well as his cup and saucer into a thousand pieces on the brass-and-glass coffee table in front of him. While Joanna fought the Colt out of its holster, Jim Bob sprang to his feet as well. The older man made a flying tackle, grabbing for Larry’s knees. Leaping almost three feet straight up in the air, Larry managed to dodge out of the way
“Stop or I’ll shoot,” Joanna ordered.
Instead of stopping, Larry sidestepped both Jim Bob and the chair. As the waitress scrambled to her knees, he grabbed her arm and yanked her toward him. With his forearm angled across her throat, he pinned the struggling woman to his chest, using her as a living shield between his body and Joanna’s deadly Colt.
Behind them in the lobby, horrified hotel customers started to scream. “Oh, my God,” someone wailed. “She’s got a gun. Somebody call the cops.”
“I am a cop,” Joanna shouted over her shoulder, but without taking her eyes off Larry. “Everybody down.” To Larry Dysart, she said, “Let her go!”
“You bitch,” he snarled back, his face distorted with unreasoning rage. “You goddamned, interfering bitch!”
Pressing his forearm against the terrified waitress’s throat, he held her captive against his chest while his other hand sought to retrieve something from his jacket pocket.
“Watch it, Joanna,” Jim Bob warned. “He’s going for a gun.”
Then, disregarding any possible danger to himself from Joanna’s drawn Colt, Jim Bob rose to his knees and lunged at Dysart a second time. Because the second tackle was launched from below waist level, Dysart never saw it coming. Jim Bob’s unexpected weight pounded into the waitress’s wildly flailing knees. In what seemed like slow motion, Dysart toppled over backward toward the fireplace, pulling the struggling waitress and Jim Bob with him.
All three of them hit the floor in a writhing heap of arms and legs. Before the tackle, Dysart must have managed to pull his handgun—a small-caliber pistol—loose from his pocket. The force of Jim Bob’s blow knocked it from his grip. The revolver clattered to the floor and then came skidding past Joanna’s feet, spinning across the polished surface like a deadly Christmas top. Joanna turned and knelt to retrieve it. By the time she regained her feet, Larry Dysart had rolled behind Eva Lou’s chair. When she saw him again, he was on his feet and halfway across the room, sprinting toward the door to the pool area.
The lobby erupted in a chorus of yells and shouts. A woman’s high-pitched scream rent the air. Joanna barely heard it. She paused only long enough to press Larry Dysart’s .22 into Jim Bob’s hand, then she raced after the fleeing man. By the time she threw open the gate to the wrought-iron fence to the pool, Dysart was already beyond the deep end, pushing his way past a startled gardener and scrambling over the six-foot stucco wall that separated the pool from the hotel’s back parking lot.
With the gardener standing right there, Joanna couldn’t risk a shot. She was enough of a marksman that she probably could have hit Dysart, even from that distance, but what if the terrified gardener dodged into the bullet rather than away from it?
The sore muscles she had strained during physical training earlier in the week screamed in protest as she pounded down the pool deck after him. When she reached the wall, she found it was too high for her to pull herself up.
Holstering the semiautomatic, she turned to the gardener for help. “I need a boost.”
Without a word, the man knelt down in his freshly planted petunias and folded his hands together, turning them into a stirrup. His strong-armed assist raised Joanna high enough to pull herself up onto the wall. She dropped heavily onto the other side, hitting the ground rolling, the way she’d been taught. Even so, the graceless landing knocked the breath out of her. Gasping for air, she scrambled to her feet just as Larry Dysart disappeared behind a huge commercial garbage bin.
Hoping for help, Joanna looked around. There were no cop cars anywhere in sight. If Carol Strong’s reinforcements were on the scene, where the hell were they? But Joanna knew the answer to that. Based on what she had told Carol about where they were, the cops were focused on the front of the building—on the lobby not on the loading dock.
