by Kit Frazier
When I got to work, my voice mail light was blinking like a strobe, and someone had hung a Jessica Alba Fantastic Four action figure upside down by her spandex superhero costume, caught in a barbed-wire fence made of paper clips. Knowing his affection for action figures, I’d bet this month’s 401(k) deduction Jessica was one of Ethan’s dastardly deeds.
I left her hanging by her spandex. I figure I’ve earned every single scar on my body and will probably have a hell of a lot more by the time it’s over with. Truthfully, I was a little proud of my scars.
“Cauley. In my office. Now,” Tanner said when he made it into the office.
Sighing, I trudged into his office.
He nodded, meaning I should close the door.
“What the hell is this?” He shoved a copy of the Journal under my nose.
“Miranda,” I swore.
“That’s not Miranda hanging upside down by her underwear,” Tanner growled, and I rolled my eyes.
“I notice the Journal left off the part where Miranda fell head over high heels, leaving little to the imagination.”
“This isn’t about Miranda,” Tanner said, reaching for a licorice stick from the clear jar on his desk. “Shiner said you were the star of the cop squawk box yesterday.”
Damn that Shiner and his stupid scanner. That boy needed a life. “What?” I said, trying to look innocent. It was not my best look.
He eyed the scratch on my cheek, courtesy of Muse and our tussle with the latest El Patron foot soldier. “What happened?” Tanner sat with his arms crossed, gnawing on the licorice.
I sighed. “All right. I had a visitor yesterday afternoon. The police have been out, the forensics guys have been through my house it seems someone doesn’t want me testifying against El Patron.”
Cantu asked that I leave the part about the dead bird out something about using that fact in interrogation when they caught the guy.
Tanner sighed heavily. “Cauley, you collect stalkers the way other people collect postage stamps.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I chose discretion a new experience for me. “I’ve got round-the-clock cops patrolling the block. There’s nothing to worry about,” I said, wishing I believed my own words.
Tanner rubbed his palms over his eyes. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just banged up a little.”
He stared across the room and out the window, which overlooked the last few acres of the Flintrock Ranch that hadn’t been bulldozed down to put up the prolific tract houses that were popping up like a plague. s
“We done?” I said, heading for the door. “That FBI agent still around?”
“Um, yeah,” I stammered. He grunted his approval.
Relieved, I swung open the door, ready to leave this train wreck behind.
“Cauley,” he called after me, and I turned.
He scratched the back of his neck like he was trying to say something and wasn’t sure how to say it.
I waited.
“If it was El Patron behind your breakin, it’s nothing to play around with.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m the one who got stabbed and nearly killed this summer.”
“I’m just saying if you need help, ask for it.”
I nodded. “That would be the sensible thing to do.” Tanner snorted. “My point exactly.”
I headed back to my desk. It’d been so long since I’d done anything sensible I’d forgotten what it looked like.
My phone rang, and I answered.
“I got news.” It was Cantu, and he didn’t sound happy.
“Let me have it,” I said, bracing myself.
“That bird the one with the note?” he said. “It was a canary. Came from the same place as that Puckett guy’s.”
I sat, staring at nothing. A dead canary.
“You understand what this means, right?” he said, and I sighed. “Yes, Cantu,” I said. “The subtlety is not lost on me.”
I managed to make it through the day without any further catastrophes. I wrote three obituaries and avoided my mother’s increasingly agitated phone calls. Apparently she’d seen the local news last night and no doubt was calling to chide me about my profession and my new “little hobby,” as she referred to search and rescue. I’d have to face her sooner or later, but like most good procrastinators, I believe if something was really worth doing it would have been done already.
Other than that, I’d spent a lot of the day in the ladies’ room avoiding my boss and Merrily. My mind was preoccupied with other things. People breaking into my house. Dead birds. Special Agent Logan. And my pseudo date at the Pier.
Chapter Nine
I was busy receiving an Extreme Makeover at Beckett and Jenks’ house when a horn blared outside the living-room picture window.
