“We’ve got other officers outside, checking out the perimeter,” the black cop said. “Did this person say anything to you? Did you hear a voice?”
We shook our heads.
“He slipped on the hill and hit a tree,” I told them. “We heard him say Ugh, but that’s all.”
“We had an earlier report of a prowler in the area,” the blond cop said.
I glared at Terry. “When was this?”
“About a half hour before your incident,” the black cop answered. “Were you in this room when the shot came through?”
I pointed to the couch. “My sister was sitting there, and I was over here.” I moved to the spot where I had been.
“You were standing right there?”
“No, officer,” Terry said. “She was not standing. She was dancing the hula.”
He gave her a stern face. “I know you’re upset, miss. But we don’t need sarcasm right now.”
“I’m telling the truth!” Terry protested. “She was hula dancing.”
“Oh.”
The officers exchanged a look, then the blond turned to me. “Can you show us what you were doing and where you were doing it?”
Oh fine.
Just fine.
Terry stifled a giggle, while the blond officer went out to the porch, closed the door, and looked through the blast hole. “Go ahead,” he said.
I twirled my hands and wagged my hips, Terry humming an accompaniment. I gave it a few seconds, then stopped. I was already traumatized enough. Anyway, it was hard to imagine I was shot at just because I got a little carried away with a luau fantasy. Nobody’s that tough a critic.
“It was something like that,” I said.
“And were you dancing when the shot came through?” the black officer wanted to know.
I nodded.
“And singing,” Terry said. “Sing for them, Kerry.”
I glared at her, telegraphing an image of her hanging from a meat hook by the nostril.
“That’s not necessary,” he said, then smiled for the first time since he got there. “Unless you’re inspired.”
“Well, either he wasn’t a very good shot or he didn’t intend to hit you,” the blond said, coming back inside. “You’d be hard to miss at that angle.”
I suddenly remembered. “No, I took a bow. I bent over like this the second the gun went off.” I demonstrated for them.
The black cop whistled. “Lucky lady.”
The officers got a squawk on their radios. They’d caught someone outside and were bringing him to the house for possible identification.
Terry ran to the door, but I stayed glued to the spot. The black officer put a hand on my shoulder, sensing my fear. “It’s okay,” he said. “They’ve got it under control.”
We looked outside and saw the patrol cars with their lights flashing, and an officer waving traffic through on Beverly Glen.
Two more cops in flak vests appeared dragging a huge man between them, his hands cuffed behind his back, wearing a black trench coat and dark glasses. He had a thick neck and a jarhead topped with brushy blond hair. Terry and I recognized him at once.
“Lance!” we yelled.
One of the officers said, “Do you know this man?”
“Yes!” I said. “Lance, did you shoot at us?”
“No, I swear!”
“He says he’s your bodyguard.”
Terry rolled her eyes. “He’s an actor. He’s going to play a bodyguard in the movies.”
“Your aunt hired me,” Lance whimpered. “She rehired me, I mean.”
“When?”
“This morning. I told her I wouldn’t work in the same house with the Irish she-devil, but you two were okay.”
“Well, you’re fired!” I yelled at him. “We just got shot at!”
Lance looked down at his feet. “I couldn’t get a parking space, so I went to Starbuck’s for a mocha frappuccino. When I came back, all hell had broken loose.”
“Is this for real?” the black officer said to me, incredulous.
“’Fraid so,” Terry said. “It’s something our aunt would do.”
I suddenly made the connection.
“Do you have a gray sedan?” I asked Lance. He gave a rueful nod. “What about a yellow VW Bug?”
“They’re rentals. I told your aunt that you had caught on to me in the sedan, so she had me rent the Bug. She didn’t want you to know you were being guarded. Said you’d be too proud, or something.”
“Well, we’re bursting with pride right now,” I said.
The officers spent another hour at the house. They recovered the shell casing from the front porch and a 9mm slug from the wall, bagging them for evidence. They also combed the neighborhood for the shooter, but without success.
