Home Free (9 page)

I was thinking that if I could turn back
time, I would turn it back a hell of a lot farther than that.
“They’re called switch plates.”

“What?”

“Switch plates. The light switch cover
thingies. They’re by the blow torches.”

“Hey babe, pizza’s here,” Jack yelled from
the table. I grimaced. Danny rolled his eyes and set his jaw, and I
knew he was done talking to me for tonight.

I put my hand on his leg, friendly, not sexy.
Well, that was my intent. But touching him, even through the denim
of his pants, sent a flare of heat throughout my body, including
areas that didn’t qualify as merely friendly. I pulled my hand away
before it melted. “It’s going to work out,” I said, not sure why or
how. Then I went back to my table.

I watched Danny till he left with his pizza.
He didn’t look in my direction again. When he was gone, I switched
sides and sat next to Jack so I could watch the game too, and he
filled me in on the progress on my house during commercials. The
plumbing in the bathrooms was done, and he had started on the leaks
in the roof. The doorbell and the bedroom floor were still on the
list, along with the annoying squeak. It was dark by the time the
game ended, and I had to admit I’d had a good time.

In the truck on the way home, he said, “I
like you, Alex. I’ve liked you ever since the first time we did it
in the orchard.” He grinned. “Seriously, though, I don’t want to
get in the middle of anything, so if there’s something going on
between you and Salazar, you need to let me know.”

Hunh. First someone was going to have to let
me know. “We’re friends, I think. I hadn’t seen him for years till
the other day. He’s in this mess with my brother, and obviously I
think they’re both innocent, but other than that, there’s
nothing.”

Big fat liar.

When we pulled up to my house, my brother’s
motorcycle was gone, but Pauline’s car was still parked on the
street. Jack parked in the driveway and helped me lever myself out
of the Ford. I had already made up my mind I wasn’t going to invite
him in again. I’d asked once, and he had declined. If he wanted to
come in, he was going to have to do the asking this time. I may
have been desperate, but I sure as hell wasn’t ready to be a
charity case. I pulled the key from my purse, but before I could
put it in the lock, Jack took it, unlocked the door and opened it.
He hesitated.

“Does the offer still stand?”

I thought about it, but only for a second.
Hell, it was a big damn truck.

“Absolutely.”

Jack kissed me on the neck when he left at
five the next morning. I stretched and thought I might purr. Sex
with Jack was like conversation with Jack -- easy, comfortable and
pleasant. Maybe nothing to write home about, but a damn sight
better than the shower massage.

The next time I looked at the clock, it was
eight-thirty. Some ideas had percolated to the surface of my brain
sometime during the night, and I was eager to check them out. The
main thing that was bothering me was Lonnie Chambers. Jimmy C had
said the cops were going with the theory that Chambers had stumbled
into the arson in progress, and had simply been shot to keep him
quiet. But what if it was the other way around? What if somebody
wanted Chambers dead and then just set the fire afterwards as a
distraction, or to destroy the evidence?

I threw on a robe and padded into the kitchen
and started a pot of decaf coffee, then fixed myself an egg white
omelet. I don’t usually do the health food thing, but after the hot
dog and pizza yesterday, I thought it prudent to take a cholesterol
break. I took my cup and plate into the office and checked my phone
for messages. Debbie had returned my call, and there were two
hang-ups. I turned on the computer and looked outside while I
waited for it to boot up. Pauline’s car was gone. The gray Escort
was nowhere in sight. A man in a baseball cap jogged by, looking at
my drought-bedraggled landscape. I sat down and checked my email.
The Garden Tour people had requested one minor change. I got some
offers to buy Viagra over the internet, and something about farm
girls. I deleted those, since I knew several farm girls and wasn’t
keen to see them in a whole new light. I made the change to the
poster before I had a chance to forget and sent the file off. Then
I went back to the online white pages. I had to try a couple
different searches, but I finally found what I was looking for. I
copied the information down on a piece of paper, finished my eggs
and went to shower.

