by Jane Graves
“I never said that. I said I have doubts. That’s all.”
“Enough doubt that you’re risking your job?”
“Make no mistake, Renee. If it ever comes down to you or my job, you’re going to jail.”
He turned his back to her and pulled the covers up over his shoulder in a gesture of dismissal. He didn’t need to be looking at her anymore. He was having a hard enough time maintaining his tough-guy demeanor when he wasn’t completely sure she deserved it.
She’d told him nothing conclusive to lead him to believe she might be innocent, but he still couldn’t get over the feeling that there was something more to this than an open-and-shut case. Could she be the victim of a random drop of the weapon and the cash from the robbery? Possibly. But what about the eyewitness who’d picked her out of a lineup? What were the odds of refuting that testimony?
Despite the overwhelming evidence against her, doubt still lingered in his mind. And he knew the only way to get rid of that doubt was to do a little investigating of his own.
Chapter 10
The first thing Renee saw when she woke the next morning was bright sunlight streaming through the blinds. The second thing was sunlight glinting off the metal bracelet she wore.
Bracelet?
She blinked, trying to focus. No. Not bracelet.
Handcuffs.
She squeezed her eyes closed, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe as the events of the past twenty-four hours whipped through her mind. She really was handcuffed to a bed. John’s bed. Which she was sharing with John.
She turned over, expecting to find him there. He wasn’t.
She glanced at the clock. Ten forty-five. She’d slept until ten forty-five?
No wonder. She’d been so tired after all that had happened, it was amazing she hadn’t slept around the clock.
She sat up slowly, looking around. John wasn’t in the bedroom, and she didn’t hear him in the bathroom. Finally she called out to him tentatively.
No response.
Louder.
Nothing.
She lay back down and closed her eyes, her arm shielding her eyes from the bright sunlight. His absence worried her. Where could he possibly have gone?
“Oh, my God!”
The voice out of nowhere made Renee’s heart leap right into her throat. She jerked her arm away from her eyes to see a woman standing at the bedroom door.
With a strangled scream, she yanked herself up and scooted against the headboard, hauling the covers up over her with her free hand, her heart beating frantically. Who was this woman, and what was she doing in John’s house?
The answer was obvious. Girlfriend.
She looked the part. Tall, long-legged, and amply endowed, with a headful of dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the crown of her head. She wore a pair of jeans, a purple crop top, and flip-flops. Her half-baffled, half-astonished expression was asking a whole lot more questions than Renee was prepared to answer.
“Wh-who are you?” Renee asked.
“Sandy DeMarco,” the woman said, her eyes still big as golf balls. “John’s sister.”
His sister? Was that better than a girlfriend, or worse? It was weirder, that was for sure.
No. It was better. A baffled sister was definitely better than an irate girlfriend.
Sandy continued to stare at her with dumb disbelief. “And you’re...?”
Embarrassed as hell? At a total loss to explain this? Going to kill John for leaving me handcuffed? All of the above?
“I’m Alice. I’m a...a friend of John’s.”
Sandy zeroed in on Renee’s handcuffed wrist, looking perplexed, and in that instant Renee knew she couldn’t explain this scenario if her life depended on it. Except, of course, to say that she was a fugitive John just happened to have hanging around. What was she going to do now?
Then it occurred to her. There was one other way to explain it, but...good Lord. Could she actually say it out loud?
“John’s a cop, you know,” Renee said, her voice shaky. “The handcuffs. I guess it’s k-kind of...well, you know...kind of a...” She exhaled. “A turn on.”
Sandy blinked with disbelief. “What?”
Oh, no. Did she have “liar” scrolling across her forehead like stock-market figures?
“You’re telling me my brother, Mr. Conservative, goes in for the kinky stuff?”
“Uh...yeah. I guess he does.”
Sandy’s perplexed expression slowly gave way to a smile of pure delight. “Well, I’ll be damned. There’s hope for him yet.”
