Kiss the Bees bw-2

by J. A. Jance

  "Sorry," he said quickly. "I didn't mean to insult your mother. It's just that sucking on a woman whose boobs are overflowing with milk can be a beautiful thing. I thought maybe you might have tried it."

  "No," Andy had responded. "I never have."

  "Damn," Lori muttered.

  Half-asleep, Mitch rolled over on his side to face her. "What's wrong?"

  "Mikey didn't eat," she said. "He already fell back to sleep. He barely touched the one side, and I'm soaking wet on the other."

  Mitch reached out and cupped Lori's swollen breast in one hand. She was right. The leaking milk had soaked her nightgown from armpit to waist.

  "If you'd let me, maybe I could take some of the pressure off."

  "Never mind," she said. "I'll go get the breast pump."

  "No, don't," he said. "Let me do it. Please. It won't hurt anything. Mikey won't know."

  Lori didn't answer right away, but she didn't move his hand, either. Finally she sighed. "All right," she said. "I guess it would be all right, just this once."

  There was no need to unbutton the gown because she slept with it open. Mitch did have some trouble unfastening the nursing bra. He had seen her do it, of course, but watching it done from the inside out wasn't the same as doing it from the outside in and in the dark as well. At last, though, he ran his hand over her damp naked breast. The distended nipple lay erect and inviting beneath his grazing fingertips.

  "If you're going to do it," Lori said, "don't take all night."

  Whenever he'd had the chance to watch Lori nurse, he'd observed the strange mixture of anticipation and dread with which she greeted Mikey's clamping his hungry lips over her nipple. Sometimes she'd make a sound that was almost like the sigh of satisfaction Mitch's grandmother used to make after taking a sip of too hot coffee.

  Raising up on his elbows, Mitch leaned over and clamped on. As his lips closed around her nipple, he felt her body tense and instantly afterward go limp as the sweet, hot milk shot into his mouth. It gushed out at him, shooting all the way to the back of his mouth, teasing his tonsils, almost triggering his gag reflex, but he fought that down and concentrated on sucking, on draining her without ever gripping her with his teeth.

  There was more milk inside her than he expected, but at last that one was empty. He sat up to find that in the dark she had deftly unfastened the other side, and now, giggling, she pulled him down onto that one, too, holding him by the back of the neck, pressing him against her, groaning with pleasure as his now aching jaws relieved the pressure on that sore breast as well.

  Ever since they had brought Mikey home from the hospital three weeks earlier, Mitch had been intensely curious about the process. For weeks he had begged Lori to let him taste her, but what had never crossed his mind was that the process might pleasure her as well. The fact that she was enjoying it almost as much as he did unleashed months of pent-up sexual deprivation. When he let go of her nipple, she was still laughing so hard that at first she didn't seem to notice that he was prying her legs apart. But she did notice.

  "No, Mitch," she said. "It's still too soon. The doctor…"

  By then Mitch Johnson wasn't interested in what the doctor had said or in what Lori wanted, either. He desperately craved the solace her body had to offer. He craved it and he took it. He had barely shoved himself home when his aching need exploded inside her like a burst of Fourth of July fireworks.

  Afterward as he drifted in a mellow haze, he realized she was crying. "What's wrong now?" he asked.

  "You raped me." She didn't say it loud, but he knew she meant it.

  "No, I didn't," he said. "You wanted it as much as I did. You were asking for it."

  "You raped me," she repeated dully. "I told you no and you did it anyway."

  "I did not rape you," he declared. "How could I? You're my wife."

  As far as Mitch Johnson was concerned, the subject was closed. In Tucson, Arizona, in 1975, Lori Kiser Johnson didn't try pressing charges because she knew they wouldn't stick. What she did do, however, was far more effective. From then on, she never said yes to Mitch again, not when it came to sex. Oh, he did get a piece of tail now and then, but only when he took it. And there was never any response. She lay beneath him whenever he did it, dry and unmoving, letting him inside her because she didn't seem to have any choice in the matter, but making sure neither one of them enjoyed it.

