Evil to the Max (4 page)

She looked at the clock. Years of early rising were ingrained despite the fact that she’d been out late and had no particular need to get up at all.

To get her mind off a certain cop, she needed some action. She needed to chase a killer. She needed to find the wino from her vision. But first, she had to find out more about Tiffany’s life.

Armed with a goal, Max pulled a black pantsuit from the closet, underwear and nylons from the dresser, and threw the lot across the bed. The toss was easily made since she lived in a boxy room with a dorm-size refrigerator, small desk, chair, single-size bed, and the absolute luxury of her own bathroom. She couldn’t stand to share.

“You never could.”

She swallowed the epithet on the tip of her tongue. Five steps and she was in
her
bathroom. No goopy bar sat in the soap dish. No razor droppings dotted the sink. No dental floss, used cotton swabs, or wadded up tissues lay in a circle
outside
the garbage can.

Cameron had been a total slob, but dear God, she’d give anything to clean up after him again.

“When are you going to fix it?” His voice was right next to her ear. He had the good grace not to mention her mental tirade on his sloppiness. Instead he asked about the medicine cabinet mirror. The cracked mirror. The crack had been there the day she moved in six weeks after Cameron died. It bisected her face. One of her eyes appeared to be an inch above the other. One side of her short, dark hair was an inch longer. Chopped in half, her image looked at least five years older than her thirty-two years.

The phone rang. She jumped. No one ever called. Well, almost no one. Sometimes Sunny Wright from the temp agency had to get hold of her. But never before seven a.m.

Max let it ring. Twice. Three times. On the fourth, the old-fashioned message machine picked up. She’d bought it at a thrift store so that Sunny could leave messages. Money and work were limiting factors in her life. She’d rather have remained unreachable.

She listened to her own terse message, then waited.

“Hi, Max, you there?” Pause. A woman’s voice. “It’s Sutter.”

Of course, she knew it was Sutter.

“Sutter Cahill.” She said it like Max would have forgotten her best friend’s name. Then Sutter sighed. “Guess you’re not there. Just checking on you. Louis says meow. He misses you. Call me sometime.” Click.

Max’s heart stopped for a full minute. Okay, a slight exaggeration. Finally, it kicked in, beating as if she’d had a shot of adrenaline.

“Why didn’t you pick up?” Cameron whispered.

Why? Because she hadn’t spoken to Sutter in almost two years. Her best friend since college. Her only close friend besides Cameron. Because she missed Louis, too, and had from the day she’d dropped the cat off on Sutter’s front porch with a note begging her to take care of him. “I wasn’t good company then.”

“That was then, this is now.”

“You’re so profound.” Better a little anger than the tears that pounded just behind her eyes. Max wasn’t a crier.

“You stopped talking to her because you were afraid she’d see me in my ghostly form.”

Sutter’s special gift was seeing ghosts. “I was afraid she
wouldn’t
see you, then I’d know I was crazy.”

“You were afraid she’d find out what my murderers did to
you
the night I died.”

A numbing cold spread through her chest. She hated this discussion, but rather than fight, she ignored it.

“Why is she still calling after all this time?” Sutter called every couple of weeks. Max did a quick calc in her head. “That’s forty-nine calls without an answer. You’d think she’d give up.”

“Sutter was never a quitter.” The unspoken accusation was evident in Cameron’s flat tone.

“I’m not a quitter, either.” Most of the time.

Cameron didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t have to. They both knew that the night Cameron left her, she’d quit on her job, her best friend, her cat, and her life.

She looked at her disjointed image in the mirror. “I’ll get that crack fixed today,” she told herself.

* * * * *

Max found Tiffany’s salon on Grand Avenue five blocks from the Round Up. A Cut Above. Catchy name on a semi-posh street. No ten-dollar-a-generic-cut establishment, the place was definitely a cut above
her
price range. In the middle of the block, it was nestled between a dress boutique and a Christian reading room. Max wondered what the Christians thought of the sexy styles and exposed flesh adorning the salon’s windows.

The “Help Wanted” sign in the front window, advertising for a receptionist, was the karmic break Max had been looking for.

