Arizona Heat

by Linda Lael Miller

“He was a lying, cheating bastard,” I said.

  “He also saved your life,” Tucker answered. “And you must have loved him a lot if you married him, especially considering all the secrets you were keeping.”

  I pushed my plate away. Pulled it back again. Took another forkful of chicken à la weird.

  “I’m coming to your place tomorrow night,” Tucker said. “And we’re going to make love again. We’ve got some catching up to do.”

  Sitting there pantyless, I felt myself moisten at the prospect. “We can’t,” I said. “Because of the kids.”

  “Kids?”

  “Gillian and Justin.”

  Tucker’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Who is Justin?”

  “Didn’t I mention him?”

  Tucker shook his head.

  “He was killed six years ago, waiting to cross the street after a concert. Drive-by shooting.”

  I saw Tucker go into cop mode, knew he was riffling through mental files. Before he’d worked for the DEA he’d been a homicide cop with Scottsdale PD. Although Justin had died in downtown Phoenix, the departments traded information all the time.

  “Last name?” he asked.

  “Braydaven,” I said.

  He nodded. “I remember that,” he said. “When the trial began, his mother tried to bring a pistol into the courtroom. Phoenix didn’t charge her, but a judge ordered therapy.”

  “I have a feeling it didn’t work,” I said sadly.

  “Why?”

  “Because Justin’s still here,” I answered. “If he wanted his killer found, like I think Gillian does, it would be more clear-cut. But the guy who shot him is in the pen.” A wave of sadness came over me, because there were lost children in the world, and between worlds, too. I wanted to hammer at the doors of heaven and demand to know who was in charge. “He told me he’s waiting for his dog,” I choked out. “Pepper’s old, and Justin’s afraid the poor thing will get lost between here and the afterlife, but I think that’s only part of it. His mother is holding him back somehow.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know—maybe it’s the intensity of her grief. I want to go and talk to her, but what do I say? ‘Stop mourning your son’?”

  Tucker reached over, pulled me onto his lap. Pressed my head against his shoulder. There was nothing sexual about it, but his tenderness overwhelmed me in ways his lovemaking never could have. I felt swamped with sorrow and consolation, clogged with tears, and not just in my sinus passages, either. In my whole body, and even my soul ached.

  “Stay,” he said quietly. “I’ll call Allison, and the kids can get by without me for one night.”

  I shook my head. As much as I would have loved to lie in Tucker’s arms until morning, he had responsibilities, and so did I. My sister’s husband was dead. She was on the edge, between that and the blackmail, and I wanted to be nearby in case she needed me. “Greer,” I said, trying to explain.

  “Jolie’s with her,” Tucker said.

  “Jolie doesn’t understand,” I told him. I knew I should get off his lap, stop acting like a baby and make him take me home. But it felt too good, having his arms around me, strong and protective. Plus, I loved the smell of his T-shirt.

  “What doesn’t she understand?” Tucker persisted.

  “How scared Greer is. She didn’t see her in that bus station....”

  Tucker eased me back a little way, so he could look into my eyes. “You’ve lost me,” he said. “What bus station, Moje?”

  I’d never told Tucker the complete story of my past. He knew I was really Mary Josephine Mayhugh, that I’d seen my parents murdered when I was only five years old and that I’d been kidnapped soon afterward by a neighbor, Doris Blanchard, who promptly changed her name to Lillian. And mine to Mojo, though I’d come up with the “Sheepshanks” part on my own.

  I explained how Lillian and I had met Greer in Boise. I didn’t say she’d been hooking, nor did I mention what I’d recently learned—that she borrowed an alias from an actress on the late show. He’d ask what her real name was, and I didn’t know.

  Suddenly it bugged me that I didn’t know. All these years my adopted sister had simply been “Greer” to me. Now I wondered who the hell she really was, and what she’d done that made her run away at such a young age, and turned her into a viable target for blackmail.

  There was always the possibility, of course, that Greer hadn’t done anything wrong. Maybe she was the victim of someone else’s evil deed.

