CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Jeanette stared into the cop's mirror shades and felt her life flash before her eyes. Seeing once again how miserable, sucky and empty it had been only made her more determined to cling to it.

Her gut reaction was to floor the gas pedal and burn rubber out of the lot where she'd pulled over to call Rayburn. Or of drawing the gun she'd used to shoot Weasel and letting the cop have it right between the eyes … then flooring it.

He was a recruiting-poster perfect young officer, with a dusky complexion and a jaw Tom Cruise might've envied. His long, lean body could have been designed to show off his uniform. He was hatless, black hair cropped short. The brass tag affixed to his pocket read "Avery."

Behind him, idling, was a patrol car. A chunky older cop filled the passenger seat, observing through the windshield as he ate not a doughnut but one of those nutritious energy-bar things. By the look on his face, he found it to be about as appetizing as a piece of cardboard. He would be slow, too slow to get his lard ass behind the wheel in time to give chase if she roared away. They might already have noted down her plates. She could change her plates. Could ditch the entire car.

Officer Avery rapped on the window again. She could see his eyebrows over the sunglasses, raised inquisitively. He smiled. It wasn't Rayburn's smile. Avery's teeth were the tiniest bit crooked, which was probably why he had been forced to resort to a career in law enforcement instead of modeling. Maybe, once he had earned the money for some cosmetic dentistry, he would trade the beat for the catwalk.

The smile, even with its minute imperfection, was open and friendly. Her apprehension ebbed, but only a little.

She rolled down the window. "Yes?"

"You okay, ma'am? I saw you sitting here with your head down and got worried."

"Fine," she said, hesitated, then added with a heaving sigh, "Well, not so fine, really." She held up the phone. "I just had an argument with my boyfriend."

His handsome face creased into lines of sympathy. He doffed the shades, revealing eyes as warm and dark as cocoa. "Oh, hey. Sorry to hear that."

"Am I blocking the way?"

"No. I wanted to check and make sure you were all right, that's all."

"That's very kind, Officer." She mustered what she hoped looked like a brave it-hurts-but-I'll-get-through-it smile.

"I'd arrest him for you if I could," he said. "It ought to be a crime to upset a pretty lady on a nice day like this."

Holy God, was the cop flirting with her? Seeing her as a freshly dumped blonde and thinking to score on the rebound?

It was all Jeanette could do to keep from screaming with laughter, and she wondered what the hell had happened to her lately. Always, she'd prided herself on being cool, being in control. And now, all because of Scoot, her composure was shattered and her nerves were twanging like banjo strings. Her emotions kept bounding from one wild extreme to another.

"Thank you, Officer," she said. "I shouldn't keep you from your duties. You've probably got dangerous bad guys to catch."

"Guess so," he said, and slid the sunglasses back on. To hide a touch of disappointment in those cocoa eyes? "Hope you and the boyfriend work things out." He almost sounded like he meant it.

"I'm sure we will."

Jeanette could hardly believe it when he sketched her a dashing little salute, then turned and ambled back to the car, whistling. He got in, said something to the other cop. The other cop snorted and looked over at Jeanette. She waved. Both of them waved back, and then drove off.

"Jesus," she murmured, resting her forehead against the upper curve of the steering wheel. "That, I did not need."

She waited until the patrol car was good and gone before starting up her engine. The close call and surge of adrenaline had left her starving, so she made a sandwich shop her next stop. A large diet cola, a chicken club wrap, and a bag of chips later, she was on her way once more.

It was after three when she reached her destination. After taking a slow cruise through the neighborhood, Jeanette parked half a block from Dunley Street, in a lot between a bowling alley and a thrift store. She locked her car – she always drove the anonymous late-model Honda Civic on these trips; it was a medium-beige that could pass for white, tan, gold or light green depending on the lighting.

With her keys and phone tucked in the pocket of her track suit, and her gun staying in the audio book case under the seat, she set off down the sidewalk.

The thrift store should have been open, but was dark and the sign was turned to 'Closed.' Glancing in, she saw the usual racks of used clothes, the usual ugly furniture, the usual broken, crappy toys. It reminded her of her childhood, of having to wear those clothes and sit on that furniture and play with those toys, and she angled across the street to get away from the unwelcome nostalgia.

On this, the south side of 6th Street, was a place called Needles & Nails, offering "tattoos and body piercing while you wait." Jeanette frowned. Of course it was "while you wait;" what the hell else would someone do? Drop off their skin to be tattooed and come back to pick it up later?

Next door to the tattoo parlor was the Luv Shak, with crotchless panties and see-through nighties and miniature bull whips on display in the window. Then a cigarette store … class all the way here on 6th Street.

Everybody she saw looked equally poor and disreputable. This was the world she had wanted so badly as a child to get away from. To rise above. Kids in hand-me-downs, alcoholic men with tempers, women overweight from only being able to afford cheap, greasy food.

It wasn't like Prewett. Prewett was sleazy but defiantly proud of it. As if there was a certain sneering joy in seeing how low you could sink. This neighborhood had the feel of desperation, of mostly decent people fallen on hard times and trying with varying degrees of success to brake their slide. A lot of the people looked old, fixed-income and dispirited.

The cross street was Dunley. Weasel had said Jon was shot over on Dunley, and the news had mentioned him breaking into an apartment. She could see three apartment buildings. One was directly across the street, old and dismal. The other two, closer to Pine than to Dunley, were newer and nicer.

She looked both ways, up and down Dunley. A 99-cent emporium, a diner, a dog groomer, a locksmith, a used bookstore, a hot dog stand and a junkyard. Straight ahead on 6th, she saw a bar, a teriyaki place, and a psychic.

Maybe she should ask the psychic how to find Scoot.

Scoffing under her breath, she wandered around looking for evidence of a break-in and a shooting. There was no helpful yellow police tape in evidence on any of the apartments in the vicinity, and she finished up at the used bookstore. It was open, with a few people browsing the stacks.

Jeanette pretended to do the same while she listened in on their conversations. She reasoned that the event would be a hot topic among the locals, excellent gossip fodder, and she was right. Within ten minutes, she'd learned that the crappy corner apartment building was where it had happened, and that the intruder had been shot by someone named Hector.

Hector.

No wonder Scoot went by a nickname. What sort of parents in this day and age tagged their kid with Hector?

"How is he?" a white-haired lady with a sweet, dimpled face asked the wheelchair-bound guy behind the counter. "The police aren't giving him trouble, I hope."

"He had to go to the station and talk to them again today," the young man in the wheelchair replied. He was handsome in an appropriately bookish, unconventional way, with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, but his mouth was set in a grim line and his eyes smoldered with anger. "I don't think they're going to charge him. They'd better not. All he was doing was defending Allison."

"Eva says that the man who attacked her is lucky to be alive." The old lady shook her head and clucked her tongue. "Poor Allison. Have you heard from her? Is she all right?"