“Ah, Cinderella’s pumpkin has arrived!” Jenks said, swishing back the curtains. Mia and Ethan had hitched a ride with Brynn, our PR buddy with a hot convertible courtesy of her ritzy PR firm.
“Are you sure about this?” I said to Beckett, staring into the door mirror at a woman who looked like me, only better.
Beckett had swathed me in an embroidered, nearly sheer camisole the color of late summer magnolias he’d picked up at Market in Dallas. On impulse, he’d ripped the bottom of my favorite jean shorts until they barely covered my bottom.
The camisole was soft, made of silk, and the hem floated just above my navel, the fabric skimming my breasts like a whisper. The camisole looked as good as it felt, and I had to look twice to make sure you couldn’t see right through it, which I supposed was the point. Color rose in my cheeks, and my gaze drifted down to my newly altered shorts. The denim was soft and worn and fit my rear snuggly. The frayed edges were now about half an inch short of a Class A misdemeanor.
“They’re awfully short,” I said, making a futile attempt to tug the back of the recently sheared shorts a little farther down my thighs.
“They’re perfect,” Beckett said, smacking my hand away from my behind. “And stop tugging.”
Beckett and Jenks escorted me to the door and stood watching out of the picture window like two proud parents.
As I stepped out on the porch, Mia, Brynn, and Ethan whooped like a crowd of downtown construction workers. I tugged at my shorts, and my cell phone beeped.
“Hello?” I said, tottering on my new Kate Spade wedges.
“Stop tugging!” Beckett and Jenks yelled over the phone. I glared back at them, snapping the phone shut, then took a deep breath and sashayed to the passenger seat in my friend Brynn’s black convertible BMW.
“Wow,” Ethan said, nearly choking on his tongue.
I looked back at the window, where Beckett and Jenks stood grinning and giving me the thumbs-up.
I smiled sheepishly back at them.
“Too much?” I said to Brynn as she put the car in gear.
“Honey,” she said, “Captain America’s not going to know what hit him.”
Easy for Brynn to say. She looked like a knockout no matter what she wore, and tonight she was doing her signature bronze bronzestreaked hair, bronze skin, bronze nails, and a bronze bandeau bikini top accented with a tasteful bronze sarong.
“Here,” Brynn said and spritzed me with a bottle of something that smelled like the south end of a northbound skunk.
“Jeez, Brynn, what are you trying to do? Kill me?”
“It’s a pheromone-based perfume we’re doing a marketing campaign for. You’ll have scads of men falling all over you.”
“One will do,” I said, and Mia said, “Ooooh.”
Mia was doing a short, flouncy, strapless number the color of fruit salad, which barely covered what her abuelita called her “ya yas” to her “cha cha.”
Ethan was sporting a black tee shirt covered with 0s and 1s.
I frowned. “I thought you were looking for a girlfriend, and you’re wearing that?”
“Hey, this is a brand-new tee shirt,” he said.
“How can anyone tell? It’s j
ust a bunch of binary code that nobody but you understands.”
Ethan grinned at me. “When I find the girl who can read it, I’ll marry her.”
“Ah,” I said, thinking of Beckett and Jenks. “The geek version of Cinderella.”
Brynn navigated the narrow tunnel of moss-bearded oaks along River Hills Road. She steered down the Pier’s steep caliche driveway, which was already packed to near capacity with vehicles. She wedged her BMW into a tiny crevice between a Porsche and an old pickup. We piled out of the car, careful not to ding the truck.
The sun was on a slow slide into the lake, and the air was hot and wet, carrying with it the sweet scent of the river, fried jalapenos, and beer. The driveway bottle-necked into an admission area and then flung outward into nearly five rolling acres of river-green grass, a scattering of picnic tables, and a ramshackle stage, complete with a dance floor fashioned from packed red dirt. At the bottom of the hillside, the river rolled through Austin, where it eventually poured into Matagorda Bay, some 200 miles away.
When I was a little girl, I used to stand on the southernmost finger of the small marina and squint toward the horizon, imagining that I could see the palm trees swaying in the Gulf “s tropical breeze. In twenty years, not much had changed.
