9 The Hitwoman's Downward Dog (7 page)

"Okay you Maggie are?" DeeDee whined worriedly.

I jumped away from Jack. "I’m fine."

"Of course you are," he soothed, thinking I’d been talking to him.

"We should find a purple bag," I blurted out, desperate to steer the conversation away from Patrick.

"Okay," Jack agreed easily, pivoting away to continue his search. "How do you know the victim again?’

He was in reporter-mode, but as long as he didn’t return to the subject of my almost-lover, I was more than willing to indulge his questions. "We’re friends. We work together."

"At an insurance company?"

"Yes. That’s right."

"You don’t strike me as the type to sit behind a desk."

"What type do I strike you as?" I asked curiously.

He chuckled. "The kind who’d disobey a police detective and return to a potential crime scene, which is why I was waiting for you."

"Aren’t you a smug know-it-all?" I teased.

"Not really," he countered, "just someone who’s trying to figure you out."

He could have meant the words flirtatiously, or he could have meant them in an investigative sense. Either way, my mouth went dry and I almost tripped again.

Thankfully, at that moment, something in the flashlight’s path caught my eye.

"There," I pointed at the purple cloth bag.

We advanced on it cautiously.

"Don’t touch it," I warned. "See if you see any tiles."

"Kitchen tiles?" Jack asked, confused.

"Scrabble tiles."

"Like the little pieces of wood with letters on them?"

"Exactly."

He swung the beam around, searching. "Here they are."

Together we studied the seven tiles that spelled out "L U C K Y O H."

To Jack, the message would make no sense, but I understood it perfectly. It had to mean Lucky O’Hara, the adopted son of the head of the O’Hara crime family. I’d had one direct interaction with Lucky in Atlantic City and a couple of indirect ones here in town.

"Mean anything to you?" Jack asked.

"Not a thing," I lied smoothly. "You?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"I know of a guy named Lucky who’s involved with some shady dealings."

"Me too," God groused. "He tried to drown me by tossing me in the Atlantic Ocean. Cretin!"

Jack stared at the squeaking reptile, his expression both fascinated and repulsed.

"Oh yeah?" Ignoring the lizard, I tried to sound nonchalant despite the nervousness blossoming in my chest, threatening to cut off my air supply. Things would be much less complicated if I could convince Jack that Lucky wasn’t a suspect. I mentally scrambled to come up with a plausible explanation that would throw him off trap. "I was thinking," I began slowly, "that maybe she was trying to figure out how to win the lottery."

Even though I couldn’t see his face, I could practically hear Jack raising his eyebrows in disbelief.

"She’s big into lucky things. She’s given me a horseshoe, a rabbit’s foot, and a shark tooth." That part was all true.

"A shark’s tooth is considered lucky?" Jack’s voice cracked with disbelief.

"Oh yes," I assured him. I wasn’t sure about the horseshoe or rabbit’s foot, but the shark tooth
had
helped to save my life once, so I considered it to be lucky. "She probably thinks zeros are lucky too."

"But it doesn’t say
zero
," Jack pointed out. "It says
oh
, or
o.h
."

"That’s because she always picks seven tiles at a time," I snapped. "That’s how she gets her messages."

"Messages."

"From the great beyond or wherever the hell they’re from."

"So why not pull a blank? Why the h?"

The man’s insistence on logic was infuriating.

Afraid that if we continued along the line of conversation, I’d inadvertently reveal something I didn’t mean to, like the fact that I too knew who Lucky O’Hara was, I gave up trying to throw him off course.

We didn’t find anything else helpful in Armani’s place, so we soon left (though this time I didn’t shimmy under the crime scene tape).

Jack walked me back to my car. "So why did you boyfriend let you come here alone?"

Thinking about Patrick in the hospital parking lot, telling me he couldn’t help me find Armani, I shrugged.

"You could have run into someone dangerous."

"I ran into you," I countered, knowing that the reporter could prove very dangerous if he kept snooping.

"I’m just doing my job."

"So you keep saying." I let DeeDee into the back of my car.

