A Clean Kill (6 page)

Dr. Adderson’s eyebrows arched. “Are you …” She
took a deep breath and shook her head. “I saw where you crashed through the fence.” She pointed. “Look.”

I turned and looked at the demolished length of fence. And, even in the moonlight, the Jeep’s tire tracks—parallel strips of churned black earth—stood out against a roadside carpet of pale winter grass. I nodded and stepped inside the car. She walked around and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Dr. Adderson dropped the idling Mercedes into drive, punched a button on the steering column to turn on her flashers, and swerved onto the highway.

I examined her profile in the soft glow from the instrument panel. “I want a tox-screen.”

She knitted her eyebrows and glanced over at me. “Mind if I ask why?”

“Because either I’ve got a brain tumor all of a sudden or somebody drugged me.”

The doctor paused. “When was the last time you ate or drank something?”

“Lunch.”

“That was four or five hours ago.” She cocked her head to the side and, once again, glanced over at me. “Doesn’t really seem to make sense, does it, Tom?”

A gas station bathed in fluorescent light came over the hill as we entered Daphne’s outskirts, and Dr. Adderson turned toward the hospital.

I thought back to the black tube with velvet walls, to the rushing wind that enveloped me even before I crashed. “Just do the tox-screen. Okay?”

At the hospital where Kate Baneberry died, the same doctor who had treated her turned me over to a lab technician
with instructions to draw blood and do a complete lab workup. Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Adderson returned and led me to a hospital room, where she placed a clear plastic mask over my nose and mouth.

“You’ve had carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s what I suspected. CO binds to red blood cells and displaces oxygen. You passed out because there weren’t enough unaffected cells left to carry sufficient oxygen to your brain. Crashing, by the way, may have saved your life. When the windows broke, fresh air flowed into the car. That’s why you woke up.” She pointed at the mask. “This is just oxygen. We’re going to basically flood your system with oxygen to help you throw off the carbon monoxide.”

Through the plastic, I mumbled, “How long do I have to stay here?”

“I’d rather you stayed the night.”

I shook my head no.

She rolled her eyes. “Give it an hour or so.”

“Doctor, I know a heater can sometimes push an exhaust leak inside the car, but I didn’t know it could put somebody under that fast.” It felt goofy trying to talk though the plastic shield. “I hadn’t gone more than five miles, and the heater had only been on a couple of minutes.”

Dr. Adderson shrugged. “Can I call someone for you?”

She was avoiding my question, but doctors tend to do that anyhow. “I guess my secretary, Kelly. But I hate to bother her just for a ride home.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take you home. I just think it’s a good idea to have someone who can call and check on you. You’re going to feel pretty lousy in the morning.”

I gave her Kelly’s number, and the doctor left me alone to snort oxygen.

Lingering cloud cover had thickened, blacking out the full moon and the bright streaks of stars that had jeweled the sky earlier in the night. Trees spun by in shades of black. Dr. Adderson watched the road. She didn’t speak. She concentrated on maneuvering over miles of country blacktop.

When we pulled into my driveway around 8:30, I spotted Kelly’s little ragtop parked by the front walk. I turned to Dr. Adderson. “You didn’t tell her to come over tonight, did you?”

“No. Of course not.”

As the doctor’s Mercedes rolled to a stop, Kelly swung her car door open and popped out. On the other side, my investigator, Joey, unfolded out of the tiny sports car like a giant on stilts exiting a clown car at the circus.

Dr. Adderson had the normal reaction to my giant friend. “Who’s that?”

I smiled. Joey stands about six-foot-six. He has white-blond hair and piercing gray eyes, and women tend to be favorably impressed. “He’s a friend of mine. Big, isn’t he?”

All she said was, “Good Lord.”

Outside the car, I made quick introductions. The doctor told me to stay home and rest the next day, and she pretty much ordered Kelly and Joey to check on me periodically; then she climbed back into her car and drove away.

I mounted the steps and paused just outside the front door.

