Better Off Dead (23 page)

Bobby D. and I may bicker, pick, banter and
ridicule each other, but we rarely fight. And we certainly never
fight in front of other people. Professional solidarity being what
it is and all.

That night, after Helen had been seen safely
to bed, Bobby D. and I broke all of our rules—in a knock-down,
drag-out argument that sent Burly and Fanny fleeing from the living
room in search of peace. By the time we had waded through the
mutual name-calling, physical threats and litany of past
professional failures, even I was exhausted. But Bobby had not
budged.

"No," he said. "Absolutely not. I'll fire
your big white ass if you go back to Duke. Use your head, darlin'.
You've been busted. That's what those bad dudes on bikes were all
about."

"You can't fire me," I said defiantly. "Who
would do all your work for you? Besides we're partners, remember?
You can't fire a partner." He always liked to try and forget that
single moment of largess in an otherwise stingy proprietorship
career.

He made a sour face and rubbed his chin. I
suspected what he was really pissed about was his sharkskin suit,
which he had intended to wear out dancing with Fanny. Instead, it
had been splattered with mud from choppers roaring past and would
likely never recover. Then Fanny had proved too elated from her
face-cracking pannery to want to go out dancing—as well as too
dismayed by Helen's collapse to leave her.

Bobby stared down at his mottled pants legs
morosely. "I was gonna get me the Texas Ranger Special at Hartman's
tonight." He pouted. "There's nothing to eat in this damn
house."

Right. There was enough food to supply a
manned air force carrier to China and back. I ignored his attempts
at changing the subject.

"I have to do something, Bobby," I
explained. "I can't just leave Helen to deal with this alone. She's
a good person. With the Wicked Witch of the West for a mother and
no one else in the world to care."

He shifted uncomfortably and glanced toward
the windows. Hugo was sitting in a rocking chair on the front
porch, Bobby's shotgun across his lap.

"He can't hear us," I said. "Now that you've
dropped the volume below buffalo bellowing." Bobby doesn't like
anyone to observe his softer side, except Fanny, I suspected.

"I didn't say you had to give up the damn
case," he grumbled. "I said you couldn't go back to Duke and
pretend to be a student, which was a stretch in the first place, if
you ask me."

Oh. So now he was getting personal. "What do
you propose to do then?" I asked. I jabbed a burning log and sparks
showered out in a burst of color. Killer stretched lazily in his
spot on the hearth, opened one eye, then fell back asleep. Unless
the house was in full blaze, he'd take his chances.

"I've been thinking about it," Bobby
admitted. "It's time to attack this creep outright. In public.
Where it hurts."

I started to listen. One thing about Bobby:
he can be maddening, self-absorbed and lazy. But he has been around
for thirty years in all the right dark rooms and alleyways. He
knows people. He knows how to push their buttons. I'd be a fool not
to listen to his advice.

"I say that we convince Helen to file a
countersuit against Brookhouse for the rape and attack," he
suggested.

"Can she do that after the criminal court
finding of innocent? Isn't that double jeopardy?"

Bobby shook his head. "Not in the eyes of
the law. We get her to file in civil court. Very visibly. Then we
put the pressure on. I can pull in some men. They can follow him
everywhere he goes. You drop the undercover. Don't ask for trouble.
Stay out of his way. It's better he never sees or recognizes you.
But keep questioning the people he works with. Have Burly dog his
past even more. And look into that other professor who came
sniffing around here just as hard. Let's find out who's dirty and
who isn't."

"You think it has to do with the drug
trials?" I guessed.

Bobby nodded. "I think when you've got a
pair of professors and a bunch of bad-ass bikers and a drug study
in between, that drugs might be the link. What else could it
be?"

"What do you think the cops are going to do
if Helen files suit?" I asked.

Bobby grunted. "From what you say, Ferrar is
smart. He'll probably stand back—he has his hands full anyway— and
let us do all the work. Then he'll come in and ask to see what
we've found out. He won't stop us, I can guarantee you that. He
needs his manpower to look into other problems."

"So you don't think Helen's rape is related
to everything else that's been happening?"

