CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jeanette lay wakeful, not even bothering to toss and turn. She lay flat on her back like a mannequin. Arms straight at her sides. Staring blankly at the dark ceiling.

Finally, when she turned her head and the clock told her it was three in the morning, she gave it up as a lost cause and got out of bed.

In nothing but a shortie satin nightshirt, she padded through the house switching on lights. She was unconcerned about peeping Toms. All of her windows not only had curtains and shades, but the glass was either tinted, frosted, or covered with a layer of pebbly film to make seeing in an eye-straining chore.

She had far more house than she needed. Five bedrooms, three and a half baths, sunken living room, formal dining room, entertainer's kitchen, furnished basement rec room with a full-wall river rock fireplace. Fenced and landscaped backyard with a redwood gazebo and a hot tub. Three-car garage.

What the hell, she could afford it. For a while there, she'd been doing five or six jobs a year, tax-free, at fifty grand a pop.

Her house was sparsely but expensively decorated, with the sleek lines and spare designs of modern furniture. The art on the walls was all abstract except for one Thomas Kinkaide full of pale colors and ethereal light.

A cleaning service came twice a week, as did a landscaper – he refused to be called anything so prosaic as a mere gardener – to keep up the yard. The neighborhood had a homeowner's association to keep everything nice, and a gate to keep the riffraff out. The lots were large, the houses spaced to provide cherished privacy. All Jeanette usually saw of her neighbors was the occasional upscale car backing out of a driveway, the occasional spoiled brat biking lazily along one of the curving streets.

Five bedrooms, and she only used one for sleeping. The others weren't even guest rooms, as she never had guests. One was a well-equipped home gym, one was an office where she kept her computer and files, the sunniest one in the southeastern corner was devoted to houseplants and herbs.

The last and smallest of the bedrooms was kept vacant. She went in there now, the hardwood floor satiny beneath her feet, and looked around at the eggshell-white walls.

The baby's room.

There was no baby. There never had been a baby. There hadn't been so much as a close call along the lines of a missed period or broken condom.

It wasn't as if she had any plans to start a family, any urge to become a mother. Yet, somehow, whenever she tried to think of doing something else with this room, she got a knot in her stomach.

Her own family life had been fragmentary and unreliable. Her parents had gotten married right out of high school, her father a Navy man who had knocked up his wife every time he came home on leave.

Jeanette's earliest memories were of cardboard boxes. The family had moved three times before she started kindergarten. Then her father had died – killed in a senseless training accident at a base near San Diego – and her mother Diane had been left with four young children, no job, little education and hardly any skills.

She tried getting work, no easy task for a young white woman in a region of the country where immigrants and illegals were willing to work for next to nothing. After paying a babysitter out of what pittance she was able to earn, there was hardly enough money left for to keep Jeanette and her siblings fed and clothed.

Some friends with good intentions set Diane up on dates, but not many men were keen on a widow who had four kids. Except for one. Chuck. He had been very keen on Diane … not in spite of her kids but because of them.

Even at eight years old, Jeanette had known that there was something wrong with Chuck. That it wasn't right for him to volunteer to give the girls their baths, offering to scrub their backs, wash their hair. He'd often told them what pretty little girls they were, and how much he wanted to be their special friend.

With her, it had never gone beyond talk. She didn't know whether he'd done more to Carrie and Deena, her sisters. All she knew was that she had been overjoyed when he and Diane broke up and Chuck was out of their lives.

Finally, swallowing her pride, Diane had been forced to fall back on relatives for help. She tried first with her father-in-law, but Hank Kurrell was a no-good drunk who lived in a rundown trailer huddled in the dusty foothills at the edge of a dying town on the wrong side of the San Bernardinos. Hank had shown no interest in the welfare of his grandchildren or daughter-in-law. To get rid of Diane, he had supplied her with an old car, enough cash to fill up the tank with gas, and the address of his sister, Cecilia, up in Oregon.

Aunt Cece, as she insisted she be called, was an enormously fat woman who wore flowered housedresses and kept parakeets. She had agreed to take them in, so Diane had packed them all into the car for the long ride north.

Cece worked in a candy factory which, to the severe disappointment of the Kurrell kids, was nothing like the one they'd seen in the famous movie. No edible gardens, no Oompa-Loompas, no benignly psychotic man in a purple velvet suit. Just ordinary workers, most of them women, most of them fat, packaging candies off of a conveyor belt.

For a while, with Aunt Cece, things had been okay. Not great; the house was small and Jeanette had to share a room with both of her little sisters while Mitchell slept on a cot in the laundry room. The parakeets twittered and cheeped twenty-four hours a day. But, for the first time since their father's death, they'd had enough to eat. Too much to eat when it came to candy. Cece got Diane a job at the factory and there was money for new clothes from K-Mart, and weekly trips to McDonalds and the movie theater.

It took almost a whole year of living with Aunt Cece for their bad luck to catch up with them. When it did, it came with a vengeance.

One day, when Jeanette was at the kitchen table doing her homework, her sister Carrie burst in, her face ashen and tear-streaked. Mitchell, their little brother, had been hit by a car.

He'd been playing catch, and Jeffy Ryerson had thrown the ball too hard. Without stopping to look for traffic, Mitchell had dashed into the street after it. The driver of the car had stopped long enough to see what had happened, and then, while Carrie, Deena, the Ryerson kids and Lottie Hessman watched, leapt behind the wheel and roared off.

Then, like dominoes, the rest had begun to fall. The shock of Mitchell's death had most likely contributed to Aunt Cece's stroke. Perhaps while visiting Aunt Cece in the hospital, Deena, always the frailest of the four, had gotten bronchitis that became pneumonia. The medical bills and the cost of the nursing home ate up what little they'd been able to save and Cece's house had to be sold to cover the rest, leaving Diane and the girls homeless again.

Jeanette had never met her maternal grandparents. She got a birthday card each year, with an impersonal signature and a dollar tucked inside. On Christmas, the Barnes grandparents always sent a box addressed to all the kids. It invariably held one of the standard board games – checkers, Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, Aggravation, Yahtzee – plus a package of store-bought holiday cookies. In return, Diane sent Sears Portrait Studio pictures of the children.

Diane called them when Mitchell died, and even in her own grief, Jeanette had been able to hope that maybe this tragedy would have some good, and bring them together as a family. She'd been wrong. Big Jim and Lucy had not come to the funeral. They had sent a flower arrangement as impersonal as the signatures in the birthday cards and that was all.

The family returned to southern California, where Diane worked two jobs to make ends meet. Jeanette was left in charge, though she found it impossible to discipline her wild sister, Carrie … and didn't have the heart to be too strict with poor sickly Deena.

Carrie smoked and drank, and hung around with older boys. It came as no real surprise when, at thirteen, she ran away from home and was never seen again.

Deena's lungs never fully recovered from her bout with pneumonia. On a school field trip, she had suffered an asthma attack and suffocated to death while her horrified classmates had looked on.

Perhaps those final tragedies had used up the last of the bad luck. Things had turned around for Jeanette and her mother after that. Diane got a good job at a ski resort up in the mountains, and there, in that small town that thrived during the winter season and slumbered the rest of the year, Jeanette made her first real friends.

It was also where she had made her first kill.

And somehow, she had ended up here. In this comfortable neighborhood and this wonderful house. With more money than her mother had ever dreamed of.

Jeanette looked again around the empty, unfurnished room.

The baby's room.

If there ever was a baby. If she ever dared try.

What did she want with a family anyway? It would only bring trial and struggle, grief and despair. Her mother had been so glad to be quit of the reminders of that whole ugly mess that Jeanette hadn't heard from her in years. Diane had happily settled into a new life with a new husband and two stepsons.

In her darker hours – like now – Jeanette wondered if there was a curse on the Kurrells. It would explain a lot.

Though she kept the house at a comfortable temperature year round – energy bills be damned – she shivered.

God, she hated these trips down memory lane, but lately she found herself taking them. Hashing over the past, remembering the poverty and the misery and the grinding hopelessness.

As much as she'd tried to put it behind her, it was all still there. The endless tweeting clamor of Aunt Cece's parakeets. Chuck smiling through a haze of whiskey fumes, telling her what a pretty little girl she was. Carrie screaming about the car, about Mitchell. Trying to sleep on the trundle bed, hearing Deena gasping, and waiting, just waiting for the time when her sister wouldn't be able to get a breath. Her mother, puffy circles under her eyes, aged into a hag before her time.

