Act One (What Doesn't Kill You Prequel): An Ensemble Mystery Novella

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  Joe reached into his pocket. Even though I was trying to keep my eyes averted, I saw the disgusting dried skin he’d shown me the night before. A large man in a rent-a-cop security uniform was moving quickly across the pool deck toward us, mercifully drawing my attention away from Joe and his prize for a moment. An angry woman was struggling to keep up with the guard in her pool-unfriendly sling-back heels. A Lilly Pulitzer skirt strained against its back seam across her tush.

  She shouted, “There he is. That’s the scary guy out from the parking garage.”

  Just as I was turning my head back toward him, Joe stuck the dried skin in my face. It touched my lips, sticking to my 50 SPF lip balm. I screamed and wrested it away.

  “Pervert. Stalker,” the woman shouted. “Just like he was back at Baylor when he got fired from working in the law library.”

  That was it! I remembered him shelving books, his eyes on me. He’d worked there. He wasn’t a classmate. I held the disgusting thing toward Joe, but he wheeled and took off. The skin fell from my fingers onto my sunscreen-dampened legs, where it absorbed the lotion and melded itself to me like an applique. I screamed again.

  The security guard yelled, “Stop!”

  When Joe didn’t, the guard pulled out a stun gun. I heard the crackle of electric current, and then Joe fell to the ground a few yards away, writhing and creating little waves in the trickle of water on the deck. The guard skidded to a stop and knelt by him. The pink-and-green-clad woman put her hand over her heaving chest, standing beside me.

  “Oh my God,” I said, staring at my leg. “Oh my God.”

  Emily stepped over to me. All I could do was point and repeat my entreaties to a higher power. She peeled the moistened skin away from my leg. “Mother trucker. What in heck is this?”

  I shivered, but I was still amused at my friend. Emily never cussed. Never. “According to Joe, it’s the dried foreskin of a Jewish boy.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Really?” She looked at me, then it, then shucked it away from her. It floated like a tiny parachute, riding the air currents slowly back and forth to the ground. “That’s disgusting.” She cocked her head. “And highly unlikely.”

  Michele put her hand on my shoulder. “He’s the guy I was telling you about from last night.”

  The security guard raised his voice. “Excuse me, everyone. Could you please clear the pool area?”

  He stood, and I could now see Joe’s zip-tied hands behind his back. The guard was dragging Joe’s floppy, still-convulsing body to a standing position, and it wasn’t going well. They were at the base of a handicap-access swimmer lift, which probably would have worked a lot better to get Joe up and moving. A buzz rose from around the pool as people pointed, whispered, and gathered their things. The few people actually in the water climbed out and joined the exodus.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.” I put on a white eyelet cover-up with a jaunty ruffle at mid-thigh. It had soaked up some water and was now completely, worthlessly transparent. I wrapped my towel around my upper body.

  We filed out and stepped into the overchilled hotel hallway, following the throng back to the lobby and elevators. The line to go up was daunting, so we hung back in the lobby. Two police officers strode in from the front entrance. The security guard pushed Joe toward them like he was a wet noodle. The officers looked at each other. Eyes wide, brows furrowed.

  Just past them, the skinny blonde we’d seen at breakfast was working behind the front desk. Elaine? I think that’s what she’d been called.

  Joe slurred at her, “You were at the theater!”

  “Over here,” a woman’s voice called on my right, from the entrance to the restaurant. “I’m the one who called you guys. That’s her. She’s wearing the bracelet I saw last night.” I turned toward the voice as the police did the same. Tiny in frame with sleek dark hair in a bob, the woman stood by the shoulder of a Native American man two or three times her size.

  Elaine darted from behind the reception desk toward the front door.

  The small woman yelled, “She killed the actress last night.” She started to run, but the large man with her pushed ahead after Elaine, and they were out of sight in a flash. The tiny woman stopped, her eyes darting around until they found the cops. “Don’t let her get away.”

  I heard a thud followed closely by a female screech.

  The security guard said to the cops, “It’s okay, I’ve got this guy,” gesturing at Joe-from-the-library.

  The police tore off toward the sound of the screech.

