Yet through it all, I managed to shoot Detective Gregson a death glare.
17
The acrid smell of burnt garlic filled the air. Detective Gregson was wearing a trench coat, of all things. He was standing statue still, and I couldn’t decide if he looked more like Columbo or Castiel from that show Supernatural. When he wasn’t seething with the desire to lock me behind bars, his eyes had a lost-puppy quality.
My teeth were starting to chatter from the ice-cold water flowing over me. But to turn it off, I’d have to twist and reach to get my hand into a position to work the faucet’s knobs. To do that would mean taking my eyes off of Gregson, and no way was I going to do that.
I felt like prey caught in a trap when Gregson started walking toward me. He paused next to the stove. Without taking his eyes away from me, he lazily turned the burner off. Then he was walking again.
I did my best to bore a hole through his head with my gaze. Then I waited with eager anticipation for him to slip on the wet, oily, noodle-strewn floor the way I had.
His gait never even faltered.
Damn him!
He made it all the way to the sink that I’d stuffed myself into. He put his hands on the sink’s lip and leaned.
I noticed things, okay? I noticed he was two weeks past due for a haircut if he wanted to be able to call his hair short. I noticed he was a good five hours overdue for a shave. The dark stubble outlined how his beard and mustache would grow in if he’d let it. And I noticed the pale outline where a wedding band had recently been on the ring finger of his left hand.
“You always this graceful?” he asked.
I was tempted to capture a mouthful of water from the flowing faucet so that I could spit it at him. But knowing him, he’d arrest me on the charge of assaulting an officer.
Gregson reached past me in slow motion and turned the water off. Then he smiled. It was a look of supreme satisfaction.
“Where’s your tattletale sidekick?” His smile turned into a sneer. “You’ve got no one to interfere now, do you?” I knew he had to be talking about Zoey and whatever pull she had over the police chief.
“What do you want?” If he was going to arrest me, I wished he’d just get on with it. At least then I wouldn’t have to look at his face one minute longer.
“You think you’re hot stuff, don’t you?” He picked a strand of spaghetti off of my head and tossed it away. “You think you can keep playing around in murders, muck up investigations, and never ever have even one bad thing happen to you.”
Let’s see… Have multiple people break in or try to break into my apartment. Try to stab me, shoot me, run me off the road, hit me with a car, and sell me for parts. The man didn’t have a clue what I’d been through. Okay… so that wasn’t true. He did have a clue because he’d been there for half of it, making my life hell after the fact.
Gregson tucked his middle finger against the pad of his thumb and then flicked the end of my nose. Hard!
“Hey!” Outraged didn’t even begin to describe how that made me feel. I wanted to stand up in the sink, grab his face at the top of his forehead, and rip it off.
“See!” he said in his gravelly voice. “Right there. I bet that’s the worst that’s happened to you since you started acting like you’re Dick Tracy’s sister.”
I opened my mouth to object. My mind raced in search of some tidbit that would prove him wrong. Then I closed my mouth again. Realization and resentment settled cold in my veins. Bile rose in my throat. Red hazed over my vision.
Gregson was absolutely right… and that killed me. Him bopping me on the nose was just about the worst thing that had happened to me—so far.
“You assaulted me,” I said. “Police brutality.” I had to find the upper hand somewhere.
Gregson blew out an exasperated breath and rolled his eyes. He then reached into the sink, sunk his hands into my armpits and lifted me out of the sink. When he put my feet back on the ground—dry ground, outside the splash ring of oil, water and noodles—I eyed him up and down. He’d lifted me as easily as a child. Either I’d magically lost a lot of weight or Gregson had more heft to him than his trench coat and off-the-rack bargain suit belied.
“You and your shadow were at the gym today. Why?” he asked. He pulled a small flip top notebook and a pencil out of his pocket.
“We, uh, were thinking of joining.”
With the notebook raised and the tip of his pencil resting on the paper, he stopped and lifted his gaze to stare at me. “Uh huh. Try again.”