Not me, she'd told herself again and again during those long, wretched years. That won't happen to me.

And it hadn't. She had avoided her mother's fate. Rather than have children and watch helplessly as they died, or went bad, or grew away and apart and indifferent, she had this empty room. The baby's room for the baby that wasn't. That would never be.

This was her life, such as it was. A little hollow, maybe. A little empty. But hers, a damn sight better than anything she'd been able to reasonably hope for as a child. Her life, and she liked it.

If that damned skateboard kid didn't ruin everything.

Jeanette couldn't stand the prospect of losing what she had worked so hard to attain. The money was part of it, but her reputation was on the line too.

How could she dial one of the contact numbers that would put her in touch with Rayburn and his associates? How could she tell them what had happened? She would look like a hundred different kinds of fool. Letting her purse get stolen? They would be disgusted at her carelessness.

What was she going to do?

Finish the job, that was what she was going to do. If she was clever enough, she could do it and have Rayburn's people be none the wiser.

It would mean losing a quarter of the money. That hurt, but it wasn't going to kill her, especially when she had been promised double her usual fee. She would still stand to clear seventy-five thousand, no matter how you sliced it.

But how was she going to finish the job? They wanted her to use that specific gun. The one from the collection. The target's own gun.

She could get around that hitch somehow. It might be difficult, but it wouldn't be impossible.

Jeanette went downstairs to the kitchen. An entertainer's kitchen, the real estate agent had called it. A feature that was lost on her, for she never entertained.

Her large refrigerator and cupboards were kept well stocked. Perhaps excessively so, obsessively so. She supposed it was some holdover from her childhood, when there had so rarely been enough to eat. An overcompensation.

She took out the makings of a ham sandwich, supplemented it with carrot sticks and a glass of milk, and carried her post-midnight meal back up to her bedroom.

It wasn't the money and it wasn't the gun. If either or even both of those things had been the real problem, Jeanette wouldn't have worried.

The target. He was the problem.

Whoever he was.

There it was in a nutshell. She had not so much as glanced at the name of the man she was supposed to be killing. She didn't know who he was, or where he lived, or what he did for a living.

All she knew was that the photographs had shown a fit, healthy blond man who looked to be in his mid-twenties, but could really be as old as forty if he was diligent about his health. And that he had a sailboat, or had at least once in his life gone sailing.

Not a lot to go on. Not nearly enough to get her started.

If she contacted Rayburn, he could provide her with copies of the file. But would he? Would he agree to do it without wanting to know why she needed it? Unlikely. He'd want to know. He'd want an explanation.

No, the only thing she could do would be to retrieve the original information. If she got it all back, gun and folder and all, she wouldn't have a problem. She could carry out her assignment and no one would ever have to know.

She needed to get her stuff back.

Which meant finding the skateboard kid.

Somehow. Anyhow.

Come hell or high water, she would find that skateboard kid.

**

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hector Cesare was in the hallway when Allison got there, and for one bad moment she thought that he was trying the door to her apartment.

He was a good-looking eighteen, with a smoldering dark sullen air that the girls who went for bad boys must find irresistibly appealing. Short, compact and fit, he sported an eagle tattoo and a bracelet made of heavy silver and turquoise links.

Allison stopped short, more alarmed by what he would find in there than by the prospect of him breaking in.

She had never exchanged a cross word with Hector, not even over the Mountain Dews he sometimes pilfered from her side of the fridge she shared Eva. She knew that despite his tough-guy image, he was at heart a good guy.

He and Eva had, like phoenixes, risen from the ashes of a disastrous family. They had a father in jail, a stepfather on drugs, a mother who silently accepted regular beatings as part of her wifely due, a sister who was a burnt-out wreck of a prostitute by the time she'd turned twenty, a brother who had been killed in a drive-by shooting, another brother in jail for knifing a rival gang member, a third brother who'd been killed in a middle-school shooting, a half-sister who was pregnant at thirteen by a thirty-year-old man, and two still-younger half-siblings at home.

Eva and Hector had gotten away from all of that as untouched and unscathed as could be hoped for. Or, at least, Eva had, and was trying to save Hector by encouraging him to ignore the ridicule he got from his peers and the rest of the family, encouraging him to stay clean. He had dropped out of high school but was, with Eva's constant support, working toward getting his G.E.D., and escaped to her place whenever things got too rough at home.

Allison knew he was an okay guy, but still the sight of him at her door dumped quarts of adrenaline into her veins. That purse and its contents could tempt even the saintliest of people. The last thing she wanted was to be responsible for Hector's fall from grace after his long struggle to climb above his beginnings. She would never be able to look Eva in the eye again. Never be able to look herself in the mirror again.

Hector must have heard her, because he turned. His dark eyes were hooded and something long and thin glittered in his hand.

A stiletto.

No.

A pen.

A silver pen, and in his other hand he had a notepad. A plain brown grocery sack rested at his feet.

"Allison, hey," he said. The hooded look disappeared as he flashed her a smile. "I was just leaving you a note."

"Me? Why?"

"I owe you some sodas," he said, and nudged the bag with his toe.

Closer now, she saw that it contained two six-packs of Mountain Dew, and that her name was scribbled on the top sheet of paper. She felt ashamed of herself for jumping to conclusions.

"I would have left it in the kitchen," Hector continued, "but Eva's got to work early tomorrow and I didn't want to wake her. They work her to death at that hospital, you know?"

"Yeah," Allison said. "I wonder who ever thought it would be a bright idea to do that to med students? Run them ragged, make them try to get by on pure caffeine and three hours' sleep, and then put other peoples' lives in their hands. It'd make me crazy. I don't know how Eva does it."

"Hey, you want some good news?"

"I could really used some good news."

"Our brother Juan is getting out of jail next week."

"Oh," Allison said, thinking that this did not exactly sound like good news to her.

Juan Cesare's street name was Rattlesnake, for the tattoo on the back of his hand and for his penchant for jabbing people with sharp objects. She had never met him, but Eva had once shown her a picture, and Juan had the flat, dead eyes of something you'd expect to see sunning itself on a rock, coiled but always alert and ready to strike.

"He's coming back home," Hector said. "And Juan, he won't take any crap from Miguel. Won't let our mom take any crap from him neither. Isn't that great?"

She failed to see how it was great. It was worse and worse all the time. Miguel was the drug-using, wife-beating stepfather. She could only hope that Hector was nowhere in the vicinity when Juan and Miguel started mixing it up.

"How's school going?" she asked.

Hector shrugged and sighed. "I thought it would be easier studying for this G.E.D. test, you know, on my own. School was hard enough with teachers who don't give a shit and everyone else in the class only caring about making it to the weekend so they can get some beers and get laid."

Her high school had not been equipped with metal detectors at all of the entrances, but her fellow students had for the most part not been able to see beyond Friday either. Beers and getting laid. Rich or poor, inner city or country club, deep down everybody was exactly the same.

"Don't you give up, though," she said.

"No way," he said. "And let Eva down, like the rest of our family? No way." He put the pen and notepad back in his pocket and picked up the grocery sack. "Here you go, Allison. Besides, last time I was here you were out, so I figure I should make sure you have some next time I'm thirsty."

She laughed and took the bag. Hector gave her a grin and headed off down the hall, which at this time of the night was quiet except for the television turned up loud in Mr. Kaminski's apartment. It brayed an infomercial about the latest orange-oil cleaning product while Allison unlocked her door and went inside.

The room was not dark, enough light filtering in through the curtains and spilling past her from the hallway to let her recognize the familiar shapes of furniture. Her tension returned as she stood on the threshold, a target in the open rectangle of the door, gaze flicking from one possible hiding place to the next searching for movement.

Nothing. It all looked exactly as she'd left it.

Switching on the lights, she went in and shut and bolted everything behind her. The purse, which she hadn't wanted to touch, sat beside her bed with its zippered mouth gaping. Beside it on the floor rested the miniature tape recorder and the folder. Because Allison knew where to look, she could see the corner of the manila bubble-wrap envelope that contained the gun, sticking out from under the recliner. The money, when she checked, was still under the seat.

On her way home from Jamie's, comfortable and full of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and pie, warmed by the kiss and the flirtatious exchange, she had thought that she'd be able to get into bed and forget about the purse until morning. Seeing Hector in the hallway had changed all that, and seeing the purse right there waiting for her made any thoughts of sleep impossible.

She popped open one of the lukewarm Dews and took a deep, steadying breath. Then she went back to the purse and resumed her investigation through its contents.

