Samantha Moon: First Eight Novels, Plus One Novella (40 page)

Stuart was looking down. A bug had alighted on his bald head, threatening its perfection. He casually reached up and slapped his head, then wiped his palm. Whew! Disaster averted. Stuart, I saw, was crying gently, nearly imperceptively.

I waited by the van. He cried some more, then nodded and wiped his eyes. His whole bald head was gleaming red.

“Let’s do this,” he said, nodding some more.

“
You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“
No, this is the best answer. This is the
only
answer, Sam. I want justice, but the courts won’t give it to me.”

“
Jerry Blum is a professional killer. He’s going to know how to fight. And he’s going to kill you the first chance he gets.”

“
I have been taking boxing lessons these past few weeks, since our last talk.”

“
Boxing lessons where?” I asked.

“
A little Irish guy. Says he knows you. Says you’re a freak of nature.”

“
Jacky’s always exaggerating,” I said.

“
Says you knocked out a top-ranked Marine boxer.”

“
The top-ranked Marine boxer had it coming to him.”

Stuart looked at me. The red blotches that had covered his head were dissipating. He looked so gentle and kind and little. I couldn’t imagine him taking on a crime lord single-handedly. “You are a fascinating woman, Ms. Moon.”

“So they say,” I said, and decided to change the subject, especially since the subject was me. “Stuart, there’s a very real chance you aren’t walking out of this grove alive in a few days.”

That seemed to hit him. He thought about it. “Well, this is a good place to die, then, isn’t it?”

“You don’t have to die, Stuart,” I said.

“
No,” he said. “I suppose I could always just shoot him before he knows what hits him. Or have a whole array of weapons at my disposal.”

I said nothing. I was liking this plan less and less.

“But he killed my wife, Sam. He put fear in her. He put terror in her. He made the woman I love feel
terror
. Think about that. He made the woman I loved, the woman I had committed my life to, the woman I was going to start a family with, die in a fiery crash. I hate him. I hate him more than you could ever know. Yes, I suppose I should just step out of the shadows with a gun. I suppose I should just level it at him, and blow his fucking brains out. Maybe I still will. I don’t know. But I want to beat him, Sam. With my fists. I want to hear his nose break. I want to see his blood flow. I want to punch him harder than I have ever punched anything in my life. I want to see the terror in
his eyes
when he realizes he will never get up again, that he will die in that moment.”

“
And when you kill him?” I asked. “What then?”

Stuart turned to me and looked perplexed by the question. He hadn’t, of course, thought much beyond this. A red welt was blistering on the side of his head, where the mosquito had gotten to him a fraction before he had gotten to the mosquito. The blood-sucking little bastard.

“I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know.” He paused, then looked me directly in the eye. “Will you still help me?”

I was never much for vigilante justice. I had taken an oath years ago to uphold the law. This was very much outside the law. This was also crazy.

These are crazy times,
I thought.

“
Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“
Thank you, Sam.”

And when he said those words, a dull tingling sensation rippled through me, and something very strange happened to the air around Stuart. A very faint, darkish halo briefly surrounded his body. The black halo flared once, twice, and then disappeared.

Chapter Thirty-nine

There was a knock on my hotel door.

Monica, who had been lying on her side and reading, snapped her head around and looked at me.

I stepped away from my laptop and moved over to the bedside table. I quietly pulled open the top drawer and removed my small handgun from its shoulder holster. Then I slipped quietly over and stood to one side of the door. Never directly in front.

“
Who’s there?” I asked.

“
Detective Sherbet.”

I grinned. I was quite fond of the detective, who was an aging homicide investigator here in Fullerton. A few months back, Sherbet had helped me solve Kingsley’s attempted murder case. And spending long nights sitting together in the rain on stakeouts had gotten us close. But not so close that I had revealed to him my super-secret identity.

I unlocked and opened the door to find the big detective standing there holding a greasy bag of donuts. He was also breathing loudly through his open mouth, and I realized just the effort of walking down the hallway had been a bit much for the old guy. The donuts didn’t help.

“
Got a minute?” he asked.

“
Do I have a choice?” I asked.

“
Not really.”

“
In that case, come in, detective.”

He came in, nodded at me, spotted Monica on the bed, and went straight over to her. He took both her hands in his one free hand. The other, of course, was holding the donuts. Monica sat up immediately when she saw him, and now she looked a bit like a teenage girl talking to her grandfather.

“Hello, Monica,” he said warmly. “Are you keeping Samantha out of trouble?”

She smiled—or tried to smile—and then she burst into tears. Detective Sherbet calmly set the greasy bag on the night table, then sat next to her and put an arm around her. He made small, comforting noises to her, and they sat like this for a few minutes.

Sherbet squeezed her shoulders one more time, patted her hands, and then stood. He grabbed the bag of donuts and led me out onto the balcony. He closed the sliding glass door behind me. He then sat on one of the dusty, cushioned chairs, calmly opened the oily bag, peered inside, and selected a bright pink donut.

“
I thought you didn’t like the color pink,” I said. “Or, for that matter, pink anything.”

“
I’m coming around,” he said, and held up the effeminate-looking donut.

“
Speaking of pink,” I said. “How’s your son?”

