Nina Wright - Whiskey Mattimoe 06 - Whiskey and Soda (22 page)

“Why?”

“By now somebody’s told him you got shot in the bump. He’s probably left three voicemails on your phone already.”

In fact, he had left four voicemails and two text messages. I had left my phone in my car. When I finally got hold of Jeb, he was en route to the archery range to check my condition for himself, before whisking me off to the E.R.

I did my best to assure him that I was fine. So fine in fact that I was heading to the office as soon as I concluded a little totally trivial business at the police station.

“You took an arrow in the womb,” Jeb insisted. “You need to see a doctor.”

“No, I took an arrow mostly in the leather jacket and a little in the epidermis. I’m all right.”

“Babe, I’m driving you to the hospital. We need to make sure the baby wasn’t traumatized.”

I took a deep breath. “The baby wasn’t touched. You’re the one acting traumatized, and frankly, you’re freaking me out. You’d better be a whole lot calmer than this when I go into labor.”

We compromised. I would drive to the police station and Jeb would meet me there. Brady Swancott, part-time peace officer and father of two, would arbitrate our next move. At least we could agree on that.

I was the first to arrive at the police station. When I walked in the door, the place appeared empty, which was not unusual. Most of the time there was no crime in Magnet Springs, so Brady spent his desk-duty shifts cooking or surfing the net. I sniffed. Nothing yummy coming from the kitchen today. I heard a soft woof, followed by the scrabble of dog paws on a linoleum floor. Officer Roscoe trotted toward me from the back office, tail wagging. As his brown eyes darted around the room, his tail action slowed like a pendulum winding down. Poor guy. He must have recognized my scent and assumed I came with the stocky four-legged tart.

“Sorry, dude. No Sandra,” I said. “I don’t even have the other one today. Abra’s working for a living.”

“Whiskey? Is that you?” Brady called out.

“It is.”

“Jenx called. She said you got shot in the bump by a fourth-grader.”

I followed his voice into the converted storage closet that was the station’s second office.

“I’m fine. Jeb wants me to see a doctor, but he’ll settle for your opinion.”

Frowning, Brady glanced up from his computer screen.

“I’m not sure my coursework in art history has prepared me for this.”

“How about your experience as a husband and father?”

“Brenda and I didn’t have any archery incidents while we were pregnant.”

I excused myself to use the restroom so I could clean the wound. My plan was to use the mirror above the sink to see whatever needed washing. That proved tricky since the wall mirror had been installed to reflect faces rather than bellies. It was hung much too high for my purpose unless I could climb up on the sink. I was in the process of doing that when the bathroom door flew open and Jeb rushed in.

“What the hell are you doing? You’re going to fall!”

Just because I was kneeling on the narrow edge of a slightly shaky pedestal sink didn’t mean I might fall, but I let Jeb help me down, anyhow. He positioned me to take best advantage of the overhead florescent light, and he knelt down to get a close look at my teeny-tiny wound. In less ridiculous circumstances, his posture might have heralded a good time. In this situation, it just made me laugh.

“There’s nothing funny about this,” Jeb scolded.

“Seriously? You’re on your knees in a police station bathroom trying to find an arrow-hole in my tummy.”

“Whiskey—” he began sternly, but when he glanced up at my face, he laughed, too. “Only you, babe. Only you could deliver your dog for a sex-date and get shot in your bump with an arrow.”

Giggling, I said, “I can’t take all the credit. I owe a big shout-out to Raphael Ramirez and his incredibly annoying mom. You can’t expect a woman with tits that size and shoes that high to keep track of her kid.”

I was laughing so hard my eyes watered.

“Hey, that’s a public restroom!” Brady called from his desk. “Don’t make me come in there.”

Jeb tenderly kissed my bare belly and cleaned the very small, shallow wound with soap and warm water. When we emerged from the restroom, Brady was still on the computer, the German shepherd at his feet.

“Roscoe’s been depressed since last night,” Brady explained. “He’s got a crush on Sandra Bullock.”

“More like an obscene obsession,” I said. “He can’t even walk on four legs when he sees her.”

Brady shrugged. “The blood rushes away from his brain.”

“What’s new with Tate McCoy?” I said, eager to change the subject.

