CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The fall could have been a lot worse. It came at the apogee of a half-pipe jump, which Scoot must have mis-timed.

The skateboard squirted out from under her feet. Scoot's shins cracked with white agony into the concrete lip. The board went skittering wheels-up down the curve Then, like in the old nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill, Scoot went tumbling after.

She fetched up groaning in a heap at the bottom of the half-pipe, the board on its back next to her with its wheels slowly spinning to a stop.

A round of sarcastic applause greeted her performance. Scoot flipped them the finger without looking. She got up and limped to a bench in front of a row of portable toilets, where she sat rubbing her lower legs.

It was all too easy to imagine her shinbones as long splintery sticks. They didn't feel broken, and the pain was already fading, but she knew from past experience that by morning she would have two colossal plum-colored bruises.

The skate park was always busiest on sunny Saturdays. Most of the crowd was made up of kids and families, the younger ones who would put up with the helmet-and-pads rule. But there were enough older participants that Scoot wasn't an anomaly.

Top-forty music thumped from pole-mounted speakers and the cement maze of ramps, bowls, half-pipes and jumps simmered in the sunshine. A few attendants perched on high chairs like lifeguards, ready with whistles and bullhorns whenever they saw someone ignoring the rules posted in red lettering on a large white billboard.

The park was adjacent to Funway, an arcade that offered miniature golf, bumper boats, batting cages, Laser Tag, singing robot animals and games that paid out in tickets to be redeemed at obscene exchange rates for cheap trinkets. The snack bar served pizza, hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, soda pop, cotton candy and giant stale pretzels. Funway was the spot for birthday parties on this side of town.

Crowded, yes, and if Scoot had been interested in purses today there would have been plenty of mom-purses to choose from. Skateboard groupie purses, too. Not that she was interested. God, no. Right now, she thought she might be cured of her purse-snatching habit forever.

She had been here for most of the day, eating an unhealthy lunch and telling herself that at least her jaw muscles were getting a workout trying to chew a pretzel with the consistency of half-dried adobe. She was sweaty, achy and exhausted.

But she felt good. She'd needed this. Had been getting herself all worked up, tied in knots, about that purse. When really, it wasn't anything she had to worry about.

The thing to do was simply claim, as Allison, that she had found it. And that she'd been so shocked by what was inside that the only thing to do was contact the police.

After all, it certainly was not as if the blonde woman would have filed a report about the purse-snatching. Not with what she'd been carrying, what she'd been doing.

The police would take it from there. The police would warn Benedict Westbrook, and it'd all work out fine.

This was not something that she, either as Scoot or as Allison, needed to involve herself in. True, the wild and reckless part of her had contemplated heading over to Palmyra Hills today instead of to the skate park. Just to see the house, maybe see Westbrook, maybe get an idea of why someone would want him dead. That was the part most intriguing to her. What could he have done? Who would pay that kind of money to kill him? Why?

A case like this, though, was probably the sort of thing that would make the papers. She could read about it later. Read about it without seeing her own name in print.

Scoot had been sitting with sore legs outstretched, but had to draw them back fast as a herd of yelling children raced by. They had sticky faces and frenetic eyes, no doubt on a total sugar high.

As she got up, thinking to move to safer ground, she noticed someone looking at her. He was a guy she'd seen around the usual skater hangouts. Hard to miss. Big. Hairy. Resembled one of Dr. Moreau's test subjects that had started out as an orangutan. Room-temperature IQ. Camo pants and combat boots. Drawing looks of his own from the attendants because he might be the type to pull out an Uzi and turn birthday parties into bloodbaths.

His beady gaze was fixed on Scoot. The quality of it made her skin creep. Greedy. Predatory.

She did a hasty but surreptitious check to make sure that her clothes were still arranged, that she hadn't torn her shirt wide open in the fall and exposed her bra or something.

Did he know the truth about her? Did he know that Scoot was really a girl?

Her clothes were fine. Baggy stonewashed jeans, sneakers, an oversized tee shirt bearing the logo of the local major-league baseball team. Her helmet hadn't come off, either.

So why the look? Why the predator's greedy stare?

Scoot didn't like it.

Pretending not to be aware of him, she picked up her board and rose from the bench. She threaded her way through throngs of kids and teenagers. Her stuff was in one of the outdoor lockers.

