It was a copy of Hard Foil, the fourth book in the James Hard series by Llewellyn Bolt.

  Chapter 36

  Melody picked up the book and thumbed through it. Like the others she’d seen, it depicted a rough-hewn masculine figure on the cover, accompanied by an attractive albeit partially denuded female. Inside, more scenes written in a prose so badly composed it was almost laughable. She was grinning even before she’d finished the first paragraph.

  ‘His face was working overtime, his fists crunching and uncrunching, his biceps furling and unfurling, as he took Darla into his arms and pressed his hard lips into all of that softness.

  “Darla, darling,” he growled, his voice gravelly like concrete. “You’re mine now. Mine forever. Mine until the end of time.”

  “Ooh, James,” the pliant damsel cooed. “You’re so hard.”

  “Hard for you,” he snarled.

  “I want you, James,” she squealed. “I want you now!”

  “That’s very convenient,” he barked. “Cause you’re mine now. All mine. Mine mine mine!”’

  Giggling, Melody flipped the pages to another passage. This stuff was so bad it was good.

  ‘The villain’s face worked overtime. Corrugated, his skin the texture of burlap, he pointed the Colt Magnum at James Hard. “You won’t catch me, Hard! This is where I kill you. This is where I kill you dead. Dead, you hear me?!”

  “Not if I kill you dead first, you sack of shit.”’

  “Jeez Louise,” said Melody, flipping to a final passage near the end. “Who writes this stuff?”

  ‘She hurled herself into his ridiculously powerful, brawny arms, his muscles rippling and undulating as he caught her in midair. “Ooh, James,” she squeaked, pressing her heaving chest against his bare-chested hardness, his nipples erect like bullets and grazing her satin-skinned softness. “I love you, James. I always loved you, only I was afraid to say it. But now that you just killed my thug husband, I’ll shout it out to the world! I love James Hard so hard it hurts!”

  “And I love you, my precious,” he growled in his gravelly voice. “From now on you’re mine. Mine till the end of time!”

  She ground her perfectly shapely curvaceousness against his sculpted muscular frame until his nether regions suddenly erupted, hard like a burgeoning lava bean.’

  Melody blinked, and reread the passage. ‘Burgeoning lava bean?’ It wasn’t possible.

  She quickly flipped to the dedication. There was none. No ‘Stay Hard. Lew Bolt.’

  She flipped to the copyright page. Published by Llewellyn Bolt.

  She replaced the book on the pile, heat rising to her face.

  Oh, God. Oh, no. She’d just solved Marty’s murder!

  Bobbi watched Melody return from the bathroom, her face flushed, looking anxious. She frowned at her but Melody refused to meet her gaze. And when she picked up her utensils Bobbi could see that her hands were shaking.

  “Mel?” she asked. “Everything all right?”

  Melody nodded vigorously. “Everything fine. Perfectly fine.”

  It was obvious that everything was not fine, and Bobbi wondered if Mel had gotten a text from Rover. Rove was a great guy but unfortunately possessed with a roving eye when his girlfriend was out of town. He’d strayed before and Bobbi knew that if men strayed once they often did it again next time they got the chance.

  She hated the guy for it. Melody was the sweetest human being Bobbi knew, and anyone who hurt her was going to have to answer to Bobbi, who could do avenging angel as well as the next Wonder Woman.

  Melody then glanced along the table at Lois. “Lois?” she said, her voice tremulous. “Can I talk to you in the kitchen?”

  Lois looked surprised. “Why, is something the matter?”

  “I’d rather not say,” Mel said, then bit her lip, a clear sign of distress.

  Then she cast a glance at Bobbi and Zita. “Can you two join me, please?”

  Hackman, who was the only one who hadn’t been invited to this impromptu gathering, kept on chewing his chicken. If he wondered what was going on, he didn’t give any indication.

