by Nancy Bush
Two men and a blond woman, who looked as if she might be stoned, sat on the chairs and couch. The men eyed Hayley and Gloria.
“How do you want to do this?” Gloria asked them.
“Who’s that?” the thinner, scrawnier man asked, pointing to Hayley.
“A friend. A friendly friend,” she added.
“I’m a watcher,” Hayley said.
Everyone turned to look at her. Gloria’s mouth was a tight line of fury. The men just waited. Hayley, herself, was amazed to hear her own voice. It was as if the words came from someone else.
“Yeah?” the other man asked. A cigarette smoldered from his loose fingers and threatened to burn into the Naugahyde.
“I don’t participate. I watch.”
“Sister, when you’re here you do.”
“Who the fuck is she?” Scrawny demanded without heat.
Hayley sat down in the nearest chair, crossed her legs, and prayed to a divine God she hadn’t recognized in years.
Gloria Carver was in a rage. “And she don’t get paid for it, either. I get her share and mine. She just enjoys the show.”
“This sucks,” the blonde chimed in without enthusiasm.
What a group of losers, Hayley thought, her fear changing to contempt. Drugs had burned out their minds and their energy. Movements in the room were so slow, she could have called the police and had the narcs at the door before anybody blinked.
“Okay, sugar. You first.” Gloria pointed to Scrawny who thought for a minute—a whole damn minute—then obligingly undid his zipper.
Hayley focused on those two rows of zipper teeth, stalked by a bad memory she refused to address. Gloria leaned down to her.
“I told you, don’t talk,” she hissed in her ear.
The man with the cigarette passed it to the blonde and Hayley saw it was a joint. The blonde dragged on the tightly wrapped doobie until it burned the opposite end in a rush of crinkly, red ember.
Gloria slid to her knees, stuck her hand inside Scrawny’s fly, then moved inexorably forward with those red, red lips.
And Hayley focused on an inner scene that sometimes came to her in times of desperately needed tranquillity. A dry meadow surrounded by pines cut by a dusty trail. Huckleberry bushes. A lone eagle circling in a pale blue sky.
Somewhere from her past? Or maybe some future destiny.
Whatever it was, it kept her from bolting from the room, vomiting, and screaming.
Dragging herself up from the depths of sleep, Denise was vaguely aware of something wrong, but her mind shied away from learning what that something was. She was warm beneath a heavy bedspread. Trapped. Something dark and menacing swelled inside her head, swelled and receded, then swelled again. A man’s voice. Like caramel. Soft and squishy and sweet. But evil.
She whimpered in her sleep, and then John’s arms surrounded her. His breath fanned her neck. John, the good. John, the wonderful. She snuggled closer.
It can’t be John. I’m at a resort in Scottsdale. It’s a dream.
But what a delicious dream. No worries. Just safety.
Denise hovered on the brink of wakefulness but then John began kissing her nape, his fingers trailing strands of hair that fell along her shoulder.
“I hate being alone,” she murmured, her breath choking.
“Denise . . .” he whispered softly, enthralled, his fingers growing bolder as they tiptoed down her arm to the curve of her waist.
She arched her back against him, suddenly so anxious for his lovemaking that she ached.
“Are you sure?” he mumbled, his mouth hot on her skin.
“ Yes . . . yes . . .”
There was no more waiting. He turned her toward him, a bit rougher than usual. John was generally so sweet; it’s what she loved about him most. His tender lovemaking. His slow “I’ll make you want it so bad you’ll die” method of stroking and teasing her.
But not this time. Now he was all muscle and strength and desire. A kernel of fear tightened inside her. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
“I was hard for you the moment you walked in,” he said, his teeth gently biting her skin. Gently, but with repressed passion. “I’ve been thinking about this, me riding you, moaning and thrashing. Both of us screaming . . .”
“Stop,” she whispered, alarm bells ringing.
“You said you like it rough . . .” She could barely make out his voice, it was so low and thick with sexual thrumming, base desire.
Blood thundered throughout her body. Denise felt as if she’d already run a marathon.
