Racing the Devil (8 page)

“He looked like shit. I don’t know what’s going on with him. Wendy says I have to let him have his ‘space.’ ” His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “He’s into all this occult stuff. I think he might be into drugs. Or worse.”

I had no idea what to say. In the middle of a family crisis, my brother had taken a second mortgage just to get me out of a jam. And Maria and D.W. Where had that come from?

“I’m sorry,” I said at last.

“Yeah, so am I.” He gave a bark of nervous laughter. “I didn’t mean to dump this on you.”

“Dump away.” I stared out at the scenery as we whizzed past. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Getting yourself out of this jam is the least you can do. Manage that, and we’ll call it even.”

I caught myself before I started drumming on my thighs. “I’m on the job,” I said. And I was. The only problem was, I had no idea where to start.

THAT WASN’T ENTIRELY TRUE
. I had a few ideas, but I was hampered by the fact that my name—and, thanks to Ashleigh, my face—had been plastered all over the news. I could disguise the latter, but Tennessee detective licenses were photo I.D.s. It would be tough to conduct an investigation without showing my credentials.

Before I worried about any of that, though, I wanted a hot shower, a home-cooked meal, and a night in my own bed. With clean sheets. And a real, honest-to-God pillow.

Randall dropped me off at Jay’s place in Mt. Juliet and waved goodbye. I watched his Saturn round the bend. Then, feeling drained, I trudged up the long, winding driveway to Jay’s sprawling, two-story farmhouse.

“Jay, I’m home.” I pushed open the antique mailroom door with the stained glass insert and walked in. The smell of garlic and cinnamon wafted from the kitchen, triggering a Pavlovian response.

Jay came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a Fourth of July dishtowel. When he saw me, he stopped short and pressed a hand to his mouth. “Oh my God. What did they do to you?”

I flicked my tongue across the scab on my lip, wondering if I should tell him how much I’d healed since Monday. “Just a little welcoming gift. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“I hope not, honey, because it looks awful. Black eye, busted lip, bruises the size of hockey pucks.” He wrapped one arm around himself and propped the other elbow on it as he catalogued my injuries. “At least they didn’t break your nose.”

I thought of LeQuintus, flexing his muscles. “Not for lack of trying.”

He stepped closer and gave me a quick and awkward hug. “Well. It’s good to have you back. We’ve all been worried sick about you. Come in. Sit down. I made your favorite chicken. Roasted with garlic, basil, and rosemary. Just a touch of thyme. Fresh corn on the cob. Salad with arugula and baby oak leaves, with Vidalia onion dressing. And apple pie for dessert, with cheese or
à la mode.”
He laughed. “Don’t I sound like quite the little housewife?”

“I’ve been eating powdered eggs and country fried mystery meat for days. Not exactly gourmet dining.” I kept my tone light. Randall says Jay has a crush on me and likes to pretend we’re a couple. I don’t know about that. It’s not the kind of thing you can come right out and ask. Besides, I’m not sure what I’d do if he admitted it. So I ignore it.

Cowardly? I never said I wasn’t.

I followed him into the kitchen. As Jay was drizzling the dressing over our salads, I did a quick survey of his appearance.

A light layer of pancake base covered two small lesions on his cheek. A hint of blush negated his usual pallor. He looked okay, I decided. Keeping up his weight enough to keep from wasting. He was wearing tight jeans and a pale blue shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons. Too uptown for a night at home.

“Hot date tonight?” I asked.

He blushed. “You don’t mind, do you? You just getting home and all? I can call and cancel.”

“No. I’m going to crash after dinner, anyway. I feel like I haven’t slept in a month.”

“I didn’t know you were going to be arrested when I said I’d go out with him.”

“Really, Jay. It’s okay. I was going to be lousy company anyway.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

Over the years, Jay has amassed an impressive collection of murky sources of information. ‘Contacts,’ he calls them, from the years he spent programming computers for Nashville businesses back before he made his fortune in gaming. This may be true, but I suspect his considerable webmaster skills also come into play. Hacking. Cracking. Whatever you want to call it. Some things I’d just as soon not know.

