I know he’s frighteningly good with weapons. I know he can judge visual distances better than a hawk. I know he’s hung like a draft horse.
Well, that part of the answer I didn’t mind so much.
“I know he’s an army veteran. I know he’s working for Paul Gladstone. I know he’s been assigned to keep me safe from the people who are following me.” I reached into my bra, pulled out the earpiece, and held it up for Bixby to see, then dropped it into the glass of room-temperature water Debra had deposited along with my martini, knowing this would make me very unpopular next time I met up with the man in question.
Bixby gave me a knowing smile. “How do you know you’re being followed?”
Because Shepard told me.
“What’s your point here, Bixby?”
“He’s not a normal guy, Miss Avery.”
“Anyone who’s seen me in my bra might as well go ahead and call me Jane.”
The beer-blush deepened in color. “He’s not a normal guy, Jane.”
I snorted and took another sip of my martini. “I could have told you that.”
“What I mean is, he has a record.”
“A record of being a pompous, overbearing ass,” I said with a grunt.
“I mean a record record.”
I knew what he’d meant, of course, but was delaying as long as possible the inevitable moment when he would tell me something I didn’t want to know.
Bixby leaned in close, beer sweet on his breath. “You have access to court records. Maybe you want to look into the restraining orders filed against him?”
The truth was, I couldn’t. I didn’t even know Shepard’s first name, a fact I didn’t want to confess to Bixby.
My heart fluttered up into my throat, pumping hard enough in my ears to drown out the sudden swell of cheers from the other bar patrons.
I felt the urge to defend Shepard, but I didn’t because I knew why I wanted to. Not owing to some misguided notion of his innocence. Not even because I’d been stupid enough to trust him.
I wanted to defend him because I’d been stupid enough to trust her. My mother. And I’d done it in direct contravention to her lifelong, repetitive admonitions.
You are the only person you can trust, Janey. Not teachers. Not police. Not even me.
Hadn’t she warned me?
Hadn’t I decided that she was just being overprotective?
Hadn’t this misguided belief inclined me toward the assumption that anyone who urged me to be cautious likely had my best interests at heart?
“Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
“No,” Bixby said. “I’ve been looking into your mother’s disappearance.”
I let my anger rise to the surface as sarcasm, an old but familiar friend. “What, are the forty-eight hours up already?” I slid another olive off with my teeth, the resinous scent of rosemary on my fingers.
“I started digging into a couple of things even before that. About the time Shepard offed two guys in your apartment. Which you haven’t returned to since, I’ve noticed.”
Now why did he have to go and bring that up? I’d been hoping I might just live the rest of my life in blissful denial that two random thugs had been sent to torture and/or kill me and had been slaughtered by Shepard instead. This memory was totally going to screw with my ability to Netflix and chill there for at least a fortnight.
“Would you be in some big hurry to return to your mother’s house if someone had killed two people in the living room?” I’d taken to shredding a damp cocktail napkin, making a little nest of the scraps and populating it with almonds in place of eggs.
“For the last time, it’s my house, and you know that’s not what I was asking.”
“I’ve been staying at a safe house. Well, a safe apartment, really.”
“Are you on parole tonight or something?”
“Or something.” I felt eyes on me. Shepard’s. Bixby’s. Men at the bar.
“I don’t know how safe it is for you to be somewhere only Shepard knows.”
“You were telling me about how you started looking into my mother’s disappearance?”
“Nice subject change.”
“I’ve been practicing.” I lifted the martini glass to my lips and drained it, trying not to notice how the rosemary had begun to steep a refreshingly woodsy counter note to the briny olive juice.
Bixby scrubbed a hand over his goatee like it was a Magic 8 Ball and he was searching for guidance as to where to begin. “I’m assuming Paul Gladstone has also been looking into your mother’s disappearance as well. What do you know so far?”
