"Mmm." He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear carelessly, which told me he wasn't afraid to come in contact with me, the way that I was with him. "Helen, listen. I really…"
Unlike the last surprise we'd had, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to know what he'd been about to say. At any rate, our little tête-à-tête was ended abruptly by the violent splintering of the wooden railing next to me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Aodhagan shoved me down just as another bullet hit the side of the house. He reached up, scrambling for the handle on the French doors. He might not have bothered to be so careful, since a second later the glass exploded and showered down on us.
My erratic heartbeat picked up to a frantic drumming when I realized the full extent of the trouble we were in. There were no police to respond to our call. I was with the only police there were. If this gun-toting freak wanted to hang around all night using us for target practice, there wasn't much we could do about it. Aodhagan pushed me, not very delicately, on the butt. "Get into my room. There, on the right. And whatever you do, stay down."
"What about you?" I argued.
"I said go." He pushed me again.
I crawled into his room quickly, cutting my hands on random glass shards as I went. Once I was safely in, I saw him hunker by, staying low to the ground. A moment later, he came back, and this time he was armed with a fat, weird-looking gun. I wasn't exactly well-versed in weaponry, but I'd never seen anything like it before. A moment later, I realized why.
I heard the report, and then I saw a blinding flash of light even through my little crack in the door. Aodhagan was shooting at an armed and dangerous two-time murderer with a freaking flair gun. Brave but stupid. He'd no doubt reached the same conclusion I had, just as quickly. If we didn't do something, we were sitting ducks. As far as really stupid plans went, his actually had some merit. If he was a good shot, maybe a flair could actually do some damage.
A couple seconds later, he flung the door open, effectively knocking me on the head for the second time in as many days. He ran past me to the window that faced the street then slammed his fist into the windowpane. "He got away."
I stared at him from my sprawled position on the floor. "Am I to understand that we wanted to keep this person with us?"
"Just until I got a good look at him."
I had a revelation. "That's why you shot the flare gun."
"He was in the bushes. There was no way to see him without a little light. I knew I would be blinded even with my eyes covered, but he'd be blinded more. I thought maybe I could get a look at him before he recovered."
"Are you insane?" I shouted. "You could have been killed. When a person is trying to kill you, one runs. One does not hurry back into the line of fire to get a good look at the guy with the gun."
His mouth twisted impatiently. "What was I supposed to do? Invite him in for tea? He wasn't just going to go away. I was hoping that the flair would be multifunctional since I don't actually have any other weapons." He threw the gun down on the bed and raked his hand through his hair in disgust.
"It worked, partially at least. He did go away."
He frowned at me. "Technically I also got a look at him but…"
"But not good enough to recognize him."
"I don't think I knew who he was." He turned and looked out the window again. "I'm not sure he actually meant to hurt us. Or I guess he could just be a really bad shot."
"Well, he hurt me." I scooted up into a sitting position and turned my hands palms up to show him two dozen cuts, some of which still had glass embedded in them.
Hissing, he rushed across the room and helped me to stand. On the way into the bathroom, he picked up the phone on his bedside table and made a brief call to Dooley, after which Aodhagan said he would be right over.
Aodhagan led me to the sink and began careful ministrations. With tweezers from the medicine cabinet, he began exactingly removing shards from my flesh. "I'm sorry. Does it hurt very much?" he asked, voice painfully gentle.
I bit my bottom lip and shook my head. It was a lie, of course. I was a baby about pain, one of the reasons I didn't like exercise, and it hurt like a mother, but I wasn't about to admit that to a guy who wasn't afraid of men with guns. To distract myself, I looked around his bathroom. It was as clean as the rest of his house and smelled strongly of Lysol. Even the mirror was spotless.
His shower curtain was the see-through plastic variety that I made a point of not thinking about too much. He had a royal-blue bath mat and a set of royal-blue and cream towels that looked soft and fluffy, as opposed to the over-starched ones in the kitchen and in my bathroom. The only thing set out on the counter was his toothbrush, toothpaste, a very official looking brand that I had never seen before and was willing to bet that he had gotten from his father, floss, and two orange plastic prescription bottles.
