Getting Rid of Bradley (11 page)

They’re no dummies, Zack thought.

“I put clean towels out for you,” Lucy went on. “In the bathroom. Do you need anything else?”

You,Zack thought. She looked like a bulky mummy in her robe, and her hair was green, and he wanted

her. It was crazy. He needed a shower. A cold one. “Thanks,” he said. “Good night.”

“Goodnight.”

He turned toward the bathroom door, and then decided he’d been too abrupt, but when he turned back,

her bedroom door was closing and she was gone.

Good. Because the last thing he needed was to get involved with Lucy Savage and her three dogs. Even

though all his instincts were for it. He shook his head and went to take a cold shower.

The next morning, Zack took Lucy to the hospital.

“That’s her,” Lucy whispered, looking at the woman’s pale face under the stringy blond hair. “That’s the

woman who was with Bradley.”

Zack put his arm around her and led her away from the bed, alarmed at how white she was, almost as

pale as the woman in the hospital bed.

“Are you okay?”

“Bradley did this? Bradley couldn’t have done this.” Lucy looked back at the bed. “I know it’s the same

woman, but he couldn’t have...” She shook her head, too upset to finish.

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“Hey.” Zack took her through the door, away from the silence and the whiteness of the room. He found

a bench for her in the hall and sat beside her, keeping his arm around her while she bit her lip.

“Somebody violent did that. Bradley’s not violent,” Lucy said finally. “I don’t think Bradley has

emotions.”

Zack tightened his arm around her. “That’s the kind who usually break, honey. The ones who yell all the

time blow off steam. The ones who don’t, well, when they blow, it’s an explosion. And this was a

gunshot. It’s easy to shoot a gun. Too easy. One bang, and it’s over, and you don’t even have to get

close.”

Lucy shook her head. “It’s like everything I knew has turned out to be a lie. I can’t even trust my own

judgment anymore. Look how wrong I’ve been. And I can’t even talk to him to find out why this

happened. I’ve been totally wrong, and I’ll never know why. This could all happen to me again because

I’ll never know why.”

Zack watched her bite her lip again, and the sight of her even white teeth cutting into her soft bottom lip

disoriented him for a moment. What kind of fool could Bradley have been to risk losing Lucy to be with

that blonde? Hell, how could he have wanted to be with anybody but Lucy at all?

Lucy leaned back against the wall suddenly, pulling his arm with her. “How could I be so blind? How

could I have been so stupid?”

“Hey.” She looked so confused and betrayed that Zack was stung. He pulled her close and cuddled her

to him, wrapping his arms around her as if to shield her from Bradley and anyone else who might hurt her.

“Look, honey. A lot of people do things that the people who know them say are impossible.” He closed

his eyes, savoring her soft warmth and feeling slightly guilty about it. “It happens all the time. All we have

to do is keep you safe until we catch him. You can talk to him then, if you want. But it won’t always feel

like this. It’ll be okay.”

“I feel safer with you after three days than I did with Bradley after eight months,” Lucy said into his

shoulder. “I’m so dumb.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Zack tightened his hold on her. “I’d say that’s pretty smart of you.”

Zack took Lucy out for Sunday brunch so neither of them would have to cook, and by the time they’d

finished, she’d relaxed again. She was still quiet, but the terrible tension he’d felt in her while he held her

was gone, and for Zack, for a while, that was enough. Anything was better than watching Lucy suffer.

He really wanted to kill Bradley.

“Now we search the upstairs,” he told her when they got home. “All your secrets will soon be mine.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” Lucy said.

“Well, then you should get some,” Zack said, and they looked at each other for a moment, and then

both looked away.

The first room they searched on the second floor was Lucy’s—a big sunny room almost filled with a

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huge Victorian bed covered with an equally huge crazy quilt.

“I made the quilt,” Lucy said. “It’s just tied, not quilted, which is why it’s kind of lumpy, but that’s okay

because that way I could put more layers of fill in it.” She smiled at Zack. “It’s really warm. I love it. It’s

the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Her smile made Zack’s mouth go dry. He hadn’t seen it often enough to get used to it, and the thought

made him both sad and angry. She should be smiling all the time. If she were his, he’d make damn sure

she was smiling all the time.

Of course she wasn’t his, and he didn’t want her to be his because he was too young to settle down,

and anyway, he couldn’t visualize her naked, which he was pretty sure meant she was like a sister to him,

but still...

She should be smiling all the time.

“Zack?”

“I really like the quilt. Let’s look at your closet.”

Her closet had two racks in it. One side was full of soft pastel flowered dresses. The other was full of

severe tailored suits in navy and black and dark brown, all with their price tags still attached.

“You schizophrenic?” Zack asked.

“No,” Lucy said. “I bought the dresses. Bradley bought the suits.”

“Then Bradley should have worn the suits. Why did you stay with this guy?”

“He wasn’t a bad person...” Lucy began, but she stopped when Zack rolled his eyes. “I know. The

blonde. But that isn’t the Bradley Porter I knew. He was good to me. He loved me. He just wasn’t...fun.

And he didn’t approve of me, really. He wanted to, but he didn’t None of that is enough grounds for

divorce. He’s not a bad person. He’s just...lonely. I couldn’t leave him. He was so lonely.”

“Which would explain the blonde,” Zack said and then kicked himself as Lucy winced. “Sorry.”

“No, I asked for that one,” she said. “What next?”

They tapped the walls, and turned the drawers upside down, and looked under the rug and found

nothing. By late afternoon, they’d turned both the second and third floors as upside down as Lucy’s

drawers and found exactly the same thing—nothing.

“You don’t even have any junk,” Zack complained as they finished the last room on the third floor.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve only lived here nine months,” Lucy protested. “It takes time to accumulate good junk.”

