Drop Dead Gorgeous

by Linda Howard

  I went through the drive-in at the bank, then threaded my way through traffic back to Great Bods. I kept an eye out for that green Nissan, and Buicks, which is why I noticed the white Chevy again. Well, a white Chevy, and it was driven by a woman, but that isn’t uncommon, so I couldn’t say it was the same white Chevy. What were the odds the same woman would be reversing her earlier path and would get behind me again? Not very high, but hey, I was reversing my path, wasn’t I?

  When I got to Great Bods I turned down the side street to go to the rear parking lot, and the white Chevy continued going straight. I breathed a sigh of relief. I either had to get over this newfound paranoia or start paying more attention so I’d know if the same car or just a look-alike turned up behind me. There was no point in imprecise paranoia.

  My head was still pounding from being jerked around, so I went to my office and popped a couple of ibuprofen. Ordinarily I love what I do, but today hadn’t been a great day.

  Around seven-thirty, the end-of-the-day influx was beginning to outflux, to my relief. I got a pack of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine in the break room, and that was supper. I was so tired, all I wanted to do was sit down and not move for, oh, ten hours or so.

  Wyatt showed up at eight-thirty, to stay with me until closing. He gave me a sharp look that made me think I probably didn’t look my best, but all he said was, “How did you make it?”

  “I was doing okay until I went to the bank, almost rear-ended a nitwit who cut in front of me, and had to slam on my brakes,” I said.

  “Ouch.”

  “How did your day go?”

  “Pretty normal.”

  Which could mean anything from dead bodies turning up in a dump to a bank robbery, though I was pretty certain I’d have heard if one of the banks in town got robbed. I needed to get my hands on his paperwork to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

  The last client left, and the staff began cleaning up and putting everything to rights. I employ nine people, counting Lynn, with at least three people on each seven-and-a-half-hour shift, and four on each shift on Fridays and Saturdays, the busiest days. Everyone gets two days off, except me. I get one. That would have to change soon, and with that in mind I wrote a note to remind myself to hire an additional person.

  One by one the staff finished and called out their good-byes as they left. Yawning, I stretched, feeling the echo of soreness caused by my collision with the mall parking lot. I wanted a long soak in a hot tub, but that would have to wait because most of all I just wanted to go to bed.

  I did a walk-through, checking that everything was in order, double-checking that the front door was locked. I always left a couple of dim lights burning in the front. Wyatt waited at the back door for me. I set the alarm, then he opened the door as I turned out the hallway lights and we stepped outside. The motion sensor lights came on immediately, and I turned to lock the door. When I turned back around, Wyatt was crouched beside my car.

  “Blair,” he said, his voice taking on that flat tone cops use when they don’t want to give anything away. I stopped in my tracks, panic and fury both rising in equal force and making a potent mixture. I’d had enough of this crap, and I was damn tired of it.

  “Don’t tell me someone has put a bomb under my car!” I said indignantly. “That’s the last straw. I’ve had it. What is this, let’s-kill-Blair season? If this is just because I was a cheerleader, then people need to get a grip, there are a lot worse things in this world—”

  “Blair,” he said again, this time with rueful amusement.

  I was on a roll, and I didn’t like being stopped. “What!”

  “It’s not a bomb.”

  “Oh.”

  “Looks like someone keyed your car.”

  “What? Shit!” Furious all over again, I rushed to his side. Sure enough, a long, ugly scratch ran down the entire driver’s side of my car. The motion lights were bright enough to plainly see it.

  I started to kick the tire. I’d already drawn back my foot when I remembered my concussion. The headache probably saved me from broken toes, because have you ever really kicked a tire, hard, as if you were trying to punt the car between the goalposts? Not a good idea.

  Nor was there anything else around that I could kick that wouldn’t break my toes. The wall, the awning posts, things like that were my only available targets, and they were all even harder than the tires. I had no way of relieving my temper, and I thought my eyes would bug out from the internal pressure.