"She called me from Bob's last night. God, it makes me sick!" He slammed a fist on the counter, causing books to fall over and a small cloud of dust to arise. "If I'd been there, that jerk wouldn't be so lucky."

"Now, Jamie –"

"Please don't 'now, Jamie' me, Mrs. O. You didn't hear her. She could barely talk from him throttling her, and Eva said she was beaten to a pulp."

Peeking at them from the mystery section, idly running her finger along a row of book spines, Jeanette frowned.

What the hell was this? Allison? Who was Allison?

All right, yes, Bigfoot Jon was a hairy ape and a pig and ten other kinds of animal, and she could easily see him knocking a woman around, even raping one if he thought he could get away with it. Aside from providing drugs to the brain-dead Steffi or renting the strutting disease-factories on Prewett, that might be the only way someone like him could ever get any sex.

But why last night, of all nights? Why, when he'd been so close to finding Scoot, had he taken time out to go after this Allison? Crime of opportunity? Had the dumbshit broken into the wrong apartment? Caught some pretty girl in her underwear and just gone berserk with lust? He was a brute, but was he that stupid?

"How could something like this happen?" Mrs. O. fretted. "We try to keep things nice, just a few nice and peaceful blocks in the middle of all this city with its noise and crime. Our little haven. Our little corner of the world. Everybody knows everybody else. We all do our part to look out for one another. And then some horrible stranger comes along."

"If I'd been there …"

Mrs. O. gave him a kindly look that Jeanette could read all too well, even from here. It said, without coming right out and putting it into words, that it was nice of him to feel that way but what, really, could he have done? Him being in that chair and all.

What she actually said out loud was, "What matters is that Allison will be fine, and Hector too. I am no fan of violence, of course, but it would be a real shame if Hector got in trouble for doing what was only right. It's like with that dirty man who frightened my granddaughter so. He got his arms broken, and maybe that was wrong, but I'd stand before the throne of the Father Almighty and say he deserved it."

Jeanette wished they would quit with the speeches and tell her how to find Hector.

The damage was most likely already done. The gun and everything else would be in the hands of the police. They would have contacted Westbrook. They'd be trying with every means at their disposal to figure out who the owner of the purse was. Who the people on the tape were.

Still, there was a slim chance that Hector hadn't been entirely honest. He wouldn't want to confess to a career in purse-snatching. He might have spun some yarn about where he got the gun.

No matter what, she had to know. Had to find him. It was this not-knowing that was driving her crazy. This sense of not being in control. She couldn't walk away and leave it like this. Even if nothing ever came of it, she'd spend the rest of her life with her mind worrying at it like a dog with a bone.

"Is Hector still staying with you?" Mrs. O. asked Jamie.

Jamie shook his head, dashing Jeanette's spark of hope even as it ignited. "I offered, but he said he was going to go home."

"He's tried so hard, that boy. The family he comes from, it's a wonder he isn't mixed up with crime or drugs."

Jeanette stifled a bitter laugh. Not mixed up with crime? Since when?

"He said he had never picked up a gun before in his life," Jamie said. "But if he hadn't, who knows what might have happened? That son of a bitch would have killed him, and Allison too."

"It's like we aren't safe in our own homes anymore," Mrs. O. said, and sighed with the weight of all the world on her stooped, frail, elderly shoulders. She shuffled off into the dusty stacks, leaving Jamie rearranging the books on the counter with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary.

Jeanette left the bookstore a few minutes later and headed back toward the corner. As she neared the Dunley Apartments, she saw a car pull up and let out a tall, slim girl with a chestnut-colored ponytail. The girl was moving slowly, with an invalid's stiffness, and as she turned to say something in through the open door to the driver, Jeanette saw that her face and neck were blotched with fresh bruises.

This, she surmised, had to be Allison. Even in a neighborhood like this, she doubted there would be more than one beaten, half-throttled girl out and about on the streets. Jon had really done a number on her.

Allison reached into the back seat of the car and got out a heavy duffel bag. The man behind the wheel tooted the horn and drove off. Allison waved. Then, with a quick glance around – Jeanette watched sidelong, pretending to fix her attention on the view visible through the dog groomer's window, a chubby young man wrestling a soapy mutt – the girl ducked her head and hurried toward the apartment building. She moved like she wanted to get inside before any of her neighbors saw her. No wonder. It couldn't be fun, being the talk of the town.

Despite the recent trouble, no efforts had been made to beef up the building's security. Jeanette passed by and took a cursory look. The front entrance had a lock that could be jimmied with a paper clip, if it even bothered to latch shut at all thanks to a warped frame. The fire doors at the end of the downstairs hall and the bottom of the stairwell were both propped open by doorstops, no doubt in direct violation of code.

Inside, the small lobby was threadbare brown carpet and peeling paint. It was stylishly furnished with a couple of large fake plants in terra cotta pots, a vinyl couch mended with strapping tape, a coffee table listing toward one uneven leg, an untidy pile of the Sunday paper, two mismatched chairs, a row of mailboxes and a large corkboard for posting messages.

Jeanette saw the girl, Allison, disappearing up the stairs. A quick scan of the intercom buzzer buttons mounted by a speaker on the wall beside the front door revealed no Hectors. There was a "Vance, H." on the fourth floor, though. Hector "Scoot" Vance.

An alley ran around the back of the building. Balconies jutted out over it like fungal growths, those shelf mushrooms that sprouted on rotting logs. A chain-link surround enclosed a bunch of large metal trash cans with the lids off, and burst-open bags suggested that some of the tenants tried their luck hoping to score a basket rather than bother with walking all the way down the stairs, disposing of their trash, and walking all the way back up.

So this was where Scoot lived.

She started on her way, meaning to come back later when she would be at less risk of attracting attention, then stopped short. Her gaze was drawn back to the garbage cans.

Something looped down over one of the rims. A strap. A familiar buttercream-colored leather strap.

Forgetting caution, Jeanette unhooked the latch on the chain-link gate and pushed it open. It squalled on rust. A thin, scruffy cat streaked out of the space behind the cans, hissing balefully. She ignored it.

The strap belonged to her purse. She pulled it out from under a few plastic bags of kitchen trash, none of which had yet broken open or split and spilled their festering contents. The purse was clean aside from a few specklings of coffee grounds and one Popsicle wrapper pasted to the side.

The zippered opening gaped wide. It was not, as Jeanette had expected it to be, empty. She dug through the contents feverishly. Compact, lipstick, tape recorder, other personal effects. But the manila folder was gone. The envelope of cash was gone. The envelope with the gun was gone.

She experienced a moment's jubilation at the discovery of the miniature tape recorder, a moment that lasted until she realized that the tape inside was gone.

