Сандра Браун - Thick as Thieves

He raised his arms at his sides. “Everybody and his grandmother has been discussing you. Because of the…event.”

“The event being my personal tragedy.”

“Which you suffered in public. Gossip thrives on other people’s miseries.”

“Yes. It does.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. “Just like when my father abandoned us.”

“Did he abandon you?”

“What would you call it?”

“Flight.”

She lowered her hands and glared at him.

Not that it had much effect. He said, “It’s generally believed that he wasn’t deserting you, so much as he was escaping capture.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“Facts point that way. The night he went missing, Welch’s store safe was cleaned out, and an employee died under mysterious circumstances. The money was never recovered, that suspicious death is still unexplained, and Joe Maxwell was never seen again. So, yeah, I’d say he’s cloaked in mystery, and, like it or not, so are you.”

Raising her voice, she said, “Well, I don’t like it.”

“Then you should have stayed gone.”

She shot up out of her chair, shoved it aside, and stalked from the room. When he caught up with her, she already had the front door pulled open. “You told me yesterday that you aren’t the man for the job. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for coming out this morning, but—”

He reached past her shoulder and pushed the door shut.

The suddenness of his movement alarmed her. She backed up to the adjacent wall. Her heart was thudding. “Have you been driving past this house every night?”

His chin went back a notch. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, I did.” Moving slowly, he raised his hands shoulder high and took several steps backward, away from her. A cleft formed between his eyebrows. “Someone’s been driving past your house?”

“Every night. Almost from the day I moved in. Even before I lost the baby.”

“Have you reported it?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“At first I didn’t think much of it. I passed it off as curiosity-seekers. Then after the emergency in the supermarket, I didn’t want to send up a flare and call further attention to myself.”

He digested that, then said, “Have you made out what kind of car it is?”

She took a breath. “Is it you?”

“Why would I be driving past your house every night?”

“That’s not an answer. Is it you ?”

“No.”

A simple denial. No embellishment. No telltale expression. Ergo, a perfect lie. A perfect liar. “Is lying another skill you honed while in juvenile detention?”

His jaw clenched.

She wasn’t going to be deterred by his apparent anger. “The marijuana was your first offense, but it wasn’t your last, was it?”

“No.”

Her breathing shallow, she asked, “What other crime did you commit?”

Chapter 6

That night in 2000—Ledge

Stopping along the roadside minutes after pulling off a burglary, to conduct a meeting with your accomplices, in a ditch no less, was just one of the reasons that this whole escapade of Rusty’s design was all kinds of ways fucked up.

During the planning stages, Rusty had charged Ledge with the task of driving them, and he had been okay with that. In fact, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. If escape became necessary, he figured he knew more back roads than the other three. He certainly trusted himself over any of them to keep a cooler head in a tight situation.

“It only makes sense for us to convene in the parking lot of your uncle’s bar,” Rusty had told him during one of only three covert meetings they’d had in advance of the burglary.

“It will be hopping on a holiday Saturday night. Cars and pickups will be coming and going from happy hour till after last call. Our cars won’t be noticed in the overflowing lot. You’re in and out of there all the time. Christ, you live there. So nobody will think twice about you leaving and returning an hour or so later.”

As Rusty had predicted, the theft itself had been incredibly easy to pull off. When Foster opened the vault, Rusty had exhaled a short laugh. “That’s a fucking lot of Easter bonnets and chocolate bunnies.”

They didn’t stand around congratulating one another, though. They’d hastily stuffed the banded bills into one large canvas bag provided by Foster. As they’d left with it, Ledge had halfway expected an ambush. At any given heartbeat, he’d feared spotlights hitting them, SWAT officers swarming, and a cop with a bullhorn shouting for them to drop facedown and place their hands behind their heads.

It hadn’t happened. Ledge had driven them away while the same mean-looking cat that had been eating from a pile of garbage when they’d arrived was still eating from it when they’d left. Not even he had scurried for cover behind the row of dumpsters behind the store.

But now, after having made a clean getaway with their haul, when they were halfway between Welch’s and the bar in the middle of freaking nowhere, Rusty told him to pull over.

“Pull over? What the hell for?” Ledge spoke for himself as well as for the two in the back seat, who shared his incredulity and were vocal about it.

“Just do it,” Rusty said, squelching their chorus of protests. “We need to lay some ground rules before we split up.”

The car was still rolling to a stop on the shoulder when Rusty opened the door and got out, taking the money bag into the ditch with him. The back of Ledge’s neck began prickling with apprehension, and it lasted the whole while they were huddled in that damn, stinking ditch. While pretending to be cool and unruffled, he’d kept a close eye on Rusty. Ledge wouldn’t put it past him to whip out a pistol and shoot the three of them right there.

As it turned out, he’d only wanted to assert his authority. The son of a bitch.

Strangely, though, Ledge felt even more uneasy now as they were climbing out of the ditch. Foster slipped, and Ledge had to lend him a helping hand. He didn’t like not having his hands free, and for a fleeting moment, it occurred to him that Foster’s bumbling might have been a ruse to distract him.

But all Foster did once he made it up the slope was to thank Ledge. Without further mishap, the four of them piled back into the car.

But the tension inside it was palpable. At least among three of them. Rusty appeared to be untroubled. Riding in the passenger seat, he whistled softly through his teeth and used his fingers against his knee to drum out a beat only he could hear.

They didn’t meet a single vehicle as they took the turnoff toward the lakeshore and Burnet’s. Ledge drove to the farthest, darkest edge of the parking lot where tree limbs were so low, the Spanish moss hanging from them brushed against the windshield.

He pulled to a stop but left the motor running. In an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust, he said, “Nobody followed us, but we’d better scatter quick.”

“I agree,” said Rusty. “I’ve said everything that needed saying.”

“You said more than needed saying.”

The complaint had been muttered, but Rusty heard it. “Hey, Ledge,” he said conversationally, “why do you think it is that Joe doesn’t do his drinking here? Why doesn’t he give your uncle Henry his business? Do you reckon he thinks nobody knows he’s an alky?”

The back door slammed hard enough to rock the car.

Angrily, Ledge said to Rusty, “Why not just lay off?”

“I didn’t mean any offense. Truly,” Rusty said with exaggerated earnestness. Then he looked into the back seat and changed his tone to a threatening one. “Foster, if you fuck up, we’re all fucked.”