by Susan Dunlap
The creaking of boards stopped her. It was coming from the back of the building. She stiffened. Wind? More like feet, cold feet on the back porch. Waiting for the go-ahead to charge inside.
She yanked open cabinets and saw brown bottles, white bottles, clear and opaque bottles, syringes. Nothing unexpected.
The back porch creaked. No gust of wind would do that. If there was a sheriff at the back, there’d be a deputy at the front. She emptied the wastebasket onto the counter. Nothing there but slightly stained cotton swabs and a bottle of nail polish remover. The bottle was almost full. The stains were the same unusual color of pale peach as the dead woman had been wearing. That didn’t prove anything, never would. But it made her wonder why someone had gone to the trouble of removing nail polish from a dead woman’s toes.
A loud snap came from the back of the building.
She eyed the window. Too late.
CHAPTER 24
THE WEASEL PRESSED HIMSELF into the wall. He could stand a long time without moving. He watched the gold Jeep charge down the street and the doc’s BMW take off after him. He hadn’t figured the doc for being in this deep. But her he could deal with later. He moved out of the shadows and strode around to the door and gave it three hard bangs. “Housing Authority! Open up!”
Feet scuffled inside.
“Lady, I’m already working on my own time. It doesn’t put me in a good mood. Don’t make me madder than I am already. Open the door!”
He heard the chain rattle before the door eased open an inch, then he pushed hard and was inside. The woman looked like a rag. But not bleached out. No. Hot, feverish, blotchy red. Hair stringy, damp, clumped to her head. Eyes wild. Touch her on the arm and he could push her over. Her nightgown hung half open down her breasts. Good pair of mangoes. Odd, a woman like this not covering herself. Oh, shit, how sick was she? Did she have the same thing as the boys? “Some kind of foreign virus,” as Adcock put it. Was this stuff one of those flus that knocks you out for weeks? He shoulda made Adcock cough up the facts on this plague business. Not that he was likely to make a guy like Adcock do anything.
Ignoring the woman’s cries of “I pay rent, I pay already,” he pushed past her into the bedroom looking for the girl. “Where is she, your daughter?”
“Señor?”
He heard the girl before he saw her, squeezed between the dresser and the door. Her face was blotched red; the kid was shaking.
“What’d you tell the big guy?”
“I don’t know.”
He had to strain to hear her.
“You talked to him five minutes ago. You know. Tell me and I’m gone, understand?”
“I don’t know.”
He started to reach for her, caught himself, and let his hand threaten her. The mother’d be a problem if he touched the kid. He didn’t have time for that. Turning to her, he said, “You tell her not to talk to strange men?”
“Si. Yes.”
He turned back to the shaking child. “This is what happens when you talk to strange men. You can make it okay by telling me what you said.” He shot another look at the mother.
“Tell him, Sarita.”
“He just wanted to know about the boys and the blond lady who took them, and the man and the nice lady they went with one day and came back.”
The blond lady, the doc. The man’d be Grady. “The nice lady, what did he call her?”
“Irene.”
A siren ripped the air, so close he could barely hear her. “Last name, did he say her last name?” He was moving toward the door.
Sarita shook her head.
“Come on, think!” The siren shrieked and cut off. The cops were here. The Weasel slid out the door and ran.
CHAPTER 25
“YOU READY?” A WHISPER. It came from the back. How many deputies did the sheriff have here?
Kiernan pulled her latex gloves off, tossed them in front of the freezer door, and hit the light switch. The room turned black as she slipped out into the hall. Hand to the wall, she hurried forward, past other doors to other rooms. There was no time to check them out. She couldn’t chance a dead end. She had to go with the one place she knew, the viewing parlor in front.
A key scraped in the back-door lock. The lock that Jeff Tremaine said kept no one out.
The viewing-parlor door swung easily, silently, and the room let in a dim glow from the street-side windows.
Metal jangled outside on the sidewalk. Keys. Fox’s men would be coming in both doors.
