Deadly Deceptions

by Linda Lael Miller

  I’d been hoping Justin would come back with the ghost report on Greer’s whereabouts, but he didn’t show, and neither did Gillian. I filled a water bowl for Dave, made sure he had plenty of kibble, spread some newspapers on the floor and vacated the premises.

  MAX SUMMERVALE was waiting with a smile when I showed up at the indoor target range in Scottsdale. I automatically checked his ring finger, which was bare and as tanned as the rest of his body. Not that you can always go by that, because married guys can be tricky. My dead ex-husband, Nick, for example, had taken his wedding band off about a week after we got back from our honeymoon, claiming he was afraid of catching it on something and peeling the skin off like carrot parings.

  As if you could do that tapping at a computer keyboard or punching in numbers on a cell phone, which was about as close to physical labor as he ever got. Nick was a wheeler-dealer real estate kind of guy, and he always worked in a suit and tie.

  God, I was naive back then.

  “Ready to shoot?” Max asked, picking up a pair of safety goggles and a set of orange-and-black earphone-style hearing protectors.

  Suddenly I flashed on Jack Pennington, sprawled dead on the floor of Greer’s entry hall, and I must have gone a little pale or something, because Max tilted his head slightly to peer at me.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said, injecting a shade more perkiness into my tone than firing at a paper figure of a man really warranted.

  “It’s not unusual to be a little nervous the first time,” he said, and his hand rested lightly, unobtrusively and very briefly against the small of my back. When I stiffened, he untouched me pretty fast. “Shooting, I mean.”

  I looked at Max and noticed a faint blush along the upper part of his neck and his lower jaw. He was capable of embarrassment, then. Probably not the sly type. I decided I liked him.

  “Lead on,” I said.

  “Are you interested in target shooting as a hobby?” he asked, opening the door to a kind of locker room, with a long panel of glass, hopefully bulletproof, separating it from the actual range. Beyond it was a row of aisles, with the requisite paper target at the end of each one. There were a few shooters popping away at them, the sound muffled but unmistakable.

  “Self-protection,” I said. “I don’t have time for hobbies.”

  Max opened a door, waited for me to pass through ahead of him. “I believe you mentioned yesterday that you don’t own a firearm.”

  I do, I imagined myself confessing, but it’s on top of my refrigerator at the moment, and I promised my boyfriend the homicide cop that I wouldn’t touch it until he made sure it was legal. I bought it from a guy in a souvenir shop, you see.

  “No,” I said, surprised to find that the lie, small as it was, bothered me a little. Maybe I was losing my touch.

  Skepticism flickered in Max’s dark blue eyes. “I see,” he said.

  I willed myself not to blush, but it was too late. I tried to get past the uncomfortable moment by changing the subject. “How did you wind up in this business? Teaching people to shoot, I mean.”

  He grinned, closed the door behind us. A pistol waited on a counter a few feet away, looking cold, black and ominous. “Not everybody needs lessons,” he said. “A lot of cops come in to practice—competitive shooters, too.” He paused, sighed. “I’ve been around guns all my life. My dad was a state patrolman, and he had me popping cans and bottles off sawhorses as soon as I was big enough to hold a revolver. Once I’d graduated from college, I went into the army and served with the military police. From there, it was the FBI.”

  Tucker had been DEA until very recently, so it wasn’t as if I’d never met a federal agent before, but I was impressed in spite of myself. Max was an impressive man, exquisitely fit, self-possessed, obviously intelligent. Not to mention good-looking. “You don’t seem old enough to be retired,” I said. I’d pegged him at thirty-five, tops.

  “I was injured,” he told me, handing over the ear protectors and goggles.

  The words jarred me. Everybody has a history, I reminded myself, putting on the gear and forcing myself to step up to the waist-high counter where the pistol lay. Seeing it up close and personal made my heartbeat accelerate, and not in a pleasant way. The Glock hadn’t affected me, beyond what tension one might expect to feel when handling a deadly weapon, but this one brought back a rush of vivid and horrific memories. It was like the semiautomatic used to murder my parents.

