The Brush Off

by Laura Bradley

  So my prospensity for inducing hilarity wasn’t taking much edge off their perception that I was potentially violent. How much more insulting could this get?

  I was about to find out.

  “I guess we oughta search her.” Crandall punctuated his lackluster tone with a gummy snap.

  Scythe shot another look, this one completely unreadable, at Crandall. Trudy, reviving miraculously from her near faint, bobbed her head up and down. “Yes, I think you should, Detective Scythe.”

  Hands still up in the air, I balanced on my left leg in order to stomp on Trudy’s foot with my right, but Scythe caught my eye and shook his head once, decisively. I put my boot back down on the concrete reluctantly, settling instead for mumbling under my breath what I’d do to Trudy when we were no longer in the presence of the law. Her grin just widened. Bitch.

  Scythe sighed laboriously and cocked his head at his partner as he approached. “Do you have reason to believe that Miss Sawyer is carrying a concealed weapon, Mrs. Trujillo?”

  “A concealed weapon? No.” Trudy started to laugh. I was insulted. Did she not think me capable of being armed, of killing? I was tough stuff. Suddenly, Trudy cut her laugh short. She cocked her head and drew her expertly penciled eyebrows together. “Except…”

  Everybody froze; Scythe and Crandall pinned stares on me. I gawked at Trudy. What on earth was she up to?

  “Except?” Scythe prompted tensely from the bottom of the six stairs. His hand was back on the butt of his damned gun.

  “Except her pepper spray,” Trudy announced with a bob of her head, obviously proud she possessed such intimate knowledge of her best friend’s belongings. I just wished she possessed some common sense. Oh, no, she wasn’t done yet. “Not to mention the hair dryer she carries in her purse. And, I suppose if someone just used a brush to kill Ricardo, you police officers would consider a curling iron a weapon, now, wouldn’t you?”

  With friends like these, who needs enemies?

  Scythe sighed again and looked to the sky (for heavenly guidance or for a weather update, I wasn’t sure) before he motioned to me. “That doesn’t leave us any choice now, Miss Sawyer. Come on down and get searched.”

  An electric thrill zapped through me at the uncontrollable image of his fingers exploring all the places on my body that might be concealing a weapon. Then reason prevailed, taking the thrill and turning it into fury. I jammed my fists onto my hips. “Now, just a minute—”

  “Hands back up, and take the stairs slowly,” he ordered, pulling handcuffs from an interior pocket of his jacket. “Or I can come up there and get you.”

  The temptation of having him exert some extra effort rivaled my need to be independent. Independence won. I descended the stairs, but ever so slowly, pleased to see Scythe’s eyebrows begin to draw together in irritation. If I was getting some additional wrinkles out of this encounter, he would, too. Of course, the way the world worked, his would be written off as character lines, while mine would just make me look older.

  I finally reached the pavement.

  “Come on down, Mrs. Trujillo,” Scythe ordered in a much gentler tone than he had used with me. She skipped down the stairs, forcing me to move to let her pass, putting me way too close to Scythe, who wouldn’t clear away from my right side and give me my space. I could feel his body heat through the denim at my hip. He jangled the handcuffs. Turd. I hugged the wall. Trudy hipped her way past me, something sticky on her catching on my bodysuit.

  “What the hell?” Trudy grabbed hold of the metal stair railing with her right hand, her left arm still up over her head, and began twisting at odd angles. I heard a brutal rip as she clawed at it with her right hand, then she waved a piece of duct tape under my nose.

  “Where did this come from?” she demanded.

  I pulled a face and pushed her hand away, remembering what Lady Godiva had been doing with tape before coming to Trudy’s rescue. “You don’t want to know, trust me.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  Crandall smacked his gum and snorted, cocking his head toward the club building. “If you got it inside there, I can tell you what it was used for, darlin’.”

  Trudy gave me a black look before smiling winningly at Crandall. “How sweet of you.”

  Scythe looked at me. “Is she really that naive?’

  “Worse.”

  “What’s she doing hanging around you, then?”

  “Everyone needs a little corruption.”

  “A little?” Scythe asked, deadpan. I glared.

  “Well, handsome?” Trudy prompted Crandall.

  “The freaks use it to make their hot dogs look like pussies.” Crandall’s mouth spread in a gap-toothed grin that showed his sadistic side.

  Blinking rapidly, Trudy sucked in enough air to fill a hot-air balloon, then swayed. This was no dress rehearsal. I leaped forward, knocking Scythe off-balance with the purse I had slung over my shoulder as I reached out to catch her. Scythe spat out a rather creative invective as he ripped my purse off my arm. Then I felt long, strong fingers clamp down on my right hand, yanking it back into a circle of steel that snapped shut. My back wrenched as my left arm moved to break Trudy’s fall, which never came because Scythe had grabbed her around the waist with his other hand, tucked her under his arm, and used both hands to fasten a handcuff around my other wrist. Superman from hell.

  Crandall watched, snapping his gum, as Scythe sat a woozy Trudy on the bottom step.

