Read Online Grilled Cheese Murder: Book 4 in The Darling Deli Series by Patti Benning - Free Book Online

wrappers crumpled to the floor. The tall man who was sitting in the driver’s seat nudged her.
    “Get up already. I’ve been waiting around too long. Shouldn’t have hit your head; I think that knocked you out more than the chloroform did.”
    “What… what’s going on?” she asked. She made the mistake of moving her head to her a better look at him, and the world spun.
    “I got fed up with waiting. I need to find the kid, and you’re going to help. Come on.” He got out of the car and walked over to open her door, grabbing her and pulling her out of the vehicle by force. She tumbled unceremoniously to the ground, trying—and failing—to catch herself.
    “I don’t know where he is,” she mumbled as she struggled to her feet. Her eyes darted to the forest that seemed to press in from all sides. Should she run? No… she could barely stand, and she knew her unsteady stomach would foil any escape attempt. Maybe he would let her just stand here and lean against the car for a while. No such luck.
    “Don’t lie to me.” He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her towards the mobile home. “One of you has got to be hiding him. If it’s not you, then who is it? That blonde girl? The other guy that works at the deli? How about the private eye? One of them knows where the kid is; he doesn’t know anyone else here.”
    “None of us have seen him, I promise,” Moira managed to gasp out. Her nausea was only increasing, but she didn’t want to risk making the man even more angry by vomiting. “Who are you? Why are you after Dante?”
    “Let’s just say it’s a personal grudge. I spent eleven years in prison thanks to him,” the man sneered. “And his little traitor cousin thought he could warn him. I showed him though, didn’t I?”
    He seemed to be talking to himself when he said this. He was staring off into space, his eyes wild and bloodshot, as if he was reliving the past all over again in that moment. Moira tripped, falling to her knees in the snow. Her arm was yanked out of her assailant’s grasp, but he didn’t seem to care.
    “Even if you don’t know where the kid is hiding, you’ll still help me,” he was saying. “You can be another message for him, how would you like that? Maybe he’ll come out of hiding once I start killing his friends one by one.”
    As her mind became clearer and the remnants of the chloroform’s chemical anesthesia faded, panic began to set in. The man seemed beyond reason. He was obviously off his rocker, and had proven himself to be dangerous. And while she was thinking more clearly now, her head was still pounding and she didn’t know whether she would be able to stand. Running still seemed out of the question. Even if she could make it to the trees, where would she go? They were probably a few miles outside of town, and she didn’t even have her coat on. Her cell phone must have been dropped when the man attacked her, and she was definitely not in any state to try to find her way back to civilization on her own.
    Thinking of her cell phone brought her to her daughter and the fact that Candice had likely walked out of the back room to find her mother gone, having left behind her phone and car. What must she have thought? Hopefully Candice had noticed Moira’s absence quickly and had called the cops as soon as she could. She would just have to hope that someone was looking for her and fall back on her tried and true practice of stalling for as long as she could.
    “What makes you think Dante is even still around?” she asked. “Wouldn’t be smarter for him to have left town as soon as he knew you were looking for him?”
    “I saw his car a couple of times,” the man grunted. “Always while I was on foot, though. Oh, he’s around. He’s watching me. He has nowhere else to go, and he knows it. This is the end of the line.”
    “You said you were in prison,” Moira began, casting about for anything that she could think of to try to change his mind. “It must