Third Grave Dead Ahead

by Darynda Jones

  “Yes.” I was already getting uncomfortable in the awkward position.

  He leaned into me and whispered into my ear. “I’m counting on it.”

  “Wait, you’re going to let me go?”

  “Of course. How else are you going to find Walker?”

  “Then why did you handcuff me to this bed?”

  A grin as smooth as glass spread across his face. “Because I need a head start.” Before I could comment, he raised a paper in front of my face. “These are the names of Earl Walker’s last known associates.”

  I tilted my head and read. “He only had three friends?”

  “He wasn’t real popular. I promise you, one of these men knows where he is.” He sat beside me, his dark eyes sparkling even in the low light, and it hit me again that Reyes Farrow was in my presence, a man I’d been infatuated with for over a decade, a supernatural being who radiated sensuality like other people radiated insecurity. He pushed the small piece of paper into one of my pockets and let his hand linger on my hip.

  “Reyes, uncuff me.”

  He bit down and turned away. “I couldn’t be responsible for my actions if I did.”

  “I’m not asking you to be.”

  “But they’ll be here any second,” he said, regret edging his voice.

  “What?” I asked, surprised. “Who?”

  He stood and rummaged around in the bag before he kneeled down next to me again. “I apparently made the ten o’clock news. The clerk recognized me, probably called the cops the minute we walked out.”

  My mouth fell open. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because this has to look good.”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t pick up on that.” Then I found out why he needed the duct tape. “Wait!” I said as he readied the tape. “How did you text me from my sister’s number?”

  “I didn’t,” he said with a grin, and before I could say anything else, I had duct tape covering part of my face.

  Reyes grabbed the duffel bag, then took my chin into his palm and planted a kiss right on the tape. When he was finished—and I was breathless—he looked into my eyes apologetically. “This is going to hurt.”

  What? I thought, half a second before I saw stars and the world darkened around me.

  10

  The police never find it as funny as you do.

  —T-SHIRT

  Moments after I’d been clocked by the man voted Most Likely to Be Killed by an Angry White Chick, the world came spinning back with a nauseating vengeance. A SWAT team crashed through the door, rifles at their shoulders as they swept the room. One of them knelt beside me and I moaned, partly to make it look good and partly because that was all I could do.

  Reyes hit me! He’d actually hit me! It didn’t matter that hitting me wasn’t really like hitting a regular girl and I’d be completely healed in a matter of hours. I was still a freaking girl, and he damned well knew it. I’d just have to hit him back. With a lead pipe. Or an eighteen-wheeler.

  “Are you okay?” SWAT guy asked, studying my eye.

  Damn, I loved it when men in uniform studied my eyes. Or my ass. Either way. I nodded as he slowly peeled the tape off. He secured it onto a piece of plastic and sealed it in an evidence bag as a detective and two patrolmen strolled in to talk to the sergeant in charge. With the help of one of the patrolmen, the officer unlocked the cuffs and helped me onto the bed after they righted it.

  “Would you like some water?” he asked.

  “No, I’m good, thank you.”

  “I think we should arrest her.”

  Startled, I looked up at the patrolman. It was Owen Vaughn. The Owen Vaughn. The guy who tried to kill-and-or-horribly-maim me in high school with his dad’s SUV. Well, this sucked ass. He hated my guts. And everything about my guts. He even hated the cavity encapsulating my guts. What was that thing called?

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Officer,” the detective said. “Wait a minute.” He stepped closer. “You’re Davidson’s niece.”

  “Yes, sir, I am,” I said, testing my eye with my finger. It stung. Not my finger, but my eye.

  After releasing a long breath, he looked at Vaughn and said, “Okay, arrest her.”

  “What?”

  A satisfied smirk spread across Vaughn’s face and an evil grin spread across the detective’s. “Just kidding,” he said.

