Dead Eye (A Tiger's Eye Mystery Book 1) (2 page)

“Son of a bitch,” Jack growled. “Tess, someone just dumped a dead body at your back door.”

“Not again,” I moaned.

He whirled around. “Not
again
? What the hell does that mean?”

My knees gave out and I collapsed back against the counter. “That’s how I found Jeremiah.”

“M
y uncle was
murdered, and I’m just now finding out about it?” Jack stared at me with narrowed eyes that flashed amber at their centers, and I was suddenly aware that I was alone in the shop with a very dangerous shapeshifter who also happened to be a man I didn’t know at all.

My mouth dried out, and I held up my hand to stop whatever he was going to say. “I thought you knew. Mr. Chen said he was using an investigator to inform you of Jeremiah’s death, and now you’re here, so I thought—”

“He told me Jeremiah died,” he said flatly. “I assumed he meant of natural causes, or he would’ve told me differently. Do you really think it would’ve taken me a month to make my way here if I’d known otherwise?”

The pain in his face did a lot to dispel my momentary fear.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” I swallowed and forced the words past the lump in my throat. “I loved him, you know? He was like a father to me. When I found him that morning, I kind of fell apart. I had no idea how to reach you, and I was concentrating on keeping things going, taking care of final arrangements, and whatever I could think of to do for him.”

I took a deep breath. “You can be mad at me if you want, but we need to talk this out later. Right now, we need to call the sheriff.”

I still didn’t want to see the body. I never wanted to see another body again. But I felt some kind of obligation to whoever it was lying on the back porch of my shop. I slipped around Jack, whose big body was still blocking the doorway, and looked down at the woman curled in a heap on the small square of concrete we used as a landing space when people delivered large items to the store. I scanned the alley almost automatically, even though we’d heard the truck peel away after dropping her. Then I looked back at her, at the…body, and I felt my stomach try to crawl up my spine.

So much blood. It covered her face and ran down the side of her neck. It was splashed all over her side, and all over her clothes too. I forced myself to look anywhere but at the side of her neck, which had what looked like a bullet hole in it, and I whispered a prayer of thanks that her eyes were closed. I’d seen Jeremiah’s dead, staring eyes, and they still haunted my nightmares.

She was dressed to party. Her short, sequined skirt was riding up on one hip, and she was wearing a skinny tank top with no jacket, in spite of the cool-for-January weather. Her strappy sandals were scuffed on the sides of the heels.

Jack’s warm hands settled on my shoulders, and I flinched, but almost let myself lean against him just for a second. Just to stop the trembling. I couldn’t take the risk he’d touch my skin, though.

Most people never saw one murdered body in their entire lives. Now I’d seen two in less than a year. Little colored sparkles started to appear in the edge of my vision, and I wondered distantly if I were about to pass out. There was just
so
much blood, and it was so red against the dark brown of her skin…

“Do you know her?”

“Of course I know her. It’s Dead End. I know everybody. I’ve lived here since the day I was born,” I said, tears clogging my voice. I glanced back down at what I’d been avoiding, a second look at her face.

“Her name is Chantal Nelson. She works—worked—down at the Pit Stop grocery and bait shop. It’s a gas station too, I guess, for when people can’t make it to the Shell off the highway, but—”

“Tess.” His voice was gentle. “You’re rambling. You might be in shock. We need to call the police, if there are any police in Dead End these days.”

“The sheriff. He’s an idiot and a blowhard, but we have to call him. His deputy is smart, she’s Mrs. Gonzalez’s granddaughter, but she knows Chantal, and I…I just need to sit down.” I hated to look weak and stupid, but falling down in a dead faint was bound to be even worse.

Not that it wasn’t petty to think about whether I looked bad fainting when Chantal was never going to look anything—good or bad—ever again.