Next was a compact with a mirror framed in a ring of battery-operated light, the make-up bed divided into a subtle dusty-pink blusher and powder while a thin tube of lipstick – a sort of pearly cream-red shade that Allison rather liked – fitted into a notch beside an eyeliner pencil. A folding hairbrush and a slim plastic holder for tampons.

Three pens, all garden-variety ballpoints, one with the name of a downtown hotel stamped into its barrel. A matchbook from a bar on 12th Street. A box of mint-flavored Tic-Tacs. A bottle of Purell antibacterial hand gel.

She dug deeper.

A parking stub from a garage near Century Plaza. A toothpick in a paper wrapper. A crumpled receipt for a latte and a croissant from a downtown coffee stand, paid in cash, ninety-three cents in change. The ninety-three cents were loose in the bottom of the purse – three quarters, a dime, a nickel and three pennies. No other money.

No other money … no wallet. No credit cards. No identification. No keys. No business cards.

No name for the mystery blonde.

All afternoon and evening, Allison had been trying to think of some other explanation for what she'd found in the purse. Few realistic answers had presented themselves, and she'd hoped that she would find something else in there that would make her slap her head and say, "Oh, of course!"

This didn't. This made her think that maybe she'd been right after all.

The blonde wasn't carrying anything to identify her. While she might not have been thinking of a robbery in particular, there was always the possibility of some sort of accident. So she'd been careful.

"Okay," Allison said, having exhausted the purse and even turned it upside-down to shake out a few bits of lint. "The next question is … was she being hired, or doing the hiring?"

Her gut told her that the blonde was the killer. The would-be killer, anyway.

But maybe she was wrong.

Maybe the man in the photographs was the blonde's husband and she'd decided to have him put out of the way. Maybe for the insurance settlement. Maybe he was about to divorce her for some younger brainless bippy with fake California breasts and a fake California tan, and she wasn't happy with the prospect of alimony. Maybe some prenuptial agreement had come back to bite her in the butt.

Allison knew from observation of her own parents, her parents' friends and her friends' parents that nobody got more worked up about money than the people who had it. A taste of the good life left you hungry for more.

Unless you were a renegade like Scoot, who had a taste for the wild life instead.

She pushed "Play" on the tape recorder and listened to the whole thing.

It opened with the bustling sounds of a crowded restaurant. She heard a woman – the blonde? – and a man ordering drinks, ordering fish and chips. The man had a low, suave, sexy voice. The woman's was a cool contralto.

He called her Jade. Whether it was really a name, or an alias, it fit her and Allison was relieved to finally have an identity for the mystery blonde.

The way they talked suggested that they were on familiar enough terms, and maybe even more than a little bit interested in each other.

And then they were talking about the gun.

"You'll like this one. It's practically an antique, but in beautiful condition. Ivory-handled."

Allison hit "Stop" and peeked at the gun again.

Practically an antique. Beautiful condition. Ivory-handled.

And she'd thought, in listening to the first few exchanges earlier, that this was just a business lunch.

Then again, wasn't it? A kind of business, anyway.

She pushed "Play" again.

The two went on to discuss corporate cases and personal motives, and it was soon obvious that they were discussing the man in the photographs. The shirtless man on the sailboat. The target. The speaker with the suave, sexy voice was hiring Jade to kill him. He, and whoever he worked for, wanted that man dead. Jade was getting double her normal fee … a quarter now and the rest on completion …

Allison stopped the tape again and rubbed a hand across her brow. Her mind hurt. If what she had found in the envelope was only a quarter of the fee instead of the half she had assumed, that meant a grand total of a hundred thousand dollars. Forget a new car; that was a nice condo, or a small house in an outlying suburb.

A hundred thousand dollars.

And the woman, this Jade, was no stranger to killing-for-hire.

The man with the suave, sexy voice invited Jade to contemplate a dinner date with him some time. When she said she didn't think it would be a very good idea, he came right back with, Hell, I know it isn't. But think about it anyway.

Then, knowing a good exit line when he got one in, the man with the suave, sexy voice left. Allison listened as Jade finished her meal, listened as Jade moved out of the restaurant and onto the street where traffic noises replaced those of diners.

Listened, with her mouth open in a daffy, unwilling grin, to the familiar growing sound of Scoot's wheels on the pavement, the scuffle and thud as Scoot hooked the purse and knocked Jade down.

She was hearing the purse-snatching, hearing Scoot in action. The whir of wheels and Scoot's light puffs of breath, the blurred sounds as Scoot sped past pedestrians and in front of cars.

The tape reached its end sometime before Scoot got to the junkyard, and the machine turned itself off with a final resolute click.

**

CHAPTER TWELVE

Putting on yellow quilted mitts to remove the meatloaf pan from the oven, Jamie barely batted an eye. "Depends on who it is, I guess. Why?"

"No reason."

"Hell of a thing to ask a person for no reason. Is there someone you're trying to get rid of?"

"No. I was only wondering."

"You wonder this kind of thing often?"

"Not usually." She couldn't see how to help in the kitchen without getting in the way, and leaned on a counter. "So you would, depending on who it was? Like who, for instance?"

"There've been times when I thought I'd kill for a publishing contract," Jamie said, setting the meatloaf on a trivet to rest before slicing. "Not even a six-figure one; a modest advance would do. Or an agent. I'd kill for an agent. Maybe for fifty thousand, I could publish my own book and promote the heck out of it, but it wouldn't be the same. Of course, that would mean I'd have to let people actually read my stuff …"

"I'm serious, here."

He spun his chair and studied her with dark, intent eyes that could have given Nathaniel Caron or even Johnny Depp a run for his money. "The question is if I'd kill someone for money. Is it someone I have a personal beef against? Or is it a total stranger?"

"Does it matter?"

"Sure, it does. Want something to drink? I've got that vanilla-flavor Pepsi."

"Thanks." She took one from the fridge and poured it over ice. "Why does it matter?"

"If it's someone I've got a beef against," Jamie said, "someone I really hated and really wanted dead, then, no, I wouldn't do it for the money."

"You wouldn't kill them?"

"For the money." His smile was predatory, like Bruno the Japanese fighting fish. Didn't suit him. "That would take away from the purity of the revenge, wouldn't it?"

"You're weird."

"If it was a total stranger, then no, I wouldn't do it for the money either."

"What, you'd kill a total stranger for fun?"

"I wouldn't do it at all. Not to a stranger. How would I know whether that person deserved it or not? I'd only have the word of whoever hired me."

"Then they'd have to deserve it?"

"They'd have to deserve it. They'd have to have done something against me personally, or against people I cared about. Otherwise, what's it to me whether they live or die? If someone wants to hide a person to kill someone else, I think that's cowardly. It's wanting them dead, but not wanting it badly enough to risk yourself."

"Fifty thousand dollars, though," Allison said. "That's big bucks."

"Not really."

She looked around the apartment, which was nicer than hers but still no high-rent ritzy downtown condo. "No?"

"It wouldn't buy a house in this city," he said. "Wouldn't leave me set for life. Fifty grand doesn't go as far as it used to. A good car would eat up half of that, and a really good car would eat up most of it. On the other hand, if I got caught, I would be set for life … life behind bars."

"You'd get the same thing for no profit killing the person you hate," she said.

Jamie shook his head. "Not necessarily. Murder-for-hire, or assassination, or whatever you want to call it, is premeditated and in cold blood. They catch you, and they throw the book at you. Killing someone for emotional reasons … in a fit of jealous rage, say … you could argue it down to a lesser charge. If you could convincingly claim that it was a crime of passion, a heat-of-the-moment thing, and not something you planned to do. Juries are more sympathetic in those cases."

"Do you sit around and think about this stuff?"

"Hey, you're the one who brought up the subject." He dumped the baby carrots into the water and set the timer. With a fork, he speared one of the potato chunks and tested it. "These are ready. Want to drain and mash them while I slice the meatloaf?"

"Sure." She poured the pot into the colander, clouds of steam billowing into her face. "Let me get this straight … it's wrong to kill someone unless you have personal reasons? And that it's cowardly, if you have personal reasons, to hire someone else to do the job for you?"

"Basically," Jamie said, maneuvering the meatloaf from the pan onto a cutting board. Clear juice ran from it, collecting in the trench around the edge of the board.

"Interesting."

"What's this all about, anyway? Who do you want dead?"

"Nobody. Sheesh!"

"What, then? Were you offered the job? Fifty thousand dollars to kill someone? Anybody I know? Not me, is it?"