Joey said, “What’s wrong?”

I sighed. “My keys are still in the Jeep.”

Joey laughed. Kelly stepped up and fitted a key into
the door. I’d forgotten she had one. Joey said, “I’ve already got a man out there looking around. He’ll get your keys. Don’t worry about it.”

Inside, Kelly said, “You should sit down, Tom. Do you want a Coke or maybe something to eat?” She was in her mother mode, which is particularly amusing on someone who’s about the size of a healthy twelve-year-old.

“I’d like a drink.”

She shook her head. “Nope. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

I said, “Probably not,” and plopped down on the sofa. As Kelly walked toward the kitchen, I added, “You do remember that you can’t cook, don’t you?”

She waved me off over her shoulder.

It took fifteen minutes for Kelly to make a ham sandwich and put it in front of me. It took about fifteen seconds for me to eat it.

While Kelly was puttering in the kitchen, I had been bringing Joey up to speed. He listened quietly, asking only two or three pointed questions, and nodded his head. I knew he already had someone checking out the Jeep before some wrecker service could haul it away, which was exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to look for, other than my keys and shotgun. I left that up to him. Joey would know a hell of a lot more about investigating possible tampering than I would. So all I did was fill him in on the Baneberry case and share a few theories. Finally, I asked if he knew anybody who might make me a deal on a new Jeep. He promised to bring over something for me to drive until I could get to a dealership.

By 9:30, my Mutt-and-Jeff nurses were gone. I locked up the house, set the alarm, and climbed into bed.

I slept like a rock, which was surprising considering how much pain I was in when I finally woke up. The bedside clock read 10:23
A.M
. My shoulders, my back, and my legs ached so badly that I barely noticed the headache.

Two extra-strength Tylenol and a long, hot shower helped. I scraped at the stubble on my chin, dabbed Neosporin on a few wreck-related cuts, and dressed for a day off in jeans and a polo shirt. Combing my hair in front of the bathroom mirror, I thought I looked pretty good for someone who’d careened unconscious into a concrete horse trough. But then, anything this side of dead under the circumstances was, it seemed to me, looking pretty good.

I padded downstairs and hung a right with the intention of heading through the living room to the kitchen.

And I froze.

My living-room sofa and two club chairs had been shoved against the back wall. An oak table from the kitchen squatted in the middle of the living room. On top of the table stood two dining chairs facing away from each other. Across the tops of the chairs, someone had balanced the coffee table, and on top of that was a tall crystal vase from the entry hall with a basketball perched on top. It was all my stuff, but none of it was exactly, or even remotely, where I’d left it.

I ran to the front door and jiggled the knob, then reached into the front closet and pulled out a softball bat. A quick search of the house yielded nothing. A more thorough search inside closets, under beds, and inside major appliances had the same result.

The doors and windows were locked, and, most disturbing, the alarm was still set.

Shit
. I picked up the phone and punched in Joey’s cell number. He answered on the first ring.

“Joey? You’re not going to believe this.” I filled him in on the makeshift sculpture in my living room.

He didn’t say anything. He was thinking.

I broke the silence. “Have you found anything useful on the Jeep?”

“Not yet.” Joey was quiet for a few seconds before saying, “I guess I’m statin’ the obvious, but it’s pretty clear that somebody wanted you to know the wreck last night wasn’t an accident.”

I didn’t answer. He didn’t expect me to.

“Why do you think they did that, though? What’s piling up a bunch of crap in your living room got to do with anything?”

I looked up at the Rube Goldberg sculpture. “Actually, if someone is trying to send a warning, it’s a pretty smart way to do it. Think about it. If I get the cops out here, they’re going to take one look at this and treat the break-in like a prank. And if I told them I totaled my Jeep last night and this pile of stuff is a warning … they’d probably give me a ride back to the hospital so I could get my brains unscrambled.”

Joey said, “Somebody wants to play.”

“Looks that way.”

