Hound Dog Blues (4 page)

The last time she’d been on this porch had been to retrieve poor Pooky for reburial in Mrs. Sherman’s back yard after King had thoughtfully dug up the dead cat and put it on her porch—an event that had immediately preceded Mrs. Sherman going into a nursing home. But then the door windows hadn’t been blacked out like they were now. It looked a little eerie. Some kind of dark curtains hung in the front bay window, as if Bruno Jett didn’t want anyone peering in, not even the sun. What was he, a vampire?

Dredging up her rapidly flagging courage, she opened the screen door to rap sharply on the front door. Nothing. She used the brass door knocker. The sound seemed to echo through the house. He had to hear it if he was home. She knocked again. Hope flared. Maybe she’d been right after all and he wasn’t home. Maybe he was having trouble getting the coffin lid up—

The front door jerked open. Not exactly short herself, Harley had to crane her head way back to see his face. Her eyes widened, probably looking a glow-in-the-dark green by now.

He stared down at her with a scowl normally reserved for someone finding a bug on their fried bologna sandwich. Or half a bug. It took her back, but she didn’t intend to leave without at least asking about King.

“Mister Jett,” she said in an embarrassing squeak that made his eyebrows go up, “have you seen the dog that belongs next door?”

It was difficult to stay focused on his face. Not only was she getting a crick in her neck, but she was far too aware that Bruno Jett was one nice hunk of masculinity. He had a chest and broad shoulders that were unencumbered by any hint of a shirt, a washboard set of abs she’d only seen on TV commercials, and stonewashed Levi’s unsnapped at the waist and suggesting even more raging masculinity below a nonexistent belt. Jeez, at close proximity, this guy was sexy enough to give her night sweats for a month.

As she’d expected, he denied seeing King. His voice seemed to come from his toes, deep and raspy: “Not since I chased his ass away from my garbage cans.”

“Was that recently?”

“Yesterday. Can’t you keep him inside a fence?”

“He’s very resourceful. So, you haven’t seen him today?” Bruno Jett made her fidgety. He had black hair in need of a trim, a beard-shadowed jaw line, and dark blue eyes that seemed to see things she didn’t want him to know. Like the way her heart had started beating double time and her breathing went shallow. Lean, hard muscle seemed to do that to her lately. She really needed a steady boyfriend. It’d been way too long.

Straightening from his lazy slouch against the doorframe, he shook his head. “I don’t keep up with neighborhood pests. That includes my next door neighbors.”

Her brows snapped down over her eyes and she opened her mouth to say something sharp, when a sparkle of rainbow light behind him caught her attention. She stood with her mouth open, coherence vanishing like smoke.

A pile of glittering stones lay heaped in the middle of his coffee table, gleaming in the light through the open door. Necklaces and bracelets—diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, all winked in the shaft of sunlight that warmed a black velvet cloth on which they lay. It took a moment for her sluggish brain to absorb the implications, and by then Bruno Jett obviously came to the conclusion that she’d seen more than he liked.

His hand closed on her wrist and he yanked her close, the screen slamming against her. He towered over her, a wall of muscled intimidation that left her reeling and scrabbling for a way to get out of what could be more trouble than she’d anticipated.

“What do you really want?” he demanded harshly, his eyes narrowed and spearing her with accusation. “You didn’t come here looking for a damn dog.”

Yunh huh
, she wanted to say, yet though the spirit was willing, nothing emerged from her mouth but a whoosh of air. And worse, as if drawn by a magnet, her eyes kept straying to the coffee table and pile of glittering jewels, despite her efforts to pretend they didn’t exist.

He still held her wrist trapped in one hand, and he gave her a little shake. “Well? What’s up with you?”

The shake dislodged the strange paralysis of her tongue, and she said, “There’s nothing up with me, but I don’t think
you
can say the same thing.”

“Yeah? How d’ya figure that?”

Pulling free, she rubbed at her wrist, feeling a little better when he crossed his arms over his chest and abandoned brute force. Momentarily distracted by the smooth flex of tanned muscle on his bare chest, her eyes crossed and her lungs emptied of air. Wait. He’d asked her something, and seconds ticked past while she tried to marshal her thoughts into a semblance of coherence. Oh yes. He wanted to know why she thought he was up to something.

Taking a deep breath, she said, “Well, that pile of stuff on your table, for a start.”

For a minute he just stared at her with narrowed eyes and his mouth thinned into a tight line. Tension vibrated in the air, and she had the uneasy thought that she’d made a grave error in judgment. Oh damn. Was that the butt of a gun sticking up from the back of his Levi’s? Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut and pretended not to see anything?

Then Jett relaxed a little, apparently deciding she was harmless. “Yeah, well just so you don’t get any wrong ideas, it’s costume stuff. Cheap knockoffs.”

She glanced again at the coffee table. In the dim light, the jewelry certainly looked real, but she wasn’t exactly an expert. That didn’t explain the gun, however. Was he licensed to carry concealed? Was it considered concealed if he was in his own house? Did she really want to know?

“Okay,” she said, ready to be agreeable at all costs, “I didn’t know you’re a salesman.”

