Superstition (23 page)

Dave took another swallow of beer. “I was sound asleep, and then I heard Amy screaming and cussing a blue streak and Cleo squealing and all this commotion like you wouldn’t believe. So I jumped up out of bed and ran into the kitchen, and there was Amy, standing up in the middle of the table hollering her head off, and Cleo up on her back legs with her front hooves on the table trying to get at her.”

Dave shook his head, remembering. Joe couldn’t help it: At the picture this conjured up, he had to smile.

“Go ahead and laugh if you want to. I don’t blame you.” Dave didn’t miss the smile. It was a measure of his distress that he managed only a half-hearted grimace in return. “It was a sight, let me tell you. So then the kids come running in screaming, and Amy is screaming, and I’m yelling, and it all must have scared the daylights out of poor Cleo, because she hopped right up on the table with Amy.”

By this time, Joe’s smile had turned into a full-fledged grin.

“Amy must have loved that,” he said as Dave paused to take a fortifying sip.

“Oh, yeah.” Dave rolled his eyes. “So she shrieked like somebody was killing her and jumped off the table. Then, wouldn’t you know, as soon as she hit the floor, her feet slipped out from under her and she sat on her butt and cracked her elbow on a chair. That’s when she said Cleo had to go. I thought after I got Cleo outside and her and the kids calmed down that she’d kind of get over it, but she didn’t. She said either Cleo was leaving or she was.”

Joe barely managed to contain his amusement.

“That’s cold.”

“Yeah.” Dave made a face, took another swallow of beer, and burst out, “I don’t blame Amy for being mad, I really don’t. But Cleo didn’t just attack her. She’s not that kind of pig. And anyway, she wouldn’t have been sleeping in the kitchen if Amy’s brats—uh, kids—hadn’t broken the gate off its hinges by swinging on it. You know she always stays in the backyard.” He looked at Joe appealingly. “I was going to fix that gate first thing in the morning, too. But then this happens.”

Joe shook his head. “Ain’t that always the way?”

Dave narrowed his eyes at him. “It might be funny to you, but it isn’t to
me.
Now Amy says that either Cleo goes or she does. So what am I supposed to do?”

A beat passed in which Joe took a reflective chug from his beer.

“How long you been living with Cleo?” he asked.

“About eight years.”

“How long you been living with Amy?”

“About a month.”

“There you go, then.”

Dave stared at him. “You saying I ought to get rid of
Amy
?”

Joe shrugged. “Unless you want to get rid of Cleo.”

“I can’t do that.” Dave looked hunted. “Amy’ll get over it. She just needs a little time. If you’ll just let Cleo stay here for a day or two . . .”

“No,” Joe said. Until he’d moved south, the only contact he’d ever had with any sort of pork had been in the supermarket, all wrapped up in neat packages and ready to eat, and that was the way he liked it. “No way. Sorry, but I don’t do pigs.”

“What’s to do?” Dave argued. “She just stays in your backyard. I’ll come over and feed her and clean up after her and everything. You won’t even know she’s here.”

“No,” Joe said. “She’s not staying.”

“If I take her back home with me, Amy says she’ll throw me out.”

“It’s your damned house.”

“I know, but I can’t say that to Amy. She’ll hit the roof.”

Joe looked at Dave for a moment in silence.

“Dave, buddy, did it ever occur to you that maybe you and Amy aren’t exactly a match made in heaven?”

“What do you mean?”

Clueless wasn’t the word.

“Well, she’s . . .” Joe floundered, looking for a tactful way to put what he had to say. The whole Big Brother thing was not his style. He wasn’t good at it. He didn’t want to be good at it.

“Hot?” Dave supplied.

Definitely not the description he’d been looking for.
Mattress-tested
was more on the order of what he’d had in mind, but he didn’t think that would be particularly sensitive.

“Experienced” was what he settled on. “More experienced than you.”

Dave made a face. “Like, who isn’t?” Joe’s expression must have changed, because Dave added in a rueful tone, “In case it’s escaped your notice, there aren’t exactly dozens of hot women hanging around my house, wanting to take me home to meet Mama. I’m lucky Amy’s willing to take a chance on me.”