Witt had said Tiffany worked as a hairdresser. But when Max entered the modest-from-the-outside shop, she knew Tiffany had not merely
worked
here. She had
become
a stylist in A Cut Above. Her occupation had defined her. Max felt it in the white marble floors, the gold-flecked, mirrored tiles on the walls, and the rows of expensive cosmetics in the discreetly lighted counter display. And in the noise. Deafening. Wonderful. Tiffany would have thrived in the bedlam. Blow dryers, phones, high-pitched female voices, laughter, running water, new age background music. Four of the stations were occupied, the stylists dressed in tiger-striped smocks and the patrons draped in leopard cover-ups. The spacious digs would give clients a sense of privacy. Nothing over-crowded in this atmosphere.

Max’s nostrils smarted with the scent of bleach and perm solution, and her eyes crossed from the animal print attire.

“May I help you?” asked the sole male in this feminine world. He appeared to be mid-sixties, both in age and dress. He wore a black frock-coat with a raised cleric collar. The style, if Max remembered correctly, was called Nehru. Gold chains covered his chest and ripe belly. Gold spectacles perched on his nose. Besides the mass of his belly and his retro dress, his outstanding features were his shiny bald head and his lobeless ears.

Max had dropped in for a quick cut and a chance to check the layout. The ad in the window had changed her mind. “I’d like to apply for the receptionist job.”

Despite the noise level, the plumed heads of the four stylists tilted toward the front. Their venomous looks would turn a lesser woman into a pillar of salt. Max was made of stronger stuff.

Her host, however, scanned her from hair to chest to hips, then back up, with a lingering glance at her breasts. Finally, his gaze rose to meet her eyes. The man had no shame. Neither did Max. His perusal had not been a construction-worker wolf-whistle equivalent. She’d just been totally appreciated in a manner which only a man who truly loves women could bestow. And Max was flattered.

Despite the survey, the man was all business. “We’ll need references and five years work history.”

Five
years
? For a receptionist? The guy might be a consummate flatterer, but he was out of his mind. Max thought fast. “I’m divorced. I’ve only been working for two. Does housewife count?”

Homemaker was the
last
thing she would have excelled at. She didn’t know how to cook, hated cleaning, and the words
ironing board
had never crossed her lips. Cameron’s concurring laughter floated on the air, cutting through the cacophony.

While most people talked while looking at a person’s mouth or the nose or anywhere but directly into the eyes, this man held Max’s gaze steadily. He smiled without showing teeth. “Have you done time as a receptionist?”

She’d done time as many things, from CPA to lost soul. She figured one of them was close enough to cover receptionist duties. “Yes. I’ve done temp assignments for The Wright Agency.”

He reached under the cosmetics counter, which seemed to do equal time as the reception desk, pulled out a pad and handed it to her. “My name is Miles Lamont. I own this establishment.” He waved a hand to encompass the shop, the accoutrements, and the four stylists. “And I’m desperate.”

Max hadn’t expected him to be so up front. Under normal circumstances, his desperation would have given her room to negotiate an adequate wage. Money wasn’t, however, her primary concern.

What she wanted was the truth. All of it. Every dirty detail of Tiffany’s last day on earth. Had she worked the day of her death? If so, what phone calls had she received? Made? Had she talked about her plans for the night? Had she told anyone she planned to get laid at the Round Up in front of a hungry male crowd?

Miles Lamont handed her a pen. “Fill this out. If everything checks”—his hypnotic gaze whisked over her once more—“you can start tomorrow.”

Wondering about the fate of the previous receptionist, Max took the pen and employment application to a seat by the latticed front window. She took her time filling it out, mostly using her powers of observation rather than her writing skills. The right-side stations were occupied by three young women with identical laughter. Max had difficulty telling the voices apart. Their attention snapped back to their clients as Miles Lamont’s eyes flashed across them like flame-throwers. On the left, a blonde bleached the gray roots of her customer, rubbing her nose with the back of a latex-covered hand. She didn’t laugh as openly or as regularly as the three across the room. Each station was decorated in a different motif, Max began to catalogue them ...

Lamont turned, eyed Max, looked from her application to the clock on the wall and back to Max again. He was timing her, and she obviously wasn’t writing fast enough.