Desperately she looked around the room, squinting to pull the dark forms into recognizable shapes. Dais, podium, rolling wooden platform ready to hold a coffin, twin bookcases that reached nearly to the ceiling, twin cabinets in the back. The cabinets she crossed off immediately—too obvious. Under the dais? Dicey.
Metal scraped metal as keys moved into locks.
The bookcases. In California they would be bolted to the wall. Here? She had to hope. The shelves were too small to hold an adult; that’s what Fox would assume. No adult would think to climb on top, he’d think. If she got out of this, she’d never again complain about petite-sized pants being too long. She grabbed a high shelf and climbed. The few books shimmied. A stack fell on its side.
Across the room the dead bolt gave.
The bookcase shimmied but held. Silently she swung herself onto the top, knelt, and scrunched over chin on knees. The dust flew up her nose. She rammed her hand over her mouth, pinched her nose. The fallen books, could she reach them, right them? Her nose tickled: It took all her concentration not to sneeze.
The door opened, banging back into the bookcase. The light came on. Sheriff Fox stood in the doorway, a thick angry figure turned black by the backlighting.
If he spotted the fallen books; if he questioned them at all, he need only look twelve inches up. She was in clear sight. She swallowed hard against the tickling dust. She could hear the back door banging open, feet clopping in.
Fox took a step into the room. He looked left and right. “Come on out. We know you’re in here!” He strode across the room, yanked open the cabinet doors. “Shit!” He peered under the dais.
Deliberately Kiernan didn’t hold her breath. She breathed through her mouth, so softly air barely moved.
Pushing his meaty body up, he stalked to the hallway door and wedged it open. “We’ve got both doors covered. There’s no way out. Make it easy on yourself. Step out, hands up.” He waited. “Jeez,” he muttered, and started forward.
She didn’t move.
He turned, surveyed the viewing room, eyeing the open cabinets, the dais, the windows, the bookcase. His gaze stopped—
Forget those fallen books, every cell of her body screamed.
His gaze moved to the door, on around. With a satisfied shrug he headed down the hall, flinging open doors, dismissing the rooms behind them. Outside the embalming-room door, he stopped. “We know you’re in there. Open the door.”
The viewing room was clear. She counted to five before Fox said, “Okay,” and pushed open the door.
Light flooded the hall. The deputies followed him in. “Hey, look at this! Gloves! She must be in the freezer!”
“Maybe we should let her sweat it out, huh, Sheriff?” a deputy cackled.
Kiernan resisted the urge to leap to the floor and race outside. There were at least two deputies in here with the sheriff. That had to be the whole force. There couldn’t be anyone else watching the front.
“Go ahead, Potter, open ’er up.”
She lowered a foot to a shelf, swung herself around, and stepped quietly to the floor. Moving as silently as she could, she crossed the room and let herself out the door into the street.
CHAPTER 26
“NOW THEY’RE TELLING DAD he needs chemo. Yeah, I know. Government sets off a bomb, sprays radiation all the hell over the grasses, the streams, the cattle, so the lads downwind get cancer from drinking the milk, ferhevvinsake, and now fifty-some years later they’re still saying it’s not their fau
lt when Dad come up with cancer. Life east of the proving ground, eh?”
Tchernak sighed as he leaned against the wall between the Gents and the Ladies and eyed the guy jabbering away on the phone—the only phone in this greasy spoon where conversation was the tastiest thing you could buy. He could understand why there was no phone book here, what with the pages and pages of escort services, with their full-page colored pictures of ladies you wouldn’t escort home to Mom. Probably fourteen-year-old boys ripped them off as fast as Nevada Bell sent them out. When he finished this case his first project would be to get himself a cell phone.
He had dawdled over the miserable dinner trying to use the time to figure out what the hell was going on with Grady Hummacher. Truth was he didn’t know Hummacher at all anymore. Much less the blonde and the brunette the little girl had seen with him. The blonde would be Louisa Larson. But the other?
“Government swore there was no danger. Where did they think the radiation was going, straight up to heaven? Dust went halfway through Utah.
