Matryoshka Blues (The Average Joe Mysteries Book 1) (11 page)

I laugh once, short and loud. “Hot damn, woman. That’s cold.” She shrugs, and I play my trump card. “Too bad he wasn’t the only one lying to you.”

18

T
he gun lowers as Turnbill takes a step. “What are you talking about?”

“Sergeant wasn’t working for you.” I rise, my arms outstretched and my knees popping from age and exertion. The box is still in my hand, and the cylinder is still hidden from Turnbill’s sight. “At least, not at the end. Your boss got his hooks into him shortly after you did.”

Her face goes white and I chuckle. She wants to shoot me. I mean, of course she does. Everyone wants to at one point or another. Hell, Tully threatens me with it at least once a week. But Turnbill stands there shaking, her rage boiling without actually spilling over into violence.

“How was he lying?” she asks through clenched teeth.

She’s got either one bullet left or none. I’m curious how far I can take this before I have to call her bluff, or get shot for my stupidity.

“For starters, he’s not a hitman. Not even close.”

Her face falls, and I imagine her walking up to every guy on the street, asking if they know how to kill people. I mean, I’m sure that’s not how it went down, but please don’t sully my dreams with the truth. Point is, for Sergeant it would’ve been easy money. Hell, I’d have said yes if she’d asked me.

“What was he?” Turnbill asks.

“Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that he never planned on killing anyone. He’s good at scaring people, though, so you should be proud of yourself for picking someone naturally intimidating.”

She swallows something—perhaps moral outrage, perhaps her tongue. This isn’t going the way she planned, and desperate people do desperate things. I’m hoping Tully comes around soon and takes her out. It’s not like she’s done anything worth a damn tonight.

I’m joking, of course. Don’t you dare tell her I said that.

“Go on,” Turnbill presses.

“He knew the exchange was a sham going in. He tried telling me as much when we were there. Sandecker figured out what you were up to, so he confronted Sergeant and turned him on you. All Sergeant did was stall me, because that’s what Sandecker paid him to do. He left empty-handed because he was never supposed to retrieve the box, and he told you otherwise because that was his assignment.” I shrug. “Sorry, but you and I were the only ones who didn’t know all along that the meeting was bull.”

For a moment I think she’ll shoot me out of spite. But she doesn’t waste what might be her last bullet. Not yet. Not until she has the box in her hand.

I wish she’d teach Tully that kind of self-control. Maybe then I’d get a fucking dessert once in a while.

“Why’d you send Sergeant to kill me?” I ask. My arm’s starting to ache from holding the box out to my side, and my palms are so sweaty I may drop it and the cylinder to the dirt. Talk about ruining a perfectly good surprise.

Turnbill’s still debating. But hey—so long as she’s not trying to shoot me, I’ll give her all the time she needs. I’m generous like that.

“When he called to say Sandecker was dead,” she finally says, “I asked if he saw either you or the box. He said your car was there but that you were gone. He didn’t know if you had it, and I had to make sure, so I sent him to your house.”

“Yeah, well, the only person who ever had it was Sandecker. If you’d hung around his house a bit, you might have figured that out and avoided all this unpleasantness.”

“He had it all along?” Turnbill asks. The mere thought turns her skin white.

I shake my head. “Probably not. He used a misdirect. By hiring me to go over
here
, he got everyone looking that way so he could go off over
there
.”

“Who’d he get it from? When?”

“No idea. Sorry.” And I genuinely am. Knowing that would help a lot.

“Where did he hide it?”

“Secret panel in his office.”

She squints. “The one behind the painting? I looked there.”

Dude, a painting? How fucking cliché can you get? “Not that one.”

“The one on the side of the desk?”

“Nope.”

“The safe in the floor?”

Christ, how many hidey holes did that man have? “Wainscoting beside the office door.”

Now Turnbill looks pissed. “I didn’t know about that one.”

“Good. Now we’re even steven.”

She glances to the box. “Did he tell you what was in it?” Something in her tone speaks to intense curiosity.

“Wasn’t interested in knowing. Had nothing to do with the job.”

“Give it to me,” she barks.

Okay, look—even though in my heart of hearts I know she’s talking about the box, for one stupendously brief moment I can’t help but think that the
it
she wants me to give her is something much naughtier.

A thought occurs to me. “Hang on—if you don’t know what’s in it, then why are you so kill-happy to get it?”

It takes her an uncomfortably long time to answer, and when she does tears have formed in the corners of her eyes.

“Because Jeff wanted it more than he wanted me,” she says.

A lot of pain drives those eight words, flashes of deep hurt and bruised pride, and something tells me I’ve seriously overestimated her inciting incident. Maybe it’s as simple as a woman scorned. It’s clichéd, sure, but clichés exist for a reason, and betrayal will always be a powerful one.