At some point I cornered the blond officer and told him that we were private investigators and that we’d been running an investigation that may have brought us to the attention of Sergei Pavlov, an escaped Russian hijacker who was suspected of killing a junkie plastic surgeon and his office manager—his cohorts in a scheme to run illegal drugs through the Dauphine Hotel—all of them aided and abetted by a criminal mastermind in the person of a silver-haired Beverly Hills attorney named Hugh Binion. . . .
“Yeah, I like those Jackie Collins novels, too,” he said, walking away.
Hmmmph.
The cops called Reba, who confirmed by phone that she had indeed hired Lance to watch us. It was clear he wasn’t the same man dressed in black who’d been running through our yard, so the cops released him and Lance went sniveling back to Reba’s house.
We had to clean up the glass first, so the dogs wouldn’t step on it and lacerate their paws, and we didn’t get around to speaking to Reba until forty-five minutes later. She was verging on hysterical when we called. “You’re all right?” she said. “Tell me you’re all right!”
“We’re fine,” Terry told her.
“Just a little shaken up,” I said. Like a hamster in a blender.
“Well, you’re not to spend another night in that house. Get over here as soon as you can.”
“He won’t be back tonight,” Terry said. “Don’t worry.”
Easy for her to say—no metal-jacketed missile had gone whizzing past her pootie tang.
“Really,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Reba, “we’re okay here.”
“Just a moment.” We heard Reba calling out, “Eli, they say they won’t come over. They say he won’t be back tonight.”
A man’s voice rumbled in the background, then Reba came back on the line. “He says you’re to come over here, anyway.”
“Uh, Reba?” Terry said, stifling a laugh. “What’s Eli doing there at this time of night?”
“We’re soul mates,” Reba said as if that explained everything, then handed off the phone.
“Kerry? Terry? It’s Eli. You all right? Who shot at you?”
“Sergei Pavlov,” I said. “He’s bumping people off left and right, and hiding in plain sight, thanks to your buddy Binion. And I can promise you Binion knows what his boy is up to. He’s sitting up there in his fancy office and pulling Sergei’s strings and—”
“Hey!”
“What?”
“I know you’re scared, kid, but I gotta say, you’re running away with this. Turning it into one of your vast, 90210 conspiracies. Look, if you don’t know who shot at you, don’t make something up. It serves no purpose. You girls come over here for the night and we’ll deal with it tomor—”
“What the hell . . . ?” came a startled voice from the doorway.
I turned and saw Boatwright standing on the threshold, looking like a contestant from The Bachelorette after stumbling onto a triple homicide. He was dressed in a navy sports coat, jeans, and a light blue button-down shirt that set off his gorgeous eyes. His mouth was open in shock (my, what a nice tongue), and a bottle of red wine hung forgotten at his side.
He stepped over the threshold, gawking at the hole in th
e door.
“I thought you were going to call,” I said to Boatwright.
“Who’s that?” Eli asked.
“Kerry’s date,” Terry said.
“No one answered,” Boatwright said, his eyes wide. “I thought I’d come over and surprise you—”
“Gotta go,” I said quickly into the phone.
“Who the hell shot into your house?” Boatwright asked.
“I can hear him,” Eli said, chuckling. “It’s the Beverly Hills dick, isn’t it?”
“None of your business!” I yelled.
“None of my business?” Boatwright said, thinking I was yelling at him. “I’m the police! It’s sure as hell my business when people go shooting into houses!”
Eli chuckled again. “Hussy. Cop groupie—”
I hung up in his ear. Terry stayed on the line, whispering into the mouthpiece and laughing as she and Eli shared a joke at my expense.
Boatwright took me by the arms, studying my face. “You okay? What happened?”
I did my best to smile flirtatiously and took the bottle from his hand. “Merlot! Just what the doctor ordered after an evening of random violence.”
