For the Love of Pete (6 page)

Jerk.
Zoey looked at the alley, too. Nothing was moving in the red SUV. Maybe Baldy had gone to sleep in there. Maybe the Indian ladies were off joyriding in Wisconsin with Pete.

“How do we know they’re even in the restaurant?” she asked.

“We don’t,” he murmured. “But the kidnapper is in that SUV, and if he’s waiting for the Indian women here, they’ll probably show eventually.”

“But what if they don’t?”

She heard a gritting sound like he was grinding his teeth. “If they don’t show, I arrest him and get him to talk.”

“Oh.” She stretched her legs out carefully. Her bladder felt like a water balloon perched in her pelvis. Any sudden movement and it might burst.

“Can’t you hold still?” Lips asked without taking his eyes from the alley.

“I have to pee.”

His looked at her and blinked, long girly eyelashes brushing his cheeks. “Oh. Uh . . . the dollar store probably has a restroom. We’re behind him and far enough back in the shadows that I doubt he can see you exit the car. Just don’t draw attention to yourself.”

“I’ll try not to jump up and down and wave my arms,” she said sweetly. “Be back in a sec.”

Zoey grabbed for the handle of the car door. Was it her imagination, or were his cheeks darker? She didn’t stay to see. This was already embarrassing enough.

Trudging through the frozen slush in the street and around to the front of the block, she hoped that Baldy wouldn’t take off when she was in the store. Just her luck she’d come back and Lips would be gone.

But fifteen minutes later, the Beemer was still sitting at the curb across the street from the entrance to the alley. Zoey opened the passenger-side door and got in, conscious that her nose was running from the cold.

“Hope nobody saw you.” Lips had his eyebrows pulled together in stern worry.

Zoey rolled her eyes as she dug a tissue from the pocket of her coat. “Would you rather I peed in your car?”

She dabbed at her nose.

He frowned harder. “I—”

“For God’s sake, don’t answer that.” Zoey opened the paper sack the cashier had given her at the dollar store. “Twizzler?”

He stared at the red licorice candy like it was a turd in her hand. “What?”

“Twizzler.” She waved it under his nose. “Do you want a Twizzler?”

“Uh . . .”

She withdrew her hand. “If you don’t like cherry licorice, just say so. Jeez.”

He seemed mesmerized as she tore open the bag of Twizzlers and took out a piece, biting off the end. She chewed as his gaze fastened on her mouth like he’d never seen someone eat licorice before.

Finally he blinked as if he was coming out of a daze. “Okay.”

She stopped chewing. “Okay, what?”

“Okay, I’ll try one.”

“Oh.” She offered the bag again.

He inserted a finger and thumb and drew out one stick of licorice. He bit into it as he returned his gaze to the alley.

“Anybody move while I was gone?” Zoey rummaged in the dollar-store bag and came up with a six-pack of half-pint water bottles—the only kind the store had carried. She peeled one off, gave it to Lips, and took one for herself.

“Thanks.” Lips took the bottle absently. “And no, nobody moved.”

“How long will we stay here?”

“Until somebody moves or until sunup.”

There wasn’t much to say to that, so Zoey stayed quiet, slowly chewing her Twizzler. After a minute she rummaged in her bag and got out a roll of silver duct tape. She opened the plastic shrink-wrap around the roll, tore off a palm-sized strip with her teeth, and stuck it on the roof hole.

The tape held for a second and then fell to the floor.

Zoey looked at Lips.

He was watching her with the kind of expression most people reserve for the mentally challenged. “It’s too cold.”

She scowled. “I know it’s cold.”

He pointed to the hole. “For the tape to stick.”

“Oh.”

She put the tape away. There went a dollar down the drain. She took another bite of Twizzler to console herself.

Lips drank some water and recapped his water bottle. “So. What do you do?”

She stopped chewing to squint at him. “What?”

He did the eyebrow thing again. Someone really ought to tell him how irritating that was. “You know, work? What do you do?”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose and took a slurp of her own mini water bottle. “I’m a poet.”

“Yeah?” He stared at her a second, probably trying to figure out if she was kidding or not.

“Yeah.” She waited for the sarcastic comment. For some reason most people seemed to think writing poetry was like this really effete endeavor and also incredibly silly at the same time.

