had no qualms shooting an unarmed man, they wouldn’t think twice about shooting a feisty dog.
“Hands up!” the officer yelled again, and this time, Vanna held up her free hand.
“My attorney is Jovani Kincaid. I’d like to call him right now before this goes any further!” she shouted back.
“That won’t be necessary,” a familiar male voice said, and she looked around the goofy officer who was standing in front of her to see Detective Beaumont.
The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. So many things were going on at once. Both intruders had been cuffed and were now sitting on the floor in her dining room. Paramedics had arrived and were looking at the wound on Ski Mask Guy’s head. They removed the ski mask, and Vanna gasped.
“That’s the guy that was in the car,” she said, and Beaumont turned his attention away from Granny, who was giving her account of what happened.
“What did you just say?” Beaumont asked.
He’d made her and Granny move from the dining room to sit on the sectional in the living room. And had watched her walk every step of the way from where, at that point, he’d stood behind her. She wore tiny boy shorts and a tank top, which was her nightwear and not an outfit for general consumption. But this was beyond her control, something she also knew Beaumont was loving.
“That guy over there is the same one I told you was sitting in that ugly brown car up the street last week,” she said.
Beaumont’s response was a curse, and she frowned. “You know who he is, don’t you?”
“Mrs. Carlson, I’m trying to get your grandmother’s statement,” he told her. “I’ll talk to you in just a moment.”
“You’ll talk to me now!” Vanna yelled, not giving a damn who heard her. “They broke into my house tonight, Detective. They had a gun, and now they’re both sitting in my dining room, being seen by paramedics like Granny and I were wrong for defending ourselves and our home.”
“I didn’t say you were wrong,” Beaumont told her. “I just want to get all your details while they’re still fresh.”
“The detail I need you to pay attention to is that the guy over there with that big gash in the back of his head was sitting in a car at the corner of my street just last week. He stared at me and I stared right back at him. But it was like he knew me, knew who I was, and now where I lived. And I think you know who he is.” She’d bet money on that.
Detective Parish entered the room with a grim look on his face. “He’s William Baylor, the cage shift supervisor at Lennox Casino,” he said, his tone edged with something like fury. “He worked with your husband.”
She sucked in a breath and blew it out in release. “So this is about that damn armored-truck robbery again. I swear, I can’t catch a break.”
“If you’d just calm down,” Beaumont said. “I’m going to get your statements, and then we’ll move on.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Vanna shouted. “You’re not the one who just faced two intruders—one with a gun—in the middle of the night.”
“Mrs. Carlson—” Beaumont began, frowning at her.
Parish rolled his eyes and said, “Will just gave a full confession about him and his cousin, Cordell, breaking in here to look for the rest of the money from that robbery back in June.”
Beaumont’s gaze returned to hers. “And why would they think it was here?” he asked. “Because they had knowledge of those bags being in your basement, wanted to see if their money was in them.”
Vanna wanted to know if there’d been any money found in those bags. Both Beaumont and Parish had made a big show of making sure she knew they’d found them in her basement, but that’s all they told her about it. Had there been money in them? And again, how the hell did those bags get there?
“You wanna tell us where you hid the money, Vanna?” Beaumont asked. “Or do you want to wait to see if either of these dumbasses will make bail. Because they’re not finished with this. The missing money is a huge incentive to go all the way in order to find it.”
Vanna doubtedgo all the waymeant what the detective was trying to imply where these guys—Will and Cordell—were concerned. If they really thought the money was in her house, why not just break in to get it after they’d seen her leave the house? How much sense did it make to wait until the middle of the night to break in when they knew people were in there? And why hadn’t that goofball Cordell shot Frito when Will directed him to? One thing she knew for certain was that if you pulled a gun out, you’d better be prepared to use it. Cordell, apparently, was not.
“Don’t try to scare me,” she said, even though fear had definitely become part of her daily diet these days. “I know my rights, and I know how this scene will play out. Now that you have a few more players in this game, you’ll learn the truth, and you can get out of my life.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Parish said. “For all we know, this could’ve been the result of them asking for the money and you refusing to give it to them.”
“Or you can get your head out of your ass,” Granny snapped.
