Cash & Carry (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 4) (8 page)

CHAPTER 10

I stood and stretched my arms over my head. A couple days of physical, if not mental, rest had done wonders for my bruises and general achiness. But I was still stiff from sitting so long, hunched over the desk with my chin pressed into the heel of my left hand. Writer’s cramp curled my right hand into an ugly knob.

But then I received the most delightful phone call of the weekend.

“Punkin?” Gus said. “Your truck’s ready.”

I could have kissed him, but thought better of making smacky sounds over the phone. “You’ve put in overtime.”

Gus chuckled. “I have a pretty good idea of the dire consequences if I don’t get Clarice’s Subaru finished soon. So yep, I pulled a couple all-nighters to clear out my backlog. I’ll be fresh as a daisy tomorrow when the last of her parts get delivered.”

I was going to have a serious discussion with Clarice about gratitude and the proper way to display it to a genial mountain of a man. I had a few pointers, and they included more than just several dozen of his favorite cookies.

Down in the kitchen, Clarice and Emmie were elbows deep in a cutthroat game of Monopoly. They’d kept me company at times throughout the weekend, but mental stewing is a boring activity to watch, and I’d been unable—or unwilling, in the case of Emmie—to share many details until I’d sorted things out for myself. Besides, my sorting still wasn’t as clearly defined in my own mind as I would have liked.

I called Loretta for a lift and tanked up on leftover tacos while supervising the game. The Fed would have had a fit if they’d seen the skimpiness of the reserves in the bank. Both Emmie and Clarice had piles of cash stashed on chairs beside them, under the edge of the board, in cereal bowls, which meant some form of house rules must have been applied. They were about to enter the realm of usury, and I was glad I wouldn’t be around to witness the meltdown.

Clarice did take a moment away from scowling at her property lineup to mutter, “We no longer have guests.”

“When did they leave?”

She shrugged. “Early. I made a big breakfast, and there was no one in the basement to eat it.”

“Dwayne did give me notice. I think they’ll be okay. And they can always come back.”

“Gonna be quiet around here.” There was a tinge of resentment in Clarice’s voice.

I studied her profile and couldn’t help smiling. Tough as nails but with a gigantic heart buried under that gruff exterior. I never would have imagined her picking up her life and joining me in the boonies to help run a bootstrap, backdoor, wing-and-a-prayer, amateur criminal takedown operation, but here she was. And we were both still alive.

Emmie rolled the dice and counted out her move.

I was distracted by the tiny white nodule she was using as a playing piece. “What is that?” I nudged her hand out of the way for a better view.

She grinned up at me with an exaggerated, cheesy wide smile, revealing a gaping hole in her bottom row of teeth.

I chuckled and shook her hand. “Congratulations. At last.”

“I think the tooth fairy’s bankrupt,” Clarice growled.

Then I slipped up to my bedroom and did something else I never would have imagined a couple months ago. I stuck the handgun Josh had given me into my tote bag along with my array of phones.

Other than during the shakedown of Viktor Lutsenko, my Numero Dos, the gun had been hidden on the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom, well out of reach of short people. The thing kind of scared me, but it also kind of reassured me—up there. In my bag was a different story. It added what felt like another fifty pounds of grim weight.

“How are you holding up?” I asked Loretta once we were under way.

“I’m fine.” Loretta slid the old rattle-trap pickup into fourth gear with a smooth wrist movement, her face taut as she stared straight ahead through the windshield. “But Tarq’s not. He’s fading fast. I’m helping him bathe now, all but his private parts. He makes me leave the room for that. I help him dress, tie his shoes. He gets winded just walking from the bedroom to the kitchen.”

“I’ll come visit tomorrow.”

Loretta nodded quickly. “That’ll perk him up. You have anything for him to worry about—besides the dead body, I mean? He gets fired up, in a good way, when there’s a problem to solve.”

“Guess what I have no shortage of? Tell him I have a real doozy, plus some old history to dredge up.”

Loretta cast a sidelong glance at me. “You heard any more from Skip?”

“Not since the bracelet.” Skip’s token from his layover in Silt, Colorado had been an expensive diamond and emerald bracelet, which I knew, courtesy of the FBI and some surveillance video, he’d purchased at a San Antonio pawnshop.

The wedding ring Skip had given me—and which I’d traded for Emmie—had also been a large emerald. Since there had been no note with the bracelet, I wasn’t sure what, if any, significance I was supposed to read into the gift. Yet another riddle from my mysterious missing husband.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this.” Loretta’s tone was tight as she pulled up in front of Gus’s service station-slash-post office. Come to think of it, her usual chipperness had been notably absent the past week or two. She must be exhausted, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she was depressed too.

I leaned over and gave her a quick hug. “You’re a classy lady, you know that? Full of grit.”

Which got a little smile from her. “Right back at you, darling.”

I watched until I could no longer see Loretta’s taillights then stepped inside the service bay, yoohooing for Gus.

Lentil was a thing of beauty. I didn’t know an engine could look so good. Gus had the hood up, and he pointed out the parts he’d replaced and the other parts he’d tuned up or improved somehow. I’m no mechanic, but I think he’d worked his magic on about ninety percent of Lentil’s innards.

Plus a wash and wax. I could hardly tell the old brown paint had been oxidizing into a putty color.

“Start her up.” He handed me the keys.

The ignition turned smooth as silk, but I nearly levitated off the seat at the voluminous roar that bounced off the close walls of the service bay. The sound was suspiciously similar to the characteristic Harley exhaust noise. “Did you mess with the muffler?” I shouted out the window.

And for the first time ever I actually saw some of Gus’s teeth. His grin was that wide—a horizontal parting of the bushy mustache-and-beard Red Sea.