“What do you mean try again? That was the truth!”
Without bothering to put his notepad away, Gregson grabbed me by the wrist and headed for the kitchen door at a strong, long-gaited pace. I was caught off guard so much that I was bent double stumbling along behind him for a good ten feet. Finally I managed to get my feet ahead of my hips, and I planted them.
I didn’t manage to break his hold on me, but I did get him to stop. I was pretty sure his hand was going to leave a ring of bruising around my wrist.
He turned back to look at me. “You ready to tell me something more than a load of garbage? I’m happy to take this down to the station if you want to keep giving me the runaround.” I didn’t answer by the next second, so he continued on with his diatribe. “You know, there’s a chance that I might actually be trying to save your life. Do you get that?” His deep vibrato voice got louder as he spoke. “And do you get how lying to me makes that a lot harder for me to do? If it were up to me, I’d leave you rotting in solitary without any human contact for the next three months, all to save your worthless, stinking life. Do you get that, Maggie? Can you sink that through that thick skull of yours?”
My voice was small when I asked the question. “Who’s Maggie?”
There was a half-second delay. Then Gregson dropped my wrist so hard and fast that it might as well have burned him. He got in my face next, and the toes of his shoes bumped up against mine. I could see each individual eyelash. I could see where he’d nicked himself shaving a day or two ago. I could smell that he’d been drinking coffee. A lot of coffee.
His gaze searched my face. It took in my nose, my cheeks, my lips and forehead. Finally, he spoke, low and threatening. “Stay out of this investigation or I’ll bust you for trafficking narcotics.”
He’d thrown down the gauntlet. Now I had to decide whether or not to pick it up.
Truth was, I’d have scrounged around on my hands and knees to find that gauntlet to pick it up. No way was he going to pull his intimidation malarkey on me. I wished I could inch closer to him so that I could get up in his face.
“Bring it on.” Of course, I wasn’t a fool. I was pretty sure that with Zoey, Brad and Joel at my back—the tech genius, the inside man, and the media guy—that Gregson would fail at any plan for ruination he might have against me. Spectacularly fail.
Gregson’s eyes narrowed, and then he smiled. It was not a nice smile. It was cold, calculating and malicious. “I’ll bust your new hired help—the old guy with the long hair—for”—he shrugged—“something. I’ll make sure that whatever it is makes him real popular with the vendetta guys already doing life without parole. Those poor sods got nothin’ to lose anyway.”
All my moxie drained away. It was one thing for Gregson to threaten me. I could risk me, but I couldn’t risk Jonathan. I had no idea what events lay in Jonathan’s past that could be used against him in his present. Maybe there was nothing at all. Maybe… But I couldn’t risk that. I couldn’t risk him. I couldn’t put him in a position of paying for my hubris.
I blinked, literally and figuratively. I stepped back and dropped my gaze to the floor.
Gregson had won.
18
I barely made it through dinner service. After running upstairs for a fast shower and a change of clothes, I operated in a daze on autopilot. The cursed aglio e olio was ruined, of course. I couldn’t face trying to make it again. If I did, I was sure that an enormous asteroid would crash into earth
exactly where my café stood.
Instead I made hamburgers to order. I kept the price low, the patties mega thick, and served them on thick, butter-toasted cuts of Patty’s sourdough bread. I even made an aioli to go with it, which is just a fancy way of saying that I made the mayonnaise myself. In truth, I made the aioli too bland and buttered the bread too much. A few pieces even ended up soggy.
For a side I made thick cut potato wedge fries. One batch was undercooked. The next batch was overcooked. But for the last batch, I sat on my knees in front of the oven doors and wept. That seemed to do the trick. Those fries turned out perfect.
When the last customer headed out at a quarter to eight, I left the café in Sam and Melanie’s capable hands. They could take care of any other customers who came wandering in, do cleanup, and restock anything that was needed out in the dining room. There wouldn’t be much available for them to serve, but there was the cake I’d made that morning, the one where Patty had told me what to do every step of the way. It had turned out pretty good. They could serve it to anyone who came in hungry.