Scoot must have listened to it. And what? Decided to hide it? Decided to destroy it?

Hoping for the latter, hoping to find a crushed case and loops of filament-thin tape tangled through the garbage, Jeanette bent over the cans again.

Movement above her made her glance up. Someone had just come out onto a second-floor balcony.

It was the girl, Allison. That bruised face was impossible to mistake. She was holding something small in her hand, poking at it with an outstretched finger. It looked like a cell phone.

Jeanette didn't move. She couldn't yet figure out how this girl was connected to Bigfoot, or to Scoot. All she knew was that she'd be hard-pressed to explain why she was digging through the trash.

Allison held the phone to her ear, her bruised face wearing the expectant, apprehensive look of someone waiting for a call to go through.

With a bright electronic chirping, the cell phone in Jeanette's pocket began to ring.

**

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.

**

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

They hadn't hauled her off to an interrogation room like in the movies, some place of all industrial sheet-metal and furniture bolted to the floor, with one window a long pane of one-way glass. She wasn't cuffed, wasn't sweating under a spotlight, wasn't even getting the good-cop / bad-cop routine.

Instead, Allison was in a comfortable conference room, with nice paneling on the walls and a long oval table surrounded by swivel chairs. A cup of silty police-station coffee sat in front of her, catching the overhead light in rainbows on the oil slick floating on its surface.

None of this made the experience any easier. She only refrained from gnawing her nails by a supreme effort of will. The sudden slam of a door nearly made her leap out of her seat.

There were two cops. The plump and smartly-dressed woman had introduced herself as Detective Victoria "please call me Tori" Bryland. She seemed friendly enough, but if they all of a sudden did decide to do a routine, Allison was sure that Detective please-call-me-Tori would excel at being the bad cop despite her generous mouth and ready smile. Her partner was short, thin and balding, with a wrinkled navy-blue suit and sad puppy-dog eyes. His name was Detective Philip Mindersohn. He had not, for the record, offered to be called "Phil" or even "Philip." He had not, in fact, said much of anything at all.

The two detectives were on the other side of the table. Next to Allison was Uncle Bob's lawyer and bowling buddy, Joe Peters. Like Uncle Bob, he was portly and red-faced, but had a steel-grey gaze as sharp and intent as that of a jeweler looking for flaws in a diamond.

Uncle Bob was waiting elsewhere in the station. He'd gotten up at seven, made Allison a breakfast of mushy oatmeal and soft-boiled egg – all she could eat with her throat so swollen and sore – and promptly got on the phone. He had talked to the station to set up a time for Allison to meet with the detectives who'd been put in charge of the case, and had arranged for Joe Peters to meet them there.

"It seems pretty self-explanatory," Detective "please call me Tori" Bryland said. "With the statements from your neighbors, the ladder outside, the damage to your apartment, and the injuries you yourself sustained, I don't think anyone would argue that Mr. Cesare's actions were justified. Our only loose end is the gun."

"I bought it," Allison said. "It was stupid. I know it was stupid. But … I … I guess I wasn't thinking straight."

"Where did you buy it? Do you have a receipt?"

"There was a guy," Allison said, feeling her way carefully through the story she and Uncle Bob had worked out. "Over on Prewett Avenue. I've seen him around. Selling things. You know, watches, radios."

This much was true; there were plenty of people on Prewett who, when the sun went down, sold dubious stuff of all varieties out of the trunks of their cars or set up card tables on the sidewalk.

"Do you know his name?"

Allison shook her head.

"What did he look like?"

"Tall, pale, dark-haired," she said, now departing from the truth completely. "His hair was slicked back and he had on a black trenchcoat and sunglasses. He looked kind of like The Matrix."

"And he was selling guns?"

"I asked him if he knew where I could get one. He didn't want to tell me at first, like he thought I might be a cop, but finally he said he sometimes had guns and wanted me to come back in an hour. So I did. I gave him a hundred bucks and he gave me the gun."

Was she over-explaining? She'd heard that people with something to hide would get too nervous and let their mouths run. Prickles of sweat broke out along her hairline. She hoped that any tension in her voice would be masked by the hoarse, raspy sound of it. And that any nervousness would be taken to mean she was still rattled by the previous night's ordeal.

"The gun … was it loaded?"

"He said it wasn't." Allison shrugged. "I didn't check. I don't know anything about guns. I figured I'd get some bullets somewhere else."

"So you bought the gun on Friday evening," please-call-me-Tori said, consulting a page of notes. "Not knowing it was loaded, you took it home to your apartment. What did you do with it?"

"This is going to sound so dumb," Allison said, "but once I got it home, I was scared of it. I mean, I didn't even know for sure if it was loaded, but I was afraid it would just … go off. So I put it in a box on my bookshelf."

"Then, Saturday night, you woke up hearing an intruder."

She nodded.

"He attacked you," please-call-me-Tori continued, "and you fought with him."

Allison shuddered and instinctively touched her neck. It felt like she was wearing a collar made from a wraparound hot water bottle. "He choked me with his belt."

"Your neighbors heard all the noise and came in through the connecting kitchen."

"Hector kicked in the door, I think. The bolt's pretty flimsy."

"Which was when Mr. Cesare saw the gun on the floor, where it had fallen?"

"Right. We crashed all around my apartment. Everything was knocked over."

"Is Miss Montgomery going to be charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm?" Joe Peters asked.

"The gun was a stolen piece," please-call-me-Tori said. "It belongs to a collector of antique weaponry. How much did you say you bought it for?"

"A hundred dollars."

Detective don't-call-me-Phil spoke up. "You got quite a bargain. Something like that would normally go for upwards of seventeen hundred."

"Detective Bryland, you didn't answer my question," Joe said. "Will Miss Montgomery be charged?"

Please-call-me-Tori exchanged a glance with don't-call-me-Phil. "Under the circumstances, I think we'd all like to avoid that. However, I still have some questions of my own."

"Hector's not going to be in trouble, is he?" Allison asked. "He was trying to help me. I don't want him to be in trouble."

"I'd like to ask you about Jon Wharton."

"Who? Oh … the guy?" She felt her neck again. "Is he going to be all right?"

"He'll live," please-call-me-Tori said. "He suffered a collapsed lung and considerable blood loss. The bullet also broke a rib. But he came through surgery well, and regained consciousness early this morning. He's being held in critical care, but he is also under arrest. Mr. Wharton isn't being as cooperative as he could be. He won't admit to breaking into your apartment though we have his bike, and his prints on the ladder. He denies having been following you at all."

"What does he say happened?" Joe Peters asked.

"That he doesn't remember." The detective's generous mouth tucked down in a scowl. "He seems of the opinion that if he can't tell us anything, he won't be held accountable for anything. Apparently, he's already making plans to move back home with his mother as soon as he gets out of the hospital."

"Is that likely?" Joe asked with a disapproving frown.

