Flamethrower (22 page)

The black-haired guy she’d seen behind the wheel of the Honda so many times was sitting in a chair with his hands handcuffed behind him.

“Ruby Murphy,” he said, apparently unfazed by the fact that there were cops everywhere. “You don’t remember me, do you?” He stared at her. His eyes were cold blue marbles.

“Am I supposed to?”

“When you fuck up someone’s life, you should remember. Least, that’s the way I see it.”

In one awful moment, Ruby realized who he was.

“Frank,” she said. He had dyed his hair and lost some weight, but it was him. The one-time boyfriend and associate of Ariel DiCello, an unstable woman who had hired Ruby to find out that Frank was not only cheating on her but was a
for-hire horse assassin as well. After the whole unpleasant thing had come to a head and the Feds had stepped in, Frank had been convicted of fraud and shipped off to prison. What he was doing out already, Ruby couldn’t imagine. Nor did she understand why he was holding her to blame.

“I’ve been waiting for this.” Frank narrowed his eyes.

“Waiting for what?”

“To get revenge.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Ruby said.

Ed was standing right by Ruby’s side, speechless. Even the cop who’d escorted them over seemed fascinated and was letting Frank babble on.

“That’s not how I see it,” he said. “Now you know what it feels like.”

“What what feels like?”

“To lose everything you value. To live in fear. To have everyone doubt everything you say and do.”

“You sent those pictures to Ed?”

“Sure.” Frank actually smiled.

“And you stole money from the museum?” She asked, keeping an eye on the gun.

“Couldn’t resist.”

“How’d you get in there?”

“Paid my admission like everyone else. You were sitting right there at the register.”

Ruby felt her mouth opening and closing. She’d been doing a lot of that lately.

“You were the guy who told me the trash was on fire?”

“Yes.” Frank smiled even wider, proud of his work.

Ruby remembered wondering about the weird-looking bearded man at the museum a few weeks back. He’d told her the bathroom trash was on fire. She’d gone in to find a cigarette butt smoldering in the wastebasket and had wondered if the guy who’d told her about it had actually been responsible. Then figured that was silly. But Frank had done it. He’d started a fire, drawn her away from the register, and apparently pilfered the large bills Bob kept stashed underneath the cash drawer.

“Why?”

“You fucked up my life.”

“All I did was tell someone else about some of the things you were doing.”

“It wasn’t any of your business. Now you know what it’s like having someone meddle in your business, don’t you? It’s not that pleasant, is it? You feel like you’re going to snap, right?”

“How did you find me here?” Ruby felt she might be pressing her luck with the twenty-questions routine, but she needed all the facts.

“The wonders of modern technology. GPS tracking system. Slapped one on that pretty little Mustang of yours.”

By now, two more cops had crammed into the security office, and one of them, a detective, stepped in.

“All right, miss, so this is the guy?”

“Yeah,” Ruby nodded. She felt numb and sick.

“Go on outside. I’ll finish up here and tell them what we know about Frank,” Ed said, gently guiding Ruby and Spike to the door.

“Okay,” Ruby nodded.

Outside, she leaned back against the wall of the office, then slowly sank down to the ground. Spike licked her cheek.

BY THE TIME ED
walked Ruby back to Nancy Cooley’s shed row, where he’d parked his car, the fire had been brought under control, and the firefighters were slowly pulling back the charred pieces of bungalow. As Ruby stood there, gaping, she saw a leg, disembodied and blackened. Ruby thought it a particularly sick irony that the last thing she should see of her psychiatrist was a leg, detached from the body it had once supported.

Ruby vomited again.

“Come on, you don’t need to see this,” Ed said. Nancy Cooley had appeared and now ushered Ruby, Ed, and Spike into her barn office.

“Sit,” Nancy said solicitously.

Ruby let herself collapse backwards onto a chair.

RUBY DECIDED SHE
would make Ed jump through quite a few hoops before she’d forgive him, but he did make her life a whole lot easier over the next few hours. He could talk the talk with all the law enforcement officials, and he monitored the people questioning Ruby.

Ruby had just finished giving her statement to yet another official and was alone in Nancy’s office when her cell phone rang, the ominous
unidentified caller
showing up on the screen. She guessed it was Tobias. She braced herself.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Ruby,” Tobias said.

“Jody is dead.” Ruby came right out with it.

“Excuse me?”

“Your wife died in a fire.” Ruby didn’t see what use it would be prettying up an ugly fact.

There was a long, awful silence.

“How?” he finally asked.

“It’s partially my fault. I was being stalked. My stalker set the bungalow on fire,” Ruby said.

“Bungalow?”

“Where Jody was staying. I was in there talking to her. The guy set the place on fire.”

Ruby was having trouble making complete sentences. She stuttered out the rest of it. How she couldn’t get Jody to leave the bungalow. How the roof collapsed. She left out the part about the leg.

“She thought she looked bad.” Ruby couldn’t get this out of her head. How Jody apparently had died because she didn’t want the world to see her looking like shit. “She wanted to brush her hair or something.”