  As the delegation filed out of the dining room and into the kitchen, Bobbi was the first one to pounce on her friend. “What’s going on? Is it Rover? Has he been cheating on you again? Cause if he has, I swear to God I’ll—”

  “No, it’s not Rover—and what do you mean ‘Has he been cheating on you again?’ It was just that one time, right?” When Bobbi didn’t respond, she repeated, “Right?”

  “You know as well as I do that cheaters will be cheaters, hon,” said Bobbi, not wanting to go into detail about the second time she and Zita had caught the cheat. Rover had promised them he’d never do it again and she and Zita had vowed to keep him to his promise.

  “This is not about Rover!” Melody cried, her face now fully flushed. “This is about this!” She produced a small paperback from the recesses of her little black dress, and Bobbi’s first thought was to wonder where she’d been hiding it.

  She took the book. It was a novel written by a Llewellyn Bolt called Hard Foil.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “Llewellyn Bolt is the same guy who wrote Marty’s book!” Melody said, trying to keep her voice down. She snatched the book from Bobbi’s hands and flicked nervously through its pages. “Here. Listen to this. ‘She ground her perfect figure against his sculpted muscular frame until his nether regions suddenly erupted, hard like a burgeoning lava bean.’ Lava bean!”

  “Oh, my God,” said Zita. “She’s right. It’s the same writer!”

  Melody turned to Lois. “Where did you get this book?” she asked. “I’ve found another Lew Bolt novel in Carl Dennison’s cabin, and also one lying around our own. They were all dedicated, though. This one doesn’t have a dedication. Which can only mean…”

  She was staring at Lois, waving the little tome, her eyes wide, a vein in her neck pulsating, and Bobbi suddenly caught on.

  “You mean… Hackman?” she asked, completely aghast.

  “Hackman wrote this, didn’t he?” asked Melody. “He killed Marty!”

  Lois, who’d been listening quietly, now took the book from Melody’s hand. She was smiling. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said, placing the book on the marble kitchen countertop, right next to the remnants of the dishes she’d prepared for this great meal. “Of all the dumb brick stuff he could have pulled.”

  “Oh, Lois, we have to call the police,” said Zita now. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I’m sure you are,” said Lois, and Bobbi thought there was something different about the woman. The grandmotherly expression was gone, and her eyes were suddenly hard. Hard like lava beans, whatever they were. “Hackman, come in here!” she called out.

  “No, first we have to call the cops!” Melody hissed.

  “Hackman!”

  “That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” said Hackman pleasantly, suddenly materializing behind them. He was casually holding a shotgun in one hand, wiping his lips with the other.

  Chapter 37

  “You both did this,” said Zita, the realization suddenly hitting her.

  “Now you had to go and put your crappy novel in the crapper, didn’t you?” said Lois as she went and stood next to her husband.

  “It’s not a crappy novel. I’ll have you know I sold a thousand copies of my Jim Hard series,” said Hackman. “And I’ve gotten some pretty solid reviews, too. So don’t you give me any of that crappy novel crap, woman.”

  “Now what are we gonna do?” asked Lois, throwing up her arms.

  “Now we’re gonna finish what we started,” said Hackman, his eyes roving from Bobbi to Zita to Melody and back, and his shotgun following the same trajectory. “Who wants to go first?” he asked. “Don’t matter which one you pick. You’re all gonna get it eventually.”

  “You’re gonna kill em all?” asked Lois, who suddenly didn’t look so sweet and kind.

  “Of course I’m gonna kill em all. What do you expect me to do? Drive them down to the police station and give myself up? Are you nuts?”

  “Better do it outside. I don’t want to have to clean all that blood and brains from my kitchen cabinets.”

  “Who cares? The moment we cash in on that novel we’re selling this dump and moving to Europe.”

  “I thought you said we were moving to the Bahamas.”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Listen, you can’t kill us,” said Bobbi.

  “Why not? You’re only going to get us caught,” said Hackman.

  “No, we’re not. We won’t tell.”

  Hackman laughed. “You’re a lousy liar, lady.”

  “Lousy writer, too,” said Lois darkly.

