CHAPTER EIGHT

She unzipped it slowly, thinking about the woman from whom she'd snatched it, playing a mental guessing-game. That added to the fun, seeing if she could predict what sort of objects might be in the purse based on what its owner had looked like.

Most of the time, she got it right. People were fairly predictable. But there had been a few startling exceptions.

Like the hard-faced woman with the rigid posture, who had reminded Scoot of nobody so much as the scary Englishwoman who ran that Weakest Link game show. Her purse had been iron-grey and square, but inside of it Scoot had found a high-tech vibrator, a pair of wispy hot-pink panties, and a knobby circular thing that she later learned was a cock ring.

Or the harried, overweight mother of three whose purse Scoot had relieved her of in a grocery store parking lot. There amid the half-eaten cookies, Happy Meal toys, moist towelettes and broken crayons, had been an honest-to-god switchblade with an onyx handle … and when Scoot popped the blade, it was crusted with dark stuff that sure looked like blood.

Or, her favorite, the stylish handbag that had belonged to a leggy, model-beautiful redhead in a seafoam green sheath, gold heels and a patterned seafoam and gold silk scarf. Inside, amid the usual make-up and hair spray, had been a black leather trifold wallet with a driver's license and business cards identifying the model-beautiful redhead as Adam Villiers, veterinarian.

The woman who'd owned this buttercream bag had been petite, Scoot remembered. Petite with platinum-blonde hair in a pixie cut, fair skin, aquiline features. Very pretty in a fragile, elfin way. She'd worn a jade pendant on a gold chain, and a dark green business suit.

Scoot hadn't meant to bowl her over. The bag had been heavier than she'd anticipated, and it had jerked on the blonde's arm and thrown her off her feet. But if Scoot had stopped to check on her, she would have been caught. The only thing to do was keep right on going.

A little blonde in Century Plaza. That meant a businesswoman, maybe a lawyer. She'd kind of had that Sex in the City air about her, a deceptively delicate-looking creature who could be a real ball-buster in the courtroom and kittenishly playful in bed with the defense attorney.

So, the purse would have a cell phone, maybe a Palm Pilot. Not much cash but a ton of credit cards …

The first thing she took out was a tape recorder. A mini-corder, the kind used for dictating memos. It had a tape inside. Scoot rewound it, pressed "Play."

Just as she'd thought … it was a tape of two people at a business lunch. Ordering drinks, ordering food. Something about a job. She pushed "Stop," planning to listen to the rest later. It would be boring, legal talk always was, but there might be something interesting in there too. The two people – a woman who had to be the blonde, and a man with a sexy voice – sounded like they might have something else going on.

Next was a manila folder, which probably pertained to whatever case they had met to discuss. Scoot flipped it open, saw a few photos of a handsome blond man with a great tan. Could this be Mr. Sexy-Voice on the tape, perhaps?

The papers didn't look like what she thought legal briefs should look like, but then, her only experience was derived from shows like Law and Order. She set the folder aside and delved into the purse again.

A sealed 5x7 envelope, thick and full. She took it out, turned it over.

Blank. No address, no return address, no stamp, no postmark. It had not been mailed.

She slit it open, and her jaw hit somewhere in the vicinity of her collarbones.

The envelope was stuffed with cash.

A lot of cash.

Scoot's breath escaped in a whoof. She riffled the edges of the bills with her thumb. Hundreds. The envelope was full of hundred-dollar-bills, rubber-banded together in stacks.

"That can't be right," she murmured after a quick count and some mental arithmetic. "That'd mean … that'd mean there's twenty-five thousand bucks here."

All at once Scoot felt the back of her neck prickle. She looked around. It occurred to her that she was sitting on the floor of her shabby apartment with the cash cost of a new car in her lap and the balcony drapes wide open. She couldn't think now if she'd locked the hall and kitchen doors or not.

