Racing the Devil (21 page)

Poor kid. First her mother, then her sister. “Been a hell of a year,” I said.

She nodded. “It’s not like Mama hadn’t been real sick. She had a couple of strokes in the last few years, and she didn’t even recognize us anymore. But still, it was a shock.” She rubbed her upper arms, as if to warm herself. “I’d just stepped out to the vending machine, and when I came back, she was gone. Choked on a bite of chicken.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

She fiddled with her braid and changed the subject. “You believe me about Dakota?
I
believed you.”

“Yeah. I believe you.” Unless something proved otherwise. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled her braid around and rubbed it absently between her fingers. “I don’t like being lied to.”

“It’s not personal. It’s an investigation.”

Her smile was tight. “License to lie?”

“Something like that.”

She nibbled at the tip of the braid. It was a gesture Maria might have made. “You think you can catch this son-of-a-bitch?” she said at last.

“I’m pretty sure I can.”

“All right, then.” She slid back into my arms and rested her head against my chest. It felt good to have her there.

This time, when she kissed me, I didn’t object.

W
ELL?” SHE LAY CURLED
along my side, one arm across my chest, fingers toying with the hairs around my nipple. “Did I rock your world?”

I bent down and kissed her shoulder. It tasted of salt. “What do you think?”

“That you should tell me you’ve never been so fantastically fucked.”

I kissed her again. “Consider it said.”

Something dark flickered in her eyes. “What’s the matter, lover? Can’t shell out a compliment?”

I raised an eyebrow. “All right. My world has been completely, thoroughly, utterly rocked.”

She unwound herself from me and tugged free of the sheets. “Forget it.”

“Hey.” I sat up and stroked her hair with the back of my hand. “It was great.
You
were great.” “Best you ever had?”

Maria was the best I’d ever had, but it wasn’t fair to compare. I loved Maria. “Yes,” I said.

Mollified, she leaned back against me, and I slipped my arms around her. Her body was still tense; she hadn’t quite relented yet. “Swear you never slept with Amy.”

“I never slept with Amy.”

“What can I do to help you catch the bastard who killed her?”

I buried my face in her hair and took a deep breath. She smelled of sex and strawberry shampoo. “Tell me about Calvin.”

She stiffened.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Just talk to me.”

She made a little strangled sound. “You won’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“I don’t want you to hate me.”

“I won’t. Water under the bridge.”

She rubbed her cheek against my jaw and squeezed her eyes shut. The words came hesitantly at first, but as she unburdened herself, they came faster, as if a dam had broken somewhere inside her. She’d kept it to herself a long time.

She’d met Calvin during her freshman year at college. She was a theatre major, and he was fresh out of his first marriage, raising a daughter and pursuing a Masters in architecture. They met at the Laundromat, a hot babe washing lingerie and a good-looking guy in dress clothes fumbling to fold his daughter’s rompers. He seemed shy, but there was an instant chemistry.

Then one day, she said, she realized she was in love with him. They talked about marriage. She took him home to meet her family, and five months later, he broke it to her that her seventeen-year-old sister was pregnant with his child. He assured Valerie that he loved her, but he had to do the right thing. He had to marry Amy.

“Must have been tough,” I said.

“We didn’t talk for years. I didn’t even go to her wedding. It was so stupid. But they’d not only broken my heart, they’d hurt my pride.”

She went by her sister’s house one afternoon, not to talk to Amy, but to hash through unfinished business with Calvin. The discussion had been heated, but somehow they ended up making love in the Hartwells’ bed.

“I know it was wrong,” she said, wrapping her arms around my hands so I couldn’t let her go. “But it turned out to be a good thing. Because I knew he still wanted me. And after that, I could forgive them.” She gave me a weak smile. “I guess you could say we were even.”

“Did Amy know?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“She never said anything about it. And, believe me, she would have.”

“Was that the only time?”

“Why would I want to do it again? I knew I could have him if I wanted him. But after he’d picked Amy, why would I want him?”

