I was here for one reason only – to do a job for the Council. I was a Bombay and I had a Vic. Nothing else should have mattered.
Right?
I couldn’t sleep that night. Finally, at about five a.m., I quit pretending and took a cup of coffee out onto the patio.
“What’s up, Moe?” He was lounging on the deck in a robe when I stumbled upon him.
“Hey, Missi!” I liked how his face brightened when he saw me. It’s always nice to feel like someone’s happy to see you, and he’d earned big points by helping me out with the Kit fiasco.
I pulled up a chaise lounge and my coffee mug. It was too early for sunrise. I’d ordered breakfast but it wouldn’t be here for half an hour.
“So what’s got you up so early?” I asked.
Moe shook his head. “I couldn’t sleep.”
I snorted. “That’s funny. Most of us can’t seem to get enough sleep around here.” I usually chalked that up to boredom.
“Nah. I never was that lazy.” Moe responded. I hid my smile. “Actually, being here has given me some ideas for when I get back.”
“Really? Then you’re the first one who’s been able to turn this charade into something positive.” Did that come out wrong?
“I’ve just been thinking. Sometimes getting away from home shakes you up. I needed that.” He shifted in his seat.
Huh. I wonder if the same thing has happened to me since I’ve been here. Well, I had a kind of boyfriend in Lex. And I’d call Sami and Moe friends. Being away from my monastic existence on Santa Muerta probably had been somewhat good for me. All the same, I still wanted to get my job done and move on.
We sat there quietly until there was a knock on the door. Sami looked at us with some amusement when we came back into the guesthouse. The laundry was delivered with the food and I slipped off to the bedroom to change before joining everyone.
Moe’s words made me think. I was getting some benefit from being here. But what did that matter in the grand scheme of things? If I had to take out Isaac, not much.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Misty watercolor memories...”
- Barbra Streisand, Memories
“As you may have guessed,” Alan was talking to us poolside at the Tigre, “both Inuit and Ottawa will now merge into a tribe of eight.”
I picked at the rubber sole of my shoe. Why did he always have to state the obvious? Like we didn’t know there were only eight of us left?
He reached into a bag and pulled out a bright yellow bandana. “You are now all part of team Tico.”
I sighed restlessly. Well, at least he got that right. A howler monkey went off, as if to give his approval.
“And you will set up a new camp together on the site of Ottawa’s old camp. Bert and Ernie will be your only camera crew.”
Sami snorted beside me. I guess the merge made the budget cuts easier to deal with. I wondered what happened to Jimmy? Maybe he got sent back to Canada.
“Today, you will spend the day getting to know your new tribe. You will not have any challenges until tomorrow. I will see you then.”
I waited for Julie and Alan to leave before snagging Ernie. “What’s going on?”
Ernie looked around before answering. “They’re flying back home to beg more money from the network. I’ve got to drive them to the airport. You won’t see anyone until tomorrow.” He motioned to Bert and the two of them took off.
I filled Team Tico in on the latest developments. Lex and I volunteered to throw together a rudimentary shelter for subterfuge, and the others decided it would be a good day to spend at the guest house.
“What was your husband like?” Lex asked softly as we worked.
“What? Oh. Rudy.” I thought for a moment. “He was great. You would’ve liked him.” I hoped my insecurity wasn’t showing. In all honesty, I hadn’t seen Rudy in seventeen years. My memory was rusty when I tried to think of him, and that bothered me.
Living on the island, I thought about him a lot. But since I’d been here, around new people and Lex, Rudy’s memory seemed to fade. Why was that?
“Are the boys like him?” Lex pressed.
“Monty is,” I answered without thinking. “He’s quiet . . . thoughtful. Jack is outgoing and a handful. Rudy was more like Monty.” But was that true? I could barely remember.
“I always wanted kids,” Lex said. “So did Fiona. It just never happened.”
