Incriminated (17 page)

Another time, another place, it could almost have been entertaining.
Probably would have been
, Paolo thought. He reached behind him, stretching as far as he could from his position at the corner of the dining table, to the refrigerator. He managed to pop the door and felt inside for a can of Diet Dr Pepper. Paolo studied the faces of each housemate as he drank.

Candace, upright and hostile, a contrast to her normal laid-back, jokey demeanor. Grace, struggling to keep her feelings in check. This must be great for her; a moment of intense relief—the most hope she'd had in years: Lucasta Jordan-Long could save Grace's father from execution. And yet, Grace was pale with anxiety. John-Michael, somber and pensive, as he often was, had taken the sixth place at the dining table and was slowly chewing on a piece of celery. Maya's caginess. She seemed fretful, presumably worried about Dana Alexander.

Should I be worried, too?
Paolo thought.

It was impossible to drag his own mind too far from the lurking horror of his own recent past. A secret fresher than any of theirs, one that still hovered at the fringes of Paolo's thoughts, every waking minute. The simple pleasures of life were a distraction. Even the tingling burn of his left upper arm, still hot to the touch, took him away for only a minute. Every time he tried to dismiss this memory it felt more and more impossible, grinning like a death mask at every opportunity.

“How much do you think Ariana knew about us?” he asked abruptly.

It wasn't his secret that Ariana was trying to find but could she expose him anyway? What would his own housemates think if they knew, these girls who Paolo realized he was proud to call his closest friends? What if right now he were to stand up and tell them about how he'd hustled Jimmy out of a car, had sex with the idiot's mother, and then left the woman for dead, alone, in the canyon?

“Enough,” Lucy replied. “More than enough that we gotta be careful.” For a moment, her eyes locked with Maya's. “Too bad that you gave her the goods on every last one of us,” she said in bald accusation.

A burning silence followed. Then Maya turned to Candace. “Maybe you shouldn't have made out with Yoandy Santiago. We warned you from the beginning he was Kay Alexander's boyfriend. Now it's just another reason for Dana to get mad.”

Paolo watched the expression on Candace's face shift from incredulity to sheer indignation. “Oh, that's
it
, we are so done,” she hissed. “I guess you never really stopped spying?”

A deep, beet-colored flush spread across Maya's face. “You were talking in my bedroom, which is where I actually
sleep
. So I stood outside for a few seconds, waiting for a good moment to walk in. I wasn't going to say anything about you and Yoandy. It has nothing to do with me.”

“No, you were just gonna write it up in your lousy, stinking report to Alexander,” Candace snarled.

Maya raised her voice. “Is there something wrong with your hearing? Didn't I already tell you that I stopped doing that?”

“Oh gee, thanks for saying you wouldn't spy on us anymore, Maya, thanks for rediscovering the meaning of ‘friend.'”

“Maybe we should all just chill?” Lucy said. She was making a pretty obvious effort to remain calm herself. “Sugar, you're in no place to accuse anyone of
anything
. Okay, so you were forced into it by your mom's boss. We get the picture. You still spied on us.
Own
it.”

“Look, Maya,” John-Michael followed up, reasonably, “not one of us here is gonna win any kind of prize for how we've handled everything difficult that's happened in our lives. But it turns out that out of all of us, you're the one who's still taking orders from Mommy. The rest of us,
y'know, we're trying to be responsible, like adults.”

“But we're
not
adults,” Maya said emphatically. “And driving a car, cooking and shopping and cleaning and paying the rent—that doesn't make you one. Making good decisions, the kind you make with
actual
freedom—that's what makes you an adult. And as you've cleverly pointed out, John-Michael, unlike the rest of you, I do
not
have freedom.”

“We're supposed to take life coaching from a liar and a spy?” Candace said. Her voice was laced with sarcasm. She tilted her chair back so violently that it tumbled to the floor with a crash, and Candace narrowly managed to avoid toppling over with it.

Paolo stood up, blocking her route out of the kitchen. “Candace,” he began. But she pushed him aside with surprising force, shoving hard against his left arm. The tattooed skin burst with a hundred hot stings. “Oww, dammit, Candace, what gives?”

Grace stood, too. “I agree with Lucy—we need to calm down. Maybe take a time-out. This is getting intense.”

“You got that right,” Candace said, fuming. “I'm out of here. Grace, you coming with me?”

