The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (35 page)

He came to his knees, then his feet. He rushed me. I swung for the seats and connected with his left kidney.

He roared in pain, jumped back, and clutched his battered side. From outside came the sounds of a scuffle.

Lyle regarded me with murder in his eyes, which I thought was fair since he had it everywhere else in his body. He came at me again. I took a left-handed stance. Big swing and a miss. But close.

He abruptly turned and ran toward the front door. I knew it was locked, and if he thought about it he’d realize the same, since I’d made him go around back when he arrived. But he didn’t think about it, or he didn’t care, and for all I knew the door would open from the inside. I took
off
after him, into the dim light farthest from the fluorescents.

He had five paces on me when his mighty shoulder crashed into the front door. It bowed but remained shut. “Damn it to hell,” he muttered, staring at the door like it had personally insulted him. He turned, snatched an eight-inch pot that was home to some nondescript cactus, and hurled it at the wall. Glass splintered. Chain-link fence confronted him. He made an animal noise.

I almost had him then, but he saw me coming and took off. He ended up in the same blind alley in which Eugene Rand had taken a poke at me with a euphorbia.

I wondered if maybe this particular shotgun could handle more than two shells. But, given what I knew about guns, I’d probably blow myself up trying to find out, and I didn’t think Lyle would tell me if I asked. “Give it up, Lyle,” I said. “It’ll make it easier for you if you give up now.”

“No,” he said. “It’ll make it easier for
you.”
He picked up a gorgeous crested golden barrel cactus, with inch-long yellow spines and a body twisted into a beautiful otherworldly brain shape. It was the biggest crest of that species I’d ever
seen
. At least it was until he threw it at me and I ducked and it crashed into a saguaro and broke into a half dozen pieces.

It was quickly followed by a
Stapeliantbus neronis
in a six-inch pot, a lumpish yet desirable succulent milkweed. This missile disintegrated on the bench top, generating enough cuttings to supply the entire CCCC. “Lyle, you’re ruining some amazing plants,” I said, always careful to keep things in perspective.

“What do I care? I can’t have any plants in the big house.” A stunning
Pachypodium brevicaule
whooshed at me. Picture a potato with big yellow flowers. I batted it aside with the shotgun.

I had to end it. Not only was he decimating the collection, but one of these times he was going to connect, and I would be picking spines from my eyes and not just my forearms. I took a step toward him. “Na-na-na-na-na,” I said in a voice that would have infuriated any eight-year-old.

Lyle was considerably older than that. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, launching a volley of hooked-spined mammillaria.

Another two steps. “Magda wears army boots,” I said.

His face turned vicious and he came at me. I ducked his outstretched hands, extended my arm to its limit, and swept the shotgun into a mighty arc. I caught the hanger of the pot containing the giant
Euphorbia antisyphilitica
that Rand had almost sent down upon us. It teetered once, twice, and, just as Lyle’s hands encircled my throat, it slipped off its water pipe and descended onto his head.

Something made a cracking noise—bone or plastic, I
wasn’t sure which. Lyle’s hands dropped from my neck. He said, “Oof,” or something similar, and collapsed unconscious at my feet.

I ran outside. Gina had Magda in a pretty damned good full nelson. “Lyle?” she asked.

“He was tired,” I said. “He’s taking a nap.”

I
RUSHED BACK INSIDE TO CHECK ON RAND. AS I KNELT AT
his side he sat up and took a swing at me. I caught his fist in my hand. “Eugene,” I said. “It’s me. Joe.”

He slowly focused. “Did we get ’em?”

“We got ’em. I’m sorry I acted like I thought you did it. I’m sorry I put you through that.”

“Doesn’t matter. We got ’em.”

I helped him up, pointed him at the first-aid kit, and called the police. They said they’d send somebody and page Burns at home. While they were at it, I said, could they send some paramedics for Rand? He’d patched himself up and was wandering around, righting overturned pots, but I couldn’t tell if the daze he was in was any different from his normal one.

As I waited for reinforcements I stood over Lyle with the shotgun at the ready. Merlin the mule popped into my mind. I wondered who would take care of him now, with his owners in, as Lyle had called it, “the big house.”

Ten minutes after I called, two officers arrived and took the Tillises into custody. The paramedics were next. They checked Rand over and said he probably had a concussion
and just to be on the safe side they ought to take him to the hospital. They loaded him on a gurney. One tucked him in while the other went to check Lyle’s head.

Burns showed up. Casillas too. Burns told the paramedics to hold on a minute, asked Rand a couple of questions, and said he could go, that she’d catch up with him at the hospital.

