Distortion (Moonlighters Series) (2 page)

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but we have to leave him there. It’s a homicide scene. We’ll take him soon. Right now I need to ask a few more questions.”

Hadn’t he asked her enough already?
“What?”

“You were carrying a gun in your car.”

She met his eyes, wondering if he thought
she
had shot Bob. She had given them permission to search the van because she had no reason not to. “Yes . . . it’s registered. I have a concealed weapons permit. I work part-time as a private investigator. It wasn’t my gun that shot him. You can take it. Test it.” She looked at the eaves on the building. “There’s a camera on that building. If you get the security video, maybe you can see who did this.”

“We’re working on that.”

“I didn’t shoot my husband.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that you did. What kind of investigative work do you do?”

She tried to organize her thoughts. “Mostly desk-type stuff. Background searches, workers’ comp fraud, adoption searches, divorce cases . . . that kind of thing. Do we really have to go over this right now?” She waved a hand toward her husband’s body. “He’s just lying there. How can you leave him lying on the ground? His head . . .”

The officer’s gaze softened as he got to his feet and blocked her view. She leaned to see around him. “Ma’am, I think it would be best if I took you to the police station.”

“No, please! I want to stay with him!”

“Ma’am, it’s not doing you any good to stay here. It can take a long time for them to examine the crime scene. We’re looking for evidence that can lead us to his killer.”

“A white car,” she said again. “I told you, it was a white
car. The man, he was white—really pale . . . and he . . . he had greasy hair that strung into his eyes. He was wearing . . . a T-shirt, I think. Please . . . just go find him!”

“Ma’am, we’ve called it in and we have people looking for him. The white car, have you ever seen it before?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She stared toward her husband. Why had she agreed to rent the U-Haul from this place? They should have just hired movers for Holly. She thought of Bob sulking at the gas station, not even looking at her. The tightness on his face as he pumped gas.

The white Camaro . . . the man staring at Bob, then glancing at her.

“Wait,” she blurted. “It was a Camaro. A white Camaro.”

“A Camaro? You’re sure?” he said.

“Yes. We stopped at the gas station.” She pointed up the road. “The one a block up. We put some gas in the truck. You have to return it full. There was a guy there in a white Camaro. He looked at us. I thought he might know Bob, but he didn’t wave or talk to him.”

“Was it the same man who shot your husband?”

She touched her throat. “Yes, I think so. He must have followed us here.”

The cop quickly spoke into the radio, turning his back to her.

What did it mean? If someone in a Camaro had followed them from the gas station . . . Had the man figured her husband was an easy mark, going to a dark, unlit place?

She begged God to make this a silly nightmare from which she would wake. To get Bob up off the ground . . .

But it wasn’t a dream.

CHAPTER 3

H
olly stood in the middle of her new living room, surveying the boxes that had been unloaded and left for her to unpack. Cathy and Michael were unloading dishes in the kitchen, something that embarrassed her. She never liked for her successful sister to see her Solo cup aesthetic, and it horrified her that Michael, her boss and mentor, was getting a close-up look at the true state of her life. She’d rather they didn’t know that she ate mostly off paper plates and drank from plastic cups she’d picked up at convenience stores. Cathy had a fully stocked kitchen the first time she moved into an apartment of her own. Her plates all matched her cups and bowls, and she displayed them in doorless cabinets like art. Holly was grateful that her cabinets had doors.

At twenty-eight, Holly knew she should be living like an adult rather than a high school dropout. She had graduated from high school—barely—and she’d lived a minimum-wage
lifestyle since she opted out of college. Though her sister Juliet had been so helpful every time she moved, her brother-in-law was getting fed up with her. But what else could she do? Six months pregnant, she couldn’t lift heavy boxes. And she had barely scraped up enough to cover the down payment on this house, much less the money to hire real movers.

Overwhelmed, she walked through the house, dodging boxes, and found her brother, Jay, kneeling in the master bedroom, patching the hole in the drywall. “Is that going to work?” she asked, standing at the door.

Jay looked up at her. “Oh yeah, it’ll be fine. Just let it dry a day or so and then you can slap some paint over it.” He stopped spackling and nodded toward the photography equipment she had unpacked on her bare mattress. “What’s all that?”

