Don of the Dead (17 page)

It was just past sunset and the road in front of me twisted and turned in the light that was quickly changing from plum to midnight blue. I put both hands on the steering wheel. After all, it was spring and every driver who ventured offNortheast Ohio city streets and into the suburbs knew what that meant: deer. Not that I don't think they're adorable, but no way did I want to meet one up close and personal with my front bumper.

I topped a hill and coasted down the other side. The road smoothed out and I cranked my car stereo, and in the spirit of the season, opened the moon roof. The yellow line in the center of the road changed from solid to broken so if the driver behind me was so inclined, he could have passed. He didn't. He kept his distance and for a couple miles, I drove on in stereophonic oblivion. Another mile or so, no sign of deer, and ahead of me, a traffic light marked another intersection. It turned from green to yellow but I had clearance. Just as the light changed to red, I zipped through.

So did the car behind me.

It may have taken me a while, but I was starting to catch on. I glanced in my rearview mirror but since there were no streetlights, it was too dark to see who was driving the car or even what color it was.

I didn't lose my head. After all, I was a private detective. Sort of. And I was smart.

Just to prove it, when I saw a street up ahead on my left, I slowed, turned, and kept on driving.

My rearview mirror remained dark.

I admit it, in addition to relief, I felt pretty dumb. I had let my imagination (not to mention my love of
CSI
reruns) get the best of me and I swore I'd never let it happen again. If I was going to solve this case for Gus and earn my nine thousand bucks, I had to remain logical and rational. I had to stop being a drama queen. I had to—

A house the size of my apartment building loomed directly ahead of me and I punched my brakes, slowed, then stopped.

I was in a cul-de-sac.

Did I say
smart
? It didn't look that way. To me or, I'm sure, to the driver in that other car. The one that was pulled over to the side of the road waiting for me when I flipped around and came back out the dead-end street the way I'd come in.

Good thing it was dark. At least the other driver couldn't see how red my face was. But I couldn't see his face, either; the windows of the late-model black sedan were tinted.

I pulled out onto the main road, and I didn't look in my mirror. Why bother? Besides, I could just about feel the headlights of the sedan boring into the back of my two-year-old Mustang.

I was being followed.

Reality sank in and my brain froze. I forgot all the good advice I'd read over the years in countless articles about what women should do to protect themselves in situations just like this. I never considered stopping at a police station. I didn't think about a fire station or a busy convenience store, either. All I could think was that I had to put as much distance as I could between me and the car behind me.

I sped up.

So did he.

We had been on the road nearly a half hour and then the countryside melted into plainol ' suburbia. Strip malls, gas stations, restaurants.

Did I think to stop at any of them?

I wasn't thinking anything at all. Anything except getting away from the car on my tail.

At the next intersection, the light was already changing when I barreled through. Yeah, it was dumb. But my timing was right. There was a pickup truck coming the other way and the car behind me had no choice but to stop. I raced on ahead and took the next corner on two wheels.

Another street, another turn. A fork in the road and I headed to the right. A couple hundred feet in front of me, there was a drive and a sign that said Home of the Invaders, an entrance to a school. I cut my lights and turned in, heading straight to the back of the two-story brick building. I tucked my car between the back door and a dumpster.

And I waited.

How long? I can't say. I only know that I sat and listened to my blood pump in my veins and my pulse pound inside my head. It wasn't until the pumping slowed and the pulsing settled that I was dead certain no one knew I was there. That's when I headed home.

I parked in the spot in back of my apartment building that I paid an extra sixty bucks a month to reserve, and even though I was confident that the crisis was over, I wasn't about to take any chances. Finally, some crumb of what I'd read in all those self-defense articles rose to the surface. I yanked the keys from the ignition and poked them up between my fingers in case I needed to use them as a weapon. It wouldn't do much in the shock-and-awe category, but at least the feel of cold metal in my hot hand deluded me into thinking I had some control over my own destiny.

As prepared as I would ever be, I scrambled from the car into my building.