She’s the lucky one, and you can bet your ass she knows it
was what Joe wanted to say, but no sooner had the words formed in his brain than they stuck in his throat. Getting into a conversation like that was way more male bonding than he wanted to do here.

“So, will you keep Cleo for a day or two?” Dave asked hopefully, having apparently read something in Joe’s face that he interpreted as a softening of Joe’s already firmly stated position.

“No,” Joe said. “Get somebody else.”

“There isn’t anybody else. Who? Most of the guys I know have a wife, kids, a dog, a
family.
Families don’t mesh with pigs.”

“I don’t mesh with pigs.”

“Joe, come on. You’re the only single guy I know with a fenced backyard. Anyway, you owe me, remember?”

“I
owe
you?”

“Remember down at Linney’s Bar when those two girls were drunk and throwing up in the parking lot and
somebody
had to drive them home in his patrol car? I did it, and you said, ‘I owe you one.’ Remember that?”

“It was a friggin’ figure of speech, and you know it.”

“Just for tonight.” Dave’s voice, his eyes, his whole demeanor was pleading. “Just so I can go home. Tomorrow I’ll find someplace else, I swear.”

“Oh, for God’s sake . . . all right, for tonight. Tonight
only.”

“Thanks, man.” Dave jumped up from the table and rushed him. For an alarmed moment Joe thought he was going to be the recipient of a big ole Southern bear hug, so—since his position smack against the counter ruled out retreating as an option—he stuck out his hand. Dave grabbed it and wrung it vigorously. “I appreciate this. Anytime you need a favor, all you gotta do is holler, and you got it. I’ll just go out and make sure she’s comfortable now, and then I’ll get out of your hair.” He frowned as though remembering something. “By the way, weren’t you going to turn in early? I kinda hoped—thought—you wouldn’t even know Cleo was here until in the morning.”

“Yeah,” Joe said dryly. “Something came up. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

“Sure, okay.” Dave was already headed for the back door, clearly eager to be on his way home now that his problem had been solved—or had been turned into
Joe’s
problem.

“Wait a minute,” Joe said as Dave opened the door. “What do I do if the pig gets hungry or something?”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry. I already put her food dispenser and water dispenser in your yard. Like I said, when I got the idea of bringing her over here, I thought you were going to be asleep. I was going to leave you a note.”

“That would have been something nice to wake up to.”

But Dave was already out the door and missed the sarcasm.

A glance at the clock in the microwave told Joe that it was one-thirty-eight a.m.

So much for getting to bed early.

He wasn’t tired now. Or, rather, he was too tired, wound, his mind racing a mile a minute just like it had been almost continually since it had occurred to him that the murder of Karen Wise was his problem to solve. Method plus opportunity plus motive equals a viable suspect, but the problem was that nobody’d been able to find the weapon, too damned many people had the opportunity—so far, the pool included practically everyone on the island except the few people in and around the Old Taylor Place at the time whose alibis he’d (tentatively) been able to verify—and the motive could have been anything. Or nothing at all. A psycho on the loose was the scariest possibility, but it wasn’t the only one.

The sick bastard—if it was Karen Wise’s killer who was doing it, which at this point was nothing more than an assumption, and one thing he had learned over the years was that assumptions could be dangerous, because they sometimes blinded you to the truth—was sending messages to Nicky. That added a new twist, and a new kind of pressure, to the investigation. He was pretty sure that she was safe in Chicago, but . . .

But the message seemed to promise two more killings.
Close together.
Whatever the hell that meant, it could not be good. With a renewed sense of urgency, Joe picked up the file, extracted the printed-out e-mail, frowned down at it, and discovered that he couldn’t read it: The words were blurring on the page.

For a moment, he almost panicked. Then he realized that his eyes were probably just too tired to focus properly, and the panic subsided.

But the dull throbbing behind his temples didn’t.
Face it,
he told himself. After five nights of practically no sleep at all, he needed a minimum number of hours of sleep tonight to continue to function at anything near optimal capacity. If he didn’t sleep, he was worthless to the case.