“Tools of the trade,” she said.

“Taxi driving?”

She laughed. “No, my other trade. I use them for surveillance.”

“That’s some expensive equipment. Does Michael pay for it?”

“Yeah, thank goodness. Those zoom lenses make my job a lot easier when I’m watching subjects.”

He scraped the extra joint compound back into the bucket, then looked up at her. “So this is getting to be a real thing? Not just a hobby?”

“Seriously?” she said. “You’re just now getting that?”

“I mean, I knew you were all helping Michael. But I didn’t know he’d made actual investments in you.”

“Yeah, imagine that. Somebody investing in me.”

He got up and wiped his hands. “You know what I mean.”

Holly went to the bed and loaded the equipment back into her camera case. “He’s even paying us now. Not much. Just ten bucks an hour, whenever we can put time in. But we’re
kind of liking this gig. Even Juliet, though she’d probably never admit it.”

“So . . . how do you do surveillance from a big yellow taxi? You must stand out like a sore thumb.”

She shrugged and snapped her case. “A taxi fits right in at the hotels, where cheating spouses like to go. And when I get a taxi call, I can leave and make a run. For everything else, Michael has an agency car he lets me drive.”

“What’ll you do when you have the baby?”

“Take him-slash-her with me.”

“Great.”

“Nothing to worry about, bro. It’s utter boredom most of the time. I vow not to take him-slash-her on any high-speed chases.”

“Okay, that doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Trust me, Jay. I’ll be even more protective of my baby than I am of Jackson.”

Jay nodded, clearly remembering that she’d risked her life for his five-year-old son.

“Besides, I like being called a PI a whole lot better than Taxi Driver. It sounds better at parties.”

“And it’s important to sound good at parties,” he said in a dull voice. “So . . . did the previous owners leave any paint cans?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any.”

“Then you may have to paint this whole room.”

She looked around at the dingy brown paint. “Can you believe somebody actually chose this color?”

“Forty years ago it was popular.”

“I’ll just paint the whole room.”

“Or move a piece of furniture in front of this patch-up job,” Jay said. “The main thing is just to get you settled before the baby comes.”

Before the baby comes. That phrase lodged in her heart, quickening her pulse. Would she be ready in time? She went into the room across the hall, the one she had chosen as the nursery. It was empty. She had nothing to offer her child. No diapers, no shoes, no little outfits. And it wasn’t like her friends were the type who gave showers. Some of them didn’t even
take
showers. She would need a rocking chair, a crib, a changing table . . . but all those things cost money.

She jumped when she realized that Cathy stood behind her. Her beautiful sister. Cathy’s long black shampoo-commercial hair, her dark beach tan, and her glamorous eyes were no worse for having spent the day sweating.

“Holly, what’s wrong?” Cathy asked.

Holly blinked back the mist in her eyes. “Just thinking about getting this place ready before the big day.”

“You still have three months. It’ll be fine. This place is a lot nicer than where you moved from.”

“Yeah, but let’s face it. I couldn’t have gotten it if it wasn’t a foreclosure. And it’s the worst house on the street. It needs so much work.”

“Well, the work’s going to get done. You’ll be in a safer area. And you’ll own it.”

She sighed. “I couldn’t have done it without Juliet and Bob. But he was really irritated with me today.”

“He just seemed distracted.”

“By the absurdity of my being a mother?”

“No, probably by a patient or something. You know him. He’s a great surgeon because he completely focuses on his work. He was just focusing on getting the job done. We all wanted you in this place.”

Holly went into the little bathroom next to the bedrooms.
Looking in the mirror was such a surreal experience these days. She hardly recognized herself. “How will I ever get ready to have a baby?”

“You’ll be fine.”

Holly breathed a laugh. “Juliet wants me to go to church with her Sunday. It was kind of a condition of her helping me get the house.”

Cathy looked at the floor. “Yeah, I kind of figured she’d pull something like that.”

Holly shrugged. “You know, it’s not
going
that bothers me so much. I mean, I can get up Sunday morning and meet her at the building. I can walk in and sit for a sermon. It’s not that.”

