Bad To The Bone (5 page)

"Did you find her yet?" I think she
answered. "Do you know where I can go and get her?"

"Not yet," I yelled back. "But we're making
good progress. I think he's headed for the coast."

There was a silence and I thought we'd been
disconnected, but her voice returned in mid-sentence: "—makes
sense. He has a couple of—" Her words were drowned out by more
static. I held the phone out, annoyed.

"Car phone?" Bobby asked
sympathetically.

I nodded glumly. The receiver squawked at me
and I took a chance at the meaning of her gibberish. "Sounds good,"
I shouted. "Call me tomorrow."

I hung up, pissed. "I wanted to ask her
about that engine thing with Jeff."

"Forget the ex, Casey," Bobby said. "I have
a feel for these things. They don't know each other. What I saw was
a man trying to pick up a woman. I guarantee it. You're not
jealous, are you?"

"God no. Just paranoid."

"Well, don't sit there and mope," he
ordered. "Do something. You're making me nervous. Can't you go home
and do whatever it is you do with that hell-on-wheels boyfriend of
yours?"

"He's getting ready to throw another pity
party," I said glumly. "I think I'll stay away."

"Then go get laid. You're bringing me down."
He followed this romantic advice by gobbling the last of three
cheeseburgers with a gusto most people reserve for their first meal
after being lost in the wilderness for weeks.

"It's all food and sex with you, isn't
it?"

"It is with everyone," Bobby pointed out.
"I'm just willing to admit it."

I was pondering the possible truth of this
pronouncement when my phone rang and Marcus Dupree came to my
rescue. "You're a lucky woman, Casey."

"Price used his credit card?"

"He just charged an early dinner at the
Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City. The total was twenty-six
dollars and change, in case you were wondering."

"I love you, Marcus," I told him. "If you
ever decide to bat for my team, I'll give you a signing bonus that
will knock your socks off."

"I am no longer a free agent," he said
primly and hung up. Spoilsport.

I checked my road trip knapsack. It held a
change of clothes, a toothbrush and a spare makeup kit. I added
credit cards, identification, cash—and my beloved .357 Colt Python.
I stopped for a moment to admire its barrel: six inches of
glistening, hard steel. Could a girl ask for anything more? (Well
sure, but she'd be unlikely to get it.)

In the past, I'd had as much bad luck with
guns as with boyfriends. They either weren't big enough, went off
in my hand or had a tendency to backfire. I finally decided that
while reliability in a boyfriend is boring, it's a must when it
comes to your roscoe. So I chose the Colt after careful
consultation with a friendly underground arms dealer who didn't
care about my felony conviction. I told him I was interested in
stopping assailants, not making hamburger out of them. The .357 fit
the bill, and the barrel tucked nicely into my waistband. It even
held a tampon in a pinch. After giving it a good luck kiss, I
slipped it into my knapsack, then grabbed my down jacket and headed
for the front door.

"Where the hell are you going?" Bobby asked
as I dashed past.

"Road trip. I'm hot on the trail."

"You need to cut back on your coffee," he
yelled as the door slammed shut behind me.

There's nothing like a fast highway to clear
the mind of daily jumble. Especially since my car can take the wear
and tear. After a string of clunkers, I'd discovered a 1963 356-b
Porsche and had it restored to its former beauty with a little
financial help from Burly. It was an odd shape, almost like a
bathtub, but it ran great, gripping the curves like a railroad car
rocking around a turn. There are two stretches along Highway 70
between Raleigh and Morehead City where you can put the pedal to
the metal, and I hit a hundred easily on both. By the time I
reached the coast, thoughts of my ex had receded, replaced by the
more immediate need to close my latest case quickly so I could get
on with my life.

I knew from DMV records
that Robert Price drove a gold 1997 Camry with vanity plates that
read
TIFFGUY,
obviously in honor of his daughter Tiffany. It was better
than
TUFFGUY
, I'd
decided. My first step would be to find that car.

Just in case he was
staying in Morehead City where he had eaten dinner, I checked the
motels in town first. No luck. I turned back toward Atlantic Beach.
As soon as I
crossed the causeway, I began
cruising the parking lots of the few restaurants and motels still
open for business. Atlantic Beach is a lonely place in the dead of
winter. The unoccupied summer houses sag forlornly, and the
neon-colored tourist traps look as washed out as over-the-hill
strippers counting on sequins for glamour.

