by Raven Snow
Vic and Connor were running around like freshly butchered chickens, clucking and fussing over me. Luckily, they didn’t try to touch me or come too close—likely, they were warded off by the vibes Wyatt was putting out there. If I’d been able to see auras, his probably would have looked like the sky when a bad storm rolls in.
_____
I wasn’t on a first name basis with any of the nurses in this hospital— not like in Waresville. Still, I felt it was rude that none of them laughed at my jokes.
Wyatt was a silent force behind me the whole time, stroking the back of my good hand when they had to use the big needles. Luckily, the arm hadn’t been broken so badly that I needed surgery. Unluckily, I was going to be wearing a cast on my dominant arm for a while.
Connor was white-faced outside our hotel room when we got back, wringing his hands. “Oh, Harper, I’m so sorry. I never would have brought you here if I’d thought I was putting you in danger.”
I tried to wave him off with the broken arm, which would have hurt if not for the really superb drugs they’d given me. “No sweat. I probably wasn’t much safer in Waresville.”
He wanted to come in to our hotel room with us—probably to apologize some more, but Wyatt put his foot down. Well, it wasn’t so much of a foot down as it was a door slammed in my cousin’s face.
Grinning, I flopped down on the bed. “You shouldn’t be so hard on Con.”
He bent over me to gently reposition my arm into a less stressful position, his face unreadable. “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
The drugs were making me sleepy, so the last thing I remembered was Wyatt crawling into bed next to me, fully-clothed. He held me still when I wanted to bounce around and talk about the case. The lack of movement and the day’s events caught up to me, and sleep took hold a few moments later.
Chapter Seven
When I woke up, Wyatt was nowhere to be seen, though the bathroom was freshly steamy. A note had been placed on the pillow next to me—trust him to do something like that. It was a quick read, just highlighting where he’d be throughout the day while he was looking for Pete the Pot Dealer. I silently wished good old Pete luck in outrunning my man and then got on with my day.
Since I had no car, but I still had a mystery to solve, there was no way around calling Vic. True, Connor could’ve given me a ride, but I didn’t want him around when I was talking to people who may have wanted to kill him. It seemed like a bad combination.
Vic was ecstatic to get my call. “I’ll be right over. We can even do lunch.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that hard-working, serious detectives didn’t have time for lunch when she said, “There’s this great Chinese place over on 5th that fries everything.”
On second thought, a lunch break could only serve to further the investigation. Who can sleuth on an empty stomach?
A couple of minutes later, we were rolling through town in her bland car, windows down, and classical music turned all the way up. I felt like a badass who’d just escaped from the nursing home and was ready to scope out bingo matches and prowl for 90-year-old men.
Instead of parking at Connor’s and cueing people into what we were there for, I directed Vic to park a block away at her house. Anyone moderately well-off lived in this subdivision, and if you were really rich, you had a mansion here. The poor all migrated in from the inner city—my former abode.
“Are we staking some place out?” she asked eagerly.
Though I’d criticized her outfit yesterday and was glad she’d changed, it was a mixed blessing. Instead of the grandma dress, she was wearing extremely tight, neon spandex that I was afraid was left over from her cheerleading days. A couple of cars on the freeway had almost crashed when the light hit her just right.
“Staking out is for cops,” I said. “We’re gonna go pester some neighbors; that’s civilian work.”
I walked a good foot away from the car before stopping, realizing Vic’s car was taking up her entire driveway. “How long until we have to move that, so your husband can park?”
“Oh−uh, maybe five.”
“Maybe?”
She shifted under my gaze, and I shrugged. As long as I didn’t have to stop mid-interrogation, I couldn’t have cared less about Vic’s peculiarities. Still, the detective in me was a little curious.
The first door we knocked on, no one answered. I peered into the window by the door and saw a man with leg warmers killing an exercise video. Vic butted her head against mine to get a glance at what I was staring at.
