Better Off Dead in Deadwood (39 page)

“How long had they been divorced when you asked him?” I asked.

“Six months, but they were still fighting over things then, including custody of his kid.”

Reid was a dad? Wow! I would have pegged him for the child-free, good-time firefighter with a string of hot women lined up on his doorstep just waiting to check out his hose.

“So, that’s why you were gun-shy with the art gallery owner who was just coming off a divorce.”

She nodded.

“Reid refused your proposal and then what? You two went your separate ways?”

“Not quite. He refused me and then I let him share my bed for three more months before I wised up and kicked him out of my life for good.”

“I always assumed you didn’t want to get married.”

“No, I was waiting for the right guy to come along. But now I’m happy with how things turned out. I just wouldn’t mind a black sports car in my drive every now and then to take the edge off.”

“Can you honestly tell me that you have no feelings left for Reid?”

“No, I can’t honestly tell you that, which is why I’m not going to give him the slightest chance of getting anywhere near my heart again. He’s addictive as all get out, and breaking that habit stung like hell last time.”

Layne ran into the kitchen, his cheeks all pink, his eyes practically glowing with excitement. “Aunt Zoe, you have to come see this show on Vikings.”

“Vikings? Oh, man, I love those big, hairy, burly guys,” she said, winking at me.

“Come on,” Layne said. “They’re showing how they’d use the skulls of their enemies to drink with.”

“Cool.” She squeezed my forearm. “Thanks for listening, kiddo.”

I covered her hand and squeezed back. “Anytime you feel like talking about cars, I’m all ears.”

Layne tugged on her other hand. “Can we watch
The 13
^th
Warrior
when this is over?”

She followed after him. “Let’s see, Antonio Banderas, Vladimir Kulich, and Omar Sharif all in one film? I think that sounds absolutely wonderful for tonight.”

My cell phone buzzed in my sweat jacket pocket. I checked the screen, which was actually working at the moment.

Doc had sent a text:
Working late. Staying in Rapid City tonight. Want to see you tomorrow. Preferably without clothing.

Speaking of black sport cars … I typed back:
Clothing stays on until you answer one question. Got a minute?

Got five
, he replied.

I hit the Call button and stepped outside on the back porch, closing the door behind me. The half-moon lit the back yard in pale silver tones.

“Hey, tiger,” he answered.

“Pulling an all-nighter?” My sweat jacket did little to offset the cold mountain air. I hunched my shoulders to keep warm.

“This client inherited a nightmare,” Doc said. “We’re talking boxes full of statements and receipts in the attic with no clear explanation as to what’s what. I’m going to put in another four hours or so, and then crash and finish up in the morning.”

“Hmmm. Sounds sexy. Wish I could be there.”

“If you were here, it would be sexy, but I wouldn’t get any work done. So, what’s your one question?” he asked.

“It may actually be more than one.”

“Whatever it takes to get you naked.”

Ahhh, true romance. “How well do you know the librarians at the Deadwood library?” He’d spent enough time there that I figured he should have their kids’ and grandkids’ names memorized by now.

“I know some basic information and a few financial details, why?”

I’d forgotten that one of the librarians was also one of his clients. “Are any of them into ghosts, medium-ship, or something else having to do with the occult?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Any funky tattoos or jewelry?”

“The one lady who wears jewelry usually has on something that has pearls on it, but no pentagram, lockets, or goats-morphing-into-pigs accessories.”

“Ugh,” I said, shivering. “Don’t remind me of Lila and her freaky tattoo.”

“What’s this all about?” Doc asked.

“I was thinking about Prudence’s last demand.”

“Remind me what she said.”

“To bring her ‘the librarian,’” I told him. “Do you know any of the Lead librarians at all?”

“Enough to say the same—none of them show any outward signs of interest in the paranormal world. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t.”

“Right. One of them could be hiding something.” Or maybe Prudence didn’t mean an actual
librarian
. I paced across the porch and back. “Is there any secret test I could use to tell if someone is a medium?”

His full-bodied laughter warmed my chills. “No, Violet, not that I know of.”

“Damn. How does one go about asking that kind of question without appearing to be off her rocker?”

