I breezed through the kitchen, grabbing my purse as I went and passing the crime-scene investigators who were still photographing and printing the hell out of the house.
“Take your time, kids,” I muttered as I passed the busy police officers. “I’ve got a mess to clean up.”
I climbed into my Camaro, fit the key into the ignition and froze. My Glock, minus its magazine, was sticking out of the open ashtray.
“No way!” I murmured.
I picked up the gun and turned it over in my hand. I wasn’t about to think my new friend hadn’t wiped it clean. What in the world was going on here? I pulled a new cartridge out of the glove compartment and inserted it back into my weapon, started the car and listened with satisfaction to the low growl of the engine as it hummed to life.
It felt good to be taking matters into my own hands. My life had purpose again. I was going to set things straight for Aunt Lucy, and Jake Carpenter’s karma was going to catch up with him.
I pulled out of the driveway, heading south toward Carpenter’s Auto Body Shop. The closer I came to my destination, the more I felt the rage and grief welling up inside of me. Jake had always seemed so slick, so good at promoting himself as the all-American rascal hero. Even I had been fooled by his charm and good looks, but I’d been a kid back then, an innocent, vulnerable kid.
True, after he left me I’d wanted revenge, but in an adolescent, imaginary way. And I had to admit that up until a few hours ago, I’d still harbored get-even fantasies. I know twelve years is a long damn time to wait for the world to rotate on its cosmic axis. A better person would’ve let go of all that foolishness.
I guess I was still a maturational work in progress because I wanted Jake to suffer some kind of public humiliation to make up for my own suffering at his young hands. In Garden Beach they used to say, “The sun don’t shine on one dog’s ass forever!” I really took that to heart, but of course, I never envisioned the turn Jake’s life would take and its effect on my family.
Uncle Benny’s murder changed everything. This wasn’t a kid’s game anymore. It was revenge and justice balled up into one ugly package. I wasn’t thinking about Jake as the boy who’d left me behind anymore. I was thinking about him as I would a suspect.
I slipped my hand into my purse and pulled out the Glock, feeling the solid weight of it as I shoved it behind my back and into the waistband of my jeans.
Jake Carpenter had crossed the line from simple heartbreaking to possibly committing murder, and he was going to be forced to deal with me. I was the black cloud on Jake’s horizon, and he was in for one hell of a storm.
Chapter 7
I began inventing myself after my parents died. I was thirteen and confused. The entire world, as I knew it, had ended when their plane plunged into the cold waters of the North Atlantic. There wasn’t anything heroic about their deaths. They were tourists on a second honeymoon, while I was just the kid they left behind. There was no war to blame for it, no terrorist to hold responsible. There was only me. At least, that’s how I saw it.
“Stella,” Uncle Benny said once, “your parents, they would’ve done anything for you. They didn’t want to leave you like this.”
We were fishing, sitting on the bank of Kerr Park Lake, our poles held lazily with one hand and our sodas clasped firmly in the other. It was the first spring after they died, the first budding of the forsythias that my mom would miss, the first hit on a crank bait that Pa wouldn’t be around to feel tug on his line. No, they didn’t want to leave me. I knew that much already. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that I’d wished for them to go away and leave me alone. Not forever. Not like this. Just for a little while. Just long enough for me to sneak out with my friends, maybe drink a beer, maybe smoke pot, maybe even kiss the cute boy at my bus stop. I just wanted to be the girl who got away with “it,” whatever that was. And now look—I’d wished them to death.
It took Uncle Benny another two years to figure that one out and arrange another fishing trip, another “casual” conversation that seemed keyed to my current state of mind.
“Stella, baby, you’re taking everything so serious! You gotta lighten up, kid, live a little. Why you don’t go to no school dances? What’s with the fellas, eh?”
I remember feeling the sun hot on my face and wishing I could be anywhere but by my uncle’s side.
