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I pushed past her, out of the thickly carpeted hallway and into her foyer.

“No, hardly. I need to ask you some questions, and this time you'd better be straight with me and not leave nothing out.”

Marla widened her eyes. “Well, Sierra, whatever do you mean? I have shown you the utmost honesty.”

“You ain't shown me shit, Marla. We're going to have a good, old-fashioned talk about guns, tempers, and boyfriends.”

Marla tried to smooth it over. “Goodie,” she cried. “Girl talk!”

“There ain't no girls talking here, Marla. Why didn't you tell me you gave your gun to Little Ricky? Why didn't you tell the police? In fact, you should've turned it right over to them. They have tests they can do, Marla. They can look at your gun and tell straight off if it's been fired.”

The look on her face told me more than I wanted to know.

“You fired the gun, didn't you?” A bad feeling crept up through my gut. I never had liked Marla and the feeling was mutual on her part. Why had I ever agreed to help her? It just never occurred to me that Marla might have nobody in her life for a reason. She might have killed them all off.

She looked down at her toes, shiny pink lacquered ones, and said nothing.

“Marla, I have to ask you this: Did you kill Venus Lovemotion?”

Her head shot up. “No! How could you think such a thing?” Marla was holding to the letter of the law. She was pulling a Clinton on me.

“Marla, did you fire your gun in Venus Lovemotion's direction?”

She shrugged, cocked her head, and gave me a very hard look. She was cracking, but not fast enough. I stepped forward quickly, shoving her shoulders with both hands. She lost her balance and stumbled backward, fear replacing the hostile look. I went after her, grabbing a handful of her long black hair and wrapping it tightly around my hand, then I yanked, hard.

“Let go!” Her eyes filled with tears and I took another step closer, forcing her to pull back and hurt herself more.

“Don't dick around with me, Marla. I'm the only person playing on your team, and believe me, I'm not doing it for you. Did you try to shoot Venus Lovemotion or not?”

“All right, all right! Yes! But it isn't like you thought.”

I let go of her hair and waited. She rubbed her scalp and looked at me like she wanted to try and even the score.

“When I found her with Ricky, I don't know, something inside me just started seeing red. Next thing I knew I was standing by my car and somebody had fired a shot.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

Marla shrugged and chuckled. “Well, Ricky ran over, grabbed my arm, and took the gun away. Venus ran like a rabbit back inside, and that's when I let Ricky keep the gun.”

I stared at her. Was she telling the truth? Somehow I didn't think so.

“Let me get this straight. You fired a shot at Venus, but nobody heard it or reported it? I frankly find that hard to believe.”

“As God is my witness,” Marla said solemnly.

“If God was witnessing half of your shit, Marla, she would've struck you dead a long time ago. Now, where's the gun?”

“I don't know.”

I looked past Marla, through the picture window in her living room, and contemplated throwing her off the balcony.

“Honest,” she swore. “You have it all now. The truth. Me and Little Ricky, we've just been so frightened. We didn't know who to trust. Honest, hon, I didn't think you'd need to know about me trying to shoot that slut. I figured it would only make things worse, and frankly, they're bad enough.”

She seemed so pathetically eager for me to believe her. For an entire moment I forgot Marla was a chronic liar. I started thinking that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad deal if Vincent lost the club to the IRS. Hell, with what I'd saved up, maybe I could buy the place and run it right. But, no, then I'd have headaches like Marla on a daily basis. It was best to deal with the current mess and never get stuck this way again.

“All right, you gave the gun to Little Ricky, and it disappeared sometime after the shooting. I'm accepting your premise. How much time elapsed between your encounter with Venus and her getting shot for real?”

Marla squinted, allegedly a sign that she was deep in thought. “I'm guessing two hours or so. We were all done for the night. The bar'd been closed for an hour or more and all the customers were supposed to be gone. That's why it was so weird that one of them was backstage and holding the door for me when I left.

I wanted to slap her. “There was a customer backstage when you left? Marla, why didn't you tell me that? That's important! You know Vincent's rule. Customers never come backstage!”

