Needles prickled over my scalp and crawled their way from my hairline down my face, neck, and shoulders. “Who?” I asked. “Who else was following me?”
“Don’t know yet.” Shepard shrugged. “Looked like three different operatives from what I saw. I was in the process of running plates when these guys moved on you.”
I thought of myself tottering down the street in my best heels in the wake of exiting Valentine’s limo, feeling proud of what I’d just pulled off, already planning my dinner of grilled cheese, and all the time, I was being followed. Not just by Carl and company, but by Shepard and some unknown quantity of “others.”
All those eyes on me, that whole time.
I gripped the counter with clammy palms. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“If I had, the people watching you would have known something was up.”
“But if you had told me I was being watched—”
“Right. Because following instructions is such a strong point of yours?” His face almost managed amusement. “Just like you did when I told you to get out of the apartment?”
“Look, I’m not exactly used to someone wanting me dead.”
“Someone?” For the first time since I’d clapped eyes on him, Shepard looked genuinely concerned. “You mean you don’t know who hired them to kill you?”
“No, Mr. Stab First and Ask Questions Later, I don’t. I mean, I may suspect that it’s a certain kinky gajillionaire, but that would have been a great thing to find out before you fucking killed them.”
Shepard nudged the thug with the thick toe of his combat boot. “The words you’re looking for here are thank you. As in, thank you, Shepard, for keeping these two grisly bastards from quartering me like a Christmas turkey and fucking the warm parts.”
Was it wrong that the parts in question got a little warmer despite there being two dead bodies within stick-poking distance?
A sharp rap on the door followed by a shouted, “Police!” brought our conversation to an abrupt conclusion.
“Come in,” Shepard shouted back. And then, quickly to me, “You let me do the talking. Understand? I know these guys.”
I was on the point of arguing when my apartment door swung open, and I muttered a quiet oath when I saw who stood in the doorway.
Officer Bixby.
Chapter Seven
“Oh, fuck. Not you again.”
“Well, hello to you too, Miss Avery,” Bixby said. Then, seeing the dead man on the floor, he nodded over his shoulder. The other officer jogged back down the hall, presumably to retrieve a roll of crime scene tape and/or to radio dispatch.
Shepard’s sandy brows drew together. “You two know each other?”
“I wouldn’t say know.” I shifted on my feet and tugged the bottoms of my boxers farther down my thighs.
“Miss Avery fled a potential crime scene I was processing earlier this afternoon,” Bixby explained.
“I wouldn’t say fled.”
“You took off so fast you ran face-first into a pedestrian crossing sign.”
“So that’s what happened to your eye.” From the way Shepard said this, I inferred that the matter had been the subject of serious consideration, which, given the two dead guys on my floor, was not altogether complimentary.
“As eager as I am to have one more fucking person comment on the state of my face, could we just go ahead and process this crime scene so I can get back to my evening?”
Bixby looked at Shepard, fatigue plain on his face. “Just give me something believable for the report.”
“Wait. You two know each other?” I asked, borrowing Shepard’s line.
“I wouldn’t say know,” Bixby said, borrowing mine. “Frequently meeting over crime scenes involving assault and/or death that I’ll inevitably spend hours writing reports for but that will never be investigated by the DA because a certain person has been granted some kind of unofficial immunity by God or one of his direct reports would be more accurate.”
“No wonder you never learned how to get rid of a body,” I said, perhaps a little too wonderingly.
“What?” Bixby blinked at me.
“Nothing.” I quickly turned to Shepard. “What was that you were saying about the totally plausible and defensible reason these two not-so-fine, not-so-gentle men needed to be not alive anymore?”
“Right.” Shepard took another swig of beer and set the sweating brown bottle down on the counter before looping an arm around my waist and sandwiching me to his side.
I tried—and failed—not to notice how his latissimus dorsi nudged my shoulder like a great wing.
“So, my girlfriend and me were just—”
“My girlfriend and I.” I gave Shepard a playful tsk-tsk gesture. “Remember how cute you find it when I correct your grammar?” I squeezed the Japanese dragon undulating up his bicep, felt my eyes go wide, and squeezed it again. Dear Lord but there was a lot of bro-beef in this apartment all of the sudden.
Shepard’s jaw ticked. “My girlfriend and I were settling in for a nice, pleasant evening of Netflix and chill—”
“I said believable,” Bixby said with a snort.
“Why is that unbelievable?” I asked. “You don’t think I’m good enough to be his girlfriend?”
“I meant the pleasant part.”
In lieu of karate chopping Bixby in the carotid artery and thereby running the risk of proving his point, I simply smiled, making my voice sweet and syrupy as baklava, which I would have shanked the average Greek restaurateur for right about then. “What’s the matter? Don’t you have pleasant evenings at home with your mom?”
It was back. That charming white line around his lips. More pronounced now than it had been earlier in contrast to the five o’clock shadow dusting his jaw.
“As I was fucking saying before I was interrupted twice,” Shepard said, raking a censorious look over Bixby and me, “my girlfriend and I were settling in for a completely mediocre evening of Netflix and chill when someone kicked the door in.”
