Sunny remembered Gordie heaving around that big bag of cat food. “Yeah,” she reluctantly agreed, “he’s strong enough to have done it.”
“What hit me last night, the clincher as far as I’m concerned, is what’s happened to you in the last few days.” He frowned, trying to organize his case. “That bullet in your car, the hose outside your house—”
“I can’t imagine Gordie coming up with those slick criminal plans,” Sunny told him.
“But could you see him as the guy who screwed both of them up?” Will asked.
That stopped her for a second, but she shook her head, remembering the lost, scared look in Gordie’s eyes when he talked about his mother. “I just don’t buy it. He was really upset about Ada’s death.”
“Sure, he was upset,” Will argued. “It’s called regret. Remember, Sunny, he’s a tweaker. No impulse control. He could freak out and kill someone, then still feel really bad about it afterward. As for those half-assed booby traps and stuff—hell, they just stink of tweaker.”
“So that’s your case? Stinks, and what-ifs, and conjectures?” Sunny said. “If you had anything solid, you wouldn’t be here talking to me.”
Will grimaced. “True. If I had even a scrap of real evidence, I’d risk going over Nesbit’s head straight to the district attorney. We did everything but put both cars under a microscope, hoping to find Gordie’s fingerprints, but all we got were smudges. He may be a tweaker, but he was smart enough to wear gloves.”
“So what are you going to do?” Sunny asked.
“Well, you said it—he’s upset. After stewing about it for a few days, he might be ready to talk.”
“You’re going to question him?” Sunny stared in disbelief. “How are you going to do that? On what pretext? You can’t just haul him down to the station. What are you going to charge him with—drugs?”
Will shook his head. “I don’t think Nesbit would go for it—even if it were a simple drug bust. We’ve got to go at this a different way.”
“We?” Sunny said.
“I’m a cop. He’s just going to shut up the minute he sees me,” Will told her. “But you—you grew up with Gordie. I could see it when you guys were talking. He responded to you.”
“So you think he’d confess a murder to me?”
“I think he might mention something to you that we could use,” Will said. “Gordie is in O’Dowd’s most nights. If you happened to come in for a drink, it would be the most natural thing in the world for you to have a little chat with him.”
He saw the look on her face. “Hey, I’d be right outside the window for backup. If I see anything weird, I’ll be right in there.” Will shrugged, spreading his arms. “Just talk to the guy, that’s all. I get an hour for meal break. So if you came in there, say ten thirty, eleven o’clock …”
*
How did I let him talk me into this? Sunny wondered as she pulled her dad’s pickup into a space in front of O’Dowd’s. It was a long, low wooden building in need of a coat of paint. The place didn’t even have a proper sign, just a neon beer advertisement in one of the small windows.
Sunny opened the door and slid down to the pavement. She shook her head in amusement when she recognized the tan truck parked next to hers. Gordie Spruance’s.
Well, at least I know he’s in there.
She looked around until she spotted Will’s patrol car parked across the street.
Okay. No more putting it off.
Finding her hands suddenly damp, she wiped them on the sides of her jeans. From what she remembered of the decor in O’Dowd’s, she’d chosen essentially the same outfit she’d worn to clean Ada’s house, with the addition of an old leather jacket.
Her dad thought she was going out searching for Shadow again.
Maybe I’d be smarter if I were doing that, Sunny thought ruefully. Instead, she straightened her back and headed for the gin mill’s door.
The unpainted wooden panel had swollen over the years, sticking in its frame. Sunny had to pull hard to open it.
She stepped into a cloud of cigarette smoke. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. A place that serves underage drinkers wouldn’t care much about a nonsmoking law. Or maybe the regulars consider this their private club.
In a way, the smoke served a useful purpose. It cut the stink of stale beer and less pleasant substances that had soaked into the raw wood walls and floors over the years.
The jukebox was playing loud country music with an amped-up bass thumping away, battling with the high-decibel babble of voices all trying to make themselves heard over the din.