  Considering that turn of events, it was hardly surprising that a few months later Mitch was out in the desert shooting hell out of a bunch of wetbacks. As frustrated as he was, who wouldn't?

  As Mitch turned left on Coleman Road, he saw a huge cloud of dust come roiling up out of the desert about a half mile away. A moment later a helicopter emerged from the cloud and set off toward town. That struck him as odd-worried him a little-but clearly it had nothing to do with him. Two miles down the road, behind a locked gate, the Bounder sat in undisturbed, solitary splendor exactly as he'd left it.

  When he stopped the car, he got out and stood for a moment listening. The only sound was the steady thrum of the air conditioner. He had created an extra duct that ran through the storage unit. It was hot, and it wouldn't have done to have Lani Walker baked to a crisp or suffocated before he had his chance at her.

  He stood there observing the Bounder and the vast tract of empty desert around it. He was almost sorry to leave this place. It had been good to him, had allowed the creative juices to flow. But it was time. He had other places to go, other fish to fry, including the stupid-ass second lieutenant from Asheville, North Carolina, who had led his platoon into a Vietcong trap and permanently fucked up Mitch's knee.

  Like it or not, it was almost time to abandon the desert. Mitch had already called his landlord to say he was moving and had notified the power company, telling them to shut off the juice as of Wednesday. His would be a planned exit. There would be no question about him deciding to leave after all the shit hit the fan.

  If anyone had seen him standing there, they might have thought he was simply admiring the landscape. What he was really doing was seeing how long he could keep from opening the door. Would she be awake or not? Her reaction to the drug had been so pronounced that he worried now that she might still be groggy. That would be too bad. The moment she saw his face, he wanted her to know. Anything less than that wouldn't be enough.

  It had been fun toying with Diana without her having the foggiest idea of what was really going on. But with Lani it was different. Diana had said she was a smart girl, and Mitch Johnson desperately wanted that to be so. He wanted her to be smart enough to realize what was happening. To Mitch's way of thinking, knowing in advance, foreseeing the possibilities and dreading them, were the only things that would place Lani Walker any higher on the evolutionary ladder than the dumb little bird he had crushed in his fist years earlier.

  Finally, taking a deep breath, he walked up to the door and put his key in the Bounder's custom-made dead bolt. Then he opened the door and stepped inside.

  "Honey, I'm home," he called as he pulled the door shut behind him.

  While Candace was in the bathroom getting ready to go to dinner, Davy paced the room. It wasn't just the ring. It was everything. There was a hole in the pit of his stomach. His palms were wet. Sweat was already soaking through his clean shirt. And the only thing he could think of was that something was wrong-terribly wrong-at home.

  Finally, feeling numb, he picked up the phone and dialed. His mother answered, sounding annoyed or sleepy, he couldn't tell which.

  "Is Lani there?" he asked.

  "She's not home from work yet," Diana said. "And she's supposed to go straight from work to a concert with Jessica Carpenter. Why, is something wrong?"

  "No," Davy mumbled. "I just wanted to talk to her."

  "What about?" Diana asked. "You sound worried."

  David Ladd's mind raced, trying to find a plausible reason for calling that had nothing to do with what he was feeling. "It's a secret," he said, as inspiration struck. "It's about your
anniversary present. But that's all right. I can talk to her tomorrow."

  "Give me your number," Diana said. "I'll leave her a note in case she does come home before the concert."

  Blushing to the roots of his light-blond hair, David Garrison Ladd looked down at the phone on the nightstand and read his mother the number of the Ritz Carlton in Chicago, Illinois. He put down the phone praying fervently that Lani wouldn't stop by the house before the concert.

  "Who was that?" Candace asked when she came out of the bathroom. "I thought I heard you talking to someone on the phone."

  "I just called home to give the folks a progress report," he lied. "My mother worries about me, and I wanted her to know that everything is fine."

