Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) (17 page)

I’d been operating under the belief that the theft was about the clothes. But what if it wasn’t? The skull must have been in the attic all along. Maybe
that’s
what Pritchard had been talking about when I overheard him approaching the attic.

Now I had a whole new hobo bag of theories. Jennie Mae told me that her husband had left her. But what if he hadn’t had the chance to leave her because he was dead? She could have murdered him and hid the body. I shivered with the thought and shook my hands as if they’d come into contact with a decomposing corpse. Or what about Mr. Charles? Maybe the skull was his dirty little secret and Jennie Mae’s closet was the perfect place to keep it from becoming discovered?

Loncar oversaw the transportation of the skull down the stairs, into the back of an ambulance. I did not point out that the skull was already dead. Seemed the least I could do.

“Do you want to hear my theories?” I asked Loncar.

“No.”

“But—”

“No.”

“Fine. But when you’re not paying attention, I’m going to raid the liquor cabinet and make out with boys!” I said.

“What?”

“Sorry. I think I had a flashback to high school.”

“God bless your parents.”

He went into the kitchen and I followed him. “So, now that we know what’s going on, it’s okay for me to sleep here, right?”

“We don’t know what’s going on, and no, it’s not okay for you to sleep here.”

“Come on, it’s obvious. Somebody has been looking for the skull.”

He crossed his arms. “Then why go to the trouble of stealing the entirety of her collection? Why provide evidence of a crime instead of working under the cover of magazine editor? Why allow the skull to reside in her attic for forty years? Why come looking for it now?”

“You don’t think we know what’s going on.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Okay, fine. Where am I supposed to go?”

“About that. I made arrangements.”

“This is my house. I pay to live here. It should be safe now that you’re here. You’re the police, right? Do your job and keep me safe.”

The dad/daughter dynamic was stressing me out, and from the look on Loncar’s face, he wanted this situation over more than I did.

“I thought you’d like to know that we heard from Mr. Taylor this afternoon. Seems his poker game went late. He was on a winning streak so he wasn’t willing to leave.”

“But Nick called his dad a whole bunch of times and he never answered.”

“Said the tables were running hot and he didn’t want any distractions.”

“So Nick’s dad is safe?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did you talk to him? Or to Nick. Did you talk to Nick?”

“I’m not a messaging service.”

Loncar made it sound like it had all been a misunderstanding. Nick’s dad had been invited to Nick’s poker game, and he’d gone, probably because he and Nick had been getting on each other’s nerves. But Nick Senior stayed out later than expected because he was on a winning streak. What if someone had arranged the invitation, gotten him out of the house, manipulated the winnings, all to send a message to me? It sounded too self-involved to be true. But as soon as I staged the parking lot fight with Nick and made it clear that we were through, his dad called home with a reasonable explanation. 

I didn’t buy for a second that it had been a misunderstanding. Pritchard Smith was behind this. Just like he’d been behind everything all along. And I was the only one who saw through him.

So why didn’t I feel good about things? Because Loncar still didn’t want to hear me out. He still didn’t believe me about Pritchard. All he wanted was for me to go away to some place where I couldn’t be involved. I bet his “arrangement” didn’t involve pretzels.

“Get whatever you want to take with you for the night. Your ride is going to be here in five minutes.”

“Let me guess. You’re having me picked up by an unmarked police car and taken to the county jail.”

“You know something? That’s the first good idea you’ve had.”

I went upstairs and packed a bag and then dug my passport out from under my assortment of fishnets. My Crystal Gayle hair kept getting tangled in the strap of my bag so I braided it quickly and then wound it around and around my scalp and secured it with a scarf, the tails hanging down the back. I put on a brown and orange floral tunic and brown flare bottom jeans. The jeans were too long, so I adjusted with a pair of platform shoes with wooden soles that I’d bought in the Nineties the first time Seventies style had threatened to make a comeback. One of my mentors had once shared this charming philosophy: Fashion comes around three times, and then you die. I hoped this current assignment wasn’t accelerating my schedule.