It was late and I was the only car on the
road. There are twelve motels total in Atlantic Beach and Emerald
Isle, and I quickly checked them all. Robert Price's car was not at
any of them. It was time to stop by the house that my computer
check had indicated was owned by two of his friends.

The road narrowed as I left the commercial
strip. Scrub pines grew by the roadside in thick clumps, their
gnarly limbs reaching out like beseeching hands. I slowed to a
crawl, searching for the address. People don't usually run off into
the void, they run to friends or family. If Robert Price was in
this area, he was staying either at his friends' house or at a
motel. So far, it hadn't been a motel.

I found the road I was looking for and
turned onto a sandy lane that wound back through a forest of
windswept shrubs. The air had warmed compared to inland. I rolled
down the window, and the rich smell of Bogue Sound flooded the car.
It was a biting, fertile odor that made me think of tar-colored mud
and invisible life teeming in a soup of decaying organisms. There
was a salty undertone to it, a hint of fish and something else:
smoke. Someone had built a wood fire.

The lane ended abruptly in
twin driveways. I checked the mailboxes and chose the one to the
right. Cutting off my engine, I stepped out into the cold and crept
down a narrow gravel drive. It wound even farther back into the
brush, and the smell of wood smoke grew stronger with each step. I
spotted lights through the pines and soon found myself at the edge
of a circular front yard. A modern gray-shingled duplex had been
built out over the sound on a small strip of land. A downstairs
light was on in the right-hand unit, and a dimmer light was barely
visible beneath a pulled shade on the second floor. A Camry was
parked by the front door. Robert Price's car. Was he there
alone
with his daughter, or were the
owners of the house with them? Neither Bobby nor I had been able to
reach the couple by telephone. I'd need to find out before I made a
move.

The great thing about sand is that you can
march through with a parade of elephants and no one can hear you.
Without Bobby D. along, I'm not quite that conspicuous and I easily
reached what turned out to be the ground-floor bedroom without
being heard. The shades were open and I could see enough in the dim
light to know that no one was staying there. The bedspread was
stretched smooth and there were no personal possessions in the room
at all.

There's not a lot of variety when it comes
to duplex layouts. I knew the upstairs held two or three bedrooms
plus a bathroom. If Price had company, someone would be staying
downstairs in the master bedroom while he slept on the second floor
near his daughter. That meant Price was probably alone with Tiffany
in the beach house.

I followed the exterior wall past a deserted
kitchen, and discovered Price alone in the living room. He'd left
the shades up on the sound side, maybe for the view of a brightly
lit mainland across the water. He was sitting on a pastel-patterned
couch drinking a beer and watching golf reruns on television. Pine
logs smoldered in the fireplace.

A pair of raggedy-haired Barbie dolls lay
sprawled on the carpet at his feet, and a trail of discarded
miniature shoes and disco outfits littered the carpet all the way
to the second-floor steps. Like all four-year old girls, Tiffany
had been reluctant to go to bed. She'd left her version of a bread
crumb trail behind her.

If you didn't know that he
had unmercifully beaten his wife, you'd think Price looked pretty
harmless. He was tall and stocky, but going soft, like an
ex-athlete who has kept up his eating routine while cutting down on
his exercise one considerably. He was wearing a rugby shirt tucked
into khakis and a pair of topsiders on his feet. His outfit blended
in perfectly with the golf crowd on the television screen, but the
overall effect was a little white bread— even for my Florida
cracker tastes. Hell, I hadn't seen a
black preppie since the eighties, when I ventured to Atlanta
for a weekend of sin with a renegade banker I met on a
plane.

I was willing to bet that Tawny Bledsoe had
something to do with the J. Crew image—and that Price would start
sporting dashikis to make up for his mistake by the time he got
through divorcing her.

After a while, my feet and fingers started
to ache from the cold. Plus, Price was getting sleepy and his
yawning was contagious. When he switched off the television and
headed for the stairs, I decided to call it a night. I'd found
Robert Price as requested. He was alone with his daughter. Now I
could get a good night's sleep and let my client know my mission
was done.

