“You love gorgeous guys,” I pointed out. “I can’t believe how rude you were to him. You didn’t even introduce yourself.”
“He shouldn’t have been dancing so close.”
“He’s very nice. He’s a doctor.”
“So he was monitoring your heart rate by inspecting your boobs?”
“He was not!”
“Mazie, I know how guys think. I’m a guy myself. Sort of. I noticed him earlier this evening. He was with his date.”
“So? She went home sick.”
“Sick? Try heart attack. This lady was in her seventies.”
“Maybe it was his mother.”
“Mummies don’t kiss their boys on the lips.”
“She couldn’t have been that old.”
“She’d had work done, she looked good. But underneath, I’m talking Granny Clampett. If Granny Clampett shopped at Bergdorf’s. Now wave good night to your yummy chum, because I am hauling your tanked little tushy home.”
Kennison watched as Magenta steered me toward the door. He started toward us, then hesitated, apparently trying to make up his mind whether to pursue me. I could have yanked myself away from Magenta and returned to Dr. Dreamboat, whose body language had made it pretty clear that he’d been hoping the evening would end with me in his bed.
I waved at him as we headed toward the door. He sent me an “Our stars weren’t aligned” shrug, then turned and shouldered his way through the crowd. James Bond had other fish to fry.
Chapter Twenty-three
Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.
—Maguire’s Maxims
I slept late the next day and spent the morning in delicious lassitude, reading the Sunday papers over doughnuts and coffee. The Cougar Killing had been bumped off the front page by a congressman and a call girl, and I had to hunt through the Metro section before finding anything on the story. Ben Labeck, the main suspect in the murder, had been sighted in various areas of the city and suburbs, but none of the leads had panned out. Lieutenant Vincent Trumbull was quoted as saying the police were following up several tips and expected to make an arrest soon. Good luck with that, Vince. If you find him, do me a favor and let me know.
As I read, I absently stroked the burn scar on my cheekbone. It was a raw, irregularly shaped scrap of skin, about an inch and a half in diameter, a shade pinker than my natural skin tone. Back in my fugitive days, a thug had set my hair on fire, and when I’d rolled my head to put out the fire, my cheek had been burned. I’d never been self-conscious about it, but ever since Dr. Dreamboat had noticed it, all I could see when I looked in the mirror was a squid clinging to my face, looking as though it wanted to suck out my eyeballs.
Muffin barked. It was his outside-or-I-dump-on-the-rug bark. Grateful for the distraction, I bundled into my coat, snatched up a plastic bag, and attached Muffin’s leash. Outside, we ambled east on Brady Street toward the lake, Muffin leisurely snuffling fire hydrants and tree trunks, catching up on canine news until he finally found a maple tree that suited him and did his business.
We were on our way back, just passing Glorioso’s Market, when a splurt of green paint suddenly exploded against a nearby hydrant, the splash spattering Muffin’s fur. Tires squealed as a car careened to the curb next to us, the barrel of an assault weapon poking from its open window.
“Usted idiota estupido,” I screamed at Rico Del Toro.
“Sorry,” Rico said, grinning. “My aim was off on account of Eddie can’t drive straight.”
Eddie Arguello was in the driver’s seat. “Hey, Maze—check out my new wheels.”
I scrutinized the vehicle. Its frame was composed of giant sheets of rust patched together with duct tape; its front bumper was attached to the body with clothesline; and its muffler appeared to be made out of a Pringles can.
“It’s a Caddy,” Eddie informed me.
“No way.”
“No shit, Mazie—this is a 1986 Cadillac Cimarron d’Oro. C’mon, get in, experience the power, let me take you for a ride.”
I clutched Muffin to my chest. “Do I look like I have a death wish?”
“C’mon, don’t be a chicken doody!” Rico threw in a few clucks for effect. “We patched up the holes in the floor, specially for you.”
I heaved a sigh, knowing I was going to regret this. “No speeding,” I warned.
Rico snickered. “This heap don’t do more than fifteen, Maze. Eighteen, tops.”
