Phil's head was craned behind the fabric, like Ichabod Mutt. Dina halted and looked at Jack. "Did you hear that?"
He assumed she didn't mean the back-to-school-sale commercial on TV. "Hear what?"
She pushed aside the drapes and tugged open the slider. "For a second there, I thought Phil growled."
"Nah. Probably something he ate is recycling itself."
If dogs were eligible for belching contests, Phil would have a wallful of blue ribbons. The other forced-air function at which he excelled hadn't yet qualified as an event.
The mutt backfooted from the door. He padded over between Harriet's chair and the dining area and sat down. Dina shut and relocked the patio door. "Maybe he's storm-phobic. It isn't thundering or lightning, but animals react to changes in barometric pressure."
Jack patted the couch cushion beside him. "I think the pressure he's"
The front door burst open and crashed into the wall. Phil sprang forward. Teeth bared, he barked like a rabid Doberman.
Jack leaped to his feet, colliding with Dina. She screamed as a golf club arced down and cracked Phil's skull. The dog crumpled into a heap on the carpet.
"
Quiet!
Move away from McPhee." Carleton deHaven pointed a 9 mm Glock pistol at Dina. His hands were gloved; a finger curled around the trigger. "I said,
move.
"
Harriet's face was stark white. A quaking hand rose to her mouth. She stared at Phil, then up at deHaven, trying to comprehend what was happening.
"You." He nodded at Harriet. "Take off the Medi-Alert device. Careful
and drop it behind you. Very good. Now the cordless phone."
The handset banged off the portable oxygen tank.
"Now you, McPhee." DeHaven reached sideward. The five-iron probed at the narrow slot between the wall and the door. "Over toward the girl, where I can see you."
Nodding, Jack crossed his arms and sidled nearer Dina. She, too, was ghost-pale. Tears streamed from eyes at once terrified, heartsick at the blood trickling from Phil's ear, and icy with hatred for Carleton deHaven.
"Hold it. Close enough." DeHaven glanced away to leverage the door shut with the club.
Jack's thumb pressed Redial on the cell phone in his pocket. Fingers tucked under his arms, his palm shielded the unit's lighted display. He prayed McGuire would realize it was a distress call. Prayed he'd answer, but not with a booming "McGuire."
"Nice tuxedo, deHaven. Which restaurant is missing its maître d'?"
"Very funny." The golf club clattered to the entry floor. "Tonight, the community opera is giving a special performance of
Pagliacci
in tribute to my unlamented, late wife."
Phil's inert body was nudged out of deHaven's path. "A private, invitation-only performance. To keep out the riffraff."
"Interesting choice of operas." Jack tamped his rage. He didn't have the luxury of indulging it. "The promiscuous Nedda represents Belle, no doubt. In your mind, anyway. Who plays you? Tonio, the fool? Or Nedda's husband, the clown that murders her in the end?"
DeHaven smirked. "Unfortunately, by the intermission, I was overwhelmed by grief. I left my guests to the buffet and Cristal and retired to the manager's office to rest, until the second act."
Tribute my ass, Jack thought. Glad Belle missed it. Buffalo wings, beer on tap and a shit-kickin' band were her style. There'd be a party in her honor, in this life or the next one, by God.
"How did you know where the Wexlers live?" he said. "Or that I was here?"
"And you call yourself a private detective? This
is
the twenty-first century. Pity you won't have time to adapt to modern technology."
Thinking between the inferences, Jack knew the Taurus had acquired an extra piece of equipment under a fender well or the bumper. A Global Positioning System tracker could be bought on eBay for a few hundred bucks, plus shipping.
"Sounds like you've finessed another almost perfect alibi. Except shooting us just adds three more homicides to the score."
Dina tried to stifle a sob. "Please, don't do this."
"Is that what Belle said when you aimed my .38 at her?"
"Shut up, McPhee."
"Four premeditated murders? Golden Boy, they're gonna put needles in
both
your arms."