  I met eyes with the tiny woman. We nodded at each other. Good on her.

  “Wait, that blonde woman was the one in the cloak who murdered the actress last night?” Emily said.

  “A murder in act one.” Michele was shaking her head side-to-side, hands on her hips. “What a night. What a reunion.”

  “At least we got to see the ending of act two.” I grabbed the arms of my two best friends, and we walked toward the suddenly clear elevator area. “Who’s up for spa time before the game this afternoon?”

  THE END

  ***

  I hope you enjoyed Act One (What Doesn’t Kill You Prequel): An Ensemble Mystery Novella. I had a blast putting all my protagonists in one place. Want a deeper dive into the characters? Get to know all of my kick-ass women sleuths in the entire What Doesn’t Kill You series of full-length romantic mysteries, if you haven’t already. You can start with Saving Grace, the first one, and you can download it free everywhere.

  And if you’re so inclined, I would be very grateful if you left a comment with an honest review for Act One on my website.

  EXCERPTS

  Chapter One

  Last year sucked, and this one was already worse.

  Last year, when my parents died in an “accident” on their Caribbean vacation, I’d been working too hard to listen to my instincts, which were screaming “bullshit” so loud I almost went deaf in my third ear. I was preparing for the biggest case of my career, so I sort of had an excuse that worked for me as long as I showed up for happy hour, but the truth was, I was obsessed with the private investigator assigned to my case.

  Nick. Almost-divorced Nick. My new co-worker Nick who sometimes sent out vibes that he wanted to rip my Ann Taylor blouse off with his teeth, when he wasn’t busy ignoring me.

  But things had changed.

  I’d just gotten the verdict back in my mega-trial, the Burnside wrongful termination case. My firm rarely took plaintiff cases, so I’d taken a big risk with this one—and won Mr. Burnside three million dollars, of which the firm got a third. That was the total opposite of suck.

  After my coup at the Dallas courthouse, my paralegal Emily and I headed straight down I-20 to the hotel where our firm was on retreat in Shreveport, Louisiana. Shreveport is not on the top ten list for most company getaways, but our senior partner fancied himself a poker player, and loved Cajun food, jazz, and riverboat casinos. The retreat was a great excuse for Gino to indulge in a little Texas Hold ’Em between teambuilding and sensitivity sessions and still come off looking like a helluva guy, but it meant a three and a half hour drive each way. This wasn’t a problem for Emily and me. We bridged both the paralegal-to-attorney gap and the co-worker-to-friend gap with ease, largely because neither of us did Dallas-fancy very well. Or at all.

  Emily and I hustled inside for check-in at the Eldorado.

  “Do you want a map of the ghost tours?” the front desk clerk asked us, her polyglot Texan-Cajun-Southern accent making tours sound like “turs.”

  “Why, thank you kindly, but no thanks,” Emily drawled. In the ten years since she’d left, she still hadn’t shaken Amarillo from her voice or given up barrel-racing horses.

  I didn’t believe in hocus pocus, either, but I wasn’t a fan of casinos, which reeked of cigarette smoke and desperation. “Do y’all have karaoke or anything else but casinos onsite?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we have a rooftop bar with karaoke, pool tables, and that kind of thi
ng.” The girl swiped at her bangs, then swung her head to put them back in the same place they’d been.

  “That sounds more like it,” I said to Emily.

  “Karaoke,” she said. “Again.” She rolled her eyes. “Only if we can do tradesies halfway. I want to play blackjack.”

  After we deposited our bags in our rooms and freshened up, talking to each other on our cell phones the whole time we were apart, we joined our group. All of our co-workers broke into applause as we entered the conference room. News of our victory had preceded us. We curtsied, and I used both arms to do a Vanna White toward Emily. She returned the favor.

  “Where’s Nick?” I called out. “Come on up here.”

  Nick had left the courtroom when the jury went out to deliberate, so he’d beaten us here. He stood up from a table on the far side of the room, but didn’t join us in front. I gave him a long distance Vanna White anyway.

  The applause died down and some of my partners motioned for me to sit with them at a table near the entrance. I joined them and we all got to work writing a mission statement for the firm for the next fifteen minutes. Emily and I had arrived just in time for the first day’s sessions to end.

