“And a driver’s license, so that’s out. But thanks. And thanks for the pep talk. Sorry I woke you up.”
“Ah, hell, we were awake…sort of.”
“We?”
“My pastry instructor. I told you how cute he is.”
Carlotta frowned. “And how married he is.”
“That, too. Hang in there and good luck on Monday. I’ll call you when I get back.”
The call was disconnected, leaving Carlotta to shake her head. One of these days Hannah was going to meet up with a vindictive wife in a dark alley.
She drank from her coffee cup, but the liquid had gone cold. She winced, her mind still whirling with questions and what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. Then she pushed to her feet, thinking she might as well go to work. As much as the loan shark’s voice haunted her, she could only deal with one crisis at a time.
First, they had to get through Wesley’s arraignment on Monday. She didn’t trust Liz Fischer, but she hoped that this time her father’s former mistress had something helpful up her skirt.
6
C arlotta sat in the back row of the courthouse gallery, shooting anxious glances between the wall clock and the door. She and Wesley had arrived together, but he’d said he needed to visit the men’s room and that was thirty minutes ago. Arraignments would begin in three minutes, and Wesley’s case, Liz Fischer had warned, could fall anywhere in the lineup, so he had to be prompt if he wanted the deal that she’d managed to work out with the D.A.
The rows of chairs in the gallery were crowded with people of all shapes and sizes, some of them nervous and fidgety, others merely bored. Liz Fischer stood next to the front row and cast furtive glances at her watch. The district attorney, Kelvin Lucas, sat sprawled in a chair across the aisle wearing a smug smile as the seconds ticked away. Carlotta remembered the way the man had grilled her after her parents had disappeared.
“They must have said where they were going, or called to say they were okay. If you know something and you don’t tell me, young lady, I’ll have to charge you with accessory, and then who’ll take care of your brother?”
But she’d stood her ground—she hadn’t known where they were. If she had, she would’ve turned them in just to stop her brother’s tears.
The man’s hair was grayer, his neck thicker, but the arrogant set of his mouth was unmistakable. “Tracking down Randolph Wren is my top priority,” he’d said to a TV reporter ten years ago, a vein jumping in his forehead. “Now it’s personal.”
When his heavy-lidded gaze now landed on Carlotta, she swallowed and looked away. The man gave her the creeps, although she supposed that was part of his job description. She wondered if he had any idea who she was and how much he’d added to her nightmares at a time when she’d thought she might never sleep again.
“Did you lose your client?” Carlotta heard him ask Liz Fischer, his voice cutting through the noise.
“He’ll be here,” Liz responded, her tone cool.
Lucas gave a derisive laugh. “It’s déjà vu, Counselor. Just like ten years ago.”
Carlotta set her jaw. Ignoring the man, Liz strode toward her and leaned down. “Where the hell is Wesley?”
“He’s in the restroom,” Carlotta said hotly. “He’ll be here in a minute.”
“He’d better,” the woman said. “I don’t even want to think about what I had to do to get him this deal.”
Carlotta gave her a pointed look. “I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t done before.”
“All rise,” the bailiff announced as the judge walked in.
“Go find him,” Liz said through clenched teeth.
Carlotta rose and exited the rear doors into the hallway, nodding at the guards stationed there. She scanned the area for Wesley, panic gathering in her chest. Had he fallen ill? Been detained in some way? Another thought slid into her mind and took her breath away. Had Wesley, who so adored their father, somehow gotten it into his head to imitate The Bird’s behavior, to earn his own notorious reputation?
She asked one of the guards for directions to the men’s room. She practically ran in the direction the man pointed and when she found it, hesitated only a second before barreling inside. There she found Wesley leaning over a sink, his mouth bloody and his clothes disheveled and a bulky man standing over him—Detective Jack Terry.
Her maternal hackles stood on end. “Get away from him!” She went in slapping at the bigger man like a windmill.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he said, arms raised to ward off her blows while he backed up. Then he grabbed her wrists and held her, his eyes blazing. “What the devil are you doing?”