"Jamie, what kind of person do you think I am?" She dumped the potatoes back in the pot, slopped in some milk, salt, pepper and most of a stick of margarine, and plugged the hand mixer into the wall.

"A good one," he said. "But you do have your sinister side."

"Sinister!"

"Maybe not sinister," he amended. "Still, you did tell me about how you like to disguise yourself and terrorize innocent pedestrians on that skateboard of yours."

"Terrorize!"

"I have fish," he said. "My mom has the parrot."

"What?" She was thoroughly confused for a moment, then got it. "Oh. Sorry. But I don't terrorize people."

She felt like she was on her skateboard again, whirring close to the edge of a precipice. While Jamie knew that she liked to dress up as a teenage boy and go caroming along on her board, she hadn't told him about her other hobbies. He didn't know about the shoplifting, or the purses.

"You've never been out innocently minding your own business on the sidewalk when a pack of skateboarders come speeding by, have you?" he asked. "Maybe blasting their rap music. Maybe just shouting and laughing, unable to construct a sentence without using an obscenity every other word."

"I think I know those guys."

"Face it, Allison … they can be scary. How are the potatoes coming?"

"Good." She stuck the mixer in, and began mashing. Raising her voice, she said, "All right, so maybe boarders do scare regular folks. It doesn't make us killers."

"Point taken," he said, laying slabs of meatloaf on plates. "And I'm sorry for besmirching your reputation. But you did bring it up."

"I did. You like lumpy mashed potatoes, or smooth?"

"Lumpy. Gives them that homemade taste."

"Hey!" Allison cried, suddenly remembering. "You promised me the instant kind! Flakes from a box!"

"I lied," Jamie said, his grin widening. "I wouldn't eat that crap if you paid me. Not even fifty thousand dollars."

"Somehow, I don't think shows like Fear Factor would be as much of a hit if they only challenged people to eat instant mashed potatoes," she said, scooping her finger through the pot. She tasted, had to admit that they were pretty good, and flicked a wad at him.

"No food fights in my kitchen." He grabbed a dishtowel and spun it into a rope. "I'm warning you."

"You wouldn't dare," she said, turning away to reach for a large serving spoon.

The towel snapped out and stung her on the butt. She jumped, whirled.

"Wouldn't I?" he asked, still with the grin.

"You want these potatoes on your plate or over your head?"

He let go of the towel and held up blameless hands. "Truce."

"Jerk."

"Meanie."

"And to think I bought pie." She rubbed the sore spot. "That hurt, you know."

"Shall I kiss it and make it better?"

Allison scoffed. "That, I'd like to see."

"You have eyes back there?"

"Ha, ha."

Jamie puckered his lips and made kissy noises. "Bring it on over here, why don't you?"

"Smartass."

"Yours is the ass that's smarting," he said.

She pivoted and cocked her hip so that her butt was thrust jauntily in his direction. "Well?"

To her surprise, he propelled his chair forward with one strong push, curled an arm around her waist to hold her in place, and smacked a loud kiss on the rear pocket of her jeans, right where he'd scored with the towel.

"Jamie!" she yelped. She tried to pull away, he wouldn't let go, and she fell into his lap.

"Most places, it costs thirty bucks for this kind of action," he said.

"Let go of me!" She scrambled out of his lap, her usual agility abandoning her, and stood flustered in the middle of his kitchen. Everything she had said to Uncle Bob not an hour ago came back to her in a tangled, confused rush. And, having no other idea how to handle it, she approached as Scoot might – recklessly and head-on. "Was that a pass? Are you making a pass at me, Jamie Tremayne?"

He eyed her. "Not if it's going to get a pot of mashed potatoes dumped on my head."

"I'm not going to dump potatoes on you."

"Gravy?"

"Not even the carrots. Unless you're planning to throw the meatloaf."

"I wasn't."

"Making a pass?"

"Planning to throw the meatloaf."

"So it was a pass?"

"If you want it to be."

She raked her hands through her hair and let out a huff of exasperated breath. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he said. "Let's let it drop, shall we? Our dinner's going to get cold."

"Okay," she said, still looking at him.

Did she want it to be a pass? Was she interested in Jamie? He was a friend, yes, and a good one. They had a lot in common. He lived vicariously through books and she lived vicariously through other people's belongings. Neither of them much liked to talk about their pasts, and they both liked to poke fun at the craziness of the world around them.

And he was cute, with his long honey-colored hair tied back in that little black velvet Amadeus ribbon.

They filled their plates and went into the living room. His apartment, while spacious, only had a dining nook with a stout round wooden table, two chairs, a hanging light fixture, and several framed wildlife photographs – grey wolf, black bear, bobcat, mountain lion, bald eagle.

The television was on with the volume down low, and Allison saw that it was tuned to one of those adventure-race shows where teams competed in hideously grueling challenges. They went biking or hiking or kayaking or climbing their way over the world's most unforgiving terrain, driving themselves beyond exhaustion into sheer physical and emotional meltdowns, and claimed to love every minute of it.

"I thought I was an adrenaline junkie," she said, sitting down in one of the chairs, "but even I'm not crazy enough to do that stuff."

"What, you don't want to ride a mountain bike down a sheer cliff face in a thunderstorm?"

"No, not particularly."

"Looks exhilarating. You might like it."

"People get killed doing that. They don't show it on TV, but they do."

"I know. One guy got killed in Washington State not too long ago. The team above his dislodged a boulder while they were on a rock-climbing leg of the race, and it fell on him."

"Was that the guy who had to cut off his own arm with a pocketknife?"

"Different guy." His wheelchair had a lever that raised it to table-height, so that they were at the same level. "The one who cut his arm off was out hiking, not racing. And it was someplace in Utah, I think."

"Brr," Allison said. "The unforgiving wilderness, huh?"

"Yeah." He punched the Off button on the remote.

As they ate, they chatted about neighborhood stuff. She told him about the Beekers and their new headboard, and about Tisha Anthony's insistence that she get her nails done. He told her that Nathaniel Caron had been in to buy a bunch of books on parapsychology and the occult that an Atherton student had traded in for store credit, that he'd had to chase some of Jake Oberdorfer's friends out of the erotica section, and that Mama Delilah had come by to offer him a kitten.

"She thinks every used bookstore needs a resident cat," Jamie explained. "Or she just has a surplus of kittens and is desperate to unload them. I saw that she also had a 'Free Kittens' sign in the window of the pet groomer."

"Should have taken the kitten," Allison said. "You turned her down, and now she might put a curse on you."

"That's just what I'd need, thanks for the cheerful thought."

It was almost nine by the time they had finished their pie, which they heated up in the microwave and served with scoops of the vanilla ice cream Jamie found in his freezer.

All through the dinner conversation and dessert, Allison had been thinking about the incident with the towel. How she'd fallen – or he had pulled her – into his lap. His arm had been very strong. She supposed that she should have realized it … of course his arms were strong, from pushing that chair around all day.

Had it really been a pass? Had she blown a chance at something that could have been good by reacting like some skittish virgin? Or, worse, like somebody who was put off by his disability?

She helped him with the dishes over his protests, and then, as she was getting ready to go, leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

On the corner of the mouth, really, and not just a sisterly peck. She felt the smoothness of his skin and smelled spicy after-shave and understood in that instant that he must have shaved again that afternoon solely for her benefit. She let her lips linger a beat or two longer than she had intended, hearing his quick indrawn gasp.

A fluttering thrill, similar to that she got when riding her skateboard, went through her. She drew back before she could get swept away in the rush. "Thank you for dinner, Jamie."

Jamie sat in his chair gazing solemnly up at her with his dark eyes, a hesitant smile playing about his mouth. "Thank you for dessert."

"You liked the pie?"

"There was pie?"

"Very funny."

"So … out of curiosity, what was that for?"

"Maybe it was a pass."

"Was it?"

"If you want it to be."

**

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Allison didn't want to leave Uncle Bob's office. She was filled with an irrational surety that the moment she set foot back in the store, she'd see the petite blonde with the jade pendant come striding through the front doors like a gunslinger.

Irrational. Yes. It was totally irrational. There was no way for the blonde to have found her. Scoot had been well out of Century Plaza by the time she could have gotten her feet and her bearings back.

Even if someone had followed, Scoot would have lost them during the transition back into Allison. Booger might not have been the greatest guard-dog, but he would have given her some kind of indication if a stranger had been nearby.

So, though she was holding her breath in anticipation and dread, she made herself leave the safety of the office.