“I just bought a gallon of milk and some Fancy Feast from her a couple of days ago,” I said, like that mattered. But I didn’t really know
what
mattered. I didn’t have a way to process violent death. I wasn’t a cop or a criminal; I’d never been a soldier, unlike Jack. I’d spent the week after Jeremiah was killed cleaning everything in sight, working myself to exhaustion, doing anything I could think of to make myself so tired that I didn’t even dream during the few hours I’d managed to sleep.

“That’s stupid,” I said, fumbling in the drawer under the cash register for the phone. “Who cares about milk and cat food? Well, you might, because you’re a cat, and all, but not when Chantal is dead. I don’t…I don’t—”

I burst into tears. Jack froze, and the expression on his face would have made me laugh in any other circumstance. Apparently the big, tough ex-soldier could face dead bodies with equanimity, but a woman’s tears scared the crap out of him.

He took the phone out of my numb fingers and looked at me. “9-1-1 work here?”

“Yeah.” I drew in a shuddering breath and wiped my face with my sleeve. “It goes right to Sheriff Lawless’s office.”

Jack raised an eyebrow, but I just shook my head. “Don’t say anything about his name. He hates that.”

He made the call. I could tell by the faint squawking coming through the line that Belle, who’d been the dispatcher since Moses parted the Red Sea, wasn’t taking it at all well that I’d found another body at the shop. She’d been one of the people leading the gossip that I might have had something to do with Jeremiah’s death, since I stood to inherit half of Dead End Pawn.

I hadn’t spoken to her since, even at church, and I’d had to physically restrain my aunt and uncle from going after her.

“Okay, they’re on their way. I’m going to wait outside and make sure nobody disturbs the body.”

“Her name is Chantal.”

He studied me for a long moment, and his eyes were back to deep green. “I’m sorry. Chantal.”

“Nobody ever goes back there, unless we have a delivery of something really big. It’s just a dirt road that hooks up to Main Street going into town on one side and eventually hits the highway on the other,” I told him. “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

I didn’t understand it at all.

I slowly sat on the stool behind the counter and put my head on my folded arms. This didn’t make sense. Nothing about it made sense. Sheriff Lawless had been so sure that it was just some random thief who’d killed Jeremiah, even though I hadn’t been able to find anything missing. The sheriff had decided that something had probably scared the thief—maybe even the sound of my car pulling into our gravel parking lot that morning for work—because Jeremiah was still warm when I’d found him lying half in and half out of the back door.

They’d done an investigation, but there hadn’t been any evidence. No fingerprints, no shell casings left at the scene, no unique tire tracks, or footprints, or notes saying “
CLUE
.” So in the end, the sheriff had pronounced it a cold case, probably some drifter or drug addict who’d carried a way-too-common-to-be-identifiable nine millimeter gun that shot way-too-common-to-be-identifiable nine millimeter ammunition. Since then, I’d spent months alternating between crushing sadness when I thought about Jeremiah, and clammy terror when I heard any unusual noises. Because the thing about unknown, murderous drifters? Especially the ones who didn’t get any cash or loot the first time?

Sometimes they come back.

*

Sheriff Bertram Lawless
looked like a cross between a bloodhound and a fireplug. Stout, sturdy, and low to the ground, the man wore his badge like it gave him permission to be the biggest jackass in the room. He affected a habit of tucking his thumbs in his belt and rocking back on his heels when he was playing big man in charge, especially in cases where there was someone around who intimidated him. I’d seen him do it a lot with Jeremiah.

Right now, he was blustering and slightly ridiculous in the face of Jack’s deadly calm, but I knew that the sheriff had a nasty habit of never letting any slight—perceived or otherwise—go by without seeking petty revenge afterward. He was working his way up to a nasty vendetta with Jack, I could tell.

“All I’m asking,” Jack repeated, his voice all the more dangerous for being quiet, “is why you didn’t call in any help when you couldn’t solve my uncle’s murder.”

