I rolled my eyes, but by this time I was quite sure there was no one there. The building was dark, the alley was silent. Our was the only car near the place. I was so sure that I had only minor qualms about slipping quietly from the car and closing the door softly behind me so as not to wake Stump. I tiptoed up to the square of concrete that sat outside the metal back door. I put my ear to the crack between the door and the jamb, and listened as hard as I could.
Nothing. Not a peep. No bad guys discussing their nefarious plans. Not even any crickets chirping. Of course, if there was someone in there and they’d been alerted by Viv’s car horn, they could have a pistol pointed directly at my head at this very moment. The nerves on my scalp and back snapped to attention, and I tried to listen for the telltale sound of a pistol being cocked.
“Nothing?” Viv asked from directly beside my left ear.
“Gah!” I lurched and cried out, tripping over my own feet and stumbling off the concrete block and into the grass and weeds beside it. “Viv! You scared the crap out of me!”
“Calm down. I don’t think anyone is here.”
“It’s a good thing,” I said grumpily. “You’re being loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Me? You’re the one who just screamed.”
I tiptoed back to see if I could discern any shapes moving beyond the glass brick window, but couldn’t make out anything.
“Just as well,” Viv said, heading back around to the driver’s side. “If we caught the bad guys here, the lawyer would probably file some kind of suit against us.”
“Why would they do that?”
“When you have money, people always want to sue you.”
“Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about that.” I reached for the door handle. It was locked.
“I didn’t lock it,” Viv said.
“Well, this side is locked.” I tugged lightly at the handle.
“Hang on, I’ll open it from my side.” Then, the unmistakable sound of a door not being opened followed.
Our eyes met over the roof of the car. Surely she hadn’t…but of course she had.
I bent and looked at the ignition. In the dark, the ruby studded key chain didn’t shine quite so brightly, but it was still there.
“You locked the keys in the car!”
“I did not!” She jiggled the handle.
I looked at Stump, sleeping obliviously through everything.
“You locked Stump in your car.”
“I’ll bet she did it,” Viv said.
“How?”
“She probably stepped on a button or something.”
“That only happens in sitcoms. Besides, look at her. She hasn’t moved a hair.” Suddenly, an uncomfortable thought occurred to me. “Viv, if she wakes up and sees she’s alone, she’s going to come unhinged.”
Viv’s eyes grew wide. She’d seen one of Stump’s separation anxiety meltdowns. When Stump got freaked out that I’d left her alone, she started this high-pitched keening that carried for miles. More than once, residents of Trailertopia had called animal control and one time even Child Protective Services on me. This was why I always took her with me, or had Frank keep her if I couldn’t.
“Don’t you have some kind of hi-tech service that you can call and get it unlocked?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. I can do it right from my phone.”
Neither of us said a word. Viv’s phone glittered prettily on the dashboard, under the alley’s one weak yellow light.
“You ought to teach that dog to do tricks, like unlock car doors,” Viv suggested.
“I’d be happy to teach her to sleep on her side of the bed,” I said. “Let’s just table for now the idea of teaching her to use your smart phone to dial 9-1-1.”
As we watched, the phone trilled shrilly and lit up, little musical notes dancing brightly across the screen.
“No, no,” I whispered. “Shhh!”
The phone, of course, did not shhh. Stump stirred, then lifted her square head. She glared in the general direction of the annoying noise, then to the side. Where I should be sitting.
After staring at the empty seat for a moment, she struggled sluggishly to her feet, looking left and right at the empty car.
Her eyes met mine through the window.
I smiled, trying to project calm. I’m afraid it held a tinge of desperation, though, because I did, indeed, feel desperate.
She ran to the window and put her front paws on the arm rest. I could hear her whining through the window.
“It’s okay, sweetie. I’m right here. See? Right here.”
Stump scratched furiously at the window.
“Is she going to do that screaming banshee thing?” Viv asked.
“Probably.” I kept smiling through clenched teeth and put a hand to the window, like a visitor to an inmate in a prison movie. “What about a spare key?” I asked, bending to feel around the edge of the bumper.
“What is this, the 80s? No one does that anymore.”
Stump scratched desperately at the window. “Oh no. She’s going to leave scratch marks all over your new window.” Stump’s meltdowns had, before I caught on to her “special needs,” cost me a sofa cushion, a comforter, two pairs of shoes, and all my house plants.
Her whines turned to yips. Yips were the precursor to the ululating howls of anguish.
“Oh no!” I said, looking frantically around. “Should I break the window or something?”
“Calm down!” Viv ordered. “You two are making me crazy!”
But then, the howling started. Low at first, but still managing to carry through the closed window. Then higher. And louder.
Viv and I looked uneasily around the alley. In the yard on the other side of the fence behind Viv, a light went on.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” I said through the window. “I’m right here. Everything is okay.”
Of course, there was no hearing me now. The Stump’s howls crescendoed into an ear-splitting tsunami of sound and drowned out everything else.
Another porch light went on, then another.
In the distance, I thought I could hear voices.