Betty was long gone, and business was picking up. It usually did in the afternoons, once school got out and more people left work. Weekends were the busiest, except for holiday Mondays when Uncle Bob liked to sell everything at half-off.

The Beekers had evidently decided on the headboard and were now trying to figure out how they were going to get it home. They didn't have a car; Allison knew that Mr. Beeker was a janitor up at Dixie Lanes, the bowling alley on the corner, so he walked to work. And Mrs. Beeker took the bus to the big Shop-N-Go grocery store a mile up Prewett, where she worked nights as a checker.

Uncle Bob, done dealing with one problem customer, moved on to a young guy who wanted to donate his computer. By the look of him, he was an Atherton College student who must've just upgraded, a dude who'd gotten a Dell. Sadly, the thrift store couldn't take used computers. Something about the tubes or the chemicals. Then Uncle Bob hustled over to the Beekers and offered them the services of Donny Fielding. Donny, who had played high school football before discovering beer and flunking out, was a moose whose main talent was lifting and carrying heavy things.

Allison took up a post by the donations bin, where a long table had been set up for sorting. She dragged a large cardboard box up onto the table and opened it. Clothes. Baby clothes. Though they'd been washed, the ghost-smell of old spit-up wafted out.

She took cute tiny garment after cute tiny garment from the box, inspecting each. A small hole or missing button was okay, but anything with huge rips or broken zippers went into a second bin destined for the dump. As she went, she scribbled prices onto cardstock tags and stapled them to the sleeves, cuffs, necklines or waistlines. Fifty-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, a buck twenty-nine.

Shooting wary looks at the door each time it opened, she told herself not to be so jumpy. All right, maybe she had reason to be jumpy. Maybe Scoot had gotten them both in over their heads this time.

But what, really, could the mystery blonde do? It wasn't like she'd go to the police. How would that look? Call up and report a stolen purse … one that happened to contain a firearm and a pile of cash? Not likely.

From the baby clothes, she moved on to a box of old magazines. Women's magazines, outdated copies of Cosmopolitan and Glamour and Elle. The smell lingering on these was like some Dickensian spirit, the Ghost of Perfume Samples Past, but it was a far sight better than stale baby-urp.

She bundled the magazines back-to-back and slipped each pair into a clear plastic bag, which she folded over at the top and sealed with a row of staples. Cardstock tag – ninety-nine cents. What a bargain. Double feature.

Next was a purse. Not one of her donations. It had been cleaned out, except for a balled-up gum wrapper caught in the lining. She bent a cardstock tag around the handle, stapled it. Two dollars and forty-nine cents. It could go hang on the rack with the rest of the purses, backpacks, fanny packs and tote bags … some of which were hers.

That was the trick, one of the perks of her job. Once she had gone through the purses, spying into the lives of the women who'd owned them, she always brought them here. The purses, maybe the occasional wallet or scarf or pair of gloves. They'd be tagged and put on display, and if anyone should ever happen along who recognized a particular bag, well, Sherwood Second-Hand got donations all the time. Often anonymously. There were mornings when Uncle Bob or Allison showed up to unlock and found the bin so full that the excess had been piled against the front doors.

Oh, but she wished she had gone through the rest of the buttercream-leather purse. She had been so spooked that she'd only wanted to get out, get away. Not wanting to find anything more. Anything worse.

What could be worse?

Opening a plastic grocery sack that bulged with someone's unwanted shoes, Allison made a wry noise. She could have found a severed hand in there, for gosh sakes … that would have been worse. Or hard drugs, or kiddie porn.

She had been lucky in her purse-snatching career so far to have run across comparatively few really bad things. A fair amount of pot, either in baggies or in joints, which she had thrown away. A vial that she surmised had been crack cocaine, which she had chucked down a sewer grating. Once, horrible Polaroid photos of a woman and a Doberman, which she had burned and felt unclean for days afterward.

Maybe, she thought as she lined up the individual shoes in hopes of finding their mates, she shouldn't look through the rest of the blonde's purse after all. Maybe she should stuff everything back in there, weight it with a couple of bricks from the vacant lot, and toss the whole thing into the river.

Sneaker … pump … slipper … aha! Another sneaker. Which didn't match. Leopard-print ankle boot with stiletto heel. Snazzy! The matching boot had the heel broken off, though, too bad. Into the reject pile.

Somehow, she got through her shift. She sorted, she hung up clothes, she took a turn on the register when Lyle went on break, she directed traffic as Donny single-handedly moved the sections of a donated sectional sofa into the furniture area.

By quarter to seven, her nerves had calmed. She was no longer sure that the blonde was going to walk in and accuse her, or skip right over the accusations and put a bullet between her eyes. The spent adrenaline left her feeling tired and hungry, and all she wanted was a big meal and then a long sleep with the covers pulled up over her head.

She and Uncle Bob were the last ones to leave. "Plans for tonight, Allie-girl?" he asked as he locked up.

"I told Jamie that I'd come over for dinner."

He smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Oh-ho!"

"Don't you start," she said. "We're friends, that's all."

"Nice young man, though," Uncle Bob said. "Smart as a whip."

"I don't think he's my type."

"Sweetie, you don't have a type."

"Gee, thanks. I'll go out with anybody, is that it?"

"I didn't mean it like that." He gave her a thoughtful look. "It's not the wheelchair, is it?"

"No! How shallow do you think I am?"

"Well," he said, drumming his fingers on his chin, "you are a Montgomery."

Allison stuck out her tongue. "I'm half Sherwood, aren't I?"

"Don't know," he said. "I think your mother had all her Sherwood blood transfused right out of her when she married your dad."

"So true!" Allison said, resisting with effort the urge to roll her eyes.

"Not the chair, then?"

"No, Uncle Bob, it's not the chair! If you must know, it's that I don't think I'm his type. We're friends. A guy and a girl are allowed to be friends nowadays without it having to turn into some complicated thing, you know."

"Now, how could a clever, pretty girl like you not be his type?" He regarded her skeptically. "You're not saying that … well, that Kurt Oberdorfer might be more of his type?"

"I never said that, and I'm not saying it now."

"All right, all right, your nosy old uncle will keep out of your business. See you in the morning."

He had parked in the lot between his store and Dixie Lanes, an arrangement that the bowling alley managers allowed because Bob Sherwood, along with Gus Oberdorfer, Mike Hartnet, Ralph Wilkowsky and Al Chesterton formed the core of the longest-running bowling teams Dixie Lanes had ever seen. The Sixth Street Strikers, as they called themselves, held a canned food and toy drive every Christmas, sponsored community events like egg hunts on Easter and Halloween trick-or-treating at the local shops, and took turns supervising the Little Strikers junior bowling league. If the neighborhood was a small town unto itself, that bunch comprised its town council … old white guys to a man.

Allison watched him go, then turned back down 6th and headed for Jamie's place. He didn't live above his store the way Needles and Tisha, Nathaniel Caron, and several of the other area business owners did. Instead, he had a ground-floor two bedroom unit in the Greenview Apartments, a fancier building than Allison's.

Halfway there, she remembered she had offered to bring dessert, and took a quick detour around the block to the bakery. It was two doors down from a Weight Watchers, which had always struck Allison as fiendishly sadistic.

The bakery was warm, well-lighted and redolent with brown sugar, cinnamon, dough, and chocolate. A man who looked like he had never and would never attend a Weight Watchers meeting if his life depended on it – which in fact it might – was in the process of sliding a sheet of cookies into one of the ovens. More cookies sat cooling on wire racks. They were chocolate-chip-walnut by the lumpy look, each one the size of a hubcap, and Allison's mouth watered.

She bought a Dutch apple pie from Mrs. Oberdorfer's friend Netta, another sweet-faced older lady with a hint of an accent and long pure-white braids that had probably once been as yellow as daffodils. She also caved in and bought a couple of the cookies, and sampled the broken pieces of gingerbread and shortbread piled in shallow bowls atop the glass display cases.

Walking back, she passed the Weight Watchers again just as a group of heavyset women came out. Allison felt them staring at her, at the slim girl carrying what was obviously a pie-box and a white bakery bag. The combination of resentment, envy, raw craving hunger and self-disgust in their expressions made her want to flinch.

Across Dunley from the Weight Watchers, to make matters worse, Lucky Sue's Diner was upwind and giving off powerful grease fumes. Everything at Lucky Sue's was griddle-fried or deep-fried. Burgers, bacon, chicken, onion rings, onion blossoms, fries, curly fries. It was also one of the few places in town that had deep-fried Twinkies on the menu.

