Deadly Star

by CJ Petterson

  Griebe slid his gaze over to Sully. “I’ll ask you what I just asked Pete. Why is Briggs still alive?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Sully said.

  “Where did that come from?” Mirabel said. “What’s going on?”

  Sully answered for Griebe. “Terrorism, espionage, international blackmail — whatever’s going on is high stakes. These guys don’t let people live. That’s a given.”

  “You’re implying Ray has something to do with all this. That’s just plain stupid,” she said.

  “Let’s hope so,” Sully said.

  Ridley waved, effectively getting Sully’s attention and stopping the argument before it could take off. “Is there a plan?”

  “Find Briggs’s BMW. He said he left it at the lab, but it’s not there.” He turned to Griebe. “Did you see it?”

  “Not me,” Griebe said and looked toward Ridley, who shook his head.

  “A silver roadster,” Sully said, “with a personalized plate that says ‘I FX DK.’”

  Ridley unfolded his long body out of the chair. “I’m on it.”

  “And the coroner in Sacramento is doing the autopsy on Thompson. See what you can find out.”

  “Anything else?”

  Sully shook his head and punched Ridley lightly on the shoulder as he walked past. “Stay in touch with Frank, okay?”

  Ridley garbled a response and tossed a dismissive wave over his shoulder as he turned out of sight.

  Frank waited a few moments then asked, “What next?”

  “I’m betting whoever hired Saint John is losing patience, because there’s a new player in the game.”

  It’s not a game, Mirabel thought. People are dying.

  Griebe nodded. “The Mercedes,” he said.

  “Before you ask, I don’t know who it is,” Sully said.

  “That’s not good. Well, the doc says they’ll take this thing out and plug the hole maybe tomorrow,” Griebe said and patted the strip of plastic tubing leading from his chest. “Then he’ll cut me loose.”

  “Perfect. I need someone to stitch together all the info we have and find the pattern.”

  “Maybe I should stay in this bed if all you need me to do is grunt work,” Griebe said.

  Mirabel could hear a debate brewing and examined the frayed tip of her fingernail. She was sorry she’d thrown away the piece of emery board.

  “You’re too hobbled up to be in the field, Frank, but you’ve got other skills I need. We’ve got to get a score card going for all the players and the changes in the lineup.”

  “A spreadsheet like that will take all of about fifteen minutes.” Griebe’s eyebrows moved closer together.

  “Maybe so, Grumpy, but we need background checks, and that’s right up your little alley.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Set me up in a hotel and get me a computer,” he said with resignation in his voice.

  “You’ll be at my place. Everything you need is there.”

  “Except room service.”

  “And what about me?” Mirabel asked. “Are you going to keep me on a short string?”

  Sully sighed. “And your point is?”

  “Cut me loose. I bet I can draw Saint John out of his hole.”

  “I told you I’m not going to use you as bait.”

  “She might be right, Sully,” Griebe said. “Bait is probably what we need now.”

  Sully threw Griebe a dirty look while Mirabel nodded eagerly. “You can tell me everything I need to know. I’m a quick study, and I’ll check with you first before I make any moves.”

  “We already know that’s not going to happen.”

  “What’d I miss?” Griebe said.

  “I had to chase her down on the road to Sacramento a while ago. And that was after she gave me a Girl Scout promise that she’d go to the sheriff’s office and then straight home.”

  “I was in a hurry to get to the coroner’s office, and I forgot,” Mirabel said. “I’ll be good. I promise. A real promise this time. Anyway, you and I both know you won’t be far away. Frank knows it, too, don’t you, Frank?”

  Sully looked at Griebe, who grabbed a Styrofoam cup and started sucking on a straw. “You’re no help at all,” Sully said then pointed at Mirabel. “Don’t let that thought make you careless.”

  Mirabel nodded and wanted to smile at Sully’s reluctant approval. It was all she could do to keep a straight face.