“Something between squat and diddly.” This had been a point of contention, as Paul had seemed reluctant to divulge any specific details when I had pressed him over the phone. His refusal had stung, as had his failure to stop by the safe house. I hated to admit that I’d wanted to see him again. To bask in a vaguely fatherly presence.
“So, after you booked it from the parking lot, I ran your mother’s plates. Turns out, that car isn’t even registered to her. It’s registered to an LLC.”
My chest filled with cold air, my lungs shrinking to half their usual size. I’d grown used to this feeling over the last couple of days.
“That’s not so unusual,” I said. “People register their vehicles to LLCs as a way to reduce liability in personal bankruptcy proceedings.”
“If they happen to be an authorized agent of the LLC, sure. The name First Security Enterprises mean anything to you?”
It didn’t.
“I tracked down their address of record, and it’s a virtual office out in the Denver Tech Center.”
“How do I explain this?” I motioned to Debra for a refill and swiveled to face Bixby on the barstool, giving him my full attention. “My mother has what you might call an inherent mistrust of government-operated institutions. She probably just didn’t want anyone knowing what kind of vehicle she owned or where she chose to base her business.”
“That isn’t all.” Bixby drained the last of his beer and clunked it down on the bar as punctuation.
“Get you another?” Debra offered with considerably more sweetness than she’d directed at me.
“Sure,” Bixby said.
“What isn’t all?”
“I also ran a background check on your mother.”
I could feel my face stretching longwise like dough hung on a hook. “Look, I already know about the arrests. And as to the criminal charges—”
“I didn’t find any.”
“Oh.” A measure of relief soothed my jangled nerves mere nanoseconds before they began jangling anew. “You didn’t find any what exactly?”
“Records.”
Debra deposited my martini and Bixby’s beer.
“Criminal records?” I asked.
“Records period.”
I couldn’t have been more breathless if someone had knocked the air out of me with a baseball bat. Panic heightened my awareness of odd details. The neon streaked through Bixby’s dark hair from the glowing bar signs. The tangled threads of gunmetal gray in his irises. The tender crease of his hooded lids.
“What does that mean?” I hated the sound of my own voice. Wobbly. Naive. Scared and stupidly hopeful.
Officer Bixby’s voice, on the other hand, was smooth and reassuring. Practiced in the art of delivering devastating news. “It means, that according to the public record, your mother doesn’t exist.”
Chapter Sixteen
“How is that even possible?” I asked.
“Beats the hell out of me.” Bixby shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No driver’s license. No traffic record. No registration. Nothing.”
“Are you sure you did it right?”
Bixby gave me a first-class crusty look. Eyes narrowed, mouth a tight, mirthless line within the carefully clipped parentheses of his goatee. “Despite what you may have assumed, my brain is, in fact, slightly larger than the average walnut.”
“I didn’t
assume that at all.”
I’d credited him with a plum-size brain at least.
“I searched every possible spelling, abbreviation, and variation of your mother’s name that I could come up with. I got no hits.”
“What about her address? Did you try searching by that?”
“Way ahead of you. Your mother’s residence is owned by yet another LLC with yet another virtual office listed as the HQ.”
“What? No.” Denial shook my head side to side like an epileptic bobblehead doll, useless words boiling from my idiot mouth. “I remember the day she closed on it. We went and had sushi to celebrate after she picked up the keys. She’d been saving for years. We cut pictures out of magazines together. She told me, she told me—”
“She lied.” Bixby’s flat pronouncement landed with the weight of a sledgehammer.
She. Lied.
I wanted to hurl more words at him. To make him understand.
I was the one who lied. Not my mother. Not the woman around whose words I’d constructed my entire life.
“I understand that all of this is probably pretty shocking for you. But that’s why I wanted to talk with you. I thought that maybe if you came down to the station and—”
“Yoo-hoo!” The unmistakable, eardrum-bloodying coo of the one and only Melanie Fucking Beidermeyer.