"No." Here, the detectives exchanged a weighted glance.

The back of Allison's neck prickled. She didn't like that way they were looking at each other, as if trying to decide what they should say and what they should keep secret. It meant they suspected something. Even if they themselves didn't know what it was they suspected … they suspected something.

She wished she had never gotten into this. It was all Scoot's fault, damned daredevil Scoot who couldn't resist snatching a purse every couple of weeks or so.

No, that wasn't fair. Scoot's recklessness might have set the dominoes falling, but Allison had done all the thinking from that point on. If you could call it thinking. Allison had decided not to turn the contents over to the police. Allison had decided to keep the money. Allison had decided to stay silent about her phone conversation with the murderous blonde. Each of those decisions only dug her in deeper.

Right now, there was a chance she could wiggle out of this. But as that thoughtful, weighted glance between detectives went on and on, becoming a proper look, a silent-communication-bordering-on-telepathy kind of look, the worse she thought that chance might be becoming. Slimmer and slimmer. Forget suspecting. They knew something.

"You've said that you don't know Mr. Wharton," don't-call-me-Phil said.

A leaden feeling sank through her guts. Maybe she had been wrong about the good-cop / bad-cop thing after all. Maybe those sad puppy-dog eyes weren't as doleful as they seemed.

"Not by name, but I've seen him around," Allison said.

"Do you have any idea why he would break into your apartment?"

"Here, now," said Joe Peters. She was glad that he, too, had noticed the change. "This had better not be leading up to one of those 'you brought it on yourself' moments. If you're inferring that Miss Montgomery somehow encouraged this lunatic, then –"

"Mr. Peters," please-call-me-Tori said, holding up a placatory hand. "No one is saying that."

"Maybe not," he said, "but I've heard it before."

"Not from me," she said.

"How could I know why he came after me when I don't even know him?" Allison asked. "I woke up and he was just there. I'm sorry he got hurt, but it wasn't my fault. And it wasn't Hector's fault, either."

Joe Peters patted her arm, but his gaze was still on the detectives. "What's this really about?"

Don't-call-me-Phil dipped his head toward please-call-me-Tori, as if indicating that she should go ahead. She took a deep breath, looking like someone bracing herself to do an unpleasant chore, and spoke.

"This morning, Peggy Wharton, Jon's mother, went to the motel where Jon had been living. She intended to pick up some of his personal effects. When she got there, she had the manager let her in. They found a dead man in the room."

Allison's eyes bugged. Her scalp felt like it was suddenly contracted by a quick tug on a drawstring. "What?" she croaked.

"Shot," don't-call-me-Phil said. "Once. In the head."

Immediately, Allison had a flashback to her conversation with the blonde, Jade.

And what about Jon? Are you at his place?

Yeah.

That had been at around five o'clock. Had the blonde rushed right out to the motel? And, not finding 'Steffi,' killed someone else?

Joe Peters was aghast. "So this Wharton character didn't just attack my client, but killed someone?"

"We don't think he did," please-call-me-Tori said. "The other man, who right now we only know by his street name of Weasel, was discovered at eight a.m. He had only been dead for a couple of hours. Jon Wharton was in the hospital from two a.m. onward."

Allison wrapped her arms around herself and leaned forward over her knees. She had gone cold all over. For a moment, she had been sure that they were going to say that this Weasel had been shot earlier, with the same gun. That wasn't possible; she knew it wasn't, but she had expected it anyway.

"Allison? Are you all right?" Joe Peters touched her arm.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I … it's …"

Please-call-me-Tori nodded. "We're sorry to put you through this when you've already been through so much. But we need to figure out exactly what happened, and some of this is still confusing us. It seems like there's a piece missing."

They asked her a few more questions, but she kept stressing that she didn't know Jon Wharton, had never met him, had only seen him here and there around the neighborhood. She repeated her story about having thought someone was following her, and how it had prompted her to get a gun.

As she spoke, she kept thinking about the folder stuffed in among her magazines. If they found that, with photos of Mr. Westbrook the antique weapon collector, what would they think? That she, Allison, had amassed information on him and then had stolen the gun from his collection for some reason or another?

Had they found it? She didn't know what might have gone on in her apartment after she'd left with Uncle Bob. She'd given the envelope of money to Eva and taken the cassette tape with her – it was in her jacket pocket right now. Had they returned and done a thorough search? If so, they wouldn't have been able to miss the folder.

And what about Jon Wharton? Had he really denied everything, said that he didn't remember, gave no reason for his presence in her apartment? Or had he looked up at them from his hospital bed and told them about Scoot? Were they playing with her? Giving her some rope and seeing if she had enough to hang herself?

She finished, and held her breath. This would be the moment when they would blow apart her feeble, fragile story like a house of cards.

"Thank you for coming down to the station, Allison," please-call-me-Tori said. "I don't think we have any other questions right now. Are you sure that you don't want to see a doctor?"

The words filled her with hopeful relief. She didn't dare let herself trust that hope too much, for fear they would abruptly yank it out from under her.

"It looks worse than it is," she said, skimming her fingertips over her face and trying to sound brave.

She had, before being ushered into this room, submitted to being photographed by Officer Flyte. The pictures would go in a file as evidence. Just what Allison had always wanted. No debutante ball for this Montgomery daughter. No off-the-shoulder ball gown, corsage, tuxedoed date. Instead, there'd be her name on a file containing photos of her, all bruised and battered.

Lovely. Her parents would be ever so proud. Assuming they found out, which was something that Allison was seriously hoping to avoid.

"Are we done here, then?" asked Joe Peters.

"Miss Montgomery will have to testify at the trial," don't-call-me-Phil said. "If we need anything more from her before then, we'll be in touch." He got up, and the others took their cues from him.

Hardly able to believe it, still waiting for that other shoe to drop, Allison slowly rose from her seat. "I … I can … uh … I can go?"

"Unless there's anything else you want to tell us," please-call-me-Tori said. Her steady gaze said that she knew Allison was holding something back, and that now was the time to spit it out.

This was it. This was her last chance to come clean. If she walked out of the room without confessing about the blonde, the purse, the phone and the rest of it, she would never be able to own up later. She would have lied to the police and gotten away with it, and if they ever found out they would never trust her again.

And what did she think that she, Allison, could do, anyway? This was no game. This was real. People had been hurt. Someone had died. The blonde called Jade was a murderer. The police needed to know about her. Needed to stop her before anyone else ended up dead.

But even if she told them now, she'd get in trouble anyway. They wouldn't be content with just a little bit of the truth. They'd want it all. Everything would have to come out. Scoot, the purses, the shoplifting, everything. There'd be no way to keep that quiet. Her parents would be told. It'd probably be on the news and in the papers.

"No, nothing," she said, and swallowed with a painful twinge. "Thank you. I wish I could have been more help."

