“You bitch!” Jack howled.
“You should have taken me up on that offer, Jack.” I tried to get to my feet and failed, my sore ankle giving at the worst possible time and causing me to lose my balance. He scrambled for the gun, and I willed myself to stand, fighting wooziness when I managed to pull it off.
My foot protested the two steps toward him as his fingers closed around the gun. Shit.
I raised the pan and brought it down on his hip, and he yelped and froze for an instant, but didn’t let go of the gun. I lifted one foot and stomped my pump down on his empty hand with all the force I could muster, leaning all my weight on that leg.
There was no doubt I was doing further damage to my sprain, but I knew from the crunch under my heel I wasn’t the only one feeling it.
He screamed again, finally letting go of the gun. I dove for it, snatching it up by the barrel and flipping it around. I didn’t have the first damned clue how to shoot it, but I figured I had decent odds of hitting something at that range.
“Don’t move.” My voice shook.
I wasn’t sure if he replied, because my heart pounding in my ears was the only thing I could hear for a good thirty seconds. When it faded, he was still howling.
“My hand! You broke my fucking hand!”
The indignation would have been funny, if I’d had the capacity to laugh.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to kill me.”
I backed carefully toward the door, my only thought that I needed to get to the car and get the hell out of there, when I heard footfalls on the steps. I held my breath.
“Nichelle?” The door flew into the wall and light flooded the room. “What the hell is going on in here?”
“Thank God.” I handed Joey the gun and sagged into a chair. “Joey, meet Jack Grayson. He shot me.”
“She hit me with a fucking frying pan and then crushed my hand,” Jack howled.
“Shut up, kid. And be still.” Joey shoved the gun into the back of his waistband and knelt in front of me, probing my shoulder with his fingers. “Always too late to save the day.” He brushed my hair out of my face and smiled.
“Can you take me to St. Vincent’s?” I asked. “I don’t feel so good.”
“You have a plan for dealing with the kid?”
“Kyle. My phone’s over there somewhere.” I waved a hand toward the door and collapsed across the tabletop.
21.
Dreamweaver
I opened my eyes to find Joey pressing a dish towel over my wound and Kyle barking orders at a handful of agents who were cordoning off my kitchen as a crime scene.
Jack was gone.
“Can I get medical attention now?” I asked when Kyle stopped and put a hand over mine, shaking his head.
“Of all the calls to miss,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have seen this coming in a million years.”
“S’ok. I was calling to tell you to go arrest that little psychopath’s mother, but then I emailed you, and he intercepted the email. You might want to get your tech guys on that. He said he’s been reading your emails for weeks. He was here when I got home.” I laid my head back on the table and Joey’s hands tightened on my shoulder.
“I need to get her to a doctor,” Joey said. “What the hell is taking that ambulance so long?”
“What was your role in all of this?” Kyle asked. “I still don’t think I caught your name.”
“I didn’t offer it,” Joey said. “All I did was stop in to see a friend and walk in on the tail end of the attack. She had disarmed him already. I can’t tell you anything.”
The two of them eyed each other warily.
“Bleeding. Hospital.” I smiled wanly, trying to get their attention off each other.
“I could’ve walked there by now,” Joey said, scooping me into his arms.
“I’ll be by in a while.” Kyle glared as Joey turned for the door. I didn’t have the energy to care. I laid my head on Joey’s shoulder and mumbled an apology for getting blood on his suit.
“Not like it’s never happened before.” His lips grazed my ear as he whispered, walking down the steps and settling me into the passenger seat of his Lincoln. “Though I’d rather not wear any more of your blood, if you don’t mind.”
I smiled and leaned back against the seat. “I’d like that.”
Joey laughed when I pulled out my Blackberry and started typing. I shushed him, firing off an email to Bob with a short, hit-the-highlights story on Jack Grayson. My shoulder throbbed, but damned if I was going to lose this headline to Charlie—or worse, Shelby—while I was getting stitched up. I called Bob to give him a heads-up since it was so late, and he roared “what?” so loud my ear rang when I told him I’d been shot. Assuring him I was fine, I rushed him off the phone when Joey pulled into the ER lot at St. Vincent’s. I didn’t like upsetting Bob, but I needed him to get the story up before Charlie caught wind of it.
A pair of stout nurses who clearly thought Joey shot me banished him to the waiting room and gave me the domestic violence inquisition when we arrived at St. Vincent’s, but after repeated assurance that he’d had nothing to do with it, they let him come in while a doctor tended to my shoulder.
The shortest nurse continued to give Joey the stink eye, even with me hiding my face in his shoulder and him stroking my hair as the doctor stitched up the wounds—which were on both sides, since the bullet went clean through.
“She should’ve been a nun.” Joey laughed as the woman shot him another glare on her way to get a second unit of blood for me. “I feel like I’m back in Sister Mary Paul’s classroom in ninth grade. She didn’t like me so much, either.”
“How could anyone dislike you?” I blurted, thinking I shouldn’t say that aloud, but unable to fight off the haze from the pain medication enough to censor it.