“So I says to my sister, Milly, you know her, right? The one in Connecticut that just broke with that loser of a husband?”
Tchernak glanced at the two women behind him in line, then turned his gaze back at the man on the phone and loudly shifted his feet. The strawberry pie had been a mistake. At home he didn’t deal with chain restaurants, period, much less a joint like this. Half the hotels he wouldn’t waste his money in. Even with the best chefs he spotted flavors too strong, sauces too thick, fish breaded and fried when it should have been poached. If salmon wasn’t flown in fresh from the Northwest, he didn’t deal with it. He had a standing order for Dungeness crab the minute the season opened in San Francisco, and organic garlic from Watsonville for his garlic-pepper marinade. And there were the Maine lobsters, and the Jersey bluefish.
He shoved the memories away. He’d never get another chance to cook like that, with a boss who never stinted. He’d known that when he quit. But dammit, it didn’t have to be this way. If Kiernan hadn’t been so pigheaded—“I don’t like to share.” What kind of reason is that?—they could be halfway to wherever the phone number in Grady’s apartment led him. They’d be eating sun-dried-tomato focaccia with black olives, capers, and wild fennel and hashing back and forth what Grady could be up to. She’d be sitting with her knees to her chest like a teenager, bitching like a special-teams coach, egging him on to everything on the far side of the law.
“No, the old man did not sue. He was a good citizen. Prided himself on being such a damned good citizen that now he’s near dead.
“Come to Vegas, Milly, I says. I mean, what’s to lose, right? That loser husband of hers lost everything they had before she lost him. But here she could get a union job and do good, you know?”
Tchernak cleared his throat. The women behind him paused long enough to look him over. The man, the only one he cared about, reacted not at all.
Tchernak tapped his shoulder. Guy’s head came up to his armpit. He almost had to bend to reach his shoulder. “Your time’s up.”
“Hey, who’re you to—”
“Time’s up.”
“I’m not done.”
Tchernak glared down at him. “Go to the back of the line.”
Tchernak couldn’t make out the guy’s reply as he stalked off because the two women were laughing too loud.
He checked his watch and dialed Adcock.
“Adcock.”
“Tchernak,” he snapped. Did Nevada Bell charge by the syllable? “Where the hell are you?”
Tchernak told him.
“Okay. The phone exchange Grady called is somewhere around Gattozzi.”
“Gattozzi? Where’s that?”
Tchernak listened to the directions, then had Adcock spend a lot of syllables repeating them as he wrote them down.
“You shouldn’t have any trouble, Tchernak. There’s only one way up there. There’s a cafe called the Doll’s House on the highway. You can’t miss it, it’s the only thing there. Meet me there in two hours.”
“Right. Two hungry kids, good chance Grady stopped there.” Tchernak put down the receiver, checked his watch again, and tapped the sour-faced little guy glowering behind the women. “Fifteen seconds. See?”
Half the strawberry pie was still on his table. He pushed it away and signaled the waitress. Gattozzi had to be some little town in the middle of nowhere. Why would Grady fly in from Central America and head straight into the back country? If he was up to the kind of double-crossing Adcock was tied in knots about, couldn’t he do that crossing right here in Vegas? Maybe he had a cabin or something up there? Yeah, but you don’t fly in and out of Panama twice in a week and then take a few days for R and R before you screw your boss. The whole thing just didn’t make sense.
What would Kiernan do? First thing she’d kick up a fuss about how slow the service is. He laughed to himself. “Never know when you’ll need a new enemy,” he’d told her the last time. That hadn’t struck her as funny as it did him. For a woman with a good sense of humor she did have her dead spots.
Food. She’d stock up like she was going camping. Well, he’d already stoked his fires on a couple burgers and shakes. Still, a dozen Hersheys couldn’t hurt. And some bottled water. Six-pack of Coke. Crackers. You never know.
He collected his larder, paid the bill, and got in the Jeep. One thing about Las Vegas, you didn’t have to wonder where you were. Billions of kilowatts marked the Strip. And next to the Strip was the freeway.