“Random?” He knitted his thick brows. “What the hell’s going on here?”
He followed me into the kitchen. I pulled out a corkscrew and went to work on the wine, while he stared at me with those piercing eyes, waiting for an explanation.
“I’m not getting any younger,” he said.
I popped the cork. “Should we let it breathe?”
“Let it suffocate, I don’t give a rat’s ass! You gonna tell me what’s going on here or do I have to play twenty questions?”
I pulled down a couple of Flintstones glasses and poured the wine. “You could play forty, I have no answers.”
I gave him a Fred glass and I took Wilma. Unconscious role-playing, I guess—a little Flintstone foreplay. He chugged the wine and held his glass out for more. I refilled it and raised my glass in a salute.
“You must have some idea who it was,” he prodded.
“Okay, I had an idea that it was Sergei Pavlov, but I probably made that up. Truth is, I’m clueless. At any rate, no one thinks he’s coming back tonight.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Look, you’re not here as my personal response unit, it’s supposed to be a date. Do you want to have a date or not?”
He looked at me, shaking his head. “If I knew you better, I’d spank you silly.”
“If I knew you better I’d let you,” I said coyly.
He smiled in spite of himself. “Then let’s get to know each other quick.”
He leaned against the counter with one of his slim, denim-clad hips and studied me closely, sipping his wine. Why did he have to be so damn gorgeous? He was making it very hard to maintain my cool. My eyes were involuntarily drawn to his pelvic area. I had a flash-fantasy of grabbing those narrow hips like handles, pulling him between my legs . . .
Uh-oh. Caught me looking.
I turned away before he could discern the awful truth—I was a hussy cop groupie.
Wouldn’t do to play my hand too quickly, I reminded myself.
I leaned against the kitchen table, the same one where I’d eaten breakfast with my grandparents—cereal loaded with sugar. Grandma’d had this quaint notion that we should consume actual food at our meals, so she’d always put apple or banana slices on top of the fluorescent-colored glop that represented some toy tie-in or other.
I was a good girl. I’d indulge Grandma by eating prunes if it made her happy. But I wasn’t that good anymore. Right now I wanted to skip the healthy stuff and go straight for the sugar. A hundred-and-eighty pounds of it.
“The police were here,” I reassured him. “They took a report.”
“Good move, calling the police.” He grinned. “Exactly what I would have recommended myself.”
The next thing I knew, he’d set down his wine, and his arms went around my body and pulled me to him. I was pressed against a wall of muscle, the smell of him making my head spin. Strong healthy man smell, accented with aftershave.
We kissed, hard.
Tongues going at it like we were trying to crawl into each other’s mouths.
I felt his shoulder holster beneath my left breast—which was very erotic. I’d always been anti-gun, but that was on the streets, not in the bedroom. In the bedroom, I figured it was my God-given second amendment right to be aroused by a sidearm.
Somebody clamped her lips down on his neck and sucked. I guess it was me. I nibbled at his beautiful flesh, wanting all of him in my mouth.
I was lifted up. Strong hands grabbed my legs, which were immediately clamped like a wrestler’s around his waist. He moved in a noisy shuffle across the kitchen floor, then smashed into the swinging door that led into the sitting room.
“Owww!” My head had taken the brunt of the crash.
“Sorry, sorry,” he whispered in my ear, his breath hot.
Can ear canals have orgasms? I thought mine just had.
We pushed through the door, almost tumbling to the floor on the other side. My mouth was on his, my neck straining as I pushed into him, trying to meld completely with his teeth, his tongue, his luscious lips.
Then I was dropped like a load of cement.
I stumbled backward, the word Shit! strangling in my throat.
Boatwright caught me by the elbow to keep me from falling to the floor. I got my balance by waving my other arm in the air. Why had he dumped me?
“Excuse us,” Boatwright said, straightening his jacket. “We got a little carried away.”