Viv had her hands over her ears. “Good lord,” she shouted. “It’s like one of those things they do to torture war prisoners into giving up state secrets!”
I could definitely hear shouts now, coming from the houses behind the fence. As I watched, another porch light flashed on at the next street over. A couple more dogs joined in the howling pandemonium.
I looked up to see the small light of a flashlight bouncing down the alley toward us.
“Somebody’s coming!” I shrieked.
“So what?” Viv shouted back irritably. “We’re not doing anything but creating some really awful noise pollution.”
“Hey!” shouted a very large and menacing sounding voice. “What’s going on out here?”
More shouts from the other side of us. Also menacing sounding.
“It’s okay,” Viv said, walking toward the flashlight. “We just locked — ”
The gunshot went off like a cannon and Viv screamed. She dropped to the ground and for a heart-stopping moment I thought she was hit.
“Viv!” I ran toward her, my arms up for the gunman to see. “Viv! Are you okay?”
Viv was up and crab walking as fast as anyone has ever crab walked before, toward the other end of the alley. “Time to get the heck out of here,” she said as she rounded the car.
The guy with the flashlight was getting closer. I turned toward him and held up my arms. “Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “I’m not armed!”
I don’t know if he heard me or not, because Stump was still going full force. Another shot went off and I dove behind the Cadillac. Then I heard another shot, sounding like it came from the opposite direction, and heard glass break.
Suddenly, the air was alive with gun shots, screaming and yelling, and what sounded like glass bottles hitting the wall near me.
Stump! If bullets were flying, she could be hit!
I cowered down beside the car, one hand against the door, terrified. “Get down, Stump, get down!” I yelled over and over. As if she could hear me. As if it would make any difference.
I yanked at the handle a few more times, but it did no good, then I dropped to the ground and scrambled to the bottom front corner of the door, where the floorboard would be. I put my lips to the crack.
“Stump! Come here, baby!” I yelled, hoping the sound would carry through the din. “Come here. Down here.” I knocked on the car fender frantically. I was pretty sure I heard her hit the floorboard and then a snuffling sound as she sniffed around the edge of the door. I closed my eyes tight and felt tears leak as I imagined a stray bullet hitting her poor body.
After another fifteen seconds or so of pandemonium, the night quietened enough that we could hear sirens.
The guy with the flashlight came running by. “Where’d they go?” he shouted.
I opened my mouth to answer, but having none, shut it again and looked around. Where’d who go?
Another guy ran by, and then another from the other direction, all of them excited and gesturing.
“I think I winged him,” one of the guys said.
“Yeah! Clipped that sucker!” another shouted. “Teach them to mess with this neighborhood!”
People were coming out from all over the block now, gathering in clumps of two and three. I dusted myself off and looked through the window at Stump. She was sitting, frozen, staring hard at the edge of the door where my voice had come from. She wasn’t bleeding, though.
I sagged against the Caddy in relief.
Two patrol cars screeched up around the same time, then two more a few seconds later. There was lots of shouting and more pandemonium while the cops tried to figure out who was who and what had happened. I was too freaked out to even respond. I just stood staring at Stump through the window, who sat staring at the door, apparently as shell-shocked as I was.
It took me a while to come out of my inner freak-out, but when I did, Viv was talking to two cops and a man wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt and a white baseball cap.
“I don’t know, four or five,” the guy was saying. “They took off down that way.”
Bobby pulled up. He got out of the car, spoke to a couple of cops, then saw Viv.
He immediately started to look around. For me, I assumed. I waggled my fingers at him.
He walked over. “I’m not even going to ask.”
“We have a stake in this community, Bobby. We need to look out for each other.”
“’Cause the Lubbock PD is sure not doing it.” His voice was mocking, like he was quoting someone else — someone annoying. “Believe me, I’ve heard all about it. Councilman Pigg was in my office for two solid hours last week.”
“I didn’t say that. We’re just saying, if everybody is looking for these guys, they have to be found, right?”
“Or we could just have enough innocent bystanders who get caught in the crossfire that people forget about the robberies for a while.”
“Yes, well…” Since I had recently been fearful of that very thing, I didn’t have a good retort.
“So, what happened here? I’m hearing there were five or six guys, maybe more, and someone screaming in agony. That was before the shooting started.”
“I have no idea,” I flat-out lied, because it was beginning to dawn on me that Stump’s cries had set off the entire melee and the Bandits were actually nowhere near here, just a bunch of trigger-happy neighborhood watch soldiers. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Bobby that. “Can you get Viv’s car unlocked? She locked the keys in it and I need to let Stump out. All this noise probably startled her.” It was the only explanation for her silence. I didn’t want to take any chances on her ‘screaming in agony’ to start back up again, though. She might set off another round of gunfire.
“So, you’re here doing your community service duty, and you get yourself locked out of your car?”
I sighed. “What else would we be doing here, Bobby? Oh, I know. We’re the Bandits. We’re here because we’re robbing places.”