Renee felt a rush of relief. Not only had Sandy bought the idea that her brother was having wild, deviant sex, she applauded it, which meant she probably wasn’t going to be calling the Depravity Squad.
“I guess this means he’s back early,” Sandy asked. “So where is he now?”
“Uh...I’m not sure.”
Sandy planted her fists on her hips. “You mean he left you handcuffed here and took off?”
“He probably didn’t want to wake me.”
“Why didn’t he take them off last night?”
Good question. With only one answer Renee could think of. “He fell asleep.”
Sandy rolled her eyes. “Then you should have given him a swift kick to wake him up!” She strode over to the bed. “Where’s the key? I’ll get those things off you, and then I’ll kill him for you when he gets home.”
The key.
Hope gushed through Renee like water through a broken dam. If the key was here, this woman could find it. She could unlock the handcuffs. And then Renee could get the hell out of here. Where she’d go, she didn’t know. First she had to get free; then she’d think about how to disappear.
“I don’t know where it is,” Renee said. “Do you suppose you could look around a bit?”
“Sure.” Sandy started poking around the bedroom. When it didn’t appear to be lying around there, Renee suggested she look in the rest of the house, but after a few minutes of searching, Sandy came up empty-handed. Renee slumped with disappointment. Her best chance for escape was undoubtedly sitting in John’s pocket right now.
“I can’t believe this,” Sandy said with disgust. “He must have the key with him. Do you have any idea where he went?”
“I don’t know. To get a newspaper, maybe?”
“He’s got you in his bed, and he goes out for a paper?” She made a scoffing noise. “And I thought there was hope for him. I hope you kill him for this, Alice. Or the offer’s still open for me to be the hit woman. It’ll be no problem proving justifiable homicide, believe me.”
Renee would have settled for proving she was innocent of armed robbery.
“Now, don’t you worry. I’ll keep you company until he gets back. Being handcuffed to a bed all by yourself would have to be a real bore.”
Uh-oh. This was bad. She pictured the look that would be on John’s face the moment he saw her sitting here talking to his sister, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
“No,” she said quickly, forcing a smile. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine by myself. Surely you’ve got better things to do than hang around here.”
“And what if he’s gone for another hour or two? I’m not leaving you handcuffed here. What if there’s a fire or something? No. I’m staying right here until he gets back.” She sat down on the comer of the bed and gave Renee a woman-to-woman look. “I know this sounds kind of weird, but I’m really glad this happened. I don’t get to meet many of the women John dates.”
This was getting stranger by the minute. Here she was handcuffed to John’s bed in the apparent aftermath of a really hot bondage scene, yet Sandy was acting as if they’d just run into each other at the mall. Somehow she would have thought any relative of John’s would have been quite a bit more...well, appalled.
“Of course, he has to actually ask a woman out before I can meet her,” Sandy went on, talking away as if they were chatting over a cup of coffee. “Most of the time he eats, sleeps, and works. That’s
about it.”
“Uh...yeah. He seems to take his job pretty seriously.”
“Too seriously.” Sandy pulled her legs up onto the bed and crossed them, resting her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand. “So. How long have you two been seeing each other?”
Ever since he almost arrested me two nights ago.
“Not long,” Renee said.
“Tell me about yourself,” Sandy said. “What do you do for a living?”
Well, if your brother would let me go, I'd have a promising career as a professional fugitive.
“I work at a restaurant. Assistant manager.”
“Perfect! John loves to eat. You’re a match made in heaven.”
Renee had the feeling that if she’d mentioned she was an undertaker, Sandy would have said John liked dead bodies.
“How about you?” Renee said, thinking maybe she should hold up her end of the conversation. “What do you do?”
“I own a flower shop. I think it’s a backlash against all that testosterone I was around growing up. One father, three brothers, no mother.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. What happened to your mother?”
“Cancer. I don’t suppose John got around to telling you any of the details of his personal life yet.”
