“I’ll tell him,” I replied.
Allison sniffled. “Okay.”
We hung up.
I turned away from the phone, an old-fashioned wall unit, after setting the receiver back in its hook, and found myself face-to-face with the idea that had been eluding me.
Justin was standing in the middle of my kitchen, watching me.
I barely flinched, which meant I was getting used to impromptu visits from dead people. Was that good or bad?
I was too antsy to decide, at least at the moment.
“I need your help,” I said.
Justin looked pleased, in a broken, weary sort of way. Pepper had already gone on, and I knew Justin would follow soon. Just what I needed—another person to miss.
“Great,” he said, rubbing his palms together. “What do you want me to do?”
“Find my sister,” I answered, moving past him into the living room to go through the few photographs I owned. I kept them in a shoe box, since there weren’t enough to justify an album, let alone frames, and they were all outdated. Lillian hadn’t allowed a lot of pictures while I was growing up, since we were on the run the whole time, but there were a few. I’d burned Nick’s and my wedding photos, which is another story.
I riffled through snapshots until I found what I was looking for—a strip of three black and whites, taken in a mall photo booth: Greer, Jolie and me, with our heads together, grinning like fools.
I felt a pang, looking at those youthful faces. Stared at them for a long moment before handing the strip to Justin.
Justin studied the images, a range of emotions moving across his face like cloud shadows dappling sunny ground.
A deep dread spread over me, and I felt sick, even a little dizzy. But I didn’t take time to question Justin; I wanted him on his way, ASAP. Tucker would be back any minute with the kibble for Dave and whatever he’d bought for our breakfast, and even though he knew I talked to dead people on a fairly regular basis, I wasn’t really keen on having a conversation with someone he couldn’t see or hear while he was around.
“Nice dog,” Justin said, bending to pat Dave, who licked his hand. It was comforting to know Justin was visible to him—it made me feel a touch less crazy.
“Thanks,” I replied. I pointed Greer out in the picture. She was young, only eighteen or nineteen years old, blond and smiling brightly, though, like the photo-me, she had a watchful, hunted look in her eyes. Of the three of us, Jolie was the only real person, confident in her identity—Greer and I were impostors, expecting to be caught out at any moment. “Her name is Greer Pennington,” I said. “Can you focus on her or something, and zap yourself to where she is?”
Justin pondered Greer’s image. “It’s harder with pictures,” he said. “And thinking ‘Greer Pennington’ isn’t working for me.”
Down in the parking lot, a car door slammed.
Tucker was back.
“Justin,” I said urgently, “please—just try.”
Justin nodded.
I thanked him again.
Tucker was coming up the outside stairway. Dave began to bark out happy, tentative little yips, and headed for the door, toenails skittering on the bare floor.
Justin handed back the photo, and I touched his arm. He was dead and no one could harm him, but he was still a child. What if he teleported himself into some grisly scene? “It might—it might be bad,” I said, compelled to warn him. “The place where Greer is, I mean.”
He nodded, squinched his eyes shut and blipped out.
I went to the door to let Tucker in. He was lugging a twenty-five-pound bag of dog food under one arm, and he carried a fast-food bag in his free hand. He gave me a tired smile and then a peck on the forehead as he entered.
“You need to call Allison,” I told him. “She said she tried your cell phone a few times, but you didn’t answer.”
He stiffened, turned his head to look back. I knew he was worried—I saw it in his eyes—though he tried to hide it. He was tired and he needed a shower and shave, and watching him, I felt something dangerously close to love. “The battery’s been acting up,” he said. “I need a new one.”
“You can call from the kitchen,” I said, nodding him in that direction.
I stayed in the living room, determined not to listen in. But it was a small place, and I couldn’t help hearing him set the dog food bag down and grab the telephone receiver off the hook.
Because I was all ears, I retreated to the bedroom, got a clean sundress from the closet, then showered, half expecting Tucker to be gone when I was finished.
Instead, he’d finished his phone call, set the fast-food breakfast out on plates and poured us each a cup of coffee. Dave was crunching away on his kibble, but it was the Glock that drew my attention.
Tucker had confiscated it the night before, but now it was sitting in the middle of the table, where a normal person might have kept salt and pepper shakers. I looked at it, looked away, remembering I was scheduled for a nine-o’clock shooting lesson with Max Summervale. I was sure Beverly Pennington would want to cancel our meeting at two that afternoon, given that her son had been shot to death the night before, but I meant to call her anyway, if only to leave a message of condolence with some visiting relative or a member of her staff. She’d been peeved when I hadn’t gotten in touch the day Alex’s body was found, and while a dead son was different from a dead ex-husband, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
“Everything okay at home?” I asked. If I’d had the energy, I would have been proud of the moderation in my tone and manner.
“Allison’s dad’s having some kind of surgery tomorrow morning,” Tucker answered. “She has to fly back to Tulsa right away, and since she’ll be at the hospital around the clock for a few days, she isn’t taking the kids. Chelsea will watch them after school, until I get off work.”