I just didn’t have it in me to do any more in the kitchen tonight. I was emotionally and physically spent. And I still had to go shopping! I was running low on a few staple ingredients. I never knew when Patty was going to show up to give me a baking lesson or to make some of her scrumptious baked goods, so I tried to have what she would need on hand at all times.
I got Sage tucked away upstairs, changed into jeans and a pink cotton knit shirt that didn’t smell of eau de fast-food-diner, arranged for an Uber and headed out. Because I was hiring someone to drive me to the store, I went out the café’s front door instead of meeting them in back the way I did with Zoey.
Night had fallen and the street lamps provided a gentle lighting to chase away the darkness. I had my purse on my shoulder, and I dug around in the bag to make sure I had the café’s business checkbook with me. The café’s bank account had infinitely more money in it than my personal one. If I forgot the checkbook at home, there was no way I’d be able to afford the supplies out of my personal funds.
I glanced up just enough to register the flash of headlights out of the corner of my eye before returning to the task of making sure I had the right checkbook. I stepped off the curb, heard an engine gun and tires squeal, and looked up into the blinding light of ultra-bright headlights.
I didn’t even have time to scream. It was patty-cake time, just me and a great big fender.
Something large and strong snaked its way around my waist, and I was jerked through the air. My flying feet felt the swoosh of air caused by the car zooming past.
“Watch where you’re going, you moron!” a man’s voice boomed a few inches away from my ear. But it wasn’t just any man’s voice. It was Dan’s voice! And he still hadn’t let me down. His arm was clamped around my waist like a steel band, and his college-football player physique was hard against my back. “That’s right! Keep going, you coward!”
“Dan!” I hissed. “Let me down!” My fingers pried at his arm, but he was completely unfazed. “Dan!” I said. This time I resorted to slapping at his arm. Meanwhile he was bouncing me around like a rag doll glued to his side.
“Did anyone get that moron’s license plate?” he yelled. “Anyone?”
I practically broke my neck looking this way and that in mortification. I didn’t want anyone to see what was happening.
“Dan!” I yelled again as my feet parodied a running man in midair. “Let me down!” This time I pinched the skin of his arm and twisted.
“Hey! That hurts!” Dan said, finally releasing me from his grip. “If you’d wanted down, all you had to do was say.” He’d adopted his hurt little boy voice.
Ahhh! I wanted to strangle him. I wanted to hire someone to strangle him.
“Dan, what are you doing here?”
Dan’s hurt look continued. “Someone tries to run you down and that’s what you want to know? Kylie, baby, I saved your life. Everything’s going to be okay now. I’m here.”
My mouth fell open. I couldn’t believe those words had just come out of his mouth. I didn’t normally consider myself a violent person, but my eye started twitching just like Vic’s had. I didn’t even have his excuse of ‘roid rage. It took every ounce of control not to start walloping Dan with my purse in the middle of the street. The only thing that kept me from it was knowing that it would finally give Detective Gregson something legitimate to arrest me for.
“Daaannn,” I said as I shook clenched fists in the air. Like a smart man, he took a step back. Right off the curb. Except that he’d forgotten about the curb, which meant that his heel slipped and he fell backward hard enough to crack his head on the asphalt. “Dan!”
I lunged forward and fell to my knees by his side. I gently lifted and cradled his head in my hands. “Dan, say something.” His eyes were all wonky. His lids were fluttering, and his eyeballs moved around like he was trying to track an invisible fairy who had drunk her way out of a coffee pot.
Finally Dan’s gaze focused and his eyelids steadied. He smiled. “Baby, I knew you’d come back.”
I released his head and let it fall against the asphalt with another smack. Dan groaned, clutched the back of his head and rolled on his side, but I didn’t care. He was alive and lucid. My job was done.