  I trembled a little.

  Max moved in behind me, put his arms loosely around me and guided my hands to the pistol. A sensation like static electricity rushed through my body with such intensity that I almost expected my hair to stand up. Was it the gun? Or was it Max’s close physical proximity?

  “This is easy,” Max said, close to my temple. “Relax.”

  I trembled a little more. “Okay,” I said shakily. It’s hard to describe, but I felt as though I might literally be expelled from my own skin, like a grape squeezed hard, and never find my way back in.

  He chuckled, and the sound vibrated through me, through all the passageways hollowed out by the electricity and the strange sense of coming untethered from that place where my essence and my physical being connected. “Easy,” he repeated.

  He showed me how to make the paper target move, using a button on the floor under the counter. It was creepy, the way the man shape rushed toward me when I stepped on the button, but I understood the reasoning behind it. Your average assailant won’t stand still and politely wait for you to shoot him. He—or she—is a lot more likely to rush you instead.

  If you’re going to shoot, you’d better mean it.

  I don’t remember much about the first few minutes of that lesson; I know Max fired off a couple of shots before placing my finger on the trigger. I pulled, when the time came, and I was shocked by the way it made me feel. I’d expected revulsion, but I liked it, liked the kick of that pistol, the grim sense of power it gave me.

  Max eventually stepped back, though I knew he was close by. Like Tucker, he seemed to take up more than his fair share of space in close quarters. I was more aware of Max than of the target, but I couldn’t have admitted that to myself at the time.

  He showed me how to reload, how to work the safety and then left me alone to practice.

  I stepped on the floor button, made the paper man zoom forward, then backward. I riddled him with bullets, taking a primitive satisfaction in the thwup-thwup-thwup sound as I fired.

  When target-man suddenly morphed into a bloody, grinning specter, I knew I was seeing Jack Pennington. A soundless scream swelled in my throat when he glided rapidly toward me, as though he, like the target, was suspended from a roller in the low ceiling.

  Sweat slickened my palms, and the pistol slipped out of my hands and clattered to the floor. Thank God it didn’t go off on impact.

  Jack was within inches of me, splattered in blood and gore, when Max hurried in, retrieved the pistol from the floor and set it back on the counter, then took me by the elbows and turned me around to face him.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. That scream was still stuck in my throat. Was the thing that had been Jack Pennington behind me, looming, ready to pounce? I was too scared to look. In fact, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have sagged into a heap if Max hadn’t been holding me up. I did manage to tear off my ear protectors and my goggles and fling them aside…just before I leaped right out of my body, rushing through total darkness at dizzying speed, then landing—somewhere—with an impact that should have left a crater.

  I was conscious of being—well, me. I could see, though I didn’t have eyes. I could feel, though I didn’t have hands or feet or any of the anatomical parts that should have been there. I was pure energy, intensely focused, acutely aware and totally terrified.

  Where was I?

  In a dark room that smelled of cigarette smoke, cheap cosmetics and stale popcorn. A
computer monitor provided the only light, the screen saver a dizzying spiral. As far as I could tell, there was no one around. I tried to move toward the computer, and the instant I made the effort I was flying backward through space again.

  “Ms. Sheepshanks?” Max prodded anxiously as I slammed back into the body I had involuntarily abandoned seconds before. He towed me into the locker-room area, walking backward himself, sat me down on a bench, got me a paper cup filled with cold water from a nearby cooler, held it to my mouth.

  My stomach pitched, and I was drenched in a cold sweat. For a moment I thought I was going to pass out. But after a few sips of water I began to feel minimally better.

  “What just happened here?” Max asked.

  I was wondering the same thing.

  I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen—Jack Pennington’s ghost racing toward me on the target rollers—or about my impromptu out-of-body experience. He’d never have let me within a city block of the shooting range again if I had.