Oops. We’d forgotten about Terry in our lust craze.
She gave us a knowing smirk. “Don’t let me stop you.”
I tugged down my shirt. “Um . . . John, why don’t you grab Fred and Wilma and join me upstairs?”
“A foursome?” Terry said. “Kinky.”
Boatwright disappeared through the kitchen door and I ran to Terry’s side.
“Please don’t say anything or do anything or pull anything, okay?” I whispered desperately.
She was affronted. “Hey, I’m the one that told you to get laid.”
“Good,” I said. “Are you gonna—you know—be down here?”
“I live here,” she said, thrusting out her chin. “That is, when I’m not under threat of death.”
Boatwright came out of the kitchen, glasses and wine bottle in hand. He and Terry stared at each other for an awkward moment.
“So . . . upstairs?” he said to me, nodding toward the staircase.
“I’ll have headphones on,” Terry said. “Feel free to make the wooden platform creak all you want.”
I turned and ran up the stairs, with Boatwright right behind me.
When I got to the loft I fell down on the bed. He set the glasses and bottle on the bedside table, then stared down at me as he peeled off his jacket.
He tossed it on the chair in the corner. Then he started stripping off his holster. He popped the fasteners and pulled the leather straps off one broad shoulder, and I almost came on the spot. Keep your lap dancers. I’ll take a gun-stripping homicide detective any day.
The gun got more careful treatment than his jacket. He bent down and slipped it under the bed. Then he stood at the edge of the bed and unbuttoned his shirt.
His chest was hard and muscled and covered in silky dark hair. He untucked his shirttails and let the shirt fall open around the chiseled stomach, watching me intently the whole time.
“What?” I said when his gaze became unbearable.
“You look so—”
Beautiful? Ravishing? Fuckable? I supplied mentally.
“Uncomfortable.”
Huh?
He put one knee on the bed and leaned over. He reached under my shirt, running his hand over my belly, and causing my skin to tingle with a sensation like tiny electric shocks. His hand found the wire of my bra and he slipped his fingers underneath it as I held my breath.
“All cinched in,” he said, running his fingertips around my shivering rib cage to the back. He fumbled with the hook, then the bra went loose.
“Much better,” I said, letting out my breath.
He smiled and moved his hand slowly around to my breast, gently grazing my nipple, which sprang up like a little pink soldier on parade. He closed his eyes, breathing through parted lips, and performed the same maneuver with the other nipple.
I couldn’t stand it. I was going to explode or scream or undergo a complete meltdown from wanting him. I ran my fingertips up his nice hard stomach muscles, making a mental note to straddle them later.
“I’m even more cinched by these jeans,” I said.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
Pop went the offending button on my jeans, down went the zipper, and now the cool smooth hand was traveling down my lower abdomen toward its reward.
“Do it,” I whispered, arching my hips.
“Do what?” he whispered back.
“Anything!”
Glass crashed downstairs.
Boatwright’s hand jerked out of my pants. He dived off the bed, going for the gun. He sprang up with it in his hand and was down the stairs before I even knew what had happened.
I scrambled off the bed and followed him, pulling down my T-shirt and fumbling with my zipper.
He was crouched halfway down the stairs, arms out with the gun aimed at the front door.
Terry stood there giving him an apologetic look. She wore leather work gloves and was holding a hammer in one hand, a big shard of glass in the other.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was trying to get this glass out of the window before it fell down. If it shattered and fell, the dogs could step on it.”
Boatwright relaxed his arms, bringing down the gun.
Good thing he was between me and Terry. I would have had to get around him to pummel her senseless. And if I did that, he’d have to arrest me for assault.
“You didn’t think that could wait till later?” I snapped at her.
She shrugged. “Thought it was too much of a hazard to wait.”
Boatwright sighed and looked at me. “She’s right about that. It is a hazard.”
Terry might not technically be from Venus, but she sure knew how to bring out the Martian in a man.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 26