Crazy for You (25 page)

“Well, I told Labeck, but he happens to agree with you. He thinks I’m way off base.”

“So you’ve been in contact with him?”

I shrugged. I wanted to say that was none of
his
business.

“You know, Mazie, I think I’m getting into this playing-detective thing. Tell you what. I’m going to run upstairs, plug a cross-referencing search into my computer, and see what comes up on Doctor Petrov. Better safe than sorry, right?”

“Look up Rhonda, too, could you?”

He did the deep, sucking inhale of a man driven to the limits of his self-control by an unreasonable woman, then exhaled. “All right,” he said grudgingly. “It’ll take a couple minutes to bring up the program. You stay here and eat, doctor’s orders. You’re far too thin.”

He hurried out. I stood there eyeing the PBJ. It looked delicious. I tore off a big chunk, but then discovered that my mouth had gone dry and there was no way I was going to be able to choke it down. I spat out the bite, chucked the whole sandwich in the wastebasket and covered it up with a fistful of napkins.

The hairs on the back of my neck were doing the heebie-jeebie prickle, and the feeling that I had to get out of here was so strong that I snatched up my things, scurried out into Jared’s office, and beelined for the door.

Then I came to a screeching halt. This was stupid! Why was I being so paranoid? Jared was being perfectly polite; in fact, he was being a lot nicer than I deserved after the way I’d water-bombed him about Petrov. And he
was
looking up the Rhonda information, right? If I left now, I wouldn’t get to hear it. And I wanted to hear it, wanted very badly to hear Dr. Dreamboat admit that yes, there
did
seem to be a connection between Rhonda, Petrov, and Tippi Lennox.

Torn between my need for vindication and my screaming meemies, I wandered over to the case displaying the lynx, a superb specimen with speckled golden eyes and fur that begged to be touched. Had it come from an interior decorator who threw in a taxidermied animal with every recliner purchase, or had Mr. Thin-out-the-herd shot the lynx himself? And what kind of person would kill such a gorgeous creature, anyway?

The door opened and Jared returned, smiling. “Started the search program,” he said. “It’ll take a few minutes before we have any results.” He came over and stood next to me. “I see you’ve met Kitty.”

“Kitty? Is it a female?”

“Yup. A beauty, isn’t she?”

“Better looking when she was alive, though.”

He glanced down at me. “She reminds me of you, Mazie. Soft and beautiful, a little wild …”

Uh-oh. This was kind of weird. One minute we were discussing a possibly homicidal psychopath, and the next we were in flirty fandango mode. Jared wrapped an arm around my waist and drew me toward him, his other hand dipping into his pants pocket.

If he was fishing around for a Ready Eddy in that pocket, he was going to get a rude shock. Because the only use Dr. Dreamboat was going to have for condoms tonight was drawing faces on them and using them as finger puppets.

He drew me closer. The lids lowered over the deep blue eyes. “Mazie, you have no idea how completely smitten I am with you.” His voice was a low, seductive murmur,
but for some reason—maybe because I was giddy from lack of sleep—I thought of Pepé Le Pew, the over-amorous cartoon skunk who was always trying to seduce Penelope Pussycat.
I am gompleetely smeeten wiz you, poozycat. Your eyes, your leeps…

I giggled, quickly trying to disguise it as a cough.

“Ever since I’ve met you—”

Avair seenze I ’av met you…

No use; a snorting guffaw burst out.

Jared stared at me, eyes going cold. “You find me amusing?” His hold on my waist tightened.

“No, I—will you please take your hands off me?”

He didn’t; his hold tightened.

A buzzer sounded, a long, jarring
brazzz
that made both of us jump.

“Goddammit!” All traces of Pepé Le Pew vanishing, he released me, stomped over to the console phone on his desk, and jabbed the talk button. “What?” he snarled.

A male voice came over the intercom, bored but official-sounding. “I got a vehicle out here parked in the handicapped zone without a disabled parking permit. License plate 402-JPK.”

“That’s not my vehicle,” Kennison snapped.

“It’s mine,” I said, snatching up my coat and purse.

“Mazie,” Kennison said. “Wait—”

Ignoring him, I breezed out of the room, levitated up the stairs, and bashed out the front door. I took a deep, invigorating breath of cold, fresh air.

A police cruiser was parked next to my car and a large, grumpy-looking cop was standing with his foot on my bumper, writing out a ticket. He looked up as I approached.