  “Hey! I thought you loved our Janet Lee Parker novels?” asked Melody.

  “I was just buttering you up. I hate those novels. There’s only one writer for me and that’s Danielle. She’s the queen of romance for a reason. No one can touch her. Especially not you three.” She turned to Hackman. “Fine, shoot them. But I’m not cleaning up.”

  “I’ll just use the hose,” he grunted as he raised his shotgun.

  “Wait!” Bobbi yelled. “What are you going to do with our bodies? And what are you going to tell the cops when they come looking? We told Mulligan we were coming over for dinner.”

  Lois and Hackman shared a look. “We’ll just tell that moron Mulligan you took off and that’s the last we saw of you,” said Lois.

  “You drove us out here, remember? So how did we get home?”

  “Good question,” said Lois.

  “Bobbi! Stop helping them kill us!” Melody hissed.

  Zita knew what Bobbi was doing, though: she was buying them time. But time for what? Hackman was holding that gun. How were they going to get out of this alive?

  “You walked home,” said Hackman. “You drank too much and so did Lois so you decided some fresh air would do you good. And that’s the last we saw of you.” He turned to his wife. “I’ll bury the bodies in the Cohutta Wilderness. Nice and deep. By the time they’re found we’ll be long gone—if they’re ever found. That place is miles and miles of unadulterated wilderness. You’ll love it out there. Air is nice and clean. Plenty of coyotes, too. They might do the job for us.” He raised his shotgun. “Now who wants to go first?”

  “Wait!” Bobbi shouted. “Who killed Marty? Was it you, Hackman, or was it Lois?”

  Hackman cut a quick glance at his wife. She gave a curt nod. “Lois told me he was working on the final novel in his bestselling series. Only a couple more chapters to go. So we figured we’d steal the thing once it was done. Only I was in there fixing the heating last week when I happened to take a peek at the manuscript and saw that he’d outlined the final stretch down to the paragraph. So I took a couple of shots of the outline with my phone, reckoned I’d post them on dBay, whet people’s appetite. He caught me, though, and got a little upset. He’d always been fiercely protective of his work, the old fool, and he accused me of trying to steal the manuscript. He demanded I show him my phone, and when he saw the snaps I’d shot he got even more upset. Said he was going to call the cops on me.”

  “We couldn’t let that happen,” said Lois.

  “You were there?” asked Zita.

  “I was cleaning up in the kitchen. I was supposed to distract Marty while Hackman messed around in the office. Marty gave me the slip, though, and when I caught him accusing Hackman and threatening with the cops I knew we had to do something.”

  “So we went home and mulled it over some, then decided we couldn’t risk Marty calling the cops so we went back to finish him off. One blow to the head was all it took.”

  “We had no choice,” said Lois. “It was either us or him at that point. So we chose us.”

  “And now you get to choose,” said Hackman with a slight grin. “Which one of—”

  “Oh, just shoot them already,” said Lois irritably.

  And he would have done just that if Zita hadn’t grabbed a nice big carving knife from the knife block and hurled it through the air in the direction of the would-be killer.

  Chapter 38

  “Duck!” Bobbi screamed and Melody ducked.

  A gunshot roared overhead and took out a part of Lois’s kitchen cabinets and Melody yelped in distress.

  “My eye!” Hackman was yelling. “She hit me in the eye!”

  “Oh, you whiny baby,” said Lois. “It’s just a scratch. Shoot again! You missed!”

  This was too much for Melody, who’d taken a liking to the warm-hearted housekeeper and felt the sting of betrayal perhaps even more than her two co-writers.

  Rearing up from where she was hiding behind the butcher block, she grabbed the first thing she could lay her hands on, which was the knife block, then hurled it through the air in the direction of the gunman, who was rubbing his left eye with the palm of his free hand, holding the shotgun loosely in the other.

  The butcher block described a perfect arc through the air and landed with a clanking thud on top of the wannabe writer’s head. A few knives went clattering to the floor but the main projectile hit its mark and elicited a surprised yowl from Lois’s husband.