She felt them watching her go, their suspicion boring into the back of her skull like drill bits. It was all she could do to keep a normal pace and not scurry or bolt from the room.

Joe Peters walked with her out into the reception area, where Uncle Bob sat waiting. He stood as Allison came in. His genial face was knotted in concern. She rushed to him for a hug.

"There, Allie-girl," he said, holding her and giving her a comforting pat, like he had done when she was a little kid with a skinned knee. "Let's get you out of here."

"Can I go home?" she asked.

"We'll go home, absolutely. I promise, I'll get some of that stuff cleared out of the guest room and --"

"Uncle Bob … I mean … home to my own place. My apartment."

He stopped as he was steering her toward the door, and looked at her. "You're sure you want to go back there? After everything?"

"Yes." She wasn't sure, not at all. But she had to.

"If that's what you want, Allie." He looked over at Joe Peters. "And … ah … if it's fit for human habitation."

Allison remembered the blood-soaked chair, and fought down a gag. The world went briefly grey and fuzzy. She had to stop for a second and regain her bearings. "Oh. Right."

"I called a cleaning service this morning," Joe said. "They promised to have it done by four o'clock." He checked his watch. "It's only two-thirty, so you might want to go have a late lunch or something first."

"Lunch," Allison said weakly. Lunch was the last thing she wanted right now.

"That sounds good," Uncle Bob said. "Then we'll swing by my house to pick up your bag, and I'll drive you home. Okay by you, Allie-girl?"

"Great." She managed a thin smile.

"Join us, Joe?"

Joe agreed, and after some debate between him and Bob – Allison, with no appetite, didn't get involved – settled on the Red Robin out by the mall. While they waited for their burgers and fries, Allison sipped at a strawberry lemonade that stung her throat like acid. She rejected it in favor of a milkshake, letting the creamy frozen treat slide in slow soothing decadent spoonfuls.

Joe made a quick call to the cleaning service. He ascertained that the chair had been removed, and her apartment cleaned.

"That quick and all," Uncle Bob said, impressed. "I thought with it being a crime scene –"

"Could we talk about something else, please?" asked Allison. "Anything else. Even bowling, okay?"

**

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

"Connect me with Rayburn, please."

She hated to do it, but she had no more choice. Not after what happened with Weasel. Not after what she'd seen in the morning paper, and heard on the radio news.

"Jade, is that you?" His voice was warm and he sounded genuinely pleased to be speaking to her, and Jeanette regretted that she would probably never hear him sound quite that way again.

"It's off," she said.

"Pardon me?"

"The job. It's off. I can't do it."

He paused for several beats. "Jade, if this is because of –"

"It's not because of that," she said. She sighed. "There's been a problem."

"What kind of a problem?"

"I don't have the gun. The police have the gun."

He paused again, then said, "Jade, this isn't anything to joke about."

"Damn it, Rayburn, do you think I would joke about it?"

"Maybe you'd better tell me what's going on."

She was in her car, and leaned her brow against the curve of the steering wheel while holding the phone to her ear. "It's embarrassing. My purse was stolen. My purse with everything in it. The gun, the money, everything."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm fuckin' serious!" She clapped a hand over her mouth. "Sorry. It's the company I've been keeping lately. A kid swiped my purse right after we had lunch on Friday. I've been trying to find him ever since. I got another kid to look for him, and that kid is in the hospital now. Shot. By, I'm willing to bet, the gun that you gave me."

The news reports had been sketchy, with no names given as of yet. Some of the details didn't add up. A man broke into a Dunley Street apartment in the middle of the night Saturday, sexually assaulted a young woman, then was shot by the woman's neighbor. In the ironic sort of twist that the news loved, the med student sister of the shooter had performed emergency first aid and been able to keep the intruder alive until paramedics arrived. He had been taken to Century Medical and was out of surgery, though still in critical condition.

She relayed all this to Rayburn. "I only wanted him to find Scoot, and I intended to take care of it from there myself. I never told him what was in the purse but even a piece of slime like him would have guessed it had to be important. Maybe he thought that if he could get his hands on it, he could … I don't know, blackmail me or something."

"But instead, he ended up shot."

"I'm not saying it was undeserved. I would have done it myself once I knew where to find Scoot." She raked her fingers through her hair, letting the platinum-blonde strands sift against her cheeks. "The part I don't understand is the sexual assault. The best I can figure –"

"Excuse me for interrupting, Jade," Rayburn said, and her heart sank. Now he sounded cool and clipped. Businesslike. Not at all the same man who'd invited her to consider dinner with him. "Are you certain that it was the same gun?"

"Not one hundred percent, but if it is, we're screwed. The police will figure out who it belongs to, and then our man will know something's up."

"What about the money?"

"I don't know," she said. "Scoot must have it. Along with … along with the folder you gave me, and my tape."

Rayburn swore softly.

"But we don't need to get worked up over nothing," Jeanette said. "These are burnt out pot-head slackers we're dealing with. Even if Scoot listens to the tape and looks at the information, he's not going to put it together. He'll probably see the money and forget everything else."

"We cannot be sure of that. And there is the matter of the money, Jade. You agreed to perform a service for a price. You were paid a quarter of the offered fee up front. Now you're telling me that you aren't going to be able to deliver –"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Rayburn!" she cried, exasperated. "You'll get the money back, if that's all you can think about. I'll cover the loss of the twenty-five grand."

"The Company was getting a tidy commission for arranging this, Jade, and now it's fallen through."

"Fine, I'll cover your lost commission, too! How much? Ten percent? Twenty? State the time and place and I'll deliver it, in cash."

"It isn't only the money," he said. "What about our man? Even if this Scoot person is, as you say, a burnt out pot-head who won't suspect what he has, our man is going to know something's up."

"There isn't anything I can do about that," Jeanette said heavily.

"And if the folder and the tape do wind up in the hands of the police –"

"They won't be able to connect them to us. I didn't have any identification in the purse."

"Thank God for that, at least." His voice went even cooler. "Because if they do find you, Jade, and you give them us …"

"I know how this works, Rayburn," she said, feeling nettled that he even thought that he had to threaten her. "The police won't find me. They might get prints off of my things, but my prints aren't on file."

"What about the tape?"

"It's not like we used our real names. The best they could hope for would be to figure out where we were, track us to the restaurant. But you paid cash, the reservation was under Dufarge thanks to your sense of humor, and they won't have anywhere to go from there."

"Descriptions," he said darkly.

She started to object, then bit her lip. The hostess. Fascinated with Rayburn, undressing him with her eyes. If the police got to her, she would be able to describe him in loving detail. As for a description of Jeanette, it would go one of two ways. Either she had been a complete nonentity to the hostess, who would have seen Rayburn and only Rayburn and dismissed everything else … or the hostess had taken point-by-point careful inventory of Jeanette, jealously comparing, searching for faults, trying to see what a man like Rayburn might want.