"The police have no evidence against me. That ridiculous blackmail scheme of yours"
"About the time that packet was delivered to you, I was with Lt. McGuire, laying out everything I sent you and more."
Harriet's fingers slowly closed around the remotea decent weapon, if thrown hard enough. Her other hand was braced against the edge of the TV tray. Jack hadn't seen her move at all. Neither had deHaven.
A flying remote, the cluttered table toppling overshe'd distract deHaven. Startle him. Draw his fire. Sacrifice herself. Jack couldn't let that happen.
"You're bluffing," deHaven said. "If that were true, the police would have arrested me by now."
Then the tracking device wasn't on the car when Jack met with McGuire. The damn packet had set off deHaven. By no means, as Jack had planned.
He lowered his head, slowly shaking it, catching Harriet's eye.
Don't,
he telegraphed.
Not yet. Get ready.
"What's this?" DeHaven backed up a step. His eyes and the Glock never wavered from Jack as he groped around on the dining room table for Earl Wexler's revolver. He pointed it at Dina. "This yours?"
She stiffened, but didn't respond.
"Well, I doubt it's McPhee's. But it better serves my purpose, regardless." He pocketed the 9 mm pistol. "It'll provoke fewer questions if Mrs. Wexler kills her daughter and her daughter's lover with it, then turns it on herself."
"Are you insane?" Dina shrieked, starting toward him. "Nobody"
DeHaven thumbed the hammer. "Stop right there."
Jack grabbed her shirt and yanked her behind him. Two sharper jerks disguised his finger pointing at Harriet.
If
Dina saw it. Turning to face deHaven, Jack glanced sideward at Harriet.
Set.
Phil's rear paw twitched. A halo of blood darkened the carpet above his head. The dead don't bleed. Nothing to pump it, when the heart stops. Hang on, buddy
.
"It's your dear mother who's insane, Ms. Wexler," deHaven said. "The pharmacy bags in your car this afternoon and a telephone conversation with a chatty clerk were most informative."
Jack chuckled, waving a time-out, edging nearer, as if one motion impelled the other. "I don't know what you're smokin', but I want some."
"Elder rage, they call it," deHaven went on, spellbound by his own genius. "Tragic, when it occurs. Two of her medications can induce paranoid delusions. Another accelerates senile dementia. Anxiety. Pychoses."
The toe of his shoe prodded Phil's haunch. "Just look what your mother did to this poor, defenseless animal."
Phil snarledtwisted toward deHaven.
Harriet yelled, "Go!"
The tray table crashed to the floor. The .357 went off like a bomb. Jack slammed into deHaven, pile driving him into the dining room wall. The window shattered. Another shot squeezed off.
Jack pounded deHaven's wrist against the casing. "Drop the gun
drop it!
" A hand clamped his face, pushing, fingers clawing, gouging. He ducked, clenched his jaw. His head snapped up, ramming deHaven in the windpipe.
The heavy gun hit Jack like an anvil and fell to the floor. He cocked a fist and hammered deHaven square in the gut, doubling him over. A knee uppercut his chin.
Golden Boy smacked the wall again. Sliding down it, he sprawled at Jack's feet. Blood poured out deHaven's nose, the glove shredded by the window glass. His mouth hung open, convulsing like a fish out of water.
Panting, the acrid gunpowder haze as thick as fog, Jack scooped up the .357. The Glock was wrenched from deHaven's pocket. The floor suddenly heaved, tilted, rocking him backward.
He staggered into the living room. The patio door was shattered. The ottoman lay canted on its side. In front of the glider, Dina and Harriet were huddled over Phil. Blood smeared their hands, their clothes. Dog blood.
"Jack! Oh, my God."
At least that's what he thought Dina said. His skull felt as if it were wrapped in a mattress. It'd be nice if he could stretch out on one. Just for a minute. So damn tired
McGuire and two patrolmen gangwayed in the front door, guns drawn and leveled. McGuire's lips moved. Why was everybody whispering?