A loud—and familiar—laugh cut across the noise. Sunny was shocked to discover that she recognized the woman behind the bar. Back when she last went to O’Dowd’s, her male college friends all hoped that Jasmine the barmaid would fall out of the skimpy outfits she wore.
Nowadays, I think folks might be afraid of that happening, Sunny thought.
As Jasmine threw back her head for another laugh, doughy flesh jiggled wherever her tiny tank top didn’t reach. And the unnaturally black hair that Sunny remembered now had an inch and a half of gray roots showing on either side of the center part.
No, Jasmine was not the barroom femme fatale anymore, explaining why a couple of guys at the bar were checking Sunny out as she stood by the door. She studiously avoided their gazes and then spotted Gordie sitting alone at one of the tables scattered around the room, a beer in front of him.
Sunny dug out a bill and headed to the bar. “Can I get a glass of red wine?” she asked Jasmine.
She’d already noticed that beer only seemed to come by the bottle or pint, she didn’t want to be drinking hard liquor under the circumstances, and soda would have made her motives for being there, alone, seem even more questionable than they already were.
The barmaid scooped up a stemmed wineglass from a shelf behind her—Sunny noticed it was dusty—and the wine itself came from a box.
Not a big seller, apparently, she thought. I just hope it hasn’t turned to vinegar.
She left a tip, strolled over to Gordie’s table, and sat across from him.
He looked up from the half-empty beer he’d been contemplating and stared as if she were Dracula’s daughter, inflamed zits showing up even more clearly on his pale face. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in the mood to go out for a quick drink. Been a while since I was in here, though.”
But as Sunny put down her drink, she found some things never changed. Ever since she could remember, the tables at O’Dowd’s had been cheap rounds of plywood on top of heavy steel pillars. The bases never sat straight, and the tops could give you splinters at a moment’s notice. They still could. The table wobbled, causing her wine to slop around in its glass.
“Heard you wrote a piece about Mom in the paper.” Gordie looked down at his beer. “Sorry, I haven’t read it yet.”
“It was more about the unfinished business she left behind,” Sunny told him.
“If you mean the ticket, I haven’t found it yet.” She had to strain to hear Gordie over the rowdy background noise. “Maybe she never actually bought the damned thing. Mom was getting a little older. She’d started losing track of stuff sometimes.”
“I know you’re depending on that money to fix up the house and get things on an even keel,” Sunny said. “Not getting it would be a real killer.”
She’d decided to approach this talk the same way she did search engine optimization for her website—throwing out keywords and checking the response.
The word “killer” didn’t seem to have any effect on Gordie. She decided to try another.
“Poor Ada changed a lot from the way I remember her as a kid. But I guess we all have.” She smiled, gesturing to Gordie. “Look at you, how you’ve slimmed down. I hope you didn’t do it the dangerous way—with amphetamines or something.”
Gordie flinched and took a quick look around the nearby tables. A bit of an overreaction, since they were all empty. Okay. She could mark down a de
finite hit at the mention of amphetamines.
“I hope you don’t mind that I wrote that article,” she went on. “Maybe I should have mentioned it the last time we talked.”
“Why?” Gordie asked. “Did you say something bad about me—or Mom?”
“No, but ever since I visited with you, somebody’s been playing tricks on me.”
Except for a little interest, Gordie wasn’t really showing a reaction.
“Yeah, somebody got into my car, somebody was making trouble outside my house—”
Again, nothing appeared to register with Gordie. He blinked at her, a little puzzled, and said, “That’s messed up.”
All right, Sunny thought, looks as if I’ll have to up the ante.
“It made me wonder if someone was afraid of that story I was doing.” She gave him a hard look. “Afraid that something might turn up to suggest that what happened to your mother wasn’t an accident.”
She had all of his attention now. “What do you mean?”
“When’s the last time your mom used those cellar stairs?” Sunny asked.