Still—is that supposed to explain everything? Goddamn it, woman. I met the guy once and knew he wasn’t on the level. Dude also drank my coffee, told me to call him Jeff, and didn’t get my reference to probably the best damn Bond movie ever made. No offense to Daniel Craig, but come on—it’s fucking Connery. It’s not even a contest.

Never trust a man who doesn’t know his Bond films. That’s my motto.

No, wait, I don’t have a motto, so that’s a lie. But from now on it’s fucking going to be.

“Care to elaborate on that?” I ask. “Or did you want to stick with
mysteriously coy
?”

Turnbill steps forward, her finger dangerously tight against that trigger. So yeah, no, she doesn’t care to elaborate. She closes the distance between us. Now I’ve got about nine or ten feet to cover if I want to jump her.

For the gun, jerkwads. Get your minds out of the gutter.

“Give it to me,” she says, “or I will shoot your balls—”

I toss it to her. Underhanded—a nice gentle lob so she can catch it without the gun going off, in case I’m wrong about the bullet count. “
Voilà
,” I say. “Now it’s yours. Congratulations.”

Holy shit, is the look on her face priceless. It’s like Christmas came early for her, but Santa brought her a flaming bag of dog poo and a crazy straw. I wish I hadn’t left my phone in Tully’s glove box, else I’d spare a moment and take a picture. Turnbill’s so shocked she hasn’t even noticed I’ve palmed the tiny cylinder.

“Just like that?” she asks.

I don’t know why that’s such a shock—she’s only been demanding the stupid thing since we met.

“It’s simple,” I tell her. “You have a gun and I don’t. You want the box, and I want you on that plane so you can leave me the hell alone. It’s what the poets call a
no-brainer
.”

I get the same dumbfounded stare I’ve seen my entire life. “Who
are
you?”

She’s looking at me like I explained quantum physics to her in German using lime Jell-O, a baby hedgehog, and a Snickers wrapper as visual aids.

I make a face and shrug slightly. “No one. A regular guy. An average joe. A shmuck who knew the woman your boss went to for help.”

Seriously, why is everyone so keen on getting to know me? I’m really not a nice person.

She tucks the box under an arm and re-aims the gun at me. God damn it, I really should have seen this coming. Way to go, asshole.

“You’ve put me through quite a bit tonight,” she says, smiling like a crossroads demon coming to collect my soul. “So I think I should shoot you. You know, to make us even steven.” Her face lights up, a tired old incandescent bulb flickering on at the formation of an idea. “In fact, maybe I’ll shoot your fag-hag friend instead, and let you watch.”

19

O
h no she fucking didn’t.

Out of bullets or not, I was honestly hoping she’d just get on the plane and leave me in peace. But no, the dumb broad had to go and threaten Tully.

Goddamn it.

I move my thumb to the edge of the cylinder, pressing the tiny button on its surface as I smile at Turnbill.

“Wrong move, bitch.”

She looks confused, bringing the gun straight out to shoot me. I lunge as the box she’s clutching to her chest jerks in her grasp like an animal making a run for it. The box is sealed, but wisps of smoke slip out between thin cracks. Turnbill glances down, her face horror-stricken.

I rush her, but she pulls the trigger once before I can grab hold of her gun hand. Nothing happens. I yank her arm to the side so hard I feel tiny wrist bones pop against my palm. Her shoulder audibly cracks, the joint either dislocated or really, really loose. She cries out as I tower over her.

I feel her working the trigger, crying from the exertion while the revolver’s chamber rotates uselessly, the hammer striking six dead primers. I wrap my other hand around her throat.

“Should’ve reloaded after killing Sandecker,” I tell her.

It’s what I was counting on. Well, praying for, if you want to get technical. She already fired one shot at Tully, then four more into her cohorts. That’s five bullets; the revolver only holds six. Since she’s not a gun enthusiast, it hadn’t occurred to her to reload the spent casing after leaving Sandecker’s house.

Well, not until now, at least.

“Do I have your attention?” I ask. I don’t wait for an answer. “I don’t know what it is with you. Maybe you sucked one too many diseased cocks during your arduous trek to mediocrity. Maybe one of your admittedly phenomenal chesticles sprung a leak and is now slowly drowning your common sense. I really don’t care. But here’s the deal: you do
not
threaten my friends.
Comprende
?”

Yes, she technically only threatened one friend. And yes, I’ve acknowledged repeatedly that Tully is the only person in this world I truly care for. But for the sake of clarity, if I
did
have other friends, this lowlife piece of shit wouldn’t be allowed to threaten them either. Got it?

Turnbill’s eyes are watering, and her jaw is locked so tight my own teeth hurt, but I don’t let go of her. Instead, I lean down and get in her face.