“Huh,” he said, biting into his Twizzler stick. “I’ve never met a poet before.”

She nodded. That wasn’t surprising.

He chewed meditatively for a moment. “What do you do with it?”

“What?”

He waved the Twizzler stick vaguely. “Your poetry. Is it published somewhere? Do they still publish books of poetry?”

“Some. There’s small presses, and once and a while a major house comes out with a new compilation. But usually you have to know someone or be dead. Preferably dead.” Usually she would be getting defensive at this point—it was amazing how little people knew about poets and poetry—but he really seemed interested in her answer. “Unless you go the vanity press route.”

“Vanity press?”

“You know. Little red book with a cardstock cover, staples in the binding, one copy to all your friends and relatives?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. But there are still magazines that take new poems. I’ve gotten three of my pieces published in the last couple of years.”

“Really.”

Now he sounded almost impressed, and she could feel her cheeks heating.
Oh, God, don’t blush.
It was such a pain having fair skin sometimes. And it was totally involuntary, blushing—it wasn’t like it meant anything.

Except now she found herself babbling. “It’s not a big deal. They were little magazines; you’ve probably never heard of them. Actually, the only people who’ve heard of them are other poets.”

“So, I’m only allowed to be amazed if I’m another poet?”

“You’re amazed?” Okay, now she was definitely blushing, she couldn’t help it. No one, not even her family, had ever said something that nice about her writing.

“Sure. I don’t know anyone who has published anything.” He looked at her, and his dark brown eyes seemed so sincere.

Good God, the man was dangerous.

“Yeah, well.” She cleared her throat. “It’s not like the checks they send me will buy more than an order of take-out Chinese.”

“So what do you do to pay the bills?”

“I have a day job at a co-op grocery store—The Serene Grape—”

“The Serene Grape?” He looked at her.

“That’s what I said.”

He stared pointedly at the Twizzler package in her hands. “Isn’t that a health-food store?”

“Yeah? So?”

“So, what’s with the licorice candy? I thought health-food types don’t eat junk food.”

She arched her own brow at him—not that he noticed, since he’d gone back to staring at the alley. “Just because I work at a health-food store doesn’t make me a food Nazi. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with Twizzlers—”

“Red food coloring? Refined sugar? Isn’t that bad?”

“I don’t eat Twizzlers all the time!” Now she sounded defensive. What was with this guy?

“Don’t see how you could. This stuff tastes like cherry-flavored rubber.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what Twizzlers are.” Zoey took another pull on her own stick.

He darted a funny look at her, and for a moment he seemed hypnotized by her mouth.

She stopped chewing. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I—”

And then everything happened at once. In the alley the back door to the Indian restaurant opened and a scrawny old man emerged. Baldy jumped from the red SUV. Lips cursed, drew his gun, and scrambled from the Beemer just as a lavender minivan rounded the corner. The little old man jumped in the air at the sight of Baldy and ran back into the restaurant, slamming the door behind him. Baldy started shouting and banging on the door, which, being metal, looked pretty solid.

The lavender minivan braked abruptly and then suddenly accelerated past Lips, standing by the side of the Beemer. As it whizzed by, Zoey caught sight of the two Indian women, one waving her arms wildly, the other bent over the wheel of the minivan as if she were on the last lap of the Indy 500. On the side of the lavender minivan someone had painted a lopsided daisy and the words “ARTIE’S FLOWERS.”

Lips said a bad word.

Baldy turned at the sound of the revving engine and looked straight at Lips. Even from this far away, Zoey saw his eyes widen. Then he got a gun out and she dove for the floor of the Beemer.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

A squeal of tires.

BLAM! BLAM!

Silence.

Oh, God, had he got Dante? The guy had been a hard-ass, but still, he’d tried her Twizzlers. What if—?

The car rocked as a man got in. Zoey raised her head to peek. Lips was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead out the windshield. He had a smear of dirt on one perfect cheekbone, and the shoulder of his black leather trench coat was smudged with white salt from the street. He didn’t look happy.

Zoey scrambled up from the floor of the car and checked the alley. It was deserted, both minivan and red SUV gone. Even the little old man was still hiding—not that she blamed him, what with the gunfight and all.

The Twizzlers packet had fallen to the floor. She bent, picked it up, and took two out. One she handed to Lips, the other she bit into.