Twenty minutes later, dressed in jeans, a red
tank top and red Converse sneakers, my wet hair in a ponytail and
wearing no makeup, I was out the door. The cat from hell appeared
out of nowhere, twisting its oversized body around and between my
ankles. I gave it a shove with my foot, and it purred. Retarded, I
thought. I walked around it to the car and had my hand on the door
handle when I heard Debbie’s voice behind me.

“Oh, Alex, is everything okay? I called you
back as soon as I got home from work, but I never heard back from
you. Are you all right?”

God, she was worse than my mother when I got
home late in high school. Missing curfew isn’t a good idea when
your mother is an ER nurse. Or, evidently, when your neighbor has
no social life. “I’m fine, Deb. Is that giant black cat one of
yours?”

“Oh, only Boots and Socks are mine. The rest
are strays. I just put food out for them so they don’t starve.”

What did she think cats did before Purina
came along? “So the black hellcat isn’t Gloves or Mittens,
then?”

“Boots and Socks. No. It must like you,
though. I’ve seen it on your porch a few times. It never went to
your house when the other people lived there.”

“No, it doesn’t like me. It left me a message
yesterday. I think it’s threatening me.”

“A message?”

“It killed a mouse and left it on my front
porch. Who does that? Maybe it’s a mob hit-cat.”

“Cats do that when they like you. They bring
you things to impress you. It could have eaten the mouse, but then
you wouldn’t have been impressed.”

“Impressed? I would have been fucking
thrilled if the dumb-ass thing had eaten the Ebola-infected rodent
instead of leaving it in a stinking dead heap on my goddamn welcome
mat.”

Debbie looked appalled. I wasn’t sure if it
was my language or my lack of respect for the feline-American
community or both. I didn’t much care.

“Ebola?”

“Plague, whatever.”

“Well, if a cat decides it’s yours, there’s
nothing much you can do about it.”

“I’m not a cat person,” I growled.

“Apparently it doesn’t think so,” Debbie
answered, angling a nod towards my feet, where Lucifer was again
attempting to tangle me until I fell on my ass. I jerked the car
door open and jumped in, slamming it shut before the beast could
sneak in. I gave Debbie a perfunctory wave and backed out with a
lurch. I didn’t feel a sickening thump. Damn.

I made my way through the inversion
layer-induced haze that had settled over the streets already,
clicking the knob on the AC one notch higher every quarter mile.
Five notches later, the system was on max and I was sitting in
front of a broken down bungalow on Cherry Street, around the corner
from the DMV. It was a neighborhood that was hostile when I was a
kid and hadn’t gotten any better. Yards were hard dirt and, more
often than not, surrounded by chain link. Windows were barred. The
sun’s ultraviolet rays were extra intense because there were no
trees to block their trajectory. The residents were depressed,
destitute, drug-addicted or very likely all three. I checked the
number on my pad again. Forty-two eleven was more of a shack than a
house, the wood siding hanging off in sections, one banister
missing from the porch steps, litter in the yard and an off-kilter
screen door that looked like it had been slammed one too many
times. There was a beat-up Toyota Tercel parked in the driveway,
and I guessed the odds of there being indoor plumbing were no
better than fifty-fifty. According to the internet, this was Lonnie
Chambers’ house.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to say if
someone answered the door. “Hello, what did Lonnie do to get
himself killed?” seemed a little crass. I figured I’d think of
something when I got there. I angled myself out of the Element and
locked it with the gizmo. There was a teenage girl sitting on the
front porch of the house across the street, rocking a stroller back
and forth and watching me impassively. The house was poor but
better maintained than the others on the street. The girl had dark
skin and wavy black hair, and I guessed she was probably Mexican,
although from this distance I couldn’t tell for sure. I hoped she
was babysitting, but I knew that was naive. I nodded in her
direction and received no response. I made my way up to Lonnie’s
front door and knocked.

A woman answered the door. She looked vaguely
familiar. I thought she was probably around my age, although she
could easily have been ten years older. She had straggly, colorless
hair that might have been washed a week or so ago, the remnants of
a black eye and the vacant expression that I’d seen any number of
times on Max’s drug addicted brother. Even so, she looked like she
had been pretty, back before the drugs and the domestic abuse had
started, though it would take more than one makeover shows to get
her there again. If she was Lonnie’s wife, I would have to presume
she didn’t miss him much.

