The Brush Off (13 page)

So, imagine what I looked like twelve hours later, and this is the photo Lieutenant Arrogant perused now. “You used to have your hair dyed blond?”

“I am a natural blonde,” I admitted grudgingly. This is not something I like just anyone knowing about, but I was secretly grateful that he’d commented on that instead of the dark circles or crow’s feet.

“That explains a lot.”

“Like what?”

He regarded me for several long moments. “Never mind.”

“Chicken,” I murmured.

He slowly pivoted in the seat and stretched those long, long legs out of the car. He stood, leaving me with an eye-to-waist view of his cowboy belt with a silver buckle and conchos. Did everything about him have to be so male? It hit me like a blast furnace. Suddenly, his face obstructed my view just as it was about to get interesting. He leaned back into the car.

“Just for the record, you weren’t just used and abused, no matter what you may think. When you’ve been used and abused by me,” Scythe warned, those torpedoes firing full force, “I promise, you’ll know it.”

“Y
OU GUYS HAVE SOME MAJOR CHEMISTRY GOING.”

I grimaced. “Like seventh-grade lab all over again—baking soda and vinegar in balloon.
Kaboom!”

Trudy giggled and wiggled in the passenger seat of my truck which we’d picked up after Sherlyn rescued us from the cops in the Illusions parking lot. She’d been late because Daisy Dawn had been fixing the peeling nude on her fingernail. “Sounds fun to me. I guess you’d be the vinegar, and he’d be the baking soda.”

“Why?” I slid her a suspicious glance and reached over to turn JoDee Messina singing (appropriately) “Bye, bye, my baby, bye, bye” down on the radio. I wanted to hear Trudy’s recipe.

“Because you’re sour, and he’s gritty.”

“Oh, Trudy, enough already. Even if I found him irresistible—which is a joke, since he’s as appealing to me as a slab of cold bacon—I’m not his ideal woman. He likes them deaf and dumb in all senses of the word. What are the chances I would ever be that?”

“Ohhhhh,” she moaned like a terrier in heat. “For that man, I’d cut out my tongue, rupture my eardrums, and get a lobotomy.”

“How could anyone who’d make a statement like that be my best friend?”

I glanced askance at her for a moment before letting my gaze lock back onto the two-lane highway. I was headed north on U.S. 281, bound for a little place in the Texas Hill Country called Sisterdale. Zorita lived there, and I hoped to hell I could remember exactly how to get to her odd house on the hill. Zorita (I was never told her last name or if the first name was her real one) had been one of the reasons Ricardo had been so financially successful. It takes money to make money, and Zorita told Ricardo where to put his money to make it multiply. She wasn’t a stockbroker; she wasn’t a financial advisor; Zorita was a psychic. I was probably the only person who knew Ricardo consulted her, and, as usual with my life, it was probably an accident and an unfortunate one at that. I’d been at the salon one day about six years ago, when Zorita called and demanded money immediately. Ricardo was busy, and I wasn’t, so I was dispatched to deliver the greenbacks after swearing never to tell. I hadn’t. After all, whom would I tell that my boss often banked small fortunes on the whims of astrological configurations and visions as interpreted by a woman who read more auras than books? I always thought the people you choose to work for reflect on you. This revelation about a man whose revered business acumen won him dozens of small-business association awards would not reflect well on me, so I kept my mouth shut.

Frankly, it really showed the chaotic state of my mind since Ricardo’s demise that I had forgotten all about Zorita. She was not a person easily forgotten. I was reminded of her during my latest confrontation with Lieutenant Loser. He’d looked at that driver’s license photo, which made me think of my sister who had her weekend ruined by a psychic, which made me think of Ricardo’s fortune-teller. That’s how my mind works mostly—these gazelle-like mental leaps. You never know where those damned things are going. That was why people couldn’t always stick with my train of thought—I was way too far ahead of them.

I could hear Sarcastic Scythe’s answer to that thought.

Right.

Who cares what he’d say, anyway?

So, here we were buzzing up to see a woman who could see the future. Did she know we were coming? I didn’t know much about Zorita’s so-called abilities other than the fact that my buddy credited her with his fortune. Wouldn’t it be convenient if she could see back in time as well as future dollar signs? She could tell us whodunit, and we could take that back to Señor Skeptical, who’d arrest the fiend forthwith. Yeah, right, even if Zorita gave us the goon on a silver platter, Scythe would still need some damned evidence, now, wouldn’t he?