It was a pointedly exclusive invitation. Reluctantly, Paolo stood aside, watching Grace depart with her stepsister. He placed three cool fingers across his burning tattoo and turned to Lucy. But Lucy's eyes were on Maya, who was next to stand up. “I could use some air, too.”

“You want some company?” John-Michael asked Maya.

“At least as far as the Starbucks,” she replied. She'd turned pale in the last few moments, yet Paolo noticed that she seemed surprisingly calm given that John-Michael had just called her a child. Yet there she was, chewing thoughtfully on a fingernail. “I'm gonna get a Frappuccino,” she said to no one in particular.

Maya and John-Michael were walking out a minute later. Finally, Lucy faced him. Paolo's hesitant smile became awkward. “Just us then,” he said.

Lucy hadn't shifted from her position at the table. She looked very tired, but managed a halfhearted grin. “Yup.” She went to the sink and turned on the hot tap. “I guess I'll clean up some dishes. Since none of you lazy-ass jerks seem to know how.”

“In that case,” Paolo countered, “I guess I'll go dig up some weeds in the yard. Since none of you lazy-ass jerks seem to know how.”

Storage space in the house was precious, so the three garden tools that he'd picked up at the hardware store more or less lived in Paolo's Chevy Malibu. He trudged out through the front door and around back. Since the house faced the beach, the road where Paolo parked his car was in the rear. John-Michael had left his car there earlier on, some ways down the road since most evenings it could be difficult to find a spot close to the beach.

Paolo popped the trunk and grabbed the shovel and the long-handled lawn weeder.

As he returned, he approached the house from the rear, where a low gray concrete wall surrounded the yard. He was about to step over the wall when Paolo noticed that the French door was already open. He opened his mouth to call out to Lucy. Then he saw something that stilled the air in his lungs. Instinctively, he moved to one side. Carefully, Paolo rested the long-handled weeder against the wall. He sidled up to the French doors, peering inside, cautiously staying out of sight.

There was a man in the living room. He was about five feet nine, stocky with thin graying hair and wearing a faded, black leather bomber jacket over slacks. He had his back to Paolo and seemed to be talking to Lucy. The man's overall stance seemed relaxed, not particularly threatening.

And yet, even though Paolo couldn't see Lucy, he could hear it in her voice.

Terror.

“Who've you told?”

The question sounded casual. Paolo didn't recognize the voice. Lucy was having difficulty replying. She was stammering even before she'd gotten started.

“I . . . I don't know why you—”

“Enough,” he said, cutting her off. He reached into his pocket. Lucy recoiled, knocking against the fallen dining chair. He spoke calmly and sounded almost weary. “We can do this the easy way. Or not.”

The man was pointing a gun straight at Lucy's stomach.

Paolo flipped the shovel into position as if to return a
serve. One glance at the space between him and the man and he'd computed the precise path, exactly as if a ball were arcing across the net toward that spot.

“Okay, kid, time's a-wastin'.”

Paolo took a deep breath and ran, barging through the open French door and into the house.

The man spun to his left, the gun in his right hand. It fired, a muffled sound—
phhooott
. The next shot never came. Paolo's shovel was already swinging, a powerful forehand. It cracked against the man's skull. Paolo watched the man's eyes widen. Just for a second, they bulged. Fingers locked in the trigger, the man's arm fell. His gun hand slammed against the floor.

Paolo stood paralyzed, blood pounding hard in his head: a roar. He could hear nothing else.

After a few seconds, he regained control over his muscles. He lowered the shovel and raised his eyes to Lucy. She stood, rigid with horror, hands by her side, her mouth open, eyes wide, staring, her breath coming in heavy, labored gasps.

Finally, Paolo turned reluctant eyes onto the fallen man. He could see now what a slight, unimpressive figure he was. In his late forties, a cheap haircut, worn shoes, a brown-and-white plaid shirt tucked into charcoal-gray cotton slacks.

Lucy seemed to emerge from her own paralysis. “Is . . . he dead?”

The man lay immobile, eyes staring just the way they
had as Paolo's shovel had connected with the left side of his face. Paolo glanced at the underside of the shovel. There didn't appear to be any blood. But the sight of the dent in the man's head made Paolo's insides clench in cold, churning dread.

Returning from the boardwalk, Maya noticed that the house lights in the front part of the house were all dark. She paused for a second, letting John-Michael catch up with her.

“You think they're all in the backyard?” he asked.

“But why no lights?”

