Meg O'Brien - The Last Cheerleader

Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all around his head and slowly seeping along his body to his shoes.

In shock, I could barely think or move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a lightly salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.

I knelt beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.

Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.

I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.

I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door and piled in. “Don’t move!” they ordered, guns pointed directly at me.

I didn’t even breathe.

CRIMSON RAIN

GATHERING LIES

SACRED TRUST

CRASHING DOWN

THE FINAL KILL

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I would like to thank Sergeant Carlos A. Mendoza, Administrative Sergeant, El Segundo Police Department, El Segundo, California, for his unflagging assistance regarding police procedures in the El Segundo and Los Angeles area. Thanks for all the e-mails, and for being so quick to answer mine. If any errors remain, they are all mine.

Thanks again to my children and all my family for helping me in so many ways throughout the writing of my books. As I finish up number fifteen, it seems like just yesterday that I stood in that little health food store in Paradise, California, declaring, “I’m going to be a writer! I’ll give it five years, and if it doesn’t work out, I won’t have lost anything but five years.” I can’t believe no one laughed. At least, not to my face!

It actually took eight years before my first book was published, but who’s counting? From the birth in 1990 of Jessica (Jesse) James, my mystery series reporter, to The Last Cheerleader today, it’s been a great ride, and I hope it goes on forever.

I would also like to thank my good friend Cathy Landrum for her invaluable research assistance, my son, Greg, for his sharp editorial eye, and another good friend, Nancy Baker Jacobs, for all the phone calls, support and helpful ideas along the way. No author should be without someone with whom to bat ideas around!

I am also grateful for the loyal friendship of Alice Austin in North Wildwood, New Jersey, who found me through my book Crashing Down; Michelle and John Jaceks, good neighbors even when they’re off in their shiny new RV, and Bernice Cook, the smartest and dearest lady I know.

Last, but never least, I would like to thank Miranda Stecyk for being such a dream editor, and Dianne Moggy and Amy Moore-Benson for getting me started with MIRA—the best and brightest publishing house around.

“In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read; if they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

—Will Rogers

“The only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”

—Dorothy Parker

“I just want to tell y’all not to worry—them people in New York and Hollywood are not going to change me none.”

—Elvis Presley

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Epilogue

When a train comes bearing down on one, there’s always a warning. The tracks shake and noise vibrates through them, like the sound of a thousand poor souls in hell. There’s a heavy smell of oil in the air, and if anyone is on those tracks—if they can’t get off, no matter how hard they try—there is also the dreadful, sickening scent of fear.

That’s the way it was for me with Tony. I’d loved him far too long and should have left him long ago. For three years I was on those tracks, and I heard and smelled all the warnings. I just couldn’t get off. I watched while he flirted with other women and didn’t show up on time, drank my coffee and never even brought me a bean. Tony didn’t spend much, and I always knew why. He held on to money as if it pained his palm to pull it out of his pocket. I tried to tell him that if you hold on to money like that it’ll just stop coming, that it’s like a cat, and if you pay too much attention it sticks its nose in the air and prances the other way. I told him he should be more generous, give some of it away, if only to a poor box at a church. I swore that it would always come back twofold, if not more.

Tony was horrified at that idea. He said he didn’t have “enough” to give away, and I always thought he felt the same way about love. He was terrified that if he gave that to someone, even himself, something terrible would happen. As if he’d wake one morning and find he wasn’t there anymore, that so much had been given away, there would be nothing left.

And what about you? one might well ask. What was wrong with me, that for three years I hoped against hope that one day this fool would wake up in his Brentwood penthouse and find that he couldn’t live another moment without me?

Well, this is what I tell myself, slipping out of my Gucci pumps and slinging my feet up onto my new antique desk: Tony wasn’t someone I could all that easily leave. I’m a literary agent, known as one of the best, and Tony sold more books than all my other clients combined—books that turned, like little miracles, into movies and made millions of dollars. In these days of slow sales in New York, of literary agents dropping by the dozens back there and moving to places like Connecticut and Vermont, working out of their homes to squeeze a dime for all it’s worth, Tony still came up with one blockbuster after another. And Tony was mine. To leave him might have been slaying the goose with the golden egg.

Slaying. An odd word to think of, under the circumstance. I’ve been dwelling more on Tony today because they found him dead last night. Worse—right next to him on the bedroom floor was Arnold Wescott, who for the past ten years had been my ex-husband.

The police called at the crack of dawn to notify, as well as question, me. I drove from my home in Malibu to Tony’s penthouse apartment in Brentwood to identify the bodies, my thoughts a jumbled mess all the way. Tony and Arnold, together? Murdered together? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

It didn’t get better with the terrible wrenching horror of seeing Tony on the floor with his forehead crushed in. As the police detective watched, I turned to Arnold, my heart thumping and questions like wasps still buzzing in my brain. Who could have done this? How did it happen?

I had questions but no answers. This was Tony’s apartment, and in the first place, I couldn’t understand what Arnold was doing here. So far as I knew, they’d never had any real connection to each other. Only once in a while did they cross paths in my office, and the two couldn’t have been less alike. Even in death, while Tony’s beautiful Italian face looked pained, Arnold’s was placid, as if he’d finally found peace.

In fact, Arnold—a Woody Allen look-alike—didn’t appear much different from any other day. All the time I’d been married to him, Arnold Wescott seemed largely comatose. The most energy I ever saw him put out was the time he asked me to wear a metal bra so he could see if it really would deflect bullets.