I shrugged, focusing my attention on the water in front of us, looking everywhere but at him. “I don’t know, Uncle Benny,” I’d said. “I’ve got a lot of homework. Those dances, they’re for the jocks. If you’re not going to college, you go to the dances. Me, I gotta win a scholarship.”
Uncle Benny shook his head and wrapped one beefy arm around my shoulders. “Don’t you worry about that,” he said, “I got your college already paid for. You’re supposed to be having fun. This is the best time of your life.”
The best time of my life? How could anybody think that being a miserable teenager was a good time? Didn’t he know? How could he and Aunt Lucy not know? I killed my parents, well, as good as killed them. How do you have fun after you’re responsible for something like that? No, all I could do now was try to make it up to them by being good, serious and well behaved for the rest of my life. I was going to be a nun who did scientific research into something terrible like leprosy. I would live with lepers and die with lepers, wasting away, feeling the pain and anguish that I deserved and finally welcomed as my body eroded millimeter by millimeter.
I had my life all figured out. I was on the path, maybe not to salvation, but at least I would find redemption in my penance. But stupid Jake Carpenter came along and ruined it all. He came barreling up on his motorcycle, with his curly blond hair escaping around the edges of his helmet, and stole my heart away like a bank robber.
At first I tried to ignore him. But Jake wasn’t the type you could just ignore. His bike was loud, roaring up from behind like a throaty tiger. He was the star player on both the football and baseball teams, varsity not J.V. He dated the cutest cheerleaders. He went to all the dances, too, but he never stayed long. He left with the girl voted most likely to, a different one every time, and we all knew where they went and what they did, even if no one ever exactly witnessed this union with their own eyes.
Teachers threw up their hands, but loved him all the same. I thought he was a flash-in-the-pan moron, even if he did have those piercing blue eyes and a grin that always seemed to say he knew something that none of the rest of us knew…except for the select few girls who left under cover of darkness and returned at dawn, transformed by Jake into the full flower of womanhood.
I made a career out of ignoring him, or watching when I knew he couldn’t see me. Somehow he managed to sneak up on me, despite my careful guard.
“Yo, what’s your name?” That was the first thing he ever said to me. He pulled up behind me as I walked home from school, gunning the throttle of his 650 Triumph, and whistling when I wouldn’t answer him, as if perhaps I merely didn’t understand English and that was why I wasn’t paying attention to him. Stupid boy.
I ignored him until he pulled up onto the sidewalk ahead of me and blocked my path. He grinned, his eyes warm with invitation. He was wearing a pair of torn and faded blue jeans with a white T-shirt. I suddenly found myself wanting to take the helmet he offered and ride off into the sunset forever. Jake had a way of making you forget everything but him.
“What? You don’t like bikes? I mean, if you’re scared, say so.” He was grinning, as if maybe he knew I wanted to go but wouldn’t let myself give in.
Something about the challenge grated on me, pulling out the little rebel who I’d thought died along with my parents.
“I’m not scared,” I scoffed. I looked him over slowly, obviously, taking in the bike and the boy with a deliberate cool gaze. “I was just thinking maybe you can’t drive, and that’s why you’re up on the sidewalk. I’d have to be a total idiot to ride with somebody who can’t operate his bike any better th
an that. Maybe you need to let me show you how it’s done.”
I saw the spark flash in his eyes, and the wide grin broke into a delighted chuckle. “Oh, so you’re a hot rod, huh?”
“No,” I said. I pulled myself up as tall as I could and casually tossed my hair back over my shoulder. “I’m just smart, that’s all. If you can’t handle your bike, then you damn sure can’t handle me!”
With that, I stepped around him and went on my way, heart pounding and knees shaking. I didn’t look back, but I wanted to. I was dying to see the look on his face, to know if I’d scored one on him or not. As much as I didn’t want it to matter, or want him to matter, it did.
Every day I ducked under Jake’s outstretched arm as he leaned across my locker and smiled down at me. Every afternoon I walked home with my friends, hoping to hide myself from his relentless attention. But, in the end, I was my own undoing. One afternoon, just after a spring break where Jake had been particularly notorious and the stories especially unbelievable, Miss Miller stopped me in the hallway.