“We’re waiting for a call from his attorney. If Kittler can convince Jenx that Tate will make full and immediate restitution, plus do community service, we’re gonna drop the charges. He’s fifteen, and he’s got no record.”

I shook my head. “I like Stevie a lot, but I’ve got a bad feeling about Tate.”

“Like a psychic feeling?” Brady asked.

“You know I got no intuition. This is more like common sense. Tate practically started a mutiny during the school assembly, then we find out he’s been destroying property. I think he’s a bad kid.”

“Maybe he’s going through a phase,” Jeb said.

“Or maybe he’s bad to the bone,” I said.

“A sociopath,” Brady theorized. “A kid with no conscience. Speaking of which, I hear you stole something.”

He held out a hand.

“Jenx told me to get something she could use when I toured the headmaster’s house.”

“She meant something like information,” Brady said.

I dropped the two flash drives in his palm. “Here’s your information.”

“If we’re lucky.”

Brady popped one into a USB port and clicked a few keys. “Of course nothing we find here is admissible in court, but we’re not officially working this case, anyway.”

He cocked his head at the computer screen.

“It’s encrypted. Somebody wanted to protect this.”

“Can you un-encrypt it?” I said.

“Decrypt it, you mean. I can’t, but I know someone who can.”

“Another cop?”

“Sort of. Chester.”

“Our Chester?”

“He took an online encryption seminar last summer. Jenx and I were hoping we’d come up with something he could try his skills on and here it is.”

“This could be sophisticated stuff,” Jeb said.

“Probably not. Whiskey stole it from the headmaster of a private elementary school. We’re not talking corporate espionage.”

“Vreelander was career Army,” I reminded Brady. “What if this is military software? State of the art, top secret stuff?”

“We’ll let Chester take a crack at it. Hand me the second flash drive.”

He removed the first, replacing it with my other “theft.” By now, all three of us were watching the screen, waiting for the flash drive to load.

“That’s more like it,” Brady said. “No encryption here. Large files, probably media.”

As he spoke, he clicked open Folder A.

“That’s it. Videos and photos.”

I was imagining elementary school sports events, classroom presentations, holiday plays. What bloomed on the screen was something else altogether: Pauline Vreelander in the buff. Sprawled like a Rubeneque beauty on a leather divan, she dangled a bunch of red grapes over her head with one hand and caressed each piece of fruit with her tongue, moaning as she did so. I turned away before I could look for her other hand.

The boys in the room had their own responses, neither professional nor mature. Their eyes stayed on the screen.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to see this,” I said.

“I don’t think you were supposed to steal this,” Jeb rejoined, laughing. “You found Vreelander’s secret stash.”

“Home grown,” Brady added. “Man, there must be twenty videos on here.”

The guys guffawed like middle-schoolers. Suddenly, I did feel like a criminal. I had invaded the Vreelanders’ private lives. On the bright side, I had inadvertently answered my own questions about the nature of their marriage. Mark had found his wife alluring, and he had found a way to sustain himself during their long separations.

“Turn it off,” I barked at Brady.

“Just making sure there’s nothing illegal in the rest of these files,” Brady said.

“Now,” I growled.

All the males in the room, including Roscoe, snarled at me and then settled down.

“I’ll take that, thank you.” My hand was out, ready to receive the X-rated flash drive. “I wonder why this one isn’t encrypted.”

“Are you kidding?” Brady and Jeb said in unison.

I wasn’t kidding. I wanted to know. The guys exchanged glances.

Jeb said, “Whiskey, you only encrypt what you want to hide.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Vreelander didn’t want to hide this. He used it.”

“Ewww. Got it. Now give it to me.”

Brady did. I had an overwhelming urge to find hand sanitizer.

“What are you gonna do with it?” Brady said. “Ring Mrs. Vreelander’s doorbell and tell her you took it by mistake?”

The guys laughed again. It wasn’t like I was a prude. While married to Leo, I was the subject of similarly sexy videos and photos, made for our eyes only. Staged simply for our own spontaneous fun. Not for Leo’s later stealth-use. Or were they? Whatever happened to those little films? A wave of anxiety rolled through me. What if Leo’s nasty daughter Avery had found them during the months when she lazed around my house with her infant twins letting the nanny I’d hired do all her work? Avery might do anything with those movies. She might show them to my friends, show them to my enemies or even post them online. Chester had said she was an online buzz-maker. I shuddered.

