We all recited the words like a benediction.
Tech. Savvy.
He shrugged. Matter-of-Fact. “All’s well that ends—”
I’d heard that before. “With only one dead guy.”
Tom grinned. “You got that right, Allie.”
While everyone was all smiling, I went for one last question.
“You and him. Mercury. You ran in ‘the same circles?’”
I made finger quotes. The occasion seemed to merit them.
“It’s a large circle, Allie. Population of a nice-sized town, Saints, five percent. Villains, forty-five percent. Mixed, fifty percent. And the who’s-who varies, day to day. Like a town.”
“And you? You in the Saintly Five Percent?” Now I was seriously pushing my luck, but the Universe owed me answers tonight.
“I try, but there’s a shitload of temptation in my line of work. Hacker powers are so very—seductive.”
Dead serious now. “And you all should know, I would have taken your Mercury out myself, no question. No remorse. In March. But once we had the setup, the bastard made himself scarce. One burner phone after another. Never gave me a clean shot. Until tonight. I took the first one I had.”
“So is it ‘Everett’?”
“You put way too much importance on names, girl. Ask quite a few too many questions also.”
“So it’s not Everett.”
“Hardly. If I could put ‘Shadow Man’ on one of my passports, I would.” He stood up. “I need a vacation. And I’ve got the extra cash. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to make myself scarce for a while.”
I turned to see if Otis was following along. And okay with all this. He was. He grinned and Otis Johnson, Fashion Maven, gleamed out of his eyes. “Give me some credit. I knew you were going to be able to pay your Nordstrom bill.”
When I turned back, the shadow had vanished.
My Louboutins were next to the “Fragile. Keep Right Side Up” box by the door. My purse was there too. I put the ensemble back together without much confidence. I checked myself out in the window of an deserted office as we took the back door to the parking lot. “Dry Clean Only” was twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of flowery dust rags. With a distinctive bloodstain.
Good thing we were rich again.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Last summer, at the end of our first T&A case, I cleared the slate of my never-going-to-be-answered questions with what I liked to think of as a “creative hypothesis.”
I used the mix of things I knew for sure and the ones I never would to imagine key moments I wasn’t present for and would never have accurate knowledge of. Especially since key players weren’t talking, due to being dead.
I had my own head movie for this case too. The creative answer for a question I’d kept at the back of my mind since the morning after Kip Wade’s murder. Where would a man like Tito meet a man like Kip Ward?
I had an answer: The Happy Dog.
I pictured a pivotal moment, maybe in the late fall of last year. After July’s foiled jackpot grab. After it became clear to Tito that an accomplice discarded in the heat of a moment had never been as disposable as he’d imagined. After Tito fled with his rage into an empty, unfinished high-rise apartment building, and before his hunger for revenge opened the door to a deadly alliance that turned him into his own collateral damage.
How one rainy autumn night he might have taken himself down many flights of stairs and out into the wet-tobacco fragrance of leaves piled up in gutters. Music would have been seeping out of the Happy Dog. Somebody reading a poem or a short story over the insistent buzz and clink of the bar. Lisa could have been there that night. D.B. too. It was my damn scene, I could set it however I liked.
Besides, they would all be neighbors before winter was over. D.B. and Tito Ricci in a bar or an elevator together was another scene I could imagine. That one was the official Allie Harper Nightmare. Surely they’d met. Said a semi-cordial hello. Sneered at each other. I shook that one off. I could ask D.B. to tell me more about it if I ever spoke to him again.
The Happy Dog was Kip Wade’s official hang out. His brother told me so when we had our little talk in the chapel after his funeral. So Kip might have been there that night when Tito arrived. At the bar drinking. He’d Uber home. It wasn’t far. He’d never had the chance to drive a car. That pissed him off. He’d made it a practice to be royally pissed off by anything or anyone that made him sad. His brother told me that too. I felt as if I understood Kip now.
“Human being” is the answer to so many “whys”.