  While all this was running through my mind, Tucker absorbed what I’d told him about how I’d met Greer in the first place.

  Because I was distracted, he caught me off guard when he asked, “What’s Greer’s real name?”

  There it was. Cop mode.

  I stiffened.

  Tucker chucked my chin. “Bad question?” he asked.

  “Bad question,” I confirmed.

  “You don’t want to answer?”

  “I don’t know the answer.”

  I could see by the look in his eyes that he believed me, and I got all emotional again. I wasn’t used to people believing me, mainly because so much of my life had been a lie. I’d lied about my name, and what I hadn’t remembered about my past. So many things.

  Maybe that was why I understood Greer’s need to keep secrets.

  “I’d better take you home,” Tucker said with a wicked light in his eyes. “Because it’s getting to me, knowing you’re not wearing underpants.”

  I laughed, but it came out sounding sniffly.

  He kissed me. Lightly. No tongue. If there’d been tongue, I’d have been in trouble, because I was even more aware of my missing underpants than Tucker was.

  “Tomorrow night,” he reiterated.

  “What about the kids?” I was referring to Gillian and Justin, but then Daisy and Danny came to mind, too.

  “Maybe they won’t be around,” Tucker said, nuzzling my neck.

  I jumped to my feet. Much more nuzzling and we’d be back in bed. “Thanks for the chicken stuff,” I said.

  He grinned up at me. “Just the chicken stuff?” he drawled.

  “Hey,” I protested. “You had fun, too.”

  He laughed, but it was a dry sound, with something broken in it. “It shouldn’t be this hard, Moje,” he said. “I’d give just about anything to wake up next to you in the morning.”

  I leaned down, kissed his forehead. “Put on some clothes, Detective Darroch. The party’s over.”

  Chapter Six

  TUCKER DROPPED ME off at Greer’s guesthouse on his way back to Allison’s.

  I tried not to think about what might happen when he got there, but I couldn’t help it. Earlier, in his bed and—gulp—the backseat of his car, I’d been fiercely, ferociously female, queen of the Amazon warriors, engaged on every level of my being, not just the physical. Giving as good as I got. (And believe me, it was good.) Now I felt subdued, even a little shy. Intellectually, I understood that Tucker was protecting his children, and even that I wouldn’t have wanted him at all if he’d been willing to turn his back on them. It was a primal responsibility, and I knew that.

  I had a solid Dr. Phil take on the whole situation.

  My heart, however, was 180 out from sensible. Being intimate with Tucker invariably opened a vast vacuum inside me, an emotional black hole, powerful enough to suck in entire star systems, swallow them whole, without so much as a burp. And that terrified me.

  It was fine to want another person.

  It wasn’t fine to need them the way I was starting to need Tucker. I’d been in less danger looking down the barrel of a killer’s gun.

  “I think we should see other people,” I told him after he’d checked under the bed and behind the shower door for the kind of psychos I’d recently
begun to attract.

  Tucker had been about to kiss me good-night when I said those fateful words. I’d felt so raw, so exposed, that I threw out the announcement as a defensive barrier. A bunker I could duck behind, however after the fact.

  He stopped in mid head tilt and his eyes searched my face, grave and wary. “Coward,” he said, being nothing if not direct.

  I entered a forlorn guilty plea.

  Tucker rested his hands lightly on the sides of my waist. The awareness of my missing panties reasserted itself. “You’re a big girl, Moje,” he said quietly. “If you want to play the dating game, that’s your choice.”

  I swallowed. “I can’t afford to need you, Tuck,” I said. I was being truthful that night. Maybe it was the sex. I didn’t have the energy for the usual diversion tactics and camouflage techniques.

  “Why not?” he asked, though not unkindly. As I said, Tucker was the direct type. In or out of bed, he didn’t take prisoners. He came, he saw, he conquered—not necessarily in that order.