  “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.” Sully put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen to me, Mirabel. Believe this if you don’t believe anything else. He will come after you again. You have to stay focused. He’d take great pleasure in creating some arcane way to kill you, but he’s not averse to old standbys. Even if it’s not his weapon of choice, Saint John’s not known to miss with a sniper’s rifle.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mirabel beat Briggs to the door of Mario’s Café and tugged it open. She braced her shoulder against the glass and waited for him to shuffle in ahead of her.

  “And the turtle wins by a hair!” he said.

  “Har, har,” she said with a bland smile.

  At ten-thirty in the morning, the breakfast crowd at Mario’s had thinned out, but the aromas lingered on. Coffee brewing. Maple-smoked bacon crisping on the grill. Sweet waffles baking. Bread in a toaster. Mirabel’s stomach responded with a hollow rumble.

  She stripped off her sunglasses and hesitated at the door, letting her eyes adjust to the restaurant lighting. A feeling she was being watched prickled the hairs on her neck. She brushed at non-existent dust on her freshly washed jeans and scrubbed the soles of her hiking boots across the floor mat while she glanced around. The place was about half-full of customers, but no one seemed to be paying attention to the two people who had just entered.

  Briggs eased into a chair at the nearest empty table. He frowned, lifted his shoulders, and twisted his torso slowly. “Wow. Everything I own hurts. I feel worse today than I did yesterday.”

  “Didn’t they give you anything for pain?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He patted the pocket of his white linen shirt. “Except I’m not supposed to take it on an empty stomach.” He picked up the laminated blue paper menu propped between the glass sugar canister and salt and pepper shakers. “Thanks for stopping. The hospital’s idea of breakfast is pitiful. It’s so … healthy.”

  She laughed. “I should be thanking you. I needed a caffeine fix, and I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I got a whiff of that bacon and cinnamon toast. Was Lisa okay with my picking you up?”

  “When she left the hospital last night, she said to tell you thanks. You did her a big favor. There’s a name-brand star coming into the station this morning to do an album promo. She’s happy she didn’t have to tell me to call a cab.”

  Angie was in school, so Mario’s fifty-year-old twin sisters worked the morning rush. With a toothy smile decorating her round face, the twin wearing a nut-brown apron with “Rosa” embroidered in gold script across the bib bustled over. Her black hair, gathered into a wiry knot at the nape of her neck, showed about an inch of white roots. She set a brown plastic tray on the empty table next to them and picked off water glasses and straws. “What you want to drink?”

  “Coffee works for me.” Mirabel pointed to the pot on the tray.

  “I got regular,” Rosa said.

  “That’s fine.”

  Ray held up two fingers. “Make it two. Got any sweetener?”

  “Sure ting.” Rosa put chunky, white ceramic mugs on the table, splashed them almost to the brim with coffee, and dropped a handful of artificial creamer tubs between them. Then she slipped a hand into her apron pocket and brought out a few pink, blue, and yellow sweetener packets which she dropped next to Briggs’s cup. She brushed a strand of friz
z off her forehead and leaned close to take their orders, ballpoint raised over her order pad.

  Mirabel tried to quiet the hunger growling in stomach with a sip of coffee then ordered the breakfast special. “Bacon crispy, eggs over-easy, pan-fried potatoes, blueberry pancakes instead of buttermilk, sourdough whole wheat bread, grilled. And some of Mario’s special warm peach preserves.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Briggs said, “except make my eggs scrambled.”

  Rosa confirmed their orders in her thick accent then hurried back to the kitchen pass-through where she clipped the order to an aluminum carousel and gave it a twirl.

  Mirabel idly looked around as she retrieved the flatware set-ups from the middle of the table, unrolled one, and dipped the spoon into her cup. No strangers, no Sully, no Ridley, but her neck hair still stood on end. “I’m really sorry you got hurt. I shouldn’t have let you — ”

  “We’ve been over this, Mirabel. You didn’t ‘let’ me do anything, and Doc says I’ll be fine. Nothing more to it.” He held up two yellow sweetener packets. “Would you do my sugar and creamers?” he asked, showing her his cast.

