If Looks Could Kill (11 page)

It took some work to concentrate on what the chief was asking. "Pardon?"

"What kind of information did Lawson want from you?"

Chris didn't look up as they walked along the old, uneven sidewalk, automatically matching strides. Instead she focused on the progress of her tennis shoes across the slabs of concrete that had long since begun pushing against each other like tectonic plates. "Um, she wants me to get together any unusual correspondence."

"Threats?" he asked. "That kind of thing?"

Chris looked up to see that his face was carefully passive, the network of crow's feet at the corners of his eyes suspiciously absent. She actually caught herself smiling when she realized that he was fighting like hell to keep his expression nonchalant. "Do you have to be so excited?" she demanded.

He gave himself away in millimeters. "I was right," was all he said. "You are spooky."

"Spooky nothing. I'm surprised you don't have the bends from the pressure change between Chicago and Pyrite. If you're anything like the cops I've known, you can smell a good case a mile off, and don't give up until you have a square foot of pants cloth in your teeth. And I bet you've probably guessed that there aren't that many good cases to go around down here."

He never slowed, never gave in to the amazement Chris knew he felt. "Just how many cops do you know?" he asked.

"I'm a mystery writer. It's an occupational hazard. Are you going to help?"

"Depends. Are you going to be honest with me?"

She knew a thing or two about masks herself. "Sure. Are you going to be honest with me?"

Simple barter. Quid pro quo. Chris knew she needed him. There was no one else who could buffer that carnivorous police detective from the big city. There was no one else in a position to keep her informed of progress. And Chris had known the minute she'd said it that the chief needed her. She had the feeling that he hadn't left Chicago as far behind as he'd thought.

It took him a second. They both stalled not ten feet from the sheriff's office, the meal still held in MacNamara's hands like an offering, the sag of his shoulders betraying the ambiguities of a man who wore his uniform like a pledge.For a minute he looked out over Chris's head to where Chris knew the secretaries were watching them. His eyes narrowed a bit in thought, and his jaw worked a little.

"It looks like we're already a hot topic on the grapevine," he said. "That could make it worse."

Chris turned to check the direction of his attention. She saw the last furtive looks as the women ducked back into the old glass-and-iron door that had been installed around the time General Grant had stopped there to water his horse.

"Nah," she assured him. "They're just trying to get the scoop on the killer. Besides, most of the town half suspects me of being a lesbian anyway."

Chris hadn't meant to set him up like that. It was worth it, though, to see the magnificent restraint in his reaction.

"Oh?"

"Well, I have lived here five years now, and I haven't gone after a single one of the local boys." She shot him a wicked grin. "It only stands to reason."

"Local boys," the chief retorted, casting a telling look toward the prison. "Like Cooter?"

"Not to mention his four sons, Cooter One, Cooter Two, Cooter Three, and Cooter Four."

"They're
all
named Cooter?"

"No matter what you have to say about Cooter, you can't deny that he has a healthy ego."

MacNamara seemed reduced to nodding. "Uh huh. Town doesn't seem overly worried about leaving you with teenage daughters."

Chris hadn't quite lost that grin. "Well, so far I haven't gone after any of the local girls, either. The town figures I'm a little quaint, and mostly harmless, and I haven't seen fit to dispel the myth since it keeps me safe from the Cooters of this world."

All the chief had to do was turn and open the door to get into the station. Through the window Chris could see Marsha, the day dispatcher, watching them instead of the soaps on her portable TV. But the chief didn't move. He simply stood where he was, his expression unreadable, his hands around the plate.

He gave away his decision before he ever spoke. Chris saw it in his eyes.

"I was going to question a murder witness," he said finally, his posture as sharp as his creases, his words careful. "Turned out he was also protecting a stash the size of Cleveland. I screwed up, and ended up short about four inches of skull."

Quid pro quo. Chris could see everything she'd anticipated, the layers of protection over the too-new wound, the challenge of the bald truth, the tensing for reaction, the deep-down ghosts that hovered around the back of his eyes. She looked away just a moment, uneasy with her own intrusion, wondering at his courage to let her in even this briefly. He'd done his job, offering truth to establish trust. But he hadn't had to offer quite so much.

She had to decide what she could afford to give back.

She took a slow breath. Fought hard to dredge up a truth, any truth. One worth even exchange for what the chief had just given.

She couldn't do it.

Dropping her gaze, she fought the familiar surge of shame and gave what little she could. "I, uh, don't live in Pyrite just because it's cute. I don't... do well out in the real world. I didn't like it when I lived there, and I don't now. I'd prefer not to have to go back." Finally she looked up and did her best to smile past the sudden, new acid in her stomach. "Which I may have to do if I'm really telling the future in fourteen-chapter increments."

The chief began to walk again. Chris followed, and saw that he had relaxed just a little, not so much a deflating as a resettling. She seemed to have passed some kind of test, though she was damned if she could figure out for what.

"Are you?" he asked.

"What?"

He pushed the door open and held it for her. "Telling the future?"

Chris stopped just inches shy of the threshold. "Oh, no," she protested. "Not you, too."

Caught with his one hand on the open door and the other balancing the dish, the chief considered her carefully, obviously trying to figure out how to play this. "You're pretty convinced that your books are coming true," he suggested.

Chris pulled her hands out of her pockets to settle them on her hips. "I'm not going to explain this again. Livvy's talent is a purely expedient one. I am as much a psychic as Stephen King is a possessed St. Bernard."

That little panicked feeling that had been growing lately had nothing to do with this. The dreams that hadn't really plagued her so much until the last few months. Chris had never considered such a possibility before, and she certainly wasn't going to do it now. Especially now. It was simply too much to be responsible for.

"Any other questions?" she asked sharply.

"Are you coming in?"