“And like I told you, boy, Dead End is smack in the middle of Black Cypress County, Florida. Hell, Dead End pretty much
is
Black Cypress County. And this county has a sovereign charter that predates any of them Indian charters. The charter says that we’ve got our own law here, and we’re not subject to y’all’s federal or state laws. That’s how it’s been for more years than the US of A has been a country, and I sure as hell ain’t going to let it change on my watch. I also ain’t about to go asking the feds for help on a robbery gone bad, and take a chance that they think they can interfere in our town on a regular basis.”

The sheriff turned and glared at me, pointing his finger at my face, but still careful not to get too close. “I don’t know why you had to go and tell him all this stuff to get him riled up, Tess Callahan. It seems a little bit suspicious that you got another dead body on your porch all of a sudden. Is there something you need to tell me?”

Something in my gut twisted as I realized what he was saying. “Are you—did you just accuse me of having something to do with Chantal’s death? Or Jeremiah’s? I don’t even know how to respond to that, Sheriff.”

A strange, soft noise started to fill the room, but it wasn’t until the sheriff stepped away from Jack that I realized the source of it. Jack was
growling
. Actually growling, low in his throat, and the deep, primal sound made the hairs on my arms stand straight up. I noticed the sheriff take another all-too-casual step back.

“It would have been pretty damn hard for Tess to have shot the woman, driven her to the store, and dumped her body on the back porch, all while I was talking to her right here at the time,” Jack said, enunciating very clearly.

The words “you idiot” were implied.

“Sheriff? We’re done here. I’ve got pictures, and the ambulance is taking the body off to Doc Ike,” Deputy Susan Gonzalez said, coming back in the shop from the back.

Jack raised an eyebrow, and I explained. “Doc Ike is the only doctor in town, and he’s also the county coroner. It’s not really a busy job around here.”

Realizing what I’d just said, I grimaced. “Or at least it didn’t used to be.”

“Tess, you doing okay?” Susan touched my hand, which was fine, since I’d touched her before. She was a few inches shorter than me, and a lot prettier, with skin the color of dark honey, and silky black hair that she wore up in a severe bun for work. She was a good cop, everybody said, and she carried herself with a sense of authority that reassured people when she had to deal with them on an official level. I’d known her at school, of course, but she was a couple of years older than me. She’d run off for a while after high school, and there were rumors that she’d taken up with a vampire, but when she came back to town, looking older and warier, nobody had ever dared ask her about it. She was the type who kept herself and her business private, and I’d always respected that.

“Susan, your grandma was in here earlier, just before six. I was surprised and a little bit worried to see her out and about that late,” I told her. “I forgot about it, after everything that happened, but I meant to call you.”

Mrs. Gonzalez wasn’t quite playing with a full deck these days, as Aunt Ruby liked to say. She sometimes slipped into her own past, and when she did, she thought she was in high school and liked to dress up and wander off in the evenings to meet her boyfriend—Susan’s dead grandfather—at a football game from sixty years ago that still played on and on in her memories.

A hint of concern crossed Susan’s face. “Yeah, my cousin has been staying with her while I’m working, but Sadie is kind of flighty and pays more attention to painting her nails than she does to taking care of Gran. I’ll check on her when we get done here.”

“If you’re done socializing, Deputy, maybe we can get back to investigating this murder,” the sheriff drawled. “If that’s all right with you?”

A dark red flush touched Susan’s cheeks, but she nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Chantal Nelson was a party girl. Heard she was dating one of those bikers that hangs out at the Swamp Rat. They probably got into some kind of drunken argument, and it got physical,” the sheriff said ponderously. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Girl needs to be more careful about the kind of riff-raff she hangs out with, especially in a town like Dead End.”

When he said
riff-raff
, Lawless aimed a pointed stare at Jack and then looked at me.

“Heavy-handed, much?” I barely whispered the words, and felt my cheeks turn hot when Jack tilted his head in my direction, a hint of a grin on his face. He shouldn’t have heard that, and yet he clearly had. Oh. Right.