Deadly Gamble (38 page)

He simply disappeared.

And I knew I would never see him again.

“I forgive you,” I whispered.

Tucker was on his cell phone, calling the cops, but he rubbed my back with one hand while he spoke. Geoff turned his head and lay there, staring at me with a blank focus that froze my blood.

“Mess with me,” I said, “and see where it gets you.”

J
olie and Greer arrived at the apartment at the same time as Andy Crowley and the usual crew of uniforms and crime scene techs. Greer had a fresh cast on her left arm, and deep shadows lay like swipes of soot under her haunted eyes.

I gasped. Forgot, for the moment, how close I'd come to being dissected on my living room floor.

“DidAlex do that?” I demanded, pointing at Greer's cast.

She bit her lower lip, shook her head and stared at Geoff, lying inert on the floor, handcuffed. Her mouth moved, but she seemed to have lost the use of her vocal chords.

I could identify.

“Christ,” Jolie whispered.

“Far from it,” I replied.

“What happened this time?” Crowley wanted to know.

I glanced at Tucker, hoping he'd explain, but it wasn't his story to tell, it was mine.

I started with the coffee, and how I got sleepy after drinking it.

Crowley dispatched one of the crime scene techs to collect my java supply, along with the things I'd stirred in.

I told the gathering how I'd awakened, put my feet on the floor and been grabbed around the ankles.

A tic moved under Crowley's right eye. He'd been a kid once, unlikely as it seemed, and probably remembered his own version of the old monster-hiding-under-the-bed routine. Or maybe he was just impatient, wanting me to get on with it.

I related the rest of the tale, leaving out the part about Nick.

Two officers hoisted Geoff to his feet and ushered him out of my apartment, none too soon as far as I was concerned.

Everyone watched him go but Tucker and me; we were looking at each other.

“There's a hole under your bed?” Jolie said, breaking the difficult silence.

For a moment, I was confused. How had she known that?

I'd included the detail in my horror story, of course.

I nodded numbly.

We all trooped into the bedroom, and Tucker and a couple of the cops pushed the bed to one side. Sure enough, the vent I'd never known was there, gaped in the floor. It was two feet square, obviously big enough for a full-grown man to climb through, a straight shot to Bert's prized Tombstone bar.

There's a way into your apartment.

I don't need a key.

“You'll want to plug that right up,” one of the younger cops said, sagely chipper.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Jolie replied.

I gave her a look.
The police are our friends
.

Her eyes were round with residual fear as the gravity of what I'd so narrowly escaped dawned on her.

“You have
definitely
gotta move,” she said. “Soon.”

I made one of those decisions that just pop into a person's brain and right out of their mouth, unpremeditated and fully formed. “I'm going to use this place as an office,” I announced, “and reopen the bar as soon as I can score a liquor license.”

“You're going to run a bar?” Greer asked.

“An office for what?” Jolie said, at the same time.

I sorted the jumble of words into two sensible sentences.

A look passed between Tucker and me.

“Yes, Greer,” I said, “I'm going to open a bar. I'll call it ‘Mojo's.' And I'll need an office for Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks.”

“Sheepshanks—?” Crowley began.

“Don't ask,” Tucker counseled.

“I like it,” Jolie beamed.

“You're both nuts,” Greer said. “Mojo, you're coming to live with me. You can stay in the guesthouse until you find something decent.”

“Alex would love that,” I pointed out.

I was hoping Tucker would jump in and invite me to shack up, which was crazy, because if he had, I'd have refused. It was too early for that, and things were still too complicated between us.

He didn't offer, so it was a moot point.

And it only hurt a little.

“Alex is gone,” Greer said woodenly. “He took his things and left.”

The guesthouse began to seem like a possibility.

“A
NY LUCK
finding Gillian?” I asked Tucker, an hour later, when he and I were standing in my kitchen. The cops were gone by then, Crowley included, and Jolie and Greer were in the living room, poking through the boxes Rotika had given me a century before, at Sunset Villa.

Tucker shook his head, leaning against the kitchen counter. “It doesn't look good, babe. Somebody found a ballet slipper a mile from the dance school, in a vacant lot. Gillian's name's written inside.”

I moved close, slid my arms around his waist. “Don't give up, Tucker. Maybe she's still—”

Tucker's jaw tightened, but he rested his hands on my hips. “I've got to get back,” he said.

I nodded, rested my forehead against his chin for a moment. “Thanks for saving me from the bad guy,” I murmured.

“I think I had a little help,” he said. He curved an index finger under my chin and lifted, and I looked up at him. Nodded.

“Nick came through in the crunch,” I told him.

“You miss him?” Tucker asked gently.

I thought for a moment. “Yeah,” I answered.

He kissed the tip of my nose. “That's okay,” he said. “You are going to tell me what really happened, aren't you? When things settle down and we have time to talk?”

I nodded again.

“You'll go home with your sisters? I want you to promise me you will, Mojo, because I'm not going to be able to concentrate if you don't.”

“I promise,” I said. “But it's only temporary, Tuck. I need my own place.”

“Fair enough,” he replied. He kissed me again, this time on the lips, and I felt the familiar stir. “Gotta go,” he said.

I walked him through the living room, past Jolie and Greer, who were kneeling on the floor, absorbed in what was left of Lillian's life and history. When I came back, sans Tucker, Greer looked up at me and smiled sadly.