I picked up a six-pack of Bud at the
Pirate's Cove Pier before heading for the Atlantic Beach Days Inn,
where they were happy to rent me a cheap room with a carpet that
felt slightly damp to the touch. I didn't want to think about
why.

I sat on the bed, popped open a beer, and
called Tawny Bledsoe. She wasn't at home. She wasn't in her car. I
finally resorted to her beeper number.

She called me back immediately. "This is
Tawny," she said in a voice that made me think she was a couple
cans ahead of me in the six-pack department.

"Casey Jones," I told her. "I've found
them."

"You're kidding? That's great news. Where
are they?"

"Emerald Isle. In a private home."

"Those bastards." Her voice grew hard. "It's
Linda and Jim's place, isn't it?"

"Yup," I admitted.

"I should have known they would take his
side. And they were always so nice to me to my face. When all the
time they knew that—"

"If you don't mind," I cut her off. "I'm too
tired to listen to who took sides against what."

She was quiet, then said, "I guess you hear
that a lot in your job."

"I do. And it's never fun." Talking about
the hateful habits of divorce reminded me. "Let me ask you a
question, Tawny," I said casually. "That guy you met outside my
office hasn't been bothering you or anything, has he?"

"The loser who tried to pick me up? Never
saw him again. Why?"

"No big deal," I answered, wondering why she
had just lied to me. Obviously she had not connected the furry
figure who ambled past them while they were bent over her car
engine with Bobby D. "I had some trouble with him. I figure you
have enough complications as it is, and I wanted to warn you about
him."

"Don't worry," she said. "He isn't my type.
No money. If you can't afford a motel room, you can't afford me."
She laughed. I didn't. It seemed a singularly inappropriate joke
for someone in her predicament to make. On the other hand, the
world is full of women who define their lives by the men in them—
and when they lose one romantic partner, the only thing they ever
think about is how to replace him with another. I had a feeling
Tawny Bledsoe fell into this category. You don't spend that much
time on your face and body unless you're trolling for big game.

I realized that, despite what her husband
had done to her, I really didn't like my client all that much.

"Look," I said. "I did my job. I found your
daughter. Is there anything else you need me to do?"

"No," she said. "I'll be there by morning.
I'll take care of the rest."

"Don't try to do this yourself," I warned
her. "You need to be careful. Look what he did the last—"

"I'm not coming down there alone," she
interrupted. "I have help."

With that, she hung up, leaving me to
contemplate the vagaries of love and marriage in the shabby
splendor of an off-season beach motel room. I had a hollow feeling
behind my heart, like maybe I needed to take a break from all the
divorce work I'd been doing lately. It was starting to affect my
personal life. Maybe Bobby was right. Maybe I did need to get laid.
It had been months since I'd had a no-holds-barred tumble in the
hay. And I hadn't missed it much. That was the scary part.

Just to prove I wasn't Tawny Bledsoe, or
even remotely like her, I called Burly and was as nice as pie.

"It's me," I said when he answered. "I'm
down at Emerald Isle on a case. I should be home tomorrow."

"I figured you were up to something." His
voice had that same quality it always has, a sort of knowing
inflection, like he could see down into my pelvic region and read
my hormones like the I'Ching. Which, quite frankly, he could. When
he wasn't feeling sorry for himself.

"Sorry you're feeling low this week," I
added. It was about the limit of my sympathetic side, a trait I
admit is not very admirable.

"It's okay," he said, a little too
cheerfully for my tastes. "I'm going out with Debbie for dinner
tomorrow night. She'll cheer me up."

"Great, have a good time. I'll call you
later in the week."

I hung up feeling even more blue. Maybe
Debbie cheered him up, but she did nothing for me. She was a
physical therapist—anyone named Debbie is either a physical,
occupational or sex therapist—and she had the hots for Burly
big-time. I suspected she was going for two therapeutic
relationships out of three. They probably fooled around, but that
was none of my business. What annoyed me about Debbie was Burly's
belief that she understood his predicament better than I ever
could. Excuse me for walking on two legs and not spending my days
cheering on the afflicted. I couldn't help who I was.