“So now you do.” He reached behind her to push the screen door wide. “I also like my privacy. Do us both a favor and remember that. And don’t come snooping around here anymore.”

Common sense prompted her to accept his invitation to depart and she did so, but with a parting shot once she was safely in the front yard again, “If you’ve done anything with King, you’ll be sorry.”

His reply was a derisive snort and slamming of the door. She heard the bolt shoot home with a loud click. Interesting. And if he was a jewelry salesman, she was Nancy Grace.

At any rate, she’d eliminated him as a suspect in dognapping. He definitely wasn’t the kind of man to send hokey ransom notes. Now she had to call Bobby in case Mrs. Trumble had already contacted the police to file a complaint. As a detective in the West precinct, Bobby might be able to head off any major problems. Unfortunately, he could also be cranky at times, and a challenge to motivate. But first—she had to deal with her parents.

“So what are we going to do now?” Yogi asked, pausing in his relentless pacing to fix her with a tragic gaze when she told them their neighbor didn’t have King.

“
We
aren’t going to do anything, Yogi. I’ll see what Bobby suggests, okay? Just give me some time. I’ll find King, I swear I will. No one will keep him too long.”
Without strangling him
, she added silently, but knew better than to even hint at that fate.

He looked relieved. “Okay. So you’ll go down to Trumble’s house to look for him, too?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, I’ll go down there. If she’s got him, I’ll call Bobby. So you stay here and don’t go back down there.”

“Sure.”

“And don’t go next door, either,” she added, a little suspicious at his quick capitulation. “Promise me.”

“I promise, Harley. I won’t go next door.”

“Next door being Mrs. Sherman’s old house—say it.”

A little peeved, he repeated it just as she insisted, and she gave a satisfied nod. Now she’d committed herself to one more visit to Mrs. Trumble, but it saved a bushel of trouble.

When she drove up, a big black Lincoln was parked in the driveway leading to Mrs. Trumble’s one-car garage in the back yard of the house, and Harley sat indecisively for several moments. The old lady had been unpleasant enough alone. With reinforcements, she could get downright nasty. Maybe now wasn’t such a good time. Jeez, what a coward she was, afraid to face a little old lady with a hefty swing.

Well, maybe a trip to Bobby first to find out if charges had been filed was the best course of action for the moment. It beat the heck out of dodging a broom.

“You gotta be kidding.”

Bobby Baroni looked at her like she was nuts. It was a look with which she was familiar, and Harley patiently tapped a finger on the sheet of paper.

“The person who sent this is serious.”

Bobby smoothed out the paper she’d brought in to the West precinct on Union Avenue. It was crudely done with letters clipped out of newspapers and magazines, a parody of every bad TV program ever shown. “This is stupid,” he said, the expert opinion of a Memphis detective.

“Not to Diva and Yogi.”

“Yeah, well, your family’s never been wrapped too tight.”

“Is that an official opinion?”

Bobby gave her another “you gotta be kidding” look and forbore an answer. Just as well. She pretty much knew some people suspected her parents were kooks. And Bobby Baroni was in the unique position to confirm that suspicion. After all, he’d practically lived at her house when they were horny adolescents, despite his strict Catholic parents’ every effort to keep him home.

“So, Mrs. Trumble hasn’t filed any charges against Yogi?” she asked.

“Not since the last time. He hasn’t been down there again, has he?”

Ignoring that, she said, “Look, Bobby, Yogi’s threatening to track down the person who has King. Do you really want to risk the mayhem he could cause if he runs amuck?”

“Shit.” Bobby looked disgusted. And a little bit worried. “How serious can this be if they aren’t asking for anything?”

“But they are. Look.” She dragged a finger over the pasted words in the first line:

BrINg WHaT YOU KnOw We WaNT Or ThE DoG diEs

“So what the hell do they want?”

“Damned if I know. Yogi says he doesn’t know either.”

“Bring it where? Harley, this letter doesn’t say anything. It was probably written by kids, or someone who knows that the dog’s missing and is trying to get something from your parents.”

“Like what? Jeez, Bobby, what could they have that anyone could possibly want?”

“Not a damn thing that I can think of, unless they’re growing opium in the back yard, too.” A pointed reference to the fact that he knew about the wacky weed growing beside the tomatoes. “But it’s probably just a way to get rid of the dog. It could be any of your neighbors.”

“True enough. But what about this?”

She plucked a wad of black and white dog hair from the envelope. Bobby sneezed. She’d forgotten about his allergies.

There were things she did remember about Bobby, though. He still looked like the cocky kid he’d been when she first met him, although he’d grown taller and muscled up and wasn’t the gangly boy he’d been then. But he still had a thick head of black hair with a slight curl to it, and heavy-lashed brown eyes—the gorgeous looks of a movie star and the swagger of a rock star.

“What about it?” he said between sneezes. “It’s freakin’ dog hair, Harley.”

“It belongs to King. There’s a lot of it here.”

“How can you tell one clump of dog hair from another?”

“I can’t. But Yogi can.”

“So it’s dog hair. How bad can that be?”

“Read the last sentence. It has Yogi ready to go on a search and destroy mission.”