“How much I owe you?” Barboni growled, pulling some twenties from an overstuffed billfold.
“How much you got?” she asked.
“I don’t think it works that way,” he said, and stuffed four twenties into her outstretched hand.
“Charity,” Raydean muttered. “I’m working for charity.”
Barboni didn’t hear her over the noise of the traffic out on 98-A and the loud splashing of the fountain. He was darting back and forth, scoping out the front of the hotel. His hand slid into his jacket and pulled out an ugly black gun. Then he moved to the edge of the fountain and leaned forward, shielding himself in a crouch behind the fountain, staring intently through the multicolored lights that tinted the spray. My heart started pounding against my chest and my body was needled with a pepper spray of anxiety. What was going on? What was with the gun?
Barboni straightened abruptly and seemed to try and duck behind the tiers that stood in the center of the water. There was a popping noise, like firecrackers, and I realized someone was shooting. I froze, unable to make my body respond to the sensory input that my brain was receiving. We were in danger. I needed to get away, but I couldn’t move. As I watched, Barboni jerked and fell forward into the fountain, his body dancing like a dolphin as it was riddled with bullets.
Twenty-one
I screamed. Everyone was screaming, running away from the entrance to the hotel, away from the awful sight that was playing itself out just in front of us. I grabbed Raydean, pushed her head down, and shielded her with my body as I propelled her around the Plymouth and took cover.
Raydean had seen everything, the way the bullets stitched across Barboni’s chest, the way the water in the fountain turned to a dark red. She was beginning to shake, trembling in my arms as the waves of fear overtook what tender hold she had on sanity.
“Ohhh,” she moaned. “Oh God, Sierra!”
I couldn’t leave her. Even though the shooting seemed to be over, I couldn’t risk running to try and help Barboni. It didn’t really matter now anyway. He was dead.
In the distance the sirens began to wail, drawing closer in response to the hotel’s 911 call. The hotel security guards, four of them wearing navy blazers with gold buttons and carrying guns and walkie-talkies, came blasting out of the hotel, running for cover behind the brickwork that sheltered the building. Fat lot of good those goons would do. The gunplay was over and whoever had shot Barboni wasn’t hanging around just on the off chance he might take out a hotel security guard.
I looked up and down the strip for Pat, but I didn’t see her. If she’d been there I could’ve sent Raydean home, saved her from the questions that were bound to follow. As if reading my thoughts, the first patrol car squealed into the drive, sealing it off. Five other cars followed, closing off the driveway and preventing escape. It would only be a matter of time before the brown Taurus showed up. If the first detective on the scene wasn’t Nailor, the second one would be. All he’d have to hear was my name, or Raydean’s license plate number, and he’d be across town and down my throat.
Raydean started to cry softly. I stroked her hair and pulled her closer as the first uniform walked up to us. We must’ve looked pitiful because he squatted down next to me, his eyes blue pools of concern.
“You aren’t hurt, are you, ma’am?” he asked softly.
I looked over her head at him. “She saw him get shot,” I said. “It was a shock.”
He nodded. He was tall and lean, with thick black eyebrows. I figured him to be in his mid to late thirties, too old to be a rookie.
“Why don’t we get her inside. We’re going to use one of the meeting rooms for our interviews. She might be more comfortable there.” He looked over at Raydean again. “I’d sure feel better if an EMT looked her over.”
I nodded, starting to feel a little cold and shaky myself. “That’s very kind of you.”
We stood up, each of us taking one of Raydean’s arms. In my high heels, I was almost as tall as he was. So intent was I on walking Raydean inside, that I almost didn’t notice Nailor’s arrival. But it’s like a sixth sense with me. I don’t have to see him actually pull up; I feel him long before he’s there.
The cop led us through the door of the hotel and I felt Nailor watching me walk away. I turned back and saw him standing by the fountain, pulling on a pair of latex gloves and issuing orders. He’d be inside soon enough; in the meantime I had Raydean to attend to. I also needed to think fast about how much Nailor needed to know of the events of my evening.
