Death Waxed Over - Tim Myers [64]
By the time I got back to my apartment, I was ready for a quick sandwich and then bed. It was hard enough standing up working all day at the candleshop, but running around grilling people without letting them know why was even more of a strain. I was ready for some sleep, and hopefully I’d be rested up enough the next day to keep tracking down the person who had shot Gretel Barnett.
A ghastly crying clown was chasing me in my sleep when I jolted suddenly awake.
An explosion still echoed outside as I jumped out of bed. It sounded as if a car had blown up in the parking lot. I reached for the aluminum baseball bat I kept by the door for emergencies, but it wasn’t there. Then I remembered I’d loaned it to Suzanne for a church league game. Not wanting to go outside without some kind of protection, I grabbed the hammer on the end table by the door, and was glad I’d forgotten to return it to its proper place. I raced out of my apartment and flipped on the light to the stairs. Nothing happened. There was something wrong with the switch or the fixture; Pearly had just replaced the bulb two weeks ago. Barely pausing, I hit the first step, then I felt my feet go out from under me as I missed the second one.
The claw on the other end of the hammer saved me. Without thinking, I threw my hands out to stop my fall, and luckily, the clawed end dug into the drywall, acting as an anchor. Pearly would have a sizable hole to patch and I’d have a sore tailbone for a while, but that beat tumbling down the long flight of stairs. I crawled back up to the landing, managed to pull myself to a standing position, then limped back to my apartment for a flashlight. I found it, then studied the step where I’d tripped.
A handful of children’s marbles were scattered on the second step, as well as a few below it. It was no wonder I’d fallen.
Carefully holding the rail, I brushed the marbles aside and went outside to see what had happened. One of the trashcans I kept on the walkway was in the middle of the parking lot, far enough away from the automatic lights to keep from tripping the switch. The can was smoking, and from the heavy smell of gunpowder in the air, I knew someone had lit an M-80 firecracker. They were supposed to be illegal in North Carolina, but there were places across the border in South Carolina they could be had, for a price.
It was clear someone had used the trashcan as a ruse to get me downstairs in a hurry so I could break my neck on the steps. But who would want me dead, or hurt enough so that I would be out of the picture?
I pulled the trashcan back in its place and realized that the lights never came on. Had they been disabled as well? No, when I walked back to the stairwell door, the lights came on. So there was a dead spot in our layout. Had the attacker known that, or had he just been lucky? I didn’t want to think about the first option, since Pearly and I had installed those lights ourselves.
I collected the marbles and headed back upstairs. I decided to keep the incident to myself in case I could use the information later. Fortunately, it hadn’t turned out as the culprit had hoped, so only two of us knew about the marbles. After taking a couple of Tylenols, I stretched out on the couch with a book, knowing that sleep was most likely out of the question. To my great surprise, I woke up the next morning with a sore rear end and a burning curiosity about who had tried to kill me the night before.
I was getting ready to open the candleshop when there was a persistent knocking at the front door. I tried to ignore it, since I still needed to do a few things before we opened and I was moving a little slower than usual, but the pounding