CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She dialed Bigfoot's cell phone again to no avail. Where was he? What was he up to? It seemed like forever since he had called to report having found Scoot at the skate park, so where had he gone after that? Had he been spotted? Had Scoot seen him, and gotten away from him?

If that was the case, Bigfoot was exactly the type to not want to own up. He wouldn't call back and say, "Oh, by the way, I lost him."

"I fuckin' lost him," Jeanette murmured to the empty house. "Dude."

Which meant he was either still out there looking, or, more likely, he had cut and run. The phone was probably in a trash can somewhere.

He couldn't and wouldn't go far without his stuff. All his worldly possessions were in that fleabag motel room. But would he go back there? He'd be paranoid, he'd be sure that she'd be watching his place. And he'd be right, which was the most aggravating part of it. She hated being predictable. Especially hated being predictable to a semi-literate scumball drug user.

Well, then, fine. She wasn't going to do it. Was not about to spend the night staking out Smiley's Motel. That part of town, she'd be lucky to be alive by daybreak. She'd find Scoot some other way.

"But that doesn't mean you're off the fuckin' hook, Bigfoot," she said. "Oh, no. There might not be any money in taking care of you, but I promise you I'll get plenty of job satisfaction all the same."

She was too wired to even think about sleep and there was no way she'd return Rayburn's call.

In the upstairs bedroom that she'd converted to a gym, she did half an hour on the treadmill, half an hour of free weights and ab crunches, fifteen minutes on the stationary bike, and fifteen minutes of stretching.

After her shower, she slipped into an emerald-green silk robe and blended a fruit-and-yogurt smoothie, then sat down to watch the eleven o'clock news. National political bullshit, a local Amber Alert for a missing six-year-old believed snatched by his father, international political bullshit, a multiple-with-fatalities collision that had closed down part of the interstate for three hours earlier in the evening, military bullshit, a pop diva's marriage-of-the-week, weather forecast for continued sunny and warm, colorful local man riding a unicycle cross-country to raise money for male breast cancer awareness, sports bullshit.

Still no call from Bigfoot, and no answer.

She flipped channels for a while, watched most of a true-crime docudrama about a woman who'd murdered her way through five husbands, then watched all of another about a man who'd tried to hire someone to kill his father so he could inherit the family business. Sloppy jobs, all of them. They should have hired a professional.

At one in the morning she turned off the television.

Tried Bigfoot again. Nothing.

Jeanette went up to her office and got online. Finding Scoot would be a longshot, but she tried anyway. No luck. Next, she did a search for Ben Westbrook, and spent a couple of hours wading through various websites and articles.

Ben, as it turned out, was short for Benedict. He lived in Palmyra Hills and was a big-shot collector of antique weapons. But she didn't learn much that would help her kill him. No convenient museum openings or historical society functions coming up. No wife, never been married. No information about the ravishing Sophia.

She still did have to kill Westbrook one way or another. She'd accepted the job. If it meant losing a quarter of her promised fee … even if it meant not getting the extra money she'd been promised … that was too bad. She'd have to do it anyway.

It was the gun, more than the money, that worried her most. Someone had a reason for wanting Westbrook shot with his own gun. Was the job connected to his collection somehow? A rival antique-weapons buff? What was it about that gun in particular? Was it a gun with history?

An old commercial popped into her head. She couldn't even remember what product it had been for, but it had involved a history geek obsessed with an old duel.

Was this that kind of thing? Had the gun been used in a famous duel? The gun used to shoot Lincoln, or something crazy like that?

She went back to one of the historical websites and looked for pictures matching the ivory-handled pistol, but came up dry.

Her initial impulse of a plan had been to break in somehow and make it look like Westbrook had walked in on a prowler and in the course of a struggle been shot with one of the pieces from his own collection. She imagined a manly room with dark paneling and crossed cavalry sabers over the mantle, glass cases full of neatly-labeled hardware and accessories. Deep wingback chairs, leather studded with dozens of little brass tacks. Maybe a few animal heads on the walls.

She'd discarded the notion. Collectors wouldn't keep their prizes loaded.

At some point she became aware she was dozing over the keyboard. It was after six in the morning and her eyes felt like they'd been rolled in fine sand. Her nervous adrenaline had leached away, and a heavy lethargy had settled into her muscles and limbs.

Logging off, switching off, turning off.

Halfway to her bedroom, the cell phone rang.

**