I let the uniform lead us to the meeting room. The hotel staff was bustling around, hauling in chairs. Someone offered us coffee and I looked at Raydean.
“I think she needs hot tea,” I said. “And if you got any cookies back there, that would be nice.” It materialized in a matter of minutes, but Raydean was having none of it.
“Poisoned. I told you there were aliens here.” She seemed resigned to it. She looked around the room at the other witnesses and nodded to herself. “That’s them, all right.” I didn’t want to know who “them” was, so I let it go. She sat with her tea on her lap, tears rolling silently down her cheeks. She was terrified. What had I been thinking, dragging her into something so dangerous?
We waited for almost an hour before Nailor made his appearance. When he walked into the room, Raydean gasped. Two streaks of drying brown blood crossed the front of his chest. He hadn’t noticed, but seeing Raydean point to his chest made him look and swear under his breath.
“All right,” he said, when he reached me, “this is what I’ve got. You and the victim arrived in the driveway at eleven thirty-eight P.M. Raydean, here, was driving. The victim appeared to give Raydean some money and then stepped away. Thirty seconds later someone shot him and he fell into the fountain.”
“That would about sum it up,” I said. I didn’t have the strength to put on an act.
“So, what’s the deal? Why did he pay Raydean?”
I stretched my legs out in front of me and tried to get more comfortable in my seat. “She was our taxi driver,” I said. “We went out to dinner.”
“He left in a Porsche Boxster,” Nailor said. “Where’s that?”
“In Grayton Beach. Raydean and Pat flattened his tires because they were worried about me.”
This brought a curious response from Raydean. She coughed, suddenly slurped down her lukewarm tea, and turned on me. “We did no such kind of a thing!” she said.
“You and Pat didn’t slit his tires?”
Nailor was watching, not certain if this was part of our act or what.
“No! We were surveilling you from behind that porch. We weren’t sure what he was up to, but Pat thought you had it under control. It wasn’t until you guys settled into dessert that Pat went around front and saw your tires. That’s when we decided to rescue you ourselves and not leave it to redneck chance.” Raydean snorted, her old self. “Tire slitters! Why we’re a whole heap brighter than that!”
“What I want to know,” Nailor said, his voice neutral, “is why you and Pat felt the need to follow Sierra.”
Raydean raised an eyebrow. “Why to protect her, of course! I didn’t see you running in to save the day. There she was, trying to catch a murderer and where were you? And it wasn’t just me and Pat acting like the Lone Ranger, neither.”
“You had help?” Nailor asked.
Raydean nodded. “Of course we did. Fluffy wouldn’t have missed it for the world! She was all tucked up in Pat’s truck, waiting, just in case we needed our secret weapon.”
Nailor sighed. He hadn’t missed Raydean’s mood shift or overlooked the tears that stood wet upon her face. In short, he had compassion.
“Why don’t you take Raydean home,” he said. “You need me to get a uniform to drive you?”
I knew he knew my car was in the hotel garage. The cops would’ve checked it long ago. So maybe it was concern on his part. Maybe it was his way of trying to make up for doubting me. Or maybe it was further evidenc
e of his lack of faith. Maybe he was testing me, trying to see if I’d lie about my car.
“I’ll drive Raydean home in her car,” I answered. I hesitated, watching his face for a sign. He was, as usual, unreadable. “That’ll leave my car here, in the garage.”
“How about I bring it out to you when we’re done here?”
“I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”
He was staring at me, right into my eyes like nobody else was even in the room. “It’s no trouble. It’ll take me awhile here, but I’ll be out when I’m done.”
I nodded. For a moment I didn’t trust myself to speak. I couldn’t tell him that I needed him. I would never tell him that.
Twenty-two
Raydean said nothing on the way home. We rolled into her driveway at one-thirty. The rest of the trailer park was dark, except for the streetlights and the occasional porch light. The full moon was hidden by clouds, and a restless wind blew back and forth, changing directions to signal the approach of an impending storm.
