3 Swift Run (28 page)

To my surprise, he unlocked the door and headed downstairs without a word to me. Shrugging
into a fleece jacket, he disappeared into the garage. Moments later the overhead door
rumbled up. I went downstairs myself and, looking out the narrow windows beside the
front door, saw Dexter trudging through the snow, shovel in hand. He dug the shovel
down, roughly where the sidewalk would be, and flung the snow toward the lawn. I opened
the door a crack and called, “Gloves, honey. It’s cold.”

He ignored me and kept shoveling. Nolan did his little potty dance at my ankles, and
I opened the door wider. There were leash laws in Colorado Springs, but who was going
to be out to complain on a day like this? I watched Nolan do his duty and then make
his way toward Dexter, almost disappearing into the snowdrifts that came over his
shaggy black-and-white head. Stooping, Dexter made a snowball and tossed it into the
air for Nolan. I smiled. My son could be very sweet. Nolan leaped for the ball and
then looked around, confused, when it splatted onto a bare patch of sidewalk and disintegrated.
He barked, and Dexter made another snowball, tossing it toward the lawn.

A funny
bump
caught my attention. It seemed to have come from the basement. If Kendall had snuck
down there to play Wii instead of finishing her homework … I hurried to the basement
door. “Kendall?” I called down. The lights were off, but daylight coming through the
garden-level windows made it light enough to see pretty well. I didn’t hear the Wii.
Then Kendall said, “What, Mom?” Her voice came from upstairs.

I stared down into the basement. If Kendall was upstairs and Dexter and Nolan were
out front, what made the noise in the basement? The answer came to me in a flash.
Les! Les had come back. He’d seen the police leave, waited a while, and snuck back
into the basement. I stomped down the stairs, furious. He had messed up our lives
one too many times. I wasn’t putting up with it any longer.

“Les, if you think I’m going to let you spend the night here again, you’ve got another
think coming. I don’t care if it’s ten degrees below zero out there. You’re not—”

I came around the corner and stopped. Wind swished in through the now wide-open window,
and I shivered. It wasn’t the cold making me shiver, though. It was Patrick Dreiser
standing near the big-screen TV, a long and nasty-looking knife in his hand.

Snow was melting off his boots onto the shag carpet, and I said, “Why can’t anyone
wipe their boots before coming into this house? Is that too much to ask?”

He looked taken aback but then raised the knife menacingly. “I knew you knew where
Goldman was. The more I thought about that whole scene at the gas station, the more
I knew you two were trying to scam me again. Well, that’s not going to happen. Where
is he?” Dreiser jumped forward and looked behind the couch. He looked disappointed
not to find Les crouched there.

“I don’t know!” I said. “He’s not here.”

“Right. That’s why you came down the stairs talking to him.” Dreiser swiped the hand
with the knife across his mouth, wiping away spittle. “Come out, Goldman,” he yelled,
“or it’s not going to be pretty for your pretty wife!”

He thought I was pretty? That lit a tiny bulb inside me that went out when he lunged
forward with the knife. I backed up and found myself against the Ping-Pong table again.
I reached for a paddle but had barely gotten hold of it before Dreiser knocked it
out of my hand. “Down the hall,” he ordered.

Maybe if I showed him Les wasn’t here, he’d leave. “Fine,” I said. I marched down
the hall and shoved the bathroom door open. “No one here,” I said, turning on the
light. Pushing aside the shower curtain, I stood aside so he could see the empty tub.
“No Les.”

Wearing an unconvinced sneer, he backed away from the door so I could return to the
hall. I strode past him, trying to ignore the knife, and flicked on the lights in
the bedroom. I slid open the closet door—that’s where my red Vera Wang dress got to!—and
floofed the bedskirt onto the mattress. Nothing but dust bunnies. It probably hadn’t
been vacuumed since I had to let the maid service go. “No one,” I sneezed.

For the first time, Dreiser looked uncertain. “How about in there?” he asked, pointing
to the utility room, where the hot water heater and furnace were. “Open it.”

I did. An unpleasant musty odor drifted out, and a scuttling sound made me jump back
so I bumped into Dreiser. He shoved me away.

“You’ve got mice,” he announced with satisfaction.

