Too Lucky to Live

by Annie Hogsett

  Rune took in the food, the beautiful view, the lovely furniture, the flowers, and the better-than-average art. “Wow, I can see why they call this a sweet.”

  Nobody was giving me any of the fancy food, though. Not even obscene amounts of dollars can get you dinner at The Cleveland Clinic if you’re on the docket for slug removal. I had that feverish, otherworldly glaze you might get from being shot but not too shot.

  A young resident-looking woman in a gleaming white coat explained kindly to me that if a person had to be shot in the chest, my bullet had been “the good, small kind” from what she called a “mouse gun” and had landed in the best possible place.

  She drew a little picture of my heart and lungs nestled in behind my ribs and showed how all the important stuff had been spared and how all that got hit was a rib which would hurt but heal fine, and something she referred to, rather unkindly I thought, as “fatty tissue.”

  She told me I was lucky, but the bullet definitely needed to come out of there. Then a wonderful nurse named Paul injected something into my IV that eased the pain and disconnected me from the fear of death. After a while they came and wheeled me down into unconsciousness.

  I awoke a long drowsy time later, pain-free and ever-so-slightly flying. My very bad/very lucky day was done. The sky was navy blue and the moon was a sliver of pure radiance in my window. Tom and Rune were curled up in the next bed, both breathing slow and quiet. Beloved shadows.

  I decided this tender little slice of moon was the earthly deputy of God in my world tonight. I thanked it for every single wonderful thing and closed my eyes.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Wednesday, September 2

  Valerio was pissed at me as usual.

  Tom and Rune were on a tour of the Clinic, which I assumed would lead them past the cookie department at Au Bon Pain. While they were on their own, I’d cajoled a nurse to wheel me around to visit Valerio in his own lovely room.

  I gave Tom a lot of credit. In spite of major distractions, he’d had the presence of mind to get someone to prevent the EMTs from delivering our rescuer to McCauley Road.

  The wheelchair was silliness, but I wasn’t in a mood to mix it up with anybody about anything since my recent discovery of au bon painkillers. I was content to roll merrily along. Valerio was very, very pissed, though, and I was trying to keep him from harshing my mellow. That’s drug talk. I also was planning to divest him of vital information before he came out from under his own mini-high and got more alert. He was unfortunately alert, however.

  “Everything you’ve asked me since ‘how are you feeling?’ is off limits,” he growled. “You need to butt yourself out of police business, missy, and take you and your blind death-magnet out of town for a while. Jesus.”

  “I thought we were trusting each other. Calling each other Allie and Tony. Off the record, of course. Tony.”

  He grimaced in an attempt to crush a smile. Valerio was a hard-edged cop with a sweet nougat center. And he liked me. He kinda liked me. Whether that was going to find me out what I wanted to know was another matter.

  “Answer one thing. What was up with Marie?”

  Another grimace. This one unalloyed. He groaned and rearranged himself on the pillows. His right arm was wrapped in thick bandages, but I could tell by the way he massaged his chest that the cold betrayal of a bullet, stopped by Kevlar on its way to his heart, hurt the most.

  “I tell you what, Allie. Off the record. Everything that happened—Let me count ’em out for you: Felix. Muff. Frank. Ulysses. Renata. Almost Sammy. Tom’s Diana. And Bob. Especially Bob. That was all her.”

  I squelched my Yeesh! reaction to Tom’s ownership of Diana. “She couldn’t have killed them all, Tony.”

  “Not in person, no. I don’t see the whole thing, of course. Nobody ever will since key players are dead. But I can piece it together. That night, after we heard about the kid with the ticket, Bob excused himself. I figured he was going to the john.

  Now I’m guessing he called Marie and she overreacted. ‘Get the ticket away from that kid!’

  “Then he maybe sent Felix and Muff off on a impromptu mission. If so, I’m sure he thought the better of it even before we left the tower. After it was too late. In any case, there’s plenty of evidence that those guys had beaten up Renata and that they’d gone down to Tom’s. Maybe they’d made Renata tell them where he lived. That’s lost now. Doesn’t matter.