  Wyatt was looking around, assessing the situation. His police-issue Crown Vic was sitting at the end of the row; the staff’s cars would have been parked in the slots between his car and mine, effectively blocking his view of the damage, when he arrived.

  “Any idea when this could have been done?” he asked.

  “Sometime after I got back from the bank. That was about three-fifteen, three-twenty.”

  “After school was out, then.”

  It was easy to follow his line of thinking. A bored teenager, walking through the parking lot, might have thought it’d be fun to mess up the Mercedes. I had to admit that was the most likely scenario, unless Debra Carson was on the warpath again, or the psycho bitch in the Buick had somehow tracked me down. But I’d been through those possibilities before, when I got that weird phone call that had creeped me out, and they were no more plausible now than they had been before. Okay, Debra was a stronger possibility, because she knew where I worked, and she knew which car was mine. The Mercedes had been a big sore point with her, because Jason had thought it would look good with the voters if she drove an American-made car.

  She would be taking a risk, though, because she was already up on a charge of attempted murder—though God only knew when it would get to trial, given Jason’s family connections—and harassing the victim wouldn’t win her any points.

  On the other hand, she was nuts. Anything was possible.

  I said as much to Wyatt, but he didn’t leap on it as a brilliant theory. Instead he shrugged and said, “It was probably some kid. Not a lot you can do about it, since there aren’t any surveillance cameras back here.”

  Since he had mentioned surveillance cameras when he installed the motion lights, and I’d said there wasn’t any need going to that expense, there was a slight edge to his tone.

  “Go ahead,” I said, and sighed. “Say ‘I told you so.’”

  “I told you so,” he said with grim satisfaction.

  I couldn’t believe it. I gaped at him. “I can’t believe you said that! That was so rude!”

  “You told me to say it.”

  “But you weren’t supposed to! You were supposed to be magnanimous and say something like there’s no point in crying over spilled milk! Everybody knows you don’t actually say ‘I told you so’!” Well, there was an item for his troublesome list of transgressions: rude. And unsympathetic. No, I’d have to scratch “unsympathetic,” because after all the man had just spent his weekend taking care of me. I’d settle for “Gloated about my car.”

  Rising from his crouch, he dusted off his hands. “I take it this means you’ve giving in on the surveillance system.”

  “Fat lot of good it’ll do now!”

  “If anything else happens, you’ll be able to tell who did it. With your track record, I think you can pretty much count on another incident.”

  Wasn’t that a happy thought? I glared at my beautiful little black convertible. I’d had it just a couple of months, and now someone had deliberately damaged it.

  “All right,” I said sulkily. “I’ll have a surveillance system installed.”

  “I’ll take care of it. I know what works best.”

  At least he hadn’t said “If you’d listened to me before…” I probably would have screamed right in his face.

  He said, “If you’d listened to me before—”

  “Aaaaaaa!” I screamed, so frustrated I thought I’d explode. Now I could add “rubbing it in” to his list.

  Startl
ed, he jerked back a little. “What’s that about?”

  “It’s about…it’s about everything!” I shouted. “It’s about nitwits, and jerks, and psycho bitches! It’s about not having anything here I can kick without hurting myself! It’s about having this stupid concussion so I can’t even stomp around! I need to stomp. I need to throw something. I need a voodoo doll that I can stick pins in and set its hair on fire and pull off its little legs and arms—”

  He looked mildly interested in my temper tantrum. “You do voodoo, do you?”

  Just as a matter of information, you can’t keep up a rant and snort through your nose at the same time. I didn’t want to laugh because I was mad about my car, but what the hell, sometimes a laugh is going to come out no matter what.

  I had to pay him back, though. I said, “I’ll need to borrow your Avalanche while my car is in the shop.”

  He stilled, thinking back over the track record he’d mentioned just a moment before. “Oh, shit,” he said, sighing in resignation.