“Well, put those guns away before the neighbors haul theirs out and start taking potshots.” Brady Street was a shoot first, ask questions later type of neighborhood.
I’d met the boys when I was a fugitive, searching for Eddie’s cousin, who was a link to my husband’s murderer. Eddie has liquid brown eyes, deep-bronze skin, and a nose that’s been recycled from some distant Aztec ancestor. He has a wrestler’s build—stocky and solid—whereas Rico is built more along the lines of a flagpole. Rico is cute, once you get past the pony hawk, the pierced lips, and the acne flares. Both boys had recently turned sixteen and obtained their drivers licenses, Eddie’s legit and Rico’s a piece of plastic purchased over the Internet that looked even more authentic than the real thing. They’re both good kids, puppy dogs at heart, the kind of guys who’d be able to score you some primo weed or show you how to get past the ogres in a video game, but not guys you’d want operating heavy machinery in your vicinity.
Displaying a surprising courtliness, Rico got out and wrenched open the rear door, which, amazingly, didn’t fall off. Gingerly, I climbed into the backseat. Eyes bright, panting at the prospect of a ride, Muffin hopped up into my lap. Eddie took off, laying rubber, not that there was much rubber to lay—in another week this crate was going to be rocking along on its rims. I used a Kleenex I found in my pocket to wipe the paint off Muffin’s fur so he wouldn’t lick it off and get sick.
“Look at this,” Rico held up his gun. “It’s a Halo B Loader. Handles twenty-two paintballs per square inch.”
“Nah—that’s a piece o’ garbage,” Eddie scoffed. “You want to see a weapon, check out the baby in the backseat. A Tippmann X7 Phenom. You can set it for manual or electro-pneumatic. Rico’s crappy Halo is like a blunderbuss compared to mine.”
“Dude, you could have a shoulder-mounted grenade launcher and I’d still outshoot you,” Rico said.
They carried on like this for a while, dissing each other’s weapons and bragging about their stealth, their cunning, and their prowess on the paintball field. Eddie was actually a cautious driver, sticking scrupulously to the speed limit, correctly assuming that he fit the police profile for driver most likely to be pulled over: young, male, driving an exhaust-spewing car with a bobblehead hula dancer on the dash, and paintball guns in the backseat so realistic they looked capable of taking over a banana republic. He drove down Lake Park’s steep bluffs and headed north along Memorial Drive. Lake Michigan glinted silver-blue in the pale sun. Seagulls skimmed its crests and clouds massed along its horizon, looking as though they’d been created by a sloppy watercolorist.
“So you’re coming to the tourney this week, right, Maze?” Eddie locked eyes with me in the rearview mirror.
“What tourney?”
Rico slapped his forehead. “What tourney, she asks. Only the most important game of this century, screw the Olympics or the Super Bowl, what nobody cares about anyway. The championships.”
“We’re in it this year,” Eddie said, so excited he forgot to act cool. “We already beat every candy-ass team on the planet. Now we’re facing off against the pansy Madison team in the tourney, winner take all.”
Rico turned around in his seat to eyeball me. “You’re coming to cheer us on, right, Maze? Wednesday, three o’clock.”
“If I get off work in time. Wait—you guys have school, don’t you?”
“Nuh-uh. School gets out at noon the day before Thanksgiving.”
Thanksgiving! I was supposed to go home to Quail Hollow and spend it with my brothers and their f
amilies. The thought filled me with dread.
“Hey, almost forgot,” Eddie said. “A certain someone said to give you a message.”
I boosted Muffin up so he could look out the window. “What certain someone?”
Eddie did the up-down-up eyebrow thing. “You know.”
“George Clooney?”
“Who’s he?”
“Thanks for making me feel old.”
“Labeck, that’s who,” Rico said. “You remember. The guy the cops have been chasing all over town.”
“You saw him?”
“Yesterday,” Rico said, grinning. “We found him a safe place to stay, a place the cops will never look.”
“Lake Waupoose.” Eddie said. “Way the hell out in the boonies. There used to be a motel and tourist cabins out there years ago, but the state paintball committee bought the land and set up game grounds. It’s where they’re holding the tourney. There’s this old woodsy who lives out there—the club pays him like a few bucks to keep up the grounds and stuff. Labeck is renting his cabin.”