He pulled out antiseptic cream. "This might sting a little." At least he had the good grace to appear sympathetic, and he was tender and quick, even if it did indeed burn. The long roll of gauze made a couple of journeys around my hand before he gently snipped off the extra gauze with tiny scissors and secured it in place. "There. You're finished. How are you feeling?"
"Okay, I guess."
"Are you hurt anywhere else?"
"No." The word caught in my throat. He actually sounded concerned. I couldn't remember the last time that someone had wasted sincere concern on me.
"Good. Dwight would kill me if I let anything happen to you."
I swallowed hard. Concern just for the sake of concern was too much to ask for someone like me. If people didn't care about me, it was my own fault. I just wasn't likable.
Outside, a car door slammed. Aodhagan washed his hands in the bathroom sink. "Speaking of Dwight, that's probably him right now." He headed off down the stairs.
It was, in fact, Dooley, along with two uniformed deputies that I had never seen before. One was a woman who came in fun-size proportions and had huge, diaphanous hair that looked like an explosion of bleached-blonde cotton candy. The other was a man in his early twenties who probably spent all his extra time at the gym. The kind who drove Wranglers with bumper stickers that said things like "Life's a bench," called lifting weights pumping iron, and compared their pecs with other men's. As far as I could tell, this guy had bigger breasts than I did. He also had a giant flattop that was shellacked to the point that I probably could have put a drink on it without disturbing it very much. Every time he moved, I kept expecting him to tear out of his clothes like the Incredible Hulk.
What happened to Abbott and Costello? Maybe they were at home starching their uniforms.
The two deputies split up to collect evidence. Cotton Candy Head went down into the yard, and the Incredible Hulk went onto the balcony. Dooley took our statements. After he'd finished, he asked, "So Aodhagan, do you think you could identify this guy if you saw him again?"
He shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. I didn't get a very good look at him. He was wearing jeans, a Big Johnson T-shirt, and a dark baseball cap. I think that he had a mustache. I mean, that could be anyone from Amarillo to El Paso. I felt like, I don't know, maybe I've seen him before. But not recently."
"You could see him well enough to read his shirt but not to describe his face?" I demanded.
"Yes. His shirt was white. It was easy to see, even in low light. His face was obscured by the brim of his hat."
"Anything else you can add?" Dooley looked at me imploringly.
"How about he almost got me in the arm."
Dooley gave me a look and, apparently deciding I had nothing useful to contribute, turned back to Aodhagan. "So, there's nothing else at all?"
"No. What about you? Did you find out anything about Norma Jean's files or anything new on Penny?"
He shook his head, chins moving. "Not much. I talked to just about nigh on everyone who's ever worked for the sheriff's office. Milo Robeck's wife told me that in the early seventies someone paid Milo a thousand bucks to do something
illegal, but he never told her what. They used the money to go on vacation to New York."
He gave me a sour look, as though that was somehow my fault, even though I had spent the seventies not being born. "Course Milo's been dead since '79, so I don't figure we'll ever know what exactly he did."
"What about Penny?" Aodhagan's voice was almost as gentle as the one he'd used with me upstairs.
"Nothin'." Dooley's voice dipped. "Nothing at all. No latents, no fibers, she didn't fight back, so no human tissue under the nails."
The very idea of there being another person's skin or something underneath Penny's nails made me absolutely ill. I could write about it all day long, but somehow it was different in the woman who'd spent so much time caring for me the way my parents hadn't.
I excused myself when Aodhagan started talking postmortem. I went outside and smoked myself into oblivion. I stayed close enough to Cotton Candy Head that it might discourage the return of our lone gunman but not close enough that I could smell her designer imposter perfume. I was guessing that she, at least, had come armed with more than a flare gun.