  “Keep an eye on her,” Scythe ordered as he dragged me by my handcuffed hands, backward over the black-top to his Crown Vic.

  “What’s your problem?” I demanded, trying to maintain some dignity as I scuttled, hunched over, gritting my teeth against the clenching pain in my back.

  “My problem is you.”

  “That makes us even, because my problem is you!” I returned.

  “No.” He stopped me long enough to fling open the back door to his car. He shoved me in headfirst. Just like they show on prime time. And they say TV is unrealistic. “Your problem is you need Ritalin. You can’t stay still for one second.”

  “And you need some common sense,” I fired back, some of my fury diffused by my face being buried in the worn fabric seat cushion. I felt a bit of a draft on my rear end and wondered how high my skirt had been hiked up in my current unladylike position. I wedged my feet under the seat and tried—with my hands still bound together behind my back—to winch my upper body into a semi-sitting position. I wiggled my rump inch by inch until it was almost underneath me again. I looked down to find my skirt bunched up at mid-thigh. I bounced up and down, moving the skirt lower, in order to prevent the jerk from seeing my unflattering underwear. Why did I care? He deserved to see the world’s ugliest panties for his shoddy treatment of me. I looked up to see him leaning into the car, dangling my heavy purse from one hand, the corner of his lip twitching. I let him have it. “For your information, the reason I had to move so fast was to prevent my best friend from smacking her head on the pavement in a dead faint.”

  “You are so unpredictable that for all I knew you could’ve been going for the concealed weapon—blowdryer, curling iron, one of those coloring squirt guns—that you keep hidden in your friend’s cleavage.”

  “What are you doing looking at her cleavage?”

  “Who said I was looking at her cleavage?”

  “You knew she hadcleavage.”

  “Yes, which is more than we can say about you.”

  “Don’t try to distract me with insults. What makes you think I’d be concealing a weapon, anyway? I haven’t shown you any propensity for violence.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you. I wouldn’t put anything past you, Reyn Marten Sawyer.”

  I shoved my chin up with pride. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Scythe pointed out drily as he eased down in the backseat next to me.

  Obviously surprised I had no comeback, Scythe half hitched that right eyebrow before continuing. “
Let me let you in on a little investigator’s secret. We usually narrow our list of suspects down by ability, opportunity, and motive. You and I agree on your ability.”

  He paused. I slid him a sideways glance. The backseat of the sedan wasn’t made for a man with legs as long as his, so it forced his knees up about chest-high. He had those unfortunately incredible hands wedged between his thighs, three fingers of his left hand extended, the pointer on his right counting off the reasons I should be locked up for Ricardo’s murder. I sucked in a deep breath to fortify my resolve and only ingested air laced with musky wood. My brain clicked. Mesquite, that’s what kind of wood it was. Did he wear a subtle cologne, or did he just naturally smell like the signature tree of the dry West Texas desert, the one with the long thorns on its trunk, the tree so tough it was impossible to kill?

  “Since the invisible Claude isn’t going to be able to provide you an alibi, and you used to work at the murder scene, and you likely still have a key to the lock that hasn’t been changed since he built that chrome palace, you clearly had opportunity. The motive remains to be explained, but we’re ready to run through several tried-and-true options, including greed, jealousy, and revenge.”

  My instinct was to jam my hands on my hips in indignation. I tried, only to have the handcuffs stop me all too cruelly. I winced. His lips thinned. What did that mean? Was he feeling guilty? Well, he should. I glared at him. “Talk about revenge! I’ll have a case for that against you, not Ricardo.”

  Scythe’s hands balled into fists. “Your mouth is going to get you in serious trouble one day.”

  “If my mouth’s so lethal, why don’t you cuff it instead of my hands?” I pointed out sourly.

  His jaw clenched as he stuck an open hand out the car door and addressed Crandall. “Hand me some of that duct tape.”

  Ee-yew. I shook my head violently as Scythe turned back to me. I forced a semiapologetic smile. “Never mind. Just joking.”

  “This is no joke, Miss Sawyer. This is murder, and you are a suspect.”

  “What’s my motive?”

  “Jealousy,” Scythe said. “Ricardo was an infamous ladies’ man. Or considering where you’ve just visited, maybe he was a man’s man, too. At any rate, he had the gall to come borrow a brush to use on the latest piece of ass he was balling, and you couldn’t take it anymore. You snuck up on them last night, and once his lover left, you made sure he couldn’t cheat on you ever again.”

  I squirmed in the seat in fury. “Is that the best you can do? Sounds like a tired soap opera episode.”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault people are generally stupid and uncreative.”

  “Are you calling me stupid?”

  Shockingly, he laughed. It was low and rumbly and took way too long. I felt my toes curl. Fortunately, he spoke again, and what he said cured the curl.

  “I can’t believe you’re more up in arms over being called stupid than being called a suspect. That’s a new one on me.”

  “Nobody calls me stupid and lives to tell about it,” I shot back without thinking. Duh.

  Scythe’s eyes glittered. “Is that what Ricardo called you right before you stuck the homemade pick in his back?”