“Plenty of people dislike me.” He cradled my jaw in one hand, running a thumb lightly along my cheekbone. “I’m glad you’re not one of them. But can you do me a favor? The next time I tell you to stay the hell out of something, will you listen?”
“Very possibly,” I slurred sleepily. “I didn’t believe you. And I never suspected Jack. Did you know it was him?”
“No. I was pretty sure it was his father, just like you.” He dropped his hand to my lap and grabbed the one of mine that didn’t have an IV in it. “Grayson’s been talking to a few of my associates about their interest in keeping the taxes on cigarettes as high as they can go. He figured out Billings was double-dipping. He’s been taking money from us for product under the table, and then doing the company’s dirty work paying off politicians. Grayson decided he could eat his cake and have it, too. Vote his conscience on the tax hikes, but still have the money coming in for his girl.
“It was just coming in from my side instead of big tobacco. I thought he had it out with the lobbyist and shot him. But I knew poking around him would lead you back to some,” he paused, “associates of mine. I worried about you pissing them off. Then I saw your story this morning and thought the farmer did it. But for a kid to be able to murder two people—almost three—in cold blood? Damn.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t you,” I said, squeezing his hand.
“I would love it if you’d stop thinking I killed every dead guy who turns up in your day.”
“I’m getting there.”
My Blackberry binged, but it sounded impossibly far away. I didn’t have the energy to look around for it.
“That’s my cue.” Joey flipped the phone into my lap and crossed to the door. “Your federal agent friend is in the parking lot. Wants to know what room we’re in.”
“Hurry back,” I said.
He turned from the doorway and smiled. “I don’t think you’re getting rid of me this time.”
Kyle shoved the door open and
strode to the side of the bed less than three minutes later, grasping my free hand and knitting his eyebrows together as he hovered.
“Goddammit, I feel like a first-class moron. Some supercop I turned out to be. I am so, so sorry, Nicey. I was so far from thinking it was that kid, I’d have suspected Lex Luthor first.”
“The mother. I found pictures of her online tonight and recognized her, but I didn’t place her at the body recovery until after I got home. Jack cracked Amesworth over the head because mom’s begging him to leave her hubby alone turned ugly. They thought he was dead, but then they got him out to the woods and he woke up. She shot him with the rifle Grayson borrowed from Eckersly. So they both did it.”
“There’s more apparently–Billings and Eckersly had cooked up their own cigarette trafficking operation when the higher tax rates passed here.”
“I see,” I said, fighting to keep my eyes open.
He perched on the edge of my cot, eyeing the units of blood hanging from the IV stand. “They didn’t need Grayson on their payroll anymore. So he stole a set of Virginia tax stamps from Amesworth’s office and tried to blackmail Billings. Threatened to rat him out to the mob for bigfooting their territory while he’s still selling them product. Billings and Eckersly were buying the stamps through a front at that jewelry store, paying real money for fake diamonds and taking the stamps with the receipts. Billings sent his boy Eckersly to talk the senator down because the two of them are tight. Eckersly is a big contributor to political campaigns. When that didn’t work, Billings sent Eckersly to steal the stamps.”
“Damn,” I said. “Covering politics is not as much fun as I thought.”
“You okay?” He laid a hand on my arm.
“I’m so tired,” I sighed. “Sleep deprivation, adrenaline, blood loss. I want to sleep until next week.”
“There’s about a dozen reporters on your lawn driving your dog batshit, and a couple of your friends from the PD are in the waiting room.”
“Aw, hell. Seriously?”
“Sorry. I issued an all call to your house when your friend called me. Where’d he go, by the way?”
“Coffee. He’ll be back. I think.”
“Who is that guy, Nichelle? There’s something about him I don’t like.”
“Besides the fact that there’s something about him I do?” I needed to deflect that question for as long as I could. “You promised me an exclusive. No talking to the TV guys,” I slurred, my eyelids dropping shut.
As I drifted off, I felt Kyle’s lips against my forehead and heard his voice from the other end of a tunnel. “I don’t want to talk to anyone but you.”
Kyle had a crew clean up the blood in my kitchen before Joey took me home the next evening. He walked me inside and checked the whole house to make me feel safe before he left me with a brief kiss and a promise to call the next day.
“So I get to talk to you on the phone now?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe and smiling. “I’m moving up in the world.”
“I still say I’m more charming in person,” he said.
I locked the door behind him and fed Darcy before I climbed into bed with my laptop. It took more than an hour to piece together everything I knew about Grayson for Sunday’s front page, and by the time I finished typing and emailed the file to Bob, my shoulder was burning again. I took a Vicodin and managed to find a comfortable position with the help of several strategically-placed pillows, dozing the evening away.
Convincing my mom to stay in Texas was no easy feat, but her bridezilla client’s wedding was in less than a week, and I begged her not to throw the account away because of me, tossing in a tiny fib about Kyle taking care of me to make her feel better. Kyle did call on Sunday. So did Joey. I snuggled back into my pillows after each conversation wondering what I was going to do about the two of them.