Tobias kept falling into long silences, and Ruby would gently remind him she was there, at the other end of the line.

“What did you tell the police about me?” he eventually asked in a small, resigned-sounding voice.

“I gave them your home phone number since you’re next of kin.”

“You didn’t tell them?”

“That you were trying to extort your wife for money? No.
I didn’t see the point. She’s dead. You lost a leg. That has to be enough.”

“The cops won’t be looking for me?”

“Only to notify you about your wife.”

There was another long silence.

“I have to go now,” Ruby said.

“Yes,” Tobias said. “All right.”

Ruby squeezed her puppy to her chest. He licked her chin.

I
t was hot for mid-September, the mercury tickling 95 and a huge low-slung sun casting haze over Belmont.

Ruby locked herself inside Violet’s office so she could change her clothes in privacy. Spike jumped onto the ancient office couch, spun around in two circles, then plopped down and closed his eyes, immediately falling asleep. Ruby envied him.

She took the crazy pink and white seersucker dress out of the suit bag. She’d bought it a week earlier on a shopping expedition with Jane, who’d finally come back from India. They’d had a restorative afternoon together, spending money on frivolous items and cheering each other up. Jane was recovering from hideous intestinal parasites she’d gotten in India, and Ruby was taking baby steps toward feeling less skittish and haunted. Buying the absurd pink and white dress helped. Only now she had to wear the damned thing. Juan the Bullet was making his debut in a little more than an hour, and Ruby had to sit in a box with the owners. She had to look festive.

There was a knock at the door, and Ruby’s heart missed a few beats. She was still nervous all the time, jumping at the slightest sound. She figured it would be like this for a while.

“Ruby?” It was Violet.

“Just a minute.” Ruby zipped up the dress. She’d had to
change in Violet’s office since Ed had banished her while he got Juan the Bullet ready—banished her gently and apologetically the way he did most things with her lately, but banished.

Ruby opened the door to let Violet in.

“Oh!” Violet seemed genuinely shocked. “You look fantastic!”

“I don’t look like a drag queen?”

“Stop being ridiculous.”

“Okay,” Ruby shrugged.

“They’re here again,” Violet said, lowering her voice.

“Who?”

“Tobias and Miller.”

“Oh,” said Ruby.

In some convoluted version of Stockholm syndrome, Tobias and his kidnapper, Elvin Miller, had become bizarrely inseparable. Tobias didn’t have any business at the track, but a few days after Jody’s death he started turning up at Violet’s barn to stare forlornly at the horses he didn’t own. Violet didn’t have the heart to ban Tobias, but having him around made her nervous. What’s more, Miller, whose job it was to navigate the wheelchair through thoroughly inaccessible areas of the back-stretch, was a reckless driver and sometimes spooked the horses.

“Will you say hello? Tell them Juan the Bullet is racing?”

“Won’t that make Tobias feel shittier?” Ruby asked.

“I think it would cheer him up.”

“Okay,” Ruby shrugged again.

“I’ll see you in the clubhouse later?”

Ruby nodded. She snapped Spike’s lead onto his collar then walked out into the barn aisle, taking care not to step in a
puddle with her new bright green sandals, repeatedly chiding Spike, who kept trying to make a beeline for the manure pile.

As she came around the corner at the end of the barn, Ruby nearly collided with Tobias’s wheelchair.

“Sorry, Ruby,” Tobias said. “My driver is drunk.” He motioned at Miller, who looked glum but not drunk. Tobias had been given a prosthesis, but he seemed to prefer having Miller wheel him around.

“Good luck with Juan the Bullet,” Tobias said.

“Oh, you know?”

“Part of why we’re here. Wanted to watch the race live.” He looked slightly sad saying it. Fearless Jones, whose new owners had put him with a trainer in California, had sustained a career-ending ligament injury. He would recover but would never race again. There wouldn’t be any bittersweet thrills for Tobias watching the horse he’d lost turn into a stakes winner.

“Good luck,” Tobias said, “and tell Ed good luck too.”

“Thanks,” said Ruby. “Nice to see you,” she added, even though she wasn’t sure it was.

As she watched Miller wheeling Tobias away, Ruby wondered what Jody would think of her husband now. Ruby thought about Jody at least once a day, had added the psychiatrist to the repertoire of dead people she sometimes imagined were watching her. It was harrowing but better, she supposed, than not thinking about it at all and internalizing it till it turned into a neurosis that one day would come screaming out at the wrong time.

Ruby walked back over to Ed’s barn to lock Spike in the
office until after Juan’s race. The puppy stared at her long and hard then rested his head on his paws and sighed.

Ruby didn’t run into Ed, who was probably at the security barn with Juan. She made her way to the clubhouse to look for the owners.

THE HEAT HADN’T
kept the fans away. Belmont was unusually crowded for a Friday in fall. There were women in hats, aging patriarchs in navy blue suits, girls in skimpy outfits, and, here and there, bedraggled degenerate gambler types grumbling about the heat and the crowd.