An aching feeling I recognized as sorrow welled up in my throat. Lex obviously had no problem remembering his wife. How sad that they wanted children and never had them. My boys had been my life for nearly two decades. I couldn’t imagine life without them. As they prepared for college in the fall, I was preparing for the whole empty-nest thingy. And I was not looking forward to it.
I touched his hand. “As I told you before – I bet you would’ve made a great dad.”
Lex shook his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I guess I was just feeling a little melancholy.”
“Well, I’d be happy to loan you the boys anytime you want.” I laughed thinking about Lex chasing after Monty and Jack.
“I’d like that. Kind of like a fun uncle or something.” Lex said.
Yeah, a fun uncle who didn’t teach them how to kill people. That would certainly be a novelty to them.
Once we were finished with the saddest excuse for a lean-to ever, I sent Lex back to the guesthouse, and slipped away to find my boys. They’d better have something. I couldn’t go on much longer with all this confusion. Back at Santa Muerta, everything was safe. The only decision I usually had to make was how much C4 to order online.
“Mom!” Jackson’s voice caught me off guard. Apparently, I’d walked right past our tree.
“Where’s Monty?” I asked, always suspicious when both didn’t turn up together. In my seventeen years of experience with these two, I’d learned the hard way that if one was gone – the other was likely covering for a punishable offense.
“He’s in town, doing some research on the show.” Jack grinned a big, toothy grin. Damn, he was a good-looking boy!
“Forget that. I need stuff on Vic.” I really didn’t care too much about the show.
Jackson frowned. “Well, I don’t exactly have anything on him.”
“What? What have you been doing?” I threw a mom-tantrum. It surprised even me.
“Geez, Mom!” Jackson looked left and right. “It’s okay. No big!”
I sighed and took a deep breath. He was too old for shaken baby syndrome, but I was considering it. “Jackson. My son. My youngest by two minutes. The only reason I’m here is to do a job. If I don’t have a job to do, I’d just as soon not be here. Got it?” Wow. I sounded pissed. I wouldn’t want to be him arguing with me.
“Did something happen with Lex?” My little boy folded his arms over his chest. When did he get so smart?
“No!” I said a little too forcefully. “No!” I said it again as if repeating it would make it true. Hey, now there’s a thought! I wonder if I could do something with that in the lab? Suddenly, I felt very homesick.
“Mom, you’ve got that screwy look on your face. Snap out of it!”
I ran a hand through my hair. “It’s nothing.” I lied to my child. Truth was, it was something. Lex’s words bothered me. There was no way I could live up to the memory of his dead wife. And I was pretty sure he wouldn’t want me once he knew what I did for a living. I mean, he spent his career making sure people didn’t die on his watch, while I made sure they did on mine.
“Look. I’m just anxious to finish the job.” I lied again. And from the look on his face, I was getting good at it. “So I need to know whether to take him out or not.”
As Jackson shook his head to agree with me (or admit to himself that I finally had gone nuts), slivers of his red hair seemed to burst into flame as they hit patches of sunlight.
“I’ll find out. If I don’t know soon, we’ll just call the whole thing off and Monty and I will get you off the s
how.”
I hugged him before he fled. As Jackson disappeared, it hit me. How were they going to get me off the show? I shuddered in spite of the heat.
I didn’t go back to the guesthouse. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to get any closer to my Vic, but in all honesty, it was Lex and not Isaac I was worried about.
After buying a large sun hat and huge pair of sunglasses in the gift shop, I ordered a pitcher of vodka tonics and sat down in the most remote corner of the pool area. Now I know drinking doesn’t solve anything. And I have the alcoholic tolerance of plankton. But being alone with my thoughts seemed to be the best option right now.