“Check out the butt on him,” Vic said. “Maybe I should ask to borrow that video.”
I found myself nodding in agreement. “They’re fresh from the bakery, alright.”
“And they stay up like they should,” she said sagely. “After my daughter, nothing stays up on its own anymore.”
Another reason to be glad Cooper wasn’t biologically mine, then.
We had better luck at the next door; a middle-aged lady came to answer. She was fully dressed—nicely, too—though from the heavy cleaning odor, I didn’t think she’d been out yet. The impeccable grooming reminded me of Wyatt’s mother, and I was a little shorter with the woman than I meant to be.
The woman’s eyebrows rose. “No, I haven’t seen anything suspicious,” she said, answering my question. “This is a nice neighborhood, you know.”
Cue the door slamming in our faces. Turning to me with a cautious expression, Vic said, “Maybe I ought to do the talking.”
“Zip it,” I growled, moving on to the next house—where we struck gold.
It was an elderly woman that just had nosey stamped all over her. It takes one to know one. Pushing up her glasses, she eyed us doubtfully. I couldn’t really blame her; between Vic’s spandex, my disco shorts, and the air of desperation, I was surprised she didn’t slam the door in our faces.
But then again, nosey women don’t slam doors on gossip opportunities.
“Yes?”
I stuck out my hand, giving her my best smile. “Hello. We were wondering if you’d seen anything suspicious going on around here lately? Police business.”
I figured since I was sleeping with a cop, everything I did was police business. And in nice neighborhoods, no one asked to see ID. Briefly, I wondered how Wyatt would feel about that, then got back to the matter at hand.
As soon as the words had left my mouth, the woman looked relieved. “Oh, good. You must be here about the break-in.”
Vic and I exchanged a micro look, and then said in unison, “You bet we are.”
The perfect connectivity of it made me sad for a moment. Though I couldn’t say I hated her anymore, Vic wasn’t my best friend. I’d left my best friend behind in Waresville after not talking to him for weeks. Sure, I was still mad at him, but the loss hurt.
The woman invited us in and poured coffee. The brew was strong enough to put hair on my chest, and I reevaluated the fragile-looking woman. If she could drink that sludge daily, she was a tough broad.
“It would help if you could tell us everything you know—no details left out.”
“Well, last night, I saw someone break into that nice man’s house across the street.”
Vic, in one of those rare moments of usefulness, pulled out her phone and showed a picture of Connor. “This man?”
The woman nodded. “I would’ve called the police, but it happened so fast, and I didn’t get a good look. I’ve been kicking myself for doing nothing all day.”
It was pretty early in the morning, but I let that go.
“Could you identify him if shown a picture?”
“I don’t know,” she said, pursing her lips. “It was dark.”
Grabbing Vic’s phone, as mine didn’t have any of the bells and whistles, I scrolled down her social media until I found a picture of Jack. It was a younger and thinner him, but I figured it’d have to do.
“This him?”
The woman’s eyes widening was all the answer I needed. We stuck ar
ound for a few more minutes, but it became clear she didn’t know anything else. Jack had gotten in and gotten out, taking something small enough that the woman hadn’t seen it. My guess was money.
“My mama always warned me about that Jack. Said he was on dope, and I should stay away,” Vic said as we left the house. “Of course, Mama liked the vapors herself, so...”
I wasn’t listening. “Why would Jack want to kill Connor if he’s already robbing him blind?”
Vic shrugged, and I pulled out my phone, dialing my cousin and putting him on speaker. He answered after a few rings, whispering, “I can’t talk now. Suzy said if I didn’t hang the disco ball−”
“Forget disco.” Did I really just say that? “How would Jack benefit from your death?”
Silence. “Listen, he may be a little jealous of my success, but Jack wouldn’t−”
“Don’t you have balls to play with? Just answer the question.”
He sighed. “Well, he does get the gas stations in my will, but−”
“What does Hannah get, then?”