The moment unfolds. The door opens and lets in the damp, leaf-perfumed breeze. Traffic sounds rush in too. Cars hum and roar. Tires fizz along the wet street. Footsteps. A voice. Puzzled. Slightly hostile. Asks, “Tom? Tom…Bennington?”
A flashpoint for Kip Wade. How might he have reacted to being mistaken for a man he both envied and hated. On a whim he could have lied. Claimed Tom’s identity, his good fortune, his story, Added his own pinch of arrogance. ‘Yeah. What’s it to you?” Lied and died outside on the street later. Maybe. But he said the magic word.
“No.”
It would have been the fatal meeting nonetheless. He and Tito having a chat that evening. Sharing a couple of drinks.
Kip would want to tell Tito what an ass that Tom Bennington The Third turned out to be. All that money. All that luck. Maybe he told Tito about the new technology coming along that might give people back their sight. Or something like it. How it cost a fortune. And here was that SOB Bennington with money to burn but no interest in helping anybody but himself. Perhaps right there, sitting at the bar, Tito began concocting his plan. Baiting his vengeful trap with the dream of restored sight for Rudyard Kipling Wade.
Bare bones that night, but the rough sketch of a design. A message for Tom Bennington. To set it all in motion.
They would have exchanged info and Tito would probably have put Kip into a car and settled up with the driver.
I wondered if, later that night, Tito stood on his scarcely finished balcony in the damp, blustering dark, feeding his ego the bile it craved. Looking down over the lagoon to the pale gleam of marble in the distance, nursing a wild dream of sweet revenge and a huge payoff. Seeing all the death he would make.
In my imagination he gazes down on the path by the water and pictures Kip Wade there, walking with his white cane to meet his fate.
Seeing it all wrong, backward, and upside down. Not noticing a second dead man, right there at the bench.
What you don’t see is what you get.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Sunday, June 24
On the evening after the summer solstice party, the sun set over Cleveland, Ohio at 9:04 p.m. The sky was a clean, uncomplicated blue and gold. Everything glowed. The lake. Tom. Otis. Me. Even the gulls—bragging raucously about how smart they were—glowed as they soared. Tom, Otis, and I lolled by the pool, drinking Great Lakes Burning River Ale, talking about everything except death and destruction. Both our devils were dead. All was as well as it was ever likely to get.
We agreed we’d stay put, for now, in this, our less-mansion-y-but-still-fairly-mansion-y mansion. We’d stand down the troops, say goodbye to “Who’s A Good Boy?” and rely, like run-of-the-mill multi-millionaires, on a high-quality security system—vetted and maintained by Shadow Man. He’d be back. And, always, Otis would keep us as safe as humanly possible. And be Otis. Tom would turn our attention away from self-preservation to philanthropy as we intended all along.
“No Ducking” was our new work in progress.
I was delighted not to have to move out of our Hobbit cottage. Tom said it would be pleasant not have to learn a new floorplan every fifteen minutes. Otis said transporting his ice cream collection would be a logistical challenge. “We’d have to eat it all. That might get burdensome. After a coupla weeks.”
I’d quizzed him about how he’d got in last night without the light from the door giving him away. “Chad and I killed the lights in the hall. He was hurting when I found him. He’s a stand-up guy. If he really wants to be a cop, I’ll encourage him. I think the museum appreciates him more now, though. He’s the first guard they ever had take a bullet for a patron.”
Otis stood for a minute, his gaze fixed on the tug Dorothy Ann Pathfinder, trundling a barge along the horizon. She was painted as brightly as the gulls in the light from the setting sun. “Great night to be on a boat headed somewhere.” He shook the wistful note off his voice. “Fine night to be alive. Good night, you guys.”
Tom and I lingered. The evening breeze was warm. I was musing about the money. Vanishing. Reappearing. $250 million. Give or take. Not the fortune of a billionaire’s social media empire. I’d seen diagrams of a billion dollars. You’d need quite a few more coffee tables to do that many millions justice. Our modest stacks of bills paled in comparison, but those millions had changed our lives.
