Bad To The Bone (38 page)

"More like no one was looking at your
face."

"Guess not," he agreed as he started the
engine.

"Oh, come on," I said, staring out at the
drizzle. It was turning to rain and the cars on the main drag made
hissing sounds as they whizzed past. "I saw her handing over the
printout."

Bill had started to pull out into traffic,
but stopped abruptly. He turned to me with a hard-to-read smile. "I
guess you mean your record?" he said.

I nodded miserably.

"Casey, do you really think that after Tawny
Bledsoe, I would have gotten involved with someone else unless I
had checked her out pretty thoroughly?"

"You knew? You ran my name?" I asked
indignantly.

"And prints. You left them all over my
apartment that time."

"I can't believe you did that to me." I
paused. "You've known all along?"

"Sure," he said, checking
the road and pulling out into the northbound lane.
"Everybody deserves a second chance. Even
middle-aged burnouts like me."

I don't remember much of the ride home to
Raleigh. I remember the squeak of the windshield wipers, the splat
of rain on the car, the feeling of safety I got from dozing in the
front seat while someone I trusted guided me toward home. I
remember a lingering feeling of lightness, as if some weight had
been lifted from my soul. Tawny? My secret? Something else I didn't
understand? I was just too tired to figure it out. And too warm to
care.

I woke up near Raleigh when Bill gently
pulled my hair.

"Where to?" he asked.

"Home," I said automatically.

"Durham?"

I realized I had been dreaming about Chatham
County, about Burly's farm and the white clapboard house and the
cow pond and our quilt-covered bed. "No," I mumbled, rubbing the
sleep from my eyes. I was too tired to avoid being tactless. "Head
to Pittsboro. I'll show you when we get there."

I leaned against Bill's shoulder as he
steered us over the rain-slicked highway. A sort of madness had
passed through, and the aftermath left me exhausted. For almost a
month, I had thought of nothing but Tawny Bledsoe, where she was
and how to bring her down. What had caused my obsession? My need to
prove I was nothing like her? The way she treated people and got
away with it? An innocent man paying for a crime he hadn't
committed? Or that Tawny had assumed I was as disposable as
everyone else? Or was I really just running away from Burly, for
fear he'd expect something from me that I couldn't give?

I wasn't sure what the reasons were, but I
was glad it was over. Now I could get on with my life.

"What's going to happen?" I wondered out
loud.

"They'll get them both," Bill predicted.
"The wife will turn state's evidence and do hard time. Bledsoe may
get the big one. Case, you did a great job. No one else could have
done it. You've done a good thing today."

"No, I mean what's going to happen with
us?"

"Oh." His shoulder stiffened beneath my
head. "Well, am I or am I not driving you out to your boyfriend's
house?"

"You are," I admitted.

He relaxed again. "So, the two of you are
still going strong?"

"I think so," I said. "If he's back from the
dark side." A stab of longing for Burly hit me. I wanted to be home
with him. I wanted him to be back, to be really back, to have
survived this latest funk of his, so we could both return to our
life together. It felt, somehow, that if we didn't make that
happen, Tawny would have won out after all.

Bill was nodding. "I can live with that. You
and him, I mean."

"You can?" I was vaguely disappointed that
he was taking it so calmly. I've always wanted to have my cake and
eat it, too. Even when I'm full.

“To tell you the truth, Casey," Bill said,
"you're one hell of a woman, but you're exhausting. I'm going to
need at least a three-week vacation before I can muster the energy
to even have coffee with you. I'm too old. I can't keep up." He
laughed. "But it sure is nice once in a while."

"Yes," I decided. "It is."

I stared out the window at the foggy skyline
of downtown Raleigh and wondered if Jeff had come by my office
yet.

"Can we keep him out of it?" I asked
Bill.

"Who? Your ex?"

I nodded.

"So far as I know, he's not involved," Bill
said. "Unless I get evidence from you otherwise, that's the way it
stays."

"I guess that's it then," I decided. "One
last bail-out, for old time's sake."

