Али Брэндон - Double Booked For Death

“Good morning,” he greeted her, and then gave an approving nod. “I heard about the hat from Jake. I am glad to see you found an appropriate outfit to go with it. I predict you will be the hit of the memorial service.”

“That wasn’t exactly my intent, but thank you,” Darla said a bit sourly as she flipped the sign to “Open.”

She was dressed for the memorial service in a basic black wrap dress, which had already seen funeral duty a time or two since its purchase. She’d dragged it from the back of her closet last night, along with a lacy black shawl that she’d tossed over one shoulder. With her cape of auburn hair twisted into a neat bun at the nape of her neck and the hat pinned on at a casual angle, she had been pleasantly surprised at the stylish results. Of course, it was the hat that made the difference. Maybe she’d been missing something all these years, limiting her headgear to ball caps and those knit toboggan thingies, she now told herself as she bagged it up again for the car ride.

Jake ostentatiously cleared her throat. “Hey, what about me?” she demanded. “And here I have that whole Kato vibe going.”

Darla grinned at her friend. In her black pantsuit with a tightly cinched jacket waist, and her curly hair neatly tucked under a driver’s cap, Jake did rather resemble the Green Hornet’s sidekick . . . except, of course, that she was female, Caucasian, and a good six inches taller than the late Bruce Lee.

“I think you look like you could kick some serious butt,” she told the ex-cop. To James, she added, “Thanks for running the place alone for a few hours. Since you’ll be stuck here for lunch, feel free to have the deli deliver you something, and tell them put it on my charge card.”

“I shall do so. And I expect a full report upon your return.”

She and Jake had started for the door, when the other woman paused. “Since I’ll be sitting around for a while, you think I can borrow something to read?”

“Sure.” Darla smiled and reached for a book off the stack of Haunted High novels and handed it over. “This seems appropriate.”

Jake took it and smiled a little, too, as she tucked it into the big hobo bag she carried. “Guess I should go ahead and read it, since the whole rest of the world already has.”

They walked to the garage in near silence. For once, Darla didn’t even make her usual half-serious protests about having to hoof it everywhere. Instead, she mulled over how best to approach the matter of the shootings with Jake. By the time she’d retrieved Maybelle from her slot and driven down the ramp to pick up her friend, she had decided that a direct approach was the best.

Jake, however, beat her to it.

“Okay, kid, spill it,” the woman demanded once she’d buckled herself in and they pulled out from the garage. “You’ve been acting odd ever since yesterday and something tells me it’s not because you’re eaten up with grief over Valerie Baylor.”

“You’re right.”

Darla glanced Jake’s way. The woman had pulled out her mirrored sunglasses and slid them into place, so that Darla couldn’t read her eyes. Which, in a way, made it easier. Taking a deep breath, she blurted, “What’s the story behind you shooting that guy in the parking garage?”

“What guy?” Jake swiveled around in her seat for a swift look back at where they’d just left. “What in the hell are you talking about, kid? I don’t even have my service revolver on me.”

Then Darla saw realization dawn on the woman’s face before her features hardened into an unreadable expression beneath the mirrored lenses. “Oh, yeah, the parking garage. So, where did you hear that story? Was James talking out of school?”

“No, he didn’t say a word. I searched your name on the Internet and found an article mentioning it.”

“You Googled me?”

Jake’s voice hit a high pitch that Darla had never heard out of her before. “What in the hell did you do that for? Who do you think I am, some loser you met on an online dating site?”

They had stopped for a red light. A bit defensively, Darla turned to meet her gaze.

“Okay, maybe it was a crappy thing to do,” she admitted, “but I was getting concerned that you kept hearing footsteps in the night, and we never found anyone in the store. So I went online. I started by looking up poltergeists, and it ended with looking up you. I found the article about how you got shot trying to arrest a suspect. It all seemed pretty straightforward, and I decided I was worried for nothing. And then I stumbled across that story about the guy in the garage.”

Jake began to sputter in outrage, but Darla held her ground. “I mean, I thought we were gun-happy in Texas, but finding out about your shooting two guys in two months was kind of scary.”

Before Jake could respond, a car behind them blared its horn. Darla looked up to see the light had changed back to green. She threw Maybelle into gear and hit the gas, wishing she could leave behind this awkward conversation as well.

If only Jake had let her ease into the subject instead of forcing her to leap right in, she thought in annoyance, her grip on the steering wheel tightening. Maybe she should swing back around and drop Jake back at the building, because it looked like her fear of spending the day stuck in the same car with an angry ex-cop was justified.

When she glanced over at Jake again, however, she was surprised to see that the woman was smiling. To be sure, her expression held more than a note of irony, but it was better than the outrage Darla had expected.

“Okay, kid, why don’t we clear the air a little?”

“Works for me,” Darla agreed in relief, deciding she could risk continuing toward the expressway, as planned, rather than turning back around and heading home again. That was, assuming that the shooting story could be explained away in a rational fashion.

She looked over again in time to see Jake’s smile slip just a little.

“Now, as far as the guy in the garage, your news story was right, to a point,” she began. “I did shoot him, but the bastard damn well deserved it. No, no, not this lane . . . move over to the left!” she loudly interrupted herself and made wild gestures as a four-door whose main color was primer abruptly swerved into their lane. Darla hit the horn but held her ground—years of negotiating Dallas rush hours had prepped her for New York City driving—and reclaimed her spot.

Crisis averted, Jake went on in a milder tone, “It happened just a few days after I’d been discharged from the hospital. Ma had driven all the way up from Florida to stay with me until I could get around on my own. So here we were in this parking garage, trying to find where she’d left her car—me in a wheelchair, and my seventy-year-old mother pushing me. And then some punk leaps out from behind a van waving a knife and demanding our money.”

Darla gasped as Jake continued, “Of course, being the good Jersey girl she is, Ma wasn’t going to take crap off of anyone. So before I could say anything, she jumps in front of the wheelchair and yells at the guy, You stay the hell away from my little girl .”

Jake’s smile grew grimmer. “Then he starts cursing at her and acting like he’s going to cut her, and she’s yelling at him that he’d better pray his mother doesn’t find out what he’s doing. Meanwhile, I’m stuck in my wheelchair yelling at Ma to get behind me, and yelling at the punk to put down his knife because he’s under arrest, and neither one is listening to me. So, I pulled out my piece, grabbed Ma and dragged her into my lap, and then blew off the punk’s little toe, more to shut him up than anything else.”

“Wow,” was Darla’s succinct reply, torn as she was between amazement and admiration. She made another quick lane change, catching a look at Jake’s coolly satisfied expression in the process. Clearly, the Martelli women as a group were not to be messed with, particularly if one wanted to keep all one’s digits.