Bad To The Bone (35 page)

"We're going in," Number One announced.
“Together."

"All of us?" Denny asked, his eyes shifting
to me.

"Yes, all of us." Number One was annoyed
again. "What the fuck were you planning to do with her while we
went inside? Leave her in the car to steal the stuff again and cut
out on us? Jesus, Denny. You're dumber than dog shit."

Denny was pissed. It was one insult too
many. "Look, we're going to have our hands full with the two of
them in there. And now I got to keep an eye on her?"

"We'll manage," Number One said dryly. "Come
on. Stop yapping. Let's go." He retrieved something from under the
seat, slipping it inside his overcoat. I didn't like it, but I had
no time to figure out what it was. They were reaching for their car
doors. I bent down quickly. I had five seconds at the most.

"Please tell me you're there," I whispered
into the cellular phone.

"Casey?" Bill's voice came back, and relief
washed through me. It felt like every blood cell in my body stood
up simultaneously to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. "I've called the
sheriff on my cellular," he said. "I'm going to keep this line
open. Stall them if you can. Don't go inside."

"No time," I started to explain, but could
say no more. Both men were stepping from the vehicle and closing
their doors. I left the connection open, face down on the floor of
the backseat beside my knapsack, and climbed out of the car to join
my captors.

"How are we going to do this?" I asked.
"That door looks solid." Both men automatically checked the door of
the room, then stared at me.

"What?" I asked.

"How are we going to do this?" Number One
mimicked. "You think this is the fucking A-Team or something?"

"Hey," the second guy said. "That's funny.
The Fucking-A Team. Get it?"

"Shut up, Denny."

"I was just trying to be helpful," I
said.

"Use her as a battering ram," Number One
told Denny.

"Forget it," I said. "I don't want to be
that helpful."

They dragged me to the motel door. Heavy
breathing and soft moans came from inside the room. Talk about a
big surprise. I had a feeling that once we burst in, I was going to
witness yet another wet bed that night.

"What do you want me to do? Just shove her
through the door?" Denny asked.

"I was kidding, you fucking moron." Number
One pushed him out of the way, raised his right leg, gave the door
a full body kick, bounced back, crouched low and then threw his
entire body against it. The cheap lock broke from the frame and the
door opened partway. Only the chain held it closed.

Denny took his cue from his partner and
threw himself against the door. He crashed through more easily than
he'd expected and his momentum sent him running straight across the
room toward the bed, which was pushed up against the far wall. Both
figures in it had disappeared under the sheets by the time we got
the door open. They looked like two ghosts popping up in surprise
at the sound of the crash.

Number One shoved me inside and threw me
against a side wall. I slid to the floor, acutely aware that there
was a .40-caliber semi-automatic pointed straight down at my ass
with a clearance of maybe one inch. I eased Bill's gun from my
waistband and slid it beneath the television cabinet where I could
reach it fast, if I needed it.

Denny landed on the bed, pinning the
occupants beneath him. A flurry of screams and shouts erupted.
Sheets flew about. Bodies wrestled. High-pitched cursing filled the
room—Tawny in full battle cry.

Then Number One pulled a TEC-9 out of the
inside of his jacket. I almost threw up when I saw it. It held
enough rounds to make hamburger of us all. Number One was the real
thing after all. "Shut up everyone and get up against the wall," he
yelled at the figures under the sheets. “Top of the bed. Now."

I shrank back, trying to disappear into the
wallpaper.

Bedclothes shifted, heads appeared and
bodies scrambled to take up a position against the head of the bed.
Denny extricated himself from the sheets and tumbled to the floor,
panting. "Shit," he said, amazed. "There's two of them."

Crouched against the wall, contorted faces
lit by the glow of the lights beaming in the open door, cowered
Tawny Bledsoe and Amanda Cockshutt, Boomer's not-so-grieving
widow.

"That's not Jeff," I offered, pissed at
myself for missing it. Amanda Cockshutt caught between the sheets
with Tawny Bledsoe? It explained everything: motive, the warning
phone calls, insurance money clearing the bank. It had been so
obvious, but I had let my fears for Jeff interfere with my
thinking. God, I would never stop paying the price for having
married him.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Tawny
screeched when she spotted me. "Who the hell are you guys? What's
that bitch doing here?"