  When we broke, the group stampeded from the hotel to the docked barge that housed the casino. In Louisiana, gambling is only legal “on the water” or on tribal land. On impulse, I walked to the elevator instead of the casino. Just before the doors closed, a hand jammed between them and they bounced apart, and I found myself headed up to the hotel rooms with none other than Nick Kovacs.

  “So, Helen, you’re not a gambler either,” he said as the elevator doors closed.

  My stomach flipped. Cheesy, yes, but when he was in a good mood, Nick called me Helen—as in Helen of Troy.

  I had promised to meet Emily for early blackjack before late karaoke, but he didn’t need to know that. “I have the luck of the Irish,” I said. “Gambling is dangerous for me.”

  He responded with dead silence. Each of us looked up, down, sideways, and anywhere but at each other, which was hard, since the elevator was mirrored above a gold handrail and wood paneling. There was a wee bit of tension in the air.

  “I heard there’s a pool table at the hotel bar, though, and I’d be up for that,” I offered, throwing myself headlong into the void and holding my breath on the way down.

  Dead silence again. Long, dead silence. The ground was going to hurt when I hit it.

  Without making eye contact, Nick said, “OK, I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”

  Did he really say he’d meet me there? Just the two of us? Out together? Oh my God, Katie, what have you done?

  The elevator doors dinged, and we headed in opposite directions to our rooms. It was too late to back out now.

  I moved in a daze. Hyperventilating. Pits sweating. Heart pounding. My outfit was all wrong, so I ditched the Ann Taylor for some jeans, a structured white blouse, and, yes, I admit it, a multi-colored Jessica Simpson handbag and her coordinating orange platform sandals. White works well against my long, wavy red hair, which I unclipped and finger-combed over my shoulders. Not very attorney-like, but that was the point. Besides, I didn’t even like being an attorney, so why would I want to look like one now?

  Normally I am Katie Clean, but I settled on a quick brush of my teeth, a French shower, and lipstick. I considered calling Emily to tell her I was no-showing, but I knew she would understand when I explained later. I race-walked to the elevators and cursed them as they stopped on every other floor before the Rooftop Grotto.

  Ding. Finally. I stopped to catch my breath. I counted to ten, took one last gulp for courage, and stepped under the dim lights above the stone-topped bar. I stood near a man whose masculinity I could feel pulsing from several feet away. Heat flamed in my cheeks. My engine raced. Just the man I’d come to see.

  Nick was of Hungarian descent, and he had his gypsy ancestors to thank for his all-over darkness—eyes, hair, and skin—and sharp cheekbones. He had a muscular ranginess that I loved, but he wasn’t traditionally handsome. His nose was large-ish and crooked from being broken too many times. He’d once told me that a surfboard to the mouth had given him his snaggled front tooth. But he was gorgeous in an undefined way, and I often saw from the quick glances of other women that I wasn’t the only one in the room who noticed.

  Now he noticed me. “Hi, Helen.”

  “Hi, Paris,” I replied.

  He snorted. “Oh, I am definitely not your Paris. Paris was a wimp.”

  “Hmmmmm. Menelaus, then?”

  “Um, beer.”

  “I’m pretty sure there was no one named Beer in the story of Helen of Troy,” I said, sniffing in a faux-superior way.

  Nick spoke to the bartender. “St. Pauli Girl.” He finally gave me the Nick grin, and the tension left over from our elevator ride disappeared. “Want one?”

  I needed to gulp more than air for courage. “Amstel Light.”

  Nick placed the order. The bartender handed Nick two beers beaded with moisture, then shook water from his hands. Nick handed mine to me and I wrapped a napkin around it, lining up the edges with the military precision I adored. Nick sang under his breath, his head bobbing side to side. Honky-tonk Woman.

  “I think I like you better in Shreveport than Dallas,” I said.

  “Thanks, I think. And I like seeing you happy. I guess it’s been a tough year for you, losing your parents and all. Here’s to that smile,” he said, holding his beer aloft toward me.