He took her fast, bucking and thrusting and fighting his way inside her as if he expected some resistance. Fear dissolved, changed to weary acceptance. This was the way it was for her. Always. Except with John.
Instead of fighting, she lay quietly, accepting his alien male form and the harsh, guttural words of degradation he slapped her with as if it were her due. She deserved it. She always deserved it. And her sick, netherworld self-fed on it.
Later, much, much later, she opened her eyes to the dim gray shapes around her. It must be midday now; the slit of light coming through the drapes was a bright glare. He’d come to her in the early morning smelling like scotch, a new scent for him because John always came to bed tasting and smelling like peppermint mouthwash.
He was awake. She could sense that he was watching her even before she turned to look at him. Her lips curved into a secretive and knowing smile.
“I can’t believe it,” he said in a worshipful tone. “I just can’t believe it . . .”
Then Brent McCaffey closed his eyes and leaned over to nuzzle Denise’s bare breast.
Denise’s mind went black. She was in Scottsdale and this wasn’t a sick dream. This was happening! Right now!
Her whole body trembled. With a sudden thrust, she pushed Brent away. Breathing hard, she wrapped the blankets around her as she scrambled from the bed, dragging them with her.
“What?” he asked, dazed, his arms outstretched for her.
He was naked on the bed. Well, nearly naked. A green condom whose latex surface was dotted with round, funky-looking bumps adorned his rather stubby looking dick.
Denise’s gaze was riveted to the condom. Then her eyes swept past Brent to the nightstand, where a green box with a smiling saguaro cactus cheerfully extolled the virtues of “CACTUS CONDOMS. ALL YOU PROVIDE IS THE PRICK.”
Truer words were never written.
She collapsed into hysterical laughter.
Chapter Five
Autumn had settled over central Oregon in a blanket of gold, sienna, and orange. The colors were too intense to seem real, the air dusty and dry during the day, clear and crisp in the evening. The earth was red from the jack and sugar pines’ bark; the whole area was a high-mountain paradise, too arid for a stranger’s idea of Oregon, too beautiful to be so sparsely populated.
Connor Jackley had grown up in Bend, the nearest city of any size to Wagon Wheel. He’d roped and ranched and done the high school football routine and gotten laid the first time in the back of his girlfriend’s Ford wagon. He’d set fire to a clump of sagebrush and damn near started a forest fire for which his father had hit him hard, once, across the face and told him you had to earn respectability by responsibility.
Law enforcement had fascinated him from the moment he could recall his first thought. This was at the age of five, when he’d watched his mother smile and flirt her way out of a speeding ticket. The traffic cop had succumbed with a knowing smile of his own, and a sidelong look at Connor’s sister’s curly blond head.
That incident had staying power. While so many ultraviolent or poignant or downright life-threatening scenes in his life blurred together like a video run at fast-forward, it still hung fresh and vivid in his memory. It was the traffic cop’s choice that had touched Connor’s young mind. Should he, or shouldn’t he ticket the pretty woman with her two pretty children? The answer, in that case, had been no.
Years later Connor still pu
lled this page from the file of his memory every so often. Should he arrest the sniffly, cocaine-abusing prostitute so that her pimp would have to pay to have her released on bail, or let her go? Should he tolerate the cruddy, verbal filth spewing from the mouth of the street kid, or haul his ass into jail? Should he shoot to wound the vile pedophile who’d kidnapped the young girl, or kill him on the spot?
It was that last incident that had lost him his job at the force. He had shot the bastard. Shot him in the knee. Crippled him.
Oh, he hadn’t gotten thrown off the force. The prick had been running away, trying to shield himself with his kidnap victim, a young girl of nine. As soon as he shoved her away, Connor had aimed for his yellow back, his hand dropping at the last instant, whether by design or chance he still couldn’t rightly say, but the bullet’s trajectory hit the guy in the back of the knee, ripping up the tendons and ligaments and shattering the patella inside out.