He followed. At a distance, but he was following her all right.

Oh, great.

When she reached her locker, she unpinned the key stuck with a safety pin to the bottom inside hem of her shirt. She opened the locker and grabbed her duffel. By then, the hairy guy was lingering at the end of the row. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear. Seeing her glance his way, he acted – badly – like he was just innocently placing a call.

She hurried for the exit, not like she was being chased but like she happened to need to catch a bus in a few minutes. The parking lot was full of minivans. She wended her way between them, reached the sidewalk of Pine Street, and set her board on the ground.

Lost him. Good.

But moments later, he appeared behind her on a bike.

No coincidence. He was following her.

Maybe she was being paranoid. Hell, didn't she have a right to be, after yesterday? She didn't know why he would follow her even if he did suspect that there was more to skateboarder Scoot than met the eye.

But he was. She was sure of it.

All right, then. Let him try. Even with wheels, he wouldn't be able to keep up with her.

Scoot was off in a flash, building up speed with a series of strong kicks. The skateboard jolted over seams in the sidewalk with a rapid thud-thud, thud-thud.

Ahead, a city bus was in the process of disgorging its passengers. Several were kids bound for Funway, happy and excited, carrying birthday presents and gift bags with tissue paper foaming out of the top. Scoot veered around them.

Mailman, dead ahead! Not paying attention. Head down, sorting through a pile of catalogs. Navy blue canvas bag taking up half the sidewalk.

Scoot went off the curb, directly in front of the city bus as its doors hiss-thumped shut and it began to pull back into traffic. The horn, right over her head, sounded like the end of the world. If she fell, the huge tires would crush her into roadkill.

Rather than try and get out of the way, she braced both feet on the skateboard and leaned her back and butt against the front of the rolling steel behemoth. It pushed her along. Her wheels shuddered on the asphalt and the word "whoa!" came out of her in a jittery stutter.

She craned her neck. Through the wide windshield, she could see the bus driver gesturing at her. The horn blew again. The bus slowed as he braked.

"Spoilsport!" she shouted over her shoulder, and kicked off from the bus. She hopped back onto the curb, dodged a man walking a cocker spaniel and a woman with a stroller, and sped around a blind corner.

A shop owner and a delivery man had been nose-to-nose arguing, but both leaped backward as Scoot shot between them. "Sorry!" she called back. But she'd done them a favor, because instead of resuming yelling at each other, they both forgot whatever they'd been fighting about and were joined in brotherhood as they yelled after her.

Another dog, this one no clownishly cute cocker spaniel but a bulldog with a scrunched-up face and a pissed-at-the-universe bark, was tied to a parking meter and tried to take a bite out of Scoot's leg. Avoiding that with some fancy footwork, she damn near ran over a portly man too busy reading the Wall St. Journal to look where he was going.

She reached the next cross street and had to stop for the light. There were too many cars moving too fast here for her to risk it. She was a daredevil, maybe, but not suicidal.

Looking back, she saw the bus go through the intersection.

And the hairy red guy come around the corner on his bike.

Shit!

The light went from green to yellow, and Scoot lunged into the street heedless of the last few drivers who tried to make it before the red. A beat-up old Mustang the color of cat puke screeched to a smoking-rubber halt inches from her, and a man's hand popped out the driver's side window to give her a stiff-fingered salute.

Then she was across, pushing hard, whirring along, trying not to bean anybody with her wildly-swinging duffel. Midway down the block she hung a hard right into an alley. It was a narrow corridor between low-rent apartment buildings, all rusty fire escapes and barred windows and overflowing Dumpsters –

-- and three little girls playing jump-rope in the middle of the alley.

"Cinderella-dressed-in-yella-went-upstairs-to-kiss-a-fella," they chanted, two of them turning the long rope while the third, scabby knees showing beneath pink shorts, jumped.

Scoot dismounted at a run, slammed her heel on the back of the board, and flipped it up so that she could catch it by the front end. She trotted to a stop a few yards from the girls, who had left off their chanting to look at her with wide, solemn eyes. The rope lay slack between them, and the jumper stood with one white-sneakered foot on either side of it. She had pink barrettes in her frizzy-dark hair and the Powerpuff Girls on her shirt.