“Tom. I need to tell you something.”
“Is it something I’ll appreciate hearing.”
“It’s about a major character flaw. So probably not.”
“Does it have anything to do with you and Shadow Man becoming a couple?”
“This is serious.”
“That would be serious.”
“Okay. Here goes. Tom. I like being rich.” I searched his face. In the dying light of one of the longest days of the year he looked quietly composed. So far, so good.
“I hate the horrible things that happened because of the jackpot since Tuesday, August 18, two years ago—”
“Our anniversary,” he murmured. Trailed his awesome handsome fingers over my bare arm. He didn’t seem to be repulsed by my confession. Yet.
“Maybe you didn’t hear what I said.”
“I heard. Don’t be disappointed. I guessed.”
“When?”
“The night you helped me verify the numbers on the ticket. You were jigglin’.”
“The first night? You’ve always known?”
“It hasn’t been a secret. You saw the possibilities of the money. I only saw the—”
“The reality. Tom. You saw—”
“Bad things. And there have been many.” His fingers found the patch of gauze covering the small cuts in the notch of my throat. “So many. But good things too. Both realities. Your brilliant object lesson the other day helped me see what I’d missed.”
“My unworkable coffee table?”
“Maybe Jay could make a suggestion—”
“Stop. I don’t see—”
“Yeah. You do. The money has always been two pallets’ worth of wonderful and terrible. Good works. Terrible evil. Joy. Love. Hate. Death. Moment to moment. It took people’s lives. It brought me you. It brought Otis to us. I would never have met Margo, and I cannot imagine life without Margo. This is the conversation we had with Rune. The one you had with Robert Wade after Kip’s funeral. Cause and effect. Luck and its consequences.
“No worries, Allie. We’ll deal with your shameless attraction to the money. Share it and use it for good and keep enough so we can be in this house and Otis can stay forever. And you can replace Dry Clean Only. From what I understand the shoes are good to go.”
He stood up and found my hand. Pulled me to my feet and held me close. “Alice Jane Harper, last night I would not have placed a dollar bet on the chance of our living to see today. Today is what counts. I’m ready to embrace our two—and no doubt soon—three pallets of cash. For every fine thing they can be. And keep funding the T&A until we get it right. Okay?”
“Uh huh.”
Back inside the house, he kissed my forehead, lightly—too lightly. Too forehead. And murmured, “See you upstairs.”
I showered. The room gleamed with marble. The fixtures shone. The rain storm fell on me in all its glory. The shower floor offered to warm my feet or whatever else I might want warmed. I paid it no mind. I was soapy, rinsed, clean, and toweled off before the steam even got going. Tom’s robe was hanging by the door. I wore it to the bedroom and let it fall to the floor.
He was lying back against the pillows in the lamplight he always turned on for me. His headphones were covering his ears. His eyes were closed, the sculptured contours of his face were relaxed, and his handsome not-so-smoothly-shaven jaw was unclenched. Dozing, maybe, or chasing his rich visual memories through the voices of a novel.
He’d told me his dad was a rockbound New Englander, trapped, sweating, in Atlanta but his mother was Italian, fierce in her love of sun and warm weather. Tonight, with his bare skin a warm contrast against crisp white sheets, he was a Tintoretto saint spilling headlong out of a cloud. Like a lightning bolt. Electric. Hot.
He smiled and slipped the headphones off. “Alice Jane, you can’t sneak up and take advantage of my vulnerability. Maybe I didn’t hear you, but you just got out of the shower, and you smell delicious. And irresistible.”
“Don’t even think about resisting me.” I climbed up onto the bed next to him, sat back on my heels, and stared down more. “You look very handsome, Dr. Bennington III. But too covered up.”
I slipped my fingers under the edge of the top sheet and billowed it out all the way to the foot of the bed. He grinned. “I feel a breeze.”
“Oh no. Are you chilly?”
“Not. Even. Close.”
I put my face to his chest and inhaled. Breathing him, as if I could make him part of me forever. Sat back again, still admiring. He came up onto his elbows to meet me, but I gave him a gentle push into the pillows.
