CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

She burst through into a kitchen smaller than her own walk-in closet, where the makings of spinach salad sat on the counter and fresh fish rested on a cutting board over the sink.

The woman with the Spanish accent had Spanish looks to go with it, dark and shapely with a lot of black hair up in a bun. She was barefoot in paisley shorts and a halter top, and Jeanette had the barrel of the gun at her temple before she'd begun to turn.

"What was that about women with guns?" Jade inquired.

Beyond the little kitchen was another sliding door, standing open to reveal an apartment identical in size and shape to Allison's, but much neater. A dusky-skinned young man had been sitting at a desk in there. He leapt to his feet in alarm.

"Hector, look out!" the woman cried.

"Move and I'll shoot her," Jeanette told him. "Then you."

He went as motionless as a kid playing statue-tag. His face was a mask of distress. "Eva …"

"It's all right," the woman said with a steadiness of tone that Jeanette would have admired under other circumstances. At the moment, she found it annoying. Steadiness was not going to serve her purpose. Terrified would have been better. Easier. People talked when they were terrified.

But something was still wrong here. Getting more wrong all the time.

"Who are you?" Hector asked. "What is this? Let go of my sister!"

"Hector, calm down," Eva said. Her voice was still steady, but Jeanette had her by the scruff of the neck and could feel her trembling.

Eva was taller than Jeanette and outweighed her by at least forty pounds, but guns had been the great equalizer since the time of the Musketeers. Presumably, antiques expert Benedict Westbrook could have told her the exact year that power had shifted from the steel edge of a sword to the deadly potential of gunpowder.

Something, though … something was very wrong here.

There was no recognition in Hector's eyes, that was one thing wrong.

And Hector, too, was wrong.

She remembered a tall, lanky figure on a skateboard. Fair skinned, long-limbed. Hector was short, almost as short as Jeanette herself. He was stocky with muscle. His skin, like his sister's, was dark.

"Please," Eva said. "Tell us what you want. We don't have much, but –"

"Shut up," Jeanette said. She stared at Hector.

He wasn't Scoot. Not even close.

"What the hell is this?" she hissed. "Where's Scoot?"

"I don't know what you mean," Eva said. "Who is Scoot?"

"Don't play with me. You, Hector, come here."

"No," Eva whispered, and now there was terror. Not for herself. "No, please, whatever this is, leave him out of it. He's my little brother."

"If he cares about you, he'll step right there into the doorway but not one inch further," Jeanette said. "And he'll tell me what went on here last night."

"What's it to you?" Hector's brows drew together.

Jeanette did not let the gun waver from Eva's head. "I'm waiting."

Hector looked to his sister, and Eva nodded almost imperceptibly. He looked then to the gun, and to Jeanette's cold eyes, and she saw his throat move as he swallowed hard and took a deep breath.

"It was very late," he said. "We were sleeping, and woke up hearing shouts and crashes from Allison's apartment. So I broke through the door – you can see, there, the new bolt was attached. Someone was attacking her. A man, big and red-haired, on top of her, trying to strangle her."

"Where did you get the gun?"

"They had knocked everything over and there was a gun on the floor," Hector said. "An old gun, like something from a cowboy movie. I picked it up and yelled for him to get off her. When he did, he came for me. I had to shoot him. I didn't even know if the gun was loaded, but it was, and I shot him in the chest."

"The gun was in there?" She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "In Allison's apartment? You didn't have it?"

"No," Hector said. "It was on the floor, with other things, like it had fallen from her purse."

A light was going on in her head, but it stuttered and winked like a strobe, and what it revealed in its flashes was so outrageous that she couldn't believe it.

"The man," she said. "Did you know him?"

"I never saw him before in my life," Hector said.

"He was a stranger to us," Eva said. "Allison said he had been following her, that she had only seen him around but did not know him either."

"Do you know anyone called Steffi?"

Blank looks from them both.

"Or Stephanie? Is that Allison's middle name, maybe?"

"Her middle name starts with a D.," Eva said, more puzzled than ever. "Please, what is it that you are trying to learn? We do not understand."

"Neither do I," muttered Jeanette. Except that she was beginning to. Or, really, she did understand but her mind kept rejecting it. "What else can you tell me? What else happened last night?"