Well, it couldn’t hurt to ask. I’d try. If she was really that good at seeing into tomorrow, couldn’t she just end it all right now for us and tell us whose face she saw behind those iron bars? I felt a shot of hope that Zorita could have us wrap this up in time for me to make my five o’clock highlight who was a really good tipper.

I might have finally broken my promise to Ricardo (what good would the secret do him now?) and told Scythe about Zorita if he hadn’t been such a complete jerk. On top of his chauvinistic remarks, he announced as they left that they were on their way to Ricardo’s million-dollar Dominion manse, and I’d better stay out of their way. If he even smelled (there was that again) a trace of me within a ten-mile radius of the exclusive enclave which was off Interstate 10 just outside the city limits, he would order an APB out on me so fast heads would spin. Oooh, scary. I’d show him. So, with his attitude getting my hackles up, Scythe effectively dried up any more information he might have gotten out of me. I’d smiled sweetly and promised easily, knowing Trudy and I had someplace infinitely more productive to go than Ricardo’s house, which I suspected would be as devoid of clues as a
House Beautiful
feature. The cop had narrowed his arctic blues at my acquiescence but drove off with his gum-smacking partner without saying another word.

“I bet Scythe and Crandall are already there, hoping Ricardo’s sofa will tell them a story, while we’re minutes away from getting the real scoop from his soothsayer,” I mused as I changed lanes to pass a truck and a horse trailer.

“I wouldn’t get so high and mighty yet, because, no matter what Zorita says, I won’t help you keep digging into Ricardo’s murder unless…”

I threw a glance right. Was that my raspberry-lipped Watson delivering an ultimatum? What was it about me that drew out the pugilist in people today?

“Unless what?” I asked after a ten-second pause, which Trudy uncharacteristically refused to fill.

“Unless,” she said, dropping her sparrow soprano to a threatening middle C, “you give me your word you’ll go on a date with Lieutenant Luscious.”

“We’ve been through this.”

“We were interrupted. You didn’t give me your word.”

“That’s easy, since I feel reasonably certain he will never ask me on a date.”

“If somehow he is persuaded to ask you, I want a promise that you will go. With him. Out. Somewhere.” She paused, her shiny, fruity lips spreading in a mischievous grin. “Or
in
somewhere.”

“Ha ha. You oversexed married women have to turn everything into potential nookie.”

“Reyn.” Trudy assumed her lecture tone reserved for times when she was about to quote one of the many women’s magazines she memorized every month. “It’s a fallacy that as a rule married women get more sex than unmarried women. Sex in marriage is only less complicated and more available, and hence only seems more frequent.”

“Where’d you read that? In the latest
Cosmo?”

In that new magazine
YOU!
as a matter of fact.” Trudy’s lower lip pooched out. I’d hurt her feelings. She was always so proud of her newly garnered facts, whatever they may be. I felt a little guilty, if only briefly.

“Well, you can tell
YOU!
that your informal survey shows that if you’ve had sex even one time in the last six months, you have not only had it less complicated and more available but also more
frequently
than your unmarried friend.”

“The article also said that contrary to popular belief, women get just as irritable as men when forced to be celibate for a long period of time.”

“Oh, please. Everyone’s ill temper can be blamed on lack of sex? What man wrote this article?”

“If you’re going to be so hard to get along with, I’m going to need to get you a dildo.”

“Trudy!” I shouted. From the backseat of my crew cab, Beaujolais woke and stretched over the seat to lay her black head on my shoulder. Chardonnay groaned. Cabernet rose, sighed, turned once around, and settled back down. I took one hand off the steering wheel and patted Beau on her sleek black head. “It’s okay, girl. Go back to sleep.” After licking my earlobe, she retreated to her place, where she leaned her head against the window.

“I don’t know why you insist on bringing those damned dogs with you everywhere you go.” Trudy tolerated my Labs, and they ignored her. Most of the time, anyway. I looked in my rearview mirror to see Cab tilt her head that was lying on her paws, open one eye, and glare at Trude.

“I feel guilty when I limit their entire lives to my house and the yard. How would you like to live like that?”