“This is police brutality!” she cried. “Help, someone!”
He released her wrist to clamp a hand over her mouth. “Shut up before you get someone hurt, dammit. I walked in and found your brother like this. I was trying to help him get cleaned up before his court appearance.”
She cut her gaze to Wesley for confirmation and her brother nodded. “He was trying to help,” he mumbled through a fat lip.
She relaxed and the detective released her, her red lipstick bright against his fingers. “What happened?”
Wesley dabbed at the blood on his face. “Some guy jumped me, took my wallet.”
She narrowed her eyes at him in the mirror but bit her tongue. She’d bet anything the “guy” had something to do with Father Thom, a detail that Detective Terry didn’t need to know. “Liz Fischer sent me to find you. You need to get to the courtroom right away.”
She moved next to him, her heart beating faster to see his puffy lip and bloody teeth. At least his glasses weren’t broken. “Are you okay?” She reached for him, but he leaned away.
“I’m fine, sis,” he said, then walked toward the exit, tossing the wet napkin in the trash. “Let’s get this over with.”
When the door closed, she turned to face the detective, who seemed bemused.
“Told you we’d be crossing paths again,” he said. “I just didn’t think it would be in the men’s room.”
She glanced around the slightly grubby tiled room lined with urinals. “Um, sorry for…attacking you.”
“Don’t mention it.” Then he frowned. “Your brother seems to be having a string of bad luck.”
“Yes. Thanks for helping him.”
“Just doing my job,” he said smoothly. “I hear that Liz Fischer made a deal with the D.A.”
“Yes, thank goodness.” Then she frowned. “Do you know Liz?”
“Sure,” he said with a slow smile. “Liz and I are…friendly.”
She pushed her cheek out with her tongue. “I so didn’t need to know that.”
He shrugged. “Just making conversation.” Then he gestured toward the urinals. “Now, if you don’t mind, I actually came in here for a reason.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Hmm? Oh…” A blush climbed her neck as she turned on her heel and headed for the door.
“But I need to talk to you,” he said behind her. “Save me a seat.”
“Fat chance,” she muttered.
When she entered the courtroom, she slid into a seat in the back row just as Wesley’s case was being called. He and Liz Fischer stepped forward and took their place behind the defendant’s table. Her brother looked so handsome in the brown suit that she’d pulled out of his closet, cut off the tags and forced him to wear. His normally shaggy hair was combed and his posture was arrow straight. But Carlotta’s gaze was riveted on how Liz touched Wesley’s chin and peered at his injury, then angled her head toward his ear as the judge situated his paperwork. Her body language seemed almost…intimate. Carlotta hardened her jaw. Had the woman transferred her affection to the son of her former lover?
“Don’t look so grim,” Detective Terry murmured in her ear as he took the seat next to her. “If the judge goes along with the plea bargain, your brother’s getting off easy.”
Carlotta frowned, and leaned away from the man who had somehow insinuated himself into their lives. Unbidden,
thoughts of the detective and Liz Fischer together in bed popped into her head. She squeezed her eyes shut. Good grief, what was it about stick-thin women that drove men nuts?
“Can’t bear to watch, huh?” the detective whispered, touching her arm.
She opened her eyes, exasperated. “Shut. Up.” She looked down and pulled her arm away. “And I hope you washed your hands.”
“I did—had to get the lipstick off.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Speaking of which, you could use a touch-up.”
She glared and snatched the hankie, then used a mirror to wipe her smeared lips and handed it back to him.
He looked at the now-pink hankie. “You can keep it.”
She shoved it into her purse and looked to the front of the courtroom.
“And the state is satisfied with the plea agreement?” the judge was asking the D.A.
Kelvin Lucas dragged himself to his feet, then gave Wesley a long, slow look, before turning back to the judge. “The state is satisfied, Your Honor.”