"The police came, and the paramedics," Eva said. "I had performed the first aid on the man, and I went with them to answer their questions."

"What about Allison?"

"She went to stay with her uncle," Hector said. "We have not seen her since then, but Eva was working and I was visiting our family."

"All right," Jeanette said.

She curled her lip, and Hector blanched. He probably thought that she had gotten what she wanted and was now going to kill them both. And the thought had crossed her mind, no mistake about it. When she had believed Hector to be Scoot, the one who had caused her all this trouble. But she couldn't bring herself to gun down innocent, decent people, even if Hector had done her a disservice by shooting Bigfoot.

That did leave her in a sticky situation, though. They had seen her. Hector more than Eva; Eva had only gotten a fleeting glimpse if that before Jeanette had whirled her around with the gun pressed to her skull.

She didn't like walking away and leaving more witnesses, not with Bigfoot in the hospital running his mouth and spilling his guts to the police. But, in the end and though she knew she should, she couldn't just shoot them.

"All right," she said again. "Listen, I don't want to have to hurt you. I'd like to walk out of here with no more trouble. What you did last night was brave, neighborly, and noble. But if you decide to play the hero again, Hector, you won't come off so lucky. Understand?"

"Yes," he said.

"Neither will your sister."

"I understand."

"Same goes for you, Eva," she said. "No coming after me. No calling the police. Because I will get away, and if I have to do that, I'll come back."

"We understand," Eva said. "Believe me. We both do."

Jeanette eased the gun away from her head and stepped back. Eva did not move or turn around. She stayed stock-still in the middle of the kitchen with her hands fisted at her sides. Hector was similarly immobile in the doorway. The space was so confined, and full of weapons – there was a wicked-sharp little knife right on the cutting board – that if they wanted to make her life more difficult, they could. But she would be able to shoot at least one of them, and neither of them wanted to risk it.

Leaving the kitchen door open so she could hear if they moved, she went quickly through the apartment and out into the hall. The kid was still there, playing with his Matchbox cars. Jeanette put her gun in her purse but kept her hand on it, ready to shoot through the side of the purse if Hector changed his mind about being heroic.

No other doors opened, and Jeanette didn't linger. She shed her sweater as she went down the stairs, wadding it up and stuffing it into a trash can in the lobby. Then, slinging her purse crosswise once more, she did what they wouldn't expect her to do – she stayed in the neighborhood instead of booking it as far and as fast as she could go.

There was a bar on the other side of 6th, a bar that seemed to exist solely to cater to the crowd from the upstairs pool hall. It was called the Eight Ball, and the Sunday evening crowd consisted of two men playing darts in the back, a trio of women who looked like they'd just gotten off-shift at a grocery store, and four men ranged along the bar munching peanuts and watching ESPN.

She ordered a Bloody Mary and took a small table by the front windows, which offered her a view of the apartment building's entrance. A couple of the men at the bar turned to give her a hopeful once-over, but she frostily ignored their looks.

Stirring her drink with the celery stalk, she watched the apartments and waited. No police cars came screaming up. Nor did Hector and Eva leave in a hurry with all their personal possessions. It was business as usual over there. She was a little disappointed. She hadn't expected a S.W.A.T. team or a mass exodus of panicked senior citizens, but the lack of any activity whatsoever came as something of a letdown.

It didn't matter, though.

What mattered was what she'd finally figured out.

Chagrin at her many mistakes brought heat to her face. She had leaped from one erroneous conclusion to the next, and made the entire mess more complicated than it really was. She'd blown it up into a conspiracy, given her adversaries far more credit than they deserved, and been entirely on the wrong track all along.

Ten minutes passed. It was six-forty.

A wheelchair rolled into the intersection. Walking beside it was a tall girl with a chestnut-brown ponytail and a bruised face.

Jeanette's teeth crunched crisply through the celery stalk. She spat the green stub into a napkin without taking her gaze from the window.

Hello, Scoot.

So, she was heading for home, was she? With her dashing bookstore boyfriend. Surprising. Jeanette would have thought that she'd be miles away by now.

A cool smile played about her lips. She watched the pair go inside. Let them try to manage that clunky old elevator with his wheelchair. That was a task she didn't envy.