  I pushed my hair back from my face. Managed an unconvincing smile, though I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at Max. I was still shaking uncontrollably. “I might be coming down with something,” I said to the row of lockers across from the bench. “Flu, maybe.” Or possibly I’m insane.

  Max went to refill the paper cup at the cooler, returned and handed it to me. Sat next to me, but not too close. “I know about your experience in Cactus Bend,” he said quietly. Still disoriented, I wondered if he was referring to my parents’ murder, when I was five, or the more recent nightmare in the same town, when I’d nearly been shot at close range. But I wasn’t about to ask.

  I was on overload as it was. I didn’t need more information to process.

  “Part of the background check?” I inquired between sips of cold water, proud of how calm and together I sounded. Slowly I was shrugging back into place inside myself—hooking up the nerve endings, blinking my eyes, tapping one foot just so I’d know I could still command my own physiology.

  “Google,” he said.

  At last I was able to meet his eyes. He was smiling, but he looked concerned. “Do you check Google for all your clients?” I asked.

  “Only the pretty ones,” he replied. “If ever anybody had a good reason to learn to shoot, Ms. Sheepshanks, it’s you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I was glad Max was there in my hour of need, but I still would have preferred Tucker. My shoulders sagged, and I came this close to bursting into noisy tears. It was the stress over Gillian, I told myself, exacerbated by my worry about Greer, and the all-nighter in her kitchen, Detective Crowley strafing me with questions the whole time.

  Or the macabre apparition of Jack Pennington, rushing at me inside the shooting range. I was already trying to pretend the astral-travel thing hadn’t happened at all.

  Max patted my back. “You’re not going to give up, are you?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to give up on anything; I didn’t know how. He meant the shooting, of course. I meant Tucker, and finding Greer, and helping Gillian, and making it as a private detective.

  “Good,” he said. His eyes twinkled. He had thick lashes, dark like his hair. “Say something, so I’ll know you haven’t been struck dumb.”

  “I’m involved with a guy named Tucker,” I said. And I immediately felt stupid, because Max hadn’t inquired about my dating status. There was an attraction, though it was probably all on my side, and I certainly didn’t intend to pursue it.

  “Damn,” he replied. “I was afraid of that. Is it serious?”

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I admitted. “I think it is.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I CALLED Beverly Pennington on my cell phone once I’d left the shooting range and returned to my car. It wasn’t a noble gesture; I wanted to get it over with, so I could get on with my nervous breakdown. Once I’d spoken to her, I planned to go back to the guesthouse for my toothbrush and the few articles of clothing I kept there. Home again, I’d fill a plastic storage bag with ice, lie down on my own bed with the bag on my head, and deal with that morning’s quota of paranormal experiences. Sure, I was still a little nervous about the apartment, but after what had happened at Casa Pennington, I would have been even less comfortable there.

  Beverly answered on the second ring, and she sounded remarkably composed for someone so recently bereaved. On top of that, I would have sworn she was sober. I recalled something Greer had said, about Alex footing the bill for his ex-wife to visit some pricey rehab center, but after my postmortem conversation with the doc, I couldn’t imagine him being that noble.

  “I hope you’re not calling to cancel,” she said after I’d introduced myself.

  I was stunned; for a moment I even wondered if the news about Jack had reached her yet. “Well, I assumed—”

  “First rule of dealing with me, Ms. Sheepshanks,” Beverly broke in briskly. “Never assume anything.”

  I stared through the windshield, almost expecting Jack’s specter to rise from the hood and press itself in a bloody, grinning smear against the glass, which might just prompt me to spurt out of the old body again, like toothpaste from a tube. A shudder went through me. “It’s just…” I faltered, started again. “It’s just that your son—”

  “Jack and I were not close,” Beverly said, cutting me off. “I’ll expect you at two o’clock, as planned.”