“Stella,” she said, her voice thick with urgency. “Tell me you’re still on the peer-tutoring list!”
“Sure,” I answered.
“Good,” she said, her thick glasses magnifying her eyes to buglike prominence. “Coach Sims says if his player doesn’t get some math help, he’ll be off the baseball team and we just can’t have that!
“Can you start today and work with him every day?” Miss Miller asked.
I nodded enthusiastically. What a stroke of good fortune. I’d be tied up after school for an hour, and Jake Carpenter would never find me.
Of course, we all know who the student was. Coach Sims rounded the corner with Jake in tow, the two of them grinning like banshees for very different reasons. I groaned, making Miss Miller whirl back around to study me anxiously.
“Stella, are you all right?” she cried.
I took a deep breath, considered visiting the school nurse with “female problems” and then realized there was no use in prolonging the agony. I turned back around and faced the firing squad with a determined look on my face.
It took Jake Carpenter precisely one week to lure me onto the back of his bike. Two weeks after that I was hopelessly, dog sick in love with the boy. But I wouldn’t sleep with him. That was where I drew the line, barely. I knew his type. All they wanted was a one-night stand and they’d be gone. Besides, I still had my lifelong intentions; a few weeks of suck-face and intense groping sessions hadn’t managed to sway me that far. But I was wavering.
“I’m saving myself,” I told him solemnly.
“For what?” he asked. “Old age?”
We were hidden by the apple trees of Highland Orchards, tucked safely into a grove that I believed to be our own secret sanctuary. Jake had spread out a quilt where we lay in the late-spring moonlight. He had me topless, and had just slipped his fingers below my waistband when I’d called a halt to the proceedings.
I knew I needed a good reason, maybe two good reasons, to keep him at bay, so I turned to my newest invention of a self, the queen of daytime drama. I drew in a breath, envisioned myself as a tortured princess who could not yet reveal her secret identity and let fly with everything I had.
I made tears well up in my eyes, not hard to do if I shifted to the left and rolled my hip over onto the sharp stone underneath the quilt.
“Stella,” Jake whispered in alarm. “What is it? Don’t cry!”
I smirked mentally and looked right into his steel-blue eyes. “Jake, before my parents died I made them a promise.”
This had him. I was about to swear on my dead parents. The fact that I was telling a lie in their names was not lost on me, but this was a white lie, a pure, for-my-own-good lie.
“I told them I would wait until I was married,” I said sadly. “Oh, baby, I do want you,” I whispered passionately, “but you see, we can’t. I promised.”
Jake stayed silent for another long minute, during which time I murmured things like “I’m sorry” and “You know I love you.”
I thought he was touched by my wish to honor my parents, but what he was really doing was standing by as I nailed the lid shut on my own coffin.
“I know you love me, Stella,” he said finally, “and that’s why I can’t ask you to sacrifice your virginity for anything other than the bonds of holy matrimony.”
I exhaled a long-held sigh of relief and almost missed the words that came next.
“My parents are going on a cruise in two weeks, and my grandma’s coming to stay while they’re gone. We’ll do it then.”
I jumped away from him, searching for my bra with one hand, and wondering if he’d heard anything I’d said at all.
“Do what, Jake? I just told you…”
“I know. I know. Shh. Let me finish.” Jake patted my hand. “Two weeks from now you tell your aunt and uncle you’re going to sleep over at a girlfriend’s house and meet me in Maryland.”
“Why?” I asked, knowing now he hadn’t listened to one single word I’d said.
Jake sighed. “So we can go to Maryland, silly!”
“Maryland?”
Jake rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You’re not eighteen yet, are you?”
I felt a growing realization start to burn in the pit of my stomach. “No.”
Jake smiled. “Then we have to go to Maryland to get married. I mean, you did say you wanted to honor your promise and you do love me, don’t you?”
