Shirley cleared her throat and with a full smile directed toward me said, “So how are we doing getting your mind off a cheating boyfriend, Sterling?”
I laughed, “You both have a way with that.”
Zoey placed both hands on the table. “Friggin’ good afternoon, ladies.”
Shirley said, “I think it’s fascinating. I’m the only one here with the proper usage of the gerund and call the word what it is—fucking.”
I poured the tiny bit of wine left in the bottle and passed the chocolates around.
“Now the weirdness came a month or so later,” Zoey continued. “A neighbor of Doctor Armstrong’s was clearing some bushes between their properties. Complained of a god-awful stench and lots of flies. Vic got involved on that one, too. That neighbor turned up a heap of dried-out guts. I’m guessing because of the missing wife the cops flocked out there, but it turned out it was nothing, but horse guts.”
“Good lord, that’s horrible, Zoey,” Shirley said.
“Sickening,” I agreed.
“It was pretty freaky. I mean, when I cleaned up the goat mess the only things remaining were the heads and legs. Struck me as odd that here we had the opposite. All the guts were there, but no skull, no legs, no bones. Just the dried-out innards.”
“And so speed up your story,” Shirley insisted. “Outcome?”
“All those rumor-mongers that decided Mrs. Armstrong just rode off on her horse realized the woman drove her car away. No Benz is going to pull a horse trailer, right? So then they think maybe the horse was real sick or injured. Maybe Mrs. Armstrong put the animal down and gutted it to stuff. You know. Keepsake stuff. Taxidermy stuff. She was weird that way, I’m told.”
“Crazy,” I said.
“Unbelievable,” Shirley said, shifting in her chair and then staring at the white ceiling as if studying a Monet.
I understood both gossip and rumors. I wanted nothing to do with it.
“I need to run,” Shirley announced, standing and grabbing her purse. Then she tried to hug me. I wasn’t going there.
She backed off and turned to hug Zoey goodbye, glancing back at me one more time. “I’ll see myself out,” she said and I heard the scuff and click of the door shutting behind her.
“Now why’d you go and do that?” Zoey demanded.
“What?”
“You couldn’t return a hug? Even a little one?”
“So I suppose you think I should start calling her Mommy.”
“You keep putting words in my mouth that aren’t mine, and in case you haven’t noticed, I have plenty of my own. At least you’re reunited, Sterling. I haven’t seen my mom in decades. You have a chance at a future. Even if that means just being civil and maybe gaining a friend.”
I sighed. “Let’s just call it a truce for the day, Z. I have enough on my plate with a cheating boyfriend.”
“Deal.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy getting to know you.”
“Hang on for the ride, then. Except for Shirley I’ve never had a white girlfriend and, if I’m not mistaken here, I’m pretty sure you’ve never been friends with a soul sistah!”
Chapter 30
One Busy Monday
DR. MARCUS ARMSTRONG would perform one quasi-exquisite surgery that day, carving a model out of moles and voles. He hated the spoiled women in his exam rooms that he played God to. He also loathed the fact that he had only one surgery and no more scheduled for the week. He was reentering his despotic world, but wasn’t sure which one of his souls was doing the dictating.
DETECTIVE STEVE TAYLOR stewed, with hands tapping the table and toes tapping the floor. He’d told Shirley to stay out of the case involving the dead shooter. He knew the whole thing had Shirley’s craw up and that meant it had his craw up, along with his stomach which felt like it held a sack of crawling mealworms. He popped a couple of antacids.
He should be happy having a thug off the streets. Even happier that no one else got hurt, but something had more than Shirley’s craw and his stomach. That something had stripped him of his nights and days.
Who the devil hired Manny Perez, a kid that had already made a big dent in cleaning up his life and going straight? And why? And was the dead man prophetic? Dying men rarely lie. Was there something more to come?