“Where is this place?”
“Twenty, thirty miles west of the city, near the state forest.”
“See, Labeck’s been in touch with us,” Eddie said. “We’ve been bringing him food and stuff. I even let him borrow the Cim.”
“Great disguise,” Rico put in. “Nobody would ever guess that a cool dude like Labeck would be seen driving this POS.”
“The message,” I reminded them.
“Hell, Mazie, I just gave it to you, don’t you ever listen?” Eddie said. “Labeck wanted us to tell you where he’s at.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole message?”
Both boys looked at me with what-were-you-expecting expressions. Guys, I swear!
We pulled up in front of my place, Eddie stopping as gently as if he were setting a baby bird back in its nest. I hopped out, clutching Muffin, grateful to have been returned in one piece.
Eddie started to pull away.
“Wait!” I yelled and the car screeched to a halt, rocking on its suspension. Scrabbling in my coat pocket, I snatched out the GoMo phone, the extra one I’d purchased earlier that week, and thrust it through the passenger window at Rico. “Give this to Labeck next time you see him,” I said.
My number was programmed in to the phone’s memory. This time I wasn’t leaving Bonaparte Labeck any weasel room for not calling me.
Chapter Twenty-four
Coincidences don’t exist.
Everything happens for a random reason.
—Maguire’s Maxims
“This is what keloid tissue looks like,” Jared Kennison told me, zooming in on an image on his computer monitor. It showed a photo of a man, the entire left side of his face a mass of burn tissue. “In your case, Mazie, reconstructing the keloid tissue would involve surgically incising it, then implanting a patch of skin taken from another part of your body—the back of your thigh maybe—onto the burned out patch. The skin graft will gradually merge with your normal skin, and after a few months the transplanted skin will look identical to the original.”
I found it hard to focus on the computer images, since my gaze kept shifting to Dr. Dreamboat. His eyes were very blue today, the color intensified by the cobalt shade of his tie, and a strand of black hair had fallen over his forehead. A faint scent of Armani drifted from him, tantalizing, sexy.
“You need to have this burn seen to now,” he said, “because in later life the tissue can metastasize.”
“Cancer?” My hand flew to my face.
“Possibly. Best take care of this thing now while you’re young.” He glanced at the information form I’d filled out earlier. “I see you’re not quite thirty yet, is that correct?”
I nodded, wondering how old he was. Had a few procedures contributed to that gorgeous facade? A jaw lift maybe? A bump of Botox? And were those creases bracketing his mouth created by the magic of collagen? He’d let his hair go silver at the temples, age signs that only added to the overall dazzling effect.
“Mazie?” He cocked his head and smiled.
My face prickled with heat. He’d caught me staring at him. It must happen to him all the time. Probably he had to keep a cattle prod handy to jolt his female patients back to their senses.
“How much would this all cost?”
Kennison handed me an informational pamphlet on rehabilitative surgery. “Since this would be reconstructive, rather than cosmetic surgery, your insurance should cover it.”
“I don’t have insurance.”
“No insurance?” He looked startled, as though I’d announced that global warming was caused by an increase in the electric eel population. He steepled his hands, prayer style, rested his chin on them and stared at me. Two impulses seemed to be warring here: his need to impress me versus his physician’s reluctance to give away his services. Where was the man whose hands had been all over me at the Bling-Bling Club? Replaced by a detached professional whose hands were staying scrupulously on their own side of the desk.
“Tell you what, Mazie. Let’s have you talk to our financial director. We’ll see if we can’t develop some kind of payment plan.”
Saturday night he’d said he’d do the work pro bono. Now he was fobbing me off as though I were a poor relation. He walked me out of his consulting room and down the hall to an office where a woman with short gray hair and glasses sat at a desk growling under her breath at a computer.
“Carol,” Jared said. “This is Mazie Maguire. She’d like to talk to you about payment options for reconstructive surgery.”