In the doorway, they listened for a moment. Nothing. Maya turned the key, pushed against the wood. That's when she knew for sure that something was terribly wrong. The door wouldn't move. Paolo was inside and was resisting their combined efforts to push it open.

“Paolo, it's me and John-Michael, let us in!” she said, a little desperate.

He let them inside then, held a finger to his lips, and frowned until they fell silent.

Maya's attention went instantly to Lucy, who was crouching on the floor beside the new red couch. A strange man lay crumpled on the checkerboard-patterned rug, his
head neatly framed on a russet-colored square. The man wasn't moving.

Lucy looked up, an imploring look in her eyes. “Maya, JM . . . what are we going to do?”

Breathing a Mexican curse through pursed lips, Maya approached. John-Michael, she noticed, hung back with Paolo, who seemed frozen in position by the front door. She stopped short of the body, noting the approximate height of the man, his gray slacks, black leather jacket, and clean but cheap-looking brown leather shoes. There was a pistol in his right hand; a revolver of some kind. He looked like a respectable, middle-aged, off-duty policeman.

Or maybe a private investigator. Maya's heart began to plummet.

This man had to have been sent by Dana Alexander.

“He shot at me,” Lucy was saying, pleading, tears in her eyes and her whole body shaking. “It was self-defense.”

“I didn't mean for it to kill him,” came Paolo's voice. It sounded dull, disconnected, and vague. As though he didn't quite believe what he was saying. “I swung for him with the shovel.”

“You thought he was a burglar,” Lucy insisted. “It was self-defense.”

“I thought some kind of intruder, yeah,” agreed Paolo. “He was going to shoot you.”

“Obviously an intruder,” Maya said briskly. “No one invited him, right?”

“And he shot at us. That's definitely self-defense, right?
It's open and shut,” Lucy said, almost pleading.

Not if Dana Alexander has anything to say about this
, Maya thought. But she only asked thoughtfully, “Did you find the bullet?”

Paolo and Lucy glanced at each other, apparently mystified.

Maya repeated herself, a little louder. “Paolo? Did you see where the bullet went? Think. It's important.”

Paolo straightened up a little, making an effort to pull himself together. “Um, I guess it went over by the stereo.”

“Find it,” Maya instructed, “but don't touch it.” While Paolo hunted, she joined Lucy in kneeling beside the corpse. The man's head had been visibly damaged by Paolo's strike with the shovel. One whole side had been dented. Maya sat back, wondering why she wasn't more repulsed. But the truth was, it felt a lot like seeing a dead body on TV. She rocked back on her heels and turned her head to examine the rug below the man's head.

“We moved him onto the brown square,” Lucy explained. “More or less right away, actually. I figured the bloodstain would show up less.”

“Cops don't need much blood to connect this rug with his body,” Maya said. “Too bad you didn't put a piece of plastic wrap underneath him.”

The boys and Lucy were still for two seconds, staring at Maya. Then John-Michael made a dash for the kitchen. “Get some paper, too,” Maya called after him. “Something we can burn when we're done.”

Looking at Maya incredulously, Lucy said. “What are you talking about?”

Maya ignored her. “Hey, Paolo, d'you find that bullet yet?”

Paolo glanced up from where he was squatting by the baseboard on the wall adjacent to the floor-mounted audio speakers. “Not yet.”

“Did you look at the gun?” Maya said.

“Did I look at the gun?” echoed Paolo. “Are you crazy? You think I'm going to tamper with a crime scene?”

Maya said, “You mean aside from moving his head onto the brown square of the rug?”

“That was basic housekeeping,” Lucy tried to say, but stopped, gawping as Maya leaned over to remove the revolver from the corpse's fingers. “Omigod, Maya! You touched a dead man!”

The man's fingers were still warm and pliable. It hadn't even occurred to Maya that he'd feel any different than a living person. She noted with surprised detachment that he wouldn't go stiff for a little while. She had no idea how long. But it might be useful to know.

“John-Michael, can you find out how long it takes before rigor mortis sets in?”

John-Michael was already taking out his phone when Maya cried out, “Actually, no, stop!”

Everyone stared at her. “What?” John-Michael asked in a voice that betrayed more than a little fear.

Maya said, “We can't do any suspicious searches on the
internet! We can't behave any differently than we might behave on the night before the Fourth of July.”

“His body will feel normal for three or four hours,” John-Michael said. His voice was suddenly hard, frosty.