  “How many?”

  “Two of each.”

  She tore the edges off of the sweeteners, poured them into his cup then peeled the tops off of a couple of the tiny creamers.

  After a few moments of stirring, he murmured, “You still love him,” and spun his coffee over the rim.

  “Excuse me?” She handed him a fistful of napkins from the stainless napkin holder. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sully. You still love him.”

  “Good grief, Ray. Where did that come from? We’ve been divorced for years.”

  “Last night, when you and Sully came by to see me, I saw the way you looked at him.” Briggs grinned like he knew a secret she didn’t. “You almost purred. Like a kitten when someone strokes its fur. Your eyes went all soft and fuzzy.”

  “I do not purr, and my eyes did not go all soft and fuzzy.” She ran her fingertip across the seam of a crack in the side of her coffee cup. At least, I hope not. She thought she’d be able to toss off her night of love with Sully as an accident of fate, a one-night stand. Instead it had stirred up feelings she’d thought long dead.

  “It’s pretty obvious there are some real sweet memories there. Maybe a recent one?”

  “Would you just stop?”

  “You don’t date,” he said. He touched his swollen lips to the rim of his coffee mug and sipped gingerly.

  “You mean I won’t date you.”

  He shrugged.

  “Ray, you’ve got gorgeous women falling at your feet. You do remember Lisa, don’t you? You’re good-looking, intelligent, a young professional on the way up.” She sipped at her coffee and looked at him over the rim. She was definitely hitting his ego’s sweet spot. “A little soft around the middle, maybe,” she said with a chuckle, “but still a marketer’s consummate ‘yuppie.’ Some lucky woman’s dream come true.”

  “Flattery and a buck fifty will get you a cup of Mario’s coffee. What you’re saying is that I’m not your dream come true.”

  She leaned in. “Little secret. I don’t date guys your age.”

  The hint of a smile showed up on his face again. “You don’t date, period.”

  “I do so date. Maybe not in a while … ” She hesitated a beat. “That’s not because I still lo — care for Sully.” She stripped the wrapper off the straw, rolled it around her finger then twisted it into a knot. “If you must know, after we first divorced, I went out with every guy I could find who wasn’t nailed down. Trying to prove that I still had it, I guess. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “Didn’t find anyone interesting?”

  “Some were interesting. A couple were even exciting, but none of them fit.”

  “Fit?” His eyebrows went up, and he took another sip of coffee. “What are you looking for?”

  “What everyone is looking for, I guess. Someone who makes us better than we are.”

  He glanced around the restaurant. “Well, I think you already know who that is for you.”

  “Not Sully, for sure.” She dipped her mouth to her coffee. She could feel Briggs’s eyes studying her. After long moments, she realized he wasn’t going to stop staring. “You need to get out of my head, Ray.”

  “You know he still cares for you.”

  “I know no such thing,” she said, even though she knew that was a lie.

  “Liar.”

  She sighed and leaned back as Rosa appeared with a tray filled with plates of food. “Rescued.”

  Rosa set the order of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of Mirabel, the golden yolks of the over-easy order in front of Ray, plates of two blue-dotted pancakes by each of them, and another plate piled high with thick-sliced bread and a dish of warmed peach preserves in the middle of the table. “Anyting else?” she asked.

  They scanned the spread in front of them. Mirabel raised a finger. “Syrup.”

  Rosa plucked a squat pitcher of amber goo off the table next to them and set it in front of Mirabel. “Okay?” When they both nodded, she said, “I come back later and bring coffee.” She bustled off to wait on an old Asian woman who had shuffled into the restaurant.

  “No way you can eat all that,” Ray said as Mirabel switched plates with him.

  “Watch me,” she said and smiled, admiring her perfect yellow islands floating in their solid white seas. She speckled her eggs with black pepper, stifled a sneeze, and salted her pan-fried potato slices. She sniffed at a piece of toast. “Yum. You know Mario bakes this bread every morning.” She spooned a gob of warmed preserves onto one corner of the crusty slice.