19
I did a hot-footed jaywalk right across the street and into Zoey’s apartment building. I was sitting on her living room floor on an enormous floor pillow less than two minutes later. “And then the car just zoomed by. I even felt the wind from it as it whooshed past!”
Zoey waved her hands in front of her. “Wait a minute. Back up. Let’s talk about what’s important here. Dan was there?”
I gaped at her.
“And he grabbed you. That big, gorgeous ex-man of yours plucked you right off of your feet and then didn’t let you go.”
“Zoey…” I lamented. I couldn’t believe that Dan was what she was fixating on about what I’d had to say. “I was almost killed.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Zoey said and waved a hand dismissively. “And you were almost killed last week and the week before that, too. But this, Dan swooping in to save the day, that’s new!”
“Augh!” I flopped over backward, throwing my arms wide. Zoey had glow in the dark stars on her ceiling, and I stared up at them. They were so tranquil. “Somebody does not try to kill me almost every week.”
“Oh, they so do.”
“You suck.” I kicked her foot.
“You suck,” Zoey shot back and kicked my foot. She stood up from the floor gracefully and effortlessly and headed for her setup of computers. It would have been at home in Batman’s high-tech cave. “What did the car look like?”
I thought a moment. “I don’t know. Dan had me glued to his side and turned away from the car so that he could yell at the driver.”
“Think he’d know what it looked like?”
“No!” I said it too fast and too forcefully. “He has night blindness.” A total lie. I just didn’t want to face having to go to Dan for help.
Zoey twisted her chair around to look at me with one brow raised. She wasn’t buying it, but I wasn’t going to recant.
“Night. Blindness,” I said again.
She swiveled back around to face her half-moon of computers. Her fingers clacked across the keyboard. The image on the monitor directly in front of her changed to a side angle of the front of my café. She was tapping into the traffic light’s video cam at the intersection just past the café. But the image was too dark. It looked like how nighttime might look when wearing dark sunglasses.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Camera’s not working right.”
There was more finger clacking and the monitor got much darker, then lighter, but the lighter version was almost as bad as the dark version. There was no contrast in the picture, so making it lighter just washed the image out.
Zoey growled and then cracked her
fingers. The screen’s image changed some more. She added blues, yellows, reds and a myriad of other hues to bring more contrast to the picture.
“That’s the best it’s going to get,” Zoey said. She then manipulated the video feed so that she could see what happened in the moments before I ran myself over to her apartment.
I saw what had to be me coming out of the café. I saw someone large coming toward me as I dug in my purse, then I saw the nose of a sedan appear. It purposefully angled in to hit me as I stepped off the curb. The sight gave me goosebumps as I saw the large man coming toward me make a mad dash to grab me out of the street. Dan had been almost ten feet away. He’d moved so fast. I hadn’t realized how hard he’d had to work to save me, and I hadn’t realized how close I’d come to being killed or maimed.
My eyes tried to tear up, but I blinked them dry.
The video played on a few more seconds, and then I saw something I hadn’t seen before. As Dan gripped me to his side and silently yelled at the driver who had sped away, another large man had stepped out through the café’s front door.
“Who is that?” I asked.
Zoey paused the image. She zoomed. She tweaked. Finally, the details of a face could be imagined from the contrasting hues that filled the screen.
“Joel?” I said, disbelieving.
“I think so.”
“I hadn’t even realized he’d been in the café. I’d run upstairs to change and then right out the front door. I hadn’t even noticed he was there.” I felt awful about that.
Zoey backed the video up and froze it as the tail end of the car became visible. She fiddled but eventually shook her head. “I can’t make out the license plate.”
“Think you could get it from another traffic light cam?”
More images filled the screen. I recognized them as Main Street, about a half a mile down the road from the café. Zoey ran the video feed back to the time when we should be seeing the car, but no sedan showed up. She checked a few more video locations, but it was the same. No sedan. “They must have turned onto a side street.” She turned to me. “Want to report it?”
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 11