“Are you sure they kicked the door in, babe?” I asked, giving his glute a pat. Purely for the sake of verisimilitude, of course. “Because I don’t remember there being any loud noises.”
“Oh, my little wildebeest,” he said, tweaking my nose. “That’s probably because all the loud noises were coming from you.”
Nose tweaking was a close second to pet names involving ruminants of the African Serengeti in my list of dick-punchable offenses. By pure, iron-spleened will, I managed keep my expression mostly unhomicidal. I needed to see where he was going with this. “Loud noises? Coming from me?”
“Yeah,” Shepard said. “You were screaming, ‘Oh my God, Shepard, you’re the best fuck I ever had! I’ve never seen a cock so big in all my life’—or something like that—then boom. There they were.”
“Boom,” I echoed.
“That one right there”—Shepard pointed to the guy with the gaping neck hole—“lunged for Jane, and I grabbed my boot knife and stabbed him. I was aiming for his shoulder, but you know how it is when your head isn’t getting enough blood.” He winked at Bixby conspiratorially. “Then Jane screamed, ‘Save me, Shepard—’”
“Funny.” I thought I could hear my jaw creak as I forced the word out through gritted teeth. “I have no memory of that.”
Shepard tugged a lock of my hair. Chiding. Playful. “You know how forgetful you get after six orgasms. Anyway, when I heard you scream and turned around, the other guy had you facedown on the floor. I was only trying to put him in a headlock to drag him off you, but he freaked the fuck out, and wouldn’t you know it? He broke his own neck.”
“Damn shame,” I said.
“How did he get into the kitchen?” Bixby glanced at Carl, whose arms were flung over his head like a deceased roller coaster rider. “Seeing how his neck was broken and all.”
All three of us looked at the bloody slug’s trail starting at the dark, damp stain in the living room and finishing in the kitchen.
> “Slithered?” I suggested.
Officer Bixby’s resigned sigh carried the weight of a hundred such nights, all of which had apparently ended badly for him. “That it?”
“That’s it.” Shepard smiled like a shark.
“Huh,” Bixby grunted.
“Huh,” I agreed.
“All right, then. Homicide should be here any minute. They’ll want to ask you two some questions.”
And ask they did. We sat on my couch, repeating different pieces of the story Shepard had supplied to Bixby while the detectives rolled their eyes and scratched down notes.
“Are we about done here?” Shepard finally asked. “We really need to get going or we’ll be late for, uh . . .”
“Choir practice,” I finished for him.
Bixby had wandered in from the kitchen, where the crime scene techs were packing up their equipment. “I’m sure the choir could deal with the disappointment of not having you there for one night.”
“But it isn’t the choir we’d be disappointing,” I chimed in. “It’s Jesus. You wouldn’t want us to disappoint Jesus, would you? I mean, without Shepard’s wicked flute solo, ‘Rock of Ages’ is more like a pebble.”
“For Christ’s sake.” Bixby scrubbed his face with a square hand.
“Exactly!” I said.
The detectives exchanged dubious glances. The foremost of them, a man with a softening middle and thinning hair, folded his notebook closed and slid it into a pocket. “We know how to get ahold of you.”
“Should we hit the road?” Shepard asked, squeezing my knee.
“I’ll just grab my purse,” I said.
“I think it would be best if you stayed at my place tonight—don’t you, babe?”
Babe.
Somehow this appellation bothered me more than anything else Shepard had said. It was just fake enough to mock and real enough to sting.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hesitating. “I was thinking I might just zip up to my great-grandmother’s ski chalet. The butler was expecting me later tonight, and he’ll be so worried if I fail to show . . .”
“Did I forget to tell you?” Shepard slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I already called and told him you’d be with me. I gave him the night off so he could spend it with little Ubuntu. You remember the Malawian orphan he adopted? His chemotherapy treatments haven’t been going so well—”
“Just get your shit and get out of here, will you?”
At the twitching of Bixby’s eye, I felt a small stab of victory.
“You heard the man.” Shepard swatted my behind, the gesture as playful as his eyes were serious. “You might want to pack extra. Just in case you don’t feel safe coming back here for a while.”
I shuffled off to my bedroom, changing into jeans and a T-shirt before dragging a dusty duffel bag from my closet shelf. Stopping in the adjoining bathroom, I swept in all the necessary toiletries. After tossing in a couple of pairs of jeans and a few T-shirts, I contemplated the contents of my panty drawer.
Thongs seemed too provocative. Briefs, too casual.
How the hell did one pack for this kind of sleepover, anyway?
“The black ones. Definitely.”
I spun around to find Shepard standing in my bedroom doorway. It was downright unnerving for a man that large to be so quiet.
I dropped the black lace thong I was holding and grabbed an assorted wad of underthings, jamming them into my bag. “Killing two assassins in my apartment doesn’t give you the right to weigh in on my choice of underoos,” I said.
“But I’m your boyfriend now, remember?” He walked over to the window, fiddled with the shade. Tested the lock.
“About that.” I riffled through my drawer of sleepwear and grabbed several T-shirts and shorts, dropping them in as well. “I feel like I really need to work on myself right now. We’re just on two different paths, you see. We’ve been growing apart for a while now. You deserve someone better. I think we should see other people.”