“Shh. Lie there for me. We’re always so busy. I never get a chance to look at you.”
“I like busy. Busy is one of my favorite things.” He settled back and reached up—unerring as always. My skin hummed her answer to his touch, but I grabbed his hand and pinned it back to the pillow.
“Stop that. Just. Let me stare at you for one damn minute.”
A smile twitched his mouth. “Then it’ll be my turn to have a look at you. And you know what that means.”
“Uh huh.”
Carpe stare, Allie. Carpe braille, Tom.
I let my gaze drift down over him. A body is a mystery that contains an entire person. A mystery within a mystery. His breathing had quickened. I could see his heartbeat stirring his chest. It reminded me of the angry pulse in his temple last night, right before he gave up the knife and stepped away from the brink of revenge. That narrow escape. I touched the patch on my throat again, remembering.
So much darkness and so few guarantees.
Before I could grab it, a tear spilled onto his shoulder. He put his fingers on it. Rubbed it into his skin. And pulled me closer.
“Shh. We’re here now. We’re alive. We’re fine. But more important, we’re super-extra-fine at the moment, and it’s my turn to look you over. Come closer. I plan to be very, very conscientious about this particular investigation.”
I moved to make as much of myself available as humanly possible.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I wasn’t done wooing him. “You’re kind of the blind Sherlo—”
He put his fingers over my mouth. “Stop it. You’re trying to seduce me by talking detective trash.”
“Uh huh. Succeeding too, I’d say. But no, really, you’ve got that analytical, honed senses thing going all the time. If he’d been blind—”
“He had a cocaine habit, Allie. If he’d been blind he’d have gotten high and fallen down Mrs. Hudson’s stairs. DOA.”
“Or over a waterfall,” I agreed. “You’d beat him in the blind detective department because of no cocaine. That’s very sexy.”
I relocated myself on his chest and brushed my lips over his. Not even a real kiss. Not yet. Teasing. Tom’s world d
eserved a long, respectful exploration. Sweet time.
“About the money?”
“Shush yourself, Alice Jane. You are the least material girl I know. You have the very expensive habit of giving cash, food, and dog biscuits to anybody within reach. Also, we are running your detective agency at a massive loss. I’m aware of how much you enjoy not having to balance a checkbook but forget about all that. We’re good.”
He yawned. It had been a strenuous less-than-forty-eight-hours.
I insinuated my head into his shoulder. “Are you beginning to tire of me, Dr. Bennington the Third?”
“Does any part of me seem at all tired, Ms. Harper?”
This was more promising.
“Let me check. Mmm. I’m going to have to answer no to that question. I only thought—”
“You think too much. That’s a problem with you. Sometimes you also think too stupid.”
I poked him in the middle of his chest to communicate indignation. He picked up my hand and planted a kiss in the center of its palm. To communicate, “This is my mouth on your hand.” Which had the effect of waking up more parts of me. Even the soles of my feet were aroused.
I could still talk, though.
“So you don’t think I’m smart enough for you? Or reliable enough? Or something else enough?”
He rolled away from me and lay back, moving his head side-to-side on the pillow. Consternation. With a dimple. “What did I say? Only a moment ago? About thinking stupid?”
Ah, God. This was a step in a very wrong direction. I scrambled for the words to change it back.
“It’s only—I don’t want you to be disappointed, is all. Or bored.” I leaned up and touched my tongue to the favored, delicious, sculpted indentation right next to his ear.
“Ah. That’s…so…kind. Do I look bored to you? I can’t see my face.”
“No. Nothing about you appears bored. Or tired.”
He sighed somewhere midway on the scale between satisfaction and exasperation and rolled back into his place like the heat-seeking missile he was born to be. Every part of my body said, “Welcome Home, Heat-Seeking Missile.” He smiled. It was a smug smile, but I didn’t care. I’m not the sort of girl to hold a grudge at such a moment. Not stupid either.
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