"Besides, he’s not my boyfriend." It wasn’t a lie… exactly.

"C’mon," Jack countered. "I saw you two together."

I reached into the car to pat the dog in order to give myself a moment to think about how to react to his accusation. How much had he guessed about my relationship with Patrick? "I don't know what you think you saw," I began carefully, backing out of the car.

"He couldn't keep his hands off you."

Startled, I smacked my head against the doorframe with a solid thunk. "Ow!"

Jack leaned his back against my car so that he could see my face as I emerged. "You're not going to deny that, are you?"

"Deny what? Hitting my head?"

"That your boyfriend was hanging all over you while Detective Griswald gave you the third degree."

I blinked, as it dawned on me he wasn't talking about Patrick, but about Zeke. I exhaled a shaky sigh of relief. "Zeke and I are just friends."

"You have an interesting definition of friendship."

Chuckling, I shook my head. "We've known each other since junior high. Heck, in high school, he even lived with me."

"You lived with him as a teenager?"

I smacked Jack's arm playfully. "Not like that. My aunts own a Bed and Breakfast and he needed a place to stay for a while."

He tilted his head to the side and studied me. I had no trouble meeting his studying gaze since I'd told the truth.

"So I read the situation wrong?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Interesting."

Something in those four syllables made me wonder what he was thinking, but before I could ask, he pushed himself away from the car and pulled something from his back pocket. "What's your plan now?"

"I have to get back to the B&B." Again, it was the truth, I'd told Griswald I was taking DeeDee to the dog park to cover up my breaking and entering at Armani's house.

"Hungry," the dog barked.

Jack glanced at her nervously.

"You don't like dogs?" I asked.

"Dogs don't like mail carriers and reporters. We're both always invading their territory."

"That's not an answer," I told him.

"I like dogs," he admitted grudgingly. "I used to have a Bichon, but I lost him."

"Pound dog?" DeeDee asked on a low, terrified whine. She'd spent a little time at the local dog pound, helping me with one of the jobs I'd been assigned by Ms. Whitehat and she hadn't liked it.

"Lost him?" I asked, wondering if the dog was really lost or had died.

Jack looked away, staring off into the distance. He crossed his arms over his chest and cleared his throat before answering. "My ex-wife got him as part of the divorce settlement."

I blinked, surprised. I hadn't expected that version of lost.

"I'm sorry," I murmured.

He shrugged. "She works more regular hours than I do. It made sense for her to have him, but it doesn't mean I don't still miss him."

Touched by his vulnerability and his obvious love for an animal no longer in his life, I patted his arm.

He looked down at where my hand rested against his jacket.

I had to fight the urge to snatch it back and hide it behind my back when his fingers covered mine, sending a jolt of awareness through my entire body. Taking my hand in his, he stared into my eyes.

My heart beat faster. My mouth went dry.

I didn't quite register what was happening when something was pressed against my palm.

"Take it," he urged with quiet intensity.

Tearing my gaze from his, I looked down to see what IT was.

I blinked at the rectangular card.

"It's got all my phone numbers on it," Jack explained. "I wrote my cell phone number on the back. If you're going to do something stupid or dangerous like this again, I want you to call me." He folded my fingers over the card, its sharp edges biting into my skin.

"Okay," I agreed automatically, even though I'd never use the number.

Or would I?

Leaving Jack at Armani's house, I broke a couple of minor traffic laws hurrying back to the B&B so as not to raise any suspicions.

"I like this Jack Stern fellow," God opined from his vantage point on the dashboard. "He seems like a straight arrow."

"A straight arrow that could uncover the truth about me, or Patrick, or me and Patrick that could result in me going to jail," I griped. "Who'd buy you crickets then?"

"Him like I too," DeeDee offered from the back seat.

I glanced in the rearview mirror at her, caught off guard by her response. "Really?"

"Yes."

"You didn't act like you like him."

"Did neither you."

"He's dangerous."

"If you say so," God mocked. "If he's divorced, he's more available than the redhead."

I squeezed the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. "Patrick is not open for discussion."

"Why not?" the lizard asked.