"Made-a-mistake-and-kissed-a-snake," Scoot said. "How-many-doctors-did-it-take?"

The three little girls gave her three gap-toothed smiles. She hopped over the rope and broke into a run, though the jogging motion renewed the pain in her shins in a way that riding the board hadn't done.

At the end of the alley, she looked back. The girls had resumed their jumping and chanting, and she didn't see the guy on the bike.

He hadn't been following her after all.

Relieved, Scoot headed for home.

She changed in the junkyard again, the shadows by now long and cool. Booger the dog was eating kibble in great snuffling gulps out of a stainless-steel bowl big enough to bathe a baby in. The tag on his collar made atonal metallic clinks and clanks.

As she stepped through the fence into the alley, and then onto Dunley Street, she was bathed in whirling pulses of red light from the roof-rack of a police car.

**

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He opened the door to go inside and she was right there behind him. A hard shove sent him stumbling into the darkened room, arms flailing. The bag of Chinese food he'd been carrying flew from his hand and hit the floor. White cardboard containers burst open and spilled fried rice and pork chow mein over the ratty carpet.

"Whoa! Fuck! Hey!" he blurted as his feet knocked into each other and he went solidly to his knees. He landed on a packet of soy sauce and popped it. "What's the fuckin' deal, dude?"

"I'm not a dude," Jade said in her coldest voice. She kicked the door shut, cutting off the daylight and plunging them into even murkier lighting.

The kid with the masses of rusty-wire hair on his head and all over his body, the hulking loser she'd nicknamed Bigfoot, started to rise.

Jade ratcheted the shotgun, and he froze. There was no mistaking that sound. Anybody who'd ever been to an action movie knew that sound.

She didn't care for the shotgun. It was messy and imprecise, hard to conceal, hard to handle. But the important thing was that it made big nasty holes in people, and Bigfoot knew it.

"Don't get up," she said. "Stay right like that."

Still on his knees, he was dumb enough – or stoned into sufficient bravado – to twist his head around and look at her. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. They squinted at her, then lit up with a low animal cunning. He recognized her. It wasn't hard; she wore a green track suit and a hooded jacket, but had made no effort to hide the color and style of her hair.

"Look, bitch –"

"Call me a bitch again, and I'll shoot your foot off."

Holding the shotgun on him, she scanned the rest of the room to make sure they were alone.

Bigfoot lived in a scuzzy motel at the bad end of Prewett. It rented units by the week or month, for cash with no I.D. necessary and no questions asked. He had blankets tacked up over the windows, casting the room into a gloomy dimness that hid the worst of the squalor. There was no kitchen, not even a kitchenette. Instead, there was a microwave so old it probably sent out sterilizing beams of radiation whenever it was used. Given Bigfoot's suitability to breed, Jade figured that in his case, a little sterility was a good thing.

The bed folded down from the wall and was a rumpled expanse of sleeping bag, dirty clothes, and dirtier magazines. Pizza boxes, beer cans, empty two-liter soda bottles, and take-out wrappers littered the floor. The closet was a bare bar above a mound of clothes and towels that looked like they might come alive if someone shot a bolt of lightning through them. Posters of bands – grunge and heavy metal – vied for wall space with centerfolds and pictures of pro wrestlers.

The bathroom door stood ajar and the fly-specked low-wattage bulb over the sink shed their only source of light. She didn't really want a close look at his bathroom, but could see enough of it to determine that no one was hiding in the shower, the floor was so grimy that she couldn't guess what color it had started as, and the toilet seat was up. She'd have bet her car that it wasn't flushed, either. And the shower drain would be clogged with a wad of rust-colored hair the size of a dead hamster.

He had himself a fairly nice entertainment setup, a stack of porn videos, a black Rubbermaid container full of video game cases, and not one but two game-system consoles.

Opposite the bed, the disassembled pieces of a bike hung on metal hooks that had been mounted on the wall. He had left his other bike outside, locking it to a metal rack, the modern equivalent of the ol' hitching post. A skateboard, airbrushed with an image of a flaming skull with snakes coming out of the eye sockets, rested against a speaker. At the foot of the bed was a pair of in-line skates with black wheels. He even had one of those shiny silver scooters. Bigfoot covered all the bases.