“Did he have other lovers?”

She slithered out of my arms and swung her legs over the bed. “I imagine he did. Calvin may or may not love the Lord, but he never could resist a willing piece of ass.”

AT FIVE O’CLOCK
, with the Ian moustache gone and my hair back to its natural buckskin, I drove Paul, Jay, and Queenie to the house I used to share with Maria. It still gave me a hollow feeling seeing D.W.’s car in the drive, knowing he was keeping my lawn mowed and my gutters cleaned. Of course, they were his lawn and his gutters now. He drove my son to school. He sat with my family in church.

The house sat on the edge of Old Hickory Lake, a single-story white stucco with Spanish archways and a fountain out front. Out back, there was a barbecue pit, a swing set, a picnic table, and a boat dock with no boat. As we unloaded Paulie, the dog, one overnight bag, my guitar, and the wrapped gifts, I heard voices from the back.

“Who talkin’?” Paulie asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Dat my birfday?”

“I think that’s your Uncle Randall and his brood,” I said, slamming the trunk. Paul and Jay were already headed toward the backyard. Josh met them halfway.

“Josh!” Paulie threw himself into his cousin’s arms. “You look scary. Rrrrr.”

“Rrrrr,” Josh growled back. I thought I glimpsed a hint of a smile, but it was gone before I was sure I’d seen it.

Paulie gave hugs all around, while I put my gifts on the table with the others.

“Jared. I’m glad you’re all right.” Maria came into my arms as if she belonged there, then pulled away awkwardly and ran a thumb over what was left of my black eye. “You are all right, aren’t you?”

“Mostly,” I said. “I still don’t know who set me up.”

“You will.” Her smile settled somewhere in the bottom of my stomach. “You’re a good investigator. Frank’s a good investigator. Between the two of you, I know you’ll solve this thing.”

“I wanted to thank you and D.W. for helping out with the bail.”

“Oh, that.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I could hardly let the father of my son languish in some jail cell, could I?”

She was wearing denim shorts and a pink T-shirt with a picture of mountain gorillas on the front. Most of Maria’s shirts have wildlife on them. So do about half of mine, mostly because she gave them to me.

Her thick, dark hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, not so much for looks as to keep it off her neck. It was too hot to do much else. Her shoes were leather sandals I’d given her three years ago, imports from Spain. They showed her small, tanned feet with the toenails painted pink to match the shirt.

I fought the urge to plunge my tongue into her mouth. The look on her face said she was having the same thought.

Or maybe it was wishful thinking.

“You look great,” I told her, meaning it.

“So do you,” she said, “except for the bruising.”

There was something else in her eyes, a tentativeness, a holding back. You couldn’t be married to a woman for thirteen years and not know when something was bothering her.

“Okay,” I said. “Spit it out. What aren’t you telling me?”

Her smile was sad. “You always could read my mind, couldn’t you? All right. There is something I want to discuss with you. But later. Right now, I have to go finish the potato salad.” She turned and called to Jay and to Randall’s wife, Wendy, who was showing Paulie how to blow his party favor. “Wendy, Jay, could you come and help me in the kitchen?”

With Jay and the two women gone, I decided to bite the bullet and say hello to my replacement.

He was using a spatula to put raw hamburger patties on the grill. Besides hamburgers, he had hot dogs, chicken breasts, and corn on the cob, still in the husks. I stifled a wave of jealousy. It was a new gas grill, not the one Maria and I had cooked out on. But it was my job he was doing.

“Hey, D.W.” He was a little shorter than my six feet, maybe five-ten, with a rugged, square-jawed face, a receding hairline, and the beginnings of a paunch. He wore knee-length khaki shorts with a navy and green golf shirt and white tennis shoes, no socks. Jay said he looked like a man you could depend on.

I thought he looked like a schmuck.

“Thanks for the bail-out, man,” I said.

He shrugged, not meeting my eyes. “It meant a lot to Maria, getting you out.”

“Because of Paul.”