There were still rusty old fishing boats bobbing beside million dollar yachts in the marina and a wide backyard-style amphitheater. South of the stage was a sandy volleyball pit where a collection of children tumbled about, batting a colorful beach ball over the sagging net.
The Pier’s small, white clapboard shack presided over it all like a gentle, if somewhat disreputable, old uncle with a wink and a nod.
Logan was already there I knew it. Not because I saw him, but because my nerve endings started to sizzle and pop. I flashed my invitation to the big side of beef manning the admission gate. A band was busily jamming to the beat of a different drummer from the sound of it, probably from a different planet. But what they lacked in talent they made up for in volume so that we had to shout to be heard.
“Holy shit,” Brynn hollered into my ear as she peered over my shoulder.
I followed her gaze, and suddenly I couldn’t hear one note of the deafening music. Holy shit was right.
Tom Logan was lounging against a picnic table near the lakeshore sipping a long neck and looking like six and a half feet of walking sin. His Levi’s were worn and faded in all the right places, and his black tee shirt revealed the fact that he worked out. A lot.
His gaze met mine and the earth seemed to tilt beneath my Kate Spades. He looked at me like he might eat me alive and I’d be glad he took the trouble.
I moved toward him, trying to look calm and collected, a woman about town, all the while being careful not to topple face-first off my nifty new wedges.
“Hello, kid,” he said, and he sent me one of his bone-melting grins. “Sorry we’re late,” I said, resisting the urge to tug at my shorts. “You remember Mia and Brynn. This is Ethan Singer.”
Logan nodded to Mia and Brynn and shook hands with Ethan. “I thought you were shooting a video,” I said.
Logan shook his head. “Hitchcock’s over there.” He motioned with his beer toward the stage, and sure enough, there was Puck, holding a beer in one hand and what looked like some sort of high-tech hybrid video camera in the other. He was chattering warp speed to a scantily clad blond who was doing her best to ignore him.
He saw us and grinned, giddy as a carload of eighth-grade girls. Suddenly, I felt like someone kicked me in the stomach. This was the last time I would see Puck “alive.”
Forty-eight hours from now, Logan was going to shove Puck’s obituary under some shooter’s nose and tell him Puck had made the big beer run to the great hereafter, a ruse to keep some thug from El Patron chopping off Puck’s ear and setting him ablaze.
My breath caught and my hand flew involuntarily to my own ear. I was going to testify at the same grand jury. Until some nut job broke into my house and attempted to clobber me with a dead canary, I hadn’t realized just how dangerous putting Selena Obregon behind bars could get.
“Hey! You came!” Puck yelled over the racket. He trotted across the sandy volleyball pit, careful not to drop the camera or spill his beer.
“This,” Logan said to my friends, “is Wylie Ray Puckett.” I thought there was a note of apology in his voice.
“Whoa,” Puck said, jabbing me with his elbow as he jogged to a stop beside me, wheezing for air. “Your friends are hot. Did you tell them I’m a producer?”
“Must have slipped my mind,” I said.
“Hey, y’all could be in my music video,” he said to Mia and Brynn. He leered through the lens, panning from my rear end to Mia’s and then on to Brynn’s. “Can y’all just, you know, give us a little goose?”
Mia rolled her eyes, but Brynn’s expression barely moved. “If you point that thing at me again, you will pull back a bloody stump,” Brynn said, and Puck swallowed hard.
“Hey, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” he said, glancing nervously at Logan.
“You never do,” Logan said as Brynn advanced on Puck.
“You’re supposed to be protecting me, right?” Logan shrugged. “You’re on your own with this one.”
Shaking my head, I slid onto the picnic bench, and Logan sat beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat of the afternoon on him. He took a long pull on his Shiner Bock long neck and looked at me, and I could practically feel his gaze skim my bare midriff and below. “Nice shorts.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks, and a wave of pure pleasure washed over me.
“Told ya,” Mia whispered.
“Y’all gotta be in the video,” Puck said, and his camera was pointing down my shirt. He started to sit down beside me when Logan gave him a look.