  Briggs stuffed bits of a whipped butter ball between the layers of his pancakes. “Our arteries must be hardening at the speed of light just at the thought of all this.”

  “Doctor says my cholesterol levels are just fine, thank you very much.”

  He corralled the three rashers of bacon on his plate and dropped them onto Mirabel’s. Then he poured maple syrup onto the middle of his short stack of pancakes until it cascaded over the sides. “I bet you told him you’d love him forever.”

  “My doctor?”

  He sent her an affected bored look.

  She stared at her food for a moment then grimaced. “Of course I did, and I believed it at the time. Turned out to be the ravings of an immature lunatic in heat.” She beat on the bottom of the ketchup bottle until she had decorated her potatoes with a watery red plop. She glanced at his cast. “Want some?”

  Briggs shook his head then contemplated some distant space in front of him. “The ultimate promise, that ‘’til death do us part’ thing.”

  Been there, done that. “Time to change the subject.”

  “It’s really awful when we get what we wish for, isn’t it?”

  “What are we talking about here?” Unable to shrug off the feeling she was being watched, she scanned the restaurant. The only new face was the mocha-skinned old woman sitting in the corner. Nerves, Mirabel thought. Stop it.

  Briggs hacked away at his pancakes with his fork. “I have to say though, I don’t know which is worse: getting what we wish for or getting what we deserve.”

  She set her knife on the plate; he wasn’t going to let it drop. “Sometimes the results are the same, but getting what we deserve has to be the worst. The absolute pits,” she said and bit into a crisp strip of bacon. “There’s almost always fear and punishment attached. And, if we’re honest, regret.”

  Briggs worked his fingers into his shirt pocket and pulled out a white sample packet of drugs. He dropped one small blue tablet into his mouth and sucked up half a glass of water. “Sounds like you’ve been there.”

  “I regret a lot of things in my life,” she said, “but I try not to look back.”
>
  “What do you regret most?”

  “Too many things.” She shook her head. “Believe it or not, I had a strict upbringing. I was born in a small town in Texas, small enough you couldn’t hide if you did anything wrong. Every time I strayed from Mama’s straight and narrow, she’d hear about it, break a branch off the bridal wreath bush then come find me and switch my tail all the way home.” She paused and smiled at the memory. “The poor thing gave up so many of its branches to my lessons that it died before I was six — leaving me and my behind eternally grateful.”

  “My mother didn’t care what I did,” he said with an edge in his voice, “as long as I stayed out of her way and nothing splattered on her.” He bent over his plate to raise a syrupy bite of pancake into his mouth then lifted his chin, closed his eyes, and seemed content to savor the taste of the food resting in his cheek. After a few moments, he chewed slowly.

  She stopped eating and watched him, her fork suspended in mid-air, egg yolk dripping off the tines. “I remember the old adage,” she said, “but are you really chewing your bites twenty-eight times?”

  He moved his head from side to side in slow motion. “Not counting. Hurts to chew.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sully spun his coffee into a cooling whirlpool and dropped the spoon on the marble counter with a ting. He eyed the utensil, picked it up, and dropped it again. “E, maybe E-flat,” he murmured, “an octave above middle C. Not a cheap spoon.” His mouth drooped into a wry grin. “Gee, what eight years of piano lessons will do for a guy.” He was still smiling when he lifted the cup to drink and glanced at the man at work in the back of the drugstore.

  George Adkins was a self-proclaimed coffee addict and kept a pot on the warmer as long as the store was open; Sully had an open invitation to drop by “any time.” Adkins ignored Sully as he worked quietly behind the waist-high pharmacy counter. He twisted open a large, opaque plastic bottle and poured a quantity of yellow, aspirin-sized pills onto a blue tray about the size of a half sheet of typing paper. He adjusted the half-rim glasses riding on the bridge of his nose and scraped the dots, two at a time, into an eyelash-shaped white cylinder attached to the side of the tray.