Deadly Gamble (28 page)

“I forgive you. Go away.” I wrenched open a cupboard door, tossed him the bag of stale Oreos.

He caught them easily and chuckled, but his eyes were sad. “You really don't want me to leave. You're lonely and you're upset and you figure I'm better than nothing. Admit it. I'm right.”

“You're right,” I said. I snagged the tea kettle off the stove, filled it at the sink and slapped it back down on the burner. I glanced around, almost afraid to ask the question. “Where's Chester?”

“No idea,” Nick said, sticking his nose into the Oreo package and inhaling deeply. The exhalation came out as a long sigh. He looked down at Russell, who was sniffing his shoes, with an expression of speculative regret. “I hope you're not counting on him as a watchdog,” he remarked.

“Why shouldn't I?” I countered, getting out the tea bags and plopping one into a mug. I was still thinking mostly about Lillian; I should have been thrilled that she was awake, and even regaining her powers of speech, but something about the whole situation troubled me.

“Mainly because there's a woman hiding behind your shower curtain,” Nick said.

Good thing I wasn't holding the tea kettle. It was already beginning to steam at the spout, and Russell and I would both have been scalded when I dropped it.
“What?”
I started for the bathroom.

Nick sprang up in front of me like one of those ducks in an old-fashioned shooting gallery. “Wait a second,” he said. “She could be dangerous. Even armed. Better to call the cops, don't you think?”

“It would take them half an hour to get here,” I replied, and kept walking.

I strode into the bathroom, threw back the curtain and found Heather there, a pair of nail scissors clasped in one hand.

I guess I was too outraged to be scared.

“How did you get in here?” I demanded.

“I have my ways,” she said.

“I'm calling the cops,” I told her. “If you get out before they arrive, so much the better, because I
totally
intend to press charges.”

“Don't turn your back on her,” Nick warned quietly, from the doorway.

I
had
forgotten the nail scissors.

“Stay out of this,” I said, but I kept my eyes on Heather as I backed out of the bathroom.

Heather stepped daintily over the side of the tub. She was dressed for stealth—black jeans and turtleneck, black shoes. She even had the stretchy stocking cap. “How did you know I was in here?” she asked conversationally, as though she and I were friends and this was just some harmless practical joke.

“A ghost told me,” I said.

“I don't believe in ghosts,” she replied.

“There you go,” I replied, backing down the hallway toward the living room. “I answered your question. You answer mine. How did you get into my apartment?”

“A man let me in,” Heather replied.

My blood froze. I glanced at Nick, but he shook his head.

“What man, Heather?”

“Just a man,” she said.

“Describe him.”

“He was just a man,” Heather insisted, as though put upon. “He said if I killed you, he wouldn't have to get his hands all bloody.”

My stomach turned over.

Geoff?

Where would he have gotten a key to my apartment, assuming that was how he'd opened the door?

Actually, there were several disturbing possibilities. Bert, being my landlord, probably kept a set in the bar. Geoff could have stolen them—he might even have been the one to attack Sheila the night before. The building was old, and so were the locks. It was certainly conceivable that there was a skeleton key out there somewhere, or he could have used a burglar's tool of some sort, and Heather, obviously a few votes short of a majority, had mistaken it for a key.

I eased toward the telephone.

Russell crawled under the coffee table and whimpered.

Nick was right. He'd never make a watchdog.

Heather sat down on the couch, and I actually felt a flash of pity, because she seemed oddly limp and jangly at the same time. She still held the scissors in a white-knuckled grasp, though, so I gave her a wide berth.

“I'm so tired,” she said.

“Poor baby,” said Nick.

I ignored him and nipped into the kitchen. The tea kettle was boiling over, making a screaming sound, and I shoved it off the burner as I passed, headed for the phone.

“I have a prowler,” I told the 911 operator. I was establishing a relationship with those people; pretty soon, I'd be able to call and say, “The usual.”

I went back to the living room, still on the line with the dispatcher.

Heather was nowhere in sight, but Russell still cowered under the coffee table, and Nick stood with his arms folded.

“Behind the couch,” he said.

I'd barely registered that when Heather suddenly sprang up from her hiding place, vaulted over the sofa back and came at me. She touched down once on top of the coffee table and flew through the air like some screeching hawk snagging a mouse.

I yelped and dropped the receiver, prepared to defend myself. Everything shifted into a weird cinematic sequence, slow-mo. The background music was the blood thudding in my ears.

Smaller than I was, Heather nonetheless had momentum going for her. She hit me like a locomotive, and both of us went down. I struck the floor so hard that the wind rushed out of my lungs, and I couldn't seem to take in even a shallow breath.

Heather straddled me.

We grappled. I made distracted plans to order
The Damn Fool's Guide to Physical Fitness,
since
Self-Defense for Women
didn't seem to be packing it.

She raised the scissors high; I saw light catch on the tips and tried to roll out of the way, but shock had turned every muscle in my body rigid. The brain gave orders, but the body didn't respond.

“Nick,” I gasped out,
“do something!”

The scissors began to descend.

I screamed.

Russell yowled.

And a blur of shrieking, hissing cat shot into my limited range of vision like a white meteor plunging to earth. Chester landed on the back of Heather's neck, claws bared, fur standing out all over his body, eyes feral.

Heather screamed and flailed, dropping the scissors. Chester hung on, like some kind of feline demon.