The smell in here was enough to make her eyes water. Jade tried not to breathe too deeply, wanting get as little of it into her lungs as possible. She didn't let herself think about what might be causing such a stench, just as she didn't let herself think about the stains on the carpet.

When she had seen him the previous afternoon, Bigfoot had been wearing a rock group tee shirt and black leather pants looped with chrome chains. Today he was in urban commando mode, with an olive-green tee shirt, army-style boot and camouflage pants.

One of his hands twitched toward his belt, where a box cutter hung in a leather loop, and Jade prodded the side of his head with the shotgun barrel.

"Unless you want to make this room even more of a revolting pigsty by decorating the walls with your brains," she said, "you'll forget about trying."

"Jeez, lady! I didn't do nothing!" He had not called her a bitch, so perhaps he could be taught after all, wonder of wonders and hallelujah.

"What's your name?"

"Jon." He said it sullenly, the way he would have – and had, she was sure – said it to a teacher or playground monitor.

"All right, Jon. Listen to me. I want to know who that other kid is, and where I can find him."

He didn't bother with pretending not to know what she was talking about. Having a shotgun pressed to his skull, just above his right ear, must have removed any desire to be a wiseass or play games. "The guy who lifted your purse, I don't know who the fuck he is. Seen him around, and I heard some kids call him Scoot. But I don't know him, lady, I don't fuckin' know him."

"Not good enough."

"Fuck! For Chrissake, lady!"

"Seen him around, you said. Seen him around where?"

"Places," Jon said. "The Plaz, the skate park, the library quad at Atherton."

"You go to Atherton?" she asked, not trying to keep the skepticism from her tone.

"To skate," he said defensively. "To ride my bike. I'm not some pussy college student, but they've got good pavement there."

"What skate park?"

"On Pine," he said. "Pine and 3rd, 4th maybe. I don't go there anymore. Used to, when I was a kid. It's for pussies. They won't let you ride your board there unless you wear a fuckin' helmet."

"But you've seen this Scoot there?"

"Sometimes, yeah." He turned his head a little, the shotgun barrel digging into his matted hair, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "You're not the first one whose fuckin' purse he's stolen. I seen him do it a few times, and so's everybody else."

"Lucky me," Jade said. "Have you seen him since yesterday?"

"No, dude."

"You're not lying to me, Jon?"

"I swear! I fuckin' swear!"

"You certainly do."

"Huh?"

"Tell me about Scoot."

"I told you, I don't fuckin' know him, already. I heard some of the chicks think he's a fag. A pretty boy; all the chicks are crazy for him, but he looks like a fag to me."

"What does he look like?"

"Told you. A pretty boy. I never seen him up close."

"Do you know where he lives?"

Jon shook his head.

Sighing frustration through her teeth, Jade said, "Do you know who would?"

"He doesn't fuckin' hang with us, okay? He's just … around. Doesn't say much."

"Does he smoke? Drink? Do dope?"

"Dope," chuckled Jon. "Dude, that's a good one."

She nudged harder with the shotgun, which the shaggy lunkhead seemed to have temporarily forgotten. "You know what I mean."

"I never seen him do anything but soda."

"Who else can I talk to? I need to find Scoot."

"Hey, I'd fuckin' help you if I could, lady. It's people like him who give the rest of us a bad name, all right? Going around fuckin' robbing people, and so the cops start thinking we're all fuckin' criminals."

Jade had, without consciously electing to do so, begun keeping score of his ludicrous profanity. She couldn't help it.

"They're always fuckin' looking for an excuse to bust one of us, dude," he went on. "Like it's against the law to smoke a little pot."

"It is."

"Fuckin' stupid law. It doesn't hurt nobody."

She wasn't about to get into a debate on law and order with him. This was absurd enough already.

"Tell me who might know where to find Scoot," she said, jabbing harder with the shotgun this time.

"Ow! That fuckin' hurts, okay?"

"It'll fuckin' hurt worse if I pull the trigger. Dude."

God, how she hated whiners! Here he was, six-foot-something and twice her weight, more covered with hair than a werewolf, and he was whining. If ever she'd needed another reason why she preferred to shoot people without having to talk to them, this was it. They would all whine, or blubber, once they had the gun to their head. And then she wouldn't be killing them for the right reasons.