  “No, Ricardo knew better than to call me stupid. He might have teased me about my business acumen or my boot collection, or any number of things, but he would’ve never called me stupid. Besides, I thought you were stuck on the jealous lover angle.”

  “I’ll work whatever angle gets you to give us more information. Or confess. Or get out of our way.”

  “Well, you’re about to work a whole geometry lesson full of angles with no results, because I didn’t do it. Ricardo might have tried to get me to sleep with him, but I didn’t go for it.”

  “I see.” I saw a question flash in his eyes before he extinguished it. “So maybe you were fighting him off when you accidentally stuck the pick in his back.”

  “Not hardly. Ricardo was so arrogant he would never have pushed himself on anyone. He was more like, ’Here I am, baby, come and get it.’ He thought himself too irresistible to chase anything. He expected to be chased, by every woman. It was more the fact that I didn’t find him sexually attractive that kept him half-heartedly teasing me about a liaison. He never found me irresistible, I can assure you.”

  “I can believe that,” he put in.

  “What? Why wouldn’t he find me irresistible?”

  Scythe cocked his head thoughtfully and paused—a little too long, in my opinion. How long could the list be? He shook his head. “You just don’t seem like his type.”

  “Whose type am I, then?”

  Scythe shrugged. “Maybe a deaf mute’s type. You’re not bad on the eyes, and he wouldn’t be able to hear you or fuel your unflagging ability to argue.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You just hate a woman who always has a comeback.”

  “You’re right about part of that statement.”

  “Which part?”

  “You’re so smart, you figure it out.”

  “I’m not the one who should be figuring anything out. You are. Instead, you’re wasting your time trying to pin the murder on me when you should be out finding the real killer.”

  “As soon as I eliminate all your potential motives, I can move on,” he said airily.

  “What’s left? Greed?”

  He held his palms up.

  “That’s easy. Just check my finances. I am a conservative spender, don’t gamble, don’t have any outrageous expenses outside of one too many pair of cowboy boots and a fortune spent on Eukanuba dog food. My business is in the black, moderately successful—”

  “But not a major moneymaker like Ricardo’s Salons is.”

  “So what?”

  “So, it might be nice to have the cash flow from a couple dozen salons instead of just one.”

  I slid a glance at Trudy, who was accepting a stick of Juicy Fruit from Crandall while still managing to talk a mile a minute. While she might be spilling the beans to the old guy about Ricardo’s weird offer to me right now, Scythe didn’t find out from her, because she’d been with me almost all day. Who did that leave? Mario, who was, if humanly possible, an even bigger blabbermouth. I grimaced. “I don’t need the cash flow from a couple dozen salons.”

  “There’s a fine line between need and want. And when one crosses that line, one embraces greed.”

  “Okay, Psychologist Scythe,” I said. “I don’t want the income from a couple dozen salons. How about that?”

  “So, what are you going to do when you get them in his will? Give them away to charity?”

  “I doubt I am going to get anything in his will besides a lump of coal. He was just talking off the cuff last night. He was in a bizarre mood. Even if he were serious, I can’t see that he had time to change his will between his visit to me and the hair appointment he was so frantic to get to in time.”

  “Maybe he’d already changed his will,” Scythe offered as he pulled my purse up from between his feet onto his lap. He pried open the snap and looked askance into the dark, overfilled depths.

  “Without telling me? Right.”

  Tentatively, he put a hand into the purse. “Happens all the time. Will readings are rife with happy and, more often, unhappy surprises for those concerned.”

  I shrugged—or, rather, tried to. Considering my handcuffed wrists and tightening back, it probably looked more like a hunchback having a spasm. “You’d know better than I would. The only will reading I’ve ever been to, my great-grandma gave every heir one plastic flamingo from her front yard, a pie plate, and a hundred bucks. We were all pretty satisfied with that. Well, except for her favorite grandson, who actually got her most prized possession.”

  He was clearly resisting the invited question. Finally, he gave a small, indulgent groan. “Which was?”

  “A pair of ornamental yard deer that Jackie Dean from two streets down had welded into the, uh, breeding position.”

  “Your grandmother kept that in her front yard?”r />
  “Well, until some city slicker got elected sheriff and gave her so many tickets for public indecency that he threatened to take her to jail unless she moved them. That’s when we really knew Great-Gran was sick. She moved those deer without another word. If she’d been feeling up to par, she would’ve called his bluff and gone to jail.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. His hand felt around inside my purse. “Sounds like you have an interesting family.”

  “I’m the most ordinary member of it,” I said proudly.

  Scythe whistled under his breath. “Remind me to come armed to the Sawyer family reunion.”

  “What reunion?” I demanded. I didn’t think he was joking anymore. His voice had gotten hard and very sure.

  His laser-sharp eyes met mine as he pulled out a black leather case, extracted what was inside, and flicked it open.

  “The reunion at the county jail when they have to come bail you out. Maybe trouble with the law runs in the family.”

  Light from the setting sun winked off the razor-sharp edge of the steel blade as the rock in my stomach hit bottom and bounced.