  “After Bob fumbled the start, Marie took over. She was the driving force behind all of it. Could be she did the hit-and-run on Sammy, for all I know. She was one tough cookie.

  “That scenario you worked out for Felix, Muff, and Frank wasn’t just—” I could tell Tony’s next word was about to be “bullshit,” but he switched gears. “—half bad. You came as close as any of us. My theory is Marie made Bob shut Felix and Muff down, once she saw the liability they were. Frank was collateral damage. Too bad collateral dies dead as target.”

  I was seeing the real Marie now. Moving through the last couple of weeks. Everything I’d missed. How quickly she got Bob to clean up his mistake. How over his head and sloppy he was at first. The rookie killer…

  “She was the brains, Tony. If you can call it that.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. She did Ulysses. I’d bet on it. Bob must have—When he saw you there with the body that night…”

  He shook his head. “Renata, too. With Renata out of the way, Rune was Tom’s. The bargaining chip she was looking for. Marie was there when Diana went off the Wyndham. We have the scratches on her and the DNA on Diana to prove that one, at least.”

  Diana. Her obsession with Tom’s money. Her reckless alliance with a ruthless lawyer. I couldn’t stop picturing her last moments. Meeting Marie up there, alone, on the precipice of greed. Both of them after Tom’s money. Eyes locked on the jackpot—clawing at each other—matching each other, instability for instability, dollar for dollar…

  I shook myself loose from the spell of that grim scene and started paying attention to Tony again.

  “Bob was…God, I don’t know. He could be this great guy, Allie. But there was something messed up with him. His right/wrong switch was busted. A good woman might have made him a preacher. But Marie took his weakness and turned him into her own deadly weapon.”

  Valerio paused and touched his bandaged arm. Gingerly. Pensive. I don’t think he was aware he did it.

  I used the silence to process my epiphany that Bob Clark was in hot pursuit of the Mondo by the time we met him. How, at the exact moment he was warning Tom to sign the ticket, he was realizing that Rune had never had it, that Tom had never taken it to his house. Obsessing, then, about the mistake of deploying his thugs.

  What might it have been like for him? To walk into Tom’s house with us and Valerio, praying that Muff and Felix had gone, freaking out while Rune was describing those two talking—terrified that the boy might have heard them say “Bob.”

  Our good old helpful Bob had rushed to my house that first morning because he was panicked that the ticket had been stolen by someone other than him. The “Let’s-cash-in-your-ticket-I’ll-drive-you-to-the-lottery-place” Bob was already three murders down that morning. Committed to Marie’s kidnapping scheme. Did he really plan to kill us all, there at the end?

  As I tuned back into what Valerio was saying, I realized I’d been rubbing my sore spot, too.

  “Way before that first night when we found you and Tom up on fourteen, Marie was turning him wrong. He was always a little bit on the take. Some little angle. Always shaking somebody down for small change. I wasn’t around for that. But I suspected. That’s why they called him Dirty Clark around the projects.”

  Ah, DIRTY….

  I tried to fend off the avalanche of blame, crashing down. What if I’d left that balled up scrap on the floor under Ulysses’ hand that night to be discovered in the righteous order of thi
ngs? What if Valerio picked it up? How many of the dead would still be alive? How many of the still alive might now be dead? How much of the Mondo tsunami of blood was on me? Suppose Bob was the one to pick up the note? What then? Who dies then?

  Valerio wasn’t focused on any of that.

  “He was a good cop, Allie, when we were working our shift, or at the precinct. Then, when he was with a guy like Felix Tequila, he’d be someone I was trying not to see. With Marie he was whatever Marie needed him to be. And that was never anything nice.”

  Valerio hadn’t jumped me about the note, so I resisted the urge to grill him about why he’d kept quiet about Bob. I didn’t have to.

  “Why didn’t I do something? Or say something? You’re thinking it. I can see. You civilian CSIs live in a dream world about what it’s like for us. I believed he’d make a good cop in the end. He was young. He wanted to be a hero so bad. He did a lot of good. When we rode together he always had my back. Bob was my friend, Allie. Maybe he was my…family. I guess that’s why it took me way too long to admit to myself…to believe…”

  I tried to pour all my empathy for Valerio and his hopes for Bob into my face without interrupting him. He was oblivious anyhow.