I took the steps two at a time all the way to the third floor and when I got to the landing, I didn't stop. I raced down the hallway and unlocked my door with shaking hands. Inside, I locked the door behind me and stood with my back against it, fighting for breath.

I was safe.

The tension drained out of me like the fat off Oprah. I didn't even realize my knees were quaking until they decided not to hold me. I collapsed on the couch. My bedroom window faced the side of the duplex next door, but both my living room windows looked out onto the street. Exhausted and overwhelmed, I stared at the streetlight directly across the way.

That's when I noticed a movement out in the street.

"Cat," I told myself. "Stray dog. Someone out for a jog."

But of course, it wasn't.

I inched closer to the window just in time to see a late-model black sedan cruise by nice and slow.

Did I say I was smart?

I was smart, all right. Smart enough to lead whoever was driving that car right back to my home sweet home.

The first person I ran into at the office the next morning was Ella. More precisely, Ella ran into me. The way her eyes sparkled with excitement, I knew there was nothing accidental about our meeting.

Ella's tie-dyed skirt rippled against her ankles. Her beaded earrings twitched. Sometime between that morning and the last time I'd seen her (which . as far as I could remember was late in the afternoon of the day before), she'd had her hair highlighted. Spikes of gold—moussed, gelled, and sprayed into submission—rose like sunny rays from her nut-brown hair and framed her chubby face.

She darted into the hallway long enough to grab me and drag me into her office. "Why didn't you tell me?" Ella could barely stand still. Her flat-soled, round-toed Earth Shoes danced a little pattern against the beige industrial-strength carpet. "You've got a secret this delicious and you don't even think about sharing it? Shame on you, Pepper! Two guys, and you never told me about either one of them."

I had been up most of the night, listening to every creak in an old apartment building full of clanging pipes and groaning floorboards. I wasn't at my best.

I blinked at her in bleary-eyed surprise. Was everyone—living
and
dead—poking their collective noses in my love life?

"How—?" I untangled myself from Ella's maternal grasp. "Dan and Quinn? How do you—?"

She leaned in close. Like she was sharing a secret. She winked. "Waiting in your office."

"Both of them?" The prospect of Quinn and Dan in the same room together terrified me. I'm not sure why. It wasn't exactly like I needed to keep my relationship with Dan a secret from Quinn. Or my relationship with Quinn a secret from Dan. So far, I didn't have a relationship. With either one of them.

The way things were going, it looked like I never would.

I made a move toward the door and actually might have made it that far if Ella hadn't taken hold of me again. "How long has this been going on?" she asked.

I shrugged off the question and her hand. "Oh, you know… " I said, and I hightailed it out of there.

My office door was closed and outside it, I pulled myself together. The good news was that in spite of my restless night and an imagination that bounced between
the guys in the black car were from the
Prize Patrol
to
the guys in the black car had bags of cement in the trunk
, I hadn't just dragged on the first thing I found that morning. I was wearing black pants, a sweet little butter-yellowcami , and a black jacket.

Dan wouldn't notice.

Quinn would.

I took a deep breath and shifted my leather portfolio from one hand to the other, subconsciously registering the fact that a portfolio made me look professional and confident.

Quinn wouldn't care.

Dan would.

Right and left brain satisfied, I pushed open the door.

In black cashmere, Quinn Harrison looked like sin incarnate. In a charcoal suit, a crisp white shirt, and a silk tie in shades of teal that brought out the blue flecks in his eyes, sin wore the skin of an angel.

My heart skipped a beat.

Right before my gaze darted around the room.

In spite of what Ella said, Dan was nowhere to be seen. And believe me, in an office that small, if he was there, I would have seen him.

"Hi." Quinn was thumbing through the stack of papers on my desk and damn it, he didn't even look guilty about it. He gave me a quick but thorough once-over and a barely perceptible nod of approval. "You looking for someone?" he asked.

"No." Before I closed it, I checked behind the door, just in case Dan was back there somewhere. "Ella said there was someone here to see me."