“Yeah?” Inside, the shades were drawn,
cutting down on the glare and those pesky probable-cause
searches.

I extended my hand. “Hi, my name is Alex. I’m
sorry to intrude. I was hoping you could give me some information
about Lonnie Chambers.” That sounded reasonable to me.

She looked at my hand like I was handing her
a plate of dogshit, nose wrinkled and mouth a half sneer. “He’s
fucking dead.” Slam.

Hunh. Well, that was certainly information
about Lonnie Chambers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the information I
needed. I stood there like a doofus, staring at the door for a
minute, trying to think of what to do next. I was too embarrassed
to knock again. Finally I turned towards my car. I spied the girl
across the street still watching me. What the hell, I thought, at
least she can’t slam the door in my face.

I crossed the street and ambled up the walk,
trying to seem unthreatening. It wasn’t hard, since the girl had
seen me make an ass of myself and appeared to be enjoying my
discomfiture. She was watching me, a smirk on her face, and I
prepared myself to be humiliated by a teenager. She looked to be
about fifteen and had a world-weary countenance that suggested she
had seen more in her decade and a half than I had seen in twice
that time.

I smiled. “Hi. I’m Alex. What’s your name?” I
didn’t extend my hand this time, since there was evidently
something disturbing about it.

“Alex a dude’s name,” she said, rocking the
stroller and meeting my gaze without blinking.

“It’s short for Alexis. You can call me that,
if you’d rather.”

“Whatever. I’m Angela. That a fucked-up
looking car.” She gestured towards the metallic orange Element.

I’d noticed when I was in college that a lot
of my fellow art students tended to like unusual-looking things
simply because they were unusual-looking. I guess I fell into that
category, because I thought the Element was bitchin’. I’d resisted
the art-school compulsion for tattoos and piercings, limiting my
rebellious self-expression to weird hair colors and funky shoes and
occasionally going without underwear. The Element was like funky
shoes. And I wanted it before I realized how much Max hated it.
Really.

“You don’t like it?” I asked Angela. “I think
it’s pretty cool.” I didn’t know if
cool
was a cool word to
use to a teenager. It was so hard to keep up. Cool, hot, bad, dope,
rad, gnarly, sick, sweet. Once I watched an extreme sports
championship on television. I could never figure out from what the
pubescent broadcasters were saying if a contestant had just set a
new world record or had fucked up royally, so I didn’t know who to
root for. I switched to a Steelers game. At least then I knew who
to hate.

“Didn’t say I didn’t like it, just it’s
fucked-up is all. What you want with Miz H? Don’t look like you
buyin’.”

“Miz H? She’s not Mrs. Chambers?”

The girl shook her head. “Nunh-uh. He her old
man, but they ain’t married. Her name Henderson. Sherry
Henderson.”

Sonofabitch, that’s why she looked familiar.
“You know Lonnie got shot, right?”

Angela nodded.

“You know anyone who would want to do
that?”

“Prob’ly plenty a people. Nobody like him
much.”

“Why?”

She gave me a bored look. “He take his belt
to his old lady a lot. Prob’ly he owe people money.”

“For what, drugs?”

She shrugged, noncommittal. I couldn’t think
what else to ask, so I thanked her and handed her one of my new
business cards. It said, “Alex Jordan Designs” and listed my phone
number and email address. There was no mailing address because I
hadn’t gotten around to getting a post office box, and I didn’t
think advertising my home address was a great idea, considering I
lived alone.

“If you think of anything else about Lonnie
or Sherry, would you call me? Please?”

“What you design?”

“Those cards, stuff like that.”

“Hunh. That’s cool.”

I shuffled back to the car, my energy sapped
by the heat and the meanness of the street and the ugly thoughts
running around in my brain. I beeped the door open, got in and
started the engine and the AC, then drove off. I didn’t know where
I was headed, but I figured with the way my luck was going so far,
I’d get there anyway.