That same nauseous feeling that came every time I did or heard something that I couldn't entirely block out by being self-centered rose up inside me. Like seeing my parents or getting engaged. Death was overwhelming when it was someone you knew. I would have thought I would handle it better than this. I smoked another one, just for the heck of it, and then I tried to engage Deputy Cotton Candy in conversation.
"So, what was he shooting at us with?" I had to bend slightly to be heard, as she had knelt to the ground, scooping piles of dirt into little baggies. All of her nails had been chewed to the quick.
"I don't know for sure. You should wait for the report from ballistics, but my guess would be a .22."
"So, will you be able to identify the gun?"
"Mfph." She sealed the baggies and dropped them into a large paper sack.
Guessing that she wasn't much of a conversationalist, I wandered back toward the door. The other cop was a few feet away, scouring the yard underneath the balcony. I hadn't seen him come out. Maybe he had just swung down from the railing like Tarzan. I took one look at him and changed my mind. I would never be that desperate for information.
"Helen?" I heard Aodhagan's voice carry into the once-quiet night, which we had now disturbed beyond repair.
"Yeah?" I came around the corner to find him standing in the front door. In the low light from the porch, his face told the story of how tired he was.
I found myself fascinated with the way his hair blew slightly in the wind and with every dark hair making up his stubble, which was so long it was now bordering on a beard. His arms were crossed over his chest, and I noticed for the first time that he was barefoot. Like his hands, his feet were long and thin, muscular. The feet of a runner.
He was dangerous. A cocktail of details that made him almost irresistible. Maybe I needed to rethink my policy and have an occasional date with a good-looking, good-for-nothing I would never actually take seriously. Maybe that would protect me when the really dangerous ones came along.
I dismissed the idea immediately. First of all, I had a very poor track record when it came to good-looking, good-for-nothings. It wasn't worth the risk. Secondly, the only thing that would protect me from my attraction to Aodhagan MacFarley was if one or maybe even both of us fell completely off the face of the earth.
"We were worried about you." The words were almost as seductive as he was.
"I just… I don't know. All the fingernails and the postmortem." I waved my hand awkwardly. "It was sort of freaking me out."
His lips curved upward very slightly. "You should see a room full of people looking at their first dead body. Then you just know some people can take it, some can't. There's no shame in that."
He stepped off the porch. His expression said he wanted to touch me, and oh Lord, did I want to be touched, but instead he did us both a favor and put his hands in his pockets. "Maybe you could just come inside and sign your statement."
"Okay." I passed him, giving him a wide berth. I could hear him following behind me with light, even steps.
When we got back upstairs, Dooley was talking on his two-way radio to the steroids poster boy. We just missed the end. Dooley looked at us seriously. "It's buckshot."
Aodhagan mumbled something short and mostly profane. I stared at Dooley. "So what? What do you mean it's buckshot? Like, somebody made it in their garage?"
"Exactly like."
I scanned my brain for what I knew about buckshot from a book I'd written about a man who had murdered his hunting partners in 1951, calling it an accident. "Doesn't everyone have their own mixture? Who around here has a .22? Check their garages."
Both men stared at me silently, like I had suggested something beyond absurd. In his surprise, Dooley's thumb must have finally slipped off the talk button, because I could hear the Incredible Hulk laughing heartily. He squeezed it out like he was being punched in the stomach.
Aodhagan glanced at the radio and then back to me. "Helen, this is Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas. A lot of them have many guns, and many of those guns are .22's. It's the whole needle in the haystack business. Actually, it would be like looking for a specific needle in a stack of needles."
"You don't have a gun," I reminded him, just a teensy bit bitter.
"That's because I'm a terrible marksman. Guns are dangerous in the hands of people who don't know how to use them."
I wondered if he'd learned that little tidbit of wisdom from a public service message. "Yeah, well, guns are also dangerous in the hands of people who do."
Dooley chuckled. "She's got a point there, Aodhagan."