“Woman, if you don’t stop interrupting me… Everything else,” he said. “We just got divorced, so I haven’t had time to draft a new will. I’m supposed to meet with my lawyer next week.”
I ended the call and turned to Vic. “Now, all we need to know is which one of them knew about that appointment.”
“Or which one of them has witchy tendencies.”
“Either or,” I agreed.
Before we set off for my hotel, I ran inside Vic’s house and grabbed the box she indicated, which was labeled “high school memories.” It was that time in the case to see the lineup.
Driving with Vic was an experience. While perfectly fine away from the wheel, she became a maniac behind one. I watched with dumbfounded appreciation as she cut someone off and simultaneously flipped off the person in front of her, calling them a “doo-doo head.” Mothers.
When we got up to my room, both of us panting from the stairs and taking turns carrying the box, Wyatt’s laptop was beeping. I poked it warily, trying to shut it off with a series of voice commands that probably wouldn’t be allowed in church.
After a moment, Cooper’s face popped up, and he smiled at me. “Hey, Harper. What’d you do with my dad?”
Pointing to Vic when she came into the camera’s view, I said, “This is your dad now, Cooper, but she prefers to be called Aunt Vicky or Bone Crusher.”
Vic leaned in, scrunching up her nose and cooing. “Oh, aren’t you cute? You must be about my daughter’s age.”
Cooper gave me a sideways glance, and I smiled. “Your dad’s on a case, but you popped in just in time to hear about the suspects for mine.”
Though Wyatt didn’t strictly approve of Cooper being my sounding board and Junior Crime Solver—I’d gotten him a badge and everything—he loved seeing us spend time together. The first time I met Cooper, it was apparent he was starving for motherly attention. Now, he got all that he could handle and more, though I wasn’t sure if most mothers made their children into sidekicks.
I opened up the high school yearbook from the trunk, flipping all the way to the back to Hannah Workman’s picture. Her braces gleamed on the glossy page, and her hair was in a side pony. Cooper squinted at the picture, and then sat back like he’d smelled something bad.
“Yeah, they didn’t have picture retakes in our day,” I said. “This is my cousin’s drunk ex-wife. She’s feeling righteous and miserable now that Connor has left her and stands to inherit a whole lot of money if she does away with him before next week.”
“I hope it's her,” Vic said. “I’d pat her on the back for the effort. Men are horrible”
After shooting her a glance, I turned back to Cooper. “I hope I’m getting you all excited for wedded bliss.”
His eyes went slightly unfocused as he thought about something, and then he said, “Are you going to marry my dad?”
My tongue got all tangled up, and I almost swallowed it. “Yes, marry him and then kill him for the money.”
Moving lightly onto the next subject, I tried to push down the raw panic Cooper’s words had brought up. I loved Wyatt more than anything, but the thought of marriage did funny things to my bowels. ‘Forever’ was an interesting concept to a 70s party girl with a restless spirit.
Before we could move on, though, Vic just had to have her two cents. “Marriage is a trap,” she said. “Just keep—er—making Wyatt’s bed. No commitments.”
“Nice save.”
Cooper thankfully looked confused. “Harper never makes the bed.”
Vic got a dreamy look in her eye. “Then maybe I’ll offer to fill in for her.”
I flipped to Jack’s picture and spoke loudly as to end the previous conversation. “This is an old friend of mine— big pot head back in the day, and probably into the harder stuff now. He’s jealous of Connor’s success, needs the money for drugs, and has been stealing from my cousin for a while now. In the will, he’d get the gas stations.”
“My dad says I can’t do drugs,” Cooper said unhelpfully, puffing out his chest.
“Good. More for me.”
Cooper frowned at me, but asked, “What clues do you have?”
“Mostly just this ladder that crumbled down on top of Connor. It’s missing its screws—we need to find those—and was covered in blonde hair.”
“Oh,” he said cheerfully, “then which one of your suspects is blonde?”
