Iris Avenue (3 page)

“The kids are fine. This is about Brian.”

“What’s he done now?”

Scott told her what he knew and she grew weary-looking as she listened.

“He’ll come here or contact me,” she said. “The FBI will be back before nightfall, you watch.”

“Sarah says the feds are already in town.”

“That’s great,” Ava said. “My kids were just beginning to feel safe sleeping in their own beds.”

“I’ll have Skip and Frank keep an eye on your place.”

“Thank you. Please tell them to watch the school, too.”

“I’ll make sure the principal and the teachers know. We’ll keep them safe.”

The oven timer dinged. Ava rose, took a tray of muffins out of the oven, and put two on a plate for Scott. She still wore a cast from breaking her wrist rescuing Little Fitz, but didn’t seem to favor that hand or feel any pain from using it.

“Scott, I know I probably shouldn’t be asking you this, but do you know how I could go about getting a gun?”

“No, Ava, not with kids in the house. I won’t let you.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “But I don’t feel safe.”

“Would it help if I stayed here at night?”

“Scott, that is so sweet, and even though I probably shouldn’t I’m going to take you up on that offer. People will gossip about it, but I can’t afford to worry about how things look anymore. If you don’t mind doing it I won’t mind what people say.”

“I don’t mind at all. I only have Duke to feed, when he bothers to come home at all. I ought to warn you, though; he’ll probably follow me here.”

“Don’t worry about that cat. He walks with Timmy and Charlotte to and from school sometimes, and I feed him on the back porch. I hate to make you sleep on the sofa every night but my rooms are all booked.”

“I don’t mind the sofa, and that way I can come and go and not disturb you and the kids.”

Ava gave him a key to the back door, along with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“You’ll eat like a king,” she said. “I’ll make sure you have a good breakfast every morning and a good dinner every night.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Scott said, but he was already looking forward to it.

Ava’s hug and kiss kept him warm all the way back to the station.

County Animal Control Officer Hannah received a call to come out to the Roadhouse, and when she got there she found a big, burly dumpster service driver sitting on the bumper of his truck, crying. He was holding something against his chest, down inside his jacket.

“Hey, buddy,” Hannah said as she approached him. “Are you okay?”

The man looked up at Hannah through red eyes, his cheeks stained with tears.

“I don’t understand people,” he said.

“Me neither,” Hannah said. “Did you call about a dog?”

He pointed at the garbage dumpster sitting between the Roadhouse and the motel behind it.

“Somebody dumped a litter of pups in there. Who does something like that?”

Hannah patted him on the shoulder.

“I know, buddy,” she said. “I know.”

He sniffed a little, and wiped his eyes with the back of a grimy hand.

“You got one of those pups in your jacket, there?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “The other ones are dead.”

He held out his jacket so she could look down at the tiny black pup he cradled there.

“Look there,” she said. “You saved one.”

“I can’t keep her,” he said. “My wife’s allergic.”

“I’ll find her a good home,” Hannah said.

“You won’t kill her,” the man said. “I won’t let you take her unless you promise.”

“Listen, little girls this cute are easy to find homes for. Before you know it this dog will be chasing squirrels all day and sleeping inside every night. I promise.”

The man carefully lifted the pup out and Hannah tucked it inside her jacket.

“I find all kinds of awful stuff in dumpsters,” he said. “I even found a dead guy once, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much as this.”

A man came out of one of the motel rooms behind the Roadhouse and when he saw the dumpster driver he stopped in his tracks. He looked familiar to Hannah, and not like someone she’d ever want to meet alone behind the Roadhouse, even in broad daylight.

“What’s going on?” he said as he approached.

He looked to Hannah like one of the biker gang members who hung out at the bar, which was notorious for violent fights and drug traffic. Even though it was cold outside he was wearing a sleeveless muscle shirt and combat fatigue pants. Hannah could see tattoos on almost every visible inch of skin, and anything on his head that could be pierced was. He even had little horn-like bumps installed above his forehead on each side of his bald head. The effect was as satanic as he intended it to be. Hannah shivered a little and was glad to be standing next to a bigger, more tender-hearted guy.

“There’s nothin’ going on,” the driver said. “I found something in the dumpster, is all.”

The devil man’s eyes widened.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” he said.

“None of your business,” the dumpster driver said, and when the devil man started toward them the driver stood up to his full height.

“You don’t scare me,” the devil man said, and drew a knife out of a sheath on his belt.

Hannah started backing up with the idea that she would run to her truck and call the police.

“Then maybe this will,” the driver said, and produced a small handgun out of his jacket pocket. He pointed it at the man’s horned head and cocked it.

This stopped the devil man in his tracks. He put the knife back in its sheath and held up both hands.

“Hey man,” he said. “None of my business, like you said.”

They watched him go in the back door of the Roadhouse.

“He’ll be back with friends,” the driver said. “You better get on out of here.”

Hannah didn’t need any more encouragement. She thanked the man and ran back to her truck with the puppy whimpering against her chest. As she left the parking lot she saw the horned man coming out the front door of the Roadhouse with two guys who were even bigger and scarier looking than he was. Hannah watched in her rearview mirror as they jumped out of the way to avoid being mowed down by the dumpster driver’s huge truck. She wondered if they would follow him. She also wondered what was in the dumpster that had the devil man so worried.

Maggie Fitzpatrick was standing in front of the checkout counter in Little Bear Books, talking to Jeanette, her second in command.

“I need your grandson to take a look at my computer,” Maggie said. “Since we upgraded I’ve been getting weird results when I run my financial reports.”