"Sorry," he said, chastened.

Now, why had that gotten through to him all of a sudden? Was it because she was finally speaking his language? Or had the pressure of the shotgun barrel finally made a coherent impression on that thick head of his?

"I'd rather not blow your brains … pardon me, your fuckin' brains out, dude," she said. "It'd be noisy and gross. So, if you want to be alive to eat those egg rolls for lunch, I suggest you listen closely to what I have to say."

"Sure, anything, lady."

One hand on the shotgun, she fished into her pocket and drew out a pre-paid disposable cellular phone. She bought them by the half-dozen and never kept them more than a couple of weeks. "My number's already programmed on here. I let you go, and next time you see Scoot, you call and tell me where he is."

His muddy, bloodshot eyes brightened with hope.

"But there's a catch," she said. "If I don't hear from you by Wednesday – that's in four days – I come back and we have another talk. Got it, dude?"

"Yeah."

"I found you this time, so I can find you again if I need to. Don't make me hunt you down. If you do, you'll regret it."

He bobbed his head again. Droplets of sweat stood out in his scruffy red stubble like beads of dew. Maybe the fact that she had bald-faced walked into his room with a shotgun at high noon convinced him she was in earnest.

"Good." She tossed the phone down beside him and backed toward the door. "And it goes without saying that if I find out you've warned Scoot off …"

"I'm not a fuckin' moron!" he said.

"Prove it."

With that, she was out the door like an eddy of wind.

**

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A muffled but loud hammering noise gradually seeped into her awareness. Once she acknowledged it, she also became aware of a steady drilling beep that drove into her head like someone pushing a long thin nail into her ear.

Allison sat up disoriented, in the grips of a decongestant hangover, and stared stupidly around at the room.

She had made herself go to bed after listening to the tape. Since she hadn't been the least bit sleepy, she'd taken a sinus-relief tablet to help her along. Her sinuses were fine, but the drowsiness side effect dragged her down like an anchor into a thick, dreamless darkness.

The banging came again, accompanied by an unintelligible but irritable voice through the wall.

Her alarm clock was going off. Had been going off for a solid fourteen … no, fifteen minutes. The banging on the wall was Mr. Kaminski next door. He kept his television on at full volume until four in the morning most nights, but if anyone made noise before ten on a Saturday, he would raise the goddamn roof.

She turned off the alarm. The pounding continued for another half a minute, then ceased, and blissful quiet descended. Still, she knew she could count on finding a nasty note tacked to her door later, or a complaint made to Teddi Lace. Or both. Why not, Mr. Kaminski? Live a little.

A shower and two cups of coffee helped to clear away the fog. Clad in stretchy leggings and a long sweater, Allison was back in her dilemma about the blonde's purse.

The smart thing to do would be to turn the purse and everything in it over to the police.

Thinking about the police made a flutter of panic beat in her belly, as if she had swallowed a large moth.

Not that she had anything against them in principle. Police, not moths. Not that she had anything against moths either …

She drank a third cup of coffee.

In principle, she believed that a strong police force was a good thing. Mr. Colucci at the locksmith shop had a brother-in-law who was a cop. Officer Tony Rugerro sometimes came into Sherwood Second-Hand. He liked to browse through the old furniture for pieces that could be fixed up, and always carried a box of like-new stuffed animals in the trunk of his patrol car in case he met any distraught kids on the crime scenes.

Allison liked Officer Rugerro, but whenever he was in the store she got clammy all over, just waiting for him to wander past the rack of purses and recognize one from a robbery report.

She could, she supposed, claim that the buttercream leather purse and its contents had shown up in the donation box. That would be the easiest way to get rid of it.

But what about the money? Who, really, who in their right mind would dump a purse containing that kind of cash? Even the most honest of persons would have a hard time passing up such a windfall. You sometimes heard of thrift store employees finding overlooked valuables in coat pockets, but a wad of twenty-five thousand dollars was a hell of a lot harder to overlook than a ring or a folded hundred-dollar bill.

What, then? Hold onto the money, but turn everything else over?

And if she held onto the money, what would she do with it?

Off the top of her head, she could list fifty people in this neighborhood alone who could benefit from a surprise bonus.