Marla stamped her foot impatiently and glared at me. “Sierra, I can't remember every little detail of life! When Venus got killed, it kind of drove the policies and procedure manual right out of my head. You just sort of forget that stuff in a time of crisis.”

“Which customer was it, Marla?”

She gave me a frustrated look. “I don't know his name. He wasn't a regular.”

“Then didn't it occur to you to call Bruno and have his ass bounced to the curb? He wasn't supposed to be there. What did he look like?”

“Oh, you know him,” she said. “New guy. Sharp dresser. Italian-looking. Kind of looks like he's always in a bad mood. I figured he was waiting on somebody. I didn't figure he'd be back there if someone hadn't said it was okay.”

I just stared at her. That's Marla for you, never thinking, always assuming, bury-your-head-in-the-sand Marla.

“Right, Marla. Maybe he was waiting on Venus so he could shoot her!”

Marla gasped.

“That's right, kid. You just keep coming up with those little tidbits. Don't trouble yourself to think back over the night or try too hard to help yourself. Hell, who knows, at this rate you might be next.”

Her eyes widened.

“Oh, yeah, Marla. See, it's like this.” I took a step closer to her and she started to back up. “Whoever killed Venus will kill again. After you kill your first victim, the second one comes easier. The third and fourth, well, it's old hat. So the killer, if it isn't you, is sitting around wondering who saw him. He's wondering if there are any witnesses he needs to dispense with.”

Marla looked really frightened now.

“So, if you're holding back any little details, anything at all that I could use to help out here, you should tell me.”

I turned around and started walking toward the door.

“Wait,” she called.

I turned back around, my hand on the doorknob.

“There is one more thing,” she said, her voice breathy with fear.

“What?”

“That Italian guy was a really bad tipper.”

I looked back, wishing I could vaporize her. I pulled the door open, stepped out of it, and slammed it shut behind me. Marla wasn't going to be any help at all. If anyone was going to save the Tiffany from an IRS lien, it would have to be me. At least I had somewhere to go. I was going to track down a well-dressed Italian who hadn't finessed the fine art of tipping but may have perfected the craft of murder.

Twelve

Raydean and Fluffy were waiting for me when I returned home. They sat across the road from my trailer, at the top of Raydean's steps, side by side, and they didn't look happy.

I pulled the Camaro onto my parking pad and got out, thinking it might be better to ignore them than to try and cater to their obviously rotten moods. But it was Fluffy's sigh that stopped me short. I heard it clear across the two yards. It was the sigh of someone who has given up hope.

“You two look like you've been to a bad funeral,” I said. I was hoping that if I sounded cheery, they'd lighten up, but it had no visible effect.

Raydean sighed and looked down at Fluffy. “It's a turrible world,” she said. “My girlfriend, here, found true love, only to have it blow up in her face.”

I looked harder and started walking slowly across the narrow street toward Raydean's yard. Fluffy did indeed seem dazed and lost.

“What happened?”

Raydean shook her head. “I was weeding.” “Weeding” is Raydean's euphemism for checking the various traps and snares she's rigged throughout her tiny yard to keep intruders and aliens at bay. “I looked up when I heard the doggie door and saw Fluffy come running out of the house and down the steps, dashing into the arms of a most handsome young Chihuahua.”

“Raydean, dogs do not have arms.”

“Whatever,” she sighed. “Anyway, when she reached the edge of the driveway, the dog blew slap up!”

“What?” The concern I felt edged into my voice and made Raydean jump. She reached behind her back and pulled out a few tangled pieces of tan plastic and some thin red and blue wires.

“See this here?” she asked. “It's a mechanical robotized dog. A toy, Sierra. Someone put this thing at the edge of your driveway while I was otherwise occupied. When Fluffy ran out, it exploded. Liked to have pushed my pacemaker into an early grave, girl!”

Raydean stretched out her arm and wrapped it around Fluffy, who had started shivering. “Girl, them boys ain't at all what they seem. Since the invasion, you can't take nothing for granted, especially love.” Raydean, sensing a theme, started humming “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” to herself. Fluffy moaned, and Raydean, taking this for approval, began to sing in earnest.