There was still the question of how to get to the freeway entrance. He got the car door open and swung into the seat, twisting to get the map. First, where was he now? Here? No, a couple of squares to the right. Two squares beneath Grady’s place.
Grady’s place? Something about it pulled at him. He couldn’t think why. Maybe he should be keeping notes.
“Stupid! Jeez, maybe Kiernan’s right!” That’s what Kiernan would do, get the e-mail from BakDat! Grady’s place would be the easier venue for that. With Persis’s backgrounds and the lead to Gattozzi, he’d be onto Grady in a snap.
The Weasel eased out of the parking lot, stick of beef jerky in hand. If he’d known the giant baby dick was going to lounge over his food like he was dining at the captain’s table, he’d have had time to get something decent himself. He could use a good relaxing meal after the run from the kid’s house. Cops were in front before he could get the car moving. He’d had to slide down to the floorboards and hope the cops weren’t too thorough. Which they weren’t.
Coming up with a working phone in that neighborhood was just about as hard. He prided himself on always knowing the nearest pay phones, but he’d really crapped out on that one. Had to go a mile and a half before the neighborhood changed and he spotted one outside a fast food grocery.
And then he didn’t have time to get on Adcock about all the bastard wasn’t telling him. All he could do was get the location where the Jeep was and race over here before the baby dick drove off.
What was with Adcock? He knew the guy’s reputation, and now word was the guy was desperate. Maybe the truth was Adcock was just wacko. This time he says the baby dick’s headed up 93, but the guy wasn’t even going toward the freeway.
Wacko or not, Adcock had paid pronto. The Weasel closed the space between the ’Cuda and the Jeep.
CHAPTER 27
OUTSIDE THE FUNERAL HOME Kiernan turned uphill and ran, cutting into the alley, up the covered stairs. Her rubber-soled shoes were quiet but not silent. At the landing she looked around. No deputies in sight. Probably still in the mortuary, checking more carefully behind all the doors she had rejected. She followed the path to the street and turned left, uphill. It wasn’t till the street ended two blocks farther on that she found herself in open field and felt momentarily safer.
There was no real safety, she knew that. She could hide out all night and Fox would be at the bus stop in the morning. If by some sleight of hand she managed to get on the bus, he’d be waiting in Las Vegas. If she
got on the plane, he’d be on her doorstep. The dead woman hadn’t been her case, but it definitely was her case now.
What she needed was that car Connie’s friend might be willing to part with. He was one guy about to make an easy sale.
The wind was stronger now, spraying her with sand. The dusty smell of the arid street was stronger. The air had to be colder, but she no longer felt it. Inside her thin jacket she was roasting. Below her the commercial portion of First Street ended and it veered left, becoming residential. She made a wide loop, crossed First, and cut down the narrow street behind it. First Street lay between two hills, and from her position she could see headlights coming from both directions, the cars moving fast. Otherwise the street was empty. She waited till both vehicles had passed, then clambered down a slide-and-jerk path to the back of the saloon.
It was the most dangerous place. But she had no choice. She took a breath and walked in.
The heat of the saloon seemed equatorial, the crowd triple the size it was an hour ago. Now Waylon Jennings’s notes of remorse were almost lost beneath the buzz of conversations flowing over one another. As she walked in, conversation stopped for a second, then picked right up. They’d all have heard about her of course. Even without the break-in, she’d be front-page gossip for a month. She tried to read the eyes of the one or two who glanced around now, but no one indicated a sheriff’s warning.
She made straight for the bar. More carefully now she surveyed the room. No sheriff, no deputies. Also no Connie. Connie said she’d be here; where was she? Time to wait was something she did not have.
“Hey there, lady.” Milo smiled a welcome. “Another Dickel and water?”
“Easy on the water, Milo. Connie here?”
He nodded to his left.
Kiernan heard herself sigh out loud. Connie was there all right, half shielded by a paper fern. She was sitting at a table alone. Kiernan started to slide in next to her, but Connie pointed to a chair across the table instead. “Where’s the guy with the car?” Kiernan asked.