Connor had walked to the screaming, yowling perp and aimed at the wretch’s face. Should he kill the soulless insect? Should he end his violent, unimportant life?
He’d wanted to. Itched to. Had held the barrel of the gun between the miserable bastard’s fear-crazed eyes.
The memory brought a grimace to Connor’s face. Fiddling with the radio of his rented Jeep Cherokee, he pondered the tricks of fate. He hadn’t pulled the trigger. He’d just sighted his crying, fear-ridden victim and waited.
Cowards. They were cowards. Every last one of them. Some hid their cowardice behind stoic, dead expressions. Some cried and carried on and even pissed in their pants.
Suddenly the twangy, bittersweet sounds of a country-western ballad warmed the interior of the Jeep. His mouth twisted into a smile of remembrance. It was hard to escape a country-western existence in a city like Bend, Oregon, where every signpost and banner seemed to allude to horses, rodeos, mountains, range, and livestock.
The encounter with the pedophile had been the last of Connor’s fifteen years with the L.A.P.D. He’d walked away after that, amidst protests from his pals and coworkers. But Detective Jackley of Homicide didn’t listen. Now, here he was two years later, leading a part-time, quasi-legal life as a private investigator, the kicker of the story being that some of his buddies on the force still relied on his help to solve their cases.
And so . . .
He was headed to some dusty, sagebrush-landscaped trailer park to the address of one Candy Daniels Whorton, Thomas Daniels’s daughter by his first wife, Jane. Jane herself had died this last spring from a massive heart attack brought on by a combination of heredity and a terrible fondness for food and drink. By all accounts, the luckless Candy was halfway to the Grim Reaper herself, having developed her mother’s fondness for—and outstripping her love of—food based on her 300-pound-plus size.
He felt sorry for her already and he hadn’t even met her.
His thoughts dark, Connor turned into the drive of the Valley High Trailer Park and bumped over the gravel-strewn ground to the dusty single-wide at the far end of the park. Sunlight burned on its weathered salmon and white exterior, showing off patches of rust that were creeping from beneath the rivets and around the screen door.
“Candy Dandy,” Connor muttered, wincing at the thoughtless cruelty of the name that had fallen from Gus Dempsey’s lips this morning. The sheriff sure wasn’t subtle about his feelings for things. Connor had forgotten about Gus’s baldly stated, politically incorrect opinions, but an hour with his high school friend this morning had reminded him with Technicolor brilliance.
“Candy’s the one who told me about that actress, Denise Scott. Said they were stepsisters. I thought she was lyin’.” Dempsey had snorted, grinning hugely. “Wouldn’t you? I mean, think about it. It’s an OK! story in the makin’.”
“The facts of Denise Scott’s history have probably been written up hundreds of times,” Connor had pointed out.
“Uh-uh.” Dempsey poured himself another cup of coffee, gestured to Connor who shook his head, then settled on the edge of his desk, as if he were getting ready to launch into a deep yarn. “Candy’s got clippin’s you wouldn’t believe. Keeps track of those girls. She always knew who they was when the rest of us was still scratchin’ our heads and wonderin’.”
“Girls?”
“Three sisters. Denise and Diane, I think. No, that’s not right, and the third one’s Hildegarde, or somethin’. I don’t give a good goddamn. It’s the actress that killed Daniels. Candy said so.”
“If you were certain of that you would have brought Denise Scott in for questioning. You just don’t want to make a mistake and have the whole world laughing at you for being such a backwoods fool.” Connor’s smile kept his old friend from taking offense.
“I don’t want nothin’ to do with this thing. I like what I’ve got here.” He gestured to the less than opulent surroundings of the county offices. “You’re here to make sure I keep it.”
“Meaning?”
“Ah, now, don’t be dense, Jackley. This thing could be a big mess if it isn’t handled with extreme caution. I don’t want to deal with it at all. I’d rather it just flew away home and never saw the light of investigation. That’s what you’re here for.”
“Are you telling me you’re lazy and corrupt?”