I cut the engine and we sat there, neither one of us saying a word or moving to get out of the car. A moment later, Pat’s old pickup pulled in behind us. The rusting door swung slowly open and Pat hopped down to the ground with a slow grunt that signaled her arthritis was kicking in. She moved like she hurt. Fluffy, feeling forgotten, jumped out of the driver’s side window and ran ahead of Pat, leaping up and into the window of Raydean’s Plymouth. She settled into my lap and began licking my hand.
“Is she all right?” Pat asked. Raydean didn’t look up. She was staring out of the window, up at the thin outline of the moon.
“I don’t know. Let’s get her inside and into bed. Maybe she’ll feel better after she’s slept.”
Pat seemed doubtful, but she walked around to Raydean’s door and opened it anyway.
“Come on, honey,” she cooed softly. “Let’s get you into the house. You’ll feel better after you’ve had a little rest.”
Raydean allowed herself to be led inside. Pat took her back to the bedroom, helped her into a nightgown, and then returned, a worried look on her face.
“I’m staying,” she announced. “I’ll sleep here on the sofa, just in case she needs me.”
I sank down into a chair at the kitchen table and put my head in my hands. Pat stepped closer and rested one of her work-roughened hands on top of my head.
“It isn’t your fault,” she said. “You couldn’t have anticipated this.”
“But I should’ve known something might happen,” I said. “After all, you two were my backup.” Fluffy barked like she objected to not being included.
“All right,” Pat said with a sigh. “You should’ve known. Now, what does that get you? Guilt on top of grief? We’ve got a situation. We took a risk. Raydean, for all her non compos mentis behavior, was sane enough to understand that this was not a game. We’ve been in some tough spots before and we’ll see them again. But don’t you see what it does to include her? Raydean spends her days alone. We’re all she has. And she’s all we have.”
Pat stopped, realizing as she spoke what a huge admission she was making about the quality of our lives. We were the outcasts: two old ladies and a stripper.
“When you make her a part of us, you’re saying we need her. Sierra, no one has needed or valued Raydean for years. Sit there and guilt-trip yourself if you want, but pull your butt up off your shoulders long enough to see things as they really are.”
I couldn’t think. I was too tired to figure it out. Maybe in the morning, I thought.
“I’m going home,” I said. “Nailor’s coming later to bring my car. Francis’ll be getting in sometime. I need to try and catch a couple of hours of sleep before they’re on me with a million questions. The team can reconvene for a debriefing in the morning.”
At the word team, Pat smiled.
I left her there in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the lone source of light casting a pale yellow circle around her as she sat drinking a cup of coffee and listening out for our friend.
I walked across the road and up onto my stoop where I sat for I don’t know how long, contemplating nothing more than the way the grass bent as the wind swept down over the trailer park. The sky sparkled with distant lightning and the air trembled with thunder that drew closer as I sat waiting. I could smell the rain in the air, feel it becoming heavier and full of moisture. It smelled like home on a hot summer night.
In Philly the rain was our only salvation during the summer. We didn’t have air-conditioning until I was in the seventh grade and Pa broke down and bought three window units. Before then, we would sit out on the stoop, waiting for the rain, our sweaty kid bodies reeking of exercise and dirt. When the storm approached, we’d stop playing and sit like stone statues, gargoyles maybe, hoping to feel the first cool drops on our skin. In Philly, in the summer, the rain was a second chance. It cooled you and washed the salty moisture from your skin, replacing it with the grassy smell of a country summer, even though we lived miles from the rolling hills of Chester and Bucks counties. In the rain you could be anyone, even yourself, because everything started over.
I sat waiting for the first fat drop, and felt it plop down beside me, then another and another. Fluffy, who’d trotted up beside me, didn’t share my enthusiasm. She scampered through the doggie door and sat whimpering on the other side. She wanted me to come in. She didn’t understand that I needed the rain.