Renee knew precisely nothing about John’s personal life. But given Sandy’s inclination to talk, she was learning more every minute.
“No,” Renee said. “He hasn’t. His mother’s death must have hit him hard.”
“Yeah, well, it hit me harder. Try dealing with three younger brothers who fought like gladiators and had to be threatened with their lives to pick up their underwear or take a plate to the kitchen once in a while. Even now...” Sandy ran her fingertip along the nightstand and held up a finger full of dust. “Look at this, will you? And that fridge of John’s. Alexander Fleming might have discovered penicillin years earlier if he’d had access to that.” She made a face of disgust, then brushed her finger off on the leg of her jeans. “That’s why I dropped by today. I thought he was still out of town. See, if I don’t clean up for him occasionally, any woman he brings around is going to throw up and leave, and when will that workaholic brother of mine ever get married?”
Ahh. Sandy’s goal: to marry off her brother. John’s goal: to make sure that never happened.
“I mean, what do you think of this place, Alice? It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
Actually, it didn’t look so bad to Renee. She personally never knocked the dust off anything until she couldn’t recognize the shape of the object beneath it.
“I’ve seen worse,” she said.
Sandy smiled. “A forgiving woman. My brother could use one of those.”
Renee didn’t know how to respond to that, except maybe to laugh out loud at the thought of her and John together. As a couple. The cop and the fugitive. Opposites did attract once in a while, but that was ridiculous.
“Actually, I think John took it harder when our father was killed,” Sandy said, jumping back and forth between subjects like a kid playing hopscotch. “He was shot in the line of duty. It happened about seven years ago.”
“Your father was a cop?”
“Uh-huh. It was a routine traffic stop. He had no way of knowing that the guy he pulled over had a dead body in the trunk that he didn’t want discovered.”
“That’s awful. So both of your parents are gone?”
“Yeah. It’s just us kids now, and aunts and uncles and cousins. And grandparents.”
“Are your other brothers married?”
“Dave was. He lost his wife in a car accident about a year ago, when their daughter was six months old.”
“That’s terrible!”
“He’s doing okay. If anybody can handle it, Dave can. It’s a struggle with the baby, but we all help out. He’ll get married again. It’s just a matter of time. Now, as for Alex, he never has a shortage of women around, but the idea of marriage kind of rubs him the wrong way. And John’s too wrapped up in his job to even think about dating, much less getting married.” Sandy gave her a sly smile. “But they can’t hold out forever.”
Renee couldn’t help smiling back. The longer they talked, the less weird it seemed, and the more she forgot she was here under false pretenses. Just for a little while it was nice to relax a bit and let herself believe that she was John’s sex toy rather than an undercover fugitive. Sandy’s nonstop chatter made her feel like one of the family when she hadn’t even met the family.
As if she ever would.
But even as they talked, John’s imminent return was never far from her mind. Where was he, anyway? And what was he going to say when he came back and found her talking to his sister? Surely he’d put on that cop face of his and play it cool until he found out what lie she’d told to cover things up.
Surely he would.
Wouldn’t he?
John told himself as he drove to the south side of town that he had one goal, and it was a simple one: he was going to check out the convenience store where the robbery took place. But he wasn’t going as a cop, because the last thing he wanted was for word to get out that he was nosing around in this case. Somebody might ask why, and he didn’t want anyone to eventually associate him with Renee. He had no business even being back in town right now. If Lieutenant Daniels found out he hadn’t finished the term of his exile, he’d pay hell for it.
He decided he’d just poke around a little. Ask a few questions. Talk with the woman who’d gotten shot, if she was there, and find out her take on the night in question. And he was sure that when he was finished doing that, he’d see how mistaken he’d been. He’d see that nobody but Renee could have committed that crime, and once he was convinced of that he wouldn’t have a bit of trouble taking her to jail.
