What Washes Up (20 page)

Wyatt ate another Cheeto, then he poured Maggie another glass of wine, topped off his own, and put the wine back in the fridge.

He picked up the two glasses and walked into the dining area. Patrick was standing just inside the French doors, his arm stretched out toward Wyatt. Wyatt had just enough time to think about diving for the kitchen floor. He even managed to start to pivot to the right before Patrick fired, and pain and heat exploded in Wyatt’s lower abdomen.

He heard the sound of the wine glasses shattering, saw the bottom of the refrigerator as his face hit the cold tile floor. Then there was just nothing.

Maggie dropped the contact lens in the sink as the gunshot rang out.

She froze, stopped breathing, and listened, but heard nothing. The only thing she could see through the open bathroom door was the edge of Wyatt’s bedroom door across the dark hall.

She pressed her lips shut before she could call out to Wyatt. If he hadn’t called out to her first, it was either because he couldn’t or because he shouldn’t. She reached around to the back of her jeans and her entire body went cold. She wasn’t wearing her holster. Her service weapon was in her purse. Out there.

She very carefully took one step closer to the bathroom door, gently setting the rubber sole of her hiking boot down on the tile. Then she took two slow, silent breaths, breathing out through her mouth, consciously trying to slow her heart and quiet the pounding of blood in her ears.

Then she leaned forward and listened.

Patrick stepped slowly toward the kitchen area, stopped before he got to the half wall that blocked his view of the kitchen itself. He hadn’t expected Wyatt to come around the corner, but he had. After, he’d expected Maggie to come flying out from the kitchen, but she hadn’t.

He waited by the wall and listened. The only things he could hear were the sounds of the rain pattering behind him and the hum of the refrigerator. He didn’t hear a sound from Wyatt, but he’d seen the red spot blossoming on his stomach before he’d even dived for the floor. He knew he’d hit him. He just wasn’t sure how good, or whether Wyatt had a gun in there.

He listened for a few more seconds, then took another cautious step forward and leaned out enough to see part of the kitchen. Wyatt’s feet, barefoot soles up. He watched the feet for a few more seconds, then stepped around.

Glass crunched underneath his feet, and he froze. Wyatt was partly on his right side, partly on his stomach, his head up against the fridge. His eyes were closed, his hands still and empty. Patrick watched his face, but it didn’t even twitch. There was no flickering around the eyelids.

Patrick blinked as a rain drop slid from his hair to his own eyelid. Then he took another step forward, his eyes darting back and forth between Wyatt and the living room. He could see almost the entire room and he was pretty sure she wasn’t in it.

The only door was the front door. That had to be a hallway wall on the other side of the breakfast bar. She would be there. Maybe right there. He raised his arm, trained the gun in that general direction while he looked back down at Wyatt. There was no blood on his back, though there was already a pool of it beginning underneath him.

Patrick glanced once more at the wall, then shoved at Wyatt’s hip with his foot. Wyatt rolled over onto his back after the second push. Man, he was a mess. He thought maybe Wyatt’s chest was moving, but he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t going to lean over and check, and he wasn’t walking around that corner so she could blow his ass away, either.

He needed his own corner, his own wall. She could come to him, but he still had an appointment with the old man. He’d go out, but he’d go out when he was done.

Maggie heard the sound of broken glass on tile, the sound of someone stepping slowly on broken glass. Wyatt was in his bare feet. Whoever was there was in the kitchen or dining area, she knew that. She swallowed as she wondered where Wyatt was, then made herself shift her focus. Could be one person, could be more. But it
felt
like one. She could feel the occupancy the way a person could walk into a house and feel that they were the only one there.

She heard another soft crunching of glass, and she took a quiet breath and poked her head just far enough around the doorway to see the hall. There was no one in it, but she hadn’t expected there to be.

She could see nothing of the kitchen area, except the line where the tile began, right at the wall of the kitchen. Her head felt naked, exposed, and the hairs on it responded by standing up, her scalp jerking like a spider had just walked up her leg.

She pulled her head back in and lowered herself to a crouch, listened. Nothing. She needed to get across the hallway, to see if she could see into the dining area. She had no way to tell if the person stepped on the glass on their way in or on their way out. Whoever it was might not even know there was someone else in the house.

She remembered her purse sitting on the floor by the breakfast bar and her stomach turned over.

Being out in the hallway when someone turned that corner would be fatal. But waiting in the bathroom wasn’t going to be any less so. And Wyatt was out there.

She slowly eased her head back through the doorway.

“Really, Maggie? You and Wyatt?” a man’s voice called.

She jerked her head back in, her heart pounding even harder than it had been. Who was that? She knew she recognized the voice. Her brain started whipping through a mental Rolodex of men’s voices.

“What a stereotype,” the man called out. Maggie’s eyes focused on the toilet paper holder across from her as she sorted through voices in her head.