"There's no way they'd get that far," she said. "It'd only be background noise of a crowded restaurant. If they want to canvass every single eatery in the city, let them try. They won't know what we look like from our voices alone."

"All right, so maybe they won't find me," he said. "What about you?"

"The same logic applies."

"But these kids saw you. They'll be able to describe you to the police."

Shit! Jeanette clenched the fist that wasn't holding the phone. "What's Scoot going to say? Tell the police that he got the gun from a purse he stole?"

"What about the other one?" pressed Rayburn. "If he spills his whole story to the police, there won't be much you can do."

"If they even believed him."

"Can anyone back him up?"

She thought of Weasel, and the way he had flopped over with a look of surprise only beginning to register on his face. Weasel wouldn't be talking to anyone ever again, unless it was by Ouija board. The only other one who had seen her looking for Bigfoot was the rhyme-talking black kid. Not the most credible witness in the world, and also someone who would want to have as little to do with the cops as was humanly possible.

Or Bigfoot's brain-dead slut of a girlfriend … where was she? She'd said she was at his place, but his room had been empty. And if he'd had a girlfriend there, why call Weasel to come and hide his drugs and porn?

"Not really," she said to Rayburn. "It sounds too crazy. The police will think he's psychotic or stoned. And he won't know that the gun was from my bag."

"I don't like it," Rayburn said. "This is a real mess, Jade."

"Yes," she said, careful to keep her tone even and not give in to sarcasm. "Yes, I know it is."

"What are you going to do?"

There it was. Not "what are we going to do?" but "what are you going to do?" She was on her own. As always. And while she hadn't really expected any offer of help from Rayburn or the people he represented, she was more than a little disappointed all the same. Part of her had hoped that he would stick up for her, maybe join in the search for Scoot and help her get this all back on track.

"At this point," she said, "I can't exactly walk away."

Because even if good old Bigfoot hadn't told the police what he knew, he would as soon as Weasel's body was found. And Weasel's body would be found, soon. Bigfoot's mom – Jeanette's mental image was of a rawboned hillbilly woman with long snarls of rust-red hair, bad teeth, and rolls of fat over a core of tough hardship-born muscle – would find him when she showed up to gather her son's belongings.

On the plus side, Jeanette thought sourly, maybe she'd done them a favor. Odds were, his mom would be so distracted by finding a corpse in the room that she might overlook the naked women on the walls.

Once Weasel was discovered, the police would be even more involved. They'd want to know who shot Weasel while his buddy was in the critical care unit. They'd interrogate him. If the story about the little blonde lady with the shotgun hadn't already been told, it'd be told then.

All that, though, really was secondary. Bigfoot could tell the police anything he liked and it still wouldn't lead them to Jeanette. She could change her hairstyle, change her look, change her habits. Move away and start over, if she had to. It wouldn't be the first time.

But damned if she was going to let these skateboard kids get the better of her. Damned if she was! They had made her look incompetent. Had made her look bad in front of Rayburn, and just at a moment when it seemed like things might be shaping up interesting between them.

Could she still salvage anything from this debacle? Maybe, if she acted fast.

"And if it's too late for salvage," she murmured, "there's always revenge."

"Jade?" asked Rayburn. "I didn't quite catch that."

"I'll take care of it," she said. "I'll get you the money, and if you still want me to deal with our man, I can find some other way to do that, too."

"I'll have to check with a few people first," he said. "This changes everything."

"Tell me about it."

"And … Jade?"

"What?"

"I'm really very sorry this had to happen," he said. His voice was warmer now, and touched with heartfelt regret.

"So am I. This'll be the end, won't it?"

"The end?"

"Of our association."

He hesitated. "My employers aren't usually very big on second chances."

"I thought so," she said. "Have someone call me when you know where I should drop off the money. Goodbye, Rayburn."

She disconnected, and dropped her phone into the passenger seat, and sat there with her head against the steering wheel with her eyes closed.

A light tap at the window made her jump. She whipped her head up and around and stared at her own reflection in duplicate, mirrored in the shiny silver shades of a motorcycle cop.

**

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The drowsiness was gone like a fog whipped apart by a sudden high wind.

Jeanette dashed to her room, threw off the robe, and put on the same track suit she'd been wearing when she'd paid her earlier visit to Bigfoot's place.

She was out the door into the early light of what would shape up to be another summery day according to the weatherman, into her car and on the road less than fifteen minutes after the brain-dead slut hung up.

Ten minutes after that, she was cruising Prewett again.

Gone was the hectic, dirty, festering activity of the previous night. The street was all but empty, the buildings along it looking like piles of roadkill so unappetizing that even the flies turned up their noses. Smiley's in particular was a gangrenous open sore.

Thankfully, there was no sign of Batman. Or of Weasel or the black kid who'd been camped in front of Bigfoot's door last night.

She drove past, then parked a block over, in front of a food bank on the corner of Dunley and 2nd. The posted hours showed that the food bank didn't open until ten on Sundays, but a few other cars occupied the slots that angled up to the curb. She got a small café mocha at a coffee kiosk to blend in with the few others out and about, and walked into the manager's office of Smiley's like she owned the place.

A tinny bell, mounted above the door, jingled. But the sound was lost in the way-too-enthusiastic patter of some morning-show hostess desperate to prove she was pretty enough and vivacious enough to be put on weekdays instead of weekend mornings.

The office had cheap tubular-chrome furniture and a scarred wooden counter that served as the front desk and divided the small room into two smaller halves. The desk was unmanned at the moment, and she could hear water running somewhere nearby.

Jeanette flipped up the hinged section of the counter, stepped into the rear half, and surveyed the keys hanging on grimy metal rings from a pegboard. She chose the one that read 'Main' and was at the door before the water gurgled to a stop.

The bell jingled again. From the back, a man called, "Be right with you!"

Without answering, Jeanette let the door swing shut and strolled around to the rear of the building.

Bigfoot's room was 119, and the key didn't give her any trouble at all.

That, though, was the last part of her plan to go right.

The room was empty. Not empty of crap, no … in that regard it was exactly as she'd seen it before. Piled high and strewn from hell to breakfast with trash, porn and junk. But empty of people.

No brain-dead slut. No sign of a brain-dead slut. No sign that a girl of any sort had spent much time in here at all. There were no panties on the floor, no used condoms stuck to the wall. Besides Jeanette, the only women present were bare-assed and beaver-shot on the walls and the covers of magazines and DVD cases.

She had come in pumped up and gun in hand, not entirely sure whether she intended to take the slut hostage or leave a vivid reminder waiting for Bigfoot. To abruptly have neither option threw her badly off her stride. She looked around the room in disbelief.

"Hey!" she barked. "Where are you?"