The drops came faster, melding into a steady stream. The lightning pierced the nearby sky and the thunder shook the trailers. I stayed on my stoop, the rain drenching me like a cool shower, my black sheath clinging to my body like a second skin. I took off my heels and slung them inside through the doggie door, stretching my feet out in front of me, and leaning back on my arms. The rain stung my face, slapping at the images that refused to leave my head.
I sat there until the tears came, crying through the peak of the storm, my sobs carried off by the wind and hidden by the thunder. I was so alone and so afraid. I hadn’t seen the attack coming on Barboni, hadn’t anticipated it, hadn’t known what to do when it arrived. In short, I’d been completely vulnerable. It could’ve just as easily been Raydean or me that took the hit. This wasn’t a game. There was a killer out there somewhere and he could strike at any time and hit anyone. Who was I to think I could stop him?
The rain had eased, moving off, the thunder rolling in the direction of the beach. The temperature had dropped by a good ten degrees. What had been refreshing and cleansing now felt like stinging icicles. I stood up and looked around. He could be watching me. He could realize that I was here, alone, and come after me. Wherever I was, he seemed to follow, killing off the people around me. I shook my head, trying to clear that thought from my head. Now I was paranoid. It only seemed that the killer followed me, shooting over my shoulder, killing the people in my path. In reality, I just happened to be there when he struck.
The danger was that he knew I was trying to find him. Maybe that was why Barboni died. Maybe the killer was trying to taunt me. No, that didn’t make sense, either. Nothing about this situation made sense. I was too tired to think clearly. I turned and went inside, peeling off my sodden dress and leaving it lying on the kitchen counter. I unhooked my bra and left it lying on the bathroom floor, along with my panties. I pulled back the covers and crawled in between the sheets. Fluffy hopped up, turned a complete circle twice, and flopped down at the foot of the bed. We fell asleep within seconds it seemed. When I awoke, Nailor was sitting on the edge of the bed.
Twenty-three
I was dreaming about him. In my dream we were riding on a motorcycle. I sat behind him, holding on, my head resting on his shoulder. We were happy, the troubles of the present forgotten. We were going away and no one was chasing us. We were driving down 98-A, the beach road, laughing at the seagulls that chased along the shore, outrunning them.
Suddenly Nailor hit the brakes, trying to avoid something in the road. The bike veered and Nailor battled for control. I l
ooked out in front of us, trying to see. Alonzo Barboni’s body lay in the road, soaked in blood, his face picked away by scavengers, decaying. Road kill. We slid, hitting the pavement and traveling, the road tearing at our skin as we slammed, inevitably, into the rotting, heat-bloated body that lay before us.
I sat up in bed, terrified, breathing hard and sweat-soaked. When I saw the figure sitting beside me, I screamed and Nailor grabbed me.
“It’s all right. Sierra, it’s me.” He pulled me to him, his arms wrapping around me, stroking my hair, shushing me with soft whispers. I shuddered as the images kept coming, a slide show of blood and gore.
“It was a bad dream,” Nailor said softly.
“No,” I said. “It was real.”
“Okay, okay,” he whispered. “It will be okay. I’m here. You’re not alone. Shhh. We’re going to be okay.”
He held me for a long time, not saying a word. Fluffy jumped down off the bed and walked out of the room, figuring this was one situation that required privacy. I felt the nightmare fade into the distance and the horror of the evening recede. I was home and I was safe. My body relaxed and for a while I let go, resting in a safe harbor.
At some point Nailor’s touch changed and I responded. His breathing quickened when my fingers moved across his back, drifting up his neck and into his hair. He kissed me, his hands pulling me closer. I felt my body tense as he touched the nipple of my left breast. His tongue started moving down my neck and I knew what was next.
“Stop!”
“What?” He straightened, pushing back a little so he could look into my eyes.
I felt like an idiot in some way, because it was finally here, the moment I’d been waiting for, and I was about to spoil it, again.
“You and me,” I said, “we’ve got stuff to figure out here. You can’t just come barging in here and take advantage of the moment.”
His eyes glittered dangerously. His body tightened ever so slightly, but enough to let me know he was on guard again.
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