I mentally measured the length of the rosemary twig in my drink and found it too short to brain myself with, even should it be shoved through the corner of my eye like my mother had once demonstrated with a cantaloupe.
Resigned, I slowly turned on my stool and spotted Melanie crossing the bar with the same show-pony prance she’d used to traverse the graduation stage. A gait I was certain she’d perfected in the many beauty pageants of her youth. Men’s heads followed her, jaws dropping like flies in her wake.
“Who is that?”
“Satan.” I closed Bixby’s mouth with a flick of my index finger. “Or one of his lesser demonic minions. The jury is still out.” I took a fortifying swig of my drink and gave Melanie a floppy, half-hearted smile.
She floated up to us in a pale-pink cocktail dress as short as it was tight, noisily kissing the air by both my cheeks. “Jane! Imagine running into you again.”
“Imagine.” I rudely slurped my drink, Melanie’s impeccable manners always bringing out something of the rebellious barnyard animal in me.
“Well, this seems like the place to be tonight.”
“How so?”
“First I run into Dean Koontz, then you.”
“The dean is here?” I glanced around and spotted Dean Koontz hunkered down in a booth across from a woman whose tits could’ve doubled as floatation devices. “Didn’t he lose his wife just a couple of months ago?”
“He did,” Melanie confirmed. “I’m glad to see he’s dating again. He’s been awful lonely.”
Yeah, I wanted to say. Dating.
“And what brings you to the Tilted Tiger?” I couldn’t care less what answer she offered up, but something told me Melanie wasn’t going away until I at least pretended to have a conversation with her.
“We were just having us a girls’ night out.” She gave a little finger wave to a table presided over by Melanie’s own mother and my buxom classmate, Lauren Hayes, whose repeated invitations I had continued to dodge. Apparently Melanie had lured her over to the dark side along with the entire constituency of my study group. My acquaintances, now her friends. As if on cue, they all lifted mason jars full of pink liquid in silent country-club salute.
“And what about you? I thought you had a birthday party to attend with your boyfriend.”
“I do.” Lie. “I did.” Lie. “Nana called it an early night. She is ninety-seven, after all.”
Melanie raised a perfectly microbladed brow. “So you decided to come have a drink with, with . . . well, who is this delicious hunk of masculinity?” She treated Bixby to a round of lash batting.
“This is Bixby.” I really needed to start asking people’s first names as an order of business. “Steve Bixby.” I decided not to count this as a lie. His first name could have been Steve.
“And how do you two know each other?” Melanie asked. “He can’t be your boyfriend too.”
“He isn’t,” I admitted. Then, seeing the Cheshire grin spread across Melanie’s face . . . “He’s my ex-boyfriend.” Oops.
Lie.
Bixby aspirated beer and coughed up a mouthful of foam. I slapped him heartily on the back to encourage respiration. “There, there, Steve. Steve’s been so upset about the breakup,” I stage-whispered to Melanie. “He begged me to come out for a drink. Just to talk, you know?”
Bixby’s wide-eyed, querulous expression failed to stop me. I was on a roll now. In my element. Working in sedition the way some artists work in oils or clay.
“I’m surprised that Shepard fella of yours didn’t mind.”
“Oh, he did mind. He’s insanely jealous. But I managed to calm him down.” I winked at her, a gesture redolent of conciliatory bones-jumping and libidinous bargaining. My cell phone chirped on the bar. “That’s probably him now. I’d better let him know I’ll be headed home soon.”
I picked it up, suddenly remembering why I’d left it facedown next to the discarded nuts in the first place. I hadn’t wanted to deal with the slew of angry messages from Shepard I knew I’d have.
Only, there weren’t any.
No messages from Shepard.
One from a number I didn’t recognize.
Valentine’s building site. Ten minutes. Come alone. Your mother is waiting.
The whole damn message was one big flaming red flag. Remote location. Expedited time frame. Emotional extortion.
And then there was the whole come alone thing.
Come alone. Code for bad idea.