Rustle-rustle! Then a stack of moldy pizza boxes fell over as a body darted out from under a pile of garbage.

A rat. She saw at once that it was a rat, nasty and brown and beady-eyed, and almost blew it to bits anyway. It scurried for the open door, slid around the jamb like a brown wad of snot, and was gone in a flick of diseased-looking pink tail.

"Son of a bitch," Jeanette said.

Rather than put the gun away – that being the sort of thing people did in movies after being startled by a cat, bird, or whatever, only to relax and then be jumped – she made a circuit of the room, kicking stuff out of her way.

It was empty. She even held her breath and checked the bathroom. Which was every inch as purely vile as she had previously suspected, and harbored millions of living things far down the evolutionary scale, but no people.

She didn't see the pre-paid cell phone anywhere.

"The bitch wasn't here," she said to the pouty-lipped silicone bimbos on the wall. "She was never here. Where was she?"

A shadow partially blocked the open doorway.

Jeanette still had her gun in hand, and it was pointed at Weasel's face before she knew she meant to do it.

He goggled at her, absolutely stunned. "The fuck?" he slurred.

Weasel, still in the same torn, rumpled, dandruff-speckled and food-stained clothes as she'd seen him in last night, stood there with a key in one hand and an empty cardboard box that had once held Soft Roll toilet paper in the other. He was, like Smiley's and most of Prewett Avenue, even uglier by day's harsh and unforgiving light.

"Where is he? Where is the stinking shithead?" she demanded.

His bloodshot eyes nearly crossed as he tried to focus on the gun. "The fuck?!" he repeated, astounded.

She was to him in four strides. At the last minute, Weasel's street-savvy survival instincts took over and he tried to run for it, but he was too late. She caught him by the collar. And although Jeanette was only five-two and a hundred and ten pounds, she matched Weasel for size and more than matched his slack, wasted frame when it came to strength and fitness. The box went flying. She hauled him backward and flung him on the floor, then slammed the door and stood over him with the gun aimed at the center of his scabby, receding hairline.

"The fuck?" Weasel groaned, there on the floor.

"Tell me where Jon is."

"The fuck I will."

Aha, she'd gotten two whole more words out of him.

"The fuck you won't," she said.

"Won't fuckin' shoot me. You're a fuckin' parole officer!"

"No, I'm not."

"The fuck?"

God! She thought she might have to shoot him after all if he said that one more time. "Last chance, Weasel."

"The fuck you know my name?"

Her finger tightened on the trigger.

"Okay, okay, hold your fuckin' water!" Weasel cried, raising his hands. He had dropped the key. "Jon called me this mornin', okay? 'Bout an hour ago."

"And?"

"Wanted me to come here and get some stuff."

"What stuff?"

Weasel got a sulky look. "Nothin'."

"Nothing?"

"His mom might come over. He din' wan' her see him livin' like this." Weasel nodded around at the centerfolds and stacks of magazines.

"Oh, really?"

The gun hadn't wavered but Weasel's eyes did. "And, okay, he's got some fuckin' recreational, okay? He don' sell it, but he don' wan' his mom findin' it. Said I'd get rid of it for him."

"Wait," Jeanette said. "His mom?"

"What? So he's got a mom, so fuckin' what? I got a mom."

She found that she did not even want to imagine what kind of women could have birthed and raised sons like this. "And she's coming here why? Where's Jon? Why doesn't he come and clean out his own porn?"

"He's in the fuckin' hospital, okay?"

This threw her for a loop. "The hospital? What happened? Did he crash that damned bike of his? Was he hit by a car?"

"Shot," Weasel said, and looked from the gun to Jeanette accusingly.

"The fuck?!" she said. "Where?"

"In the fuckin' chest."

"No, not where on his body did he get shot, you moron, where –"

"Century Medical," Weasel said.

"No, again. Where was he when he got shot?"

"Fuck'f I know. Dunley Street someplace, I think. He din' tell me the whole fuckin' story, okay? Said he'd been shot, some guy shot him, he hadda have surgery. An' his mom was comin' to get his shit, okay?"

"Shot," marveled Jeanette.

Then the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Shot. By some guy. Shot. And she had a very bad feeling she knew which gun had done the shooting.

She looked down at Weasel, who hadn't budged from where he'd landed when she had thrown him to the floor. He lay there in a litter of trash and pornography, watching her. Not afraid. He had never been properly afraid, not even with the gun leveled at him, and now a cocksure insolence was growing in his eyes.

He didn't think she would shoot him, especially now that she'd gotten what she wanted to know. He didn't think she had the guts.

She shot him.

**

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The warm milk didn't help.

Allison's sleep was thin and restless. She kept waking with a start and a painful gasp, sure that someone was in the room with her. The first time, she saw Uncle Bob's life-sized cardboard stand-up figure of Elvis in the corner and almost wet the bed.

She wrestled Elvis into the hall, but still spent the next few hours tossing and turning and getting up to check that the window was locked.

At six, when the eastern sky was beginning to turn pale, she gave up and got dressed. She moved quietly around the amiable music-memorabilia clutter of the guest room, trying not to knock anything over.

The guest room technically wasn't a guest room. It was a shrine, a museum. The bed was a rollaway that normally stayed in the closet, and had been set up in the middle of a cleared space barely large enough for it to fit. Allison was sure that not having any part of the bed up against the wall had contributed to her uneasy rest. She'd felt like she was on an island, or floating unanchored on a raft, out in a dark, dark sea.

Her body ached all over. Slowly, carefully, moving like a little old lady, she dressed in sweatpants and a white sweatshirt advertising a Rose Bowl now seven years gone.

She could still taste the toothpaste from when she'd brushed before bed, but it was a faint residue under a nasty coating. She shuffled into the tiny bathroom, avoiding her reflection.

Her throat burned and throbbed. There were pain-relievers in the medicine cabinet and she took three ibuprofen, thinking that she'd heard somewhere that ibuprofen reduced swelling. Each pill felt like a boulder going down. A boulder covered with jagged outcrops of stone. Obsidian-stone. Volcanic glass.

Then, because it was better to know the worst and view the damage, she closed the medicine cabinet and looked squarely at herself in the mirror.

"Damn," she whispered.

It was pretty bad, even allowing for the unflattering light. Her face was lumpy, bruised, and unfamiliar. The marks on her neck had darkened. Sunglasses and a turtleneck would only make her look like a battered woman trying to hide what had been done to her.

And she was supposed to go to the police station like this?

Well, maybe they'd take one look at her and feel so sorry for her that they'd go easy in their questioning.

She went back to the guest room to put her little overnight bag back in her duffel, and as she was doing that she saw the phone at the bottom. The pre-paid cell phone. She took it downstairs with her.