“Right,” Puck said. “I think I’m going to take a break.” He slouched around the table to the opposite bench.
The small band was ranting on the elevated stage. The words Phoenix and the Firebirds were carefully painted across the width of the big drum.
Logan’s gaze swept the crowd as usual, but flickered over the sound and light guys gathered around the console. I watched as they milled about, a small group of vatos who seemed to be jittering in place.
“Racial profiling?” I said.
“Troubleshooting,” he said, his gaze not leaving the small group.
As Logan and I spoke, the man at the console caught my eye. He stared at me, a dead-eyed stare, and a sickening jolt slithered up my spine.
The man had slicked-back hair and wore headphones as he adjusted the levers on the console.
“Logan,” I said. “I think that’s him. The guy who attacked me.”
“Guy with the headphones?” he said, his eyes narrowing in like a gun sight.
I nodded, my voice stuck in my throat.
He made his way through the crowd, people parting around him like he exuded some sort of force field.
The cholo saw us coming and tried to give Logan a dead-eye stare. It chilled me to the bones but bounced right off of Logan.
Logan badged him. “Wanna take off those headphones,” he said to the guy. It wasn’t a question.
He and Jitters looked at me, a pair of slimy looks that had me crossing my arms over my chest. Still looking at me, he slid the headphones off to reveal two rather small ears the approximate shape of turnips. No scratch marks on his face. No big cat-sized chunks out of his ear.
“Want the shirt off too?” he said.
“Not today,” Logan said. “You ever see this woman before?” nodding toward me.
A slow smile slid over his thin lips.
“Now, don’t you think I’d remember seein’ something like that, jefe.”
“Just answer the question. I wanna get wise, I’ll visit your boss.” The cholo shrugged. “No. I never seen her.”
“You?” he said to Jitters, scanning the skinny guy for scratch marks.
“No hablo ingles,” he said with a twitch in his to
p lip.
Logan stared at him. The moment stretched uncomfortably, and Jitters was vibrating so hard he was in danger of wearing out his jeans from the inside out.
“No,” Jitters said, his voice rising with his nerves. “No, I never seen her.”
Logan stared at both of them, and I swear I heard his cop radar pinging somewhere near his spinal cord.
“You okay?” he said, and I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Logan. I thought it was him.”
“Don’t worry about it, kid. Better safe than sorry.”
I followed him back to the table, where my heart rate slowed below three hundred thirty, very glad that Logan was there. And very glad that Logan was Logan.
“Hey!” Ethan chimed in, breaking my trance. He spoke to Puck, who had lowered the video camera.
Ethan pointed. “Is that one of those new Tribeca mini DVD recorders?”
“Yep. Nothin’ but the best for Faith’s video,” Puck said, slipping back into the present. “Quality all the way, baby.”
“Can I see it?” Ethan said.
Puck gave him an appraising look. “Your friends are total babes,” Puck said. “Maybe we could set something up.”
“Right,” Brynn said. She shook her mane of bronze hair. “Where do I get one of those?” she said to Logan. She was either pointing at his long neck or his long fellow. With Brynn, you could never tell.
Logan started to get the waitress’s attention when Brynn purred, “Well, hello, Orange County…”
She nudged Mia, pointing toward two sandy-haired, prepubescent surf boys scarfing down Jell-O shots like they’d just hit legal age.
Mia snorted. “Brynn, you have underwear older than that boy.”
Brynn smiled like a puma on the prowl. “Leave my undies out of this for now.”
And with that, Brynn stalked toward the bar, Mia in tow. “Direct,” Logan said, and I sighed.
“Yeah, you never have to guess what’s on Brynn’s mind,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that.” He smiled and thrust my hormones into overdrive.
Logan caught the attention of a waitress as she wound her way through the crowd to take our drink orders. She had a forty-something face atop a twenty-something body, with bottle-blond hair and more hip sway than a waffle-house waitress. She wore a small denim skirt slung low on her hips, showing off an elaborate tattoo that spelled out the lyrics to “Dixie.” She’d topped off the ensemble with a cropped baby tee that said Keep Austin Weird.