"Because I'm not sure how I feel about him," I admitted. Ever since I'd discovered that the cop/hitman's wife wasn't the invalid I'd imagined, some of Patrick's charm had dimmed. Not wanting to continue talking about him, I changed the subject. "There's big news about Katie."

"What?" God demanded imperiously.

"The doctors say she's almost ready to leave the hospital. In another week or so, she'll be home."

The lizard clapped his tiny feet together, but I was filled with a sense of dread.

Picking up on my mood, DeeDee asked, "Maggie, wrong what's?"

"Nothing, sweetie," I told her smoothly.

God narrowed his gaze, peering at me through tiny slits. "Liar."

I shrugged, pretending to focus on my driving.

"Out with it," God ordered.

"With what?"

"You’re not clever enough to play coy with me," he warned, flicking his tail for emphasis. "What’s bothering you?"

Tightening my grip on the steering wheel, I admitted, "I'm not ready."

"Ready for what?"

"For her to come home. For me to be a responsible parent. This was not what my life was supposed to be."

"You'll be fine," God assured me.

"What makes you think that?"

"You'll have me telling you what to do," he declared with confident superiority.

"Gee, thanks," I muttered sarcastically. "That makes me feel so much better."

Pulling into the driveway of the B&B, I saw my sister Marlene launch herself off her seat on the front porch to hurry toward me. The overwhelming urge to throw the car into reverse to escape whatever bad news she bore had my fingers curling around the gearshift. Grudgingly, I put the car in the park and got out to face whatever she dropped at my feet.

"You’ve got to do something." Her eyes were wild with worry. If I didn’t know that her former pimp had died recently, I’d have worried he was after her.

"Now what?" I asked tiredly, letting DeeDee out of the car. The dog bounded happily into the backyard, seemingly unaware of the tension that was making it difficult for me to breathe.

"The witches are fighting," Marlene said pitifully. For a second I forgot she was a grown woman, and not the eight-year-old who’d come to me with the same problem decades earlier.

"I’ll see what I can do." Just like years before, the promise sounded weak. Of course back then the witches, my three aunts, had been arguing about whether to institutionalize my mother, their sister. I had no idea what they were fighting about now.

"Maybe it’s my fault," Marlene offered.

"What’s your fault?"

"That they’re fighting." Her lower lip quivered and her eyes were pools of unshed tears.

I pulled her into me for a tight hug, wondering how someone so fragile had survived the world of prostitution for so many years. Pressing a kiss to the top of her head, I assured her, "They can find plenty of reasons to fight that having nothing to do with you."

"You think so?" she mumbled into my shoulder.

"They don’t even need reality to fight," I assured her, stepping back, out of the hug so that I could see her face. "Right?"

She nodded, seemingly half-convinced that I was telling her the truth.

"I’ll take care of this," I promised her. "Don’t you worry about anything." Gently I led her back into the B&B. She immediately scurried up the stairs toward her room, while I, squaring my shoulders and lifting my chin, marched into the dining room, determined to be the voice of reason.

But it wasn’t the sisters who were fighting. It was their men, or more specifically Aunt Loretta’s fiancé and Aunt Susan’s ex-boyfriend Bob. The two men circled the dining room table, spewing insults at one another.

Susan and Loretta were huddled in a corner, clinging to one another, twittering shrilly as they watched the macho display in horror.

"Shut up!" I roared at the top of my lungs.

It wasn’t subtle or polite, but it was effective.

The room fell silent as the four of them stared at me in shock.

I glared at them all, daring them to utter a sound. None were brave enough to take me on.

"Sit down before you fall down, Templeton," I ordered Loretta’s other half. "You look terrible." Not long before, he’d ended up in the hospital as a result of something stupid Bob had been done. While there, Templeton had suffered a severe allergic reaction to a medication. He hadn’t fully recovered and looked as though it took all his strength to remain standing.

Obediently, Templeton sank into the nearest chair.

"Now," I said in a quiet tone that made it clear I was pissed. "You’ve scared poor Marlene. Are you
trying
to make her leave us again?"

"Of course not," Susan gasped.