Number One silenced Tawny by walking forward
and sticking the barrel of the TEC-9 into her mouth. Amanda
Cockshutt moaned, grabbed the edge of a sheet and pulled it up to
her shoulders. Her body trembled and she looked like she was
fighting hard not to cry.

"Where's the rest of it?" Number One asked.
He raised the gun barrel a couple of inches, tilting Tawny's head
upward. "Or did you store it all up your nose?"

It was a professional guess. Tawny looked
like she'd been snorting Peruvian speed bumps a dozen at a time:
she was pale-faced, runny-nosed and jumpy. Number One recognized a
problem user when he saw one.

I didn't need to try and bury Tawny, just
the way she looked said it all. Poetic justice. Number One was
convinced she was in it with Jeff.

"Where's the rest?" he repeated. "Where's
Jones?"

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking
about," Tawny mumbled. That woman had steel balls. A gun in her
mouth and she could still sound scornful.

Where the hell were the cops?

“Tie up the other one," Number One ordered
Denny, letting the TEC-9 drop to his side.

Denny grabbed Amanda Cockshutt by the arm
and dragged her from the bed. She was too scared to resist. Her
naked body hit the carpet with a thud.

"Get up," Denny told her, staring at her
breasts.

Amanda looked to me for help.

I shrugged. "You sleep with the devil, you
wake up in Hell," I reminded her.

"Don't you dare talk to her that way," Tawny
hissed at me. "This isn't over yet, you interfering bitch. Just you
remember this: I know where the old man lives."

The room became a vacuum, as if all the air
had been sucked from it in an instant. A roaring filled my ears. I
could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

"What did you say?" I asked, oblivious to
anything but her contorted face. Her tongue darted out again,
pointed and pink, like some separate animal that lived inside her
mouth. She touched its tip to her lips and smirked.

"I said I know where the old man lives," she
said softly. "Jeff told me. The last person left in your family.
Boo hoo. And I'm going to make you sorry you ever met me."

I lost it. The roaring in my ears gave way
to the buzzing of a million bees. A hard heat exploded in my chest.
I went for her, hands outstretched. I leaped across the room,
shoving Number One to one side, focused only on grabbing her throat
and throttling her into silence.

"Hey!" one of the men shouted, but I was
beyond stopping. I didn't care if they shot me, I was going to
choke the words from her filthy mouth and make her eat them. She
dodged and I missed her throat, but I got part of her ponytail and
pulled her across the bed toward me. My fist went back and I put
all 170 pounds behind it, smashing it into her nose while holding
her in place by her hair. I felt the cartilage crunch beneath my
knuckles. She screamed, enraged, and came at me, fingernails
slashing. I caught her wrist and threw her down on the mattress,
then straddled her and started to pummel. Blood was gushing from
her nose, running down her chest, staining my jeans. I hit her
again, hard, hating that mouth. I had seen her smirking at me one
too many times.

"Knock it off," Number One shouted, but it
didn't slow either one of us down. Tawny was wiggling beneath me,
hissing and spitting, trying to grab at my hair. I kneed her hard
in the groin and she didn't even flinch. Calluses, I expect. I was
about to rip her ponytail off her head when Denny grabbed my arm,
clamping down with surprising strength. He dragged me away from
Tawny.

"Cool down, princess," he ordered me. "Pick
on someone your own size."

"Get her back over there," Number One said,
waving the TEC-9 at the wall where I had been sitting. "You're one
stupid bitch," he told me. "I came this close to pulling the
trigger."

Tawny was rolling around on the bed, holding
her nose, wailing and screeching, trying to stop the bleeding. She
sounded like a cat caught in a blender.

"You shut up, too," Number One ordered her.
"Where the hell is Jones?"

I had gone for Tawny out of real anger, and
the cat fight had strengthened my ruse. "They're looking for Jeff,"
I screamed at Tawny. "They know you're in on it."

"I'm not in on anything," she started to
yell, but she gagged on the TEC-9 when Number One shoved it back in
her mouth.