Whether it was the blood transfusions or the narcotic-induced full weekend of sleep, I felt like a new woman by Monday morning. My arm was in a sling, and would stay that way for three weeks. Instead of skipping the gym altogether, I settled for walking on the treadmill, watching a recap of Charlie’s weekend coverage of the Ted Grayson scandal on the flatscreens that lined the wall. He’d resigned when my story about Jack went live, bribery and solicitation charges notwithstanding. I already knew that, but she had a tidbit on a possible challenger for Calhoun in the swiftly-coming election that I hadn’t seen.
“Knock yourself out, Trudy,” I said. “I can’t wait to read it.”
I walked into Bob’s office at five ’til eight, sporting a pair of sapphire Louboutins that almost matched the color of my hospital-issued sling.
“Miss Clarke.” Rick Andrews, our publisher, was in my usual chair. He rose when I walked in, putting a hand out and smiling. “Welcome back.”
“You have no idea how glad I am to be here, sir,” I said, shaking his hand with my uninjured one.
“We’re very glad to have you. Your piece yesterday was outstanding, and the fallout from all this is just beginning, so I’m told.” He smiled stiffly, and I thought about what Bob had said about Grayson being his friend. But not that good a friend, apparently.
“I’m on top of it,” I said.
“So you’ve shown. I came down this morning to congratulate you, and extend the gratitude of this newspaper. But I also owe you an apology. Bob tells me you were working on this investigation last week, and I had no idea. The courthouse is yours again, if you want it back.”
“I would love that.” I smiled.
“Good.” He stepped aside, and I lowered myself gently into my chair. Andrews and Bob exchanged nods.
“I’ll leave you to running your newsroom, Bob,” Andrews said from the doorway.
“I appreciate that, Rick.”
Bob swiveled his chair toward me and I flashed a grin.
“Not bad in terms of making up for getting my ass kicked, huh?”
He narrowed his eyes at the sling.
“Are you ever going to learn?”
“I hope so.” I moved my shoulder gingerly. “This is way less glamorous than it looks on TV.”
“But you’re still rocking the shoes,” Parker said, shaking his head and sitting down across from me. “I’m going to appoint myself your full time bodyguard. Mel says someone has to do it.”
“That could work,” I said. “Will you drive me around, too?”
He rolled his eyes and looked at Bob. “Can you give her something less dangerous to cover? Like, I don’t know, a war?”
Bob laughed. “Her escapades are always good for sales,” he said. “And this one got the other half of her beat away from Shelby.”
“She’s going to be pissed.” I smiled at the thought.
“She threatened to quit,” Bob said. “Les talked her out of it.”
“Damn.” I shook my head.
“Hey, before I forget; I left your coffee syrup on your desk, Clarke,” Parker said. “Sorry it took me a couple of days to get it back to you. I had to go to three different stores to find the sugar-free one. It really is good, though. And better for me than sugar and half-and-half. Thanks.”
Parker. I smiled, not even able to muster a little of the annoyance I’d felt as the syrup disappeared by degrees. “We’ll take turns buying?”
“Works for me, Lois,” he said.
Everyone filed in for the staff meeting, which Trudy finished off with a call for applause.
“I’m a big girl, and I can admit when I’m wrong. It’s rare,” she said, grinning at me, “but it happens. Nichelle, honey, you have my congratulations and thanks, and best wishes for a speedy recovery. I also owe you an apology. I should have listened to you last week. I thought I knew my people better than anyone else could. I won’t make that mistake again. So, you know, anytime you feel like tipping me to the story o
f the year, bring it on. I promise to listen.”
“Thanks, Trudy.” I returned the smile. “No hard feelings?”
“Are you kidding? I’m going to be up for a Pulitzer by the time I get through with Grayson. I owe you a bottle of wine. Or a pair of new shoes.”
“Size nine,” I chirped. Everyone laughed.
Back at my desk, I scanned through police reports. Nothing except another robbery. This one looked to be the work of the cat burglar, too—which sounded nice and safe.
I opened my email, finger on the delete key for the usual Monday morning blitzkreig of “Miracle Weight Loss!” and “Penis Enlargement Now!” spam.
At the top of my inbox, sent less than five minutes before from a washintonpost.com address, was a subject line: brava. My heart in my throat, I clicked it open. It was from the politics editor.
“Nicely done. I’ll have an eye out for your byline.”
“Holy headlines, Lois.” I sat back in the chair and smiled.
Reader’s Discussion Guide
1. Which of Nichelle’s suspects did you know was innocent?
2. Who did you think was guilty?
3. Nichelle has a strong bond with her editor, but there are times in this story when he’s disappointed in her. Has anything similar ever happened to you? How did you remedy your situation?
4. Nichelle’s scanner fails her at a crucial moment. What’s your “batteries die at the worst times” story?
5. Did you expect Kyle to come back? Do you think he and Nichelle should give it another try?
6. Nichelle’s heart is torn between two guys, both of whom come with issues. Which is your favorite?
Buried Leads (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery) Page 23