Inherit the Dead (23 page)

“Angel?” Perry knew it, but he couldn’t quite believe it. There had been something dramatic, almost film noir, about the places this
commission had taken him so far. He usually dismissed high-flown romantic ideas like that as idle fantasies designed to make him feel better about the routine repetitiveness of the job. But being confronted with a woman who could have stepped out of the pages of Dashiell Hammett was deeply unsettling.

And it was Hammett that came to mind, not Chandler. This girl—no, make that this woman—was bristling with raw sexuality. Her photograph had attracted him; her physical presence mesmerized him.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Who are you
really
?”

“Like I told Athena, my name is Perry Christo. I’m a private eye. Your mother hired me to find you.” He didn’t have to work at injecting his voice with warmth.

She shuddered, and it wasn’t just from the cold, her arms folding even more tightly round her slim body. “Are you the one? Is that what this has all been about? My goddamn mother finding me?”

He couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. Was he so dazed by her beauty? “I don’t know what you mean. Am I the one? What one?”

She unfolded her arms and ran a hand through her hair. Even in the gray light of an overcast day, it shimmered bright gold against the dull green of the garden’s evergreen foliage. “The one who’s been stalking me,” she said impatiently.

“Stalking you? Someone’s been stalking you?”

She gave him the haughty stare that youth reserves for the dim adult world. “But I don’t suppose you’d call it that, Mr. PI.” Her top lip curled in a sneer.

“I’ve not been stalking you, tailing you, following you, or anything that might come under that heading.” He took a step backward and spread his arms out in a placatory gesture. “Swear to God. I’ve been trying to
find
you, sure. But today’s the first time I’ve clapped eyes on you, Angel.”

Angel frowned, her cat’s eyes narrowing, her expression considering. “I don’t know . . . You
look
like you’re telling the truth. But somebody’s been stalking me.”

“Is that why you took off from Montauk?”

She drew back, her arms clamping against her midriff again, jittery as a stand-up comic waiting to go onstage. “How did you know that if you’re not the one?”

“I told you. I’ve been looking for you. All I had to go on was what your mother knew. She sent me to your father’s house, but all he could tell me was that you’d taken off. He pointed me toward your buddy, Lilith. And that’s how I found out about you and Randy going on the run.” Perry shook his head, desperate to impress her with his truth. Usually, he didn’t give a damn what the targets of his investigations thought of him. But Angel was different. He wanted her to think well of him, and that made him uncomfortable.

Angel sneered again. “ ‘I thought he’d, like, protect me?” Her voice rose at the end of her sentences. It was her generation’s habit to make the most commonplace statement sound like a question.
Her generation,
Perry reminded himself.
She’s hardly more than a child, and you’re a man heading straight down the slope toward middle age. Get ahold of yourself.

“And he didn’t?”

Angel looked sideways. “I got scared. I was sure someone was on my tail, but Randy, all he cared about was . . . Well, you know. He just blew me off, told me I was paranoid. I figured if he wouldn’t take me seriously, I was better on my own.”

Perry remembered his own uneasy sense of being followed—and it was more than paranoia, he was sure about that. Still, it was easy to succumb to paranoia when you were out on the edge. He knew that from living with his eyes on the rearview mirror. It saddened him that this beautiful young woman was already prey to such fears.
Quickly, he scanned the street. Seeing nothing suspicious, he focused on Angel again. It wasn’t exactly a hardship. Perry chastised himself for the thought and forced his mind back to the job in hand. “So you took off again?”

She nodded. “I figured I’d be safe with Athena. The one person in my life who never betrayed me.” She sighed and gave him a half smile. “And then you showed up.” For a moment, she brightened. “You think maybe the person who was stalking me was another PI my mother hired?”

Perry shrugged. He didn’t think Julia Drusilla was a belt-and-suspenders kind of client. “It’s possible,” he hedged, trying to keep the doubt out of his face and his voice. “She’s certainly keen to find you.”

Angel unfolded her arms and put her fists on her hips. It was an attempt at taking control of the conversation.
Attempt
being the operative word. Whatever subterfuges she’d learned over the years, hiding her feelings hadn’t been among them. He could read her body language as easily as the morning headlines. He could see anxiety in the tightness of her stance and the rigidity of her features. “Did she tell you why?”