Eva, for example, and Hector. With that kind of cash, Eva could afford a bigger place and actually have her brother live with her, to keep him away from the bad influences of his stepfather and soon-to-be-released convict brother.

Or Martha. Even if Martha wanted to live in her vacant lot, it couldn't be good for her and she couldn't really be happy.

Or the Strevyks … or Needles and Tisha … or even Jamie Tremayne. Indeed, practically everyone she knew on Dunley Street could make good and welcome use of twenty-five thousand dollars.

For that matter, if she was being truthful with herself, so could Allison "Scoot" Montgomery. She didn't need a nicer apartment or a car … but if she had those things, she could bring her sister over for visits. Spend weekends with her. Summers, even. It would be a way to erase some of the loneliness and misery from Missy's eyes. A way to get her out of that luxurious, loveless house for a while.

But she couldn't keep the money all for herself and not share with her friends and neighbors … and she couldn't realistically share with her friends and neighbors. What would she tell them? That she happened to find twenty-five G's and wanted to share the wealth? That she'd won the lottery? She never played the lottery and they all knew it. Even the most grateful of them would have to be a little suspicious … and someone might say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

"For God's sake!" she said into the stillness of the living room. "Forget about the money! The money's the least of your worries right now!"

While that wasn't entirely true, it was true enough for her to push the issue aside and turn her attention to what really mattered.

The gun.

The gun and the folder.

A man was marked for death, as crazy as that sounded. Someone wanted him killed and was willing to pay big bucks to see it done.

Allison wasn't naïve enough to believe that the people who'd hired the woman called Jade would, upon learning of the mishap, shrug and say, "Oh, well, never mind then … let him live." There had been steel beneath the smoky sexiness of Jade's lunch date's voice. He wasn't someone to change his mind.

No, whatever else happened, somebody wanted the man in the photographs dead, and would find some other way of accomplishing it.

For all Allison knew, he might be dead already. Was it so far-fetched to think that Jade, alarmed by the loss of her purse, had decided to strike fast before the target could be warned?

She smacked herself in the head. That was what she should have done first! If he was dead, it was her fault.

When she opened the folder, the photos slid out. Handsome man, blond curls, bronze tan, excellent teeth. Looked a little like the actor Heath Ledger had. Expensive clothes. The watch on his wrist looked like a Rolex. Pricey sailboat.

He appeared to be the kind of guy that might have been buddies with her Montgomery-side relatives. From money. From influence. Tennis, yachting, polo. His nickname was probably Chet, or Chas, or Skip … if he had a sister, she was Tiffy, or Muffy, or Babs.

Was it possible that she might even know him? Had they been guests at the same parties? If he was local, it wasn't that far-fetched. She'd certainly met plenty of men like him. But she didn't recognize this specific one.

On one of the pages of information, she found his name.

"Benedict Westbrook."

She didn't know the name … yet felt the nagging, niggling feeling that she should.

The address was in Palmyra Hills, which Allison knew to be an area of opulent mansions, waterfront property, and general extravagance.

New money, as her father might say with a sneer. The Montgomerys had made their fortune several generations back. Their particular branch of the family was not associated with the department stores but with canned fruits and vegetables, frozen dinners, and one of the earliest patents on a type of circuit used in microwave ovens and other small appliances.

So this Westbrook could be a computer mogul, an e-commerce kind of guy. Or … hadn't she only a few minutes ago been imagining herself sharing around the money and claiming she'd won the lottery?

If that were the case, then it was even less likely she might have met him. In her parents' hierarchy of worthiness, the old-money families whose current descendants never had to do a real day's work but could coast on the inheritance and investments were the top dogs. Big-money celebrities, sports figures and high-tech dot-commers were next, because while they might not have the bloodline, they had at least earned their fortunes and their way to the top.

But the lowest, the worst, the intolerable were the ones who made their fortunes out of the blue and with little apparent effort. Allison had once overheard her mother and her sister-in-law talking disdainfully about a woman who'd won a million dollars on a game show and was buying a nearby house. This woman even had the temerity to want to join the country club. As Susan Montgomery had put it, "She suddenly has a million dollars and thinks that makes her good enough."

It hadn't been long after that, come to think of it, that Allison had moved out and been glad to go.