“This is your only warning: if you don’t take that box and get on that goddamn plane right this instant, I will rip your throat out and piss down your fucking neck until your tits pop like water balloons. Am I being clear?”

She’s staring at me like she’s about to shit a brick. I really hope she does, too, because I would join Facebook simply to make that my first post:
Today I made a sexy psycho-bitch crap herself, so I went to Maggie Jane’s to celebrate! Here’s a picture of my yummy sandwich!

That’s how Facebook works, right? Fuck me, another item for the list.

The debate in her eyes takes forever, or maybe it only seems to because my patience has worn microscopically thin. Either way she nods slowly, her eyes searching for the plane on the other side of the SUV, the box tucked under her arm like roll-on deodorant in a locker room after the Super Bowl.

Ouch, that is one shitty analogy. Please forgive me. It’s been a long day. I swear I’ll do better next time.

“Drop the gun,” I say, squeezing her wrist.

She lets out a stunted yelp, the gun falling to the dry, dusty ground. I release both my holds, and she backs away quickly, clutching her wrist to her chest and nearly stumbling in her sensible heels several times. I follow her around the SUV and back onto the runway.

When she’s almost to the plane its door opens downward into a set of stairs. I glance over to see Tully rising up on an elbow, shaking her head to clear the cobwebs. Thank God. She’s going to have one hell of a bruise later, not to mention a complete and total bitch-rage for the next week or three, but at least she’s okay.

A man in a shirt, tie, and pilot’s cap appears inside the plane’s opening, beckoning Turnbill inside. She reaches the door-steps, and the man helps her up, tossing me a look I can’t quite translate before he closes up shop.

What the fuck was that for? Does he think we were bumping uglies this whole time? I mean, I totally would have, but shit, dude. Don’t act like this was all my fucking idea.

The plane’s engines roar to life, the pilot preparing to take off.

I feel Tully come up beside me, and I pull her in close. I used to do this with Scotty, once upon a time, and he used to do it with her. Now that it’s the two of us, there are times when I need to feel my brother’s presence, despite the pain the memories bring. The only way to do it anymore is to hold tight to the one person he loved more than me.

“Good riddance,” Tully says. She’s holding her face where the gun hit her, and under the fingers I can see the bruise already forming. It’s going to be fabulously ugly.

“Are you okay?” I ask her,

“I will be.” She spits, and I’m relieved to see there’s no blood. “That twat waffle’s lucky I didn’t wake up sooner.”

“Why do you think I was in such a hurry to get her on that plane?” I tell her.

“She hit me in the face with a fucking gun, you dick. I owe her.”

I find no fault with her logic—and neither should you.

The whine of the engines escalates as the plane rockets down the runway. The nose lifts up, and the plane rises into the air. It’s moving like a gunshot, and it’ll be out of sight before too long.

I wonder what Costa Rica’s like this time of year. Then I wonder what Loretta Turnbill looks like in a two-piece thong bikini, and realize maybe I’ve had enough excitement for one day.

Tully laughs. “She didn’t even ask if you opened it, did she?”

I smile. “Nope.”

“She didn’t look for herself?”

“Too busy resisting my masculine charms.”

Tully makes a fake vomit sound, complete with gags. It’s scary how good she is at that.

“Too bad for her,” she says. “She might have noticed the smoke bomb you stuck in there.”

I nod, feeling my pants pocket with the hand not holding tight to my only friend. My smile grows wider. The contents of Sandecker’s puzzle box were small, but heavy enough to weigh down a pocket. I’m surprised my pants didn’t fall around my ankles during all this nonsense.

What can I say? I’m good at puzzles, and it was a long drive from my house to wherever the fuck we are now. I needed to pass the time somehow, and I didn’t feel like digging Sandecker’s book out of the foot well.

The plane’s lights join the twinkling blanket of stars as Tully gathers up our stuff, while I search Turnbill’s dead associates for keys to the SUV.

Neither body has any identification. I’m not surprised. You shouldn’t be either.

Normally patting down corpses would bother me, but it’s been a long goddamn day, and it’s a long walk back to the Tully’s car. Matchstick Man has them in his pocket, and Tully carefully snags Turnbill’s discarded gun to give to the authorities investigating Sandecker’s murder. She tosses it into my bag, throws the bag onto the SUV’s back seat, and we both climb in and drive off.

As I pull up behind the Boss, I’m half tempted to claim the SUV for myself, as payment for a job kinda-sorta well done and as recompense for putting up with everyone’s bullshit. But then I remember that Sergeant owes me new tires, and I’d have to register the SUV at some point, and I change my mind. I’m sure as hell not paying for the gas on that gluttonous piece of shit—I don’t care how well the heated leather seat cups my ass.

“She killed her partners,” Tully says, slamming the rear passenger door, gym bag in hand.

“So she did.”