  Vaughn scowled in disappointment and stalked off as the detective sat beside me.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “I was carjacked.” Obviously, my telling the cops was the plan. Otherwise, Reyes wouldn’t have hit me. Or I hoped not. “And handcuffed to this bed frame with handcuffs.”

  “I see.” The detective took out his notepad and jotted down a few notes right as a U.S. Marshal came through the door. “Does he still have your car?”

  With a mental sigh, I realized this could take a while.

  Annnnnnnnnnnd it did.

  Two hours later, I sat in the back of Owen Vaughn’s patrol car waiting for Uncle Bob to pick me up. I’d been checked out by an EMT and harassed by a rascally officer named Bud. After that, I figured it was time to get the heck outta Dodge, so I called for backup in the form of my favorite uncle to convince Albuquerque’s finest to let me go. The black eye helped. Holy cow, Reyes packed a punch. And I doubted he was even trying. Which, thank God.

  I looked into the rearview mirror at Vaughn. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, which was cool, since it was his car. “Are you ever going to tell me what I did?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t pop a cap in my ass for the asking.

  “Are you ever going to die screaming?”

  That would be a big fat hopefully not. Man, he hated me, and I’d never found out why. I decided to try to humanize myself so he’d be less likely to kill me if ever the opportunity arose. I’d read that if you say a victim’s name repeatedly to, say, a kidnapper, then the kidnapper forms a mental attachment to the person they’re holding hostage.

  “Charley Davidson is a fair person. I’m sure if you just told Charley what she did, she’d be more than willing to fix it.”

  He stilled, then eased around to me, slowly, as though I’d mortified him. “If you ever talk about yourself in third person again, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

  Okay, he was clearly sensitive about narrative forms. I wasn’t sure it was legal for a police officer to threaten a civilian like that, but since he had a gun and I didn’t, I decided not to question him on it.

  I learned two things about Owen Vaughn as we sat there waiting for Ubie: First, he had the uncanny ability to stare a person down in a rearview mirror without blinking for like five minutes. I wished I’d had eye drops to offer him. And second, he had some kind of nasal deformity that made him squeak a little when he breathed.

  * * *

  Not long after my nerve-racking stretch in hell—otherwise known as Owen Vaughn’s patrol car—a very grumpy man named Uncle Bob gave me a ride to my apartment.

  “So, Farrow carjacked you?” Ubie asked as we pulled into the parking lot, unconcerned with his bed head.

  “Yes, he carjacked me.”

  “And why were you at a convenience store in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of a flash flood warning?”

  “Because I got a text from … Oh! Gemma!”

  I dug my phone out of my bag, which Reyes was nice enough to leave on the nightstand, and called hers. Still off. So I tried her home phone.

  “Gemma Davidson,” she answered, her voice as groggy as I felt.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “Elvis.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Hammer time?”

  “Charley.”

  “Did you text me? Did your car break down?”

  “No and no. Why are you doing this to me?” She was funny.

  “Check your cell.”

  I heard a loud, sleepy sigh, some rustling of sheets, t
hen, “It won’t come on.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No. What did you do to it?”

  “I ate it for breakfast. Check the battery compartment.”

  “Where the hell is that?”

  “Um, behind the battery door.”

  “Are you punking me?” I heard her fumbling with the phone.

  “Gem, if I was going to punk you, I wouldn’t simply turn off your phone. I would pour honey in your hair while you slept. Or, you know, something like that.”

  “That was you?” she asked, appalled.

  She’d totally fallen for the open-window technique of throwing the victim off the trail of the true assailant. She thought Cindy Verdean did it for years. I was going to tell her the truth eventually, but after what she did to Cindy in retaliation, I changed my mind. Cindy’s eyelashes were never the same.

  “Wait,” she said, “my battery’s gone. Did you take it?”

  “Yes. Did you go out this evening?”

  After another loud sigh, she said, “No. Yes. I went out for drinks with a colleague.”