I smoothed the skirt of my sundress primly, like somebody at a garden tea party, and sat down. Reached for my breakfast sandwich, one of those croissant things with enough trans fats in them to clog a mule’s arteries, let alone those of an ordinary human being. “I’ve met Chelsea,” I remarked, because that was the first thing that came into my muddled head. I was actually thinking about Justin, wondering if he’d already zeroed in on Greer, and Tucker’s mention of Allison’s father’s surgery didn’t register immediately. In fact, a few moments passed before I even put Chelsea’s name and image together. “She’s Helen Erland’s neighbor, and she used to sit with Gillian sometimes.”
Tucker nodded absently, munching on his sandwich. His body might have been sitting at my kitchen table, but his mind was obviously somewhere else.
My brain finally began to work. Surgery, it said. Bad thing.
“I hope Allison’s father will be all right,” I said.
Tucker’s gaze connected with mine. “It’s probably his heart,” he said. “There’s been some talk about a bypass.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
That’s when Tucker surprised me. “I think it’s time Daisy and Danny got to know you a little better,” he told me. “How about coming by the house for supper tonight? Around seven?”
“Allison’s place?” I asked. I’d been on the property once, when Tucker and I took Russell to Allison’s veterinary clinic for emergency care, but I hadn’t gone inside the house.
A muscle ticked in Tucker’s cheek, but the expression in his eyes, though bleak, indicated a clear conscience. “That’s where they live,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I murmured. “It’s—well—kind of intrusive, isn’t it?”
“They need to get used to the idea, Moje.”
“The idea of what?” I was edgy and because of that, I probably sounded abrupt.
“You,” Tucker said. “The divorce. That life changes, and that’s okay.
”
I wasn’t the other woman—Tucker’s divorce was final when I met him—but I felt guilty just the same, and it was a good bet that Allison had conditioned the twins to see me as the villain of the piece, the sole Reason Daddy Lived Somewhere Else.
Tears scalded my eyes.
Tucker reached across the table and took my chin in one hand. “No pressure, Moje,” he said hoarsely. “If you don’t feel ready, I’ll deal with it.”
My thoughts were still jumbled, but the gist of it was, I could go on orbiting the fringes of Tucker’s life like some negligible planetoid or stray moon, fighting the pull of gravity, or I could be somebody real to Danny and Daisy—and to myself. In some ways, even though I’d worked hard to raise Mojo Sheepshanks from the wreckage of Mary Josephine Mayhugh’s brief existence, I felt insubstantial, as invisible as Justin or Gillian or the dead greeter at Walmart.
Tucker grinned gently at my expression. “You’re thinking too much again,” he said.
I wanted to smile back, but I couldn’t quite make the grade. “I guess it’s no big deal,” I admitted. “It’s not as if I’ll be their new stepmother or anything.”
Tucker didn’t say a word. He laid his sandwich down, though. Looked away, taking a sudden interest in the calendar tacked to one of the cupboard doors.
I figured it would be a good time to change the subject.
“Maybe you ought to get some sleep,” I said quietly. “I have an appointment, but you can crash here if you want.”
He turned back to me, but his gaze dropped to the Glock before rising to meet mine. “No rest for the wicked,” he said, his voice a little gruff. “I didn’t get a chance to run the stats on this gun. If it’s illegal, I’m going to have to confiscate it—permanently.” He pushed back his chair, stood and set the pistol on top of the refrigerator. “In the meantime, hands off.”
As if I couldn’t get to it if I wanted to. I did an internal eye roll. “Whatever,” I said.
He came to stand directly in front of my chair and leaned down so we were practically eyeball to eyeball. “I mean it,” he said. “If the serial number checks out, I’ll teach you to shoot. If it doesn’t, I don’t want your fingerprints all over the thing.”
Something just in back of my stomach twitched, and paranoia hormones flooded my system. I hadn’t fired the Glock, but I’d certainly handled it.
“Promise,” Tucker insisted, still leaning, although now it was more mouth to mouth than eyeball to eyeball. His breath made my lips tingle.
I promised, albeit reluctantly.
He kissed me lightly, then straightened, but he was still within easy range.
I fought a strong temptation to unzip his jeans and delay his departure for a while.
He stepped back. Smiled down at me. “Don’t touch the gun,” he said.
I grinned up at him. “Is it loaded?” I asked.
“For bear,” he said. And then he kissed the top of my head, cleared the remains of his breakfast from the table and left.
I waited until I heard him descending the outside stairs before following to lock the door behind him and put the chain on.
Then I just stood there for a while, uncertain what to do next.
I decided Dave ought to have a walk, and found the leash. Went through the whole process of unlocking and unchaining the door again.
By the time Dave and I got back to the apartment, it was almost time for my shooting lesson at the range. I decided the sundress probably hadn’t been the best choice, and swapped it out for black jeans and a lightweight turtleneck of the same somber hue. All I needed to complete the cat-burglar look, I thought, assessing my reflection in the mirror over my bureau, was a stocking cap.
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.
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