  It wasn’t enough to knock him out, though, and then Lois seemed to have had enough of this charade and was trying to yank the shotgun from her husband’s grasp.

  Bobbi, meanwhile, had also emerged from her hiding place and produced a loud growling sound, stampeding towards the duplicitous couple. Flinging herself through the air like a regular Jackie Chan, she took both Lois and Hackman’s necks in a chokehold and then dragged them to the floor, her momentum carrying them along as she launched herself up and at the couple. The threesome went down in a confused tangle of arms and legs.

  Hackman managed to squeeze off another shot but it went wide and proceeded to take out a biggish chunk of kitchen ceiling, sending a nice lamp crashing down to the floor.

  It was Zita, finally, who saved the day by grabbing the shotgun and removing it from Hackman’s fingers before he could fire off another shot and inflict any more damage.

  She pointed the gun at Hackman and said, ice in her voice, “Move and you die.”

  “Great line,” said Bobbi, extricating herself from the welter and getting up.

  Lois and Hackman were on the floor, staring into the barrel of the shotgun, which seemed to have inspired in them a sudden humility, for they remained conspicuously silent. Then Lois irritably snapped, “I asked you to do one thing, Hackman. One thing!”

  “There’s three of them and only one of me, Lois. What did you expect?!”

  “I expected you to kill them and then bury them and generally get rid of them!”

  “Enough talk,” said Bobbi, taking out her phone. “The jig is up.”

  Ten minutes later the cavalry arrived, Mulligan and Mullet the first ones to arrive. Lois and Hackman were still on the floor, with the housekeeper loudly complaining about her sciatica and Hackman grumbling about rheumatism and the nasty bump on his head.

  Both of them were finally led outside and into a waiting police van, to be exported to the police station for extensive questioning.

  “So you did it,” said Mulligan as he surveyed the scene. “You caught the killer.”

  “Killers,” Bobbi corrected the cop. “They both were in this together.”

  “They confessed, Detective Mulligan,” Melody clarified. “They killed Marty.”

  “For the money,” Zita added. “To get their hands on a piece of Marty’s millions.”

  Mulligan was shaking his head. “I’ve got to hand it to you guys. When I first laid eyes on you I thought you were nothing but trouble. And I was right. Trouble to the killer, that is.” And for what Melody thought was the first time ever, the hardened cop was actually smiling.

  “You’re very welcome, Detective,” said Bobbi. “At least now we can finally start working on our book.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You have a book to write. So will I be in it?”

  “Of course,” said Bobbi. “Only under a different name, of course. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.” She was grinning too, and it was obvious she was going to turn Mulligan into one of the main characters in the new book.

  “What about Mullet?” asked Mulligan. “Is he going to be in it, too?”

  “Sure. He’ll be the strong silent one. Very strong, very silent.”

  Mullet seemed pleased by this, at least if that waggle of his beard was any indication. It was hard to know if he was smiling, the lower part of his face entirely covered by the blond shrubbery, but Melody thought so. She’d never actually heard the sound of his voice, and now she figured she probably never would.

  “So what’s going to happen now?” asked Zita.

  “Now we’re going to take down Marty’s book from that auction site and return it to his wife. And then hopefully the ending will be rewritten by a competent writer and in due course the book will be published in as near a version to Marty’s as humanly possible.”

  “I can’t believe Hackman actually thought he could finish Marty’s book and no one would even notice,” said Zita. “The guy definitely gives new meaning to the word ‘hack.’”

  “What I can’t believe is that you caught the killer by doing a comparative analysis of two writing samples,” said Mulligan, addressing Melody. “Well done, Miss Pen. Hats off to you.”

  “Please call me Melody, Detective Mulligan,” said Melody, blushing profusely.

  “Only if you call me Mike,” he said with a flicker of amusement in his eyes.

  “Thanks… Mike,” she said. “And you, Detective Mullet. What’s your first name?”