“I ain’t no Urganis.” Gus snorted, referring to the previous sheriff who’d been caught with his pants down and a few other things as well. Sheriff Urganis had gotten booted out of his house, and out of his office as well. “I’m just lazy. But you gotta understand how things are. Thomas Daniels . . .” Gus’s happy, homely face fell into a grimace. “Well, people around here practically declared it a national holiday when he disappeared. I don’t want to see anybody get hurt who doesn’t have to.”
“I hate to break it to you, Gus, but you just catch the baddies. Juries decide who gets punished.”
He shook his head in pure disgust. “Damn screwed-up system!”
“So I’m here to learn a few facts, keep a low profile, then steal back to Los Angeles.”
The intelligence he hid so well glimmered briefly in Gus’s bright eyes. “I suppose we’re going to have to keep after it, huh, Jackley? You go to L.A. and chase those girls down, but first . . .”
He’d handed Connor a piece of paper with Candy Daniels’s address.
And so here he was.
Connor slid to a stop, his tires crunching gravel, the Cherokee humming at a high, anxious whine as if it wanted to get far away from here, to the action, to the future.
Outside, the air was too cool for the hot, angry sun. Connor stretched his arms over his head, then strode to the half-rotten wooden porch that led to the door. Boards squeaked ominously beneath his booted feet. Lifting the unlocked screen, he rapped on the door.
A shuffle and a thump alerted him to someone’s presence within. Slow footsteps moved deliberately to the door. A moment later the door cracked open and a suspicious female voice demanded, “Who is it?”
“Connor Jackley. Sheriff Dempsey asked me to talk to you about the Daniels murder.”
“Yeah?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he added patiently.
The door widened a bit farther and Connor’s nerves went on red alert when his eyes met the dark, menacing nose of a .38 special. Lifting his gaze, he met a pair of black-lined blue eyes where suspicion, distrust, and hostility vied for supremacy. Candy Dandy had been kicked hard by life, and her tremendous bulk made her a standout whether she wanted to be or not.
He said carefully, “I wanted to talk to you about Denise Scott and her sisters. I understand they’re your stepsisters.”
“Like they’d admit it,” Candy sneered.
“Could I . . . come in?”
Eyeing him carefully all the while, Candy pressed the door open a little wider with the barrel of the gun, then gestured for him to enter.
He hoped to high heaven the damn thing wasn’t loaded.
Dinah was up with the birds. Last night she hadn’t slept the pro
verbial wink of sleep. Furious thoughts had circled her mind and she’d thrashed around the bed until she’d started worrying that John Callahan might come back to her bedroom to see what all the ruckus was about.
That quieted her down in a hurry, but then she lay wide-awake and still, listening to her heartbeat, attuned to the littlest squeak and creak of the house. She’d heard the phone ring in the middle of the night but Callahan had answered it before she’d even lifted a hand. Not that it was likely to be for her, but she was pretending to be Denise. She’d half expected him to throw open her door, level a finger at her, and holler, “Fraud!” but nothing had happened.
So far . . .
Now she tossed on jeans and a black T-shirt, snapped her hair into a ponytail, and was in the process of brushing her teeth when it occurred to her that she didn’t look anything like Denise. Oh, sure, the raw material was the same, but Denise was never anything less than glamorous, no matter what. Dinah, on the other hand, was plain Brand X.
Grimacing at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she thought about digging through Denise’s clothes, then rejected the idea straight out. Okay, she could wear some makeup. But she worked in blue jeans and by God, she wasn’t going to change her apparel even for the sake of keeping up this charade.
“You didn’t ask for this,” she whispered, pointing at her frowning image.
Part of her wanted to come clean and explain the circumstances, but she had a strong feeling that wouldn’t cut much ice with His Highness. God knew what punishment he would inflict—more on Denise than herself, she was sure. So maybe she could brazen it out. Callahan didn’t know Denise had a twin unless Denise had told him, and Dinah had an equally strong feeling Denise kept that fact a secret. Denise was good at keeping secrets, and her screwed-up present self was surely a helluva lot more interesting than anything in her past.