A few minutes later, relieved to be away from the baleful glares of the overweight women, Allison and her pie and cookies arrived safely at Jamie's front door.

The Greenview Apartments were not totally inaptly named; it was possible to see some greenery from the windows on the east side of the building, where trees and a small neighborhood park and a parochial elementary school stood on Pine Street. Jamie, however, had a view of the covered parking slots and the alley and the stairs that climbed the side of the Eight Ball Bar to the pool hall.

He had left the door ajar for her, and she nudged it open with her foot. "Hello?"

"In here!"

His apartment was three times as large as hers and much nicer, with all of the furnishings down low and widely spaced to accommodate his chair. She had only been here a few times, once to help Donny deliver the mammoth roll-top desk, but had been given the grand tour.

The second bedroom had been turned into a study, with even more bookshelves for a guy who already spent his days surrounded by them. Here was where Jamie wrote his stories, and where he fussed over them endlessly, not wanting to send them out to magazines unless they were perfect. He had both a typewriter and a computer, and said he preferred the former for his writing while the latter was primarily used for games and surfing the 'net.

Jamie had goldfish and angelfish and neon tetras in an aquarium with a bubbling sunken ship fixture, and a single irritable Japanese fighting fish named Bruno. Bruno had elaborate scarlet and indigo fins and lived in a glass punchbowl, endlessly cruising its watery home with such menace that you expected to hear the low, thrumming theme from Jaws.

Allison found Jamie in the kitchen, aggressively bright with yellow cabinets and white tile. It was full of good cooking smells that reminded her of the kitchen at home, though certainly not of her mother. Marian only ventured into the kitchen to give instructions to the cooks and caterers.

"I brought pie," she said.

"Hostess pies from the 7-Eleven?"

"Real apple pie from the bakery." She set the box on the countertop. "How's the meatloaf?"

"Coming right along." He had potatoes boiling on the stove, a pot of brown gravy simmering, and an orange mound of baby carrots poised to go into a third pot where water steamed.

The question, which had come and gone in her mind all afternoon, popped out before she knew it was going to.

"Hey, Jamie? Would you kill someone for fifty thousand dollars?"

**

CHAPTER TEN

Elvis had gone on to another song, one Allison didn't know. Bob frowned and sat up, taking his feet off the milk crates. "Allie-girl, Allie-girl, what do you need a gun for? Has someone been bothering you?"

"It's nothing like that –"

"Some crazy guy, you just let me know and we can have that taken care of. This is a good neighborhood. We look out for ourselves and we look out for each other. Do you think I would have encouraged you to move here if I thought it was a bad place?"

"No, I –"

"So if you're not feeling safe, we have to fix that, but I'd hate to see you carrying a gun. We'll get you some of that pepper-spray stuff, sign you up for some self-defense courses. I should have thought of it sooner, a pretty young girl like you and all the times you spend out roaming, you should have something like that, just in case. But there's no sense in getting you in trouble with the law, either."

"I'm not!" Allison said, blushing hotly.

"Why do you need a gun?"

"I don't need a gun."

Bob rubbed his pate, disturbing his comb-over. "What are we talking about, then?"

"Never mind."

"Never mind? I think not. If someone’s been bugging you, following you, some stranger or boyfriend who won't take 'dumped' for an answer, I need to hear about it."

"I can take care of myself, Uncle Bob, really. Nobody's bugging me. And, sheesh, the way you're talking it sounds like you'd hire someone to –"

Her thoughts broke off with a snap, or maybe it was the decisive snap of a last puzzle piece fitting into perfect place.

"Allie?"

"Oh, whoa, hey," she murmured.

Uncle Bob, his disorderly office and his Elvis music faded out. She was thinking of the blonde in the forest green business outfit. She looked like the least likely hired killer anybody could imagine.

And yet … a gun, twenty-five thousand in cash, and that folder …

She wished she had taken a better look at the folder and its contents. Wished she had listened more closely to the tape.

"Allison, are you okay, hon?"

It was nuts. Wasn't it?

Of course it was. She had been listening to Uncle Bob talk about how in this neighborhood, they looked out for each other. How, if some creep was stalking her, she should tell him and he'd have it taken care of. Like Needles took care of the flasher that had shown his version of bratwurst to Gretchen Oberdorfer … took care of him to the tune of two broken arms and worse.

All of that floating around in her head, was it any wonder she'd come to such a conclusion about the blonde with the buttercream-leather shoulder bag? When, really, there was probably another explanation, a perfectly logical and perfectly innocent one, for the things that had been in her purse.

She shook herself. "Sorry, Uncle Bob. I got thinking about something else."

He leaned closer, his blue eyes not so much twinkling now as penetrating. "I can tell something's up, Allie-girl, something's on your mind. I promised your mother that I'd keep an eye on you, remember. While I've broken more than a few promises to my baby sister, this is one I'd like to keep."

"I'm fine," she said. "No creeps, no stalkers, no psycho ex-boyfriends. I haven't even dated anybody long enough to qualify as a boyfriend, let alone an ex. What have you been telling Mom about me, anyway?"

Four years ago, at the age of eighteen, Allison had announced to her stunned family that she didn't want to go to college. That, in fact, she wanted to move out on her own, get a job, and be independent. It had not been a speech that received rave reviews from the Montgomerys. They couldn't believe that anyone, least of all one of their own children, could reject their wealth, their influence, their luxurious country-club and high-society lifestyle.

Her father waxed wroth, saying that if she wanted to do such a foolish and irresponsible thing, she'd have to do it without any help from him. The money meant for college would be put away in a trust fund and she would have no access to it until she came to her senses. The car, the cherry-red birthday Corvette, would be taken away. So would the allowance, which by then had gone up to a hundred a week. He had hoped that he could scare her into complying, but all his threats had done was to make Allison more belligerent and determined.

Her mother had been crushingly disappointed. Hilary was too caught up in her ballet career to even think of marrying yet, and Susan's mother got to have all the fun and bask in the glory when Susan and Daniel Jr. married. Marian had been banking on Allison to go to college long enough to find a husband, thereby letting her plan the idyllic storybook society wedding. The fact that Allison had no interest in prospective bridegrooms mattered not one bit in these maternal dreams, which were so brutally trampled underfoot by Allison's uncaring, callous, selfish desire to lead her own life.

Finally, seeing that they could not dissuade her, and perhaps coming to an unwilling understanding that she really did not care about the money, the connections, and the privilege, her parents had consented to let her move out. They might even have been glad of it, since clearly, whatever her DNA, she was no true daughter of theirs in spirit.

But they had imposed one condition. A condition that her father perhaps thought of as a dismal fate guaranteed to bring Allison groveling home again. They wanted her to go to work for Uncle Bob at his thrift store. Surely this humiliation would get through to her, would teach her a lesson.

Wrong.

She'd loved the thrift store from the moment she had first set foot inside. It had been like a larger version of the purses, an entire building full of oddball items. Mostly trash, occasionally treasure.

Dealing with the donations, or with the customers, offered Allison the same secret peek into the lives of strangers that she got when rifling through the contents of a stolen purse. Everything, and everyone, had a story to tell.

There was the one woman who had undergone weight-loss surgery and came in every month to drop off the clothes she could no longer fit into, while buying smaller ones. She had told Allison, laughing and shamefaced at the same time, that once she reached her goal, she would go on a huge spending spree at the ritzy downtown department stores and blow a fortune outfitting her sleek new body, but until then she would get by on second-hand.

And there was the guy who came in every week without fail, looking for board games, which Allison suspected he sold on the Internet for a tidy profit. She had once seen him almost capering with glee when he found a set of old Lawn Darts, the kind that had been discontinued because of their deadly metal tips but which apparently sold for big bucks. Jamie said that the same guy made regular stops at the Readmore, looking for role-playing games.

"I haven't been telling her anything," Uncle Bob said, in response to Allison's question about her mother. "Only that you're fine and well, you're not starving, you're not sleeping in a cardboard box."

"As far as they're concerned, I might as well be," she said. "They'd croak if they ever saw my place."

"Well, it is a little run down," he said. "You're always welcome to the rooms above the garage, if you want."

Uncle Bob lived on Pine Street, in a long skinny house that looked tiny from the front and like a railroad car from the inside. He had a detached garage in the back, with a two-room apartment over it. At the moment, the utilities in the apartment weren't hooked up and he used it to store all the spare furnishings and possessions he'd moved out of his house to make room for his ever-growing collection of records and music memorabilia.