“I wouldn’t mind if I was a
dog,
” Trudy retorted. “You know, this could be another reason you never have a date. The percentage of men who might be attracted to you and
not
repelled by dog slobber is probably lower than the percentage of men merely attracted to you.”

“I wouldn’t want a man who didn’t love my dogs.” The vitamin salesman had a dog—a yappy, pin-headed toy fox terrier—but at least it proved he liked pets. “Listen, Ricardo is more dead than my love life.” I ignored Trudy’s challenging stare. “So, can we just concentrate on finding his killer this week and a date for me next week?”

“Promise?”

“I promise anything just to keep you on the subject at hand.”

“Goody, goody.” She clapped her hands together so enthusiastically that I wondered just how much she’s worked Scythe already. I felt a brief pang of panic at the thought but then brushed it off. After all, Trudy was an eternal optimist. Which was why we made the ideal pair—I was an eternal pessimist. The two of us together were perfectly balanced. Although I have to point out that I consider
pessimism
another word for
realism.
I pressed the volume on the radio back up to one of the Dixie Chicks begging for a cowboy to take her away. Oops, springing into my mind’s eye came the image of Scythe in his way-too-talkative Wranglers. Quickly, I switched the station to one where Faith Hill was whining about her lover putting her through emotional torture.
Ah.
I relaxed. If that didn’t just justify my celibate lifestyle, I didn’t know what did. The only torture my life partners put me through was some occasional bad canine gas, which I seemed to have evoked with the simple thought. Trudy made a gagging noise. I rolled down the two front windows to clear the air.

“You know,” Trudy shouted over the radio and the whistling wind. I braced for the worst, but she surprised me by changing the subject as I’d requested. “We haven’t gotten very far, besides figuring out that Ricardo was meeting on the sly with a prepster in tennis whites at a transvestite club.”

“I think that’s a pretty big clue. It’s more than the police know, anyway,” I added defensively.

Trudy laughed. “You are so competitive, Reyn. You’d think you had something to gain from beating the police on this investigation. But no, you just can’t stand to lose, at anything.”

Sometimes my sweet but dimwitted friend could read me so sharply it hurt. Or maybe I was just so damned easy to read anyone could do it. Ouch.

“It’s not that at all. I owe it to Ricardo.”

“Whatever,” she answered with a knowing smile.

We lapsed into silence for a while as we left the San Antonio city limits, climbing in elevation as the terrain began to change dramatically. San Antonio sits on the cusp of four different topographies. South of downtown was flat, sandy prairie. The farther east you went from the Bexar County Courthouse, the more rich red-clay farmland you’d find. Westward travelers on Highway 90 toward the Mexican border encountered limestone-imbedded mesquite that eventually gave way to desert, and due north, the direction we were headed, became a hilly limestone, cedar-dotted, aqua-crystal-stream-lined paradise known as the Texas Hill Country.

Being 180 miles from the Gulf Coast and the center of all these geographic patterns made our weather changeable, to say the least. Winters could be hot and humid one day and ass-chilling cold the next. One esteemed politician who was running for governor in the nineties likened Texas’s weather to rape, recommending that if people didn’t like it, they might as well sit back and enjoy it. Charming, huh? Well, he didn’t win the governor’s race, if that is any consolation. And, though his comment was in extremely bad taste, he was right about the weather in the Lone Star State.

Still, most of us sit back and
complain
about it, instead of enjoying it.

The four-lane highway narrowed to two, and I had to slam on my brakes suddenly to avoid the ten-point white-tail buck that picked that moment to visit the ranch across the street. My bumper missed him by inches. The girls were thrown into a whining, scuffling, growling heap on the floorboard. I’d glanced back to make sure they didn’t need help untangling their legs, when Trudy screamed. I looked up and swerved, barely missing an 18-wheeler that had drifted a few feet across the solid yellow lines into my oncoming lane. The girls were left to themselves as I waited for my blood pressure to return to normal. Trudy’s knuckles, which had wrapped around the grab bar at the dashboard in front of her, had just begun to look flesh-colored again, when a big black cloud came out of nowhere and dumped grape-size raindrops on our front windshield. Just as I began to wonder if nature weren’t conspiring against us, I recognized the small clearing off to the right that was Zorita’s driveway. I cranked the wheel, and the truck bounced down the gravel road into a patch of cedar trees, unseating the grumbling dogs yet again.