Deadly Gamble (34 page)

And there, leaning against the trunk of a cottonwood tree, almost out of camera range, was Geoff.

I
stared numbly at the TV, watched with half my brain as the graveyard segment filmed that morning during Lillian's memorial service melted into a driveway shot of me, standing in front of Greer's place. I caught only snatches of the things I'd said—
He's my uncle…except that sometimes I feel as though I'm on the verge of remembering…

I couldn't seem to connect. It was like watching and listening to another person, who looked like me but wasn't.

I shut off the set, with a motion of my thumb, and just as I did so, my cell phone chimed, from the separate and largely unexplored cosmos inside my purse.

Contact with the outside world!

I dived for it. Didn't even take the time to check the caller ID first.

“I came home,” Tucker said, without bothering with a hello, “and you were gone. According to your note, you went back to your place. I've been there. You, on the other hand, are definitely
not
.”

Something odd flashed into my mind.

There's a way into your apartment.

I don't need a key.

Tucker didn't have a key; he'd given it back, albeit reluctantly, a month before, when we decided to give each other some space. We hadn't actually stuck to our guns on that score. I had a key to his place, because I'd been staying there—I'd used it to lock up when I went back with Jolie to get my things. But as far as I knew, it had been a one-sided exchange.

Which didn't mean Tucker couldn't have made a copy before the breakup.

Even more disturbing.

How had he gotten in, that morning when I found him in my kitchen, after he'd come back from the dead?

“Moje, are you there?”

“I'm here,” I said, letting out my breath.

There were a great many things I didn't know about Tucker, like what he did for a living, for instance. The idea wasn't easy to face, but it was within the realm of possibility that
he
was the one who'd made those mechanically distorted phone calls. He might even have arranged for the delivery of that almost-fatal chow mein.

But why? What motive could he have had for doing those things?

If he'd laced the chow mein with rat poison, why had he turned right around and helped me save Russell?

Maybe because he was after you, not the dog.

“How did you get into my apartment?”

“I'm not in your apartment. I'm on the road.”

“I mean that morning, when I thought you were—someone else?”

“When you called me Nick,” Tucker said. “Bert let me in. Mojo, what's going on? Where are you?”

“I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind.”

He sighed. “All right. Shoot.”

Unfortunate choice of words, an instant reminder that I'd come to Cactus Bend to tell my uncle that I'd gunned down both my parents. Nausea swept through me.

“You're not a cop. Allison told me, and I believe her, because she might be a jealous ex-wife, but she's also a competent professional. So don't deny it. You lied to me, Tucker, and that raises serious trust issues.”

“We're not going to discuss this over the phone. Where are you, Moje?”

“Never mind where I am. We're not going to discuss it in person, either. E-mail me, or something. Send me a fax.”

Not that I had a fax machine.

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

I was facing an uncertain future, to say the least. Either I'd be tried and sent to prison for the murder of my parents, or I'd be locked up in some hospital for the rest of my natural life.

Maybe Heather and I could room together.

Yeah, the odds seemed very good that I
had
lost my mind.

“Probably,” I said, limping around the room as I talked, getting used to the pain in the bottom of my feet.

I'd watch for the senator to come home, I decided, and when I saw him pull in, maybe I could find a way to slip into the house behind him. Locate my keys and get out again without setting off the alarm.

Cute trick. What I needed was
The Damn Fool's Guide to Burglary
.

“Look, Moje,” Tucker said, “you're really starting to scare me.”

“Back at you, buddy. I thought I knew you, and now I find out you're not who you said you were.”

“Does this mean I don't get to join the ranks of Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks?” The timbre of his voice was darkly amused.

I felt a pang at the reminder of all the things I wasn't going to get to do, now that I knew I was a murderer. Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks was one of those things.

My promising career as a P.I. was over before it began.

I'd never get to spend the windfall from Nick's mother, adopt a dog or a cat from the pound or figure out what to do with Bad-Ass Bert's Biker Saloon.

Worse, I'd never go to bed with Tucker again.

“That's what it means,” I said miserably. By then, I was in the living room, peering out the front window. I hung up the phone with a press of my thumb, set it down and watched as Joseph went through my car like a customs agent at the border.

The cell rang again, and I didn't pick up.

Joseph locked the Volvo, tossed the keys in the air and caught them.

Headed for the house.

He stopped, near one of the tables lining the swimming pool, set the keys down and raised his cell phone to his ear.

I held my breath.

I couldn't hear what he was saying, but the way he was gesturing indicated that the call represented some kind of unpleasant surprise.

I waited and watched.

Sure enough, he went into the house, evidently forgetting that he'd left the keys outside, on the table. I stared at them, glinting in the lights surrounding the pool, my heart skittering unevenly.

After about thirty seconds, I shut off my cell phone, dropped it into my bathrobe pocket, eased open the guesthouse door and dashed for the poolside table. Snatched up the keys.

I barely noticed the sting in the bottoms of my feet as I ran to the Volvo, zapped the locks from the fob and jumped inside.

I left the headlights off and drove slowly around to the main driveway. About the thousandth thing I needed was for Joseph to see or hear me and thwart my escape.