Taylor looked over his notes from the morning meeting. Everyone from the beat cops to the Chief agreed this was no mafia or gang crime. First, they didn’t use punks like Manny. Second, if someone was intended a warning that someone would have received it loud and clear. And third, there wouldn’t be as much as a sweet-sixteen ring left in the Falls & Falls inventory.
The Chief wanted Taylor to move on. Case closed. Bad boy dead. One freebie for the troops. Other cases to handle.
Taylor’s days and nights, and those meal worms in his belly, wouldn’t allow that to happen.
He thought again about the lack of a getaway car. Manny Perez either had a partner in crime or –or what? A suicide by cop? That didn’t make sense either. No one could have known Shirley was there pulling off her bag lady undercover stunt.
So, Taylor thought, an accomplice. He stood up and wrote that single word on the large whiteboard. Then he underlined it, with the word duress written next to it. Was Manny Perez under duress? Forced involvement in a crime?
A big what if. A who. And another damn why.
Chapter 31
Second Blood
SACRUM SPENT THREE nights aboard The Sarah. His hands were twitching, his eyes were twitching. Hell—his whole body was twitching. Then on that fourth night, what became bullet-like convulsions would stop. He heard the sounds coming from the distance. Running. The seasonal monsoon hit hard and lashed out on the land with buckets of water. The caliche soil, unable to absorb the rain, became sheets of glass with deep puddles on the ground. Although a tropical warm rain, it had arrived with a fierce wind. One would need shelter.
This is too good to be true, he marveled. I don’t have to hunt. The feast appears before the famished.
“Almost biblical,” he whispered to himself.
His refugee appeared and Sacrum delivered his perfect words in Spanish. “Bienvenidos. ¿Cerveza frio?”
As always, fear struck across the face of his guest frozen in his stance, but swiftly disappeared under Sacrum’s reassuring voice, demeanor, and the mention of a beer. A cold beer.
His ritual and delivery thereof had been flawless and he expected this blueprint toward success to continue. The two chairs. The drinks. The cigarettes, lighter, and duct tape. All ready. Pull up a seat!
This illegal, maybe in his forties, but so damn hard to tell with their weathered faces and rotten teeth, proved to be an honest man. He didn’t know English. His name was Jesus.
“You mean GEEZ-US,” Sacrum teased.
The man politely shook his head and reaffirmed, “HAY-SUS.”
Seated at the magic chairs, Sacrum removed the pack of cigarettes from his denim pocket, along with the lighter.
The man put out both palms and shook his head again. “No. Muy mal.”
“Sure, old boy. Bad for our health, huh?” Sacrum said. He laughed and shoved the cigarettes to the side of the table.
Plan B. Time for Jack. Time for Jack. Don’t look back.
He showed his guest the premium label. Jesus grinned. Four missing teeth, that Sacrum could count.
“Oh, yes. Indeed. Cigarettes are bad for your health, but the Jack will kill you.”
The guest smiled.
Sacrum walked behind the man, pulled out the remains of his depleting ice cubes from the chest, and poured two Js with a little something else for his new friend.
“Patience,” Sacrum said. “I’ll need a little patient, with you, asshole.”
The man began to swig, just like any other good old boy in the company of a damn good bourbon.
Sacrum decided to be kind and pronounce the guest’s name. “Hey, HAY-SUS, I’m in love. Bet you didn’t know that, Scumbag.
&
nbsp; “I orchestrated the whole thing. I was going to be the white knight. Ride in on a white horse and rescue my maiden. My White Goddess.”
The guest kept drinking his bourbon, smiling through with those gaping black holes in his mouth.
Sacrum continued as if reading scripture, “It’s true I’d never seen her in person, you understand, but after receiving that lovely postcard announcing her arrival and grand opening in Tucson, well, it was a done deal. It was my White Goddess and her announcement she was here for me. I looked her up on every search engine, you know. Such joy. I found so many lovely photographs of her that in my mind I could sculpt my White Goddess’s body out of iced clay, from the top of her head to the tip of her perfect toes.”