  “You know why not,” I answered. “You have kids. You’re still entangled with Allison, sex or no sex. Getting involved with you is the same as spilling my guts on the 101 and letting cars run over them.”

  Tucker winced at the image. Being a cop, he’d probably seen things like that in real life. “Too late,” he said. “You’re already involved, Moje.”

  I gnawed at my lower lip.

  He caught it gently between his thumb and forefinger. “Stop it,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my bad habit of chewing on myself or the sudden angst over our nonrelationship. Probably it was both.

  “Go home, Tucker,” I said, putting a slight emphasis on the word home.

  “Give this a chance,” he argued. “Don’t wimp out on me. Something big is happening here.”

  “Exactly my point,” I answered, but I didn’t bite my lip. Sometimes you have to be content with the tiniest bit of progress. “It’s too big.”

  “And you’d rather find a safe guy? One who didn’t make you feel too much? Care too much? Want too much?” The challenge was softly spoken, but there was steel behind it.

  “Right now,” I said, because it was apparently my night for involuntary candor, “I’m leaning toward no guy at all. It doesn’t get any safer than that.”

  “Give it a shot,” Tucker answered, stroking my cheek lightly with the backs of his knuckles. With some men the gesture might have had an element of threat. With Tucker it was tender enough to pick at the tight stitches in my soul. “Try another guy. Try No Guy. It won’t be enough. And when you realize that, I’ll be waiting.”

  I trembled, closed my eyes. There were so many things I wanted to say, but they wouldn’t coalesce into words.

  Tucker touched his mouth to mine, breath-light. “I’ll be waiting,” he repeated hoarsely.

  I didn’t open my eyes again until I heard the door close behind him.

  “He’s seriously into you,” a voice said. “What I don’t get is why you won’t go for it.”

  I started a little and turned my head. Justin Braydaven stood practically at my elbow, looking confused and sympathetic. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said, peeved.

  “Do what?” Justin asked innocently.

  “Just appear like that,” I snapped. “Out of nowhere!”

  “I can’t help it,” Justin said, shrugging a little. “I think ‘Mojo Sheepshanks,’ and picture you in my mind, and zap, here I am. It’s sort of like on the Star Trek reruns, when Captain Kirk or Mork or somebody steps into that big cylinder thing and teleports.”

  “The character’s name,” I said, irritated, “was Spock, not Mork. Doesn’t anybody have a firm grasp on TV trivia anymore?”

  Justin grinned. “I don’t think it’s much of an issue here in the great In-Between,” he said. “Chill out, will you? You’re just pissed off because you want the cop like crazy and you’re scared to take what he’s offering.”

  “Have you been spying on me?”

  “Oops,” Justin said with an insouciant grin.

  I wanted to slap him, but one, he was a kid, two, he was dead and three, he was right. That’s what really chapped my hide—he was right. I did want what Tucker was offering, and supersized. “You’d better not have been watching us,” I said. As if there was a thing I could do about it either way, but when you live by your wits the way I do, you have to bluff a lot.

  “Relax,” Justin replied. “I’m not into peep shows. Way uncool. I just got here a couple of minutes ago. I’ve been hanging out with Pepper all evening.” A shadow of sadness crossed his face, and I realized that, as young as Justin had been when he died, he must have been a heartbreaker. And bright, too. It made me wonder yet again about the general management of the universe. Why did good kids like Justin die, while their killers survived? “My mom has this little shrine on the mantel in the living room,” he went on. “Pictures of me. The badges I earned in Scouts. Votive candles. It’s kind of creepy.”

  I softened. Completely forgot about the Tucker drama, at least for the time being. “She misses you, Justin. Losing a child has to be the worst thing that can happen to a person.” Oh, Gillian, I thought. Danny and Daisy came to mind then, which inevitably looped the mental tape right back to Tucker.

  “Pepper doesn’t want to leave my mom alone. That’s why he won’t come with me.”

  Everything inside me ached and tears filled my eyes.