I turned off the engine and yawned to clear the burr out of my ears. “Do the high school kids go drag racing on Saturday nights around here? ‘Cause this old girl sounds like she could clean them out.”

Gus rumbled that deep belly laugh I love so much. “You need to stay out of trouble, punkin.”

“You’re not going to do this to Clarice’s Subaru are you?”

Gus waved a meaty hand. “Noooo. For a sophisticated lady like Clarice? Never. That station wagon is going to purr like a tabby but accelerate like a cheetah. You’ll see.”

“She doesn’t need help in the speed department.”

But Gus only waggled his eyebrows at me.

“Send me a bill?”

“Sure, sure. When I get around to the paperwork.”

I drove away wondering—if Clarice was a sophisticated lady, then what was I? Some kind of renegade apparently. Yep, with an unlicensed gun in my purse.

oOo

Selma had not wanted to part with Laney’s new address. Especially since I wouldn’t tell her exactly why I needed it. And because I also made her promise not to tell Laney I was coming. It’s a hard thing for a mother to let go of feeling responsible for her adult offspring, even when they make really dumb decisions. In return, I promised to fill Selma in after the fact. Maybe it was nothing, I told her, although my intuitive antenna said otherwise.

Laney lived in a dump. And if it looked scary now, I could only imagine how depressing it was in daylight. She had the upper right unit in a fourplex of indiscriminate color. Three out of the four exterior lights were burned out or possibly broken.

The narrow parking lot was crowded with vehicles that—from all appearances—could only qualify as capricious in their drivability. One was up on cinder blocks, wheel-less, bumper-less, and window-less. I parked on the shadowed side of an overflowing dumpster and clicked my door closed as quietly as possible. Except Lentil’s fabulous new muffler had certainly announced my presence.

But I was in a neighborhood full of no-muffler types, so maybe the noise wasn’t uncommon. For the first time ever, I had to worry about the possible theft of my souped-up pickup. Lentil would be the envy of every rally racer in the county.

I picked my way up the stairwell toward Laney’s door. The handrail jiggled so much that it was safer not to use it. It was probably only affixed to the rotted plank siding with a few rusty screws. If I had to, I was sure I could rip the handrail off the wall and use it as a weapon. A big, clunky, awkward weapon, but a reassuring thought nonetheless.

There was no peephole in Laney’s door, so she’d be opening it blind, if she opened it at all. I wasn’t sure if that was to my advantage or not, since I had no idea what I’d be walking in on either.

I knocked in what I hoped was a firm, authoritative, but not frightening manner. I wondered if law enforcement officers took classes in knock methodology, for those times when a battering ram or a hard kick below the handle wasn’t appropriate. I could have used a few pointers.

But I needn’t have worried. Because the guy who answered the door was so strung out I could have tipped him over with my pinkie. I plucked out the joint that had dangled loosely between his first and second fingers and brushed past him.

“Hey,” he whined behind me, but he was busy hanging on to the door frame so he didn’t fall over.

The apartment was so tiny there was no way I wasn’t going to find the bathroom. Laney, wearing a bra and cutoffs, was doing something at the mirror with eyeliner which required that she pitch forward over the sink and pin one of her eyelids open with her fingers. I brushed past her too and lifted the toilet lid.

I flushed the joint, letting the lid slam back down.

Laney jumped, making a long black streak down her cheek with the pencil, and turned to gape at me.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Hey,” a voice warbled down the short hallway. My greeter—the bozo who couldn’t find his belt loops so his pants were hanging down around his knees, exposing nearly the entire length of his flannel boxers—staggered into the bathroom, making the room extremely cramped and foul smelling.

I jabbed a finger into his sternum. “You’re leaving. Now.”

Laney’s mouth was open as though she wanted to speak, but nothing was coming out. I wanted to keep it that way.

My tote bag is pretty hefty. Has to be to carry all my phones around. If I hold it the right way, it about doubles my width. I basically snowplowed the punk crotch-dragger back into the living room. It was kind of like running at full steam with a cowcatcher out front. He slid along the wall in a nicely pliant fashion and tumbled into the first available seat, a look of wide-eyed, if dull, surprise on his face.

“What’s your name?” I barked and put on my most menacing grimace. I haven’t been under Clarice’s tutelage for nothing.

“Hey,” he managed again. His pupils overwhelmed his irises. I had no idea what color his eyes should have been. He lifted a shaky hand and began scratching at the stubble on the side of his chin with a ragged fingernail.

His face was spotted with raw places where he’d already compulsively picked through the surface of his skin, creating his own sores as though he needed more problems. Marijuana wasn’t the only illegal substance this guy had been high on.

“Name,” I yelled.

He’d been staring at me with a kind of horror, but his gaze slid to the side before he murmured, “Charlie—Chuck. Yeah, Chuck.” He nodded as though if he said it enough times he might even convince himself.

“Where’s your stash, Chuck?” We were going to have to take this one simple step at a time.

“In the fridge. I just got it today. I ain’t sharing.” There was a flicker of belligerence in his whine.

“Don’t move.” I ducked behind the three-foot-wide wall that ineffectually shielded the galley kitchen from the living room.

Sure enough, a plastic baggy half full of a dried herb was tucked into the door compartment next to a couple cans of Pepsi. There wasn’t much else in the refrigerator, which I guessed made it a good hiding place, at least in Chuck’s mind.

But there was something wrong with the plastic tray that formed the bottom of the fridge, besides the dried and crackled remnants of old food. The plastic was pockmarked and dimpled in regular rows. It surely hadn’t come from the factory warped like that. I ran my fingertips over the indentations, and my heartbeat pounded in my ears.