Ten minutes later he pulled up to the Handi-Mart, one of those tacky little convenience stores with hand-drawn ads in the window advertising cheap cigarettes and milk for a dollar ninety-nine per gallon. A barefoot woman in a long flowered dress stood outside talking on her phone while a toddler wearing only a diaper and a Cookie Monster shirt hugged her leg.
John went inside the store, bells clinking against the grimy glass door. A geeky-looking Middle Eastern kid wearing wire-rimmed glasses stood behind the counter. According to his badge, his name was Ahmed.
John browsed the store nonchalantly for a moment, then came to the counter with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of 7UP.
“Hey,” he said, looking around questioningly as Ahmed rang up his purchases. “Isn’t this the store that was robbed a little while back?”
“Oh, you bet!” Ahmed’s face broke out in a huge, toothy grin. “And the owner got shot right in the arm.” He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger. “Pow! Just like that!” Ahmed had clearly watched one too many action-adventure movies.
“An older lady, I hear. That’s a shame.”
“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “No shame. Mrs. Bunch is a tough old broad. That’s what she says.”
John heard the shuffle of feet and turned to see someone coming out of the back room, a tiny, gnome-like woman he estimated to be somewhere between eighty and eight hundred. Her sparse white hair lay against her scalp in wispy ringlets, and her face had the deep, fissured look of a dried-up river basin. She wore stretchy pink pants and the same kind of cheap red cotton coat worn by every convenience-store employee in America. Her name tag read Trudy.”
“Now, Ahmed, you’re talking about me behind my back again,” she said. “What kind of crap you dishin’ out?”
“No crap, Mrs. Bunch,” Ahmed said, his hand over his heart. “I tell the truth.”
“You tell the truth, huh? Then tell me what you were doing in the bathroom all that time yesterday right after the Playboys came in.”
Ahmed gave her a crafty smile. “This is America. Constitutional law. Fifth amendment, you know?” Then he turned his smile to John and added a furtive thumbs-up. Miss October. Harley and Ahmed. Appreciation for the naked female form knew
no cultural boundaries.
Trudy shook her head. “You’re a smart-ass, you know that, Ahmed?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am told I have a very smart ass.”
“Are you the lady who was the victim of the robbery?” John asked Trudy.
“Yep. You must have read about it in the paper like everybody else.” The old woman cackled. “Nothin’ like getting robbed to make you famous. I was almost this famous when I got robbed back in ’82, but I didn’t get shot then. Gettin’ shot now that’s what really gets people talkin’.” She leaned over the counter. “Wanna see my scar?”
Before John could answer one way or the other, she hauled up the sleeve of her red jacket. “Looky here,” she said, pointing to the remnant of stitches on her upper arm, circled by a faint ring of black and blue.
John felt as if he’d entered a carnival freak show. He gave a low whistle. “Pretty nasty.”
“Yep. Took ’em half an hour to dig out the bullet, it being deep in the muscle and such.”
John nodded with as much awe as he could muster. “I read that it was a woman who robbed you. What did she look like?”
“Well, first off, she was pretty tall.”
“How tall?”
“Maybe five-eight. Or ten.”
“Wow.”
At the expression of awe in John’s voice, the old lady immediately upped the ante. “Maybe six feet. Or I don’t know--maybe even six-two. It’s hard to say.”
Just pick the most impressive number, John thought, as Trudy added even more credence to what cops generally believed-eyewitness testimony could be some of the flakiest evidence of all. In this case it was especially true. From Trudy’s vantage point, just about any woman who walked into her store would look like an Amazon.
“And mean-looking, too,” she went on. “She wore these big, dark glasses and all this fire-red lipstick. And she had this deep voice, kinda like Bette Davis in Dead Ringer, where she killed her twin sister and assumed her identity. That’s what the robber sounded like. Couldn’t forget that.”
John thought about Renee’s voice, middle range, and relatively soft when she wasn’t shouting at him about something. But a person’s voice was just one of many things that could easily be disguised.