Maya noted the confidence of his response. It was pretty obvious what everyone was thinking.

No one in the house said a word. They couldn't even look at him.

John-Michael had seen his father's body when it was still warm. Which probably put him in the room with his recently dead father. The rest was easy to conclude: John-Michael's arrest for the murder of his father might be a whole lot more serious than he'd led them to believe. But Maya wasn't going to be the one to voice any suspicion. At least not right now.

She examined the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson model 60, she noted, being careful to point it away from anyone and to keep her finger far from the trigger. She opened the revolving cylinder. Inside were five cartridges and one collapsed, metal casing.

“Maya, why are you touching the guy's gun?”

She turned the revolver around so that Lucy could see the inside of the cylinder. “You ever seen a casing all crumpled up like that?”

“Maya, I haven't ever seen a real
bullet
,” Lucy said.

“My mom has a handgun,” Maya said a little reluctantly. “She's not just a driver—she's also Dana's bodyguard. In Mexico, Mom was a police officer. Maybe you know
how things are with the cops and the
narcos
in Mexico? It was safer to leave the country. And believe me—with some of the enemies my mother made as a cop, she'd better not go back. I've been to the range with her a few times. Mom made sure to teach me how to handle a gun. I never fired a shell like this one.”

Exasperated Lucy said, “Goddamnit, Maya! D'you have any other secrets you want to share right now? Or you think you're about done for the night?”

Paolo stopped his hunt for the bullet. He straightened up and faced her abruptly. “Maya, just tell us what it is you think you've figured out.”

Maya shrugged. “My guess? Mr. Private Investigator here was trying to scare the bejesus outta you both. That was his first tactic. That casing is from a blank cartridge. And I'm betting you won't find a bullet. Maybe a wad of cotton somewhere closer than the wall where Paolo's looking. Yeah, might be a good idea to find that.”

Paolo's jaw was slack as he spoke. “A blank? Why would he fire a blank?”

“Like I said,” Maya muttered as she removed the collapsed casing from the cylinder. “To threaten Lucy. The rest of the bullets are real enough, though.” She slammed it back into position and proceeded to wipe the whole gun carefully with the edge of her shirt. Once she was satisfied that it was clean, Maya handled it through her own shirt and replaced it in the dead man's outstretched hand.

“What the hell did you just do?” Lucy said, her words
heavy with accusation. Maya moved over to the futon, where she felt her knees buckle slightly. Her heart was starting to thud painfully hard as her body responded to the decisions she'd just made.

“Yeah,” Paolo said, but quietly. There was an unmistakable note of hope in his voice. “What did you do?”

John-Michael had been standing stock-still through the last few minutes of Maya's actions. Now he knelt beside the dead body and handed Lucy the roll of plastic wrap, still inside its box. “Pull a sheet out and get ready to slide it under the guy's head. Okay?”

Quietly, Lucy did as he asked. Then John-Michael lifted the head and Lucy placed a yard-length sheet of plastic wrap beneath the corpse. With a nod, he was on his way back to the kitchen.

Maya watched for a few seconds and noted with a nod the moment when blood began, now very obviously, to ooze around the dead man's head. She sucked in a few breaths, willing her heartbeat to slow down. Lucy and Paolo were obviously dazed, quite possibly unable to think straight. Lucy's shock was understandable. If Maya's own mind was already beginning to run through the implications of all this to her life and Lucy's, the consequences for Paolo had to be even scarier. Paolo's would be even worse.

A sharp cry from Lucy made Maya gasp. “Omigod. He just moved.” She stared at the man on the floor. He didn't budge. She slid off the sofa and once again knelt beside him. This time she listened at his mouth. She gulped down a
chunk of air and held it for several seconds, listening. When Lucy made a sound, Maya raised one hand to silence her. Paolo crept closer. Maya released her breath.

“I can't hear . . .”

The man's empty hand twitched. All three of them jerked back at the movement. John-Michael brought a tray and four mugs of steaming cocoa from the kitchen. He alone continued to move. He placed the tray on the wooden folding table near the French doors, then calmly paced over to where the man lay.

As Maya watched, the man began to regain consciousness. First his hand moved, then his whole arm. His chest started to visibly rise and fall.

“Holy crap holy crap holy crap,” Lucy intoned.

Maya couldn't drag her eyes off the impossible sight of an apparent corpse returning to life.

“He's not dead,” she whispered in a tone of wonder.