The house was old and creaky, and every stair tread that squalled under her made her pause, listening for an interruption to Uncle Bob's snoring. She felt bad enough for screwing up his night's rest already. But he snored on, undisturbed. He might not have heard if a jet buzzed the roof.

Downstairs, she sat by the front window and watched the sky brighten. Then she turned her attention to the phone and switched it on.

The display screen came alive and informed her that there were missed calls. She brought them up. All were from the same number, at various times through the night and even into the wee hours of the morning. Someone had really wanted to get in touch with the guy.

Allison fiddled with the keypad until she got the "return call" option. She held it to her ear. It rang once, then again, and then was answered.

"It's about time!" A woman's voice, sounding wide-awake despite the early hour.

"Um," Allison said, faltering. "Hello?"

"Who is this?" Instantly alert, and sharp as a blade.

"Who's this?" Allison countered.

"Let me speak to Jon."

"He's … um … not here."

"Well, where the hell is he?" She sounded like an older woman, angry, mature … and weirdly familiar. "Who are you, and how did you get his phone and this number?"

"I'm …" Allison trailed off as recognition dawned.

"Hello? Are you there?"

She felt like she'd been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The woman's voice … it was impossible. It couldn't be. How …? What …? Her mind did not so much spin or reel as it skidded, like tires on a sheet of black ice.

It was the blonde. The voice from the tape. The woman named Jade. The killer.

Somehow, it was her on the other end of the line.

Allison didn't know how that could be, and grasped mentally at straws. She hadn't listened that closely to the voices on the tape …

A lie. She had concentrated intensely on those voices, trying to absorb every nuance, once she understood what she was hearing.

"Damn it," the woman said. "I'm not in the mood for stupid games. Let me talk to Jon."

"How do you know Jon?" Allison asked. Her own voice was thick and odd, and not just because of her throat.

"Put him on the phone."

"I can't. He's not here."

"Then who is this?"

What could she say? "I'm … um …"

She heard the blonde grumble something about idiotic drugged-out kids.

"His girlfriend," Allison blurted.

"That figures. Where is he?"

"Out."

The blonde hissed in annoyance. Allison had thought herself awake before, but now she was sitting tense as a wire on the edge of the chair, fingers locked around the phone, heart skittering, mouth so dry she could barely work up the spit to say even those few words. She knew she should hang up, that this was too dangerous even for her tastes. The woman on the other end was a killer. Had somehow sent Jon after her. How much did she know?

"He told me about you," her mouth said, seemingly independently of her sliding-on-black-ice brain.

"What?" The word snapped through the phone like a whipcrack.

She had to find out how much Jade knew. "You're looking for Scoot."

"Yes," Jade said, with a tight, clipped tone that made her sound like she was striving to hold onto her temper. "He's got something that belongs to me."

Tentative relief thrilled through her at the knowledge that part of her secret was still safe. "You mean, he took your purse."

"That's right."

Allison closed her eyes. The spinning tires in her mind caught traction and raced. She'd seen Jon place a call from the skate park. Saying what? Saying he'd found Scoot and was going to follow Scoot home. Then he'd lost the trail and hadn't wanted to admit to it … and somehow caught up with Scoot again.

He must have seen Scoot go into the junkyard, and either spied as she changed – she squirmed with revulsion – or guessed when he saw Allison come out. And then what? Why hadn't he called back and told Jade that Scoot was really a girl?

She could envision the cold-voiced woman on the other end of the line getting Jon or someone like him to follow Scoot. She couldn't wrap her head around the idea that Jade would tell Jon to retrieve the purse. Not with what was in it. Jade must've only wanted him to find Scoot, and then planned to take over from there herself. But Jon had gotten ambitious.

"So, like, what's in there anyway?" Allison giggled the vapid, empty giggle of a skater groupie.

"Look, maybe you can help me." The voice warmed, became just-us-girls conspiratorial, and if Allison had really been the dippy skater-girl persona she was pretending to be, she would have been taken in by it. "I really need to find Scoot, or Jon. Can you tell me where either of them are? Jon was supposed to call me when he found him."

"Gee, I think Scoot lives over on the south side somewhere," Allison said. "I see him on the bus, you know, the 62?"

"Does Scoot have a real name?"

"Well, duh, like, probably!" Again with the giggle. "I don't know it, though. Maybe Kip. I think I heard someone call him Kip once."

"Who are you?"

"Steffi." The names popped out. Kip and Steffi were another couple of skater-kids she had known, back when she'd still been learning her way around. Kip was tall, lean, and hot, and had gone off to college in another state. Steffi had been his girlfriend, though rumor had it that he'd turkey-dumped her when he came home for Thanksgiving.

"And what about Jon? Are you at his place?"

"Yeah."

"Where's he?"

"I told you, out. He said he had to see a guy about some stuff. He's been gone all night."

"He left the phone?"

"I just found it under the bed."

"You've been there all night?" The sharp edge was back.

Allison got a precarious feeling. "Not all night, I guess. It was pretty late when I got here. What time is it?"

"Never mind that. Did anyone come by?"

The urge to hang up was stronger than ever. She suddenly felt that Jade was seeing right through her stupid act and stupider lies, was playing with her, stringing her along. "Um … not that I know of."

"You're sure."

"Yeah, why?"

"When Jon gets home, tell him he needs to call me. It's important. He knows why."

"Okay. Hey, I better go."

Before Jade could reply, Allison jabbed the buttons to end the call and turn off the phone. She dropped it onto the rug between her feet and put her hands over her face.

She had the shakes again, and was beginning to seriously reconsider her self-conception of a daredevil and risk-taker.

The skateboard stunts, the shoplifting, even the purse-snatching now seemed childish and moronic. Only risky on the surface, but safe underneath, the way a roller-coaster might scare the hell out of you but you knew, deep-down, that it was a controlled situation and nobody was really going to get hurt.

She'd had a few close calls and a few minor injuries pursing her various interests these past few years, but always, down-deep, she'd known she wasn't really going to get hurt. If she took a bad fall on her board, the worst that was likely to happen was a broken wrist. If she got arrested for shoplifting or purse-snatching, nothing too terrible would come of it. Especially not once they found out who her parents were. Oh, she'd be in plenty of trouble with her family, yeah, but no one was going to throw her in jail for it.

Now, though …

Now she was playing with fire. Now, the risk was real. Now, she could get her impulsive butt killed.

Her apartment had been broken into. She'd been beaten up and nearly raped. She had just gotten off the phone with a cold-blooded murderer. The police would expect her to come and talk to them on matters a lot more serious than a few stolen purses.

And a guy had been shot. Might even be dead.

Allison went even paler as she thought about that. Hector had shot Jon. Eva and the paramedics had saved him, but for all she knew he could have died on the operating table. If he was dead, she was responsible.

If he wasn't, though … if he wasn't, what would he tell people?

**

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.

**