Sherbet paused mid-chew, breathing loudly through his nose. He finished the bite and looked at me sideways. “That was a low blow, Ms. Moon.”

“You know I adore your son.”

“
I do, too,” he said. “The kid’s fine. I caught him trying on his mother’s pantyhose the other day. Pantyhose.”

“
What did you do?” I asked, suppressing a giggle.

“
Honestly? I went into my bedroom, shut the door, and sat in the dark for an hour or two.”

“
So you took it well.”

“
About as well as any dad would.”

“
You love him, though.”

Sherbet reached inside the bag again. “In a weird way, I think I love him more.”

“Oh?”

He pulled out an apple fritter. Remnants of the pink frosting donut were smeared on the fritter. Sherbet licked the remnants off.

He said, “The kid’s going to have it tough in school, and everywhere else, for that matter. He’s going to need someone strong by his side.”

I patted his roundish knee, hidden beneath slacks that were stretched tight. I think Sherbet had gained 10 or 15 pounds since I’d last seen him. He didn’t sound very healthy, either. As he ate the donut, I reached over and gently took the greasy bag from him. He watched in mild shock as I held my hand over the balcony railing.

“Sam, don’t,” he said.

“
You’re gaining weight, detective. And you sound like you need a respirator. These things aren’t helping.”

“
You sound like my wife.”

“
You should listen to her.”

I let the bag go. Five seconds later, I heard it splat nine floors below.

Sherbet winced. “I should give you a ticket for littering.”

“
Then give me a ticket.”

He went to work on the rest of the fritter. “My hands are too sticky to write. Besides, I’ve got some news for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“
We got a call from a guest staying here at the hotel.”

Sherbet licked his fingers. I waited.

“She reported that a strange man had been watching the hotel for a few days now. So we sent one of our guys around and talked to him. The guy’s story didn’t sound kosher, and so we picked him up for questioning.”

“
And did he answer your questions?”

“
Not at first, but, believe it or not, I can play bad cop pretty damn well.”

“
Bad cop? You? Never!”

Sherbet grinned. There was pink frosting in his cop mustache. I should have told him there was pink frosting in his cop mustache, but he looked so damn cute that I decided not to. “So I shake this guy down and he finally tells me his story.”

“He’s a hired killer,” I said.

“
You know the story?”

“
I can guess some of it.”

“
So what else can you guess, Sam?”

“
He was hired by Ira Lang.”

Sherbet raised his thick finger and shot me. The finger glistened stickily. “Bingo.”

Chapter Forty

Detective Sherbet sat back and folded his hairy arms over his roundish stomach. I mostly wasn’t attracted to roundish stomachs and hairy arms—or, for that matter, hairy anything. But on Sherbet, the longish arm hair and extra stomach padding seemed right. On him, oddly, both were attractive. If he had been single and I had been another twenty years older, there was a very good chance I would have had the hots for him.

He seemed to be noticing me looking at his stomach and unconsciously adjusted his shirt over, not realizing that his padded stomach was adding to his manliness. At least for me. I can’t vouch for every woman.

I suspected I had daddy issues, whatever that meant.

“
He also said something else,” said Sherbet. As he spoke, he looked through the sliding glass door at Monica, who was sitting on the edge of the bed and wringing her hands and rocking slightly. I couldn’t be sure, but I think she was mumbling something, or singing something. The woman was tormented beyond words, and my heart went out to her.

I looked back at Sherbet, “What else?”

“He told me that Ira Lang would never give up trying to kill her, that Lang had approached many, many people in prison, and that just because we caught him once, didn’t mean we were going to catch the next killer that Ira hired, or the next, or the next.”

“
He’s going to keep coming after her,” I said. “Forever, until one or the other dies.”

“
Which, for him, is sooner rather than later, since he’s on Death Row.”

“
Still a few years away, though.”

“
Or longer,” said Sherbet. “Unless, of course, you visit him again, in which case he might not survive the meeting.”

“
He threatened the kids.”

“
You are a mama grizzly.”

“
I’m a mama something.”

Sherbet looked at me, seemed about to say something, paused, then seemed to go a different direction. “Anyway, he’s out of the hospital and back on Death Row.”

“Where he belongs.”

“
I couldn’t agree more.”

We were silent. Sherbet’s overtaxed digestive system moaned pitifully as it went to work on the greasy donuts.

“Which reminds me,” said Sherbet, reaching down and opening his briefcase. He extracted a smallish electronic gizmo thingy. “I want to show you something.”

“
Your new DVD player?” I asked.

He grinned. “Sort of. It’s a loaner from the department.”

I watched with mild amusement as his sausage-like fingers tried to manipulate the small piece of electronic gadgetry. He picked it up and examined it from every angle.

“
Everything’s so damned small,” he grumbled.

“
Let me have a look, detective,” I said. He gratefully handed it to me. I took it from him, and flipped a switch on the side and the player whirred to life.

“
Should I press ‘play’?” I asked.

“
Yes,” he said.

I set the player on the table between us and pressed ‘play’, and a moment later I saw a sickening scene. It was footage from a security camera, looking down on two people conversing in a jail visiting room. Both were on the phone, speaking to each other through a thick, bulletproof glass window.