"That would be me."

"And you look… " I was going to say "hot enough to set off the smoke alarms" but that seemed kind of bold. Especially that early in the morning. "You're all dressed up. You must be going someplace special."

"Nope. Back on the job." He flicked the right side of hissuitcoat back just enough for me to see that he was wearing a leather shoulder holster with a gun in it. "No more administrative leave. Everything got cleared up and in my favor, I'm happy to say. All's well that ends—"

"Well?"

"Well, sometimes all's well just because it ends."

"I'm glad." I was. I don't know what Quinn did to land himself in hot water but whatever it was, I suspected he had his reasons. Even if he would never share them.

I glanced at the papers—my papers—that he still held in his hand. "You looking for something?"

"Me? Nah." He set the papers back on the teetering stack of old newspaper clippings on my desk and stood. He was taller than I remembered. "I was wondering, though, why you stood me up last night."

I sidestepped around him and over to my desk chair, and believe me, as tempted as I was, I was careful not to brush against him. If we were going to fight about the fact that I'd canceled our dinner date—and from the thread of irritation that colored Quinn's words, I suspected we were—I couldn't afford to lose my concentration.

I set aside my portfolio and sat down. Quinn perched himself on the edge of my desk, just a hair's breadth away from me.

"Technically, I didn't stand you up," I said, looking up at him because, like I said, he was tall. "I called you," I reminded Quinn. "I left you a voice mail. I told you I had an evening tour last night and—"

"Except that there was no tour scheduled for last night." One of the things Quinn had apparently been reading was the latest issue of the Garden View newsletter (complete with a listing of all our tours and lectures). "Want to try again?"

"Only if you think there's some reason I owe you an explanation."

He considered that for a moment or two before he shook his head. "Nope. There really isn't. Not if you didn't want to go to dinner."

"Except I did."

"Or if you think I'm a total loser."

"Which I don't."

"Or if you're telling me right here and now that you don't want to spend any time with me."

"But I do."

"Good. Because I want to spend time with you, too." Though we were in agreement, his smile was grim.

"You've got to admit, it's only natural for me to be curious, then. Especially when you bail on me and spend your evening with RudyScarpetti ."

I stared at him, my mouth open, and when he pinned me with a look, I knew how it felt to be on the wrong side of this boy in blue.

"How do you—?"

"What are you up to, anyway?"

By now, I had the story down pat. It didn't even feel like a lie.

"I'm writing a book." I had the nerve
to
look Quinn right in the eye. "About GusScarpetti . I told you all that back at the police museum."

"The way I remember it, you also told me you'd steer clear of these people. Hell, you promised! So why did you stroll into the homestead to interview the family?"

I didn't like the tone of Quinn's question so I matched my voice with just the edge of steel that hardened his. "Yeah. That's pretty much exactly what I did. I called and requested an interview and—"

"Ever wonder why RudyScarpetti's number is even in the phone book?"

He had me there. I shrugged. "So he can get phone calls?"

He rolled his eyes. "The number in the book is Rudy's public number. You know, the one he gives out at his country club and his church and his wife's women's groups."

"He's married?" I had never thought to ask about the Cootie's marital status because really, I didn't care.

It was just that—

"He came on to you?"

Quinn wasn't one to mince words. I glanced away. "It wasn't blatant. He just said—"

"I can imagine." I wasn't sure if that was a compliment or not. "That didn't worry you?"

"Should it?" As much as I enjoyed the scent of Quinn's expensive aftershave and being this close to him, I stood and sidled around to the other side of the desk. "Are you telling me I should stay away from Rudy?"

"I'm telling you that these are dangerous people." Quinn stood, too, and turned to face me. "You have no idea what you're getting into."

"I'm not getting into anything," I told Quinn and reminded myself. "I'm just asking a few questions. And none of them is about anything that's happened in the last thirty years, so how dangerous can it be? I talked to Rudy about his father, about Gus. I asked him what he knew about Gus's murder and—"