“Man,” she said as she swallowed her gummy bite. “Have you got bad karma or what?”

Chapter Eight

Thursday, 7:03 p.m.

N
eil’s nerves had been pretty much shot to hell since the two old ladies had snatched his fucking Hummer, so it wasn’t surprising that the sound of his cell going off in his jacket pocket made him jerk the wheel of the red SUV, which nearly sent the big truck into an oncoming bus. Fortunately, he got the SUV back in the right lane in time for the bus to fly by while the driver gave him the bird. At one time in his life, that would’ve been cause enough for Neil to pull out his Beretta and pop the bus driver.

But he’d turned forty-five just last month, and Neil had found that age was mellowing the fuck out of him. He hadn’t killed anyone in nearly six months, and it’d been a good two weeks since he’d broke some little fucker’s legs on behalf of Tony the Rose. True, he’d been in a shootout twice today, but that was a pretty small lapse. Ashley had made him do these anger management classes, and while he’d been in AM classes before—court ordered—he’d never paid any attention to them in the past. But when Ash said he needed to take the class and stay awake this time, Neil had figured he’d better do it. Ash was the best thing that’d ever happened to him, and he knew enough not to mess up something that good.

He’d met Ash five years ago now, and she’d knocked him on his ass, metaphorically speaking. Ash was smart and not afraid to show it. She’d stand up to any guy, give as good as she got, and stare them down. It’d taken Neil two years and a pink diamond big as the nail on his pinkie to get Ashley to marry him, and he figured it was about the smartest thing he’d done in his life.

So now, instead of plastering the fucking bus driver’s brains against his fucking bus-driver seat, Neil turned off the main street and pulled up beside a brick bungalow. He took a breath, checked the rearview to make sure he’d lost the FBI agent. He hadn’t even realized he was being followed until he saw the fucker again at the Indian restaurant. The guy was in plain clothes, but his shiny dress shoes and suit screamed Feeb. Neil snorted and pulled out his still-ringing cell. He checked the screen and nearly had a heart attack on the spot.

Slowly he took two short breaths and one long, like his AM teacher had taught them, and then flipped open the cell. “Yeah?”

There was a pause on the other end and an exhale like someone was blowing smoke, which of course he was, then a high voice that sounded like it was coming from a kid that didn’t even have hair on his nuts yet.

’Cept this was no kid. “That you, Neil?”

Deep breath, blow it out slowly. It was supposed to lower his blood pressure, but Neil felt like his heart rate was going through the roof. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Go okay?”

Neil shifted a bit in the car seat. Fact was, Tony the Rose wouldn’t be calling at all if he didn’t already know that the fucking job had gone all to shit in a shit basket. “Not so much.”

Another pause while Tony blew more smoke. Way the guy sucked on cigars, he should’ve had a voice like a steam shovel, instead he was stuck with a little girl’s lisp, go figure. “Wanna explain that to me?”

Not so much,
but he couldn’t tell Tony that. Instead, Neil took another deep breath, hoping he wasn’t hyperventilating with all this fucking breathing, and said, “They didn’t get the asshole.”

“No?”

“No.” Neil felt sweat pop out under his armpits, even though the heater on the SUV was only lukewarm. It was never a good thing to be the one to tell Tony bad news. “When I got there, the Feds were shooting at each other and Spinoza was nowhere in sight.”

“He wasn’t dead on the floor like he shoulda been?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t shoot him.”

“No, I—”

“’Cause you know that’s why I sent you over there in the first place, Neil,” Tony the Rose said gently in his little-girl voice. “As backup, should that FBI agent screw me over and
not
kill Spinoza like he promised to. Which, as it turns out, he did.”

“Ah . . .”

Tony blew smoke into the phone. “So you’re sayin’ I’m screwed now. Spinoza’s still walking around plannin’ on testifying against me.”

“I guess.” Neil swallowed. Turned out the fucking breathing wasn’t helping worth a damn. “But I got the kid.”

There was a pause from the other end, which Neil couldn’t figure was good or bad or just surprised. He’d been a bit surprised himself when he’d had a brainstorm and snatched the kid when Spinoza hadn’t been home. This was a clear case of “thinking outside the box,” one of the things he’d learned in anger management class. Almost made the $149.99 class fee worth it.