  “Did anyone bump into you? Drop something in front of—”

  “Yes! Oh, my gosh, this man bumped into me, apologized, then about five minutes later, personally brought over a bottle of wine to make up for it. It was nothing. I mean, he barely touched me.”

  “He took your phone, texted me from it, stole the battery, then put it back when he brought the wine over.” With Reyes’s circle of friends, I was hardly surprised a pickpocket was among them.

  “I feel so violated.”

  “About the phone or the honey?”

  “You know that whole payback’s-a-bitch thing. Hey, you never called me back after your meeting with Reyes. How’d it go?”

  “Oh, it went super.” I looked over at Uncle Bob, who sat waiting for a report. “Well, that explains that,” I said as I closed my phone midsentence.

  “Charley, I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. The man is a convicted murderer. If you’d seen what he did to his father…” He trailed off, shaking his bed head.

  I decided to confide in him despite the state of his hair. “Uncle Bob, is it possible that the man in that trunk wasn’t Earl Walker?”

  His brows slid together. “Is that what Farrow told you?”

  “Is it possible?” I asked again.

  Ubie lowered his head and turned the engine off to his SUV. “He’s like you, isn’t he?”

  His question surprised me, and I wasn’t sure what to say, but I should have been expecting it. He’d seen Reyes’s body after the demons got a hold of him. He’d seen how fast he healed. The doctors were calling the fact that Reyes survived at all a miracle. And two weeks later, he’s walking around in gen-pop at the prison like nothing happened. I would have bet a large mocha Frappuccino Ubie was keeping tabs on Reyes. I would’ve been after what I saw.

  “You have this uncanny ability to live through the most impossible situations,” he continued. “You heal faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. You move differently sometimes, almost like you’re not human.”

  He’d been keeping track.

  “I have to ask you something, and I want you to be totally honest.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little worried. I was not at my best. I hadn’t had caffeine in like three hours. And he was definitely putting two and two together.

  “Are you an angel?”

  And coming up with twelve. “No,” I said with a chuckle. “Let’s just say, if I ended up in the lost-and-found bin at the airport, I don’t think the Big Guy upstairs would come down to claim me.”

  “But you are different,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

  “I am. And … yes, so is Reyes.”

  A long sigh slipped through his lips. “He didn’t kill his father, did he?”

  “First, Earl Walker is not his real father.”

  Ubie acknowledged that with a nod. That fact had come out in the trial.

  “Second, I’m beginning to believe the man isn’t even dead.”

  After staring out the window for a long moment, he said, “It’s possible. Not likely, certainly not probable, but possible. There are ways.”

  “Like switching the dental records?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “And the fact that Earl Walker’s girlfriend at the time was a dental assistant at the very office the authorities obtained those records from didn’t strike anyone as odd?”

  I knew Ubie had been the lead detective on the case, so to say I was skating on thin ice would have been more than appropriate. And I sucked at ice skating.

  His lips thinned under his thick mustache. “Are you helping him?”

  “Yes.” There was no reason to lie. Uncle Bob wasn’t an idiot.

  I felt a spike of adrenaline emanate from him when I answered, the surprise he felt, but I think he was more surprised that I was being honest. So he tried again. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.” When his brows slid together with a hint of doubt, I added, “That’s why he handcuffed me, to get a head start. He didn’t want to put me in that position.”

  “And he hit you because?”

  “I called his sister a doody head.”

  He fixed an exasperated gaze on me.

  “He’s very sensitive.”

  “Charley—”

  “He wanted it to look good, you know, for the cops.”

  “Aw. Did you have anything to do with his escape?”

  “Besides getting carjacked? No.”

  “Are you going to fill in the details that you so conveniently left out for the sergeant on duty?”

  “No.” I couldn’t tell him about Amador and Bianca or the super-spy plan they’d concocted to get him out of there.

  “Do you think Cookie is up?”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes and glanced over at Misery. Apparently, Amador had her delivered sometime during the night. Thoughtful of him.

