Theresa Weir - Bad Karma

Had he seen the real Cleo for one unguarded moment? And when she realized how open and vulnerable she’d left herself, she’d lashed out, distracting him, bringing him back to his original impression of her- Cleo the con artist, Cleo the fraud.

“Premonition.”

Daniel’s thoughts were pulled back to the man on the other end of the line. Premonition? How had Tyler known? Was he a mind reader? Was this sixth sense a family trait? A genetic thing?

“Where’s Premonition?” Tyler asked. “Cleo never goes anywhere without him. She loves that dog.”

Daniel didn’t handle guilt well. At the moment it was eating at his stomach. “My brother’s got the dog. She gave him to my brother.”

“She never goes anywhere without that dog,” Tyler said. “She loves that dog.” His voice rose. “That dog is like her kid.”

Daniel thought about that first evening, the way she’d watched Beau and Premonition playing, her expression appearing calm. Maybe if they hadn’t just met, he would have recognized emotions hidden to a stranger.

“I’ll call you if I hear anything,” Daniel said, sweat running down his spine.

After hanging up, he continued to stare at the collage in his hand.

Groping blindly in the darkness, Cleo found the bottled water Campbell had dropped. She unscrewed the cap and drank thirstily. Before she was finished, warmth seeped into her arms and legs. She tried to replace the cap, but couldn’t match the threads. The bottle slipped from her numb fingers, cold liquid splashing on her legs. She wilted against the straw.

The sound of the dental drill rang in Dr. Burton Campbell’s ears.

His patient flinched and tried to pull away.

“Almost done, Mrs. Cabot.”

He pressed harder, his mind drifting to the woman in the barn. He’d thought it over and decided he was going to have to kill her. He didn’t want to. He wasn’t some psycho, killing people for the sake of killing them. But he had a reputation to protect, and the only way to be certain nobody ever found out about the prostitutes was to kill Cleo Tyler. It was that simple.

Beneath the sound of the drill, Mrs. Cabot, a woman in her mid-fifties, a woman with very little tolerance for pain, was making noises in her throat, a kind of panicky hum, the sounds getting louder and more desperate by the second. With an internal sigh, Burton pulled the drill away, impatient and irritated at her for making this take twice as long as it should.

“Are you feeling some discomfort?” he asked in a concerned, soothing voice.

She nodded, her brows drawn tightly together, eyes watering.

“I’m almost done,” he said. “Just one more minute and we’ll have it.”

She shook her head and said something too garbled to understand.

“More Novocaine?” he asked. He picked up a syringe from the stainless-steel dental tray. “I’ll just deaden that a little more for you.” He patted her arm. “We don’t want anyone in pain.” He stuck the needle into the fleshy part of her mouth, just under her tongue, pushing the plunger too fast, novocaine spilling down her throat.

He hadn’t meant to kill either of the prostitutes. Both had been accidents. The last one had told him she liked rough, kinky stuff-that was why he’d picked her-but at the first sign of blood, she’d freaked. She’d acted like he was the lowlife, the pervert. That pissed him off, really pissed him off. He’d shoved her, held her down. She started screaming. Well, what else could he do but make her stop?

With hindsight, he saw that he should have just shot her full of dope, making it look like she’d overdosed. But she was bruised and bloody, and he’d panicked.

Maybe he could have told a slanted version of the truth and gotten off with a couple of years, but his reputation would have been ruined.

But the drug thing might work with the Tyler woman. Oh, yeah. He’d load her up with morphine. When she was too drugged to fight him, he’d find a vein in her arm and finish her. She wouldn’t know a thing. It would actually be a pleasant experience for her.

His daydream moved on. He could even be the one to find the body.

He almost laughed out loud at the idea. How perfect. He imagined himself on the front page of the paper, looking distraught and concerned.

He smiled. “How does that feel, Mrs. Cabot?” He poked a metal instrument against the woman’s cheek. “Numb yet?”

She closed her eyes in relief, nodding, letting him know he could proceed, that everything would be all right. She was in capable hands.

Three days dragged by with no sign of Cleo. Daniel had searched every barn within a ten-mile radius of Egypt. Nothing.

“Did you check the barn at the Radcliff farm?” Beau asked.

Beau was dressed in his Tastee Delight shirt and cap, sitting at the kitchen table, working on a bowl of cereal before heading out. In true Beau fashion, he wasn’t worried about Cleo. Not that he didn’t care. If something bad happened, he would just pretend that she’d left town.

It had to be nice, Daniel thought. For most people who suffered a great loss or witnessed an unnecessary act of violence, there was no looking back, no returning to the way it had been before. Because now you had proof that bad things happened for no reason. And life didn’t always make sense.

Beau hadn’t been tainted by the horrors of life. He didn’t know that most things were out of his control. Control wasn’t anything he thought about. He could sit there eating his cereal. When he took a bite and it slid to his stomach, the food didn’t churn until it turned into a heavy stone. At night, he slept a deep sleep, because in his own mind his mother was at a nursing home. In his own mind she would be coming back any day now, and Cleo had simply gotten tired of Egypt.

Daniel had gone without sleep for too long. He couldn’t stay focused. “The Radcliff place?” he asked. “There’s no barn on the Radcliff place. It burned down along with the house.”

“There’s a barn. A different barn. I saw it when I was riding with Percy, delivering mail. He turned wrong, and we ended up at a barn. There was a lot of weeds in the road. Percy got some of them stuck under the car.”

“A barn?” Daniel asked, leaning both hands on the table, staring at his brother. “Are you sure?”

Beau took another bite of cereal, swallowed, then continued. “A big, broke barn with one of those wind things on top.”

“A weathervane?”

“Yeah. Weathervane.”

Beau had an eye for detail. If he said there was a weathervane, there was a weathervane.

“With a pig. It had a pig on it.”

Daniel grabbed his truck keys off the table and headed for the door. “Thanks, Beau.”

Hands on her. Cold hands. Rolling her to her back. Something tight on her biceps. Tight, like a big rubber band. Somebody slapping the inside of her arm, rubbing, slapping, breathing hard. Cleo felt a sharp/dull poke. The rubber band fell away. The ground fell away.

Daniel pulled down the lane that led to the Radcliff place, his heart rate increasing.

There was the spot where the house used to be, the only thing left a cement foundation and a brick chimney. To the left, across the lane, was a small hill of soil, littered with the ugly kind of weeds that went along with disturbed earth. A huge milking barn had once stood there. As far as Daniel knew, the Radcliffs still owned the place, but they’d quit farming and had moved to the city.

There was a lane of sorts, leading past the place where the barn used to be. The weeds were so tall and overgrown that his two-wheel-drive truck wouldn’t clear them. He shut off the engine and got out, slamming the door behind him.