She finished the paperwork, handed it back, smiled, and straightened her shoulders beneath the strength of his gaze.

He held out his hand, glancing down at the application. “Nice to meet you, Max Starr.”

His hand was warm, a tad damp, but strong. He hung on a moment longer than polite or necessary. Looking down at her wedding ring, he asked, “Do you go by Miss or Mrs.?”

“Mrs.”

What was he fishing for? She’d already told him she was divorced. There was something in his glance and the redundancy of his question, but Max couldn’t say what. So much for her newly acknowledged psychic skills.

“By the way,
Mrs
. Starr,” he emphasized the title. “I really will have to insist on giving you a new style before you begin.”

She touched her short, uneven hair. She knew she needed it and had the sense not to get pissed at him. She also found the temerity to unapologetically say, “Only if it’s on the house, Mr. Lamont. I’m on a budget.”

“Please, call me Miles. And Max,” he paused while she noted his increased familiarity. “I
am
desperate. You’ve got the job. You can start tomorrow. And of course, the cut will be on the house and with my personal attention. You’ll find I can be very generous.”

Ah, she caught the first whiff of a psychic burst. Miles Lamont was desperate for more than just a receptionist.

* * * * *

From her second floor window, Max watched Witt pull into the gravel drive that evening in a black and red Sport Ram truck exactly like the one in her dream.

“I’m going to kill you, Cameron.”

“I’m already dead.”

She’d kill him anyway. “You nudged him. I know you did.”

“Nudged him about what?”

“Dammit, DeWitt Quentin Long is
not
a Ram kind of guy.”

“He was in your little fantasy last night.”

A loud knock sounded on Max’s private door on the lower level. Max had her own entrance at the bottom of the stairs. “If he’s wearing black and red flannel, you’re going straight to hell, Cameron Starr.”

He exited the window with a peal of ghostly laughter.

Thank your lucky stars, Cameron
.

Witt wore black jeans and a pink gecko shirt from Hawaii. Thank God he wasn’t wearing red. But damn, with his blond hair, he looked good in hot pink, even if it wasn’t a particularly macho color. And cops were a real macho breed. But then, Witt did seem to stand out from the slobbering bunch she’d seen at his station house.

“Ready?”

He was taking her to the Round Up. Research. She’d been leery of tackling it on her own. It was far too soon after her last debacle of a “date” at the Round Up to test herself alone at the scene of her own crimes.

“Yeah, I’m ready.” She’d dressed in her customary work attire—black blazer, black pants, white shirt, striped tie, and black suede heels. The shoes were not because Witt had mentioned them last night. They were the only style of dress shoes she owned.

She locked the door behind her, then turned to drool at the sight of the pristine Ram. Black was damn hard to keep clean. However, it was the red detailing that really got her motor running. Something about a sharp blond guy driving a red-on-black truck. Something about the dream of what he’d done to her on the hood of that truck ...

Jeez. Dropping Witt and a black Ram smack dab in front of her was worse temptation than jiggling a full bottle of gin in front of a dried-out alcoholic.

“Max?” Witt touched her elbow.

Max jumped and almost squeaked like an idiot. “Umm, new truck?” she managed to say.

“Had it awhile.” The gleam in his eye said it was his pride and joy, sort of akin to having a twelve-inch ... love tool.

Cameron’s laughter whistled through the trees.

Chapter Four

They stopped for a bite to eat at the Cattle Barn before going to the Round Up. Witt exploded over a beer and the biggest steak Max had ever seen.

“You did what?” Red-faced, he dropped his knife. The clatter of steel on ceramic was loud enough to draw attention.

“I got a job at A Cut Above.” The bubbles of her champagne cocktail tickled her nose. She wanted to giggle, but stifled it as he glared at her.

“This isn’t a game for amateurs,” he said in that dictatorial, let-a-man-do-his-job tone. She should have known he wasn’t above it. Most men weren’t, not even dead men like Cameron.

“I needed a job to pay the rent. Now I’ve got one. I start tomorrow.” She set the champagne glass on the table and picked up her knife and fork. She’d choke on her food before she’d let him have the upper hand.