“I have a feeling Meloni and Ehrle aren’t going to like that. Whoever the hell they are.”

And this, ladies and jellyfish, is why we’re friends: quick, solid grasps of the obvious. Nothing gets by her.

Eventually.

“I’d wager they’ll take umbrage,” I say.

“Any chance you can clue me in to what’s going on?”

“Wish I could, Tullinger. But your guess is as good as mine.”

And that’s the truth. I know very little with absolute certainty. All I really know is that some guy named Jeff Sandecker wanted a box, while a woman named Loretta Turnbill, his secretary and lover, wanted payback. So she hires a man named Sergeant to steal the box from me, but Sandecker figured all of that out, and turned Sergeant against Turnbill. Then Sandecker lied about—well,
everything
, probably as a diversion. I know when she found out, Turnbill got so pissed she drove to Sandecker’s home and ultimately killed him. I know I ended up with the box and gave it to Turnbill to stop her from—well, not shoot me, as it turned out, but something just as not-good.

So I know a lot, but only the basics. I don’t know the story, and if you don’t know the story, then you don’t know anything.

Perhaps one day I’ll figure it out, but it won’t be anytime soon. My luck, the answers will come out of the blue, probably knocking on my door as I’m getting in the shower, so I’ll have to stand there in a fucking towel, dripping wet and jumping and screaming like I won the Publishers Clearing House.

I mean, I’m not holding my breath, but stranger and more unseemly things have been known to happen once in a blue moon.

Tully gets behind the wheel of the Mustang and puts my bag on the passenger seat. We locked the car when we got out, so I have to wait for her to lean over and unlock my door. Which she doesn’t do.

“Are you going to tell me what was in that stupid box?” she shouts.

She’d been too focused on finding this place to pay attention to what I’d been doing beside her. Once I opened Sandecker’s box, I shoved its contents in my pocket and stuffed the smoke bomb in there before closing it back up. Tully never asked until now, so I never told.

I lean down to the passenger window and shake my head. I have my reasons, not the least of which is to keep her safe. Plausi-ble deniability is vastly underrated, especially when her company’s client is one of three dead bodies connected to it.

“I didn’t think so,” she says.

I know she’s not happy with me, and she doesn’t believe I’m being fair, so she gives me a grin that tightens my sphincter.

She closes her door and starts the car, gunning the engine. The Boss flies backward and spins around, fishtailing in the loose dirt before catching on the compacted dirt road. Then it’s off like a shot.

“Should have seen that coming,” I say to the dust swirling about me. Then I groan. “Damn it. I left my phone in her—”

The car stops thirty feet away, long enough for Tully to dump my cell phone and Sandecker’s paperback out the driver’s window before taking off again. I swear I hear her high-pitched laugh on the evening breeze, and I stand there staring at brake lights trailing off into eventual nothingness.

I wonder if she plans on coming back. Yeah, she’s angry, but at some point I suspect she’ll calm down and realize what she’s doing. I just need to be patient in the meantime.

Yeah, right. We all know she’s not coming back.

Looks like I get a new ride after all.

I look around, taking in the night sky and the fields of wheat swaying in the gentle breeze, momentarily enjoying the peace and quiet. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—we have to take these moments as they come, because it’s not often we get them.

The weight of a MacGuffin succumbs to gravity and tugs my pocket toward the earth, and I pull out Jeff Sandecker’s last bit of hopes and dreams. I’ve never seen anything like it. Staring at it makes me want to stomp it to a pulp, screaming every obscenity I’ve ever learned, then making up an entire linguistic explosion of new ones to compensate for the lack of adequate variations of the word
fuck
.

It’s a metal box, brushed aluminum possibly, about the same size as one of those Altoid’s mints containers. Do they still make those? Yet another item for the list, I guess. The top-hinged lid is pretty tight. The box’s corners are rounded, and for that I’m thankful. Walking around with something sharp and pointy that close to my balls? I may as well follow Tully’s lead, for all the good it’d do me.

First, it was the decorative box inside Sandecker’s secret cubby. Then it was the puzzle box I was hired to find in the first place. Now it’s this stupid little trinket box. I’ve been chasing a goddamn matryoshka doll all day, each new layer revealing something a bit smaller and a shitload more infuriating.

The puzzle box this thing was hiding in weighed next to nothing—two pounds, max. The eight pounds Sandecker had warned me of comes almost exclusively from this tiny box. I don’t think it weighs that much by itself, given the feel of the metal. That means the item inside is both small and dense. Well, multiple items, judging from the rattling. I’m dying to see what they are.

There’s one problem—I don’t know the six-digit combination to the lock on the box’s goddamn face.

An announcer’s voice in my head is offering a play-by-play of the horse race that this case has been. And here I am getting stymied at this finish line by the nose hairs of a fucking combination lock.