“One doesn’t, that’s how. Give me time to finish down here and catch up with a few other clients tomorrow and then we’ll put our heads together.”

I nodded to nobody in the darkness. “Fine but when do we get to put our bodies together again?”

“Keep it up, Violet. You’re going to make it hard to work.”

“Well, it does work best when it’s hard, although I’m willing to work with it when it’s soft. It’s just not as much fun.”

“Night, Boots,” he said, chuckling. “Sleep tight.”

I’d rather sleep nightmare-free. I hung up and leaned against the wall next to the door, staring out across the heavily shadowed yard. A cloud that had been covering the moon moved on, the shadows becoming more defined.

Something moved in the semi-darkness near the back of Aunt Zoe’s glass workshop, something low to the ground.

My breath caught. What in the hell was that?

My imagination raced to answer, picturing something crawling toward me—an albino with a barbed hook, a zombie with blood-covered jaws, a killer with a burlap sack over his head. I wanted to look away, but my eyes downright refused.

Get inside!

I fumbled behind me for the doorknob, finally catching hold of it, and stumbled inside. Locking the door behind me, I shut off the kitchen light. Then I put my ear to the crack, listening for the sound of footfalls, breathing, moaning, scratching, anything.

I heard nothing.

My breath rattled in and out of my throat.

I pulled the curtain back an inch and peeked out the back door.

I saw nothing, only shadows.

Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. All of these ghosts and zombies were starting to mess with my head.

I kept watching. The shadows grew thicker as another thin cloud filtered the moonlight. When the cloud moved on, the shadows grew more defined again.

Then I saw it move again, this time on the other side of the workshop, near the door. I pressed my nose against the glass, squinting. Blood rushed in my ears.

Something grabbed my arm. “Mom, what—”

I screamed.

Addy screamed back at me as my knees gave out and I slid to the floor.

Harvey came busting into the kitchen and hit the lights. “What the hell is going on out here?”

I blinked up at his grizzled face. “I saw something out by Aunt Zoe’s workshop.”

He grabbed a frying pan off the rack and a flashlight from the cupboard over the fridge next to the liquor. Yanking open the back door, he stormed out into the night.

“Harvey, wait!” I scrambled to my feet and peered out after him through a crack in the door.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,” he said, standing on the bottom porch step. “You did see something.”

I tucked Addy behind me. “What is it?”

He disappeared into the yard, returning a moment later with Elvis tucked under his arm. A big grin hung on his cheeks. “Looks like an attack of the killer chicken.”

I closed my eyes and rested my head back against the wall. Christ, I was losing it. What happened to the good ol’ days a couple of months ago when a shadow was just a shadow, nothing more?

“You okay, Mom?” Addy asked, touching my forehead with her cool palm, checking my temperature.

“No. I’m definitely, one hundred percent NOT okay.” I opened the cupboard above the fridge and grabbed the half-empty bottle of tequila.

Chapter Twenty-One

Sunday, September 9th

The world had turned on its side.

No, wait, it was just me. I lifted my head off my pillow long enough to groan and let it fall back down.

What was wrong with me?

My gaze darted around the room, landing on the bottle of tequila on my nightstand. Make that the three-quarters-empty bottle of tequila.

Oh, my God, what had I done?

Then I remembered—that damned chicken clucking around in the shadows, scaring the crap out of me. I’d taken the bottle of tequila to my room to calm my nerves, worrying about how to keep my kids safe in a world with creepy ghosts, killer albinos, and body-dumping zombies. After a few swigs too many, followed by some texts to Doc and someone else I couldn’t remember—maybe Natalie—I’d passed out.

I groaned. Nice irony. So much for being a great protector. Good thing Harvey and his shotgun were practically living here now.

I pushed myself up to a sitting position, sat there for several seconds while the room spun and rippled, and then stumbled to the bathroom where I hugged the toilet for a bit. Brushing my teeth had me bending over the toilet again, so I settled for a swish of minty mouthwash and then slid my shoulder against the wall for support all of the way back to my bedroom.

A look at the clock made me groan again. Dang, I needed to get into the office. I had some paperwork to do, Jeff Wymond’s and Cooper’s places to show to some new clients, my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend to call, and one frustrating Abe Lincoln doppelganger to track down.