Yuck. “I’m not going in there.” I don’t like rodents. Their long, whiskery snouts
make my skin crawl. I’d never let Dexter have the rat he wanted, even though Les was
okay with it. I knew who would end up cleaning the rat cage, and I knew Dexter and
his friends would let the rat loose accidentally-on-purpose to scare Kendall and her
friends. It was one of the few times I put my foot down.

With a put-upon sigh, Dreiser shouldered past me, banged around in the utility room
for a moment, and came back looking frustrated. “He’s not in there.”

“Told you.”

“He must be upstairs.”

“He’s not! He’s not anywhere. Not in this house, anyway.” I did not want Dreiser anywhere
near Dexter and Kendall with his knife and his bad attitude. I tried to think of a
way to keep him down here, or better yet, get him to leave. There was a phone in the
bedroom, on the far side of the bed. If I rolled across the bed … No, I couldn’t grab
it and dial 911 before he stopped me. I’d noticed the back brush hanging from the
showerhead, but it was plastic, and it would probably only make him mad if I swatted
him with it. A Gorman statue of a firefighter stood on a pedestal beside a bookcase
in the rec room just to the right of the hall opening. I didn’t know what it was made
of, but if I could get Dreiser to go ahead of me, I could pick it up—I hoped—and dent
his skull with it. The thought made me feel sick, but it was the only plan I could
come up with.

I half-jogged toward the end of the hall.

“Hey! Where are you going? Stop.” Dreiser snagged the back of my sweater and pulled
me back. I gagged and coughed but felt a flicker of triumph when he said, “I’ll go
first.”

He stepped from the hall into the rec room, and something hurtled into him, knocking
him sideways. I gasped and froze. Curses and the sounds of a struggle pulled me forward.
I came out of the hall to see Les atop Dreiser, trying to mash his face into the carpet
while keeping him from wriggling away. Dreiser was trying unsuccessfully to buck Les
off his back. He was having trouble shifting Les’s weight. Good thing he hadn’t lost
his paunch.

“Knife,” Les wheezed when he saw me.

I looked around and spotted it under the Ping-Pong table. Skirting the struggling
men, I ducked down and reached for it. That didn’t work, so I had to crawl under the
table. My sweater snagged on one of the metal supports, but I pulled it loose and
kept going. “Got it!” I yelled.

Neither man answered. I backed out and saw that they were tangled together like Adam
Bomb and Moondog Manson from the WWE. “I’ll call the police.” I started toward the
phone.

“No!”
both men gasped.

I chewed my thumb cuticle.

“Mom? What’s going on down there? Sounds like an elephant stampede.” Kendall’s voice
came from the top of the stairs.

Both men stilled, and their eyes swiveled to me. “Uh, just moving some furniture around,”
I called up to her. “You know I never liked the poppy couch in the middle of the room.”

“Oh.” Kendall lost interest. She didn’t offer to help, I noticed, grateful for her
self-absorption for the first time. We watched the ceiling, following her footsteps
with our eyes. Les took advantage of Dreiser’s distraction to wrench his arms behind
his back.

“Give me the knife and get the duct tape, Gigi,” he said. He was sweating, and his
breath came in little puffs, but he looked determined.

Staying out of Dreiser’s reach, I gingerly handed the knife to Les and found the roll
of bright pink duct tape Kendall had used to decorate her T-shirt for the first dance
of the school year. I peeled up the edge with my fingernail, pulled a length free,
and bit it off with my teeth. I handed it to Les. “Here.”

He shook his head. “I’ll hold the knife on him, you tape his hands.”

“But—”

“This is kidnapping!” Dreiser objected loudly.

“Ssh,” Les and I said together.

Reluctantly, I stepped behind Dreiser and began to wrap the tape around his wrists.
It kept getting tangled and stuck on itself, and I had to use half the roll, but I
finally got it done. I pffed hair off my forehead. “Now what?”

“Yeah, now what, Goldman?” Dreiser asked in a hateful tone. He’d wiggled into a sitting
position with his back against the wall. Rug burn left a red smear on his cheek, and
his dark hair stuck out wildly, as if Les had pulled it.

Les flapped his hand. “I’m thinking.”

I watched him anxiously. “How did you know he was here? I was never so glad to see
you before in my life.”

“Thanks.”

Dreiser barked out a laugh.

I looked from one to the other, confused. “Were you already down here?”

“No,” Les said. “I was hiding in the shed. After you called the cops on me, which
I never thought you’d be vindictive enough to do—” He glared.

“I didn’t! It was Dexter.”