Out front, a car honked. I looked out the window. A grey sedan sat in my driveway. Everything about it, from the four antennas on the back to the red and blue lights nestled under the front grill, said Police Car. I’d been right.

I stuffed a few more things into my bag and went downstairs. Loncar stood by the front door. “You’re going to thank me for this, Ms. Kidd.”

“Yeah, right. The laundry is overflowing. Detergent is under the sink. Washer and dryer are in the basement. Feel free to take care of that while you’re here.”

I left the house and got into the back seat of the sedan. I recognized the officer in the passenger seat from the day I’d filled out the Citizen’s Police Academy application. “Officer Callahan,” I said. “Nice to see you again.” I looked at the second officer. “Hi, I’m Samantha Kidd.” I reached my hand over the back of the seat and he shook it.

Callahan gave him a critical look and he shrugged. “What?” he said. “She’s being polite.”

“This is silly, you know that, right? You don’t want to drive me around anymore than I want you to drive me around. There are actual criminals out there on the streets that need to be caught.”

“We’re just following orders, ma’am,” said Callahan.

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” I said. I sank back into the back seat and crossed my arms.

“Buckle up. It’s the law,” said the driver.

I straightened up and fastened the seatbelt. He backed the car out of the driveway and headed the opposite direction of the highway. We got up the hill, past the street where the Fourth of July parade took place each year, toward the defunct Ribbon Railroad train tracks. A dark blue car sat by the train tracks, blocking our way. “What’s he doing?” I asked. “Honk your horn.”

“Looks like car trouble,” Callahan said. He put the car in park and got out. The officer in the passenger seat got out too. They approached the blue car.

This didn’t seem right. We were on an empty road with no other people in sight. No way was this the way things were supposed to go down. I felt around inside my bag from the spy store until my fingers closed around the canister of pepper spray. I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the car. “Hey,” I yelled,” What’s going on?”

The officers got into the blue sedan. It pulled past me and drove off. I’d been so intent on watching the cops get into the car and drive off that I hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t alone.

A tall man in a plaid shirt, jeans, mirrored sunglasses and a Duck Dynasty amount of facial hair came out of the woods. He grabbed me. He threw me into the back seat of the unmarked police car, jumped into the front, and peeled out.

Chapter 20

SUNDAY
,
SIX
-
ISH

I landed face down on the bag from the spy store. As the car accelerated, I unsheathed the pepper spray and aimed it at the side of his face. The spray stung my hands, and I squeezed my own eyes shut.

The driver screamed. The car swerved as he reached up to cover his eyes. “Damn it, Kidd!”

Nick?

He pulled off the aviators and tossed them to the floor. I reached for the steering wheel from the back. We were the only car on the road. Whatever orders the two officers had been given, they didn’t include sticking around after the car swap had taken place. I didn’t have time to think about what had just taken place. The only thing on my mind was making sure we didn’t crash.

The car swerved from one side of the road to the other. I did what I could to even it out, but we were going too fast for me to be steering from the back seat. About a quarter mile later, we hit a slight incline and the car slowed considerably. I yanked the steering wheel to the side and we eventually came to a stop thanks to the interference of a cornfield. Nick grabbed a bottle of water from the center console, tipped his head back, and poured the water on his face. Water splashed onto me. I dropped back into the back seat and waited for him to say something. The silence was interminable.

Tentatively, I spoke. “Are you okay?”

He wiped his eyes. “You sprayed me with pepper spray. Since when do you go around with cans of pepper spray?”

“Since this morning. I didn’t know it was you. Since when do you have a beard and mustache?”

“Since this afternoon.” He peeled the beard off and scratched his chin. “It’s a lot itchier than I expected.” He set the beard on the seat next to him, but left the mustache and sideburns on.

“Do you want to tell me what just happened?” I asked.