  Justin went on glumly, “He’s in a lot of pain. Arthritis. Hip dis—dis—”

  “Dysplasia?” My heart crept out from behind the barrier I’d erected earlier to protect myself from Tucker, and rushed to the dog. They’re loyal in ways a human being could never understand, dogs are. They’ll hold on literally until their last breath, no matter how much they’re suffering, caught in the twisting vines of somebody’s love.

  “You’ve got to talk to her,” Justin said, his eyes pleading. “I’ve tried, but she can’t hear me.”

  Paying a visit to Justin’s mother was on the long list of last things I wanted to do. I was up to my butt in hassles—Greer had just lost her husband, she was being blackmailed and she was a semisuspect in a murder.

  For all I know, he’s lying dead in the desert somewhere...

  And then there was Gillian. I had to help her—the knowledge grew more urgent with every breath I drew—and I didn’t have the first idea how to go about it. Why had she come to me, of all people, and not to our famous local psychic, the one who inspired Medium?

  All that was missing in my current life scenario was somebody who wanted to kill me, in the most painful way possible, and I figured they’d be along anytime now.

  I pulled in some air, let it out in a noisy gust. “Justin,” I said evenly, “have you seen the Light? Is that what this is about?”

  “Sort of,” he answered, looking understandably confused. “There’s this...space. Sometimes it’s up ahead. Sometimes it’s to the side, or I can feel the heat of it behind me. It’s like a doorway or something and I’m supposed to go through it, I know that. And I’m strong enough to do it now. But I can’t leave Pepper. I can’t.” His eyes said a lot more. They begged me to help. “When I was fourteen I had mono. I was in bed for six weeks. Pepper didn’t leave me, except when he needed to go outside. Mom had to bring his food and water to my room.”

  I laid a hand on his shoulder. He felt warm; if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was alive. “I’ll stop by your mother’s place tomorrow,” I promised, resigned.

  The tension in the boy’s face eased a little. “Thanks,” he said. And then he blipped out—most likely because he’d thought of Pepper and been teleported.

  I locked up, brushed my teeth, washed my face and swapped out my sundress and bra for a T-shirt Tucker had forgotten at my apartment, back when we first met and thi
ngs weren’t so complicated. I lugged it everywhere I went, because it smelled like him.

  I got into bed, waited a few minutes for Gillian to show up and switched out the lamp when she didn’t.

  I closed my eyes, not expecting to sleep, praying not to dream if I did, and when I opened them again, it was morning.

  There were no dead people in the room, and no psychos.

  So far, so good.

  I showered, put on a tailored black pantsuit and subtle makeup and corralled my hair into something resembling a French twist. When I went to see Mrs. Braydaven, I wanted to look businesslike. Practical.

  Sane.

  I was off to a good start, until I got to the kitchen and found Alex Pennington sitting at the table, reading yesterday’s copy of the Arizona Republic.

  I suppose he was good-looking—salt-and-pepper hair, nice physique, square jaw—but I was distracted by the bullet holes strafed across his chest. So far, the ghosts of my acquaintance—Nick, my childhood cat, Chester, Gillian and Justin—hadn’t sported the wounds of their demise.

  I stopped, staring.

  Calmly Alex closed the newspaper and laid it aside. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could have been that casual, with blood and powder burns staining my clothes.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. It was becoming a routine question with me. I probably sounded cool and collected, even reasonable, but inside I was squealing like a little girl caught in a lawn sprinkler in her favorite party dress, and I had to clutch the door frame on both sides just to stay upright.

  “My name’s on the deed, after all,” he said mildly, but the old dislike was there, in his eyes.

  “It was,” I answered, wondering even as I spoke where I got the moxie, “but now you’re dead. D-e-a-d, dead.”

  “I can spell,” he informed me, shifting a little in his chair as though he might get up and come toward me.

  I knew I’d lose it if he did.

  I tried again. “Why are you here?” I asked, terrified of the answer.

  “Because of Greer. They’re going to blame her for killing me. She didn’t do it.”