“Raydean!” I shouted. “Did you see who did this?”

Raydean shook her head, completed the verse, and turned to look at me. “No,” she said. “Did you?”

I shook my head and my shoulders slumped in defeat. Did no one take this as seriously as I did? As if in answer, a car's engine came within earshot, loud and powerful. I knew that car. I looked up at Raydean.

“Well, at least I done one thing right,” she said. “I called in the law. At least one of us is gonna find true love and happiness.” In the distance, I heard the faint wail of sirens. He was bringing reinforcements in response to whatever it was Raydean had said when she called. This was not going to be pretty.

Fluffy stood, her tail wagging as she identified Nailor's car. What was it about that man that just seemed to drive women wild?

His car whipped onto my street, jerking to a stop in front of my house. Nailor jumped out, his gun drawn and an anxious look on his face.

“Where is the bomb exactly?” he asked.

I suppose the rest of the afternoon would've gone better had I not laughed, but I couldn't help myself. He looked so officious and cute in his Kevlar vest and helmet. The safety glasses he'd pulled on were an extra-special touch.

Raydean reached over and held up the detonated dog, now a mass of wire and plastic.

“False alarm,” she said calmly. “It was just another death threat, disguised as true love.”

Nailor lowered his gun and glowered at Raydean.

“I'm taking you in,” he said as the first patrol car pulled to a halt. “I'm having you committed to the state hospital and they won't let you see daylight for a hundred years!”

I turned on him. There was no call for scaring Raydean. She'd meant well enough.

“Now, wait just a minute,” I said.

“No, you wait, Sierra. I've humored her and tried to be fair, but this just takes the cake.”

“Listen to me,” I said. I took a step toward him, hoping he would read the urgency of the situation in my face and realize this wasn't just a false alarm. “Someone left a toy dog in my driveway, and when Fluffy came outside, they detonated it. It's a miracle Fluffy wasn't killed.”

Nailor looked back at Raydean and the mass of wires, then turned to look back at the two squad cars full of combat-ready officers and bomb-sniffing dogs. He signaled to them, and with obvious disappointment they departed. Nailor took a moment to remove his helmet and safety glasses, then the heavy ceramic-plated vest. When he walked toward us, it was with a calmer attitude. You just can't fight city hall, especially not where Raydean's involved. You just go with the flow and hope you don't drown.

Nailor knew all about Raydean's yard, yet he hesitated at the edge of her little patch of lawn and stared up at her, as if waiting for a bobby-trap update.

“Ain't nothin' a wise human cain't avoid for hisself,” she said. “You've been through it all before.”

He nodded and walked up the narrow paved path to her door, avoided the third stair step, and ducked under the nearly invisible fishing line that attached to a water-filled bucket tucked up just under the awning. Raydean reached behind her back and pulled out the detonated dog.

“Careful,” she said. “Explosives can be dangerous in the wrong hands.”

Nailor sighed and his back stiffened. I could imagine the many things he wanted to say to her, but saying them would've only caused Raydean to clam up.

“Thank you,” he said in a tightly controlled cop voice. “Maybe y'all could tell me what you know about this”—he hesitated—“this … invasion.”

That brought Raydean around to his side again, and his threat to hospitalize her was forgotten. With great care, she repeated everything she'd told me, with one addition.

“I didn't see the fella what done this, but I heard a car slow down in between our two houses, just about the time Fluffy come running out. I was around back, weeding. I am always alert to invasion potential, so I stopped, especially when I picked up on the tune playing on his radio.” She had our complete attention. Raydean leaned forward, looked both ways up and down the street, and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. “You see, I ain't heard that tune in a long, long while, not since Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks used to play the VFW up home and my dearly departed husband would request it.”

“What was it, sugar?” I asked, hoping to stop her from straying down memory lane.

“‘How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away.'” Raydean leaned back and smiled. “I never took it personal. He was just a fool for a catchy tune.”