  The toast almost stopped my heart. He was spot-on about the tough part, but I did better when I kept the subject of my parents buried with them. I clinked his bottle but couldn’t look at him while I did it. “Thanks, Nick, very much.”

  “Want to play pool?” he asked.

  “Let’s do it.”

  I was giddy, the sophomore girl out with the senior quarterback. We both loved music, so we talked about genres, bands (his old band, Stingray, and “real” bands), my minor in music at Baylor, and LSD, AKA lead-singer disease. Over a bucket of beers, we swapped stories about high school, and he told me he’d once rescued an injured booby.

  “An injured booby?” I asked. “Implants or natural? Eight ball in corner pocket.” I sank it.

  He gathered the balls out of the pockets and positioned them in the rack while I ground my cue tip in blue chalk and blew off the excess. “You’re so land-locked. A booby is a bird, Katie.”

  I rolled his use of my real name back and forth in my brain, enjoying how it felt.

  “I was out surfing, and I found a booby that couldn’t fly. I carried it back home and took care of it until I could set it free.”

  “Oh, my gosh! How bad did it smell? Did it peck you? I’ll bet your Mom was thrilled!” I talked fast, in endless exclamation points. Embarrassing. I was a Valley Girl on acid, like Oh-My-Gawd. “It was in shock, so it was calm, but every day it got wilder. I was fourteen, and my mom was happy I wasn’t in my room holding some girl’s real booby, so she was fine with it. It smelled really bad after a few days, though.”

  I broke. Balls clacked and ricocheted in every direction, and a striped one tumbled into a side pocket. “Stripes,” I called. “So, your mom had caught you before holding a girl’s booby, huh?”

  “Um, I didn’t say that . . .” he said, and stuttered to a stop.

  I was more smitten than ever.

  “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” was playing in the background. I hadn’t heard that song in years. It got me thinking. For months, I had been fighting off the urge to slip my arms around Nick’s neck and bite the back of it, but I was aware that most people would consider that inappropriate at work. Pretty small-minded of them, if you asked me. I eyed the large balcony outside the bar and thought that if I could just maneuver Nick out there, maybe I could make it happen.

  My chances seemed good enough until one of our colleagues walked in. Tim was of counsel at the firm. “Of counsel” meant he was too old to be called an associate, but he wasn’t a rainmaker
. Plus, he wore his pants pulled up an inch too high in the waist. The firm would never make him a partner. Nick and I locked eyes. Until now, we’d been two shortwave radios on the same channel, the signal crackling between us. But now the dial had turned to static and his eyes clouded over. He stiffened and moved subtly away from me.

  He hailed Tim up. “Hey, Tim, over here.”

  Tim waved to us and walked across the smoky bar. Everything moved in slow motion as he came closer, step by ponderous step. His feet echoed as they hit the floor, reverberating no . . . no . . . no . . . Or maybe I was saying it aloud. I couldn’t tell, but it made no difference.

  “Hey, Tim, this is great. Grab a beer; let’s play some pool.”

  Oh, please tell me Nick didn’t just invite Tim to hang out with us. He could have given him a short “hey how ya doing have a nice night I was just leaving” shpiel, or anything else for that matter, but no, he had asked Tim to join us.

  Tim and Nick looked at me for affirmation.

  I entertained a fleeting fantasy in which I executed a perfect side kick to Tim’s gut and he started rolling around on the floor with the dry heaves. What good were the thirteen years of karate my father had insisted on if I couldn’t use it at times like these? “Every woman should be able to defend herself, Katie,” Dad would say as he dropped me off at the dojo.

  Maybe this wasn’t technically a physical self-defense moment, but Tim’s arrival had dashed my hopes for the whole neck-bite thing, and all that could have come after it. Wasn’t that reason enough?

  I cast out the image. “Actually, Tim, why don’t you take over for me? I was in trial all week, and I’m exhausted. We have an early start tomorrow. It’s the last day of our retreat, the grande finale for the Hailey & Hart team.” I handed my pool cue to Tim.

  Tim thought this was a fine idea. It was clear women scared him. If I had hoped for an argument from Nick, though, I didn’t get one. He reverted to his outside-of-work “Katie who?” act.