“Jeffrey’s got school until two forty-five,” Jeanette said. “But I’ll let his mother know he should come here before soccer practice.”

“Can’t we get him out of school?” Maggie asked.

“He’s fourteen, Maggie,” Jeanette said. “He can’t miss school to work on your computers.”

“Maybe he could get class credit for the work,” Maggie insisted.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ve been paying him but not that much. Maybe I should give him a raise.”

“He does it for the discount,” Jeanette said, “and because his grandmother works for you. Maybe you should give me the raise instead.”

Maggie looked so stricken that Jeanette laughed.

“You should see your face, Maggie. You’re as tight as a tick.”

“I know,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “My mother did that to me. That woman could squeeze two cents out of every penny.”

Since Maggie couldn’t do the bookkeeping she wanted to do she went over to the family’s bakery to see if she could help out there. Maggie’s bookstore ran better without her nitpicking the staff to death, and Jeanette had everything well in hand, so she could afford to be flexible with her schedule.

She arrived at the bakery right after Patrick told their mother that Brian had escaped from prison. Bonnie, pale and shaky, left to go tell Fitz, their father. Maggie was worried about her mother, but couldn’t go with her and leave the bakery unattended.

Maggie called her cousin and best friend Hannah and asked her to please come to the bakery as soon as possible. She didn’t dare tell her the news over the phone, as the scanner grannies in town listened in on cellular and cordless phone calls using their police scanners. They were mostly harmless, isolated by age or illness, and looking for excitement by listening in to other people’s lives, but Maggie didn’t underestimate the negative effect of their gossip.

Hannah’s mother Alice, who worked the eight-to-four shift in the bakery, came back from a short break and Maggie got her caught up.

Alice’s response was, “Well, why on earth didn’t they shoot him rather than let him escape? He may come back here and kill us all in our sleep.”

Maggie rolled her eyes as she turned away. Her Aunt Alice was ditzy and prone to say tactless things, but Maggie overlooked her for Hannah’s sake.

When Hannah arrived, Maggie told her what was going on.

“Your brother is like a comic book villain,” Hannah said. “No bars can hold him!”

“Seems like it,” Maggie said.

“Maybe he’s half man, half water vapor. When cornered he evaporates, and then reappears out of a puddle somewhere nearby.”

“Hannah.”

“I’ll have to think of a good comic book name for him. I know I want the word ‘red’ to be in there somewhere.”

“Watch it,” Maggie warned.

Brian and Maggie both had the red, freckled coloring of their mother’s Scottish side of the family, while their brothers Sean and Patrick had the blue eyes and dark hair of their father’s Black Irish side.

“Keep your curls on,” Hannah told her. “Something to do with pirates, maybe.”

When Brian tried to kidnap his son Timmy, the young boy had described his would-be assailant as looking like a pirate, with long red curls, a beard, and an earring.

“Brian the Red,” Hannah said. “Or Slippery Brian, the Red Pirate of Rose Hill.”

“Too long,” Maggie said.

“Redbeard!” Hannah said. “Like Bluebeard only red.”

“Bluebeard killed his wives.”

“Accuracy is the hallmark of a good comic book name.”

“Don’t joke about it,” Maggie said. “It feels wrong.”

“Alright,” Hannah said. “I’ll work on another one, but it won’t be half as good if it’s not accurate.”

Maggie helped her Aunt Alice prepare for the lunch rush, and Hannah rang up customers. Hannah tended to eat more baked goods than she sold so they had to keep an eye on her. Even though Hannah was tiny and skinny she ate like a lumberjack.

“Have you used any of that makeup I bought you?” Alice asked her daughter. “It’s supposed to erase the lines you have around the eyes.”

“No, mother,” Hannah said. “You know I don’t wear makeup.”

“Well,” Alice sighed, “a mother can continue to hope, I guess. I had four boys before I had you, and if I’d known you wouldn’t like girly things I probably wouldn’t have bothered.”

Maggie gasped but Hannah just laughed.

“After I threw that fit at the first pageant you put me in you should have drowned me in the river,” she said.

“I don’t know why you say such awful things,” her mother said. “You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

Maggie shook her head in disbelief, but Hannah shrugged it off as her mother went back to the kitchen.

“She thinks Claire and I were somehow switched at birth, even though we were born a year apart.”

Claire was their cousin, daughter of Uncle Ian and Aunt Delia Fitzpatrick, and she, Hannah, and Maggie had always been close growing up. Claire was a girly girl, and worked as a hair and makeup artist on movie sets around the world. It only sounded glamorous, according to Claire, who suffered through long months on difficult location shoots babysitting bratty actors and actresses. She came home about once a year, and lived in California when she wasn’t traveling.

“Have you heard from Miss Claire?” Hannah asked Maggie.

“I get e-mails occasionally, but she hasn’t called in awhile.”

“Last I heard she was in Istanbul,” said Hannah. “Where is that, by the way?”

“Turkey.”

Hannah looked unenlightened.

“Next to Greece,” Maggie said, pointing to an imaginary map on the counter. “There’s the Mediterranean, then Greece, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.”

“That’s scary; why would you film a movie so close to a war zone?”

“Because the story takes place there, I guess.”

“Yeah, but can’t they build a pretend Turkey in California, on one of those lots? Seems like it would save a lot of money.”

“Claire says spending money is what directors are good at, not saving it.”

“She also says everyone in Hollywood sleeps with everyone else,” Hannah said.