Patience may be a virtue, but it never did right by me. I’ve had some pretty tricky hits over the years. The first time I used one of my inventions for a hit was, oh, about twenty-five years ago. It was 1982, something like that. I’m not that good at math. That’s weird for an inventor – don’t you think? Anyway, I had to take out a woman who’d engineered a major terrorist plot that killed a marketplace filled with innocent people in the ‘70s and was then living as a divorce attorney in Tempe. She was a real dragon-lady bitch. And she favored suits with huge shoulder pads. I could’ve just plugged her, leaving the cops to think it was the ex-husband of one of her clients. But I wanted to try something new . . . have a little fun with it.
At first I thought about exploding shoulder pads, but that would be hard to rig and what if it just blew her shoulders off? I mean – she’d look pretty silly and would probably survive. So I rigged her garage. I messed with her car’s ignition so that once turned on, it wouldn’t turn off. Then I built sensors for the garage door and door to the house that would lock when it sensed CO2. I guess they found claw marks around the doors where she tried to scratch her way out.
The detectives put it down to equipment failure. There was no CSI then so no one knew what to look for. From that moment on – I was hooked.
Shortly after that, I went through a James Bond phase where I experimented with everything from the deadly bowler hat Odd Job flings (for a vicious white slave trader) to the suffocating gold paint from Goldfinger (on a visiting nurse who murdered her senior charges once she put her in their wills). After about four hits though, I got bored and wanted to get back to developing my own stuff. Besides, no one got it. I was at least hoping to terrify people with the 007 Killer – but no one figured it out.
Of course, that was followed by the time I had to take out this Vic who worked in construction and dealt crack to middle-school kids in his neighborhood (they had only a 50% survival rate due to his lethal blend). I rigged a nail gun to backfire via remote. The gun shot the nail out backwards, killing the bastard instantly. I switched the gun out before the body was found. It looked like he’d committed suicide. I guess I rambled a little in the suicide note I’d left for him because the police spent months interviewing employees at Hostess Foods in an attempt to discover reason for the Vic’s obsession with Ding Dongs. I love Ding Dongs.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Probably my favorite job was where I invented a pair of stroke-inducing panty hose. You know how they have massaging nylons for people with poor circulation? It’s kind of the same theory, really, except that as you move, the hose constrict in a way that creates blood clots in the legs. From there, it’s only a matter of time before death by aneurism occurs. Of course, I had to trail the Vic for a while to make sure they worked. Boy was he surprised. Oh, did I forget to mention the nylons were for a man? Yup. A corrupt judge with cross-dressing tendencies who like to wear them under his robes. He’d had a weakness for mob money and was known to slap the brutal defendants in his courtrooms with nothing more than community service. Two of the guys he set free killed later went on to murder a prominent female district attorney who posed a threat to Cosa Nostra.
I’d looked into various means of death, but that was the only thing I could come up with. I even tricked them out with an old L’eggs egg. Remember those? They don’t make them anymore, do they? I think they came out the same time as Mork and Mindy – maybe they were cross promoting?
Oooh. This vodka was smooth. It seemed pretty strong but like I said before – I didn’t have a lot of experience drinking.
Anyway, as I was saying, I was pretty much obsessed with inventions by then. Let’s see. . .I had the sunglasses that sprayed poison in your eyes; rigging the garbage disposal and faucet to electrify the sink – when the Vic washed dishes he was shocked; the weight belt that crushes your spine – I got the inspiration for that having my blood pressure read; the remote-controlled brick falling from the building to crush your skull (timing is really important on that one); the floor wax that looked dry but was actually slipperier than Crisco on an eel; oh yeah – and the Super Viagra.
You know, I think I really missed an opportunity there. I actually invented the stuff before anyone else knew about it. But being a Bombay meant no future as a patented inventor, so what are you going to do?
Anyway, as you, of course, know, a vasodilator opens capillaries which can cause a dangerous drop in blood pressure. Too much of it, your blood pressure is so low you have a heart attack because your heart is pumping harder. My little blue pill (I should’ve sued them for that too) was ten times stronger. So when a certain pimp of kidnapped child prostitutes from Thailand took what he thought would increase the time of his erection, he keeled over before getting his pants off.