“Later,” I said. “You can try and find out if there was an insurance policy on Amy Hartwell. Tonight, go out and have a ball.”

His date arrived as I was finishing the last crumbs of my pie. Jay hurried to the door to let him in, then led him back into the kitchen just as I was pushing my chair away from the table.

“Jared, this is Eric Gunnersen. Eric . . . Jared McKean.”

Eric, tall and Nordic-looking as his name implied, gave me a cool once-over and licked his lips. “Mmm. Rough trade. Cute, though. Should I be jealous?”

Jay gave me a playful slap on the shoulder as I carried my dirty dishes to the dishwasher. “Honey, he’s as straight as half a dozen arrows.”

The Viking gave a deep, theatrical sigh. “Pity,” he said. “The best-looking ones are always straight.”

Which was not only a shitty thing to say to Jay, but also probably untrue. Sit behind a group of women in a Starbucks sometime. Sooner or later, one of them is going to point to some stranger and say, “That guy’s way too good-looking. Ten to one he’s gay.”

I decided I didn’t like Eric Gunnersen.

Jay seemed not to realize he’d been insulted. “Isn’t that the truth,” he agreed. He picked up the bottle he’d put his evening meds in, flashed me a sad but hopeful smile, and tucked his hand into the crook of Eric’s arm. “Don’t wait up, darlin’. I intend to dance until the cows come home.”

It was bravado speaking. We both knew he’d tire long before dawn, probably before midnight. The AZT cocktail kept him alive, but it also left him listless and fatigued.

“Don’t forget your red shoes, then,” I said, referring to one of his favorite films.

He picked up one foot to show me his snakeskin cowboy boots. “Oh, honey. I have something better than red shoes tonight. I have boots made from the foreskins of the rare and priceless Ming snake. Do you know how many foreskins it takes to make a boot this size? And every one is endowed with incredible virility and vitality.”

“Get out of here, you lunatic.” I steered him and the Viking toward the door. “Reptiles don’t have foreskins.”

“They don’t?” He turned to Eric and said
sotto voce
, “He knows this from experience, of course. Years of examining the genitalia of a thousand species of
genus reptilicus
. He’s considered a giant in his field.”

I closed the door behind them just as Eric said, “I’m considered a giant in my field too. Why don’t we go to my place, and I’ll show you my credentials.”

Since Jay wasn’t my kid sister and I couldn’t fly out of the house and flatten Eric in defense of his honor, I turned on the dishwasher and went out to the barn to feed and water the horses, hoping the blond Viking wouldn’t turn out to be a complete shit after all. I didn’t have high hopes for that, though. Jay’s taste in men had turned out to be a lot like my taste in women lately. He picked the ones most likely to pour acid on his heart.

I
THOUGHT I
’
D FALL ASLEEP
before my head hit the pillow. But there was something eerie about being in my own room, where everything was so familiar, and yet everything had changed. There was a subtle disorder to the room, along with the black residue of fingerprint powder. It looked like Jay had tried to clean it up, but there were still traces of it in the cracks and crannies.

The hairs on my forearms prickled as I realized they hadn’t been looking for my fingerprints, which were already on file, but for Amy Hartwell’s.

My gun cabinet had been emptied, the rifles and handguns confiscated as evidence. The room looked empty without them.

I ran my fingers over my desk, picked up the framed photograph of my father. I was four when he died. He’d come back from Vietnam with a silver star and a purple heart, spent three years as a patrol officer, went out for cigarettes one evening and was killed while protecting a seventy-year-old convenience store cashier from a cranked-up junkie waving a .45.

Maria used to ask when I was going to stop trying to live up to him.

Frank Campanella was my friend, and he had seen this picture maybe a dozen times, but the thought of him dusting it for prints made my stomach roil.