Her own shoulders slumped a little. She took her hands off her hips and preceded the chief into the office.

"Cooter Taylor still locked up?" the Chief asked, heading right for the cabinet over the dispatching console to get the keys.

"Can't you hear him?" Marsha retorted. A pleasantly plain, overweight woman with a scratchy, beer-stained voice, Marsha had been manning the mikes for about twenty years. She kept a secret about as well as Victor threw his voice, but very little fazed her.

Chris instinctively looked up toward the heavy iron door that led into the jail. Cooter was definitely back there. She could tell that raw, pit-bull voice anywhere. She could also place most of the obscenities he was tossing around back there with Elvis James, the turnkey. Must have been an intense discussion.

"He been doin' that all morning?" the chief asked evenly.

Marsha just nodded as she buffed at her nails and kept an eye on both the dispatch board and
The Young and the Restless.
The phone rarely rang here. A fairly new office that smelled like coffee, dust, and air freshener, it was decorated much like the city hall down the street, the only difference being that instead of real plants they had silk ones. Sheriff Tipett was allergic. Besides, Marsha killed anything she tried to grow.

"You motherfuckin' sack o' shit, I seen that!"

Marsha pursed her lips at the language. Chris grinned. "He's gettin' kinda musical."

The chief wasn't at all pleased. "I'll be right back."

He slid the big brass key into the lock, pushed the door open, and stepped back across a hundred years.

Chris had been in the jail once when one of the deputies gave her a tour. Built in 1860, it had held slaves, Confederate prisoners, Union prisoners, and moonshiners, in that order. Constructed of solid whitewashed granite blocks, the small building was U-shaped, with the cells opening out from the center. Sporadically illuminated by bare bulbs, each cell sported a flat iron-grilled door. The only toilet was set into the left-hand wall by the office, and most of the meals were passed on a tray through a special little door that led through to the sheriff's house, which was attached to the far end. Until the new connecting offices went up, the prisoners had all been admitted through his living room. His wife still cooked for them when she was home.

Chris stood just shy of the door. She couldn't go in there. The lights were blinding against the whitewash, and she knew Elvis was as harmless as he was ugly, but those cells made her break out into a cold sweat. Empty black eyes in a death's-head face, bottomless voids of agony.

The light never reached into those harsh, square cells where the old ring bolts from the time of slavery still protruded from the floor. The sun never even came close. When Chris shut her eyes, she could hear the low, lost moans from all the people who'd been trapped here, in other cells like them, and it unnerved her.

She couldn't go in. Even poised at the very edge, she was clammy and flushed, her chest tight. So she guarded the door with slippery hands, standing near enough that she could smell the old sweat, thick dirt, and reused motor oil on Cooter, far enough away that she didn't have to see where they'd trapped him.

And then, all hell broke loose.

The chief was just making the step down into the jail hallway, tray in hand, scowl settled over his features at Cooter's inventive language. Elvis, standing right by Cooter's cell, turned to greet the new chief, the gaps in his teeth as stark as the cells he served. The kind of guy who'd do anything for a dollar. Suddenly Cooter's hand shot out from between the bars.

Before Elvis could so much as squeak, those beefy fingers with their jailhouse tattoos clamped around his throat and lifted the skinny, vacant-eyed jailer right off the floor. Elvis shrilled and turned purple. The chief, who had so carefully carried that dinner all the way to the jail, promptly dropped it, spattering gravy and corn all over the concrete floor.

Chris was caught in the doorway, unable to step in, knowing better than to even try going a round with Cooter, her attention fixated on the lopsided blue crosses tattooed into Cooter's hairy fingers where they were curled around Elvis's throat.

"Get me the fuck outa here!" Cooter rasped, the very timbre of his voice invoking the image of little girls spinning their heads and spitting up pea soup. Elvis squeaked again as Cooter slammed him into the grate.

"Come on, you pussy motherfuckers, get in here and get me out so I can go home and beat some shit outta that cuntface bitch that called the cops on me!"

Chris wasn't even sure whether Cooter knew it was the new chief he'd heard come through that door. She was sure that he wasn't expecting what he got.

The chief never went for his gun. He didn't need to. While Cooter was busy shaking poor Elvis's last few teeth out of his head, the chief reached right in and grabbed Cooter by his throat.

Chris couldn't see Cooter's face, but she heard him. He was built like a tree trunk. The chief had him squealing like a stuck pig.

Cooter acted completely within character. He spit right in the chiefs face.

"Oh, shit," Chris muttered to herself, frozen in place even as the spittle ran down off the chief's chin and stained his shirt. She should move. She should run like hell, or get on in there and help somehow.

The chief didn't blink. Didn't even bother to wipe his face. He simply yanked as hard as he could. Cooter slammed into the grid with the force of a car wreck. The door, unbreached in a hundred and thirty years, shook with the impact. Cooter made a thudding, pulpy noise, like a watermelon hitting the street, and let Elvis go.

Chris took a huge breath, closed her eyes, and scurried in to get Elvis out of the way. While Mac was preoccupied with Cooter, she pulled the little jailer up off the floor and pushed him back out through the door where Marsha was already calling for backup. Then she turned around to keep an eye on the chief, just in case he needed help—although what help she could be, she wasn't sure.

"Listen to me, you ignorant prick," the chief was snarling, the sound far more frightening than anything Cooter had managed. "I guess you don't remember me." Yank. Slam. "Well, you sure as shit will now, you stupid piece of wormpiss." Yank. Slam. "I'm the guy you tried to give rabies to last night."

Somehow the chief had even gotten Cooter's arm caught by the grate and was exerting pressure on it as he made an imprint of the door on Cooter's face. Chris slowly sank onto the office step, propping the door open with her back, too mesmerized by the change in MacNamara to move.