Bobby shrugged. "I sure as hell don't know.
But we've got to start somewhere, and I think that means the drug
trials."

"I need to get a list of the students in the
trial," I said. "I could break into the department secretary's
offices. She's supposed to be calling everyone in the study about
the new interview night. She'd have a phone list, at least."

"Let Burly keep working on that through his
computer," Bobby ordered me. "I don't want you going near that
joint."

I kept silent. No sense starting a new
argument. "What is Brookhouse going to think when I don't show up
for class. Or work?"

"Use the kid," Bobby suggested gruffly.

"Luke?" I asked.

"The punk," he confirmed. "Did Brookhouse
see the two of you hanging out together?"

I nodded.

"Tell the kid to feed him some story. You
ran off with a boyfriend. Anything. Didn't you say he wanted to
help?"

"Okay. I'll get on it." I thought about it.
"What about a good lawyer for Helen? The one she has now is a
defendant's lawyer. We need a pit bull."

"Fanny will take care of that. She knows the
best lawyers in town. Meanwhile, we're staying put. I don't want
those biker dudes coming back here with only Helen and that wetback
around."

"Bobby," I complained.

"Sorry." He rolled his eyes. "That Mexicali
guy."

"His name is Hugo. You're hopeless." I
stared at him. His face was as worried as I had ever seen it. He
looked like a giant bulldog in mourning. "How long have you been
thinking this new plan through?"

"Since this afternoon," Bobby admitted. "And
I'll tell you why: whoever we're after knows who we are and where
we're living. But we don't have a goddamn clue who we're up against
here. We are shooting at possums in the dark."

Fanny and Burly were up to something. I
discovered them the next day making lists in the kitchen. They
covered the pages when I entered the room. "What's going on?" I
demanded as I headed for the coffee machine. I'm still waiting for
those geniuses at Mr. Coffee to invent an intravenous drip model.
I'll be the first to sign up.

"Thanksgiving," Burly explained.

I stopped, dumbfounded. Had the weeks really
passed that quickly? What the hell was the date anyway?
"Thanksgiving?" I repeated.

"Two weeks, Casey. We've been camped out
here nearly a month."

God. I thought about it. Had time really
gone by that fast? It had been like living in a foreign country. My
old life in Raleigh seemed planets away. Bobby had been dealing
with the forwarded phone calls. I'd only had to worry about Helen's
case.

Wow, I thought. I had never lived with so
many people for such a long period of time, at least not without
guns being drawn.

"I can't believe it's that close," I
admitted. "Why all the secrecy?" I tried to peer over Burly's
shoulder at the notebook in front of him, but he folded his hands
over the page. "Go away," he said. "We're planning the menu and
Thanksgiving guest list. This house could use some cheering
up."

"And so could Helen," Fanny chirped.

"Thanksgiving guest list?" I said. "What
guests? This state ran the Indians out long ago."

"Maybe so." Burly smiled mysteriously. "But
we plan to have a few surprise guests anyway."

I stared at them both. "I don't like
surprises."

"You'll like this one," Burly predicted.

"It will be good for Helen," Fanny explained
as she bustled around pouring cheese grits into a bowl for me and
unearthing the bacon, which she had hidden from Bobby D. in a
cupboard too low for him to ever bother with. "She needs more
company."

"More than us?" I was incredulous. "Is there
anyone left in the Western world not living here yet?" I'd had to
wait a good fifteen minutes for the bathroom that morning. Not a
good way to start the day—crossing my legs and waiting has never
been my style.

“Trust me," Burly said, nodding confidently.
"You're gonna love it."

"Right," I said sarcastically, annoyed that
someone had nabbed my favorite coffee cup—the one with bullethole
decals on it that I'd brought from my apartment. Bobby was probably
the culprit.

God, but I was getting tired of other
people. It was going to be a very long weekend.

Tracking Luke down was easy. He had a phone
in his name. The phone led me to a dorm room. By Sunday, I was
parked outside it, waiting.

But of course, he wasn't there. I cruised
around, searching for his car. No luck. The kid had a lot of nerve,
maintaining a social life without me.