For a long moment, Gordie’s eyes refused to meet hers. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “But then, I haven’t lived there in a while.” He looked as if he were trying to push something away.
“But you were there when your father was still alive. I hear that’s when she stopped using those stairs.”
This turn in the conversation had him definitely uneasy. He tried to take a sip of his beer, but stopped when he saw how his hand was shaking.
“Ada at least tried to clean up the places where she usually went,” Sunny told him. “But there was thick dust on those stairs. Years of it.”
“Just what are you saying?” Gordie demanded, his fists clenched on the table.
Impulse control issues, Sunny thought, remembering Will’s list of tweaker tip-offs. Let’s see if I get a reaction if I start circling around Ron Shays.
“I’m saying it could be dangerous for an old woman to have something worth a lot of money, when there’s criminal stuff going on around her. What do you think?” Sunny stared Gordie right in the eye. He looked as if she’d morphed from Dracula’s daughter to the Prince of Darkness himself.
But before he said anything, angry voices rose over the crowd noise and the music. Sunny turned to see a big, beefy guy in a hooded sweatshirt with a mullet and a healthy beer gut shove a skinny guy whose beard didn’t hide the acne scars on his face. Screaming like a banshee, Skinny launched a roundhouse right. Fatso ducked the wild swing, then slammed the other guy into the bar. Skinny came back with a bottle in his hand, smashing it against a bar stool.
Somebody ran past their table as people started to intervene.
Sunny turned back to Gordie to find a changed man.
Staring pale faced at the fighters, he muttered, “I know those guys, and they’re bad news.” Still staring, he bolted up from his seat. His hip jostled the unsteady table, and Sunny’s wineglass fell over.
Before she could grab it—or him—Gordie was out the door. Sunny had never seen him move so fast.
A second later, Will Price entered, his expression hard, his right hand hovering beside the pistol at his hip. He came right over to where Sunny was still sitting. “I saw Gordie run out and heard sounds of a fight when the door opened. Everything okay?”
Behind him, except for the thumping country music, the place had gone dead silent. When Sunny looked over at the bar, the crowd had gotten a bit smaller, as if several people had preferred not to be seen by a representative of the local law.
So much for my undercover career, Sunny thought.
“I’m fine,” she said, wiping at her lap as red wine began to dribble onto her jeans. “Nothing a wash won’t fix.”
She tilted the rickety table so the wine went the other way. Of course, that sent the glass rolling, too. Sunny grabbed it, then stared. “What the—?”
A lumpy mass sat in the bottom of the glass, stained the same color as the wine. At first she thought it might be past-due sediment, or maybe a drowned creature. Yuck. But as she brought it closer, she saw that the lump was made up of a bunch of smaller globs, some kind of melting capsules …
Capsules that were supposed to have dissolved in her drink.
13
Will’s eyes went wide as he took in the gooey mass of pills in the glass. He whipped out a handkerchief, wrapped the glass up, then pulled Sunny to her feet. “We’ve got to get you to the hospital. Who knows what this stuff is.”
Sunny resisted. “I didn’t drink any of it. There are two guys you’ll want to talk to. They were fighting—”
She stopped, looking around at the crowd. Somehow, Fatso and Skinny had disappeared.
“Gordie got spooked when he saw them, but they’re all gone now.”
Will turned to the crowd. “Anybody know the guys who were fighting?”
“What guys?” Jasmine the barmaid tried to give Will a sexy smile, but the effect was a bit ruined by her missing front tooth. None of the other patrons said a word.
Will’s face got stony as he scanned the boozy wall of silence lined up in front of the bar. “And I suppose you have no idea how that broken glass happened to wind up on the floor over there?”
Jasmine peered over the cheap plywood bar, her cleavage dangerously straining her little tank top. “Somebody musta got careless and dropped a bottle.” She bustled out with a broom and pan. “Thanks for pointing that out, Constable.”
As the barmaid straightened up with her load, Will approached her, looking at the shards of glass in the pan. “Where’s the top of the bottle?”