"Don't encourage her." He snatched the pen from Dooley and signed his statement with a tiny, cramped signature that looked like nothing more than a lot of lines and loops to me. I took my paper and did the same, except more legibly.
Dooley took both the papers and the pen with a deep sigh. In a fatherly voice he told us, "You two better get on up to bed. I'll call you tomorrow if I learn anything. Otherwise, I'll see you on Friday."
Friday. Penny's funeral. I couldn't even imagine what that day would be like for Dooley. In a lot of ways, Dooley had lost more than I had. "Thanks," I murmured, for once subdued.
"Sure." Dooley gathered his deputies and headed out.
It took Aodhagan and me almost thirty minutes to do a hodgepodge repair job on the shattered French doors. When it was done, Aodhagan told me—no, more like ordered me—to go to bed, and he would sweep up.
"Helen." I peeked my head out the door of my room. "If you need anything or you hear or see anything, you come and get me, okay? Don't be a hero."
I could have given the same advice to him right before he rushed out into the line of fire brandishing a traffic-safety implement. Instead, I just agreed and said good night. Hesitantly, he said good night too, and for a long time I could hear him moving around in the hallway.
A lot longer than it took him to sweep, and I understood somehow that, despite my suspicions, he didn't care in the last week he had gone from my Dooley-appointed captor to my self-appointed protector. That thought wrapped around me like a warm blanket on a cold day, and the buzz that it gave me was what finally sang me to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I woke in the morning to an insistent knock on my bedroom door. At first, I dreamed the knocking was Lenny DeCarlo and Douglas Minor-Wilks, the philandering III, fighting each other with two-by-fours. It was a fight to the death, and I've got to tell you, I was really enjoying it. Eventually, what it really was permeated my sleep-fogged brain.
"Hold on." I tried to look at the clock, which read nearly eight, and get out of bed at the same time. All I succeeded in doing was tangling myself in my blankets and sliding face-first onto the floor.
"Are you okay in there?" Aodhagan's voice was muffled through the door, and mine was muffled because my face was wedged between the carpet and three layers of ros
e-scented down.
"Yeah, just a second." I struggled to my feet and threw open the door. Blinking against the bright spray of sunlight in the hallway, I searched out his form. "Uh, yeah?" I raked my hand through my hair, which actually managed to somehow make things worse.
"It's late. I just wanted to make sure that you were okay."
"Sorry, I just had some trouble sleeping."
"Dooley called me this morning. He thinks they found the gun in a Dumpster out behind the Home Cooking Café. It was just an unnumbered Saturday night special. It could have come from anywhere."
"What does that mean to us?" I asked, covering my mouth with my hand to spare him even an accidental whiff of my dragon breath.
"It means that we can't trust anyone, Helen. And you don't know how much it hurts me to say that, because I really like to trust people."
I stared at him. "I'm from New York. I already don't trust anyone."
He shook his head. "I mean it. No one. Not Junior, not Thelma Sue, not Earl. Not anyone. Someone is playing for keeps here, and now they're enlisting their friends. We don't know who wants to help us and who wants to hurt us."
I might have thought that he was being overdramatic including people he'd known for almost four decades, but his flat tone told me that he believed in what he was saying. I could hear the hurt in his voice. It really meant something to him to trust the people around him.
This investigation was rattling the very fiber of his social belief system, and for that I felt a deep and instant sense of uncharacteristic remorse. But I also knew that it was too late now to back out or try to fix it for him. I really did believe that some people could be trusted, maybe Marian and Junior. Despite my better judgment, they were starting to grow on me. They had merits I hadn't recognized when I'd first rolled into town.
"So what you're saying is it's just you and me, kid?"
He managed a slight smile. "That's right. Wherever we go and whatever we do. I've canceled all my meetings and appointments all the way through next week, and if this is still going on then, I'll start taking you with me. Neither one of us is allowed to be alone until someone is behind bars, agreed?"
Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1) Page 16