He shook his head and and grinned that sexy lopsided grin of his. “I don’t suspect you two for a second. These robberies have been way too successful for that.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. The fact that he was right was no reason to say it out loud.
Viv charmed one of the younger cops into contacting her fancy car service and got the door unlocked remotely. I snatched Stump up and squeezed her. We drove back to Trailertopia in silence, me clutching Stump so close in my lap that she started to grumble and push at me.
It was just past ten o’clock, but after everything that had happened, I felt like I’d been through the wringer, and Viv looked as bad as I felt. As I reached to open the door, she stopped me. “There were no Bandits, were there?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think that was all us.”
Viv looked at Stump. “You set off a riot out there, girl.”
I dragged myself into the living room and collapsed on the sofa. Stump bounced off me and went to find her food bowl. Viv sat beside me, silent.
Frank held his usual spot in my recliner, watching TV, but he dragged his attention away enough to take in me and Viv, looking a bit shell shocked.
“Yallright?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “I’m never taking Stump with us on an investigation again. I don’t care if I have to leave her here and she shreds everything I own. Never again.”
“She almost got us killed,” Viv said.
“She almost got killed, too! She could have been caught in the crossfire.”
I felt like the world’s worst parent. What was I thinking, having Stump in the midst of all that? Seriously, never again. Ever.
Chapter Eight
Concerned Citizenry
If Viv was traumatized by the excitement of the night before, she was over it by noon the next day. She called me at work.
“I heard a story on the news about all the leads the police are getting. They say they’re following up on all of them, but I’ll bet they’re not.”
“Of course they are,” I said, sweeping up dog hair with one hand and holding the phone to my ear with the other.
“Not like we would, though. I’ll bet we would do a more thorough investigation.”
“Maybe.”
“They won’t give me their leads.”
“The police won’t?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I asked. I wanted to follow up on the ones they’ve interviewed, and they won’t give them to me. I’m telling you, there is no professional courtesy in this town.”
The first time Viv and I got involved in a criminal investigation — quite by accident — Viv became immediately carried away. Turns out, she was bored out of her mind and terrified of her brain atrophying while she died a slow death at Belle Court. Viv is a woman with a lot of energy, and I can understand how she would have trouble reconciling herself to old age. Plus, there was sobriety to think about. You have to believe there’s a decent life to be won, to be worked toward, or sometimes it’s hard to see how all the struggle is worth it. I can imagine a life of bingo nights and quarterly bus trips to the casinos in New Mexico wouldn’t do it for Viv. She needed the excitement of a new case to keep herself occupied. She’d decided early on that we were PI partners, which worked out just fine for me because it meant I got to ride around in nice cars and sometimes she bought me dinner.
Unlike Viv, though, I was under no delusion that we were “professional” anything. We were something more along the lines of nosy busybodies who’d gotten lucky a couple of times.
Rather than point that out, I sighed and said, “That’s a shame. But what can you do?”
“You can call your friend.”
“Which friend?”
“Patrice Watson. She said on the news last night that they were getting a lot of calls at the station, a l
ot of tips. They were passing them on to the police. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them passing those tips on to us, too. Right?”
“I can ask,” I said, feeling kind of guilty because Viv knew what Patrice Watson said on the news and I didn’t. Patrice and I had been best friends for years, back when she went by Trisha. I always meant to watch the news, like respectable adults did. I just kept forgetting.
“I’ll call her,” I said. “I’ll be done in about forty-five minutes. Come by the trailer and pick me up.”
“You don’t want to take your car?”
“I’m not used to parking it yet. I had to park at Walmart this morning, by the trucks and RVs, and walk to work from there. The thing is so huge.”
“You just need practice. And there’s no time like the present. We’ll take your car and I’ll talk you through the finer points of large car handling.”
“Viv, I’m really not up for the stress of it.”
“Salem, this is for your own good. Now, I won’t take no for an answer. You can’t go through the rest of your life afraid to park your own car.”
“I can too.”
“No. You can’t. We’re taking your car, and that’s that. I’ll pay for the gas.”
“Your car is in the shop again, isn’t it?”
“It’s not in the shop. Well, it is, but just for some regularly scheduled maintenance.”
I had an idea. “Viv, do you want to drive my car? That way we can — ”
“Fantastic idea. You can learn by watching. Okay, come get me, and we’ll do some detecting. Beat the police at their own game.”
And there it was. The other reason Viv was so into this High Point Bandit thing. We’d solved two murders before the police did, and it would be such a feather in her cap to do so again with the robberies, since half the town was mad at the police for not solving the case.
As for me, I wanted to believe I did it because I enjoyed helping people. But yeah. I liked being able to tell Bobby I’d figured out who the bad guys were before he did. Especially after he’d had me falsely arrested for prostitution.
I pushed the “End Call” button and said, “Windy, call Tri-Patrice.” That’s the hybrid name I’d come up for Trisha, not to be cute, but because that’s what came out of my mouth every time I said her name. Although she’d been back in my life for over a year now, my brain wasn’t catching quickly to calling her something new.
Caught in the Crotchfire Page 16