Joey’s an unusual guy. You never know what’s going to get to him. “Fine. Somebody wants to play, we’ll fuckin’ play.” He paused. “Why are you so quiet?”

“I didn’t know I was.”

Joey thought about that. “You’re gettin’ pissed off, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am.”

My midnight visitor had shoved a glass-topped table over by the window to make room for his sculpture. Now, morning sunlight bounced off the tabletop and angled up to shine dead center on the vase that formed a crystal column between the precariously balanced coffee table and my ancient basketball. The vase threw a shimmering, cut-glass rainbow across the ceiling. And I wanted very much to kick the whole damn thing over. Unfortunately, the whole damn thing was made out of some of my favorite stuff.

By the time I had wrestled the oak table back into the kitchen and shoved my living-room furniture into place, I desperately needed food. Either inhaling carbon monoxide or crashing into a concrete slab had unsettled my insides, and my empty stomach felt as though it were coated with dryer lint.

Twenty minutes later, I had already polished off two bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and was pouring a
cup of coffee when Joey knocked on my door. I found him standing on the front porch. He looked especially proud of himself.

The smiling giant glanced over my shoulder. “Where’s that pile of furniture and stuff you told me about?”

“I put everything back.”

Joey shook his head. “You got no sense of the absurd. I wanted to see it.”

“What the hell are you so happy about?”

“Just trying to cheer you up.” Since our phone conversation, Joey had shifted into his cheer-up-the-sick-guy mode.

I smiled. “Yeah, well, I don’t want to be cheered up.”

Joey raised his eyebrows, shook his head theatrically, and made
tsk-tsk-tsk
noises. Then he stepped away from the door and swept his hand out toward the driveway. The Vanna White move didn’t really suit him. “And look what I brought you.”

I looked. Squatting on my white gravel drive was … I didn’t know what it was. But it looked like a great-white-hunter vehicle, like the kind of thing John Wayne and Red Buttons would have used to chase a wildebeest across the Serengeti in
Hatari!
The sand-colored 4×4 had a spare tire bolted to the hood, a huge winch welded to something that looked like a cattle catcher in front of the grille, and a metal luggage rack running around all four sides of its roof.

“Okay.” I looked back at Joey’s smiling face. “What is it?”

“It’s a Land Rover, bubba. And not one of those pussy SUVs stockbrokers buy to haul their kids to soccer games. This is a serious off-road vehicle. A Series
2-A Safari. Somebody told me Land Rover only sold ’em in Africa and South America.”

“And you got this one …?”

“It was a fee. I managed to locate something you don’t wanna know about for a client you
really
don’t wanna know about. The guy was in the kind of business where you’re rich one day and indicted the next. Give him credit, though. The government attached his liquid assets, so he paid me off with this.”

I looked from Joey to the Land Rover and back to Joey again. “You sure you don’t want to keep it? It’s got all those memories for you.”

A classic red GTO convertible pulled into my driveway. “Loutie’s here. Gotta go.” Joey tossed me the keys. “Check it out. The guy I got the Rover from blew a wad of cash on it. Brush guards, steel-mesh headlight covers. Leather seats and a CD player, a phone, everything you could want. Bought it from some place in California that restores ’em to like new.”

“Does it have airbags? I’ve developed a real fondness for airbags.”

“Yeah, I think so. If you wanna keep it, I’ll let you have it for what the guy owed me in fees. Be a hell of a deal.”

As Joey trotted out toward Loutie’s car, I said, “You’re a prince.”

Joey yelled back, “Ain’t that the God’s honest truth.”

Loutie Blue—a gorgeous ex-stripper who for years had been Joey’s best operative—smiled and waved, and they were gone.

I glanced down at the key ring in my hand. It held two remotes, two sets of keys, and a gold disk about the size of a half-dollar. Each side of the medallion bore the
likeness of a cannabis leaf—and I thought I understood what kind of business Joey’s client had pursued before his unfortunate incarceration.