Mist cloaked the farmhouse. The pond was as
flat and gray as gun metal, a nickel nestled among the hills. It
was a dreary day outside, but the lights were on in the kitchen and
smoke billowed from the chimney. That meant Burly was home and my
heart lifted at the thought. I wanted everything back the way it
had been before Tawny Bledsoe entered my life.

I found Burly in the kitchen, his wheelchair
pulled up close to the stove. He was tasting lamb stew and nodding
his head in satisfaction. It smelled great and I was suddenly
starving.

Killer was asleep on the hearth, snoring in
front of the fire. He smelled me finally—not even lamb stew could
mask my on-the-road-again funk—and he opened one eye. His tail
quivered in his version of a wildly enthusiastic greeting.

"Honey, I'm home," I announced, helping
myself to Burly's lap. I snuggled against him. "Of course, the
drawback is that I stink."

"Mmmm," he said. "No problem. I'm part
French, remember?"

"Which part?"

"All the right parts."

We laughed and I inhaled the air around him.
I could feel and smell the change in him, there was no stale
tobacco odor lingering around him and his body chemicals were
different, they were back in balance. His face was relaxed, his
hair was washed, he had on clean clothes and had shaved. The black
dog had moved on to bite someone else. The man I knew and loved had
returned.

I ran my hands over his cheeks. "I'm
impressed." I rubbed my face against his, feeling our skin pressed
together. "You must be doing better."

"I guess you could say I'm back, too," he
admitted.

"It was a bad one, wasn't it?"

He nodded. "But it's over now."

"For a while." The words hung in the air. I
hurried to soften them. "I'm sorry I'm so lousy at being there for
you. I hate that in myself."

He gripped my arms, his voice strong. "Don't
be. This is something I have to go through alone. There's nothing
you can do."

"You're just saying that to make me feel
better."

"Does it matter why I'm saying it?" he
asked. "You did the right thing for you. I don't want you to be any
other way. I mean that."

I buried my head back in his shoulder. "Did
anyone get killed, arrested or otherwise compromised this time
around?"

He ran his hands up and down my waist,
moving them up to cup my breasts. "The only damage done was to my
liver. And my dignity, if I have any left."

"I'm glad you're back," I whispered, sliding
my hands under his shirt and rubbing them across his chest. He had
the smoothest skin I'd ever touched, it was like corn silk beneath
my fingers.

"And I'm glad you're back." He paused,
noticed my scratches and touched them lightly with a finger. "You
had me worried."

"I did it. I found her. I got the proof.
She's in custody."

He smiled. "I knew you could do it; I never
doubted it for a moment. Without exception, you're the most
stubborn woman I ever met."

"Lucky for you," I pointed out.

"Lucky for me."

"Want me to tell you about it?" I
offered.

He shifted in his wheelchair. "Oh, yeah,
baby. You know I like that Xena Warrior Princess stuff."

"Well," I whispered into his ear. "We had a
cat fight. A really knock-down, drag-out one."

"Hair pulling?" he asked hopefully, his
hands sliding over my stomach to find the zipper of my jeans.

"Yup. Some bitch-slapping, too."

He started to breathe harder. I licked his
ear and whispered into it. "I had to rip her clothes off, but it
was worth it. She was begging me for mercy in the end."

His voice was thick as he fumbled with the
top button on my jeans. "You kicked her ass7'

"Of course," I said. "And I kicked in a
couple of doors, too. There was even gunfire. I had to hit the
floor."

That did it for Burly. His hand slid down
the front of my pants as he pressed his mouth against mine. When I
felt the familiar touch of his lips, a jolt went through me like it
did every time our bodies met. Four hundred volts of direct current
and then some. It had the power to make me leave everything else
far behind. Which was exactly what I needed to do just then.

Four days later, I was sleeping late when I
got the call.

"He's here," Bobby D. said. "In the office.
And he doesn't look too good."

"Be there soon," I promised, wondering what
I would say when I saw him.

Jeff looked even worse than I expected. His
skin had a yellowish cast to it, and his eyes drooped at the edges.
His hair was dirty and his clothes looked as if he had slept in
them for days. There was a sour air around him, like the beer slop
that ferments on barroom floors.