No, there was no room in the Montgomery world view for lottery winners – not even those who scored the multi-million-dollar jackpots – or game show contestants, or people who successfully got enormous lawsuit settlements because they'd spilled hot coffee on themselves. A gold-digging bimbo who married an elderly oil tycoon and then had him drop dead a week later of a sexual-overload stroke was more welcome in their society. Heck … a woman like that would receive a certain grudging respect, because she had earned it.

If Westbrook was one of 'those' people, it made sense that Allison might have heard his name but wasn't able to connect it to anything. He wouldn't have been a guest at the house, but someone who might have been mentioned in passing, with that lofty arrogance only the truly lofty spoiled rich could achieve.

She had to do something.

Do what?

Allison folded her legs tailor-fashion, braced her elbows on her knees and propped her head up on her hands.

Do something.

Uh-huh, sure.

Call him up, why not? "Hi, Mr. Westbrook … you don't know me, but there's someone trying to kill you."

Send him a fortune cookie. Beware of petite blondes with guns.

Mail him what she'd found?

That had possibilities. Package it all up, and send it to the Palmyra Hills address with an anonymous letter. When one of his own guns fell out of the envelope, it'd have to make him sit up and take notice.

Except then, the police would get involved. And no matter how careful Allison was, they'd trace it back to her. Somehow. Her fingerprints were all over everything. Even if she wiped off each article, would that work on paper? Didn't the oils from the fingertips soak in and leave an indelible mark?

There would be hairs, fibers from her clothes and carpet. Handwriting analysis of the letter, the address … even if she typed them, or used a computer, there were ways to ferret out the truth by the kind of ink, the brand of paper. She watched television. She knew what they could do.

The greater pains she took to cover her tracks, the more it would make the detectives think she had something to hide.

Which, okay, she did. But that was beside the point. She was trying to do the right thing here, damn it! Trying to save a man from being murdered!

It just so happened that she was also a petty criminal.

"Sheesh, Allie-girl," she muttered, using Uncle Bob's pet name. "What's more important here? Your freedom or a guy's life?"

Then there was the scandal to think about, what her family would –

Allison veered her thoughts sharply away from that, thank you very much.

What, then? What to do?

She was never going to come up with an answer just sitting here. She needed to get out, away from this mess. She needed to get some air, some movement.

She needed to be Scoot for a while.

**

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The baby's room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was also where she had made her first kill.

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

Jeanette looked again around the empty, unfurnished room.

The baby's room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If that damned skateboard kid didn't ruin everything.

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

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

What was she going to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The target. He was the problem.

Whoever he was.

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

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

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

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

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

She needed to get her stuff back.

Which meant finding the skateboard kid.

Somehow. Anyhow.

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

**

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A stiletto.

No.

A pen.

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

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

"Me? Why?"

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

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

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

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

"Hey, you want some good news?"

"I could really used some good news."

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

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

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

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

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

"How's school going?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She dug deeper.

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

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

No name for the mystery blonde.

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

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

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

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

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

But maybe she was wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they were talking about the gun.

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

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

Practically an antique. Beautiful condition. Ivory-handled.

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

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

She pushed "Play" again.

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

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

A hundred thousand dollars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

CHAPTER TWELVE

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

"No reason."

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

"No. I was only wondering."

"You wonder this kind of thing often?"

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

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

"I'm serious, here."

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

"Does it matter?"

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

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

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

"You wouldn't kill them?"

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

"You're weird."

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

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

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

"Then they'd have to deserve it?"

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

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

"Not really."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Interesting."

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

"Nobody. Sheesh!"

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

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

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

"Sinister!"

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

"Terrorize!"

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

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

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

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

"I think I know those guys."

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

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

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

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

"Lumpy. Gives them that homemade taste."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jerk."

"Meanie."

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

"Shall I kiss it and make it better?"

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

"You have eyes back there?"

"Ha, ha."

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

"Smartass."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Gravy?"

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

"I wasn't."

"Making a pass?"

"Planning to throw the meatloaf."

"So it was a pass?"

"If you want it to be."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, not particularly."

"Looks exhilarating. You might like it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You liked the pie?"

"There was pie?"

"Very funny."

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

"Maybe it was a pass."

"Was it?"

"If you want it to be."

**