  Deputy Fellows was used to working on his own. After Kath Kelly left, it took some time for him to get his mind back on the job, but eventually he did. He made plaster casts of what footprints he found. He combed the area again, looking for clues. And three separate times he retraced the path of the dirt track from the place where the attack had taken place to the spot where Kath Kelly had found the injured man lying in the dirt.

  It was a long way. Almost a hundred yards. The question was why the killer would drag his victim anywhere at all? Eventually the answer became clear. The attack had been a reaction to being discovered rather than a premeditated crime. As such, the attacker didn't view himself as a killer. Rather than finish his victim off, he had simply dragged the injured man away, and hopefully out of view, expecting nature to take its course.

  That meant that the real crime and also the key to the attacker's real intentions and identity had something to do with the digging back on the edge of the charco. At four o'clock in the afternoon, Brian went back to his truck, took a long drink from the last of his water, and collected his shovel. At four-ten, he started to dig.

  Digging is a solitary occupation done with an implement that has changed little from ancient times to modern. The act of shoving a sharp spade into the dirt and then extracting a heaping shovel leaves plenty of time for reflection.

  With the scattered remains of Gina Antone's shrine mere feet away from him, pieces of Brian Fellows's own life intruded into his thoughts about the case he was working on. Most people would have said that Brian came from a "troubled background." He had found respite from his half-brothers' constant taunting only at school and during those precious hours when he had managed to escape Janie's chaotic household to spend time at the Walker place in Gates Pass.

  As Davy Ladd's faithful shadow, Brian had been welcome in places where he never would have been able to venture otherwise. He had walked, wide-eyed, into the dimly lit adobe hut where a blind medicine man named Looks At Nothing had lain confined to a narrow cot. The blind man had been sick, dying of a lingering cough, but he had nonetheless continued to smoke his strange-smelling cigarettes, lighting them one after another, with a cigarette lighter that somehow never once burned his fingers.

  Those Tohono O'othham people-Rita, Looks At Nothing, Fat Crack, all of them-had been unfailingly kind to little Brian Fellows in a way his own family-mother, stepbrothers, and successive "daddies"-never had.

  And now, as he worked in the hot sun with his shovel, he felt as though he was protected somehow from the restless spirits that Davy Ladd had once told him inhabited this place. He had barely come to that conclusion when his shovel bit into something hard. Not wanting to break it, he tossed his shovel aside and then got down on his knees to dig in the sand by hand.

  Almost immediately, his hand closed around something long and smooth and straight. When he pulled whatever it was free of the dirt, he saw at once that it was a bone. A leg bone of some kind, he thought. Maybe from a weakened cow that had once become trapped in the muddy charco and drowned. He dug some more and was rewarded with another long bone and what looked like a rib of some kind. Up until he found the rib, he kept thinking the bones belonged to an animal. The rib, however, had a very human look to it. Then his hands closed around something round and smooth and hard. The hair rose on the back of his neck. Letting go of the skull, he didn't even bother to finish pulling it free of its earthen prison.

  Instead, he climbed out of the hole, walked back to his Blazer, and called in. Fortunately, the dispatcher on duty earlier had gone home for the day. "Where've you been, Fellows? I was about to send someone out looking for you."

  "Great," Brian said. "If you're sending somebody, how about a homicide detective? Have him come equipped with shovels and some water-especially the water. I'm about to die of thirst."

  "A homicide detective. Why? What have you got? The last I heard you were working on an assault. Did the guy die?"

  "Not as far as I know," Brian Fellows said. "That guy was still alive when they loaded him into the helicopter. But somebody else out here is dead as a doornail."

  "Dead?" the dispatcher returned. "Who is it?"

  "How should I know?" Brian answered. "That's why I need a homicide detective."

  "I'll get right on it," the dispatcher said. This time Deputy Fellows was relatively sure the man meant what he said.

  It was about time.

  11

  So I'itoi gave orders to chase the evil ones to the ocean. When they reached the shore of what is now the Gulf of California, Great Spirit sang a song. As I'itoi sang, the waters were divided and the Bad People rushed in to go to the other side. Then Elder Brother called the waters together again, and many of the PaDaj O'othham-the Bad People-were drowned, but some reached the other side.

