Matryoshka Blues (The Average Joe Mysteries Book 1) (10 page)

Those people are stupid. The only things worth a damn are the relationships that get us through the bullshit. Take those away, and we’re nothing but decaying sacks of carbon and water plastered to a shoddily-constructed marble of dirt and rock and water and lava zipping through a vacuum of cold nothing in an elliptical orbit around a—

“What are you doing?” Turnbill asks suddenly. She’s staring at me in confusion.

Son of a bitch. I got caught internal-monologuing. What is wrong with me? Was I distracted by her long blonde hair and spectacularly fake tits? I have to admit, after redheads I’m a sucker for that combo. If Tully had gone that route, she’d be kneeing me in the nuts a hundred times a day, regardless of our history, just to keep me focused.

What can I say? It’s called a
character flaw
for a reason. I see, I like, I appreciate. And then I take a shot. If it works, awesome. Go me. But if it doesn’t, for any reason, I back the fuck off like you’re supposed to do. I’m no fake-killer Canadian saint, but I’m hardly a—

“Seriously,” Turnbill says, her brows all wonky from watching me. “What is wrong with you?”

Shit, busted again. They make pills for this, don’t they? I should look into this health insurance con game at some point and get a prescription. You know, in case of emergencies like this one.

Hopefully they’re not cherry-flavored or anything. That’d be disgusting washing them down with beer and whiskey.

I know Turnbill’s eyes are nowhere near her breasts, but given the day’s events I don’t care. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die looking at an awesome pair of hooters and not the barrel of a gun.

“Depends,” I tell her cleavage. “How much time you got?”

17

B
efore she can answer, the world behind me gets louder. Way louder. The plane comes screaming toward us, dropping at a steady rate toward solid ground. It’s landing, and there’s every possibility that Loretta Turnbill is about to get away. At least she doesn’t have the box yet.

“Give me the box,” she shouts over the growing noise.

Christ. What is it with all the fucking mind readers today?

“Blow me,” I yell back.

She rolls her eyes, like nearly every other woman I’ve ever said that to. Not all of them, though. You’d be surprised how often that actually works. Sure, you’re more likely to get punched in the face or kneed in the groin for your sexism, but you deserve that anyway, so take it like a man and move on.

“No, really,” I add. “Do it and I’ll hand it over. No questions asked.”

You think I’m lying, don’t you? Shows what you know. Loretta Turnbill ain’t no Jennie Whitlock, that’s true, but she’s still plenty
caliente
.

She cocks her head. “Are you stupid?”

“No,” I shout before scrunching my face. “Well, possibly.”

That throws her for a New York minute. “Give me the box,” she repeats.

She extends her arm fully, the gun moving too much from the action for her to be an expert at firearms. When professionals do it, the gun doesn’t move. You lose whatever aim you had on your target. Turnbill lets the gun arc up and down, side to side, and that tells me she may know how to handle them, but not with the training of a long-term user.

Knowing that doesn’t give me an edge, not with the distance between us. But I can work with it, given half a chance.

The plane rolls past us slowly, making a wide turn at the end of the runway and rolling back before coming to a stop twelve yards from us, its engines going quiet.

The world is stuck on pause. No one inside the plane comes out, and neither Turnbill nor I look over to it. She stands there aiming a gun at me, and I stand there watching her.

“Why’d you kill Sandecker?” I finally ask.

Her eyes narrow and her lips form a thin line. “You killed my poor boss. Don’t you know anything?”

Oh yeah, she’s not dumb. Sergeant needs to learn a thing or two about reading people.

Says the dumbass who didn’t realize Sergeant
wasn’t
a professional killer.

I shake my head. “No, it was you. Your Canadian messer-cleaner-upper showed up at Sandecker’s house after I did, because you sent him there to
find
, quote-unquote, your boss’s body. And if I happened to be standing over it, so much the better.”

That I’ve sussed this out worries her, her face going from
supermodel
to
Walmart-at-three-in-the-morning
in the time it takes Tully to eat a fucking Maggie Jane’s number six.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says softly. At least, it sounds soft. My ears are still ringing from the plane landing and the gunshot, so what do I know?

The ease with which she lies is disconcerting. Sergeant’s less-than-astute observation notwithstanding, it’s clear how she’s able to con so many people. Well, so many
men
. She must have had Sandecker wrapped around her finger, all the while letting him think he was in charge.