Perry smiled, trying to reassure her. “There are some papers you need to sign so you can both claim an inheritance. It’s money your grandfather left in trust for you. You can’t access the money until you’re twenty-one, but you both have to sign the papers.”

“Did she tell you how
much
money?” Angel’s chin came up. Perry thought she was trying for assurance, but she just came off like a defiant little girl.

“Let’s just say she made it clear that the stakes were high. For both of you.”

Angel shook her head in disgust. “I’ll say they’re high. High enough for her to want me dead so she can get her claws on all of it.”

It was a melodramatic moment. Perry had long years of
experience watching families tear themselves apart, and it wasn’t the first time he’d heard an accusation like this against a parent. But no matter how often a child spat out such words, it still cut him like a blade. All those broken relationships started in the same place—the innocent eyes of a newborn gazing into the face of someone who owed them a duty of love and care. And they’d all taken a journey down a twisted highway littered with shattered dreams and broken hearts to a place from which there was no retreat. If Angel truly believed this about her mother, there was no way Perry’s mission was going to have a happy ending.

Just as well,
he thought,
happy endings are for Pixar.

“You don’t really believe that,” he said.

Angel snorted. “All she cares about is
money
. She tried to stop me from finding out about the inheritance. She hid the papers and letters, anything about them. I only found them by accident when I was . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she tried to figure out a way to make herself the good guy. Inspiration lit her face. “When I was looking for my birth certificate so I could apply for a passport.”

The lie didn’t come anywhere near fooling him.
But why lie?
“That doesn’t mean she wants you dead,” Perry said firmly.

“You don’t understand.” She cast a quick, nervous glance around her and put a hand on his arm. “Look, let’s go someplace we can talk properly about this. I’m cold.”

Perry moved away from her touch. “We could go inside to Athena’s.”

Angel shook her head. “I don’t want to burden her with this. She doesn’t deserve to have this shit in her head.”

He wanted to suggest his car. Sitting side by side, so close he could smell her, an intimacy impossible to ignore. “There’s a coffee shop on the corner,” he said, his voice gruff.

“Okay,” she said. They set off down the street. Perry kept a couple of feet between them, fearing and distrusting the attraction he felt.
He eyed the cars parked on the other side of the street, checking that they were empty.

But it wasn’t the parked cars that were the problem. As they reached the end of the street, Perry picked up the high note of an accelerating engine behind them. He swiveled in time to see a black sedan racing up the street toward them. Dimly, he heard Angel scream as the car mounted the sidewalk in a screech of rubber. The rest was a blur of movement and color.

Afterward, Perry reconstructed what had happened. He’d known exactly where Angel was, and he’d jumped straight backward, knocking her off her feet and over the low iron railings of the last house on Washington and St. James. Then he’d thrown himself sideways to land painfully on his hip beside her. He’d struggled to his feet, but the car had already been lost in traffic. Worst of all, none of the nearby pedestrians seemed inclined to break step in their busy day to offer support or witness. Nobody even started yelling about the damage they’d done to the shrubs. So much for a friendly neighborhood.

Angel scrambled to her feet and threw her arms around Perry. “Now do you believe me? Now do you get it? She’s trying to kill me. She wants me dead so she can steal all the money.” She was quivering in his arms like a frightened animal. Which, he supposed, was exactly what she was. And she certainly provoked all his animal instincts.

Gently, Perry tried to pry her free. But she wasn’t ready to let go. “You have to help me,” she pleaded. “You’re the only one who’s taken care of me. If I’d been with Randy, I’d be dead right now. Please, Perry, I need you.” She planted a kiss on his cheek, her smooth skin soft against his weathered cheek.

Perry caught himself feeling he could be a hero. He would be the one she could depend on, the one she trusted, the one she wanted to wake up with. Then his better self kicked in, and he reminded himself he was a sorry sack of a middle-aged man seduced by the needs
of a beautiful—and terrified—young woman. The oldest story in the book. He should know better than that. Hell, he was better than that.