Carol’s eyes flicked over me, taking in the frayed jeans, the Target turtleneck, the unmanicured nails, and the fake silver jewelry in one swift glance, shrewdly assessing that I was poverty-stricken but possibly of romantic interest to her boss. “Have a seat,” she said briskly, her tones clearly indicating she resented having her work interrupted by a person inconsiderate enough not to have chosen wealthy parents.
“I’ve got to go.” Jared squeezed my hand. “I’ll give you a call, okay?”
He winked at me as he left. I guess the wink was supposed to make me feel less like a door-to-door evangelist who’d just been shoved off a porch.
Carol went into a canned spiel, but getting her to commit to the actual cost of the procedure was like trying to get a straight price quote out of a car salesman. She hemmed and hawed and circled around the cost, but eventually she got to the bottom line. Yes, I could afford to get rid of the squid.
But only if I sold my liver, spleen, and kidneys on the black market.
“I’ll think about it,” I said politely, getting up and making for the door, suddenly feeling an overwhelming urge to get out of the place. I should have known better than to come here. I didn’t belong in this oasis of seaweed wraps and diamond-dust dermabrasion and Evian water colonics. I didn’t fit in with the toned, tanned suburban women whose hair was fifty shades of ash blond and who spent more on their dogs’ manicures than I made in a year. I could barely afford a box of Band-Aids, let alone a patch of my own thigh grafted to my cheek.
Even the clinic’s parking lot gave me a case of the insecures. There was my sweet little Pig parked amid a sea of hogs, the enormous SUVs suburban families now required to get their two point five kids to cello lessons—although I did spot a few lowly Toyotas and Chevies scattered about, and there was a gas-sipping little motor scooter snugged in the staff parking area.
Scooters in November? Scooters had lousy traction on ice and snow and turned their riders into popsicles. I paused with my car keys in hand. Green Hoodie had been driving a scooter. I hadn’t gotten a close look at it, but had noticed it was a dark color. The one parked in the lot here was a black Honda with silver trim.
A coincidence. Motor scooters were rare, but you did see them around, even in winter. Probably its owner lived two blocks away and rode the scooter to work to help save the planet. I got into Pig and started the engine. Then I sat there as my good and bad angels went at i
t hammer and tongs.
Good: Waste of time, Mazie. The odds against this being the scooter driven by Green Hoodie are a million to one. You’re already late for work. You need to be prompt and reliable. You owe it to your employer to put in a full, honest day’s work.
Bad: Ah, go build an orphanage, ya little brown nose. I say it’s time for the Mazie Maguire Hogwash and Hooey Show!
As usual, Bad kicked Good’s ass. A minute later, I was back in the clinic, trotting up to the reception desk. “Excuse me,” I said breathlessly to the young woman, who’d apparently been chosen as the public face of the Kennison Clinic because of her resemblance to a currently hot movie star, “but I just saw two kids hanging around the staff parking lot. I think they might be trying to steal a motorbike parked there.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, jeez! I better call security.”
Dammit! I’d wanted her to notify the scooter’s owner, who would then rush out to see that it was all right.
She pressed a button and spoke to someone in a low, urgent voice, then hung up and smiled at me. “All taken care of,” she chirped. “Thank you for reporting it. Lots of people wouldn’t have bothered.”
“That’s what’s wrong with people nowadays,” I said sanctimoniously. “Nobody wants to get involved.”
Back outside, I stood by Pig, pretending to unlock it, but watching as a woman in a security uniform burst out of the clinic’s back door. She scanned the staff parking lot, then strode over to the black scooter, inspected it, and spoke into a walkie-talkie.
The back door opened again and a man emerged.
My heart stutter-stepped. It was Green Hoodie! I’d spent so much time staring at his photo over the past two days I could have sketched his face by heart. Short sandy hair, sharp cheekbones, goatee. He’d rushed out in his doctor’s smock. Hurrying over to the scooter, he opened the saddle pouch, then conferred with the security guard. The guard set off around the building, presumably in search of the phantom punks, while the man examined the scooter, probably checking for evidence of vandalization.
Crazy for You: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 16