“Something wrong with your legs, lady?” he growled.

“What? No.”

“You got a heart condition?”

“No.”

“So why’s an able-bodied person like you hogging a handicapped zone?”

I gestured around the empty lot and said in a small voice, “It’s after hours?”

“So that’s okay, huh? What if there was an emergency and some poor cripple
needed a doctor?”

I tried to imagine the kind of emergency Dr. Dreamboat would be forced to handle. A pesky liver spot that needed lasering off?

“It’s lazy, selfish persons like you who are ruining this country,” scolded the cop, taking a deep breath, obviously primed to go into full lecture mode.

Maybe I could head him off at the pass. “You’re right, Officer,” I cut in, frenziedly rummaging through my purse. “It
was
selfish of me.” My hand closed around a stack of Hottie Latte coupons. The coupons for a free cappuccino were Juju’s scheme for drumming up business. Each employee had gotten two dozen coupons, with orders to spread them around our home neighborhoods. I waved the sheaf of coupons at Officer Grumpy.

“What’s that?” he said, sounding suspicious.

“It’s for free coffees at Hottie Latte. We have doughnuts, too.”

“That the place with the naked waitresses?”

“We model lingerie.”

“My Aunt Fanny. This better not be a bribe, lady.”

“Of course not. Just our way of supporting our men in blue.”

He thrust the ticket at me. I thrust the coupons at him.

Somehow the parking ticket found its way back into the cop’s ticket book. Stuffing the coupons into his parka pocket, the officer told me to have a good night, went back to his car, and pulled away. Even his car sounded grumpy.

I gazed at the clinic door. I should go back, see what Kennison’s computer search had turned up. But now that I was outside, it suddenly didn’t seem so urgent after all. I crawled into Pig, locked the door, and felt an enormous wave of relief wash over me as I realized that there was no way I was going back in that building tonight.

Because somewhere along the way tonight, Dr. Dreamboat had morphed into Dr. Nightmare.

Chapter Twenty-nine

You can’t get a man with a gun. So try a flying tackle.

—Maguire’s Maxims

Buddwinkel’s Bungalows was a popular stopover for travelers in the 1930s and ’40s, back in the days when it lay along the most direct route between Chicago and Minneapolis. The bungalows were one-room cabins set on a rise above Lake Waupoose, a small, glacial lake on the border of state forestland. But a new interstate highway was built in the 1960s, bypassing the lake and spelling disaster for Buddwinkel’s. The tourists stopped coming and the bungalows went bust. For years, the place sat neglected, its cabins collapsing, its boat dock sinking into the lake, it parking lot overgrown with weeds, until the Wisconsin Paintball Association bought the entire forty-acre site for combat games.

Buddwinkel’s was hard to find if you weren’t sure where to look. Despite Labeck’s directions, I managed to take two wrong turns and get lost on the winding backcountry roads before I finally stumbled across the paintball grounds.

The predicted storm had roared in on schedule and snow was falling fast and thick as I drove into the parking lot. A guy wearing an orange snowmobile suit was directing traffic. He pointed me to a corner of the lot and I wrangled a space between two vans.

I left my purse in the car, figuring I wouldn’t be here long enough to need it. I was only putting in a token appearance at the tournament to placate Rico and Eddie, then I’d pick up Labeck and we’d be on our way to Quail Hollow. As I made my way toward the motel office, which was now the paintball association headquarters, Eddie Arguello jogged up to me. He was wearing a green camo vest over a black snowmobile suit and heavy boots.

His face split into a grin. “Maze, you made it!”

“Do you think they’ll cancel?” The snow was falling at a thumping rate, propelled
by a strong northwest wind.

“You kiddin’? Snow makes it more fun. Come on, meet the team.”

“Is Labeck here?” I asked.

“He’s holed up in Gozzy’s cabin.”

“Gozzy?”

“Romy Gozchika. The guy directing traffic. Everyone calls him Gozzy. I told you about him. He’s the caretaker here—plows the lot, does the upkeep in exchange for living in one of the old bungalows. Labeck’s paying him to let him hide out in his cabin.”

“Do you trust this Gozzy?”

Eddie shrugged. “The guy’s elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top, know what I mean? He’s always buzzed on meth, and I think he’d sell his own granny for a can of Miller, so it’s a good thing Labeck’s getting out of here.”