“Very well. The defendant is hereby sentenced to five thousand dollars in reparations, one hundred hours of community service, which will include collaboration with the city on computer security, and one year of probation.” He banged a gavel. “Next case.”
The sigh of relief she’d been saving remained pent-up in Carlotta’s chest at the realization that yet more debt had just been heaped onto their already considerable pile. Add to that her credit card balances and the miscellaneous bills that were late, and the fact that tomorrow a big, hairy guy was coming by to collect a thousand dollars they didn’t have, and she could barely push herself to her feet and toward the door. She just wanted things to be…good. She’d given up on easy years ago, but good would be nice.
To her chagrin, Detective Terry was on her heels. “Ms. Wren, I need to talk to you.”
She turned and sighed. “What do you want, Detective—to tell me more about your manly conquests?”
A whisper of a smile crossed his mouth before his eyes turned serious. “Er, no. When was the last time you heard from your parents?”
She frowned. “I don’t remember—oh, we received a postcard maybe two years ago.”
“From where?”
“Texas, maybe. I don’t recall.”
“Where is the postcard?”
“I threw it away.”
His eyebrows went up. “One of the few pieces of communication that you’ve had from your fugitive parents, and you threw it away? That’s destroying evidence.”
Anger surged in her blood. “So arrest me, Detective.”
His mouth flattened into a thin line. “Ms. Wren, I think you and your brother both are keeping secrets. I think you might know where your parents are.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
“I can have your cell-phone records seized. And your mail.”
For a second, she wondered if that might buy her time to pay her bills, but then she fisted her hands at her sides. “You’d be wasting your time. Besides, I figured you were too busy giving McGruff the Crime Dog speeches to salesclerks to be digging around in an old case that not even the D.A. cares about anymore.”
“Wrong, Ms. Wren.”
She turned to see Kelvin Lucas standing there, slump-shouldered, his hands in his pants pockets. “I do care. Funny thing, your brother’s arrest got me all interested in your fugitive daddy all over again. I’ve reassigned the case to Detective Terry here because he always gets his man, don’t you, Detective?”
A muscle worked in the detective’s jaw. “Yes, sir.”
Lucas smiled, but his eyes remained hard and cold. “So just in case this trouble that your delinquent brother’s gotten himself into happens to smoke out your runaway parents, Detective Terry will be watching. And if I hear that your brother does anything to violate his probation, I’ll nail his scrawny ass to the wall.”
The D.A. walked away, his hard-sole shoes clicking against the floor. Carlotta scowled at the detective and he scowled back. “I know my rights,” she said with more confidence than she felt, pulling herself up to her full height, which, even in heels, brought her only up to the man’s chin. “Stay away from me and my brother or I’ll…I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” he asked dryly.
“I’ll sic your ex-lover Liz on you.” She smirked—ten points for her.
But he barked out a laugh. “Lady, you’re way more scary than Liz, and that’s saying a lot.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t like the idea of you watching me.”
“You’ll get used to it.” He gave her a little salute and walked away.
7
W esley swung his legs over the edge of his bed, put on his glasses and stared in the predawn light at the empty wall unit where a dozen monitors, hard drives, routers, keyboards, joysticks and printers had once sat, all interconnected. Damn, the police had cleaned him out. They’d even taken his software cabinet, games and landline phones.
He smiled to himself. It was a good thing that he kept all his good equipment at his buddy Chance’s apartment.
He stood and stretched the kinks out of his neck, a bothersome side effect of spending so many hours bent over a keyboard.
Whew. Thank goodness the business with the police had been settled yesterday in court. Liz Fischer was a godsend…and a hottie. Too bad a woman like her would never take him seriously—movies like The Graduate and PS gave guys like him false hope.