“You okay, babe?” Jeb asked. “You don’t look so good. Better sit down.”

I let him lead me to the sofa in Jenx’s office, where I lay down. I didn’t feel well at all. Screw the arrow wound. Guilt plus worry will fell the strongest among us.

I deeply wanted to get back, fast and hard, into the Real Estate game, but I also had karma to settle or restore or rebalance. Whatever it is you have to do to fix that stuff. All I knew was that I had overstepped a cosmic boundary in removing at least one of those flash drives, and I needed to make things right.

As I lay, eyes closed, on the too-short couch in Jenx’s office, my shoeless feet balanced on the threadbare arms, my cell phone rang.

“Want me to get that for you, babe?” Jeb asked. He was keeping me company on an adjacent chair, doing good-daddy duty massaging my size tens.

Shifting my weight, I slid the phone out of my hip pocket. Caller ID announced Pauline Vreelander. My first response was to drop the phone on the floor in a panic of guilt. My second response was to scoop it up, answer it, and fix my world.

“Hello, Pauline. What can I do for you?”

I assumed she wanted the name of the real estate attorney who could handle the immediate cash sale of her house to George Bentwood on behalf of The Bentwood School. But if Pauline had been calling to demand the return of her flash drives, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. I would have crawled over there on all fours and begged her forgiveness, then I would have hunted down Avery and demanded to know if she’d ever found her father’s stash.

“Whiskey, I’ve decided not to sell the house to The Bentwood School. I would like you to list it and sell it.”

I was on my feet moving toward the door so fast that Jeb had to follow me with my shoes. Of course, I would list the Fresno Avenue property, I told Pauline, and I would sell it for more than George Bentwood had offered.

I had a secret weapon—Irene Houston, office manager and receptionist. I might not understand how my mother’s juju worked, but Odette wasn’t the only salesperson getting great business vibes, and this deal came with a bonus, a legit excuse for me to re-enter the Vreelanders’ home and replace the flash drive that rightfully belonged to the widow.

I just hoped I wouldn’t picture her naked the next time we met.

The one snag in my business plan—and, hence, my karma—was that Pauline Vreelander couldn’t meet with me until that evening. First, she had to handle the remaining details concerning her husband’s remains. His wish was to be cremated and to have his ashes scattered on the family farm in his home state of Kentucky. Or was it Kansas? Truth be told, I was only half listening. The other half of my attention was on Brady as he conversed with somebody phoning in an anonymous tip about the president of The Bentwood School.

Sensing my interest, Brady switched to speaker phone. The woman caller, who refused to give her name, seemed to be altering her voice. I guessed that she was lowering it while speaking through a muffling piece of cloth. She might also have faked the thick accent although we do have Germans in this part of the state.

“George Bentwood is not who he says he is,” she intoned. “You must do a thorough background check. The man is up to no good.”

“Ma’am, a background check won’t reveal what anybody’s up to,” Brady said. “It can only show what somebody has already done.”

“Well, he has done plenty that he should be ashamed of, and he won’t stop. He uses money and privilege to cover his tracks.”

“Can you be more specific?” Brady said.

The woman had hung up.

“I think that’s about his womanizing,” I told Brady, forgetting that I still had Pauline Vreelander on the phone.

“Pardon?” Pauline said. “Who’s a womanizer?”

“Sorry. I was just talking about … um … ”

My eyes scanned the room for a bailout. They lighted on Jeb, still helpfully holding up my shoes.

“Jeb,” I told Pauline, not wanting to leak the latest police station developments.

“Your husband is a womanizer?” she asked.

“My ex-husband. Well, he used to be. I don’t know if that’s true now—”

“You don’t know?” Jeb demanded.

Before I could reply, he dropped both my shoes and exited the police station. Hastily, I concluded my phone business with Pauline and started to go after him. Roscoe blocked my way, growling.

This wasn’t our first fight since Jeb’s return; it was just our first fight since his return that had nothing to do with dogs. This one was entirely my fault, at least that was how Brady and Roscoe saw it, and they were eye witnesses.