But my bed looked so soft.

As if on cue, a small chicken feather, more like a tuft of down, floated in from who knew where, landing gently on my quilt.

Just five more minutes, I thought as I fell face-first onto the bed. Make it ten, I told my internal alarm keeper …

… I blinked awake, the soundtrack of screams and evil laughter and pain-laden moans that had been playing in my head stopped in an instant, leaving my ears throbbing.

I sat up, swallowed another bout of nausea, and then glanced at the clock.

“Oh, crap,” I whispered, blinking at the number eleven. My internal alarm keeper was fired! I needed to dive into a phone booth and turn into Superwoman, because I had a client showing up at my desk at noon. I stood up and immediately sat back down.

Okay, maybe I should call first and then hurry second.

I grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand. Five voicemails waited for me, four of them from Mona, one from Doc.

Damn, damn, damn!

I called Mona’s number and got her voicemail. “Hi, Mona. I’m sorry I didn’t call in sooner, but I was … uh … ill this morning. Give me a call back when you have a moment. I’ll be there soon; I just need to shower first.”

Forty-five minutes and two ibuprofen later, I dropped my purse on my desk and practiced smiling at the empty chairs across from me. It felt stiff on my face, but doable.

“Blondie!” Ray’s voice boomed behind me, inspiring a bolt of pain to ricochet through my skull, leaving me cringing. “So nice of you to grace us with your presence today.”

Mona had passed me in the parking lot on the way to meet a client for lunch, leaving the office empty at the moment except for Ray and me. I didn’t even try to hold my tongue. “Kiss off, jackass.”

Chuckling, he dropped into his chair and kicked his Tony Lamas onto his desk. “You know, Blondie, you and I haven’t really had the chance to talk about that night at Mudder Brothers, have we?”

His cologne burned the back of my throat. Ray gave Stetson cologne a bad rap. Someone from the manufacturer should sue him for sullying their reputation.

“What’s to talk about?” Besides, of course, my suspicions that Ray was running some kind of contraband for the late George Mudder under Cooper’s supervision—although crates loaded with bottles of mead didn’t really seem like contraband.

“Unless you want to discuss how I saved your bacon,” I said, referring to when I’d found him tied bare-assed naked to an autopsy table. “Yet you refuse to acknowledge that fact and show me the respect I deserve for saving you from a possible live dissection demonstration.”

“Respect you deserve?” he scoffed. “For what? You left me strapped down and you ran away screaming.”

“First of all, I wasn’t screaming.” Well, not aloud anyway. “Second, I left you strapped down because we had company, remember?” As in a huge albino with a barbed hook in his coat pocket who wasn’t there to sell me Tupperware. “If I hadn’t come along, you’d be just another file in Cooper’s caseload.”

“If you hadn’t started nosing into what we were up to in the first place, I wouldn’t have even been on that autopsy table.”

I glared at his sneer. “So, it’s my fault they figured out you were a nark?”

“Yes.”

“How can you possibly blame your inadequacies as an undercover informant on me?”

“Because you distracted me.”

“What?”

“I knew you were spying on me, trying to find something you could exploit to fuck with my job.”

Well, he had me there. I had wanted to kick his I’m-the-king-of-Deadwood arrogant ass right off the mountain. But he’d have to twist my arm for me to own up to that right now.

“Christ, Ray. You’re such a narcissist that you can’t even take ownership for your own screw up.” I dug through my purse for a tube of lip gloss, trying to act like I was bored with our conversation. “What were you doing running contraband for George Mudder anyway?”

“My actions are still none of your business.”

Cooper must have schooled him on that response. “Don’t tell me you were doing it for the good of the community …” I continued as if he hadn’t parroted my favorite detective, pulling the lip gloss from my bag. Then a thought struck me. “Unless this was some kind of community service you had to do after getting caught breaking the law.”

His eyes narrowed, his mouth wrinkling into an ugly scowl.

“That’s it! You screwed up somewhere along the line and Cooper busted you.” I rubbed my lips together. “The question is, was the screw up from some illegal dealings with George Mudder, like laundering money or running drugs? Did Cooper give you the chance to be a snitch and take down some bad guys?”