"How are you holding up?" I asked. I slid
behind my desk, anxious to put room between us.

"Not so good," he admitted, staring down at
his grimy fingernails. "I can't sleep. I never know when those guys
are going to show up. And I had to leave Tawny's apartment. I heard
she got arrested and all."

I was amazed at his paranoid isolation from
the real world. Jeff hadn't heard about the drug dealers. One of
them, Denny, was dead and Number One was in a Florence hospital,
under arrest for narcotics trafficking. He'd be in jail for
decades. But such an unremarkable event along the I-95 corridor
would never have made the papers up here, not when Tawny Bledsoe
and Amanda Cockshutt were being splashed across every inch of
available newsprint. All anyone knew was that they had been
arrested together, the details were still coming out.

"You're lucky you're not in jail with
Tawny," I told him.

"I know. She really had me fooled." He took
off his cowboy hat and stared at the tattered rim. "Thanks," he
mumbled, like it was a big effort. "It's too bad we had to lose the
coke, you know. It would have brought in a lot of money. Given me a
stake so I could start over."

When I heard those words, I knew what I had
to do. "I didn't have a choice. I had to give it back to them," I
said. "But I don't think you'll have to worry about those two guys.
At least not for a couple of weeks."

He looked up hopefully. "What do you
mean?"

"I sent them to Arizona," I lied. "I said
you went to Tucson."

"You did?" He threw back his head, laughing.
"You're a piece of work, Casey."

If only he knew.

He paused. "Hey, where's my car? I need my
car. I gotta go while the going's good."

"Forget your car, Jeff. They're just waiting
for you to go back to it."

"Who?" he asked, alarmed.

I shrugged. "The cops. The SBI. The FBI.
Those goombahs. Who knows?" I stared at him, wishing I could
somehow get through. There had to be someone deep inside him. I
could never have fallen in love with such an empty man. Could I?
Where had he gone? What had happened to him? Had I really been so
different back then?

All the hatred I felt for my ex-husband was
gone, replaced by a sort of sadness for what we had been, what we
had lost and who we had left behind. Sometimes not knowing is a
good thing. Sometimes not caring is even better.

"You're going to have to do something to
turn your life around, Jeff," I told him. Unexpected feelings
welled in me. I knew he'd never make it. I knew it was only a
matter of time. One day I would open the paper and read about a
body found in some canal in Miami, a thousand miles away, and I'd
wonder if it was him. And it would be him. Until then, though, I
had to try.

"You got pulled into some bad things this
time," I said. "Really bad things. A lot of people could have been
hurt. An innocent man could have gone to jail for life. A little
girl could have lost her father."

"What did happen to the dude?" Jeff asked
guiltily. "They let him out?"

"They let him out of jail two days ago. He
was happy to be with his daughter again."

I did not tell Jeff that I had been there
for the release, that Robert Price had asked for me to be waiting
for him on the outside. Nor did I tell him how Robert had locked
his eyes on mine when he walked through the front door, a free man
again, how he had taken my hand and held it in his, or about the
tears he blinked back—and the gratitude on the faces of the friends
and family members who had gathered to welcome him back into the
world.

"Thank you," he had whispered, unable to say
more.

"Hey, man," I said. "No problem. Just doing
the right thing."

"Why did you do it?" Price's lawyer had
asked me a minute later. We were watching a car door open down the
block. A young girl dangled her long legs over the sidewalk,
gauging the distance, then hopped down and started running toward
her father. She called to him as she ran: "Daddy! Daddy!
Daddy!"

"That's why I did it," I told him as Tiffany
flung herself into her father's arms. Price's sister hurried up the
sidewalk after her niece, crying. I got a little teary-eyed myself.
"I feel like I'm in a goddamn Hallmark commercial," I muttered.

Price's lawyer patted my shoulder. “Tough
chick to the end," he said. "I like that in a private
investigator."

"It's only allergies," I lied, then I caught
sight of a regal-looking woman standing at the edge of the family
crowd. "Holy shit," I said, tears forgotten as I stared at her
beaded braids, the colorful strip of cloth binding them on top of
her head, and the vibrant colors of the robes she wore.