Last Girl Standing

by Lisa Jackson

  “He thinks I’m still too involved personally to be clear-eyed about Carmen.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “But he told me he liked the way I’ve been investigating and the conclusions I’ve drawn, and he thinks I should work to be a detective.”

  He pulled her beer bottle away and slid the whiskey glass along the bar, closer to her. “Is that what you’re going to do, then?”

  “There are no openings at West Knoll, but that’s my plan. I’ve been stuck in a rut. Might as well move on.”

  “And if you’re a detective, you can look further into Carmen’s death.”

  It wasn’t really a question, but Bailey smiled faintly and answered, “You’re onto me.”

  “Drink,” he said, nodding toward the glass of whiskey.

  “I told you. It’s not my drink.”

  “Drink,” he insisted.

  “This is worse than high school.”

  “You’re an officer of the law now, and it’s my duty to make certain you remember how to have fun. You do remember, right? Fun?”

  Bailey shook her head. Not because she was answering him, because she didn’t know what the hell was holding her here with him. He was too pushy. Too ready to do the wrong thing. He hadn’t matured all that much from high school, and yet . . .

  “I think you qualify for the ‘Bad Influence’ label,” she told him.

  He grinned at that. “Most definitely.”

  “You’ve changed since high school.”

  “I was always a bad influence.”

  “No.”

  “No?” he queried, one eyebrow lifted.

  “You and Sumpter were just Tanner followers, not really bad.”

  She heard her words as soon as they were out and cringed a little inside. No man liked to be called a follower. She should have chosen what she said more carefully.

  But Penske just gave her a crooked smile. “Jesus, it’s hell to be dumb, isn’t it? I wanted to be Tanner. I saw him there, with all those girls, women, after him, and it seemed like he had everything. I wanted it all. Right then. Right now.”

  She was relieved he hadn’t taken offense. “We all paid him a little bit of homage,” Bailey admitted.

  Another roar came from the billiards table. Bailey looked over at them sharply. She half-expected one of them to bash their pool cue down on the other’s head, and she tensed. She’d dealt with the Crassleys enough to know what she needed to do before things got out of control.

  The pressure of a glass into her palm brought her head snapping back around.

  “Take a sip or two,” he said. “For fun.” When he was certain she wasn’t going to drop her drink, he held his nearly empty one up to his own lips.

  The pool players were grudgingly racking up another game. No blood. No fight. Bailey resisted the urge to look at the time on her cell phone and instead lifted up her glass in a toast. “To fun.”

  “To fun!” He grinned, tossing back the last swallow of his as Bailey brought the glass of whiskey to her lips. She sipped, thought, “Yuk . . . but not horrifically terrible.” She took a second sip and a third, none of them more than a small swallow.

  “There ya go,” he said.

  “Are we going to go eat at Danny O’s?”

  “We could. Like we used to. Or we could stay here.”

  She looked into his eyes, seeing the way they narrowed slightly as he assessed her. She was assessing him right back.

  “Here,” Bailey opted.

  Penske’s grin widened, and he signaled the bartender. “Two more,” he said, pointing to the bar in front of them.

  “You’re drinking both of them yourself,” Bailey warned, to which he said in his cocksure way, “We’ll see.”

  His cell phone rang, and he pulled it from his pocket and squinted at the screen.

  “Need some help seeing?” she asked.

  “Nah.” He tucked it back in his pocket.

  He drank another whiskey pretty fast, but Bailey was still sipping away on her first. She started to feel very warm in the chest.

  A slow country-music song came on, and Penske pulled her away from the bar and into his arms. She felt a bit silly, dancing, but it was really nice.

  “Let’s get outta here,” he whispered in her ear.

  “I thought we were staying.”

  “Can’t a guy change his mind?”

  Pretty sure she was making a big mistake, Bailey nevertheless let herself be guided through the door and into the parking lot. She started toward Danny O’s, but Penske twirled her around and into his arms.

  “Wanna fool around?” he asked, pressing her body close to his.