Mom’s picture smiled up at me from the opposite corner of the desk. She passed away when I was fourteen. Cancer. It happened fast. Diagnosed in February, buried in June, and in between, the radiation treatments, the nausea, and the pain. By the time she died, she’d scream when you touched her. I was both relieved and bereft when she died.

I pictured clumsy fingers pawing at my mother’s face, jostling my guitar, riffling through my books: Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, a couple of John Grishams, a handful of thrillers and graphic novels, and a shelf full of books on criminology, psychology, and horsemanship. I imagined Frank and Harry poring through my photo albums, thick with photographs of Paulie and Maria. I envisioned them searching my closet, rough hands rifling the pockets of my suits and jeans and the linings of my L.L.Bean shirts.

And I felt violated.

Don’t get me wrong. I understood why these things were being done, and why they had to be done. I would have done the same things, in Frank’s place. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

Exhaustion has a way of catching up to you, though, and finally I sank into a sleep so deep it verged on coma.

I didn’t hear when Jay came home, but he must have, because when I awoke, the sun was streaming through my curtains and the house smelled of pancakes and fresh-brewed coffee. By the time I’d showered, shaved, and dressed, breakfast was on the table. Jay was humming some romantic tune, something from an old Bing Crosby flick.

“Nice night?” I asked.

“God, yes.” His grin was childlike, beatific. I thought he looked a little wan without the makeup, but the lesions seemed a little less noticeable than they had the week before. “He’s incredible, Jared. Smart, funny, unbelievably handsome. And, of course, the sex was incredible.”

I tried not to envision that. “Well. Good. Good for you. When are you going to see him again?”

He brought a creamer brimming with warm syrup to the table and set it in front of me. “He’s going to call me tonight.”

“Ah.”

He looked pained. “Don’t give me, ‘ah.’ He said he’d call, he’ll call. You have no idea what a fabulous time we had last night.”

“I know. I hope he calls.”

He took a bite of pancake and washed it down with a swig of juice and a pill. He took twenty or thirty pills a day, some every few hours, some on an empty stomach, some with meals. Along with his meds, he took Shaklee food supplements by the handful: C, E, beta-carotene, garlic, calcium, a multivitamin, and who knew what all, washed down with a soy protein drink and an ungodly blend of homemade juices. The mixture this morning was carrot, celery, and beet juices, sweetened with orange and pineapple.

It wasn’t bad.

We steered away from the subject of Mr. Perfect and moved on to more pragmatic matters. My truck had been impounded, and it might be weeks before I got it back. So if I was going to investigate Amy Hartwell’s homicide, I was going to need wheels.

“Oh, please.” Jay rolled his eyes. “Give me a real problem. You can just drive mine.” He worked from home these days and rarely drove his silver Buick LeSabre. It was tempting, but a man can only take so many favors.

“You’ve done enough already. Randall told me you helped with the bail. Thanks for that too, by the way.”

He shrugged. “What are friends for? I know you’d do the same for me. Besides, with you gone, who would I cook and clean for?”

“I don’t ask you to do that.”

He sighed, touched my forearm gently. I tried not to let it make me uncomfortable, but it was hard not to think of it as seductive. “Honey, I want to do that. It makes me feel needed.”

“Jay . . .”

“Ssshhh.” He moved his hand from my arm and pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t say it. I know what you are, and what I am. And I know there is no way in this world that you’re ever going to feel about me the way I feel about you. But I like to think that when I . . . when the end comes, you’ll be here.”

I toyed with my fork, the pancakes suddenly sodden and unappealing. “You know I will,” I mumbled. I wanted to tell him that would be years from now. I wanted to tell him there might even be a cure by then. But we both knew the odds on that.

“All right, then. If you’d do that for me, the least I can do is cook you a few meals. Besides, it’s good for me. If it were only me, I might subsist on cold cereal and potato chips.”

I forced a laugh. “You? The semi-vegetarian gourmet?”

“Ah, yes.” His smile was sad. “But what good is it, if there’s no one there to share it with?”