The gates presented a major problem.

They were closed.

I could crash through them, of course, but I suspected that technique worked better in the movies than it would in real life. I was sitting there, like a lump, wondering what to do, when I saw headlights swing off the main road, coming in my direction.

I backed through a flowerbed, hoping the Volvo and I were hidden from view in the shrubbery.

The senator's Jaguar purred to a stop on the other side of the gates. By electronic magic, they swung open.

I gunned the engine the instant I thought there was enough space to pass through and shot past the Jag, flipping on my headlights as I streaked toward the road.

Glancing into the rearview mirror, I saw the taillights of the Jag, still sitting in front of the open gates.

After that, I didn't look back again.

If I had, I might have seen something important, but I wasn't exactly in the zone when it came to taking sensible precautions. I just knew I needed to get out of there, fast.

I headed straight for the cemetery. I'm not sure why—just some instinctive need to be close to Lillian, I guess. I wished she'd appear to me, the way Nick had, and answer all the questions she'd never been willing to deal with in life. All the while, I knew she wouldn't. I wasn't going to get that lucky.

There were no gates at the graveyard. At the time, fresh from my break from Casa Larimer, I saw that as a good thing.

I drove past my parents' graves and pulled over a stone's throw from Lillian's. I shut off my headlights, and realized for the first time that the moon was nearly full. The cemetery was bathed in an eerie light, shot through with shadows of tombstones and the occasional cottonwood.

I got out of the car, picked my way gingerly over the rocks at the side of the one-lane road, welcomed the cool softness of the grass.

A mound of raw dirt marked Lillian's final resting place. Greer had ordered an elaborate Italian marble headstone off the Internet, but it would have to be carved and then shipped all the way from Carerra. Maybe by the time it arrived, the grass would have grown in like a green blanket over Lillian. Her grave wouldn't seem so anonymous then, so new and exposed.

“Why didn't you tell me I killed them?” I asked.

A night breeze played in the treetops, and I thought I heard the call of a mourning dove. Something else, too—maybe traffic out on the main highway.

I knelt next to the grave, sat on my haunches.

“You wanted to protect me. I understand that. But it didn't work, because the one person I can't run away from is myself.”

Another sound came then, so faint that I wasn't sure I'd heard it at all.

I turned to look behind me, and saw nothing.

“Boomer?” I asked hopefully. Maybe he lived on the premises. That was it. He'd seen me drive in and, being the caretaker, come to investigate. Kids liked to party in cemeteries, and vandalism was probably a factor, too.

I turned back to the grave, and that was when I saw the figure standing on the other side.

Definitely not Boomer.

Moonlight caught on the barrel of a pistol.

“Geoff?”

Laughter.
Female
laughter, low and throaty.

I wondered crazily if my brother had turned transvestite during his years in the joint, but the shape wasn't right. It
was
familiar, though.

Everything will look better in the morning.

“Barbara?”

She'd been wearing a dark scarf or a hat. Now, she pulled it off with her free hand, letting her blond hair show in the moonlight.

“You remembered,” she said. “I knew it for sure when I saw you on television today.
You remembered
.”

The truth was, I
hadn't
remembered what happened the night my parents were killed, but now, facing what I knew would be my own death, the floodgates opened in a rush of crimson and black images, like a video tape on fast-forward.

I was five again.

It was an ordinary summer night.

I was lying on the floor, on my stomach, coloring in a mermaid's tail in a book full of pictures.

Dad sat at his computer. He was so proud of that bulky, mysterious machine, and his big fingers made a comforting clicking sound as they tapped the keys.

Somebody knocked at the front door of the trailer.

“Get that, will you, kid?” Dad said, without looking away from the flickering blue words on the screen of his TRS-80.

I laid down my crayon, got to my feet, and hurried to unlock the screen door. Aunt Barbara came in, put a gloved finger to her lips.

I was a kid. I was delighted that there was a surprise afoot.

I barely noticed when Geoff slipped in behind her.

Dad didn't turn around. “Who is it?” he asked.

Aunt Barbara put her finger to her lips again. Reached into her black shoulder bag.

Everything happened quickly after that.

Barbara pulled a pistol out of the bag, walked over to my dad and shot him point-blank in the back of the head.

Blood splattered everywhere.

Droplets of crimson gleamed on the pages of my coloring book.

Before I could scream, Mom rushed in, eyes wide with horrified alarm. She was wearing a green bathrobe, and her freshly washed hair was wrapped in a towel. She was on the night shift at the truck stop that week. She liked working those hours, because the tips were better.

Barbara turned, fired the gun again.

A bright red wound opened in my mother's throat. Her eyes, vibrant with fear only a moment before, widened in disbelief. She landed hard on the floor.

Geoff moved Dad's inert, bloody body and plucked the floppy disk from a slot in the side of the computer. He didn't seem to mind the gore covering him, soaking his clothes.

Barbara dropped the gun. She went to stand over Mom, put her foot on the body, gave it a cruel little shake.

I tried to scream again, but no sound came out.

“Where's the kid?” she asked.

I'd taken refuge behind Dad's easy chair, without being aware of moving at all, but I knew they'd find me soon.