"Party's over, man," Jack said. "Where the fuck you been?"
The uniforms glanced at Dina. She pointed, still whispering. They rushed past Jack into the dining room. Absently, he wondered how he could stand still while the duplex revolved around him.
Getting dark, too. Dina and her obsession with the light bill
penny-pincher.
McGuire holstered his weapon. The guns leaving Jack's hands made his knees rubbery. "Dog. Got get 'im
vet."
One leg buckled. McGuire grabbed for him. Pain screamed in Jack's head. The world went black.
23
D
ina skewered a hole in a large cube of cheddar cheese. Into it, she inserted a tiny white pill, then a capsule. A spoonful of sugar wouldn't make the medicine go down. Not in this house, no matter whose name was on the prescription bottle.
Phil sniffed at the cheese. He looked up at her, his blue eye torpid, the lid adroop, fixed in a permanent, blind wink. The brown one told Dina he didn't fool that easily, but cheese was a vast improvement over yesterday's peanut butter Mickey Finns.
The crown of his head was shaved like a reverse mohawk with a crescent of blue-filament sutures in the middle. The exposed skin was a healthy pink, the gash mending nicely. Fur would regrow and hide the scar, but Dina would never forget that golf club whistling downward, the sound of the blade bashing his skull.
Phil gulped his pain-pill-antibiotic treat, licked his chops, then begged for a plain cheese chaser. She kissed his snoot. "Sorry, mooch. Not for another four hours. Now go take a nap, while I finish my rounds."
A saucepan of decaf tea poured into a plastic pitcher of ice was set on a tray. Seedless grapes, cantaloupe slices, plums and a bowl of rice cake chips more or less camouflaged four prescription bottles.
"Di-na," Harriet called from the living room. "When you get a minute, would you bring me a pair of socks? The blue ones, if they're clean. Same shade as my feet, seeing as how it's cold as kraut in here."
Breathe in, breathe out, Dina thought. Count your blessings.
Count
their
blessings. She hefted the tray and set off for the living room.
Harriet's rickety, throne-side trays had been righted. Restored or replaced necessities and clutter heaped each of them, placed just so, exactly as before, except somehow a clearing had been made large enough for a vase with a dozen red roses.
The ottoman, she complained bitterly, was lopsided and no longer rocked in tandem with the glider. Her scepter, the TV remote, was crisscrossed in adhesive tape and rubber bands. The Select and Info buttons had popped off. Up and Down had reversed polarity, but she wouldn't part with it for a truckful of roses. Not after she'd held it, like a grenade, to hurl at Carleton deHaven when he dispensed with Jack and came after them. Instead, as the patrolman escorted the prisoner past Harriet, she'd clocked deHaven upside the jaw with it.
Lt. Andy McGuire sat inches away from the ottoman, hunched over on a dining room chair, his elbows braced on his splayed knees. How he held a legal pad with one hand and wrote with the other was beyond Dina.
He'd apologized over and over for not responding faster to the cell-phoned distress call. Apparently, he just had again.
"If deHaven wasn't so in love with his scenario, we'd have had one of those so-called unfortunate outcomes." Jack rapped the arm winged in a cast with a metal bar holding it aloft. The fiberglass body cast extended diagonally across his chest and down to his waist. "My prize for keeping him talking is lurching around in a half-zombie suit for the next couple of months."
McGuire said, "The E.R. doc told me that uppercut to deHaven's belly is what blew out your shoulder. Generous of him to let his face meet your knee halfway."
"Generous of me not to finish him off."
Dina set down the tray on a rolling table at the foot of Jack's hospital bed. Even the narrowest one the medical supply house had available was a tight squeeze between the couch and Harriet's headquarters.
"With a pretty lady waiting on you hand and foot?" McGuire shook his head at the iced tea Dina offered. "I hope one of those pills is an attitude adjuster, Ms. Wexler. His sure could use improving."