Six-forty-five. Any minute now, Allison would be getting quite the earful from her neighbors. She'd discover that the folder was gone.

"Pardon me, miss." One of the men from the bar had decided to try his luck after all, frosty demeanor or no frosty demeanor. "That blouse looks nice … but do you know what would be better on you?"

He was pushing forty, on the chunky side, wearing dark brown slacks, a yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned, and a loosened red-yellow-tan striped tie. A fancy watch showing the time in three different cities, the tide, and the phase of the moon took up most of his wrist, and a gold varsity ring sparkled on one finger in a desperate effort to cling to long-gone youth and fitness. His hair was medium-brown and worn in a curly Michael Bolton mullet that made Jeanette flinch. She wondered if he had escaped from the used car lot over on Prewett.

"What?" she asked, meaning 'what did you say?' and not 'what would be better on me?' because she didn't think she had fully understood him.

The mullet-man took it as 'what would be better on me?' and beamed. He had a glass of beer in his hand, half-full. "Me."

It took her a few moments to figure out this exchange, and when she did, she thinned her lips and gave him the subzero glare.

"Bad line, huh?" He dropped into a chair at her table without an invitation. "Yeah, I know. Cornball. I thought about trying 'did it hurt when you fell from Heaven?' or maybe 'does your face hurt –'"

"I'm not interested," she said, using the same aural liquid nitrogen she used on telephone solicitors and petition signature gatherers.

"Come on, cut me some slack."

"Why in the world should I?"

"It's hard meeting people these days," he said. "I figure, why not take a chance? By the way, I'm Larry. And you are …?"

"Not interested," she said, inwardly fuming. Of all the times for some loser to try picking her up …

Six-fifty. By now, Allison would have heard about Hector and Eva's visitor, would know that Jade had been in her apartment. Would she notice that the folder was gone?

"Hey, it's not easy for us guys, you know," Larry said, putting on the wounded-puppy act. "Try to get to know someone, and –"

He must be a car salesman, because he could not give up. And she was supposed to place a call in a few minutes … she couldn't very well do that with him hanging over her shoulder the whole time.

She got up.

"Oh, don't go away mad," Larry said.

Just like that, she wanted to shoot him. To haul out her gun and drill him right between the eyes. Public service. Maybe not as worthy of a key to the city …

What had happened to her? Where was the cool, calculating, emotionless Jade?

Instead of plugging him, instead of even throwing the contents of her drink in his face and leaving him sputtering with tomato juice and vodka dripping from his mullet, she stalked out of the Eight Ball and into the twilight.

Six-fifty-five.

"I'm sorry. I'm a jerk."

Dear holy God, he was following her!

She felt his hand fall on her shoulder. Shaking it off, she tried to continue on her way without a word.

"I'm trying to apologize here!" Now he was getting all indignant, like it was her fault. Like she was the rude one.

"Get away from me," she said, biting off each word.

Across the street, a man who looked uncannily like Johnny Depp had paused on porch steps beside a sign reading "Palms – Cards – Dreams – Past Lives" to watch the drama unfolding. He even had Depp's bemused little smile. A couple of teenage girls on the sidewalk had been sneaking surreptitious glances at him, but now turned to see what he was looking at. A beefy older man loitering at the foot of the stairs leading up to the pool hall stubbed out his cigarette and snorted a smoky laugh, maybe at Larry the mullet-man, maybe at Jade.

Great. Now she was attracting all sorts of attention.

"Can't a guy get some credit for apologizing?" Larry the mullet-man whined.

Six-fifty-eight.

The age of chivalry truly was over. Here she was, attractive woman being hounded by an asshole on a busy street, and nobody intervened.

She walked faster. Not saying anything. Because if she spoke, she'd start to swear, and once she started swearing, she feared she'd lose her tenuous hold on her temper.

"Stuck-up bitch!" Larry shouted after her. "I said I was sorry!"

Six-fifty-nine. The low heels of her suede boots clacked on the concrete. She was passing the Greenview Apartments, which were much nicer than the dive where Allison lived. On the corner up ahead was a karate school with wide windows. As she came up even with it, seeing a bunch of mommies and a few daddies looking on with indulgent smiles while their kindergarteners pranced about in cunning little white outfits, her watch beeped the hour.

Seven o'clock.

**