Walking to the bathroom connected to his room, he rubbed his sore mouth, working his jaw. He wished he knew who had sent the guy who’d jumped him in the courthouse bathroom, but the thug seemed to prefer to talk with his hands. In truth, the guy could have been working for either one of the people that he owed—Father Thom being his biggest creditor. Then again, the guy robbing him could have been a coincidence.
But he doubted it.
The worst part was that he’d been carrying the fifteen hundred that Chance had paid him for deleting the speeding tickets—money he’d planned to take to Father Thom this morning. Instead, he’d have to scrounge together a few hundred from his various hiding places and beg for more time.
He thought about showering, but decided that fresh deodorant and mouthwash would suffice. If he got the ass-kicking he expected from Father Thom’s thugs, a soak in a hot tub of water was probably in his near future anyway.
He rooted around the floor for a cleanish pair of jeans and pulled a T-shirt from the laundry basket of clothes he hadn’t gotten around to folding. He dressed and shoved his feet into his old Merrell slip-ons, mourning his brown suede Pumas, and kicked Hubert’s decaying shoes near his trash can.
In the fifty-gallon glass aquarium on the other side of the room, a mouse scurried around, terrified. A pang of remorse hit him and he walked over, unlocked the pin and slid the screen top aside. With a practiced hand, he captured the mouse and held it up by its tail.
“Relax, buddy, you got a reprieve. Einstein must be fasting again.” He stared down at the black-and-gray spotted axanthic ball python, all six feet of his longtime pet coiled disinterestedly in a corner. “Finicky reptile, are you sure you aren’t female? Or vegetarian?”
Einstein didn’t move, and would likely stay in his stoic position for the next several hours. The police search, with all the activity and noise, must have traumatized him.
Wesley slid the cover closed, locked the pin, then returned the lucky mouse to a smaller container. Sometimes he thought that Einstein didn’t eat out of sympathy for his prey. When he did feed, it was as if he would begrudgingly relent, then coil around and squeeze his prey to death before it had time to react, and swallow it promptly, as if to get it over with. Carlotta thought the snake was a man-eater, but Wesley could barely get him to eat enough to sustain his monstrous size.
Wesley sometimes wondered, though, what his pet could kill and consume if it were motivated.
Hearing a noise in the hallway, Wesley frowned. He’d hoped to be out of t
he house before Carlotta got up, partly because he didn’t want to worry her, and partly because he didn’t want to face her. The fact that she wasn’t normally an early riser told him that she probably hadn’t slept well, and no doubt he was the cause. Frustration tightened his chest. He just needed some time and space to get things worked out with his creditors and to investigate his father’s case. Although he appreciated his sister’s concern, her hovering was making things more complicated.
He made his way around the room and checked various hiding places—the hem of the curtain, the hollow leg of his metal bed, inside his worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye—and counted up three hundred sixty dollars.
He heard a muffled voice and realized that Carlotta was calling his name. God, he hoped she hadn’t set the kitchen on fire again.
He grabbed his backpack and stuffed his iPod, cell phone and money inside. Then he stepped out into the hall and closed his bedroom door. It was a house rule that his bedroom door be closed at all times because Carlotta lived in fear that Einstein would somehow escape his enclosure.
“Wesley!”
“I’m coming,” he yelled. But when he reached the living room, he stopped short. Sitting next to Carlotta on the couch was Tick, the tub of lard who had forced his way in the house last week and called Carlotta at work.
“Mornin’, Wesley,” the guy said, smiling and patting Carlotta’s knee.
Carlotta, clutching the newspaper, looked terrified. Tick must have been waiting for her when she stepped outside to leave for work. Fury balled in Wesley’s stomach—he wanted to kill the guy. He had always wished he was big and beefy like Chance, but never more so than at this moment.
“Leave her alone,” was all he could say.
“Where’s the money?” Tick asked.
Wesley pulled himself up to his full height. “Maybe you can tell me.”
Tick laughed. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“I was jumped yesterday. Guy took all that I was carrying. I figured it was for Father Thom.”
Body Movers Page 6