He was rather pleased about all the attention he was getting. “This is the most excitement I’ve ever had,” he told me as they wheeled him into the ambulance. “I’m certainly glad I sent you that e-mail. Although at the time I didn’t know it was you.”

“You’re Succuman?”

“Yes. I’m rather proud of that ID.”

“As well you should be. But why’d you deny you’d ever seen a striped milii when I came to see you? The day you attacked me.”

“I thought you might be the killer.”

“So you told some total stranger on the Internet, who you hadn’t an inkling the identity of, to go looking for this big clue.”

“I liked the tone of the request. Clever and to the point.”

“Gina wrote it.”

He nodded. “I liked that it came from a woman. Design-woman, you know? No one who could ever, you know, have relations with Brenda.”

Best not to show him the light. “How’d you know the plant had something to do with the murders?”

“I didn’t, for sure. But it seemed so important to Brenda, I just had a hunch.”

After the paramedics drove Rand off, Gina and I answered some questions for the two detectives. Burns said we’d have to come down the next day and make a statement. We said okay and turned to go, but I stopped and walked
back up to Casillas. He was wiping his forehead with a tissue. “You owe me an apology,” I said.

“For what?”

“For dragging me down to the station not once, but twice, and generally treating me like a criminal.”

“That’s what I get paid for. So I was wrong. Big deal.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” He turned his back on me and went to talk to one of the officers.

“Maybe I can apologize for him.” It was Burns, in a snug black T-shirt and jeans, looking a lot more attractive than she usually did in her cop suits.

I shook my head. “Not necessary. He’s probably right.”

“He’s a hell of a cop.”

“As are you, Detective Burns.”

We eyed each other for a second or three. “We’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and gathered up Gina. We rode home in silence and pulled into my driveway in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

We sat on the couch, spooning rocky road from a container of Dreyer’s I found in the back of the freezer. An empty bottle of witch hazel sat on the table before us, its contents spent on my sting and spine punctures. We talked about Brenda, and my father, and Eugene Rand, and everybody else we’d encountered since stumbling upon Brenda’s body. Everyone except Carlos and Amanda. Somehow we skipped around them.

My eyes kept slipping closed. Gina’s as well. I said, “It’s bedtime,” and Gina nodded sleepily.

We stood up and she began removing cushions from the
couch. I put a hand on her arm, turned her around to face me. “Gi?”

“Yes?”

“How would you feel about sleeping together?”

Her eyes searched my face. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.”

I shook my head. “I mean just sleeping. In the same bed.”

“Oh. Didn’t I suggest that just the other day?”

“It was a good suggestion.”

I let her use the bathroom first. When she was done I went in. I brushed my teeth and stripped to my Jockeys. Put my T-shirt back on. Took it off again and came out. When I looked at the bed, I cleared my throat.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“You’re on my side.”

She grinned. “It’s my side too.”

“At your house it’s your side. At my house it’s mine. When we do this at your house, you can sleep on that side.”

“When we do it at my house? Is this going to become a habit?”

“I don’t know. It might. Let’s see how it works out tonight.”

She laughed and shoved over. I turned off the light and slid in beside her. We lay there, a foot or two apart. I reached out and took her hand in my own. I listened to her breathing, slow and regular. “Gi?”

“Hmm?”

“Tonight, when Lyle threw Rand at me, and you got the drop on him with the gun. I couldn’t really tell what was going on, and for a second it looked like Lyle was going to do something really awful to you.” I squeezed her fingertips. “That was one of the worst moments of my life. The thought of losing you—”

She reached over and placed a finger on my lips. “Lets not talk about it, okay? We’re safe now. Go to sleep, baby.”

We moved a bit closer and slipped off into dreamland.

The first thing I saw when I awoke was Gina’s face. After all that fuss we’d both ended up on my side of the bed. The two of us were entangled there, wrapped up like a couple of kittens.

She had a bit of sleep stuff in the corner of one eye. Her breath eased in, out, in, out; her lips were ever so slightly parted. Her black hair fell effortlessly over the side of her face. I wrapped a bit around my fingers, moved it aside.

She woke up. I watched the split second of disorientation, then she smiled as she realized where she was. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to move my head just a few inches, lay my lips upon hers. I’m pretty sure I know what would have happened.

And after that, what? Things were safe the way they were. So instead of traveling those few inches, I disengaged myself. I rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom. If she’d asked me to come back, I would have. But she didn’t.

By the time I finished showering, she was dressed. We went back up to her place so she could clean up and change and took separate vehicles to see Burns and Casillas. We didn’t talk about that morning for a long time.