He unpeeled her arms from his body and stepped back over the railings onto the street. A line of wrought-iron spikes was just what he needed between them. “I believe you, that somebody is trying to kill you. But I don’t think it’s your mother. Whoever was behind the wheel of that car had to be waiting for an opportunity. He or she knew just where you were. If your mother knew that, she wouldn’t have needed to hire me.”

Angel pushed her tousled hair away from her face and climbed over the railings. “Maybe she bugged you. Maybe she’s got a trace on you. Like in that movie.”

Perry had no idea which movie she meant, but he didn’t care enough to ask. “We need to go to the police.”

She shook her head. “No way. As soon as that happens, I’m public property again. I’m going back to Athena. I’m safe there. She won’t turn me in. And she’ll protect me till you find out who’s behind this.” She angrily tapped his chest hard with her index finger. “And I guarantee you it will be my evil, fucking mother. And then we’ll go to the police.” Then she smiled, that slow, feline Bacall smile. “You and me. Together.”

Angel’s shift from fury to seduction was as smooth as a jaguar, and possibly quite as lethal. She ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip and smiled again.

This time, it didn’t work. Because this time, Perry’s brain was working harder than his hormones. He knew who was to blame for what had nearly happened. He didn’t believe Angel’s crazy notion that he’d been bugged. But he knew he’d been followed. He should have figured out what was going on, who was on his tail, before he led them straight to Angel. Instead, he’d been so puffed up with his own ability to track a fugitive that he hadn’t covered his back the way he should have. And a young woman had almost died as a result.

“You have to promise me you’ll stay out of sight at Athena’s. No rushing down the path to chase the next guy who shows up looking for you.” He took her elbow and marched back down the street to Athena’s place.

“I promise,” Angel said breathily. “Whatever you say, Perry. You saved my life. I’m going to do whatever you tell me from now on.” She paused on the path leading to the front door, stood on tiptoes, and planted a kiss on his surprised mouth. Then she was gone, the door closing behind her with a sharp click.

Perry drew in a shuddering breath. He felt as if he’d had more than one narrow escape. But he wasn’t so shaken up that he’d forgotten how the world worked. Somebody knew about Angel’s safe house. And Angel herself wasn’t to be trusted to take good care. Maybe Angel wasn’t to be trusted at all. Still, he needed backup. He pulled out his phone and called Henry.

“How’s it going, Perry? You find your gal?” Henry sounded clipped, the background noise suggesting a busy squad room.

“I did, thanks. Trouble is, I’m not the only one. Somebody just tried to pull a hit and run on us, Henry.”

Henry gave a low whistle. “Time you brought her in, Perry. You need to make this official.”

Perry sighed. “I wish. But she’s running scared. She thinks coming to you guys will leave her in the wind. I’m working on it. But I could use a pair of eyes on the girl till she’s ready to come into the fold.” What he couldn’t admit to Henry was his niggling doubt about trusting Angel. Something she’d said, or something she’d done had set his mind jangling.

Henry sucked air through his teeth. “You don’t make life easy for any of us, do you?”

“I try.”

“Tell you what. I know the captain at the local precinct out there.
I’ll have him put a uniform on the block. That should be enough to scare off anybody with the wrong idea about your gal.”

Henry’s words drove some of the tension from Perry’s body. He leaned his head back and let out a long, slow breath. He noticed a tiny patch of blue at the heart of the thick gray cloud cover. Maybe he was finally starting to see daylight on this case. Maybe it was time to find out whether he was a player or just being played. It was time to find out just what Julia Drusilla was up to.

Whatever it took.

Maybe confronting Angel’s mother would take his mind off Angel’s kiss. Impatient, Perry scrubbed his hand across his lips, as if that could wipe away the impact of her mouth on his. He wished he could have believed in its sweetness.

That damn private eye.

Eyes in back of his head.

Too late now to go turn around and try to run them both down again.

You’ve got to think. Got to make a decision.

And you do. You will take care of the PI first because he knows about you now, and he’s going to be looking for you, trying to stop you, and you can’t have that. You have to get rid of him—doesn’t fucking matter if he sees you because it’s going to be the last goddamn thing he ever sees.