The guest sat quiet. It pissed Sacrum off until he realized the drugs had taken affect and the man couldn’t move, let alone utter a single word.
Soon Sacrum would begin his research. He sampled. He explored. What if you took a throat apart and put it back together, backward? Not his best experiment, but it made for a fucking good time, he thought. The ultimate game would be the skin game, but for now he could have a little fun along the journey.
The experiment with Jesus had turned into an annoying debacle. Jesus was dead. His body, torn apart and put back together again, as well as Humpty Dumpty. But like any jigsaw puzzle, Sacrum deduced, some of the pieces could be forced together. And some would go missing.
He realized he didn’t care. he had to get back to Tucson and his White Goddess.
Chapter 32
Not Just Coffee
SHIRLEY RACED TO meet Detective Steve Taylor at the corner coffee shop. The gourmet one with gourmet prices and only because she was buying.
This time Shirley showed up as a soccer mom. Or soccer grandma. And she showed up late, which meant the first thing in her mouth was one of Taylor’s antacids. Shirley hated to be late.
Taylor could have cared less. He was sipping his latte and juggling a cell phone, a tablet that he bought with his own money, and the morning edition of the Arizona Star.
“Breathe,” he told Shirley.
“I need to know. Have you told anyone about me. My ID?”
“We’ve had this discussion before. Just through your channels and a need-to-know. Top brass and retired Vic Romero. I could ask you the same thing, and you know who I’m talking about.”
Shirley grimaced. She knew exactly. She didn’t answer.
“Conspicuous in your absence of words. Zoey knows. Sterling knows,” Taylor drilled down.
Shirley only shrugged.
“So why are you rushing in here asking me about my big fat mouth?”
“I don’t know. Seriously, something just doesn’t feel right.”
“Shirley, it rarely does in our line of work. Maybe you need to stick to one undercover cover. I mean, this is no New York City. Small town. People see you. You have to figure people recognize you as a pope and prophet one day and a prostitute the other. The public is more observant than what we give them credit for,” Taylor said.
“Yeah. I’m unforgettable. Maybe that’s it.” Shirley shifted around in her plum leggings with red Nike’s stretching out beneath the table. “You called the meeting. What do you have?”
“I’m telling you this as a friend because this isn’t your case. I repeat. This is not your case. Local crime. Local jurisdiction. Got it?”
“I got it. What do you have?”
“The kid. Manual Perez. The guy that—”
“I know who I shot dead, Steve. What about him?”
“You also know it’s a helluva quagmire of a situation. I want to run over the scenario one more time with you. He’s the one in a million that appeared to be making the turn and getting clean. On record he’s got one lengthy rap sheet. Petty crimes. Pages of them. The one forged check, a felony, seems to have somehow gotten through to him and scared him straight. The charge was effectively expunged from the records, but you and I both know how to dig ‘em up.
“Perez enrolled in night school. Got a job flipping burgers and on his days off he started fixing cars. From what I’ve learned he had a real knack for it. Planned to turn it into a full-time business. He even started going to church and volunteering at the food bank.”
“Keep talking,” Shirley said. “I can take it even if you’re telling me I just killed a church-going Good Samaritan.”
“You FBI types like this profiling stuff. What I just told you takes care of the mental, financial, and spiritual sides to the kid. Physically, we know he was clean and going to the Y. Social was the Y and the church. That makes for one well-rounded young man.”
“Who happened to arrive at a jewelry store slinging a gun and getting shot dead,” Shirley piped in. “Give me more before I puke.”
“No ties. No mafia or cartel connections. He had a tear tattoo removed from his face, so you can bet your ass he wasn’t active in a gang. Either he did the job alone, which seems impossible, or someone hired him out. Since he didn’t aim to kill, my money says it was a scare job.”
Shirley spit out the last swallow of her cold coffee. “And we deduced, not meant for me. No one knew I was going to be there.”