Granted, that’s a lot of male-female relationships, but this chick went and killed her other half. And now she’s trying to blame me for it. So yeah, she’s good.

And in case you missed it—I said
astute
. Ass-toot. Ha. I kill me sometimes.

“Your hitman already told me,” I say to her. “Right after I beat him up for coming to my house to kill me. On your orders, I might add.”

Oh, shut up. I know I didn’t beat him up, but why would I tell her that? She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t need to know that her Canadian not-a-killer got taken out by a short woman kicking him in the balls. Piss off.

Turnbill looks me up and down. “You’re not as stupid as Jeff said you were.”

For those of you joining us late, some of us already knew that.

Wait a second—Jeff told her I was stupid? Damn, that hurts.

I try really hard to let that slide. “The point,” I tell her, “is that Sergeant didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill Sandecker.”

I hazard a glance to the plane. From this angle I can’t see into the cockpit, and no one is peering through the windows dotting this side of the fuselage. For all I know, some X-Man wannabe piloted this thing with ESP or some shit.

But more than that, I now have alarm bells ringing in my brain, warning klaxons of the highest order. I look over my shoulder at the two unconscious men on the tarmac, connecting dots I should have connected from minute one.

“This isn’t their plane, is it?” I ask Turnbill. “It’s yours.”

Turnbill smirks, and somehow it’s still sexy. “Took you long enough. Maybe Jeff was right about you after all.”

Shit. How did I not see this sooner?

This whole time I thought Turnbill was working with these men, either by choice or by coercion. But they’re down for the count, and no one inside the plane is coming to their rescue. Which means no one inside the plane cares about them. But they do care about Turnbill, who’s currently holding a gun on me, and in no immediate danger.

I remember the matchstick man’s concern for Sandecker’s tardiness, and now I realize why. If the plane had landed and Turnbill got on before Matchstick Man and Humpty Dumpty got their hands on the box, they’d be shit out of luck. For all they know, Sandecker’s already on a plane to wherever Turnbill is taking this one.

I want to smack myself in the forehead, but I’m still holding the stun gun. If I do it, then either Turnbill will shoot me out of fear, or I’ll shock myself in the frontal lobe. Not that that would damage anything.

This
is the fucking exchange. Right here, right now. Turnbill was going to double-cross Sandecker, so he set up the fake exchange to throw her off the trail. They were both setting each other up, and me, Tully, Sergeant, Matchstick Man, and Humpty Dumpty are all pawns in their stupid little grudge match.

See? This is why I’m not a fucking PI. They would have spotted this bullshit a mile away. But me? No, I stumble around like a goddamn imbecile and waltz right up to the chick with a gun in her hand.

“I know you have the box,” Turnbill says for the umpteenth time. “Give it to me and I’ll shoot you.”

“Don’t you mean: Give it to me
or
I’ll shoot you?”

Turnbill’s smile chills the blood in my veins so hard Dracula would get fucking brain freeze if he were to bite me right now.

For some reason everyone thinks I wound up with that stupid box, and no one has yet to tell me why. Hell, I didn’t even realize I’d been set up until this very second, and these dinguses think I’m some paragon of intellectual efficiency?

I mean, sure—I found the box eventually, but it’s not like I woke up this morning with a stunning redhead to my left and a puzzle box to my right and thought,
Hmm, which shall I play with today?

Hang on—dingi? Dingosi?

Shit. Ignore me. Even I know that one’s stupid.

“I’m curious,” I say, switching tracks. “First Sandecker turned on you, and then you went and killed him. Exactly how many double crosses are going on in your little group?”

In response, and without any preamble whatso-fucking-ever, she fires four shots, two into each of her downed conspirators. It’s the most professional act of anything I’ve seen tonight, and that’s including all the moronic shit I’ve done since waking up.

Matchstick Man gurgles once as life drains from him like a radiator flush, while all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Hump…

You know what? I’ll leave that one alone. It’s too easy.

“That answer your question?” Turnbill asks calmly.

“Most eloquently. Thanks,” I shout back over the ringing in my ears. I mean, it doesn’t answer jack shit, but you try fucking telling her that.