He hated to do it. It felt like backsliding, like a failure. But otherwise . . .

Padding barefoot toward the bathroom, he let the thought trail off.

The bathroom was small, basic, and ugly. Everything from the tiled walls to the toilet, sink, and bathtub was puke-green. As a nice contrast, the floor was a mosaic of tiny gray, white, and pink tiles, and the little bit of wallpaper that covered the untiled portion of the wall around the medicine cabinet was a pink-and-green floral. Instead of a shower curtain, the tub was enclosed with frosted-glass sliding doors with big plastic daisies stuck to them.

Some long-ago resident had clearly been more concerned with safety than aesthetics.

But ugly or not, the bathroom was his and it worked, and in the end, that was all that mattered. Pulling open the medicine cabinet, he picked up the bottle of prescription sleeping pills that the hospital had sent him home with.

That had been more than eighteen months ago now, and the bottle was still almost full.

The first couple weeks at home, when sleep had been absolutely impossible, he’d taken them dutifully, night after night. He’d told himself that he needed sleep, that sleep would help his body heal, help him recover faster. But the real reason he’d taken the damned things was that he had craved oblivion, craved falling into a dark hole for a few hours every night, when he knew nothing and remembered nothing and regretted nothing.

As soon as he had realized that, he’d quit with the pills. What had happened had happened. The only thing he could do was face the truth of that, and learn to deal with it.

But now he needed sleep, and he knew himself well enough to know that the kind of sleep that came in those little yellow pills was the only kind he was going to get tonight.

So enough with the soul-searching,
he told himself, and he popped a pill and washed it down with a swallow of water from the sink without further ado. Then he walked through the house, turning off the lights and TV and checking the doors, shucked his clothes, and fell into bed and lay there on his back with his eyes open and his hands folded behind his head, staring up at the ceiling so that he wouldn’t have to see anything else as he waited for the pill to work.

NICKY ARRIVED in her office on the third floor of the Santee Productions building promptly at eight a.m. the next morning, and breathed in the familiar scent of stale air and coffee with resignation. The term “office” was really a misnomer; “cubicle” described her workspace better. It was beige with charcoal carpet, maybe six feet by eight feet, with a continuous desk surface built into three walls, and a shelf running around the same three walls about four feet above the desk. The desk, the surface of which was beige laminate, was home to an assortment of work-related objects including a computer, scanner, and printer, two telephones, an overflowing in basket, and an assortment of neatly stacked files. The latest ratings chart had been pushpinned onto the bulletin board on the wall beside her computer, with
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
’s position circled in red. The shelf, also beige laminate, was crowded with videotapes and a row of small TV sets in case she wanted to watch several channels at once, as she sometimes did in the case of, say, breaking news. The fourth wall, the one with the door, was also the only one with a window. It was a very nice window, quite large, complete with short beige-and-charcoal-striped curtains and a pull-down shade. Its only drawback was that it didn’t face the outdoors. Instead, it provided her with an excellent view of the corridor that separated her office from the offices just like it across the hall.

The ones with real windows.

Around Santee Productions, which was the company that owned and produced
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
and many other made-for-TV programs, office space was allocated by virtue of an individual’s status within the company. Nicky had realized early on that her cubicle said it all. The
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
gang had been given the interior rectangle of offices on the third floor. This was a clear indication that they, and their program, were very small, unimportant cogs in a very large, very results-oriented organization. A closer glance at the chart confirmed that
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
was number 78 in the latest ratings. Not good, but better than the 89 it had been the previous week. It had fallen from number 42 in the fall, when the network had opted to keep it around because (a) it was relatively cheap to produce, and (b) they didn’t have anything better to replace it with.

But unless something turned around fast, her chances of ever getting an office with a real window didn’t look good.

Fortunately for her morale, she wasn’t in her office all that much. She was just as likely to be out somewhere working a story, or in a meeting, or downstairs on the set, which was a good thing. It kept her from getting claustrophobic and depressed.