Cathy lifted her eyebrows. “Then what is it?”

“It’s that I’m pregnant and I’m not married, and I’m walking into a place where people don’t take well to that kind of thing. At least my friends don’t judge me. I just have this vision of walking in there trying to act all pious, like I belong, and having everybody in the congregation turn around and scream, ‘Fraud!’ ”

Cathy chuckled. “It won’t be like that. They’ll probably just ignore you.”

“Yeah, there’s that too.” Holly looked back in the mirror, rethinking the neon pink ends on her blonde hair, the tattoo of a huge butterfly on her left bicep, and the smaller butterflies on the inside of her arm down to her wrist . . . all things she’d done to make the statement that she was different than the preacher’s kid she used to be who’d sat like a robot in church. But if she had to go Sunday, she’d rather blend in.

Cathy sighed and put her arms around her, smiling at Holly’s reflection in the mirror. “Maybe it’s changed since we were kids.”

“Juliet says it has. That her church is full of oh-so-wonderful people.”

“And if anyone’s mean to you, they’ll have her to contend with. It won’t be bad.”

“Then why don’t
you
come?”

“Juliet isn’t holding anything over my head.” Cathy laughed, let go of her. “Maybe I’ll go anyway.”

Holly turned, hope rounding her eyes. “Would you? It would make me feel so much better if you were there, just to have someone on each side of me. Maybe they wouldn’t notice that I have this bump.”

Cathy touched Holly’s stomach. “That ‘bump’ is a precious child.”

“Tell me about it. I’m the one who feels him kicking.”

“Could be a girl.”

“So what do you say? Will you come?”

Cathy just sighed and looked at her for a long moment.

“Michael can come too,” Holly added. “We could pack a pew.”

Cathy laughed at the reference to those revivals their father used to do, where each church member was tasked with filling up a pew each night. Holly remembered inviting everybody who came into the Laundromat next to the church, just so she could have her own pew. She promised them there would be cheesecake and door prizes, but none of them ever came.

Michael stepped into the doorway, and Cathy’s face lit up. “Michael, what do you say? Holly wants us to go to Juliet’s church with her Sunday. Wanna come?”

“Sure. Count me in.” He slid his arms around Cathy’s waist, kissed the top of her head.

Holly glanced away. She was happy for their relationship,
but it sometimes reminded her that she’d done everything backwards. She should have found someone like Michael
before
she got pregnant. Now the chances of finding a soul mate had gone down drastically.

But wasn’t that how everything in her life worked?

“So you’ll come?” Holly asked.

Taylor Swift’s chorus of “Romeo and Juliet” rang out suddenly from the kitchen—Holly’s ringtone for Juliet. “My phone!” Holly pushed past Cathy and headed for the kitchen. “They’re probably on their way back,” she said as she grabbed the phone and swiped the screen to answer. “Hey, Sis, what’s up?”

She heard screaming, sobbing, and Juliet blurted out something that Holly couldn’t understand. Pressing the phone to her ear, she shouted, “Juliet, what is it?”

More hysterics. Holly motioned for Cathy to turn off the radio, and she put the phone on speaker. “Juliet, I can’t understand you. Speak slower.”

“He shot him!”

“Shot? Who?”

Suddenly everyone was around Holly. Cathy and Michael and Jay, staring at her, waiting to hear what was going on. Michael spoke up. “Juliet, who shot who?”

“Bob. At the U-Haul place. This man . . . he just drove up and just . . . shot him.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Yes, they’re here . . . I mean, there.”

Cathy grabbed Holly’s hand to pull the phone closer. “Juliet, where are you?”

“They’re taking me to the police station. But Bob’s still there, on the ground in the parking lot, and they won’t take him to the hospital. I begged them to. They could save him . . .
give him blood . . . they’re saying he’s dead but they haven’t even tried . . .”

Holly gaped at the others, speechless. Mouths fell open, hands went to their faces.

“Honey, we’re coming,” Cathy said. “Do you know what precinct?”

They heard Juliet asking the cop transporting her, then she came back to the phone. “The main one. My car. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll meet you there,” Cathy said. “Honey, it’s going to be all right.”