No one in the plane responds, nor does anyone appear. Assuming anyone’s even in there, and it’s not two inflatable dolls sitting up front with plastic wings yanked from a Cracker Jack box duct taped to their chests. In that case I’m sure they’d have something to say to Turnbill in private about offing her business partners.

And that’s not even mentioning Meloni and Ehrle, whoever they are. I’m curious how Turnbill plans to justify all this.

She smiles at me like I’m now her bitch, or her co-conspirator. Neither’s all that appealing.

“You have the box, don’t you?”

That smile makes me nauseous. And dirty. And cheap. But mostly nauseous. I’m not getting out of this any other way. I have to give it up.

“Black bag on the other side of the SUV.” I jerk my head like I’m the third Butabi brother.

Please tell me someone got that one.
Night at the Roxbury
, anyone? No? Fuck all of you.

“Get it,” she says. “Consider it your last act of decency before an early death.”

You’re all heart, bitch.

“Is that wise?” I ask. “I’ll be out of sight doing God knows what.”

Turnbill wiggles the gun, directing me around the vehicle. I glance at Tully still unconscious on the tarmac before I head back the way I came. The bag is where I left it, and I drop to a knee.

“Slowly,” she tells me.

I raise one hand to show her that I’m not a fucking magician, reaching into the bag with the other one. I’m praying against all odds that what I’m about to try works. My fingers touch the smooth wood of the box, along with a small round cylinder, like a roll of Life Savers. I move quickly, tucking the cylinder between my palm and the box, then bring both out of the bag.

For what it’s worth, I may not be a magician, but I’ve learned a trick or two in my time.

When the box comes free, Turnbill lets out a little gasp between her succulent lips, and I know that if I manage to squeak out a win here tonight, I’ll be remembering that glorious sight for years to come.

What? Seriously, I’m probably going to die here anyway, so let me have my fantasies. Consider it a dying man’s last request.

“Tell me something,” I say, kneeling like a knight offering his undying fealty. “Were you always planning on stealing this for yourself?”

Regret flickers across her delicate features before turning to steam under her heated gaze. “No. But it was better than the alternative.”

Damn. I really, really want to follow up on that. But I have this sneaky suspicion I won’t be getting an answer.

Screw it. You only live once, right?

“Then why hire Sergeant?”

“I saw an email Jeff tried hiding from me. It looked like he was making plans to leave without me.”

“And was he?” Seriously, did she not ask? This is what’s wrong with the world today—nobody takes the time to learn shit. Everyone assumes, and I wind up on my knees looking like I’m proposing to the hottest sociopath to ever aim a gun at me.

And holy shit, you’d be surprised how often that’s happened. Come to think of it, one of them may have been an actual proposal.

Fuck. I should look into that sometime.

“So what happened?” I ask. “Why the clusterfuck?”

She studies me for a long time, deciding whether to talk, or just shoot me and yank the box from my warm, dead hand. Then she lets her breath out slowly.

“Sergeant called me after the exchange and said it was a wash. Jeff told me the same lie he told you. When Sergeant left empty-handed, I realized the truth.”

“So you went to his house to kill him?”

Another debate plays out across her stunning face, and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing I am—that she may very well be out of bullets, and is not shooting me simply because she can’t.

Easy killer. I’ll explain in a minute. Mommy and Daddy are talking right now.

“Not at first,” Turnbill finally says. She gives me a mischievous wink. “I went there to screw his brains out so he’d tell me on his own, but he was on to me.”

I’d say g
ood on you, Jeff
, except that, well, he’s fucking dead. If he’d nailed her on his giant desk and shut the hell up, I wouldn’t have had to touch a still-warm dead-man dick. But no, he’s kaput, and I’m wondering if there’s enough hand sanitizer in the universe to kill that memory.

I shake my head and bite my tongue. “Please, continue.”

She debates some more, and my she’s-out-of-bullets theory is sounding more plausible by the second.

“He was yelling,” she says. “He was angry at me for hiring Sergeant. We shouted a lot, and he laughed at me, calling me stupid.” She shrugs her shoulders without any real emotion behind the action. “I loved him, I guess, but nobody gets to call me that. So I grabbed his golf trophy and beat the shit out of him.”

Who says romance is dead?

“And then you shot him in the stomach.”

“I was aiming for his balls.”