If he got hold of that, he might get some fingerprints, Sunny realized.
But Jasmine looked around, making a big show of puzzlement. “I dunno.”
Sunny’s shoulders fell. Skinny probably took it with him.
Will looked mad enough to spit. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a buck, which he dropped on top of the mess in the pan. “For the lady’s glass,” he told Jasmine, gesturing with the handkerchief-wrapped wineglass in his other hand. He came back to Sunny. “Let’s get out of here.”
She followed him back to his patrol car, where he carefully stowed the glass. “I have to go in and get that analyzed.” He looked at her with worried eyes. “You’re sure you didn’t drink any of it?”
Sunny gave him a crooked smile. “It wasn’t exactly the most appetizing vintage.”
Will relaxed a little. “That’s good.” Then he switched to superserious mode. “What’d you ask Gordie that made him decide to spike your drink?”
“I don’t see how he could’ve,” she objected. “The glass was sitting right between us while we talked.”
She stopped for a second. “Of course, I turned away for a couple of seconds when the fight broke out.”
“What were you talking about when that happened?” Will asked.
“The conversation was just beginning to get interesting,” Sunny said. “I raised the possibility that his mom’s death wasn’t an accident, and he really got bent out of shape.”
“And you wonder why he tried to poison you?” Will demanded.
“Not that kind of bent out of shape,” she tried to explain. “More like he was dealing with an idea he didn’t want to think about. And he seemed seriously scared when he saw the two guys go at it.” She went back over the series of events. “Besides,” she continued, “he knocked my drink over. I can’t see how that would help him much if he really wanted to poison me.”
“I think we might be able to file that under ‘Henchmen, Fumbling,’” Will told her. “It sounds as if the fight was staged to distract you while the pills got into your drink.”
“But nobody knew I was going to be there,” Sunny protested.
From the look on his face, Will didn’t want to think about that right now. “Can you describe the two guys?”
She tried to replay the fight again. “One was fat—big beer gut, but he was wide, too. Brown hair in a
mullet, unshaven. Dark eyes, I guess. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with some kind of beer logo on the chest—I didn’t really see—and a hoodie over that. The other one was smaller—skinnier—with lighter hair that really needed to be cut. He had a full beard that was darker than his hair, and he had acne scars.” She paused. “Most of the time he had his back to me. He had jeans and a tight T-shirt, and I think he may have had a tattoo on his arm—his right arm. That’s the hand he used to wave the bottle around.”
Will jotted down the descriptions. “Okay. Why don’t you go get into your car, and I’ll see you home.”
“I don’t—” Sunny began in annoyance, but then her voice faded as the significance of what Will was saying sank in. “You think someone’s been following me?”
Will scowled. “Let’s call it a possibility.” His words came out very grudgingly. He tore off a piece of paper and scribbled on it. “This is my cell number. I’ll try to rustle up one from Semple, too. Whenever you have to go somewhere, give us a call.”
“And if I go potty, whom should I announce that to?” she asked sweetly, her frown now matching his.
For a second his eyes snapped, but when he spoke his voice was quiet, almost mild. “I just think it’s a good idea that the good guys know where you’re going to be,” he said.
Sunny shivered, positive she was thinking the same thing he was.
Because, apparently, the bad guys will.
*
Shadow lay very still, trying to ignore the waves of pain coming from his side. He’d been hurt before—worse than this, even. Usually the thing to do was to find a good hiding place where he could heal up.
This time was very different.
He closed his eyes, but found himself reliving the events that had brought him here.
He’d been out foraging, roaming the part of town where the two-legs weren’t so careful about wrapping up their trash. They often tossed out food, and on the street any chance to eat was a good one.
Shadow found some salty things that he licked, but he kept on, looking for meat. If he didn’t find it in the trash, well, perhaps a nice fat mouse would come looking for a meal, too … and end up becoming one instead.
1 The Big Kitty Page 13