Harley Jean Davidson 03 - Evil Elvis (14 page)

“Do you think something’s wrong?” she whispered after a moment.

“I don’t know. It just feels wrong.”

That was it. It didn’t have to be lights flashing and bells ringing—it was the feeling that something wasn’t right that provided a warning. It’d saved her butt a few times.

“So what do we do now?”

“I’m not sure.” Tootsie looked around. Tension vibrated from him. “It seems okay. It’s just...”

“Dark,” she finished, and he nodded, his body silhouetted by the light behind him.

“Yeah. Too dark back there.”

“And I left my Mace in the car, dammit. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the light’s out. Do you think?”

“Could be. Well, we can either go back inside for a security cop, or keep going. What do you want to do?”

“The security guard is drunk and dancing alone. I’m not sure he’d be much help.” She thought a moment. “You may be right. After all, who’d be dumb enough to jump us?”

“The same guy who was dumb enough to sit on a van full of people and knife a guy in the back, I presume.”

“Oh. That one.” She shivered despite the muggy heat. “Twice, if my suspicions are right.”

“Okay, we’re going to the car.” Tootsie sounded determined. “This is ridiculous. Here we are cowering in the parking lot because a vapor light is out. I refuse to let my imagination rule my intellect. The probability of someone waiting in the dark to jump us is much less than the probability of faulty lighting. Come on.”

“Right behind you, my fearless leader. This is really dumb, but you sound so brave I’m not scared anymore.”

That wasn’t quite true. She grabbed his arm and kept in step with him, not behind and not ahead, so that they had the ungainly gait of contestants in a three-legged sack race.

“You’re hurting my arm,” Tootsie said after a yard or two.

“Sorry. Is that my car just ahead? It’s so dark back here. The only light is from that damn vest you’re wearing.”

“Then it’s come in handy, hasn’t it. I think that’s your car. Home free, baby.”

Harley breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, a little terror is good to get the blood running, but I feel kinda stupid now.”

“Me, too. These murders hitting so close to home make me realize how you must have felt a few months ago. I take back what I was thinking about you. Or some of it, anyway.”

“I can’t believe you were disloyal.”

“Not disloyal.” He stopped behind her car as Harley fished in her jeans pocket for her car keys. “Just uninformed.”

“And now you’re well-informed?”

“Better informed, anyway. What are you doing?”

“Looking for my keys. I thought I put them in my right pocket.”

“Maybe they’re in your purse?”

“You know I don’t carry a purse. My backpack is much more efficient. Ah. Here they are. I put them in the other pocket. Hold my pen and notepad, will you?”

As she transferred the legal pad and her pen to Tootsie, she dropped her keys. Bending to pick them up, she heard Tootsie shout and jerked to the side just as something hard struck her in the left shoulder. Reaction set in and she dropped to the asphalt and rolled to the right. Footsteps sounded loud on the rough pavement, and she couldn’t see anything but a vague blur over her, so she lashed out as hard as she could with both feet. She connected with something. A grunt and curse was followed by a high-pitched yell that sounded like Tootsie, but the language was unknown.

More grunts and thuds mixed with scraping footsteps, but by the time she got to her feet, the assailant was running away. A little dazed, she looked toward Tootsie.

“Are you okay?” they both asked at the same time, and then both answered, “Yeah.”

Harley inhaled a deep breath and tried to get her hands to stop shaking. “I don’t suppose you got a good look at him?”

“No. Tonight Elvis wore black, including a mask. You sure you’re all right?”

“Just all shook up.” She laughed without real humor at her own joke. “Except my left shoulder hurts. What’d he hit me with, anyway?”

“He had a knife. Omigod, you’re bleeding. We need to get you to the emergency room. Do you have anything to put over the wound?

“A knife?” Lightheaded, Harley pointed to the trunk of her car, and Tootsie pulled out a couple of rags she kept in there for emergencies. He tied one around her upper arm, and gave her the other to press against the wound.

Despite the pain in her shoulder, a cold chill went down Harley’s spine. The sparkling stones and glitter on Tootsie’s vest blended together in a colorful blur, a dull light in the darkness around them. She put out a hand to grab Tootsie’s arm. “But if it’s the same Elvis who’s been killing the others, why did he attack me?”

“Can we worry about that later? Get in the car. I’ll drive, as soon as I find your keys.”

It took him only a moment to find the keys where she’d dropped them and he unlocked the passenger side door for her. “Why me?” she asked again, dropping awkwardly to the seat.

As Tootsie lifted her suddenly heavy legs into the car, he said, “Sugar, he has to know you and Lydia can identify him. I’d say he’s eliminating witnesses.”

Oh God. She leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Her arm and shoulder began to throb painfully. As Tootsie started the car and shifted gears, she opened her eyes and said, “Someone needs to warn Lydia.”

Chapter Seven

Fortunately
, Harley only had a flesh wound. If she hadn’t bent for her keys, it might be a very different matter. Tootsie took her home from the emergency room, doped up and bandaged, and helped her into her apartment.

“You should have let me take you to your parents,” he grumbled. But even as drugged as she was Harley knew better.

“No way. Diva would cleanse my aura and do all this mantric stuff, and Yogi would get a tire iron and go looking for the guy. I don’t need a review of the seven chakras or a hernia getting the tire iron away from Yogi.”