I was about to ask Eddie how to get to Labeck’s cabin when Rico shambled out of a nearby building, followed by a herd of teammates. He gave an exuberant whoop when he saw me, hugged me, and introduced me to his team, the Mojos. All wore olive camouflage vests and had comic-book names like Thor or Hulk or Wolverine. Most were kids around Rico and Eddie’s age, but Captain America had gray hair, and Hulk was forty if he was a day. Eddie’s paintball name, I discovered, was the Silver Surfer. Rico’s was The Punisher.

“Where’s Spawn?” Eddie asked.

Rico looked worried. “He’s late.”

“The Cobras are gearing up,” Batman said. “We better get ready.”

I assumed the Cobras were the team across the parking lot, dressed head to toe in camo brown. They’d arrived in a school bus and were standing behind it, sheltering from the wind as they inspected their weapons and put on their helmets.

“How does this tournament thing work?” I asked, clapping my gloved hands like seal flippers to keep the blood circulating.

Rico was checking his paint gun. He gestured toward a nearby scraggle of pines and oaks. “That’s our playing field, okay? Our enemy is the blues.”

“I thought they were the Cobras.”

Eddie pointed to his helmet, striped with red fluorescent tape. “We’re red, the
Cobras are blue,” he explained. “The tape makes it easier for the marshals to tell who’s who, because everybody looks alike out in the woods. We already won the coin toss, so we opted to have our base set up here on this side. The blues’ HQ is half a mile away on the opposite side of the woods. Whoever brings the other team’s stick back to their base first wins.”

“It sounds like Capture the Flag,” I said.

“Right. Except it ain’t a flag.” Eddie took a glow stick out of his pocket, a tube about the size of an electric toothbrush, and showed it to me.

“You get points for shooting the enemy,” Rico explained. “If you get shot in the torso or head, you’re dead.”

“Can you come back to life?”

“No resurrection. Once you’re dead, you got to go sit in the stands.”

Not a very pleasant version of the afterlife. “Don’t people cheat?” I asked.

The Mojos roared with laughter.

“Yeah, the Cobras cheat like shit,” Eddie said. “But so do we.”

A warning whistle blew. The Mojos all picked up their weapons, checked their ammo, and donned their helmets. Instantly, all traces of personality vanished. They looked like riot police, faceless and menacing.

“Good luck,” I called as they trooped off. I hurried over to the spectator area, a row of wooden bleachers at the south end of the field. A portable jumbotron screen was set up to one side of the stands, presumably hooked up to videocams in the woods, so spectators could view what was happening on the field.

As soon as the game started, I planned to sneak away to find Labeck. I sat there for what seemed like ages, stamping my feet on the bleacher floor and whacking my arms against my sides to keep the circulation going. What were they waiting for—the Air Force flyby?

The longer I sat there, the stronger the sensation grew that I was being watched. Craning my neck, I let my eyes rove over the spectators. Everyone looked nearly identical, dressed in dark hooded parkas, their faces mere blobs in the falling snow.

I thought of the silver car I’d noticed when I’d left the café today. It had kept four or five lengths back, but every now and then I’d glance in the mirror and spot it again.
When I pulled onto the freeway, it had vanished in traffic and I’d dismissed it from my mind. But as I blundered along the backcountry roads, I thought I glimpsed a silver car about a half mile behind. Coincidence, I tried to assure myself. There were millions of silver cars out there. Anyway, the pelting snow made it hard to distinguish car colors; I could have been mistaken.

Eddie came tearing off the field. He clumped up through the bleachers, found me, ripped off his helmet, and panted, “Maze—you got to come in the game.”

I gaped at him, wondering whether chemicals were leaking out of his helmet into his brain.

“Spawn just called. He was in a car accident. He’s at the hospital, he’s got broken ribs. He tried to sneak out, but they caught him and strapped him to a bed.”

“What kind of sissy doesn’t show up just because he’s strapped to a bed?” I said.

“My point exactly,” Eddie said, my sarcasm missing him by a mile. “So the marshals say we forfeit the game, because there’s got to be exactly ten players on a team, except it turns out the Cobras are short a man, too. So both sides now got five minutes to come up with replacements.”

“
Man
, Eddie. You said you’re short a
man
.” I gestured toward the crowd. “There’s men all over the place. Just pick and point.”