“You’ve had time to accumulate three dogs.” Zack stepped over Maxwell, who was staring into space

again. “If you could do that, you could accumulate a little junk.”

“You don’t accumulate dogs.” Lucy patted Maxwell, who didn’t seem to notice. “You meet them, and

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you both know that you belong together. And even if you know that that’s dumb, and you don’t need a

dog, and you can’t handle the responsibility, and you don’t even want a dog anyway, there it is and you

have to go with it. It was meant to be.”

Zack stopped in his tracks. “Why does this sound like some dumb women’s magazine description of the

perfect relationship?”

Lucy’s head jerked up from Maxwell to him. “Listen, the best relationships of my life have been with

dogs. And they aren’t dumb at all. Einstein never brought a blonde into my house, and Maxwell never

stood me up in a restaurant, and Heisenberg never grabbed me in an alley.”

“Hey,” Zack said. “How did I get into this?”

“Sorry,” Lucy said.

Anthony came by the house late in the afternoon. He stood in the middle of Lucy’s soft, flowered living

room and said, “This is a wonderful room. It feels good just to be here.” He smiled down at Lucy. “It’s

like you.”

Lucy beamed back. “That’s the nicest thing you could have said to me.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed

him on the cheek, and he put his arm around her.

“Hey,” Zack said. “Let’s be professional here.”

“You want to be professional?” Anthony raised an eyebrow. “Get a haircut.”

“Very funny. What are you doing here?”

Anthony let go of Lucy and sat down in one of the overstuffed armchairs. “I went in to catch up on the

reports this afternoon and found a message from the lab. You know the bomb that blew up Lucy’s car?”

“I’ll never forget it” Zack sat on the arm of the loveseat and pulled Lucy down onto the cushions beside

him.

Anthony leaned back in his chair. “It wasn’t much of a bomb to begin with, according to the lab,

although granted it did a nice job on the car. But the really interesting part is that, besides the extremely

long timer that not only gave you time to notice the cat, knock Lucy into the driveway, and then have a

long conversation with her—”

“Get to the point.”

“It also had a hell of a big alarm clock taped to it with a lot of sinister-looking wires. None of which had

anything to do with the mechanism that caused the explosion.”

“Oh, hell,” Zack said.

“I don’t understand,” Lucy said.

Anthony turned to her. “If you had looked in your car, you would have seen a big package about the

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size of a shoe box with a clock taped to it and a lot of wires. What would you have done?”

“I’d have thought it was a bomb and run like crazy,” Lucy said. “I still don’t get it.”

“He’s trying to tell you that you were right,” Zack said, disgusted. “Nobody’s trying to kill you. They’re

just trying to scare you out of the house. You would have called us, the bomb squad would have

confirmed that it was a real bomb. And we would have moved you out of the house for safekeeping, so

the house would have been empty. Except that you wouldn’t leave the dogs.”

Lucy looked back and forth between them, incredulous. “My car blew up. This guy blew up my car to

scare me out of my house?”

“Well, he didn’t know about the dogs,” Anthony said. “Without the dogs, it would have worked.”

“He could have killed me!”

“No,” Zack said. “The timer on that sucker was almost five minutes. If the package was as big as Tony

says, you’d have been long gone before it went off. This nut was just trying to scare you.” He met

Anthony’s eyes. “Which means...”

“...there’s something in this house,” Anthony finished.

“No, there isn’t,” Lucy said. “We’ve looked. We’ve looked everywhere.”

Anthony shook his head to stop her. “That’s not all. Your report from the patrolman came in. And not

only has Mrs. Dover been complaining about prowlers around this house for two weeks, she also

phoned in another complaint last night. If she’s really seeing somebody, he’s still around.”

“You know, I wanted to move out of my apartment because I never felt safe there,” Lucy said. “I

moved here because it felt so safe.” She looked around her at the bright, warm room. “I don’t feel so

safe anymore.”

“Are you crazy?” Zack said. “You’ve got me for a bodyguard and you don’t feel safe? What’s wrong

with you? First no junk, and now this.”

“No junk?” Anthony said.

“Cleanest house I’ve ever searched,” Zack said. “No junk.”

“That’s un-American,” Anthony said.

“So what happens when I go back to school tomorrow?” Lucy said.

“We keep somebody in the house,” Anthony said.

“You’re not going back to school,” Zack said.

Lucy and Anthony both frowned at him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he told Anthony. “Suppose this guy grabs her and forces her to let him in

the house? Suppose he decides to take a hostage? Suppose...”

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“Suppose you stop scaring Lucy,” Anthony said. “He’s not going to grab her.”

“We don’t know that. We’ve got one attempted-murder charge that could turn into murder at any time.

We’ve got a million and a half that’s floating around somewhere. And we’ve got the guy who’s mixed up

with both, who also makes bombs and shoots guns. You want to tell me again about how we should

dress Lucy up and send her off to the one place where everybody knows she’s going to be?”

Anthony considered Zack for a moment. “All right. If it’s all right with Lucy.”

“All right,” Lucy said after a moment and went upstairs to phone her principal.

“What are you doing?” Anthony asked when she was gone, and for once Zack was serious when he

answered.

“I’m scared for her. You should have seen her at the hospital. She was absolutely rocked. I just want to

keep her safe until we get this guy. We’ve got to pretty soon. We’re close. I just want to keep her safe.”

“There’s something else,” Anthony said. “I spent most of the afternoon on the phone to Beulah Ridge,

Pennsylvania, trying to catch people while they were home. I talked to a couple of people who knew

both Bradleys.”

“And?”

“And John Bradley was the school’s golden boy until he got caught one too many times stealing and

cheating. The strange thing was, even while people were talking about how bad he was, there was

admiration in their voices. And they said, every one of them, that the one person who stuck by John