  She could feel his hardness, and a thrill zinged through her. She let her hands move down to his hips, pulling him closer, intensifying the feeling.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said breathlessly, moving her toward their vehicles at the back of the lot.

  Chapter 13

  The First Fives had all left the reunion except for Zora, and there definitely was that “party’s over” vibe as Ellie poured the rest of her wine down the bathroom sink. She glanced around. The golf club was definitely lower tier in the decorating department. Faded flowered wallpaper, pinkish tiles on the floor, ornate and gilded fixtures, tarnished in spots. It probably hadn’t been redone since the eighties, but it was about the only game in town in West Knoll for an event this size.

  You shouldn’t have come, she told her reflection.

  She’d thought for a moment that Delta and Amanda might really get into it. Now, that would have been a story. Old rivals duke it out at the ten-year reunion. She could have a field day writing a tongue-in-cheek article that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to sell as a human-interest story. She wanted to write. Her gig at Channel Seven wasn’t really giving her what she needed creatively.

  She walked back out of the bathroom. There were still a number of people around, but the place was definitely starting to thin out. Almost to a one, her classmates had brought up that they’d seen her on the news . . . and almost to a one they called her the “weather girl.” She wasn’t the meteorologist, she was just the fill-in. She supposed she should be gratified that they’d seen her at all, but she found it more annoying than anything else. She was a journalist who’d written for a number of local newspapers and then went off on her own to interview different people for stories around Portland, sending her tapes into the Portland television stations, hoping for a bite.

  Nada.

  But she wouldn’t give up. Alton had called her his fierce Chihuahua, which she didn’t like either, but he and his wife, Coco, had a Chihuahua named Penny who was mean as dirt. That dog could only snarl and growl and glare, as far as Ellie could see, but she’d pretended to think it was just darling because Alton was an anchor on Channel Seven and he told her he had a thing for redheads when she stalked him into a bar after work one night and struck up a friendship. He’d seemed half-interested in her work, more interested in getting her into bed, but she held off on the latter until he’d read some of what she’d written. “It’s good,” he told her, sounding surprised, and then they ended up in a downtown Portland hotel room for a couple of hours before he had to go home to Coco.

  After that, Ellie worked her way into meeting the production staff. One of the producers took a liking to her, and she almost jettisoned Alton in favor of Rob, but luckily she stuck with Alton, who she could tell was really falling for her. Rob was a bit younger and brasher, and he was definitely a decision maker, but he was engaged to a woman whose family had money, according to Alton, and so Rob wasn’t going to stray too far.

  She managed to keep Rob at arm’s length, but not much farther away, and she learned her hair color was a plus on television. “People notice red hair,” Rob told her. “And yours is natural.”

  It took a little bit more time before they put her on screen. Ellie wanted to be a reporter, but Channel Seven was the domain of that bitch on wheels Pauline Kirby, who, though getting a
little long in the tooth, had a big following around the Portland area. Ellie sometimes fantasized that Pauline would just keel over and die and she, Ellie, would be able to pick up the mantle as Channel Seven’s number-one reporter. Not so. She was . . . the weather girl . . . part-time.

  But she had Alton. He was leaving Coco, that was for certain. He was more concerned about leaving Penny, the Chihuahua, than his crazy wife. Penny was a purse dog, tucked into Coco’s big bag whenever they came to the station. Ellie made faces at Penny when Coco couldn’t see, and the dog went ape-shit. Rob had caught her at it once and smothered a smile. Alton loved the dog too much to ever see what a pain in the ass it was, so Ellie kept her low-grade loathing to herself as much as possible.

  Now she thought about Alton as she cruised through the main room of the reunion one more time. Most of the guys were still hanging around together, and they’d traded in their beer cups for shots at the bar. Always a good idea. Justin Penske had left with Bailey; go figure.

  She looked around for McCrae but didn’t see him either. Damn. Even with Alton, McCrae was an itch she would like to scratch again. His body looked as hard as it ever had, maybe even more so, and she half-dreamed about having him slide in and out of her, their eyes locked, just letting their bodies do the work.