“Our connection was mostly physical anyway.” He closed the bedroom door. Locked it. Jiggled the handle. Unlocked it again.
“I knew you’d understand. Also,” I said as I turned and raised an eyebrow at him, “six orgasms?”
“So I underestimated a little.” He shrugged. “I would have gone with ten, but that just seemed like bragging.”
“As opposed to the giant cock comment?” I asked around the golf ball lodged in my throat.
“Bixby said he wanted believable.”
“You know what they say about guys with big egos.” I made sure to amplify my snort so it could be heard from my bedroom’s minuscule walk-in closet, a place whose clutter and disarray tended to reflect the general state of my life in ways I didn’t like to consider overmuch.
“Where does this go?” Shepard glanced up at the small, square trapdoor in the closet ceiling I had always ignored.
“Could you not follow me everywhere?” I kicked a pair of panties behind the overflowing laundry basket as he brushed by, his front grazing my back. “Dude,” I said. “Personal space.”
“A luxury you no longer enjoy.” He reached up and pushed the square, seeming concerned when it didn’t budge.
“You’re doing what, exactly?” I asked the broad muscles of his back.
“Discovering how ridiculously unsafe your apartment is.”
“Unsafe?” I backed out of the closet and slung my bag down on the bed. “My mother checked this place out herself.”
“That explains a lot.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means your mother thinks like a good guy trying to think like a bad guy. Which isn’t the same thing as knowing how someone who wants to hurt you would actually operate.”
Now there was a disturbing thought. “And you’re saying you do?”
“No,” he said. “But even if I were, which I’m not . . .” He trailed off, leaving me to marinate in the memory of my own flippant words. Lord, how I hated any smart-ass who wasn’t me.
“Shepard?” Bixby called from the other room. “Can you come in here a minute?”
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m almost done.”
Truthfully I just wanted him gone so I could add one last item to my bag. I hurried over to my nightstand and pulled out the drawer.
Then stared at its contents for the longest minute of my life.
There, in place of the revolver I had been hoping to grab, was a note from my mother.
Chapter Eight
With trembling hands I reached down and picked up the note, heart pounding as I traced a finger across my name. The same loops and curves that had graced a thousand brown-paper-bagged lunches. My mother’s writing.
Janey,
Needed to borrow Face-Gravy. I’ll explain later.
XOXO
—Mom
PS. Never keep your gun in your nightstand. It’s the first place people look.
PPS. Lasagna in the freezer.
The how didn’t puzzle me as much as the when and why.
When had my mother come to my apartment? Why had she borrowed Face-Gravy—so named for the Magnum’s ability to reduce the facial features of your average assailant to meat soup—when she had an arsenal most small countries would envy?
I closed my eyes and tried to feel her in the room. Tried to see her. To watch how she had come, how she had gone, and why.
You’re stopping by your apartment?
Had it really been just that morning she had asked me that? It felt like another lifetime.
How content I had been sitting there at her breakfast table, not knowing she had an appointment with Valentine only a few hours later. Having no earthly idea she had a standing appointment with Paul Gladstone, longtime fuckbuddy. That she had a longtime fuckbuddy at all.
What had she been thinking when she’d asked me about my plans?
Had she been calculating when I’d be at my apartment so she could slip in when I wasn’t arou
nd? Had she come by here before or after her meeting with Valentine?
Surely not after she disappeared from my graduation. Because if that were the case, she would have at least added some obscure line to inform me she was okay.
Wouldn’t she?
Or was this just another thing I was incorrectly assuming about a woman I only thought I knew? And if I only thought I knew her, what else didn’t I know?
Did I know anything?
I knew how she looked standing at the ironing board.
I anchored myself in the memory, letting the details superimpose themselves on the backs of my eyelids, that blood-colored screen.
The shape of her body. Her solid shoulders. Her small waist. Her round hips. The perfect union of utility and grace in that always-familiar form.
What alien mind lived beneath the bundle of that dark hair? What thoughts scuttled through its channels? It seemed impossible that she could hold me in it, and secrets too. That she could smile at me, look at me, touch me, and still feel like the woman I knew even with all those foreign thoughts in her head.
“Ready?”
I started and gave a little shriek. Not a good thing to do in an apartment full of cops, several of whom came rushing into my bedroom like something out of a bad police academy fantasy.
“Spider,” Shepard said, waving them off.
“You do that again, and I’m putting a bell on you,” I threatened, folding the note and tucking it into my bra.
“Who’s Face-Gravy?” he asked.
He’d read the top of the note over my shoulder.
“My vibrator.” The lie weighed less than a mustard seed.
“I’m just going to move right past that name and ask why your mom borrowed your vibrator.”
“Hers must be on the blink,” I said. “Desperate times, and all that.”
“This is exactly why you shouldn’t have broken up with me,” he teased. “No such thing as desperate times in my bed.”
“Pfft.” I hoisted my duffel from the bed and looped it over my shoulder. “Face-Gravy sees your six and raises you seven.”
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 7