Linda Howard - To Die For

“Jason, you dummy,” I groaned. “Why would you do something stupid like that?”

“She’s always trying to make me jealous,” he said defensively. “I love Debra, I really do, but she isn’t like you. She’s clingy and insecure, and I got tired of the way she tried to make me jealous and I started firing back. I knew it made her mad, but I didn’t know she’d flipped out about it. Last Sunday night, when I got home from playing golf and found out she’d actually shot at you, we had this huge argument and she swore she’d kill you if it was the last thing she did. I think she’s been staking out your house or something, trying to find out if there’s something going on between us. Nothing I said made any difference to her. She’s crazy jealous, and if she kills you, I probably won’t even be reelected as state representative. I can kiss the governorship good-bye.”

I mulled all this over for a minute.

“Jason, I hate to tell you this, but you married a nitwit. That’s fair, though,” I added judiciously.

He looked at me. “How’s that?”

“So did she.”

That made him sulk for a few minutes, but finally he groaned and said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to kill you, but if I don’t, Debra is going to keep trying and she’ll ruin my career.”

“I have an idea. How about you have her committed to a mental institution,” I suggested sarcastically. I meant it, too. She was a danger to others-namely, me-so she met the criteria. Or criterion. Whatever.

“I can’t do that! I love her.”

“Look. It seems to me you have a choice: if she kills me, it may ruin your career; but if you kill me, the results will be way more serious because you’ve made a prior attempt and this shows premeditation, which will get you in serious hot water. Not only that, I’m engaged to a cop, and he’ll kill you.” I took my left hand off the steering wheel and held it over for him to see the ring.

“Wow, that’s a rock,” he said admiringly. “I didn’t think cops had that kind of money. Who is he?”

“Wyatt Bloodsworth. He questioned you the other day, remember?”

“So that’s why he was so nasty. I get it now. He was the football player, wasn’t he? I guess he has plenty of money.”

“He gets by,” I said. “But if anything happens to me, he’ll not only kill you-and the other cops would look the other way, because they like me-he’ll burn your village and sow your fields with salt.” I thought I’d throw in a little biblical warning just to impress him with the seriousness of the consequences.

“I don’t have any fields,” he said. “Or a village.”

Sometimes Jason could be stupendously literal. “I know that,” I said patiently. “It was a metaphor. What I meant was, he’ll totally destroy you.”

He nodded his head. “Yeah, I can see that. You’re looking hot these days.” He tilted his head back against the seat and groaned. “What can I do? I can’t think of anything that will work. I called in that murder/suicide to get the cops out of the building, but not all of them left. You were right; there were witnesses. If I kill you, I’d have to kill them, too, and I don’t think that would work because by now the cops have probably found out that call was a false alarm and they’re back at the station.”

As if on cue, my cell phone rang. Jason jumped a foot. I started to fish around in my bag for the phone, but Jason said, “Don’t answer it!” and I pulled my hand out.

“That will be Wyatt,” I said. “He’ll go ape shit when he finds out I left with you.” That wasn’t biblical, but it was accurate.

Sweat beaded on Jason’s brow. “You can tell him we were just talking, right?”

“Jason. Get a clue. You’ve been trying to kill me. We have to get this settled or I’m telling Wyatt you made a pass at me, and he’ll take you apart all the way down to your molecules.”

“I know,” he groaned. “Let’s go to my house so we can talk, come up with a plan.”

“Is Debra there?”

“No, she’s watching your folks’ house, figuring you’ll turn up there sooner or later.”

She was stalking my parents? I’d scalp the bitch for that. Hot fury zipped through me, but I controlled it, because I needed to keep my head. I had talked Jason around, but I knew Jason and I wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. Evidently his wife was crazy as a loon though, and I didn’t know what we could do about her.

I drove to Jason’s house, which of course is the one we’d bought together, and which I’d given him in the divorce. It hadn’t changed much in five years; the landscaping was more mature, but that was about it. The house was red brick, two-story, with white shutters and trim. The style was modern, with interesting architectural details, but there was nothing about it to make it stand out from the rest of the neighborhood. I think developers have at the most five house plans and styles that they use, so subdivisions have a cookie-cutter look to them. The garage doors were down, so Debra wasn’t at home.

When I pulled into the driveway, I said thoughtfully, “You know, it might have been smart to move rather than expect Debra to live here.”

“Why’s that?”

Like I said: clueless. “Because this is where we lived when we were married,” I said patiently. “She probably feels like this is my house instead of hers. She needs her own house.” Weird, but for the first time I felt a gleam of sympathy for her.

“There’s nothing wrong with this house,” he protested. “It’s a good house, nice and modern.”

“Jason. Buy the woman her own house!” I yelled. Sometimes that’s the only way to get his attention.

“All right, all right. You don’t have to yell,” he said sulkily.

If I’d had a wall right there, I’d have beat my head against it.

We went inside, and I rolled my eyes when I saw he still had the same furniture. The man was dense beyond saving. He was the one Debra should kill.

Now, I knew the cavalry was on the way; the first place Wyatt and the guys would check would be Jason’s house, right? They knew Jason wasn’t the one who had shot me, but Wyatt would also see my notes and put two and two together the way I had. The person who was jealous of me was my ex-husband’s new wife, only she wasn’t so new, since they’d been married four years. How much more obvious could it be? Jason hadn’t shot at me, but he’d left that worried message the next morning-after five years of no contact at all. Wyatt might not catch on immediately that Jason was the one who had cut my brake lines, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I could probably expect the first patrol car to come rolling up within five minutes.

“So,” Jason said, looking at me as if I had all the answers, “what can we do about Debra?”

“What do you mean, what can you do about me?”

The shriek made me jump about a foot straight up, not only because I hadn’t been expecting it, but because it obviously meant Debra was home, after all. On the list of things that were not good, that was at the top.

Jason jumped, too, and dropped the pistol, which didn’t go off-thank you, Jesus-because my heart probably would have stopped. It came close to stopping anyway when I turned around and faced the former Debra Schmale, now Mrs. Jason Carson, who appeared to be dead serious about her status. She was holding a rifle, and she had the stock up to her shoulder and her cheek against the stock as if she knew what she was doing.

I swallowed and put my tongue in gear, though my brain was still stuck in park. “He meant how could we convince you that you don’t have any reason to be jealous of me. This is the first time I’ve talked to Jason since our divorce, so he was just trying to get back at you for trying to make him jealous, by throwing me in your face to make you jealous, and really you should shoot him instead of me because I think that was a really shitty thing for him to do, don’t you?”