  The thought brought on a wave of desire.

  Whoa. That shot a thrill right through your hoohaw, didn’t it?

  “Have you seen McCrae?” she asked Crystal Gilles.

  Crystal was nibbling on a stuffed mushroom cap. Woody was with the guys, but she didn’t seem to mind. Ellie had heard they were married, but maybe it was a common-law thing. That’s kind of how they rolled.

  Swallowing a bite, Crystal drawled, “Trying for a replay of the barbeque?”

  Ellie’s heart galumphed. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know. You and McCrae . . .” She lifted her brows and smiled slyly.

  “Did he say something?”

  “God, no. The guy’s a cop now. Doesn’t give away anything. We all knew, Ellie.”

  “You weren’t even there.”

  “Woody saw you. He told me about it. You thought you were the only ones out in the woods?”

  Ellie was stricken. It was an odd day when she had nothing to say, but she was embarrassed and flabbergasted.

  “Oh, forget it. Nobody cares. McCrae’s a hottie. Happy hunting.” She grimaced and put the rest of the mushroom cap on a plate with half-eaten food that had been abandoned.

  Ellie wanted to scream, It wasn’t like that, but she knew better than to make a bigger deal out of it than it was. Still . . . Woody had seen them?

  She eyed the guy group with trepidation, wondering if she was a source of their “guffaws.” But like Crystal had said, it was old news. Ten-year-old news, to be exact.

  “Somebody said you’re the weather girl on one of the local stations. What’s that like?” Crystal asked.

  She could tell by Crystal’s tone that she was wanting to make fun of her, maybe gathering material to take back to Woody and the guys. “About what you’d expect,” she said shortly, and moved away from her.

  She gave the guys a wide berth, still keeping an eye out for McCrae. Yes, she loved Alton, but he spent most evenings at home with his wife, and that left her kind of footloose and, well, horny.

  She hadn’t picked up any vibe from McCrae that he was interested in a “replay,” as Crystal put it, and when she was talking to him earlier, she hadn’t felt it either. But now she did. Her blood felt hot in her veins, and the more she thought about the two of them ripping off each other’s clothes, falling onto a bed, or a couch, or the floor would even suffice, him kissing her like his life depended on it, sliding into her, thrusting, pushing, her mouth open on a silent scream—

  “Ellie?”

  She came back to earth with a bang. It was Brad Sumpter. He of the huge muscles and small brain. She cooled off right away. McCrae had a lean, hard sexiness, whereas Sumpter was somehow too big. Probably fake big. Enhanced.

  “You wanna go somewhere after?” Brad asked.

  “I can’t. Got someone waiting for me.” She gave him a regretful smile.

  “Heard Penske say something about Danny O’s. We’re all kinda thinking about going.”

  “Like I said, I’m already booked. Tell everybody, next time.” She sketched him a wave and headed for the door. Outside on the steps, she texted Alton. Maybe, just maybe, he could get away. She waited about five minutes. He kept his phone on SILENT so his wife wouldn’t hear his texts, and sometimes it took him a while to ease himself free of her.

  But not this time. No text back. He couldn’t get away.

  Damn.

  She didn’t have McCrae’s cell number. She should have asked for it. He was reachable at the police station, but what good would that do her tonight?

  Tanner was still inside the golf club, drinking with his buddies. She thought about sleeping with him, but that would be really taking a chance. What would Delta do if she found out she and Tanner had already done the dirty? Amanda had basically given the game away, but Delta was so convinced Tanner was a hero that she hadn’t really listened. At least Ellie didn’t think she had. In any case, she hadn’t reacted when Amanda had let it be known that she’d had sex with him. And Zora, too, maybe? That was an unwelcome surprise. Tanner was far more of a man-whore than she’d known.

  “I’d still do him,” she said aloud; then, aware that anyone could be outside and listening, she clamped her lips together and headed for her car.