“I called Loncar after I heard from my dad. He asked about you and I told him about our fight.” He went silent. I knew he was thinking about what we’d said to each other. “You staged that fight, didn’t you? You did it make sure whoever had my dad saw that you and I weren’t together.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Come up here,” he said quietly.

I didn’t climb over the seat. I got out of the back and moved to the passenger side. As soon as I sat down, he reached out for me and slid me across the seat. He took my face in his hands and crushed my lips with a hot, wet, open mouth kiss that erased anything he’d said earlier that day. His lips were soft and gentle and if it wasn’t for the prickly fake mustache and the residue from the pepper spray, the kiss would have been perfect. I put my arms around his neck and twisted my torso until I was pressed up against him. I would have straddled him if the steering wheel wasn’t in the way. My heart raced and the adrenaline that I’d felt since the car hand-off kicked back into gear. I was going to have to find an outlet for all of this pent up energy.

“I’m not going to lecture you about the kind of decisions you make ever again,” he whispered. “That’s a promise.”

“I don’t want you to make promises that you can’t keep.”

“Kidd, you and my dad are the two most important people in my life. What you did brought him back to me.”

“Loncar doesn’t think the two things are related,” I said.

“Loncar has been known to be wrong in the past.”

If Nick had suggested that we curl up in the Crown Victoria in the middle of the corn field and spend the night there, I would have said yes. At that moment, him acknowledging all of the times that Loncar and I had gone head to head, when Nick had suggested that I leave things to the police, when my own interactions had led to captured criminals, I would have done just about anything to preserve the moment.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

Or, there was always Plan B.

He put the car in reverse. I buckled into the seatbelt in the middle of the front seat and rested my head against his shoulder. He backed through the cornfield until we found the road, and then turned around and headed back the way we’d came. I didn’t know where he was taking me and I didn’t care. For whatever reason, being with Nick felt safe (even if he was dressed a little bit like Paul Bunyan) (or maybe that’s why). If it was all an illusion, I didn’t want to find out.

He turned right at Perkiomen Avenue and drove a couple of miles east, and then took a right at a small used car lot. Two blocks later, he pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“My old apartment. It’s mostly empty, but the lease isn’t up until the end of the month. I’ve been slowly moving myself out. ”

He hadn’t been kidding about the “mostly empty” part. The only furniture was a dining room table and an inflatable air mattress on the floor. Partially packed boxes lined the walls. A fancy coffee maker sat in the kitchen. A pizza box from Brother’s sat on the counter.

“I don’t have any chairs,” he said. He went to the oven and pulled out a pizza. Nestled into the cheese were small birthday candles. He looked at me, and then at the pizza. “Do you even know what day today is?”

“It’s my birthday,” I said. I hadn’t thought twice about it since hanging from the shutter. I was officially one year older.

Nick lit the candles with a lighter and then set the pizza on the middle of the dining room table. He climbed up and sat on one side. I sat on the other.

“Happy Birthday, Samantha,” he said. “Make a wish.”

I wish life would be normal for one day
, I thought to myself, and blew out the candles. Then again, what was normal?

We ate our pizza off paper towels, keeping pace slice for slice until it was gone. That was one of the things I’d missed about Nick after we’d stopped working together. That we could share a pizza or a couple of hot dogs from a New York City street vendor just as easily as we could dine in a five-star restaurant. That he’d order a side of potato chips as an appetizer and then fight me for the last one. We might not have dated for those nine years, but I knew from how well we’d gotten along that we were a lot alike.

“Do you ever think about raising chickens?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He gave me a funny look and was quiet for a moment. “But sometimes I think about giving up everything and becoming a carpenter.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “There are days when that seems more simple.”

“That’s how I feel about chickens.”

“You do know that the people who raise chickens don’t raise them as pets, don’t you?”

“I hadn’t really thought it through that far.”

I climbed off the table and stretched my arms directly up over my head, and then and tipped my head from one side to the other. “I need to unwind. Decompress.”

“You can relax here. It’s safe. Have a glass of wine and let your hair down.”