The Ex Who Wouldn't Die (12 page)

Or something.

This wasn't the best neighborhood in the city, but she'd never been frightened in the two years she'd lived here.

One night a couple of months ago two men had come to the door looking for Charley. They'd wakened her at one o'clock a.m. after she'd battled insomnia until
midnight
. Then, when she told them Charley no longer lived there, they became belligerent. Rather than scaring her, they'd aroused her anger.

She
grabbed a hammer she'd been using to hang a picture. Brandishing it above her head while shouting her opinion of rude people running around in the middle of the night, disturbing women trying to sleep, she chased them down the stairs and into their car, then halfway down the block before she came to her senses and went back to bed.

She wasn't usually skittish.

Tonight, though, something felt strange. Not really scary, she assured herself, just wrong.

Good grief. One little tumble down a mountain and she lost her nerve. 

Refusing to give in to such vague nonsense, she marched into the bedroom, flipped on the light and looked around.

No one there.

Of course not.

Maybe the head injury had scrambled her brains and made her paranoid.

She set her wine on the dresser, strode over to the closet, hesitated, then yanked open the door, half-expecting to see a felon crouching inside.

Have to be a skinny, midget felon, she thought, studying the crush of clothes and boxes in the small closet.

As long as she was in the vicinity of all those boxes, she might as well find that gun
that damned
Detective
Daggett
was so hot for. And once she found it, she could keep it on a night stand next to the knife. Surely this uneasy feeling would vanish when she was thus well-armed. She could even find that hammer that had inspired the fear of God and Woman in those rude men who'd wakened her in the middle of the night.

She tossed the knife onto the brightly colored quilt she used for a bedspread. Reaching into the closet, she grabbed one of the cardboard boxes and hauled it out, set it on the floor, then frowned. Granted, she didn't pay much attention to the storage boxes, but she would have sworn the top box had been a computer paper carton containing sweaters instead of a sturdy liquor box
marked
Christmas decorations
.

Prickles darted up her spine.

She peered into the closet more closely.

Some of the clothes Charley had left behind were now in the middle of the rack rather than shoved to one side.

Against her will, her heart-rate accelerated.

Refusing to
give in to her paranoia,
she hauled out
more boxes
until she reached the one in the back of the closet, the one she knew contained the gun Charley gave her.

Turning the
box upside down,
she
dump
ed
the contents on the floor. A chipped crystal paperweight, some old CDs, a worn wallet, a tangle of ear buds and miscellaneous wires, USB ports, adaptors…a wide variety of paraphernalia…but no gun.

So she was mistaken about which box she'd put it in.

No. The striped kitchen towel in which she'd wrapped it lay among the odds and ends.

"
I know who
took
it.
"

Amanda shrieked and shot to her feet, heart pounding loudly in her ears, wishing she'd found the gun and a few bullets or at least hadn't tossed aside the kitchen knife.

For an instant, her brain refused to register what her eyes saw.

Charley stood on the far side of the room.

Chapter Six

For an instant, Amanda felt only annoyance. Charley had managed to get into her apartment after she'd changed the locks.

But Charley was…dead.

The accident.
Head injury. Hallucinations.

Amanda
closed her eyes firmly then opened them again.

He was still there.

"Yeah, i
t's really me,
"
he said.

He didn't sound dead. His voice was normal, if a bit less arrogant than usual, but definitely not sepulchral. 

She turned away and began tossing things back into the box. If she was going to have hallucinations, why couldn't it be George Clooney or an anonymous knight in shining armor? Even the Easter Bunny or
Santa Claus would be preferable to
Charley.

"It's no good ignoring me, Amanda," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. I can't."

Amanda tossed the last of the items into the box and closed it. But she couldn't put it back into the closet. Charley
now
stood between her and the closet door.

"Damn it!" In frustration, she dumped the contents of the box back onto the floor, then stood and confronted her hallucination. "Go away! Get out of my head! You're dead, and my mother's making plans to bury you!"

Charley's lips quirked in a grin she once found appealing. "That's just like your mother. I'll bet she wants to put me in one of those
nice navy blue suits
she's always going on about."

"Don't worry. I told her you wanted to be cremated, so I'm going to have you shoved,
buck
naked, into a blast furnace and reduced to ashes." In shock, Amanda lifted her hands to her face. "Omigawd! I'm talking to my hallucination!"

"Hallucination?" Charley looked shocked. "I
'm not a hallucination. I'm y
our husband."

"No, you're not! You're dead! That ended the marriage deal!"

"I might be dead, but I'm still right here, and you're still my wife."

She'd heard those last words way too many times. Suddenly
everything
seemed all too real. Somehow Charley had manag
ed to cheat death. Not surprising. He'd cheated everybody else
.

"
Damn you, Charley Randolph!
" she exploded.
"What kind of scam are you running now?
Do you realize I
'
m being accused of killing you? And righ
t now, that sounds like a pretty
good idea! Did you break in here? Did you take my gun? You did, didn't you? I wouldn't bring it to you, so you stole it.
This time you
'
ve gone too far!
"
She reached for his collar, intending to choke him
…
just
until he turned blue.

Her fingers closed on air.

She looked at her hand, then at Charley and frowned.
"
How di
d you do that? What kind of con
are you up to now?
"

"
Okay, it
'
s true. I
'
m dead. Sort of.
" He shrugged, his grin widening. "Depends on your definition of
dead
."

Amanda backed away.
"
Stop that! This is no
t the
time for your tricks, and I
'
m the wrong person to try them on
.
I know you way too well!
"

"No tricks
. Check this out.
"
Charley disappeared into the wall, then appeared again, smiling and spreading his arms.
"
Ta da!
"

Furious at his continued clowning, Amanda swung at his shoulder. Her fist slammed hard against the wall.

"
Ouch! Damn you, damn you, damn you!
"
She rubbed her bruised knuckles and glared at him. S
light-of-hand magic was
one of Charley
'
s specialties, but
never anything
fancy.
Pick a card. Look at this quarter I found behind your ear. Watch me get out of these handcuffs.
Nothing of the David Copperfield variety…until now. What was he up to? And how was he doing it?

A tiny wisp of a suspicion niggled at the edges of her mind, a suspicion too absurd to be considered.

"
Sweetheart, you need to sit down
so we can
talk,
"
he said in his
I can explain the perfectly innocent reason I was kissing that woman
voice.

"
Don
'
t call me
sweetheart
, and I don
'
t want to talk to you.
"
She turned her back on him, trying to shut him out. She
'
d barely adjusted to his being dead, and now he w
as alive again. Typical Charley chaos.

She sighed as she realized she'd have to
go through with the
divorce after all, figure out some way to get Charley to sign those papers.

"
I know you don
'
t want to talk
to me
,
" he said, sounding either a little abashed or a lot the con-artist. Amanda would put her money on the latter. "But you
have to. I
'
m almost as confused about this thing as you are. Not having a body takes some getting used to. I
could use
your help."

Amanda spun back around to face him, ignoring everything he said except the last sentence, the only one that
made sense, that
sou
nded normal, sounded like
Charley.
"
You want
my help?
Why should I help you?
"