“Take this gun out of my mouth and I'll
talk," she said with instant calm, as if her pain and the blood
trickling down her body were not real. Her sudden and complete
self-control was scary, she was like two different people. At
least.

Number One pulled back, his expression close
to admiration. "A sensible woman. I like that."

"What are you looking for?" Tawny asked, her
eyes flickering toward me. "That woman is a psychopath. She's out
to get me. Don't believe a word she says. I've got nothing to do
with her ex or his drugs."

"Then how did you know we were talking about
drugs? Or her ex?" Number One grabbed her by the upper arm and
jerked her to her feet. She stood naked on top of the bed, dripping
blood, swaying unsteadily on the soft mattress.

Near the bathroom door, Denny had tied
Amanda Cockshutt to a chair using the cord from the draperies. She
still hadn't said a word. I don't think she was able to. This was
not the cocktail party ending she had planned.

"What else would a pair of goons waving guns
want to know about except drugs?" Tawny spit at him.

Number One drew back the TEC-9 and lashed
the butt across her face. It lifted her off the bed and she fell to
the floor. Ouch. It had to have hurt.

Tawny didn't make a sound. But I could feel
the hatred radiating off her like heat. And a whole hell of a lot
of it was radiating my way.

Amanda Cockshutt started to cry.

"Gag her," Number One ordered.

Denny jammed a pillowcase in Amanda's mouth.
Her eyes turned to me. I shrugged. I was in no mood to help her.
Unlike the other people Tawny had scammed, Amanda had known what
Tawny was like when she recruited her to kill her husband. She'd
made her choices, not me.

"Back on the bed, skin-and-bones," Number
One said. He poked at Tawny with the barrel of the TEC-9. She
shrugged it off and scrambled back on the bed, almost snarling at
him, a feral animal trapped in its lair.

"Well, aren't you a frisky little—" Number
One started to say.

He never finished the sentence. An avalanche
of shouting, armed, uniformed, pumped-up humanity cascaded through
the open door. Commands rang out, shots were fired. Bodies tumbled
to the ground. Voices filled the room.

"Freeze!" "Gun, Charlie! Gun!" "Drop it!
Drop it! Drop it!" "Look out to the right." "Over here! Over here!"
"Get down! Get down!"

I scrambled to safety under a desk, covered
my head with my arms and cowered. Then I remembered that I had
Bill's Strayer-Voigt. Bad news no matter what. No one was watching
me and the room was filling with smoke. Someone had thrown in a
flare. I eased the gun out from under the television cabinet and
wiped it down. Bill would kill me, but I couldn't afford to be held
on a weapons charge. God, he'd never forgive me for losing his
beloved gun. Holding it with the edge of my shirt, I flung it
across the room. It skittered across the carpet and lodged along
one edge of the bed. No one noticed in the confusion.

Around me, the chaos grew. Headlights
flickered on in the parking lots, sirens approached, the rasping
honk of a fire truck screeching toward the motel surely woke up
anyone within a three-mile radius. Outside the door, angry shouts
from the motel owner competed with the rough commands of
officers.

A man was bellowing for order. "Who set off
the smoke bomb?" a fat man in khaki demanded. He stood only a few
inches from my hiding spot, his upper body swathed in gray smoke. I
stared at his shoes. They gleamed in the glare of the headlights
beaming through the front door. I had never seen cleaner shoes in
my entire life. For some reason, those shoes made me feel safe.

"It was an accident, Charlie," someone
muttered.

"Hold your fire. Let's see what we've
got."

It took a while for the smoke and human army
to clear. A couple of officers took pillowcases and began flapping
the smoke toward the door. As the gray fog lifted, the results of
the invasion slowly materialized.

Amanda Cockshutt lay on her side on the
carpet, still bound to the chair. She was screaming through the gag
wound around her mouth. Denny sprawled over her, his body unmoving.
Blood seeped from his torso, flooding Amanda's naked skin as it
trickled to the rug.

"One down," someone said. "Not one of
us."

Tawny Bledsoe was on her knees, clutching
the side of the bed, naked as a jaybird, looking almost as if she
were praying. "Thank god you're here, officers," she said. "These
men just burst into here and started pushing us around. I think my
nose is broken."