He looked at me the way a kid looks at Santa Claus, hopeful and excited. I mean, I just couldn’t let him down, could I? Besides, I knew deep in my adolescent heart that I loved Jake Carpenter.
That was how I wound up in Elkton, Maryland, parked in front of a tiny brick house that had Justice of the Peace on a sign in the front yard, waiting for a boy who never showed up and feeling totally humiliated.
I waited for hours, long enough for the old man who lived inside to come out and ask if I needed help, long enough that I couldn’t go home and explain that I couldn’t spend the night with my girlfriend Laura because she was sick, and long enough to realize that to Jake, this had all been a horrible joke and I was just another one of his victims.
What made it worse was the way he studiously avoided me, the way all of his crowd dumped me back into my old, anonymous life without so much as a glance over their shoulders. My pride kept me from doing all the things I’d seen his other girlfriends do. I never called, never pursued him for answers, just smiled when I passed and kept my head held high.
I was so unbearably miserable. I graduated, but as soon as I could, I left town, claiming that I wanted to go far away to college. However, all I really wanted was to stay safe in my aunt and uncle’s home, wrapped in their unconditional love. It took a long time for me to get past Jake’s betrayal, and then, all I could focus on was revenge. I wanted to know he hurt like I did, even if that meant I was immature, or that I couldn’t let go and grow up.
Eventually, I quit looking over my shoulder for him when I’d come home to visit. I focused on my studies. I became a cop and was on the road to being the best in the business, a real badass with a mission. I dated, but never seriously and never for long. But then I found Pete, my mentor turned lover, and watched the whole disastrous process repeat itself. It seemed I’d learned a whole lot about protecting my body, but not a damn thing about guarding my heart.
Love and betrayal. When would I ever learn? Some people are meant to fall in love and find eternal happiness. I was born to kick ass and take names. My purpose on Earth was clearly not to fall in love and make babies. I had a higher calling. I was going to right the wrongs in my little universe, and I was going to start with finding my uncle’s murderer.
Chapter 8
Old habits die hard, I suppose, because I just can’t seem to stop reinventing myself. I pulled into Carpenter’s Auto Body Shop and put on my cop face. I was hurt and angry, but Jake wasn’t going to get to see that in me. Jake was in for the steel-reinforced law dog
, the officer who stops at nothing until the criminal is apprehended and the wrong avenged. I wasn’t that little lost girl now. I was Jake Carpenter’s new worst nightmare.
I cut the Camaro engine, stepped out onto the tarmac and proceeded to walk toward the open bay of the garage. I had the entire act working for me, the tough stride, although marred a bit by my lingering limp, the squared shoulders, the aviator-style, mirrored sunglasses and the I’m-right-you’re-wrong attitude. It carried me through the doors and into the semidarkened interior of the garage. It lasted right up until Jake poked his head out from underneath the hood of the rusted-out Oldsmobile and smiled.
That smile, along with the I-like-what-I’m-seeing gaze, stole my cool for a brief second. How could he be so at ease when he’d just robbed my house? Surely he didn’t think I hadn’t seen him? Of course, he had the agreement now and I didn’t. That’s why he was so cocky. This little discussion was going to take some careful playing, all right.
He straightened, laid down his wrench and wiped his hands on a grimy rag. “It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t need to apologize. I understand.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
Jake’s smile never wavered. “Yesterday. The things you said about me and your uncle. You were just upset. I know you don’t really think I killed him.”
I leaned against the edge of a tool cart, folded my arms across my chest and played stupid.
“So now you’re a mind reader,” I said. “Well, you’d better hone your technique, Sherlock, ’cause you’re batting zero with me. I don’t know who killed my uncle, so I wouldn’t be able to rule you out as a suspect.” Before he could interrupt, I went on. “But since you’re so clairvoyant, I won’t have to tell you that I didn’t come here about that.” I paused, waiting to see if he seemed anxious at all. His clear-eyed gaze stayed as cool as ever.
Stella, Get Your Gun Page 7