"I like my place," Allison said. "Besides, I'm supposed to be independent, aren't I? How could I be independent living over your garage?"

The phone hidden somewhere in the papers on the desk let out a braying buzz. Bob excavated it. "Yes?"

As he talked – to Virginia, by the sound of it – Allison let her thoughts go back to the blonde, the gun and the money. What if the blonde was a hired killer? A hit man, or hit woman if you like. Maybe things like that did happen in the real world, and not just on the cop shows.

If it was true, how pissed must she be?

How pissed, and how alarmed and scared?

Another chilly glissando ran down Allison's spine, just like the one she'd gotten when she had first seen the gun.

Pretty damn pissed. Pretty damn alarmed. Pretty damn scared.

Suppose that the blonde had just … what did they call it? Had just been offered a contract on someone's life.

Whose life?

The guy in the pictures. The muscular guy on the sailboat.

Again, the chill, spreading out through her body. She had only glanced at the photos, but had seen enough to know that the man in them had been handsome, smiling, cheerful.

So, suppose that he was the target. Suppose the blonde had been given the information, the weapon – wouldn't she have her own weapon? Allison didn't know – and the cash. The payment. Some sort of contingency. Half now, the rest on completion? That'd be fifty thousand dollars.

Fifty thousand dollars to kill someone. To take a human life.

Was that enough?

People did some pretty gross and unbelievable things for that kind of money, if reality TV shows were to be trusted. People ate live spiders and immersed themselves in tubs full of rancid animal parts for that kind of money. People lied, betrayed, and cheated.

Would they kill?

Probably.

The blonde, then. Assume the blonde is the kind of person who would accept money to shoot a guy, to murder him. She gets her preliminary payment, her gun, all the details … and then …

"And then someone steals her purse," whispered Allison, feeling pale and cold all over. "Some skateboarder knocks her down and makes off with her purse. What's she going to do? What does she have to do?"

Uncle Bob was still talking, explaining to Virginia with the aggrieved air of someone repeating himself for the umpteenth time that, no, they didn't buy used items. No, not even for store credit. It was all donations.

"She has to get her stuff back," Allison said, still whispering. "She has to find the purse-snatcher. And … and make sure nobody else knows. Ever."

"Tell him to hang on, I'll be right down," Uncle Bob finally said, in a grumpy tone. He got up and turned off Elvis. "Time to get to work, Allie-girl."

"Okay," she said, barely aware of what she was saying.

It was a strange feeling, realizing that someone wanted to kill you.

**

CHAPTER NINE

Mr. Gavins wasn't in the hall when she left. The only person she saw was three-year-old Billy Strevyk, playing with toy cars on the grubby hallway carpet. The door behind him was open, and through it issued the smell of cooking pot roast and the sounds of one of the afternoon shows, something too raucous to be Dr. Phil but not quite trailer-trash enough to be Springer.

The Strevyks had two of the units and the connecting kitchen. Mr. Strevyk had been laid off from his job on an auto assembly line and now minded the house and kids while his wife worked. Whenever their paths crossed, Allison always saw a sort of hurt befuddlement in his eyes, as if he couldn't understand how his life had come to this.

On the stairs, she passed Mr. Gavins after all. He had his now-empty pillowcase slung over one meaty, hairy shoulder and a box of Tide in his hand. There was no need for conversation; his doctor had advised him to take the stairs instead of the elevator as much as possible, and he was wheezing and sweaty-faced as he trudged up the last few steps with the air of a climber finally reaching the peak of Everest.

Her landlady was in the entryway, pushing a vacuum that wheezed almost as badly as Mr. Gavins.

"I'm telling you, Allison," she said without looking up, as if carrying on an earlier conversation, "I finally appreciate the difference between suck-and-spit, and suck-and-swallow."

If asked, Allison might have expected a woman like Teddi Lace to have a whiskey-roughened voice with a smoker's rasp. Instead, she affected a cooing little-girl voice like the actress Jennifer Tilly, which made the things she said seem even dirtier.

"Uh … yeah," Allison said.

"Swallow, you bitch," Teddi said to the vacuum. It rolled back and forth, picking up bits of paper and cat litter and spraying them out from under its undercarriage.

Ex-stripper, possibly ex-porn-star and ex-prostitute as well, she claimed she'd once had the face and figure of a living Barbie doll. Now, though, the living Barbie doll had put on fifty pounds … most of it in the chest. Each of her boobs was bigger than Allison's entire head, though considerably less firm.

Teddi had a slight pooch of a gut, a slight sag to her rear, and lots of unconvincing brassy-blonde hair in a Farrah Fawcett 'do. She slathered on too much make-up, but to Teddi's credit, she didn't do herself the further disservice of trying to shoehorn herself into clothes designed with much younger and shapelier women in mind. Instead, she was mostly seen in a succession of drawstring sweat pants and men's triple-X extra-tall flannel shirts that still had a job of it bridging the gap of her canyonesque cleavage.

Allison went around the chugging, grinding, laboring vacuum and let herself out onto the street. The sun was low, golden rays slanting like melted butter between the buildings and lending even this part of town a hazy daydream charm.

The two blocks stretched between Prewett at the top of the hill and Pine at the bottom. Prewett was a sleazy main drag, all fast food and bowling alleys and motels. Pine was quieter, tree-lined, residential.

What Allison liked best about her neighborhood was that, in a weird sort of way, it was a small town unto itself. She wouldn't have thought such a thing was really possible in the bustling but anonymous heart of the city. People still knew each other here. They talked to each other … even more, they talked about each other.

It was like living in the middle of a soap opera, where you quickly got to know all the characters and their problems. Allison hadn't been a resident of Dunley Street for two weeks before she'd learned more about the people around her than she'd ever known about the other 'good' families with whom the Montgomerys associated.

She had heard about Teddi Lace's checkered past. She had heard about Martha. She'd heard how Mike, who ran Mike's Pool Hall, had a drinking problem. And how Samuel "Needles" Jefferson from the tattoo parlor had once broken both the arms of a flasher who'd exposed himself to little Gretchen Oberdorfer … and how that had just been the beginning of the luckless pervert's punishment. She knew that Ralph the barber had lost his wife to cancer, and Al the bartender had lost two wives to divorce and was up to his eyeballs in alimony and child support payments.

Some of the secrets of the neighborhood remained secrets, though. She didn't know, nor did anyone else, exactly how Jamie Tremayne had ended up in that wheelchair. Nobody knew whether Kurt, the middle Oberdorfer son, had officially come out to his parents, or if the family was playing a game of willful ignorance and denial.

And then there were the weird kind of secrets. She didn't know what the deal was with Mama Delilah, who some people said was a voodoo queen, and others said was just the requisite crazy old neighborhood cat lady … though she did know that Mama Delilah's one milky cataract-filmed eye made her skin crawl. It was enough to make a person sympathize with that guy from the Poe story, who had chopped up the old man and buried him under the floor … here, you fiends, the beating of his hideous heart.

People said that Nathaniel Caron, who sold crystals and incense and Tarot cards, and charged forty bucks a session as a 'psychic advisor' was really about as psychic as Uncle Bob, and that the only reason he kept a roof over his head was because he bore a striking resemblance to Johnny Depp. A steady clientele of teenage girls and older ladies alike were willing to pay that forty bucks for an excuse to hold his hand and look into those dreamy dark eyes.

They also said that the little house Nate ran his business out of, which huddled between the Dunley Apartments and Red Bowl Teriyaki, had been the site of a murder back in the 1920's and that the ghost of a young woman still turned up in mirrors, window glass, and any other reflective surface.

Allison crossed the intersection on a diagonal, waving to the only car currently moving. The driver, Tina Wendmeyer from the video store up by the 7-Eleven, tooted her horn and raised a hand in return.

Once across the street, she was in the Dog Haus zone, awash in the aromatic goodness that surrounded the corner shop where the Oberdorfers had been fattening up the locals for twenty years. Her mouth watered as helplessly as that of any of Pavlov's test subjects. Hot dogs, bratwursts, salami, pepperoni, corn dogs … if it was meat in a tube shape, it was on the menu at the Dog Haus, either served hot and ready to go, or available from the deli counter.

When she had first moved here, Allison had discovered that she could easily eat two meals a day at the Dog Haus. A grilled bratwurst on a bun, served with a heaping side of Mrs. Oberdorfer's German potato salad – tender paper-thin slices of potato melting in sour cream, bacon and cheese – was sheer heaven. She had also discovered, shortly thereafter, that she didn't dare eat two meals a day there if she wanted to stay trim. Not after putting on four pounds in two weeks.