She jumped up, drew the drapes, checked the locks. If someone had pounded on her door that very second, she would have wet her pants and maybe had a heart attack to boot. Never mind that she was twenty-two and in good shape. She would keel over, dead.

Twenty-five thousand dollars!

Was it a bribe? A payoff?

Hell, for all she knew it could be ransom money, lottery winnings, or counterfeit bills.

Who in the hell went around with 25 G's in her purse?

Scoot crammed it all back in the envelope, re-sealed it with strips of masking tape, and then crammed the envelope under the seat cushion of her ratty old recliner. She went to the hall door again and squinted through the peephole. Her nerves were buzzing, and she wouldn't have been surprised to see the petite blonde standing right there.

Or maybe a couple of guys in dark suits and sunglasses, like the FBI agents always looked in movies. The men-in-black, wasn't that what they were called? There were men-in-black, and men-in-white-coats, and if the way she was feeling now meant that she was going crazy, then maybe the men-in-white-coats would turn up, too.

The hall, as far as she could see in the distortion of the fisheye lens, was empty. She opened the door and stuck her head out. Just then, a door at the far end opened and old Mr. Gavins stepped out, shirtless, scratching his hairy potbelly with one hand and lugging a pillowcase full of laundry with the other.

She grimaced and ducked back in, quick. Closed the door. Locked it. And, for the first time since she had moved into the Dunley Apartments, hooked the chain.

The purse still sat on the carpet, its mouth gaping, the zipper-edges like a multitude of tiny teeth. There was another envelope in it. A big manila one, the padded kind used for mailing.

Telling herself that the smart thing to do would be to shove everything back in there and ditch the purse in the nearest Dumpster, Scoot nonetheless went back to it and hunkered down.

"Besides," she said into the stillness, which was only broken by the irregular herky-jerky tick of the grotesquely ugly sunburst clock over the television, "the nearest Dumpster is the one where Martha hangs out. She could use the money, yeah, but it'd get her killed."

With thumb and forefinger tweezing like pincers, she got the corner of the envelope. It was heavy. Scoot prodded the shape through the sides, both hearing and feeling the faint pip-pip-pip of bubble wrap giving way.

Solid. Lumpy.

"I'll probably regret this," she said, and tore open the end so she could peek inside.

A gun.

"Holy crap!" Scoot almost dropped the envelope, had a vision-flash of the gun going off when it hit the floor and maybe putting a bullet through her ankle, and gingerly lowered it into the seat of the recliner. She tipped it, and the gun slid out.

She was no judge; aside from an old skeet-shooting rifle that had belonged to some Montgomery ancestor or another, she had never seen a real gun up close. But it looked like an antique. A revolver, not an automatic. In good shape. Polished, shiny. The handle had the mellow, satiny gleam of ivory.

Scoot stood over the gun, rubbing the heels of her hands up and down the sides of her face. Her hands were cold, but her face was numb, so that was all right. The fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck were quivering on end and it felt like the ones on her head would have liked to do the same. Despite the stuffy heat of the apartment, she was all-over goosebumps. Glissandos of ice strummed up and down her spine.

"Shit, shit, oh shit," she whispered.

Her mind grasped desperately at straws of explanation.

The petite blonde was … um … an antiques dealer? In the movie biz, and this was a prop?

Every instinct told her otherwise. This was no prop. This was a real, actual, could-kill-you gun.

Was it loaded?

The goosebumps that had begun to settle now hunched up again.

She didn't know how to tell if it was loaded or not. Short of pulling the trigger, which she was not about to do. The neighborhood around Dunley and 6th might not be the best, but it wasn't such an urban wasteland that a gunshot would go unnoticed.

Okay. A gun.

A gun and a pile of money.

Think about this. Think about it rationally.

But Allison didn't want to think about this, rationally or otherwise. She wanted to get out, get away from the problem and let distance and routine help bring it into some sort of perspective.

Thankfully, she had just the excuse she needed. It was time to go to work.

**