Thus, by Monday afternoon, I was reduced
once again to crouching in the bushes outside the psych department
building, like some academically inclined Peeping Tom.

He came ambling up a good two minutes after
our class together was supposed to start. Clearly, punctuality was
not his strong suit. Unaware that he was being watched, he looked
much younger than when he was trying to swagger about. He was
eating a Twinkie, for godsakes, as happily as a kid. Bits of white
cream filling curved around the corners of his mouth like a pair of
parentheses. He was wearing gray jeans and a maroon-and-black
striped knit shirt that all the lead singers in rock bands wore
these days. For Luke, it was a positively garish outfit.

"Pssst," I hissed at him through an opening
in the bushes.

His face broke out in a huge smile. "Casey?"
he whispered back, searching through the branches to see where I
was hiding.

"Just get in here," I ordered him. I grabbed
his sleeve and pulled. It stretched out preposterously, then he
sort of boomeranged into the clearing where I was huddled. We
crashed together and stayed together. A completely inappropriate
turn of events.

"Hello there," he said and smiled. The icing
still clung to the comers of his mouth.

"Get off me," I demanded, untangling myself
from his arms. "You are way too young for me. Now that we both know
who I am, let's just say I'm old enough to be your mother."

"My mother's dead," he offered.

"Oh, god, you're so romantic." I tried to
push him away. "I mean it. Back off."

He took a step back and looked me up and
down. Very slowly. I was dressed in my regular clothes again, black
jeans and tight black T-shirt topped with an open denim shirt. "You
look different," he said. "Like you could kick my ass."

"I could," I assured him. "So keep your
hands to yourself."

"Cool." His voice dropped. He stared at my
body. It was a strange feeling. Outside, the fall day was sunny and
crisp. Inside the cluster of bushes, it was as artificially dark
and hushed as a bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. The time
when people cheat on their spouses. Suddenly, unbidden, a
mini-fantasy of Luke and me thrashing around in the bushes while
people walked a mere few feet away began to unroll in my mind.

I stared at him. He stared at me. The boy
was watching the same mental channel that I was.

"We can't," I said.

"We could," he offered.

"We aren't."

"We should."

"Oh, Luke." Why did we have to get into
this? He was so sweet. I didn't want to be mean. And, sure, I'd
love a tumble in the bushes as much as the next unprincipled slut.
But I'd spent the last few weeks slamming Brookhouse for taking
advantage of kids too young to know the difference between lust and
love. And I wasn't about to tum around and do the same damn thing
with Luke. My heart had a thick covering of rawhide around it at
this point in life, his was still very tender. And still very
breakable.

"I know what you're thinking," Luke said,
staring at me with that head-ducked look that made his eyelashes
seem even longer. Man, he was probably deadly with girls his own
age.

"I doubt that," I said firmly.

"You think I'm too young to know what I'm
doing. You think I'm not serious about my feelings for you, that
it's all just a crush."

"It probably is, Luke," I tried to explain.
"It takes a while to find your footing in things like love, and
until you do, you can get hurt and be confused and trample on
people without meaning to. I love the way you think of me, but I
don't want to be someone who stomps on your heart, okay? I like
you."

"I'm old enough to know how I feel," he
protested. "If I'm old enough to be drafted and go fight for my
country and maybe even be killed, then I'm damn sure old enough to
know who I want to be with."

"This isn't a war," I pointed out, though,
in truth, my private opinion was that the tricky dance of the heart
that goes on between men and women was the oldest running war in
the world.

Luke stared at me, using those huge puppy
dog eyes to their full advantage. I felt like I'd just pulled out a
newspaper and smacked him over the nose with it for no reason other
than to be mean.

"Don't look at me like that," I said. "I
have a boyfriend."

"That guy in the wheelchair?" Luke said. "He
doesn't care about you."

"How can you possibly say that?" I
countered. And even though my words were true—Luke had no way of
knowing what Burly's feelings were for me—his assertion somehow
carried an ominous warning. My heart cringed a little. What would
make Luke say such a thing?