He jabbed at a burger with his spatula. “I expect so. She says you absolutely couldn’t have done this thing. She knows you, I guess.”

I felt a flush creep up my neck. “You think I did it?”

He stopped what he was doing and met my gaze. “I don’t think you did it,” he said. “But I don’t know you didn’t. All I know is that my wife thinks you didn’t do it.”
My wife
. I tried not to wince as he went on. “It means a lot to her that you didn’t do it. So if you did, I’m telling you right now, you’d better never even dream of hurting her the way that other poor woman was hurt. If you so much as breathe on her wrong, I’ll tear out your spleen with my bare hands.”

You and what army
, was my first thought. Then I thought again and knew that, if our places were reversed, I’d be giving him the same speech. “D.W.,” I said, “I would eat hot coals before I’d hurt Maria. Or Paulie. Or you, for that matter.”

“Well.” He sighed and flipped the burgers. “Well, that’s kind of what I thought. But I felt it needed to be said.”

My jaw felt tight. “Consider it said.”

He nodded.

“Thanks for the bail-out, anyway.”

He looked at me blankly for a moment, then said, “You’re welcome.”

I wandered over to the picnic table, where Randall sat glowering at his soda.

“Your face will freeze that way,” I told him, quoting Mom. “What’s eating you?”

“Look at that.” He pointed toward the swing set, where Josh was pushing Paulie on the swing. Paulie laughed, a smiling Buddha in a striped T-shirt. In the next swing, Caitlin pumped her long, sun-browned legs. With her blond hair and her yellow shirt and shorts, she looked like a human sunbeam.

“Caitlin’s growing up,” I said, knowing Caitlin wasn’t Randall’s problem. “You’re going to have to fight the boys off with machine guns.”

“Not Caitlin. Josh. He looks like . . .” His shoulders lifted. Drooped. “Like some kind of freak.”

“It’s just a phase,” I said. “Like when we grew our hair long and drank beer up in the loft. We didn’t even like it.”

“There’s a lot worse things out there than beer,” he said. “You ought to see his room. Everything in black. Posters of that Marilyn Manson. What kind of sick shit names himself after a woman and a mass murderer?”

“The kind who wants to shock people. Remember Kiss? Remember Ozzy Osbourne? I used to hope that son-of-a-bitch would catch rabies or something, biting the heads off bats.”

“That’s what I mean. We might have drunk a couple of beers in our time, but we knew you had to be a creep to bite the heads off live animals. I’m not sure Josh knows.”

“He’s good with Paulie,” I said.

Randall’s sigh was heavy. “I don’t know who he is, Jared. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“You don’t have to have done anything wrong.”

He looked away from his son. “Then how did he turn out this way?”

I couldn’t answer him. Instead, we sat in silence for a moment. Looking at my brother, I realized how much alike we looked. He was two inches taller and four years older, but we had the same gray eyes, the same shock of buckskin-colored hair, the same dimples at the corners of the mouth.

From the time we were kids, he’d planned to follow Dad into the Air Force. He enlisted at eighteen and was four months into his stint when our mother passed away. I was fourteen and probably a pain in the ass, but he left the service to take care of me without a backward glance. Then a construction accident shattered his knee, and the dream was over. At my graduation from college and later the police academy, he’d clapped louder than anyone else. He’d stood by me through my divorce, the mess with Ashleigh, and my decision to go into business for myself as a P.I.

He never once blamed me for the end of his Air Force career.

I blamed myself enough for both of us.

I was grateful when D.W. announced that the food was done. Wendy and Maria came out, bearing deviled eggs, potato salad, and coleslaw. Jay followed with the watermelon wedges.

“Save room for cake and ice cream,” Maria said, though how she expected anybody to leave room for anything after such bounty was a mystery. Somehow, we all managed.

Maria got out her camera and Paulie blew out his candles with a series of staccato, spit-filled blows. Perhaps anticipating this, Maria had placed all eight candles in one corner, thereby preserving the rest of the cake.