“I could really use a cup of tea,” she said. “Too bad the police took all your groceries away, in case that maniac poisoned them with something.”

I plunked down on the couch. “What happened to your arm, Greer?” I asked. “And when did Alex leave?”

Greer and Jolie exchanged looks.

“Spill it,” I said.

“We stopped to buy gas on our way over here,” Jolie explained. “I was inside, getting us some coffee, and Greer was at the gas pump. This guy screeches up in an old van and grabs her—tries to throw her into the back of his rig.”

I was sitting up straight by then. “Can you describe him, Greer? Did you get a license plate number?”

“I've been over all that with the police,” Greer said, her voice thin with remembered fear. “They met Jolie and me at the emergency room. That's why it took us so long to get here.” She paused, bit her lower lip. “I've never seen the man before, and the license plate was covered.”

“Thank God you got away,” I breathed.

“I had some help from Jolie,” Greer answered. “She came running out of the convenience store and poured hot coffee down his back. He yelped and let me go. The police are checking hospitals and walk-in clinics for patients with scalds.”

“He let her go,” Jolie clarified, “but not before he snapped her arm like a chicken bone.”

I winced.

“Do you have any idea what the attack was about?” I asked gently. Greer was clearly fragile, and I didn't want to push her too hard. “Was it random?”

Greer shook her head. “I think Alex paid him to kill me,” she said. A tear slipped, unnoticed, down her right cheek. “God, Mojo, you can't imagine how scared I was.”

“I think she can,” Jolie told her quietly. “Her psycho brother was going to filet her like a side of beef, right here in this living room.”

Greer's gaze found its way to me, unsteady and a little blank. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

“We know what happened with Geoff,” Jolie said, watching me. “Tell us about last night.”

I described my graveyard adventure.

“Why would you go to the cemetery in your bathrobe?” Greer asked, when I'd shared every heart-stopping detail.

“She really does need tea,” I told Jolie.

“She needs
whiskey,
” Jolie replied.

“I want to go home,” Greer said.

Jolie and I nodded. I packed a trash bag, and Jolie and I loaded Lillian's boxes into the back of her Pathfinder while Greer sat in docile silence in the front passenger seat.

“I am really worried about her,” Jolie confided, after I'd locked the apartment and joined her in the parking lot. “And not just because of the broken arm.”

I nodded. “Do you think the guy with the van was really working for Alex? He's three kinds of a bastard, but I can't imagine him siccing somebody like that on Greer.”

“I don't know,” Jolie said. “Maybe it was connected to the blackmail.”

“Did she tell you anything more about that?”

Jolie shook her head. Looked up at the apartment, and shuddered visibly. “Let's get out of here,” she said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied.

We stopped off at a supermarket on the way back to Greer's and made her go inside with us, so we could run interference if another sicko came out of the woodwork and tried to nab her.

The three of us stocked up on wine, French bread, various cheeses and every other decadent thing we could think of, and then went on to Pennington Palace.

As promised, Alex had vacated the premises.

His car was gone.

Most of his clothes were gone.

His Rolex was gone.

Fine by me.

I stashed my trash bag in the guesthouse, which was half the size of the one at Clive and Barbara Larimer's place, but still equipped with a plasma TV and all the modern kitchen appliances. There was even an alarm system, and I made a mental note to change the code and check under the bed for a hole in the floor.

“We forgot to get coffee,” Jolie told me when I entered the kitchen via the patio. Greer was at the table in the breakfast nook, bathed in sunlight. She looked so alone, even with Jolie and me right there.

“I cannot function,” I said, “without coffee. I'll go get some, and you look after Greer.”

Jolie nodded and handed over her car keys. “Drive carefully,” she said. “I'm still making payments.”

I grinned. “Careful,” I said, “is my middle name.”

“Like hell,” Jolie retorted, but she was grinning.

I'd picked up two cans of java and all the stuff that makes it palatable, and I was headed back to Greer's when suddenly I got that tingly feeling, and the little hairs stood up on my arms and legs.

Somebody was in the car.

Besides me.

Impossible.
Like any good paranoid, I'd checked for stowaways when I put the coffee in the backseat. Thanks to Heather, Geoff and Barbara Larimer, I was in a semipermanent state of mistrust.

Still, the air felt almost electrified.

I risked a glance into the rearview mirror, gasped and bumped off the road, onto the shoulder, coming to a jostling stop. The driver of a blue Escalade honked furiously as he/she/it roared by, narrowly missing my back bumper.

I turned in the seat, my heart pounding.

My passenger was about seven years old.

She wore a tutu, leotard, tights, all pink, and one ballet slipper.

“Gillian?” I asked.

Her gaze sought mine, landed.

Ice formed in my veins.

She nodded.

“Please tell me you're not—”

A tear trickled through the grime smudging her face. I noticed the grass stains on the knees of her tights, the rip in one side of her tutu.

“Can you talk?” I scrabbled for my cell phone, remembered I'd left it at the apartment, plugged into the charger.

Gillian said nothing, but her eyes were round and eloquent, and their message was clear.

Help me.

She was dead.

Tucker and the others hadn't found her in time.

How
could
I help her?

I wanted to climb into the backseat and gather her into my arms, tell her everything would be all right, but I sensed that she didn't want to be touched.

“Nick?” I asked hopefully, looking around the interior of Jolie's Pathfinder.