Free EDGE OF SUSPENSE: Thrilling Tales of Mystery & Murder by R. Barri Flowers Page B

was ready to go at it
again.
    Then a shot rang out.
    The man clutched his chest and fell flat on
his face.
    I turned and saw Gabriella holding a gun in
her hand.
    "You killed him!" I said.
    "Yeah." She regarded me with eyes that had
gone cold.
    I tried to collect my thoughts as I moved
toward her. "Look, you could say you shot your husband in
self-defense."
    "That won't be necessary," a man's voice
said from behind me.
    I turned to see the Latino man I had run
into on the dock. He joined Gabriella. She handed him the gun and
he aimed it at me.
    "What the hell are you doing?" I asked.
    The man looked at Gabriella. "Should I tell
him or do you want to?"
    As he put his arm around her protectively,
she smiled at me. "You followed me home and raped me," she said as
if a prepared speech. "When my dear husband came home unexpectedly,
the two of you got into a fight. Then you shot him." She glanced at
the other man. "That's when Antonio, my husband's lawyer, came over
for a meeting with him—and shot you before you could kill me,
too."
    I watched as Antonio pulled out another gun,
aiming it at me. "After I shoot you as a rapist, murderer, and
maybe even a burglar, I'll put the murder weapon in your hands and
call the cops. They will take our statements, haul your ass off to
jail, and then Gabriella and I will live happily ever after on
Eric's money."
    I glared at Gabriella, wondering how I could
have fallen into this trap of sex, deception, and murder. More
importantly, I wondered how I could avoid the husband's fate as I
stared at the wrong end of a gun barrel.
    "Why me?" I asked her.
    Gabriella smiled and turned to her partner
in crime. "You do the honors."
    "My pleasure," Antonio said, grinning. "You
can thank your ex wife for this..."
    "What—?" My head snapped back as though I'd
been punched again.
    "I happen to work at the same law firm as
her divorce attorney. Seeing how easy it was for them to screw you
over made you a perfect patsy. It was easy to get a handle on your
routine. Work, drink, feel sorry for yourself, and hope to get
lucky with some hot dame. You get the picture."
    I did and it wasn't pretty. They were
holding all the cards and I never even got a chance to shuffle the
deck.
    Antonio bared his teeth. "So long, sucker.
Hope she was worth it!"
    The way I saw it, my only hope to get out of
this alive was to go on the attack. But with two guns pointed at me
from a safe distance, the odds were anything but in my favor.
    I had nothing to lose at this point that I
hadn't already lost.
    That was when fate stepped in and lent me a
helping hand.
    As I prepared to lunge at Antonio, a shot
rang out. Only he wasn't the one firing.
    Antonio went down in a heap. Half of his
head had been blown away.
    I turned and saw that the husband Gabriella
had shot dead had come back to life. He had managed to crawl to a
cabinet where a spare gun came in handy. And he knew just what to
do with it before collapsing again.
    I wasn't about to let lady luck down. With
the two guns Antonio had now up for grabs, I dove and got my hands
on one quicker than Gabriella could.
    Recognizing that the tables had turned
against her, she fled the houseboat.
    As I got to my feet, I suddenly felt a
stinging sensation in my shoulder and saw blood making its way down
my arm.
    I had been shot, apparently a parting gift
from Antonio as he went down for the count.
    Ignoring the pain, I made my way over to
Gabriella's husband and felt for a pulse. He was still alive and so
was I.
    Wanting to keep things that way, I dialed
911.
    * * *
    Two days later, Gabriella was arrested and
tried to sweet talk her way out of the hole she'd dug for
herself.
    Her husband survived his brush with death,
while I recovered from my injury with little more than an
occasional throbbing to remind me not to play with fire.
    We both testified against Gabriella, helping
to send her up the river long enough so that her days of tempting
men were over.
    Life for me has since drifted back