“Dexter? Why would he do that?” He paused, but then continued, “Anyway, I hid in the
Klamerers’ hot tub—pretty smart, right?” He puffed his chest out.

I eyed him. He didn’t look wet.

“It’s been empty for two years,” he reminded me. “Remember it sprang that leak during
their Fourth of July party and the water drained out and we were all sitting there
naked?”

Did I ever. I’d never been so embarrassed. I blushed at the memory.

“That Janet!” Les shook his head admiringly. “Anyway, Albert’s too cheap to fix it.”

“This is all very entertaining,” Dreiser said sarcastically, “but can I leave now?
I’ve got to take a leak.”

Les ignored him. “So after the police left, I came back here and hid in the shed,
planning to sneak out tonight and borrow the Hummer. I saw this dickhead jimmy the
window and creep in. I was worried about you, so I followed him.”

“Oh, Les.” I felt quite warmly toward him since he’d saved my life. Of course, I realized
a second later, my life wouldn’t have been in danger if Les hadn’t ripped off Patrick
Dreiser. “What are we going to do with”—I lowered my voice—“im-hay?”

“Stop with the pig Latin,” Les said, exasperated. “I can’t stand it when you do that.”

“I’m right here,” Dreiser said. He rolled his eyes. “I can hear every word. Even the
pig Latin ones. I’ll tell you what you’d better do with me, and that’s turn me loose
right now. Otherwise, I’ll slap a lawsuit on you so fast your grandchildren will be
eighty-five by the time you’re out from under it.”

“You broke into our—my—house!” I told him. “You can’t sue me.”

“Wanna bet?” A wide, oily smile cracked his face and made me wonder if he was right.
Hadn’t I read somewhere about a burglar suing the people whose stuff he was stealing
when he broke a leg on their stairs or something?

“I’ll disappear. You call the cops,” Les said to me. “Tell them Dreiser broke in and
you caught him.”

Dreiser laughed again. “Oh, right. Like any cop’s gonna believe Mrs. Pink Marshmallow
here overpowered me.”

I was starting to dislike this guy—again—even though he’d said I was pretty. I turned
my back on him and told Les, “He’ll tell the police you were here. In fact, I’ve got
to tell them you were here or they’ll arrest me for harboring a fugitive. I can’t
go to prison, Les; I’ve got the kids to think about.”

“Okay, then,” Les said decisively. “We’ll lock him in the storage room. Just until
I can get away. Then you can take him to the police and it won’t matter what he tells
them.”

“There are mice in there.”

“All the better.”

Dreiser looked slightly nervous for the first time. “Hey, I wouldn’t really have hurt
her. The knife was just for show. C’mon, Les, we were partners for a long time. You
can’t turn on me like this.”

“It’ll only be for a few hours, Patrick,” Les said. “Until I can get some papers together
and disappear. I’ve got contacts here, people that can get me ID. I can’t leave until
I’ve got them.”

“You mean like a new identity?” I stared at him. Charlie and I had worked a case not
long ago that involved a ring of identity thieves who created new identities for criminals.

Les continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “As soon as I’m on my way out of the country,
Gigi will take you to the police, or let you go, or whatever she wants. For now, get
up.” He gestured with the knife. Les wasn’t very good with knives. The way he hacked
the turkey up on Thanksgiving was a neighborhood joke.

“No.” Dreiser thrust his chin forward mulishly.

“Then we’ll drag you. Gigi, take a foot.”

I was too tired and confused to argue. I grabbed Dreiser’s left foot, and Les put
the knife through a belt loop—making him look like a middle-aged, paunchy pirate—and
grabbed the other one. We yanked. Dreiser slid down the wall and his head banged onto
the floor. “Ow,” he complained.

“You had your chance,” Les said. We dragged him down the hall. It was harder than
I’d have guessed, especially since Dreiser was kicking. It was tough maintaining a
grip on his leg, and one of my fingernails broke when it snagged on his bootlace.
That pissed me off. Manicures weren’t free.

“We need to tape his ankles, too,” Les grunted. He dropped the foot he was holding,
headed into the rec room, and returned seconds later with the duct tape. He wrapped
it several times around Dreiser’s ankles and then kicked open the door to the storage
room.

I stopped him. “Can’t we at least put him in the guest room?” I couldn’t stand the
thought of making anyone sit in the storage area with the mice.