  “But don’t you—I mean—”

  “Be here at two,” Beverly reiterated. “By then I’ll have made the funeral arrangements.” A pause followed. “Do you believe death comes in threes, Ms. Sheepshanks?” she asked.

  I decided even a specter on the hood of my car would have been preferable to this ludicrous conversation. “Yes,” I heard myself say, and it shook me, because I’d had every intention of saying no instead.

  “Then we’d all better watch ourselves, hadn’t we?” Beverly said. “Two down, one to go.” This was followed by a goodbye, and the call was over.

  It was a warm Arizona day, but I felt chilled sitting there in my car. Two down, one to go. Would the third death be Greer’s? Or perhaps my own?

  Or did poor little Gillian figure into the trio somewhere?

  Methodically I put the cell phone away. But I was still hearing Beverly Pennington’s voice in my head. And in the back of my mind I was seeing the spiral on that computer screen, in the dark room. The recollection made me nauseous—I wanted more than ever to hide out under the covers on my bed, but now that I knew the Pennington interview was still on, I’d have to delay hibernation.

  Then we’d all better watch ourselves, hadn’t we?

  Had she just threatened me? And was she really so cool, calm and collected that she could dismiss her son’s death—so soon after her ex-husband’s—with what amounted to a breezy “oh, well”?

  I put the Volvo in gear and pointed it toward Greer’s place.

  When I got there—I remembered nothing about the drive—I parked at the base of the driveway and stared up at the mansion.

  It was so substantial, all stucco and red tile, its many windows gazing back at me like empty eyes. But it was a house of cards, I decided, already falling in on itself.

  I might have gone inside to do more sleuthing, but the front door had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape, and frankly I was relieved. After the episodes at the shooting range, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t bump into Bloody Jack if I set foot in the entryway, since he’d died there. Or blip myself into some other dark room. I knew if I told Jolie about that, she’d say I hadn’t really left my body—I’d just disassociated, because I was under so much stress.

  I considered buying into that theory myself, since it was a little less creepy than spontaneous astral projection, but I knew it had really happened. I’d seen that computer screen, glowing eerily in the gloom. And I’d known there was something important behind the twisting, snakelike spiral. A few taps at the keyboard…

  Resolutely I shook off the creepy-crawlies and
headed for the back gate, punched in the code on the keypad, and was glad Carmen hadn’t changed it. Maybe, I reflected, remembering that the alarm hadn’t been blaring when Tucker, Jolie and I arrived the night before to find the police already there, she’d gotten no farther than the main-house locks. Braced for the possibility that the guesthouse might have been taped off, I crossed the lawn.

  No tape.

  And my key worked.

  I stepped inside, and immediately the tiny hairs on my forearms and the back of my neck stood up.

  My first instinct was to turn and run, but I couldn’t move. I just stood there, on the threshold, listening. Waiting.

  I didn’t see anyone, and I didn’t hear anything.

  There was a subtle weight to the air, though, and a negative charge, faint but unmistakable. Someone was there—or had been, very recently.

  Nothing was out of place, at least in an obvious way, and yet things had been touched, shifted ever so slightly.

  The police, I thought with a sudden surge of relief. Of course they’d searched the guesthouse the night before. That explained it.

  What it didn’t explain was the feeling that I wasn’t alone.

  I would have given a lot for that forbidden Glock right about then, though I was still far from an expert markswoman. I managed to communicate an order to my legs, and took a step back over the threshold. A splash of sunlight seared my eyes, temporarily dazzling me. I blinked, heard the sound of running feet—and felt someone bash into me, straight on.

  I got the vague impression of a slender shape, dressed in dark clothes like mine, before I went down, conking my head on the door frame and then the high concrete edging of the flower bed.

  I wasn’t completely out, but everything went dark, and in the moment or two it took me to rally enough to sit up and look around, my assailant had vanished. I hadn’t seen a car out front, so I decided he/she must have gone over the high stucco wall enclosing the massive backyard.