  “Whatever Bob was, Marie was uglier. Psycho, maybe. She could have been one of those female serial killers, except I don’t believe she got off on the killing. It was all money with her. Marie wanted to be rich. Wealthy. She told me once she wanted to see her house in some fancy architecture magazine. She wanted designer clothes. She wanted to quit her job and lie on the beach and have guys bring her umbrella drinks. Truth was, Marie wanted every single dime Bob Clark could squeeze out of every poor son of a bitch he could get his hands on. And when your 550 million-dollar dime dropped in front of Bob that night, it drove her wild.”

  Wild Marie. I grappled with the rage that swept over me every time I remembered all her righteous warnings. How she’d shepherded us and Rune to the Rock Hall. How she’d smiled, nice as pie, over breakfast, while pretending to be the guardian of his wellbeing. How she’d drugged Rune. How she’d said, “You made me sorry.” And shot me, not sorry in the least.

  Like swatting a fly.

  I did not feel bad about feeling good that Marie was dead.

  “How did she kill Ulysses and Renata?”

  “Don’t know for sure. Not going to find out, I don’t imagine. They didn’t look real hard at Ulysses and they didn’t find Renata until it was way too late to see much. The theory is insulin. Marie was a diabetic from the time she was little. Good with a needle.”

  My memory sparked and I saw the container of brown sugar sitting untouched by her bowl, that morning before she kidnapped Rune.

  Valerio picked up the thread again. “And Renata. Maybe insulin. Maybe something else. That’s even harder to know now. The autopsy was compromised, of course.”

  “Diana too?”

  “No question on that. Diana and your—that D.B. Harper, got themselves on Marie’s radar. Guess is Diana found out about him on that MondoSecrets.com you called me about. Our techs tracked all three of them through there, though Harper was never in direct communication with Marie.

  “It’s funny. People think they can do whatever they like online, but a lot of times you can get better evidence than fingerprints off there. Diana used information from the site to find D.B. We shook that out of him, thanks to you. Something Diana did or said there must have made her look like a threat to Marie’s plan.”

  Ah, yes. Here was the Diana I understood now. That Diana would have dressed up her relationship with Tom, their “very long engagement,” their plans, their new life together, their newfound riches….Her gorgeous, self-assured photo. Marie would have been all over that.

  Valerio continued, unaware of my small “Ah-ha!”

  “Marie was batshit about loose ends. Your—that D.B.—is lucky he didn’t go off the Wyndham too.”

  I contemplated this scenario for a second and rejected a comment I’d probably regret.

  “Bob was with me the night Diana was killed, but when they cleaned up at the warehouse, they found another body. Unaccounted for. No ID yet, from what I hear. Another of Marie’s loose ends, I bet. Accomplice, looks like. Tall, good-looking white dude. A younger, supersized Bob. Not a mark on him except for the needle in his arm. They’re thinking heroin for that one. Shirt off. Don’t know how he fits, but he fits.”

  That might explain Size 14 Shoes in the ladies at the Rock Hall. A janitor with a tool box but no yellow sign. Perhaps a chilly “janitor’s closet” at the McCauley for Renata, too. Maybe he’d been a real janitor after all. Maybe he’d had a key for access to the HVAC up on top of the Wyndham. Loose ends.

  “I could maybe help you with that one, Tony. In exchange for some information.”

  “For some—? Are you nuts, Allie? Shit. I already told you…Way more than I meant to. There’s something funky in that IV.”

  “Yeah, ain’t it great?”

  He grinned. A sad, pained grin. “It is, Allie. It is so great.”

  “All right. Truly. One more. How did you know I had the note?

  “Okay. And this is it. Allie. It. You do comprehend ‘it’, don’t you?”

  “Yessir. ‘It’ is what this is. Now, give.”

  “Before Ulysses called you that night? He called me.”

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Later that same day they checked Tom, Rune, and me out of The Cleveland Clinic. I would like to have stayed longer. Maybe forever. The Founders’ Suite was great. I felt safe. The Clinic is The Clinic. Oprah goes there. I rest my case. But we couldn’t stay. They needed the room.