I knew it then.
Just like I knew that I wasn’t expecting some tearful reunion wherein I managed to rescue my mother with naught but my wits and the sidearm strapped to my thigh beneath my “conspicuous target” skirt.
Nope.
I was about to run headlong into danger, eyes wide open and metaphorical ass cheeks exposed to the wind.
Why?
Same reason I had commandeered Valentine’s limo and cuffed Shepard to a shower.
Because I could.
Because I knew how to get myself out of trouble just as well as I knew how to get myself into it.
Because I was Alex Avery’s daughter, goddamn it, and I wasn’t about to sit around on an organic pleather barstool with a thumb up my butt while some ass-raptor firebombed me with obscure and vaguely menacing texts.
“Trouble in paradise?” Melanie asked hopefully, nudging me with her bony wing.
“Not at all.” My smile felt brittle and unconvincing. Someone had left a dumb slab of meat where my face had once been. I’d forgotten how to make it do things. “I just need to visit the ladies’. Would you two excuse me?”
I could feel Bixby’s eyes on me, but I refused to meet his gaze. The last thing I needed was for him to decide to do something stupidly heroic.
That was my job.
When I was out of sight behind the cavernously large wine rack, I broke right toward the kitchen instead of left into the ladies’ room.
Plan B—wherein Jane ditches the babysitters—had officially been engaged.
The thing about people who have a highly developed set of skills in one area is that there are often glaring gaps in education about things they don’t consider important.
Take Shepard, for example.
Tactical badass, surveillance ninja, and weapons aficionado. Absentee clothes-shopping buddy.
He had been so busy silently devising plans to kill every single person in the mall should the need arise that he hadn’t been paying attention to the additional items I’d slid in my shopping bag while we hit the racks in search of my conspicuous outfit.
Like a wig and glasses.
Lest you be tempted to get all judgy here, I’d like to
point out that I kept a running tally of where the items had come from and how much they’d cost so I could mail in payment along with an anonymous yet polite as fuck sorry-I-stole-shit-from-your-store card.
I’m a pathological liar, not a kleptomaniac.
In the bustling Tilted Tiger kitchen, I ducked into the walk-in fridge and proceeded to transform myself behind a metal rack of organic local produce. I shimmied out of my skirt, revealing the shorter skirt I’d been wearing beneath. Off came the blouse, under which was a plain black fitted T-shirt. Next I retrieved the pair of knee-high socks I’d secreted in the cups of my bra and pulled them on, sliding back into my nondescript black flats. From a pouch strapped to my thigh next to the disappointingly small pistol Shepard had lent me, I withdrew a spiky blonde wig, black-rimmed hipster glasses, a fake nose piercing, and a tube of matte blue lipstick.
When I was finished, I looked exactly like any and every other server at the Tilted Tiger, the spot P-Ripple had chosen as ground zero when we’d gone over plans earlier that afternoon.
Catching a glance at myself in the mirror, I decided my mom would approve.
A disguise is like a face-lift, Janey. The better it is, the less people notice it.
From a board next to the time clock, I swiped a nametag to complete the look, along with someone else’s army surplus jacket, which I fully planned on returning the following day.
I was no longer Jane, but Billie, and Billie knew about a fire escape on the second floor.
Billie agreed with Shepard on one score.
Never enter a building without knowing all the exits.
I had scarcely hoisted myself over the chain-link fence on the perimeter of the building site when the smell hit me.
Acrid, metallic, and sweet by turns. Acrid—the searing muscle tissue. Metallic—the sizzling of iron-rich blood. Sweet—the evaporating cerebrospinal fluid.
The odor of a burning body was unmistakable.
I knew because I had encountered one at close range when I was ten.
Okay, it was a white-tailed deer carcass that my mother had used to make a point, but close enough.
We were three days into a trip Mom had pitched as “camping” but that had turned out to be survival training when we saw the smoke and followed it to the balder face of the mountain.
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 15