“You’re probably right. Want me to put you to bed?”

Harley shook her head. “Please. I know you’re just one of the girls, but I’m not an invalid. Not yet, anyway.”

Sam had perched atop the back of her cushioned chair. As Tootsie lowered Harley gently into it, careful not to touch her shoulder, the cat let out a shriek and leaped down.

“Jesus,” Tootsie gasped with a hand pressed to his chest, “that scared me almost as much as the Elvis.”

“Now you’re scared? Why didn’t you ever tell me about this Rambo part of your personality? Not that I’m complaining. It definitely came in handy. What was that foreign language you were speaking?”

“A little self-defense class I took a while back. You’re supposed to do these yells with it. You know, to unnerve your opponent.”

“It unnerved me. So ... it’s karate or something?” Her tongue felt thick and her voice came out all strange, slow and slurred.

Tootsie’s hazy face hovered above her, but she thought he was smiling. “Or something. Stay here. I’m going back to the car to get your takeout, and Steve is coming by to pick me up in a little while.”

Maybe she nodded her head. She wasn’t sure. Her eyelids felt so heavy that she had a hard time holding them up. Waving the hand on her good arm, Harley got out, “Taco Bell. Food of ... the ... gods.”

As if through a fog, she heard Tootsie say, “This is your brain on drugs. Close your eyes and give them a chance. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Lovely, lovely clouds wrapped around her, taking away the pain in her shoulder. Nice. If she stayed real still and didn’t breathe too hard, maybe she’d float away on them. Why not? She was already light as a feather, drifting along, drugs relaxing her muscles, taking away pain ... wait. She couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t lift her arms, could barely wiggle her fingers. Oh yeah. Now she remembered. She didn’t like drugs. Anything that took away self-control and left her helpless as a slug was a bad thing. No ... she had to get up, not let freewill be sucked away. That’s what she had to do. Was going to do. In just a minute...

She must have dozed off, because when she woke up, she was alone and Sam was curled in her lap. Groggy, mouth dry as the desert and probably smelling like a litter box, she sat up gingerly. It was dark outside, and cool and quiet inside, with a single lamp lit. Tiffany-style, it glowed on an end table in warm colors of ruby, emerald, brilliant blue, and amber. It was on low and didn’t put out much light. Squinting, it took her a minute to find the note propped up on the table beside her. She had to blink a few times, careful not to do it too fast or her head might fall off, and peered at it.

Didn’t want to wake you, you looked so peaceful. Your grease is in the fridge, the phone is next to you, and your cell phone is charging. Keep your door locked and don’t take candy from strangers. By the way, your hair could use a trim. Call me if you need me. Tootsie.

Harley lay back on the cushions and smiled. Good girlfriends were nice to have.

After a few minutes of testing her extremities one by one to see what worked and what didn’t, she abandoned the chair and cat and made her way to the kitchen. She’d just opened the refrigerator door when a sudden loud whirring close by made her jump, banging her bandaged arm and shoulder against the open door.

“Damn!” she yelped, clutching at her arm while her heart pounded and Sam’s four paws thudded across the wood floors as he dashed for safety under her bed. For a moment she stood there. Then she recognized the whirr of the self-cleaning litter box in the little alcove off the kitchen. She put her good hand against her forehead and stood there letting the cool air of the refrigerator chill her feet. “I’ve got to get hold of myself,” she muttered. “Next thing, I’ll be hiding under the bed with the cat.”

She grabbed a two-liter bottle of Coke and swigged from it, relishing the sharp bite of the carbonation that went a long way toward waking her up. Then she burped, a long, satisfying sound, ignoring Grandmother Eaton’s frequent admonitions that ladies did not make unpleasant bodily noises. She’d often wondered just what ladies did. Keep it all inside until they swelled up like hot air balloons? But of course, she’d never said that to Grandmother Eaton. She recognized that her grandmother’s efforts were to make up for fourteen years of lost time learning table manners, social graces, and all the things that Diva, her eldest daughter, had left behind. Maybe her grandmother thought she could correct with Harley everything she’d not managed to perfect with Diva. But then, Diva was doing quite well without social graces and knowing which fork was the shrimp fork and which knife was the fish knife. And she was very happy, something Grandmother Eaton had finally begun to recognize.

Who’d have thought it would turn out that way? Certainly not the Eatons. They’d been horrified and disapproving when Diva—still called Deirdre by her mother—ran off with a totally unsuitable young man by the name of John Davidson. It’d been a family scandal at the time, but since Diva and Yogi were in California by the time it got around to all the relatives, they’d never been concerned with disapproval. They just went on being happy and living in vans, moving from one place to the other, mostly staying in California. That had been during the heyday of the early seventies, when women burned bras, free love was everywhere, and staying in one place was “a drag, man.”

If Yogi’s parents hadn’t died and left him the house he’d grown up in, Harley would still be in California, though probably not living in a van. Somehow, she was more like Grandmother Eaton in many ways—not exactly insistent upon appearances, but not really crazy about living like a nomad, either. It’d been a relief to move to Memphis and go to a real school, one that taught English, math, and spelling, not herbal remedies and the importance of the fourth chakra. Not that love, compassion, and acceptance weren’t important, of course.