  We had to give Rune back to Elaine. It wasn’t her fault, after all, that she’d been a pawn of Marie like pretty much everybody within a fifty-mile radius of Cleveland. She was the same caring mom-person she’d always been. Saying goodbye was hard for us, but Rune went without a fuss. The kid took his home with him wherever he went these days. He was a turtle. A spunky, hard-shelled, smart little turtle. Tom had convinced him that his place in our world was secure. He still hadn’t used the “family” word. But we were going to make that happen.

  After we dropped Rune off, we went back to the Wyndham. To a different suite this time, for my sake, with no view of the theaters or the sidewalk down on Euclid. Sure, it was all tainted by violent death and other bad memories, but we’d grown us some turtle shells, too. And, honey, it was clean there. The Price Motel had sold Tom—even Tom—on the value of an expensive, clean hotel room. With silent air conditioning. And nothing sticky or smelly on it anywhere. Plus the Shock Abzzorber Plus. Did I mention that was a definite plus?

  Also, no wonder Vicodin is a controlled substance. It removes pain and it also tempers bad memories and takes away anxiety without, as far as I could tell, impairing many of the sensations a person would still like to enjoy. Tom had been gentle and considerate with the kissing and touching up until the moment I’d murmured, “Is that all you’ve got, Dr. Bennington the Third? Because this is lovely, but I’m missing the—” And then I whispered in exact detail what that missing stuff was. Message delivered. I got exactly what I’d asked for.

  Did it hurt? Maybe. Did I care? I don’t remember.

  We were waiting for our hearts to calm down and our bodies to bid goodnight to each other, when the thought hit me.

  Like an echo. A frisson of uneasiness.

  “Unaccounted for.”

  Valerio had told me nearly everything I wanted to know. But someone—besides my dead janitor guy in the warehouse—was unaccounted for.

  Big Lying Idiot. Mr. Probably-Plaid. Where the hell was he?

  Tom was in a unique position to feel the ripple effect of the realization course through me. “What? Allie, you just thought about something. Something bad.”

  “Yeah. I did. The big guy who grabbed me at my house.”

&nbs
p; In spite of this unwelcome memory, I yawned.

  Thank you, Ms. Hydrocodone. You are my Fairy Godmother.

  “But y’know, Tom, he’s not here, as far as I can tell. We’re okay tonight. Way okay. Let’s talk about this at breakfast. Between the drugs and the part where you—” I whispered in his ear again, “I’m feeling too wonderful to mess with him right now.”

  We gave ourselves a rain check on worry and went off to our dreams like the lucky, happy, satisfied people we were.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Thursday, September 3

  We didn’t even have to wait for breakfast to start accounting for our guy because we got a call. Our original phones had been crushed under the wheels of countless vehicles in downtown Cleveland, and the FBI had confiscated the burners. I’d asked Skip to order us new ones. We needed some way to take care of business and stay in touch with Rune. My new phone had been waiting for me at the Wyndham, all programed with my number and ready to go.

  Bright and early the next morning it rang.

  Generic ringtone.

  Excellent. I could deal.

  It took me a moment to figure out I was talking with Nan Randall.

  “Alice, it’s Nan. From GG&B.”

  “Nan. Oh, hey. Hi. How are you?”

  “I’m okay. I’m doing better. I was off work for a couple of weeks, but they didn’t fire me. That was a miracle. You made it happen. You and Skip Castillo. I’m not supposed to know that, but a receptionist has her sources.”

  “Well, I’m glad. It didn’t seem fair for you to not have your job. After…” I paused in the presence of my thought that Nan’s life had maybe been improved by a bullet “everything.”

  “Alice, I think D.B. is up to something. He’s so pi—mad about all that happened. That Diana Wiles episode didn’t help his standing here at the firm. You know how they are.”

  Oh, yes.

  “I’m sure, Nan, but—”

  She was on a roll, talking fast before her training could overtake her heart. “I think you and Tom should check out this very disgusting man named Lester Grose. He’s after your money. All of it. And I think D.B.’s working for him now. Good luck, Allie.”