A Gift for Murder

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Shock held me frozen for a moment, before I started to bend down.

"Don't move," Ellen Spencer said, "He's not hurt. Just knocked out for a while. The guy who sold this to me swore it didn't do any real harm." Her right hand rose to show me a small black box with some metal pieces sticking out of the end. A red LED light glowed on the side.

"Stun gun?" I ventured.

She nodded. "I saw you at Kirshorn's, looking at the jewelry. I could see it on your face when you realized."

I glanced at the elevator's control panel, but she stood between me and it. No way I could reach the alarm button without her zapping me. She pressed the button for the sixth floor, the highest number on the panel.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Shut up. I don't know."

We reached the third floor. When the door started to open, she pressed the "Close" button, and it immediately started to shut again.

"It was self-defense, wasn't it?" I said.

"Yes. He would have strangled me."

"He found out you'd told Kirshorn that Rupika was available?"

"I've never seen Tim so livid. He was capable of murder. I could tell."

"Why didn't you use that?" I gestured toward the stun gun.

"I didn't have it with me. I went to the loading dock to find a missing box. I didn't think I'd run into any trouble there."

"So you picked up whatever weapon was handy to defend yourself-the crowbar."

The car reached the sixth floor and the doors opened. The top floor was just a small area, featuring doors out to the roof on both the left and right.

"Pull him out," Spenser told me.

I considered my options but none looked like good choices. The best I could come up with would be to drag Scott halfway out of the car and leave him while I ran for the stairway entrance behind the elevator shaft. With any luck she'd trip over Scott, giving me a crucial head start. It would leave Scott at her mercy, but he was no danger to her. He'd gone down so fast, he probably had no idea who'd done it or how.

Unfortunately, as I leaned down to grab Scott's arms, she moved to the car's entrance and held the door open with one arm, guarding the passage with the hand holding the stun gun.

If I could heft Scott up to his feet, I might push him into her, which would also give me a chance to get away. Unfortunately just dragging his limp body was proving a challenge. He wasn't a huge man, but he had a good bit of muscle packed on that lean, six-foot frame. None of it wanted to slide easily across the gap between the car's door and the floor of the building. It took all my efforts to get him partway out of the car.

I dropped his arms. "I don't think I can do this. I don't have the benefit of any big pieces of cardboard to slide him on. That's how you got Tim's body to the trash bin, isn't it?"

"I was lucky he fell on it." Her face crumpled. "I never intended to kill him. I didn't even mean to hurt him. I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone. But he wouldn't." She shook her head and her eyes narrowed. "Try again. Get him off the elevator."

I yanked on Scott's arms again and succeeded in moving him about a foot before I was huffing and puffing and my shoulders hurt from the strain. I was so going to get back to working out at the gym regularly when this was over.