These days, she allowed herself a trip to the Dog Haus a couple of times a month, usually every other Saturday or on a special occasion.

Two doors up, past the Close Shave, was Sherwood Second-Hand. It was set back from the sidewalk, under a portico roof with a perpetual pigeon problem. Trash cans and squat, columnular ashtrays of pebbled concrete flanked the entrance.

Signs on the glass doors promised 50% Off All Red Tags, 20% Off Seniors Every Day, Early Bird Special – Buy One Get One Free All Clothing Items Before Ten A.M., and Donations Gladly Accepted.

"Sherwood Second-Hand," she said, reaching for the door. "Robbing the rich to give to the poor since 1992."

Inside, the store was spacious and well-lit by florescent fixtures. The floor was tan-flecked-with-green linoleum, the ceiling off-white. To her immediate left was a large wooden bin for donations, which was a third of the way full of bagged clothes and cardboard boxes of toys and dishes despite the posted hours. To her right, a row of changing room stalls and a rack full of rejected try-ons.

A year ago, Uncle Bob had hired teenage Jake Oberdorfer to paint murals on the interior walls. "Putting the punk's graffiti talent to good use," he had explained, grinning his patented Uncle Bob grin. As a result, the walls were almost entirely covered with images from the Robin Hood legends. Robin and Little John duking it out with quarterstaves. Friar Tuck. Maid Marian. Will Scarlet. Prince John.

Except that Allison thought that somewhere along the line, either Uncle Bob or Jake had gotten Robin Hood mixed up with William Tell and Legolas from the Lord of the Rings movies. She certainly didn't remember reading about Robin Hood shooting apples off of anybody's head, or riding a shield down the steps of Nottingham Castle in a smooth skater-move that even Scoot wouldn't be nervy enough to try.

Lyle Kane, a not-too-bright but amiable enough guy a few years older than Allison, was at one of the registers, selling a stack of puzzles to Winnie from the craft store. He bobbed his head in greeting as Allison came in. Winnie smiled cheerily and waved.

A few other people browsed the aisles. Allison saw the Beekers from one of the apartments downstairs from hers arguing over a headboard, and Caroline Dressler digging through a tray of flatware in hopes of finding a matching set.

In the toy section, Needles' girlfriend Tisha was telling their four-year-old son Isaac that he could choose one stuffed animal from the bin or one baggie of action figures – old He-Man toys, with a couple of Happy Meal prizes mixed in.

Seeing Allison, Tisha raised her voice. "You need your nails done, girl!" she said, shaking back long bronze-dyed beaded cornrows. She had gorgeous mocha skin that she refused to let Needles touch with his tattoo inks, and the kind of figure that Teddi Lace might have envied even back in the day.

"What's wrong with my nails?" Allison held out her hands and looked at them.

"They're short, they're uneven, they're bare and they're boring," Tisha said.

"Besides that."

"Besides that? Besides that, you've got a cuticle nightmare going on. Give me one hour, and you won't believe the difference."

"I bet I wouldn't," Allison said, though of course a manicure with the fancy, jazzy polishes that Tisha liked was out of the question. She couldn't very well make her transformation into Scoot with shaped, buffed, sparkling-gold nails and perfect cuticles, now, could she?

"Mama, I have this one, it little, and the hero-men?" Isaac asked, holding up a small floppy stuffed tiger and the action figures.

Tisha gazed down at him and blew out a fond sigh, and Allison had the feeling that Isaac was going to get what he wanted. Mama Delilah, the maybe-voodoo-queen, was Tisha's great-grandma. If the bloodline did possess any powers of persuasion, they'd resurfaced in the youngest generation.

"Sounds like you've got some negotiating to do," Allison said. "See you, Tish."

"Don't you forget about those nails," came Tisha's parting shot as Allison continued toward the back of the store. "I hate to have a hex put on you just to get you in my door."

Swinging metal doors opened into the thrift store's back room, which was the great land of Not-Yet. It was a hodgepodge of donated items not yet sorted and priced, broken items not yet hauled off to the dump, and holiday decorations not yet in season. A short hallway led to the staff room, where Betty Tullia was in the process of taking off her smock.

"Allison, thank goodness, I thought you might not remember," Betty said.

Her purse was open on the bench in front of the dented steel row of lockers, and Allison took an automatic peek inside. Grandma-clutter. Half-eaten rolls of Life Savers, crochet hooks, a coupon-saver with frolicking puppies on the cover, a disposable camera.

"But here I am," Allison said. She opened her own locker.

The staff room was a windowless space that also included a card table, chairs, a coffee maker, a microwave, a small fridge, the old-fashioned time clock that no one ever used, a water cooler and a single swaybacked couch with burnt orange cushions. The walls were hung with posters gleaned from Hank Cotterman's travel agency showing exotic locales like the glaciers in Alaska, Ireland's misty fields, sunny Mexico, the African savanna and that Disneyland castle in Bavaria.

The smocks were really aprons, but Uncle Bob never called them that. Maybe because Lyle Kane and Donny Fielding would balk at wearing anything called an apron. They were a bright shamrock-color, probably intended to be the famed Lincoln green of the Merry Men, with a gold bow and white arrow stitched above the lettering. Deep pockets in the front, suitable for holding a heavy stapler, pens, a bunch of the little cardboard tags used for pricing clothes and bagged toys, and a roll of stickers used for pricing other things.

"Thank you so much for doing this," Betty said. She patted her purse. "I'll take pictures. Penny is such a darling. And I'm not just saying that because she's my granddaughter. She'll be the star of the show."

"Hope so. Is Bob in the office?"

"Listening to that music of his," confirmed Betty. "'Bye, Allie."

"Bye." She pinned on her nametag – Hi! My Name is Allison! – and shut her locker.

The short hall continued on to a bathroom, and at the end of it, a flight of stairs climbed to Uncle Bob's office door. Allison could hear Elvis doing "Heartbreak Hotel," the song filled with the scratches, pops and hisses that only came from a record player.

She tapped, heard The King turned down. "C'min!" Uncle Bob said.

Allison did so. The office was even smaller than the staff room, with a tinted window so Bob could survey his domain without being seen except as a smoky shadow behind the glass.

There was not much in the way of a family resemblance between Allison's mother and uncle. Marian Sherwood Montgomery was a small graceful china doll of a woman, with a soft cloud of auburn curls and limpid, expressive sapphire eyes. Her brother Bob was tall and stocky and red-faced, with a comb-over fringe of grey all that remained of a flaming red head of hair. His eyes were a light cornflower blue, twinkling behind spectacles. Put him in a fake white beard and a red suit, and hey, presto! Santa Claus. He did it, too, every year, though no longer at his sister's family's house.

He had a monstrosity of a desk, the flesh-colored paint peeling off gunmetal steel, the top of it hidden beneath piles of papers. His chair was a wooden slat-backed swivel on wheels, which he had rocked back to the point where it was about to tip over, his feet up on a stack of milk crates, one foot bopping in time to the beat.

What had possessed her grandparents, who seemed so normal in all other ways, to name their children Robin and Marian was beyond Allison. Her only guess was that Granny Helen, who had always been hopelessly enamored of Sean Connery, had been inspired by the movie in which Connery played an aging Robin Hood.

"Allie-girl," Uncle Bob hailed.

In here, the walls were not covered with travel agency posters or fanciful murals, but concert posters and album covers. The shelves were full of records, organized in a system that made sense to no living being but Bob himself, and the pride of place in the room was given to a table where the record player sat.

"You know," Allison said, smiling, "you can get a better sound from a CD."

"Heretic." He made as if to swat her, but she was well out of reach and they both knew it.

"Smaller, too," she said. "Better storage. Because, you know, one of the operative words in CD is compact."

"Silvery Frisbees," he said. "Saucerian slipped disks. Vinyl, Allison Danielle. As God intended."

And yet, once you dug a little below the surface, there were some similarities between brother and sister. This deep and abiding love of music, for instance. True, in Marian's case it was all classical stuff and opera, while Bob's true loves spanned the big band era right up through disco, but neither could be happy without music in their lives.

"As God intended? God listens to records?"

"If He does, you can bet it's on vinyl."

Instead of going on to tease him about MP-3 players and digital playlists, she heard herself ask, "Uncle Bob, do you know anything about guns?"

**