  Maybe the unholy union of Cookie and Uncle Bob wasn’t such a bad idea. They’d started flirting recently, and as much as it caused this burning sensation in my stomach, they were both healthy, responsible adults, capable of making their own bad decisions that resulted in years of couple’s therapy and, eventually, court fees.

  It would be disturbing to watch, though. I could just pack up all my worldly possessions and live in Misery. The Jeep, not the emotion.

  I glanced back at Uncle Bob, at his pathetically hopeful expression, and decided to negotiate. “You gonna get that tail off my ass?” I gestured toward the car parked across the street with a nod.

  His face fell. “No. It’s good for your ass.”

  “So is taking the stairs, but I take the elevator every chance I get.” When he shrugged, I added, “Cookie’s asleep,” right before exiting the vehicle.

  11

  Mistakes were made.

  Others were blamed.

  —T-SHIRT

  Since I still had a couple more hours before we opened up shop, I decided to read some more of the research on my missing-wife case before hitting the showers. Uncle Bob had totally scored with the statements, but I mainly focused on Teresa Yost herself. Besides tons of volunteer work and sitting on a couple of boards, Teresa Yost had graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Mexico with a degree in linguistics. Which meant she was freaking smart. And she probably knew another language or two. She’d worked a lot with disabled kids and had been instrumental in starting a horse ranch that catered specifically to children in wheelchairs.

  “And she didn’t deserve to die,” I said to Mr. Wong, who continued to stare into his corner.

  Two hours later, I sat drinking coffee with a towel on my head, placating a very disappointed-that-I-hadn’t-called-her Cookie. “He was naked?”

  “He was in the shower, so … yes.”

  “And you didn’t get a picture?” She sighed in frustration.

  “I was in handcuffs.”

  “Did he … did you…?�
��

  “No. Oddly enough, the actual act doesn’t seem to matter where he’s concerned. Just looking at him causes these sharp waves of ecstasy to flood my girl parts, so it’s almost the same thing.”

  “That’s so unfair. I’m going on a killing spree.”

  “Can I drop you somewhere?”

  “No, I have to get Amber to school. At least let me help with Reyes’s case.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” She frowned in disappointment. “I can research shit. It’s what I do.”

  “I have names. I’ll look them up while you check into the good doctor’s finances.”

  “Oh, well, okay. Isn’t he like a billionaire?”

  I smiled. “That’s exactly what I want to know.”

  After covering my black eye with enough concealer to make the late Tammy Faye Bakker proud, I trudged across the parking lot, my feet getting heavier with every step. This whole lack-of-sleep thing seemed to be wearing on me if the little girl following me with the knife was any indication. “Weren’t you a hood ornament yesterday?” I asked.

  She didn’t look at me. Which was horridly rude. She wore a charcoal gray dress with black patent leather boots, an outfit that could have doubled as a Russian school uniform, and she had shoulder-length black hair. Her only accessory was the knife, which didn’t really match. Apparently accessorizing was not her thing.

  I walked over to the tail parked across the street and knocked on the window. The guy in it jumped with a start. “I’m going to work now!” I yelled through the glass as he squinted at me. “Pay attention.”

  He rubbed his eyes and waved. I recognized him as one of Garrett Swopes’s men. Garrett Swopes, I thought with a snort. What a freaking traitor. My uncle Bob says, Follow Charley, and he does it. Like, just does it. Like our friendship means nothing to him. Of course, it doesn’t, but still. Punk ass.

  “Are you Charley Davidson?”

  I turned to see a woman in a worn brown coat and penny loafers. Practical but hardly appealing. “Depends on who’s asking.”

  She walked up to me, scanning the area as she went. She had long black hair that could’ve used a good brushing and huge sunglasses covering half her face. I recognized her from the Buick in the street yesterday morning. The same hair. The same sunglasses. The same sadness percolating beneath the surface. But her aura was warm, its light like the soft glow of a candle, as though afraid to shine too brightly.