  * * *

  Bailey was drunk. She couldn’t believe it. She’d hardly had anything to drink. But her vision was blurred. Her heart jolted. “Did you put something in my . . . drink?”

  They were at her car. She’d unlocked the door, but she was swaying slightly. Penske had a hand on her arms, steadying her. He frowned. “Whad’re you talkin’ about?”

  She realized he was swaying, too. “Did the . . . bartender?”

  “I just want to be inside you,” he said, pulling her close.

  It melted her. She wanted that, too. It had been too long, far too long, since she’d been with Greg, even longer since they’d enjoyed sex in that wonderful way.

  Penske opened the door to the back seat of her Explorer. “Let’s make out inside.” He practically pushed her in, and then she was lying on her back on the seat.

  “We can’t do this here!” she said, when he took her shoes off and her skirt and her underpants. The door was still open, and he was pulling down his own jeans.

  “Yeah, we can.”

  “I’m a . . . cop!”

  “I’m gonna fuck a cop. I love it.”

  “Penske . . .”

  But then he was on her. The door was still open.

  “Shud do door!” Her words were garbled under his marauding lips.

  He twisted back and grabbed the handle, and then they were scrunched in together, fighting for space, all legs and arms. Bailey was torn between horror and a kind of maniacal amusement.

  And then he was inside her, thrusting, and she was trying to keep her head from banging into the door. It felt good, so good. She grabbed his buttocks and drove him further.

  “Yeah, yeah, babe, yeah,” he muttered.

  She lost consciousness for a heartbeat. Her eyes snapped open. Did she go out for a moment? They were still at it, and Penske was panting hard, close to climax.

  Birth control.

  God. Shit. What?

  What’s wrong with you?

  “You can’t come inside me! I’m not on the pill!”

  “Oh, babe,” he groaned, pumping his seed into her.

  “Oh, shit.”

  He collapsed atop her. She tried to think through the haze enveloping her. Think.

  What just happened?

  You had sex in the parking lot.

  She moaned in disbelief. Had the bartender spiked her drink? Something was off.

  Penske rose on his hands and pulled out of her, yanking
up his boxers and pants.

  “You were pretty wet,” he said.

  “I told you not to come.”

  “I couldn’t help myself. You got me going so hard.”

  “Somethin’s wrong. My head is so fuzzy.”

  “The booze.”

  “No, it’s . . . I think I’ve been . . . roofied.”

  He laughed in disbelief. “Roofied? Bullshit. You’d be unconscious.”

  “Not necessarily . . .”

  “Come on. Let’s go to Danny O’s.”

  “Don’t think I can.”

  “You serious? You think your drink was spiked?” He moved his head back and forth. “I feel a little drunk myself. Maybe . . . huh . . .”

  It was so difficult to converse, to think, to do anything. Her skirt was still in the footwell, where Penske had thrown it. She knew enough to feel embarrassed. “My clothes . . .”

  “Lemme help you.”

  He picked up her underwear and handed it to her. With an effort, she got into a sitting position and slowly pulled the panties on.

  “Sumpin’s really wrong. I think . . . I need to go to Emergency. . .”

  “Here.” He handed her the wrinkled skirt. “I’ll drive you.”

  “Wha? Wha? You can’t drive! We need . . . Uber . . . or sumpin.”

  “You got a gun in this car?”

  “Uh . . . um . . . what?”

  Penske was out of the back seat and climbing into the driver’s seat, punching the button for the glove box. “You do!” he said, pulling out her service revolver.

  “Stop!” She sat up bolt upright.

  “Want me to go kill him? The bartender? I think he fucked with us.”

  “No! Whad’s wrong wit you?” She yanked on her skirt, struggling to get it on.

  When she was dressed, she climbed out of the car, staggered a bit, knocked on the driver’s door, but when Penske seemed enamored of her gun, she lurched around to the passenger side, yanked the door open. Distantly she heard people coming out of Lundeen’s, and she dropped into the seat and slammed the door shut.