  Chapter

  Twelve

  I wrote the new items on Wyatt’s list of transgressions as soon as we got home, but I might as well have been using invisible ink for all the attention he paid to it. He didn’t even glance at it, lying there on the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen, instead settling in a chair with the morning newspaper, which obviously he hadn’t had time to read that morning, and asking me if I wanted the paper when he finished. Well, hell, it was my newspaper, wasn’t it? Why would I pay for the thing if I didn’t want to read it? And why was he reading the paper instead of paying attention to his list? Things were not right in my world.

  But I was exhausted, and I was sick of that blasted headache. “I’ll read it tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to take some more ibuprofen, shower, and go to bed.” I was feeling grumpy, too, but most of it wasn’t his fault, so I didn’t want to take it out on him.

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” he said.

  I sulked in the shower, thinking about my car. There should be a security system you could put on cars that would electrify them, so when some punk scraped a key down the paint it would fry his ass. I amused myself visualizing bulging eyes, Einstein hair, and maybe even wet pants, so people could point and laugh. That would teach the little bastard.

  In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not much on turning the other cheek.

  After showering I doctored my various scrapes and bruises—none of which needed bandages, so I just put stuff on them to help the healing process. I ran a little experiment on myself, by putting La Mer on one scrape, antibiotic ointment on another, and aloe gel on yet another, just to see which one healed best. I applied vitamin spray to my bruises. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t. It was something to do.

  I had just turned out the light and crawled into bed—naked, to save Wyatt the trouble of pulling off my clothes—when he came upstairs. I went to sleep while he was showering, roused enough to kiss him good night when he got into bed beside me, and didn’t know anything else until the alarm went off the next morning.

  Lynn always opened the gym on Tuesdays, so I didn’t have to be there until one-thirty, though I usually was there before then. Today, however, I had a lot to do before getting to work. First I called the insurance company about my car, then I talked to Luke Arledge, then I made an appointment to get my hair cut—at eleven that very morning, if you can believe it—and finally I went shopping for the fabric for my wedding gown. On the way to the fabric store, I stopped at a place that refinished antiques to ask some questions, and as a bonus found a gorgeous Queen Anne desk that would look great in the office I was creating at Wyatt’s house. All of this was by ten o’clock, so I was hustling.

  I felt much, much better; the headache was nothing more than a twinge, and that was when I forgot myself and sort of skipped a little, just because it was a gorgeous sunny day. The weather was much warmer, the cool snap over for the time being, and everyone I talked to was in a good mood.

  I had just enough time at the fabric store to look through their silks and satins and know they didn’t have what I wanted. I was in a hurry, because of my appointment at the hair salon, so when I saw a woman who looked familiar I deliberately looked away, just in case I really did know her and would be obliged, if we made eye contact, to make small talk for at least a few minutes. Sometimes being a Southerner is a burden; you can’t just nod and go about your business, you have to ask about family, and usually end the conversation with an invitation to come visit, which would really throw a monkey wrench in my schedule if, God forbid, someone actually took me up on it.

  Shay, my hairdresser, was putting the finishing touches on a customer when I arrived, so I took a few minutes to look through some hairstyle books. Because it was one of those days when good things seemed to fall in my lap—it was about time I’d had one of those days!—right away I found a hairstyle I liked.

  “This one,” I said to Shay, pointing to the picture, when it was my turn in her chair.

  “Very cute,” she said, studying the lines of the cut. “But before I start cutting, be sure you want to go that short. You’ll be losing five, six inches of hair.”

  I pushed my hair back to show her the shaved place in my hairline. “I’m sure.”

  “I guess you are. What happened?”

  “I took a header in the mall parking lot.” That version saved on explanations. Some other time I might have been in the mood for a lot of drama and sympathy, but right then I was moving on, and wanted to put all that behind me.

