Блейз Клемент - Raining Cat Sitters And Dogs

Without waiting for a response, she swished away to dispense coffee to other caffeine-deprived people. I felt miserable. If Judy knew I was the person who had delivered the million dollars to Victor’s kidnappers, she wouldn’t see me as a friend anymore. She’d think of me as a person she didn’t know very well, somebody who had weird secrets about weird things done in the middle of the night. If my role in the ransom payment ever came out, everybody I knew would look at me in a different way.

They might even look at me the same way I was looking at Harry Henry, as somebody involved in Victor’s kidnapping. Just thinking that made me feel as if I were wandering in a maze. The Harry I’d always known wouldn’t have had anything to do with kidnapping.

Judy brought my breakfast, seemed about to say something, decided not to, and left me alone with my dark thoughts.

One idea lay like a lion stretched on a rock in the sun, lazily swishing its tail while it waited for me to draw close enough to leap on me. I had to face the possibility that if Harry had anything to do with Victor’s kidnapping, it would have been with Maureen’s knowledge and consent. Harry not only had a history of letting Maureen use him, but I was positive he was currently involved with her. As in being her lover, which can make a man do all kinds of things he might not otherwise do. Harry had always been a fool when it came to Maureen. If she’d asked him for help, he would have helped her.

But if they were involved in the kidnapping, that meant they also had something to do with Victor’s murder, and I couldn’t believe that of either of them.

Which made me drop to the less onerous but more likely possibility that neither of them had been involved in the kidnapping, but that Maureen had leaped at the chance to get rid of Victor and keep his money. If she had wanted to leave him anyway, she might have seen his kidnapping as the best thing that ever happened to her. If he were returned, she’d be in the same spot she’d been before, a wife with a rich husband and a poor lover.

Maybe when she’d got the call from his kidnappers she had decided to do the thing that would make them kill Victor. They had told her not to report that Victor was gone, and the first thing she’d done was run to me. Then after I’d delivered the ransom money for her, she’d put on a distraught wife act and called a press conference to tell the world he’d been kidnapped. Even as she begged for Victor’s release, she’d known her act might get him killed. And all the time, Harry may have known about her plan.

If all that were true, anything I did now would only help her cause. If I confessed to the investigators that I had been the person who carried the duff el bag full of money to the gazebo, it would simply corroborate that Maureen had paid the kidnappers. It would also make me look like sixteen kinds of an idiot. Which I probably was. The two people I had always believed were dumber than a sack of dirt may have played a clever trick on smart me. They both knew me as well as I knew them, and they had known how to push my loyalty buttons.

On the other hand, I didn’t have a shred of proof that any of my dark suspicions were true. Once again, I was thrown back to the bottom line: Maureen had done nothing illegal when she chose to pay off Victor’s kidnappers. I had done nothing illegal when I carried the money for her to the gazebo. Even Maureen’s press conference to reveal that Victor had been kidnapped hadn’t been illegal. Stupid, maybe, if she wanted Victor returned alive. Disloyal and unconscionable if she didn’t, but not illegal.

The only truly unlawful things had been done by Victor’s kidnappers—not Maureen, not Harry Henry, and not me.

Even so, the whole thing was ugly, and I wished I didn’t even know about it. The fact that I not only knew about it, but was involved in it, made me so disgusted with myself that I didn’t linger for another cup of coffee. I left money for Judy and went out without saying goodbye.

Like a homing pigeon, I sped south on Midnight Pass Road and made a right turn onto my lane where a discreet sign warns DEAD END, PRIVATE ROAD. I felt better just to be so close to home. I wanted to talk to Michael and try to get my life back on an even keel. Slowing so as not to freak out the parakeets in the oak trees, I began to relax as I looked out at the sun-spangled Gulf. Distant sailboats made white triangles against the blue horizon, and I could make out the white track of a water skier behind a speedboat.

Motion in the rearview mirror caught my eye, and my heart began to leap like a trapped beast when I saw still another dark sedan in the lane behind me.

Half the people in the world drive dark sedans, but they don’t drive down private lanes unless they have reason to go to the house at the end of the lane. Cops drive unmarked sedans. If the car behind me was an unmarked cop’s car, that could only mean that somebody from SIB was coming to notify Michael that something had happened to Paco.

21

It’s funny how the world goes gray when you’re faced with something you’ve always feared, as if a layer of cheesecloth settles over all the color and dulls it. I pulled into the carport next to Paco’s truck and forced myself to open my door and slide out. If what I feared was true, I did not think I could bear it. Michael’s car was gone, which was either good or bad. Good that he wouldn’t be there to hear the news that would break his heart, bad that I would have to be the one who ultimately told him.

The sedan crawled to a stop on the shelled parking area, and the driver turned his head and looked squarely at me.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I half turned to run away. It wasn’t a deputy from SIB, it was Jaz’s stepfather.

Throwing his door open, he lunged from the car. The gray screen that had lowered over my vision dissolved, so I saw him silhouetted against a sky blazed by a feral sun.

With bald accusation, he said, “Where’s the girl?”

I took a half step backward toward the stairs to my apartment and played ignorant.

“What girl?”

He moved forward, but not just a half step. He was coming at me, and fast. “My stepdaughter! Is she here?”

There are times when I feel strong as a jungle tiger. This wasn’t one of them. Pure and simple, I was afraid of the man. Afraid of his size. Afraid of the gun I knew he wore under his left arm.

Grabbing the remote from my shorts pocket to open my hurricane shutters, I turned and ran up my stairs.

As the shutters began their upward glide, he thundered to a huffing stop at the bottom step. Red faced, he yelled, “You don’t know what you’re involved in, lady.”

I hate it when a sleazeball calls me lady. Makes me want to kick him where it would do the most good.

I looked over the railing and said, “I’m giving you two seconds to get in your car and leave.”

I tried to make that sound like “otherwise I’ll call down a rain of fire on your head,” but I didn’t really have an otherwise.

He must have known it, because he started up the stairs, moving with surprising speed for a man his size. My shutters made it to the top and clicked home, but I was trapped. He was halfway up the steps, and even if I pushed through my french doors and ran inside my apartment, he could come after me before I could lower the shutters again.

As he climbed higher, I did the only thing I could do. I ran to the top of the stairs, planted my foot in the middle of his chest, and pushed. Surprised and knocked off balance, he flailed the air while I ran to my door. He grabbed for the banister, missed it, and stumbled awkwardly to the bottom step just as Michael’s car jerked to a stop downstairs.

Michael slammed out of his car, and I could tell from the expression on his face that he had seen me kick the man. That’s all he needed to go into white-hot fury.