  Great Spirit again tried to have his good warriors kill those evil ones that had escaped the waters, but the warriors would not. AndI'itoi — Spirit of Goodness-felt so ashamed that he made himself small and came back from the other side through the ground, under the water.

  Many of his people returned withI'itoi, but some could not, and these were very unhappy, for thePaDaj O'othham who had not been destroyed were increasing.

  ThenI'itoi 's daughter said she would save these good Indians who were not happy. She took all the children to the seashore, where they sat down and sang together. This is the song thatI'itoi 's daughter andA'ali — the Children-sang:

  O white birds who cross the water,

  O white birds who cross the water,

  Help us now to cross the water.

  We want to go with you across the water.

  Kohkod — the Seagulls-heard the song. They came down and studiedI'itoi' s daughter and the children. ThenKohkod flew up and circled around, singing:

  Take these feathers that we give you

  Take these white feathers that we give you-

  Take the feathers floating round you

  And do not fear to cross the water.

  So the Indians took the white feathers that the seagulls gave them. They bound the feathers round their heads and crossed the water safely. That is why,nawoj, my friend, theTohono O'othham keep those white feathers-thestoha a'an — very carefully, even to this day.

  Candace and David had a beautiful dinner together in the hotel dining room. The champagne Candace ordered was Dom Perignon. "It's okay," she said, sending a radiant smile in Davy's direction over the top of the wine list. "Daddy said we could have whatever we want. It's on him."

  "Exactly how much did Bridget and Larry's wedding set your folks back?" David asked once the sommelier left the table. Bridget was Candace's next older sister. Her wedding had taken place two months before Davy and Candace met.

  Candace shivered. "You don't even want to know," she said. "It was a complete circus. She had nine attendants."

  David gulped. "Nine?"

  "The reception was a sit-down dinner for three hundred at the club. It was awful. 'Ghastly' is the word Daddy used. He was a little drunk before it was all over that night. I remember him taking me aside and telling me that night that no matter what, he wasn't going to go through that again."

  The waiter returned carrying a champagne bucket. Candace winked at Davy. "All Daddy's doing is making good on that promise."
>
  The wine was served with all due ceremony. "I finished reading your mother's book last night," Candace Waverly said over the top of her glass a few moments later. "You hardly ever talk about that, you know. I remember your saying once that your mother was a writer, but until she won that big prize last month, and until Mom saw her on 'The Today Show,' I didn't know she was an important writer. My dad only reads boring stuff like The Wall Street Journal and Barron's, but still he's dying to meet her. So's Mother."

  "She'll probably be in Chicago on tour sometime," David said without enthusiasm. "Maybe she can meet your folks then."

  "What do you think of it?"

  "What do I think of what?" David Ladd asked. "Of her going on tour? Of her meeting your parents?"

  Candace glared at him in mock exasperation. "No, silly. Of her book."

  In fact, like his stepfather, David Ladd had avoided reading Shadow of Death like the plague, and for many of the same reasons. For the first seven years of his life, Davy had been an only child, the son of a woman obsessed by her dream of becoming a writer. In the beginning, maybe Davy hadn't had to contend with sibling rivalry as such, but there had always been competition for Diana Ladd Walker's attention. All his life David had felt as though he was forever relegated to second place, first behind Diana's typewriter, and then behind Brandon Walker and Lani and a succession of ever smaller computers.

  With that foundation, it wasn't at all surprising that Davy regarded his mother's increasing success in the world of writing with a certain ambivalence. When it came to Shadow of Death, however, ambivalence turned to active abhorrence. He resented the idea that his mother would have anything at all to do with Andrew Carlisle-with the monster who had single-handedly brought so much destruction on the Ladd family. Andrew Carlisle was the single individual who bore ultimate responsibility for the death and subsequent disgrace of David Ladd's father, Garrison. Once released from prison, Carlisle had come back to Tucson. In a binge of vengeance, he had brutalized and raped David's mother while Davy himself remained imprisoned and helpless behind a locked root-cellar door.