  She wet my hair with a spray bottle of water, combed my hair back, and started cutting. I had a moment of panic when a half-foot-long strand of blond hair fell on the cape over my lap, but I was strong and didn’t whimper at all. Besides, it was too late to turn back, and there’s no point in wasting a whimper.

  By the time Shay finished her magic with the blow dryer and curling iron, I was ecstatic. My new chin-length hairstyle was chic, swingy, and sexy. One side was pushed back and really showed off my earrings, while the other side sort of swooped down to cover the outside half of my eyebrow, which also, of course, meant it covered the stitches and shaved patch. I gave a tentative shake of my head, just in case the headache waited to pounce on me again, but I remained pain free and my hair did a very satisfying swing and bounce before settling back into place.

  When you know you look good, the whole world seems a better place.

  I called Wyatt as soon as I was back in the car. “I just got my hair cut,” I told him. “It’s short.”

  He paused, and I could hear background noise that told me he wasn’t alone. “How short?” he finally asked, his voice both wary and pitched low.

  I’ve never known a man who likes short hair on a woman. I think their DNA is damaged by testosterone poisoning. “Short.”

  He muttered something that sounded like “shit.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t like it,” I said cheerfully, “so I thought I’d give you a blow job to make it up to you. Toodle.”

  I hung up, feeling very pleased with myself. If he was able to think of anything besides me for the rest of the day, I’d be surprised.

  There was time to pick up something to eat before going to work, so I swung by my favorite barbecue restaurant and got a sandwich to go. Traffic was heavy because the lunch-hour crowd was scrambling to get back to work before one. I was the last in line in a left-hand turn lane waiting for the green arrow when a flash of white filled my rearview mirror.

  Automatically I looked in the mirror. A white car was riding my bumper, so close I couldn’t see what kind of car it was. The driver was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. A man? I couldn’t be certain. A smallish man, maybe. I let my car roll forward enough to see the emblem on the front of the white car; it was a Chevrolet. The driver immediately pulled the Chevy close again, closer than before.

  My stomach knotted. I had to get over this paranoia. I’d almost been hit by a beige Buick, not a white Chevrolet, so
where was the logic? Just because I’d twice seen a white Chevrolet behind me yesterday? It wasn’t as if white Chevrolets were rare; if I’d been paying attention, I probably had a white Chevrolet behind me at least once every time I went somewhere. Big deal.

  My stomach wouldn’t listen to logic, and it stayed knotted. On the traffic light, the green arrow lit and the line of vehicles began moving forward like a snake, the head moving first, then the next segment, until the entire line was moving. I put some distance between me and the white car, distance that it immediately closed. I looked in the mirror; I could tell that the driver had both hands on the wheel, which made it seem as if he or she was deliberately tailgating me.

  I was driving an agile, responsive car with a powerful engine that didn’t redline until it hit about seven thousand rpms. If I couldn’t get away from a tailgating Chevrolet, then I might as well trade this baby in for a Yugo.

  Giving a quick check to the traffic around me, I whipped the Mercedes to the right, into the middle lane, taking advantage of a space barely big enough to squeeze into. A horn blared behind me, terrifyingly close, but I swung into the far right lane then shot forward, passing three cars in as many seconds. A glance in the mirror showed the white Chevy trying to swerve into the middle lane, where it almost sideswiped a delivery truck before the driver of the Chevy jerked the car back into the left lane.

  Oh my God. If it’s really happening, then it isn’t paranoia. That car was following me!

  I braked hard and took the next right, then the next right again. I would have circled the block and got myself behind the white Chevy, but in their wisdom modern street planners almost never put streets in a grid anymore. Instead of a nice ordinary block, I found myself driving on a wide street that curved back and forth, with a lot of cul-de-sacs on it. The cul-de-sacs were filled with various businesses, so it wasn’t even a residential area. Excuse me, but has no one ever told these stupid urban planners that grids are the most efficient means of moving traffic?