The coroner’s report (who knew they had coroners in Thailand?) said he had an erection that lasted more than ten hours after his death (Take that, Cialis!). I guess it made the news and everything.
Ahhhh. Memories. Like a fine pitcher of vodka and tonic on a warm day. I was starting to feel better, remembering my successes. But my head was starting to feel thicker – kind of like being stuffed up. I hate that alcohol does that. My glaucoma stash doesn’t have that effect. That’s a whole different thing. Unfortunately, I have a very low tolerance there too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I’ve spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.”
- Westley, The Princess Bride
“Missi? What are you doing here?” Lex pulled up a chair next to me.
“Bitch is fucked up.” Sami grinned as she helped herself to my cocktails. Now if she would only stop quivering...
“I just needed a few mishuts.” I waved my hand and stared at it as it moved. It was quivering just like Sami.
“What?” Lex looked at the almost empty pitcher. “How long have you been out here?”
“Damn!” Sami cried out. “This is straight vodka! This dumbass should be dead!”
I shook my head and had to stop it with my hands. “No. There’s tomik init.” I’d asked for tonic. Maybe Sami was right? If so, was this sabotage too?
Lex frowned and sniffed the pitcher. “Dammit. Who served you?” When I didn’t answer he turned to Sami.
“She could’ve died from alcohol poisoning.” His words sounded like they were far, far awaaay. . .
Lex began to rotate in place like a spinning wheel. I was fascinated. How did he defy the laws of physics like that?
“Let’s get you back to the guesthouse.” He started to lift me out of the chair, and I walked sideways into a wall.
The next thing I remembered was waking up in bed next to Sami. It was completely dark outside, so why did it feel like the sun had taken up residence in my brain pan? I shrugged on one of the fluffy robes and stumbled into the great room.
Damn. No aspirin. What kind of luxury cabana was this?
“How are you feeling?” Lex appeared next to me, no longer rotating 360 degrees. Good for him. That could be dangerous.
“Great.” I lied. I was doing a lot of that lately. “I need aspirin.” Now that was actually true.
“Here.” He handed me a whole bottle of ibuprofen. “I picked this up in the gift shop after putting you to bed.”
It took all of my strength – which at this point was not considerable – not to throw myself into
his arms. Instead I swallowed four capsules on the spot.
“I thought you were only supposed to take two?”
I waved him off. “I’ve developed a high tolerance to this stuff a while back.” It was true. Back home I chugged these pretty regularly, what with all the concussions from my explosions and what not.
“Apparently you handle medicine much better than you do alcohol.” Lex smiled before wrapping his arms around me. Mmmmm. He smelled really good. Like soap. I love that smell. I’m sure I smelled like a distillery.
I pulled back and smiled weakly. “Well, thanks for taking care of me. I guess I overdid it a smidge.”
He laughed. “A smidge? Sami had two glasses and got a buzz. She told me that back home it usually takes a case of beer for that to happen. That was strong stuff.”
I would’ve laughed, but my whole body threatened to explode if I even giggled. Everything – and I mean everything – hurt.
“It’s not funny, Missi. That could’ve been an attempt on your life.”
Okay. I stopped laughing as I remembered that my head had been on the keg seconds before it exploded. Damn. Had Isaac figured me out and started trying to kill me first?
“So why did you disappear like that?” Lex looked concerned and I loved him for it. I loved him for it enough to lie some more.
“I just needed some time alone. You know how it is, having a camera and everybody else around twenty four hours, seven days a week.” I hoped that sounded sincere.
Lex smiled. “I can totally understand that. It’s like being under a microscope. I wish I’d thought of it, actually.”
I hated myself. I hated lying to him and my sons. This job was killing me. And I had to lie to everyone here. And while Lex was being so supportive and thoughtful, I felt even worse.
“Well, goodnight.” I kissed him lightly on the lips and practically raced back to my room.
Greatest Hits Mysteries Boxed Set (Books 1-4) Page 54