Vic and I shared a sorrowful glance. “Neither.”
“Well…” He scrunched his face up, thinking hard. “My dad says people who do drugs are bad, so maybe it’s the guy.”
“I’ll remind him he said that later. Possibly when we’re fighting, and I need the upper hand,” I said, before bidding Cooper goodbye and signing off with the help of Vic.
We sat in silence for a moment, both contemplating marriage. Vic’s pondering was probably less panic-stricken than mine, as she’d already made the plunge. If Wyatt asked sometime in the next seventy years of our cohabitation, could I make that same plunge?
“Chinese?” Vic asked after a moment.
“Yeah, I need some heartburn to go with this indigestion.”
“Getting old is great.”
We made the trek to her car, and sitting there, I banged my fist on the dash, startling her. “We’re not old yet! We’ve still got prime time left. This is only the tenth reunion, not the fiftieth.”
She looked a little doubtful, but rallied behind me. “Right.”
“We should get out there; do stuff.”
“Right.” Vic paused before leaving the parking lot. “But Chinese first?”
“Right.”
In all my years in the city, I’d never been to the little hole in the wall Vic took me to. The restaurant was sandwiched between an accountant’s office and a place that did free drug tests—no court mandate required. Vic pulled me past the latter before I could fully appreciate it, and the smells of orange chicken and noodles attacked my nose.
We got our food, sat down, and dug in. Vic was right about them frying everything, and I was opening up a button on my pants before I’d even gone halfway through the first box. I wondered if I’d just have to take the pants off completely and risk the indecency charge.
The next time I looked up from my buffet, Jose Capello was smiling down at me.
“If I didn’t know better,” he said with a grin, “I’d think you were following me.”
Crap.
“That’s your office next door, isn’t it?”
He worked next to this place and had still kept his body? I’d picked a winner for my high school crush. As tempting as it was to flirt with him, my mind was too full of Wyatt—a permanent affliction—to seriously entertain the idea.
“Hey, Jose,” Vic mumbled, uncharacteristically keeping her head down.
I shot her a strange look she didn’t see and said, “We were just taking a lunch break.”
“Me too.” He plopped down in the se
at across from me, and I tried not to groan. There was just no good way to get rid of him now.
Except the phone call I wasn’t expecting, I thought, picking up my phone as it blasted a little known 70s song.
“Connor, I’m working,” I said without heat. “On your case, remember?”
“You’ve gotta get to a TV,” he said. “Pronto.”
He hung up then, leaving me staring at the phone in puzzlement. Since when did a Beck turn down a chance to banter?
Walking into the back, past an “employees only” sign, I ignored the loud voices yelling at me in Mandarin. There was a tiny, portable TV in the kitchen, and I grabbed it, tuning it to the local news.
Vic was suddenly behind me, staring at the screen as intently as I was, because it had no sound, only captions. “Whoa, shootout downtown. Newsworthy even in Miami.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what Con−”
I was interrupted by the news anchor reading off a list of the names of people involved in the gun show. My jaw hit the floor, and this sick kind of fear enveloped my heart. I’d never felt anything like it, the experience enough to make me want to puke.
Running out the door without even glancing at Jose, Vic and I were in the car and peeling down the freeway within minutes. People swore and swerved to avoid us, but mortality couldn’t even touch me in that moment. I needed to get to Wyatt.
It barely registered, but we were very close to where my old apartment was. In fact, the attempted apparition was going on in the building across from mine. The feeling of being so close to a place that held equal parts horrible and wonderful memories prickled at my skin, but Wyatt had my full attention.
They had a blockage set up to keep the curious people away from the building. Even so, a crowd pushed closer and closer with every shot that went off high above our heads in the decrepit, brick building.
When I tried to get past, a burly cop blocked my way, shaking his head. “You can’t go in, ma’am.”
“My boyfriend’s up there,” I said, trying to dodge him again.
“Then he’s going to jail, where he belongs.”