“Exactly. All the facts we’ve known all along, but they’re starting to ring my chimes.”
Chapter 33
A Desert Tsunami
GAGE STORMED THROUGH the doors of Falls & Falls as I was handing over a wrapped emerald bracelet to my female buyer who explained she had her husband’s approval for such extravagances after she engaged in something extraordinarily kinky. God bless her and the kinks. Gage had the presence of mind to back off and smile, however forced that smile looked. You could cut it with a smudge stick of Silly Putty.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Sterling? I’m gone six days and you don’t bother to return my phone calls. No emails, texts, no cosmically charged messages through osmosis.”
I crooked my neck and stared at him. “Take your voice down three notches and can the swearing. This is a place of business.”
“Fine. Let’s go get a coffee.”
“Back room.” I nodded toward the hall and buzzed him through the dividing gate.
The staff stole glances at us, but had the decency to turn their gazes away. Smart staff.
Closed office door. I’m seated behind my scrawny power desk. Gage refuses to sit down.
“You have a lot of nerve marching in here like this,” I said.
“You call it nerve? For what? I’m trying to figure you out and it’s like deciphering Sanskrit. Maybe easy for some. Not so much me.”
“What is there to figure out? Oh. Forget that since I did all the figuring. You get me to move to Tucson and suddenly you have all of these trips to Chicago, and all back-to-back.”
I’d never seen the go-lucky Gage so furious. His temples pulsed in tandem with the wincing of his eyes.
“It’s called one helluva bluebird, Sterling. My paintings are selling out of one gallery and I’ll be damned if I know why, but it happens to be in Chicago. Do you really think I like attending all these snooterati art world affairs?”
“And you expect me to believe there’s only one gallery in the universe that happens to be selling your work?”
“Yes. I do. I sold six paintings this week. You know the prices I get. You do the math. It’s a lot of money along with some rocket recognition.”
“Now there’s a word. Recognition. Like I recognized the voice of your favorite redhead.”
His jaw dropped. His eyes—dazed. Maybe a practiced response for the inevitable.
“You’re crazy,” he said with a raised vocal pitch.
“And you’re a dickhead. And not smart enough to tell her not to answer your phone. Or maybe you did, but your dumb bimbo couldn’t follow your instructions.”
In a spray of verbal utterances, “Oh, geez. Wait a minute. That’s what this is about? I can explain it.”
“Of course you can. Just tell me one thing. Was the Irish redheaded bed-thrasher i
n your hotel room while you showered?”
He bit his lips. “You mean Rachel?”
“Bingo.”
“Well, yes. It was her, but—”
“Can it. Save it for when a tsunami hits the high desert.”
His stream of consciousness came next. “I lost my phone, Sterling. Then it was the damn battery. The damn phone. The store said the battery got wet, but it didn’t, but I called you from the hotel, I called you from the gallery, and I rushed to buy a new phone. For you. For you and me. I need to be connected to you when I’m gone.”
He was so rambling. Sounded like guilt to me. “While you’re connected to the redheaded Rachel?”
“Okay. I know this mistrusting state of yours. You aren’t being reasonable. You’re thinking about bad past shit. I’m here with you now, but until you’re listening you won’t understand that you are always with me. Good thing my luggage is in my car. I’ll be staying at The Club until you get your senses back. You’re out of control.”
“No one else thinks that.”
“You mean your new cadre of criminologists? You all should design the first husband beater T-Shirt for women. Form a society. Make a bloody fortune.
“In the meantime you ask them. Until you have DNA or some other form of forensic evidence, I think I’m innocent until proven guilty.”
Chapter 34
Just Dinner
I PUNCHED IN THE code Marcus gave me that would open up his property gate. As promised, he stood on his veranda and waved me in. A cordial if not lingering hug followed.
“We have to quit meeting like this,” I teased.
“Never. And Chef has the best lobster and crab legs in the country. Fresh. This morning’s catch, I’m told, but if you’d rather go out—”
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