“Hey, Maggie, does my father know?” the man called, and then laughed, almost a giggle.

Maggie’s mouth opened and then closed. Patrick? Her eyes darted around as she tried to process that as quickly as possible. What the hell? Her first, useless thought was that he was pissed about the search at Sea-Fair, and she immediately brushed over it. She knew Patrick’s opinion of Wyatt was mostly disdain, and that he couldn’t stand her. But that wasn’t something for a very public man to throw everything away for. He was the Assistant State’s Attorney. He was rich. He was a Boudreaux.

A Boudreaux.
I’m tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes
. She felt a quick swell of nausea as she realized that she hadn’t just withheld information in a case, she had become incapable of working one. If Harper had said Smith, she wouldn’t have just picked one Smith out of the phone book and decided it was him. Why had she been so stupid?

A small voice reminded her that she had just watched David get killed, and that she had just been shot. That her entire month had been surreal and mind-bending. She quelled the voice quickly; she didn’t have time to excuse herself. She needed to get out there and find Wyatt. She needed to get out there and get her gun.

She took a shallow breath and eased her head back out the doorway. She heard a scraping noise she couldn’t define. She still couldn’t tell exactly where he was. Which side of the breakfast bar he was on was the difference between suicide and possible survival.

She got up on the balls of her feet, then silently dashed slightly diagonally across the hall to Wyatt’s bedroom, being careful not to brush against the open door. She took a second to catch her breath and listen, as she crouched just inside the room.

“Your
other
boyfriend’s not looking too good, Maggie,” Patrick called. Then he spoke at a more normal volume. “You slut.”

Maggie pushed the fear and then the anger down, shoved them into their own box and closed the lid. Then she blinked a few times. The vision in her right eye was blurry, but she could think around it. She just needed to stay cool. She edged closer to the doorway and peeked.

Wyatt’s room was only about a foot closer to the living area, and it didn’t provide her a much better view. But when she leaned out just a bit further, she could see part of the wall across from the kitchen, and there she saw Patrick’s shadow. She was pretty sure he was in the actual kitchen.

She heard him step on more glass as she pulled herself back into Wyatt’s room. He wasn’t bothering to be stealthy anymore. She heard something move on the counter.

“You know, you should be grateful, Maggie,” Patrick said, his voice just slightly louder than a conversational volume. “If Pop found out you were sleeping around on him, he’d kill you. And I promise you he wouldn’t do it nearly so nicely.”

Maggie took a couple of breaths and closed her eyes for just a second, saw the hallway in her mind, measured her distance. She was dead if he walked around that bar and looked. But she was dead either way.

She looked back out the doorway, saw the shadow moving, and waited. It stopped, and she heard him move or put something hard on the counter.

She blinked once, slowly, and in the space of time that her eyes were closed, she saw Kyle swing at a curve ball, felt Sky’s head on her back at the sink. Then she pushed herself out into the hall.

Once there, she stood up slowly, and put her back to the wall but not on it. It wouldn’t matter which side of the hall she was on if he took a look around the corner, but she needed to try to keep an eye on his shadow.

“Hey Maggie? It occurs to me that I’m basically cleaning up your entire love life for you,” Patrick said. “First your hubby, now Wyatt, and pretty soon your sugar daddy. I bet that rankles, huh?”

Maggie slowed her breathing to almost nothing and made herself stare at a scratch on the opposite wall, until she could zone out everything that he had just said. She waited a moment, until she felt the cold, slow, wave of calm flow into her mind, then started inching her way down the hall, her eyes on the dining area wall. He was moving, but standing in one place.

“I don’t have all night, Maggie,” he called. “Gotta go see the old man.”

Maggie kept moving, and when she was about three feet from the end of the hall, she switched sides. She heard a sound she couldn’t quite make out. It didn’t make sense to her. She stopped, her back nearly against the wall, six inches of drywall separating her from Patrick. She listened, and blinked when she heard the noise again. He was eating the damn Cheetos.

She slowly sank down into a crouch, and crabbed her way another foot or so toward the kitchen. She heard him doing something else at the counter and stopped.

“Aw. I broke my little spoon,” she heard him say to himself.

She edged forward again, and came to the end of the wall. She got on her knees so she could lean forward just a bit, then tilted her head toward the breakfast bar. Her purse was there, under the closest stool, but it was still about three feet away, too far to just reach out and grab it.

She started inching forward on her hands and knees. Patrick, sounding so close, sniffed and then coughed softly. She laid down on her stomach, praying he wasn’t tall enough to see her, and reached out for her bag.

She tried to mentally inventory her purse, to remember what would jingle, what would clink, as she slid it slowly onto the carpet, then pulled it back with her. She got back up into a crouch at the end of the wall, then reached into her purse and put her hands on her holster. She slid the Glock 23 from her purse, and only remembered to breathe once she had it against her chest.