I threw Heather off, rolled free, scrambled to my feet.

I could hear the 911 operator calling something from the discarded phone receiver.

“Chester,” I rasped, when I caught my breath. “Sit.”

“Sit?” Nick asked.

I picked the scissors up off the floor, threw them across the room, and pried my ghost cat off Heather's back.

Chester was bristly as a porcupine, and he still had a lot of fight left in him.

Heather, who had fallen to her knees under the attack, got to her feet and fled. I stroked Chester's back until he mellowed out. When I went to set him down, I saw that his coat was bloody.

I screamed.

Memories surged out of every dark closet, cupboard and cubbyhole in my mind. I must have passed out, or just put my brain on standby, and when I came to, Nick was gone. Chester was gone. And two cops were crouching on either side of my prone body, looking concerned.

Russell growled uncertainly from his post beneath the coffee table.

“Lie still, miss,” the younger cop said. “You've been stabbed. There's an ambulance on the way.”

Stabbed?
I didn't remember being stabbed. I hadn't felt anything, during the whole tussle with Heather, besides stark, undiluted fear.

“It was only a pair of nail scissors,” I said, in what I thought was a sensible tone.

“Well, you're bleeding a lot,” said the second cop.

“I'm not going to the hospital.”

“Excuse me?” asked the first cop. I focused on his name tag. Rodriguez.

“I will not leave the dog,” I said. “He's been traumatized.”

Rodriguez and his partner exchanged looks.

“I mean it,” I insisted, trying to sit up. I was woozy.

“We'll see,” said Rodriguez, pushing me gently back down. “Just lie still.”

The EMTs arrived.

I was examined, disinfected, bandaged and propped on the couch for questioning by Andy Crowley, who arrived late. I think he liked to make an entrance.

He spared me a concerned smile. “
Now
what?” he asked.

I filled him in, but grudgingly. I thought he could have been a little more sympathetic, given that the whole universe seemed to be out to get me.

“Have the nutcase picked up,” he told Rodriguez and the partner. I'd tried to get a look at the other cop's name tag, but the light always blanked it out.

Twenty minutes later, Crowley took a call on his cell phone. Heather was in police custody.

I breathed a little easier, except now that I knew my stab wounds were
stab wounds,
I was hurting.

“You really ought to check in at the emergency room,” Crowley said. “You probably need antibiotics, not to mention something for the pain.”

I shook my head. “I'll be okay until tomorrow,” I said, wondering if I would. I planned on heading for SunsetVilla at first light, with or without Greer and Jolie. I wanted to see for myself that Lillian was really on the mend. Stopping off at my HMO for a long stint in the waiting room and a handful of drug samples was not my primary objective.

It was the middle of the night when the cops trailed out, and by that time I was so tired I couldn't sleep.

Plus, I kept remembering what Heather had said, about a man letting her into my apartment and essentially telling her that if she killed me, she'd save
him
the trouble.

He wouldn't have to get his hands bloody.

I coaxed Russell out from under the coffee table with a piece of lunch meat, only a little curled on the edges, and took him downstairs for a poop tour of the parking lot. Back in the apartment, I wedged a chair under the knob on the outside door, double-checked that all the windows were locked and fired up my computer.

I did billings until just before sunrise, then made coffee.

While I was waiting for the machine to chug its way through the usual cycle, I took a shower with the curtain most of the way open, taking care not to get the bandages on my right shoulder wet. A little floor-swabbing after the fact seemed a small price to pay for a non-
Psycho
experience.

I found Chester lying across the foot of my bed. I'd searched the apartment for him after the police left the night before, but to no avail. He'd vanished, along with Nick.

The bloodstains on his coat had disappeared, but he looked less substantial somehow, and I knew he'd undergone some kind of severe energy drain, attacking Heather the way he had.

My heart ached, and tears were imminent.

Seeing me standing there in my after-shower underpants and T-shirt, complete with bandage-bulge, Chester lifted his head and gave a soft, almost apologetic meow.

I blinked a couple of times, trying to compose myself, and stretched out beside him on the mattress, shimmying as close as I could get. I stroked him lightly, and he purred, content.

“Cat Avenger,” I said, with a sniffle. “That was some kind of last hurrah, wasn't it, pal?”

“Meow,” Chester replied sadly, and butted my chin a couple of times with the top of his head.

My vision blurred. “God, Chester, I am going to miss you so much.”

“It's not as if he's dying,” Nick put in.

By then, I was so used to my ex's sudden appearances that I didn't even start. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, a watery image leaning against the dresser in front of the bedroom window. Sunlight rimmed his lean frame and cast his features into shadow.

“But he's going away,” I murmured.

“Inevitable,” Nick said, not unkindly but with a quiet matter-of-factness that I didn't even try to understand. I think a person would have to
be
dead to follow ghost logic, and I wasn't ready to empathize quite that much.

“Will I see him again, Nick?”

“I don't know, sweetheart.”

I looked up at Nick. He could have taken the easy way out, said Chester would be waiting to wrap himself around my ankles when I croaked and stepped out of the tunnel, into the Light, and I wouldn't have known the difference. But he hadn't.

“Don't call me ‘sweetheart,' you coward,” I said. The fur at the back of Chester's neck was matted with my tears. “Chester saved me. You just stood there, like a big lump. Never send a man to do a cat's work.”