Frankly, it really showed the chaotic state of my mind since Ricardo’s demise that I had forgotten all about Zorita. She was not a person easily forgotten. I was reminded of her during my latest confrontation with Lieutenant Loser. He’d looked at that driver’s license photo, which made me think of my sister who had her weekend ruined by a psychic, which made me think of Ricardo’s fortune-teller. That’s how my mind works mostly—these gazelle-like mental leaps. You never know where those damned things are going. That was why people couldn’t always stick with my train of thought—I was way too far ahead of them.
I could hear Sarcastic Scythe’s answer to that thought.
Right.
Who cares what he’d say, anyway?
So, here we were buzzing up to see a woman who could see the future. Did she know we were coming? I didn’t know much about Zorita’s so-called abilities other than the fact that my buddy credited her with his fortune. Wouldn’t it be convenient if she could see back in time as well as future dollar signs? She could tell us whodunit, and we could take that back to Señor Skeptical, who’d arrest the fiend forthwith. Yeah, right, even if Zorita gave us the goon on a silver platter, Scythe would still need some damned evidence, now, wouldn’t he?
Well, it couldn’t hurt to ask. I’d try. If she was really that good at seeing into tomorrow, couldn’t she just end it all right now for us and tell us whose face she saw behind those iron bars? I felt a shot of hope that Zorita could have us wrap this up in time for me to make my five o’clock highlight who was a really good tipper.
I might have finally broken my promise to Ricardo (what good would the secret do him now?) and told Scythe about Zorita if he hadn’t been such a complete jerk. On top of his chauvinistic remarks, he announced as they left that they were on their way to Ricardo’s million-dollar Dominion manse, and I’d better stay out of their way. If he even smelled (there was that again) a trace of me within a ten-mile radius of the exclusive enclave which was off Interstate 10 just outside the city limits, he would order an APB out on me so fast heads would spin. Oooh, scary. I’d show him. So, with his attitude getting my hackles up, Scythe effectively dried up any more information he might have gotten out of me. I’d smiled sweetly and promised easily, knowing Trudy and I had someplace infinitely more productive to go than Ricardo’s house, which I suspected would be as devoid of clues as a House Beautiful feature. The cop had narrowed his arctic blues at my acquiescence but drove off with his gum-smacking partner without saying another word.
“I bet Scythe and Crandall are already there, hoping Ricardo’s sofa will tell them a story, while we’re minutes away from getting the real scoop from his soothsayer,” I mused as I changed lanes to pass a truck and a horse trailer.
“I wouldn’t get so high and mighty yet, because, no matter what Zorita says, I won’t help you keep digging into Ricardo’s murder unless…”
I threw a glance right. Was that my raspberry-lipped Watson delivering an ultimatum? What was it about me that drew out the pugilist in people today?
“Unless what?” I asked after a ten-second pause, which Trudy uncharacteristically refused to fill.
“Unless,” she said, dropping her sparrow soprano to a threatening middle C, “you give me your word you’ll go on a date with Lieutenant Luscious.”
“We’ve been through this.”
“We were interrupted. You didn’t give me your word.”
“That’s easy, since I feel reasonably certain he will never ask me on a date.”
“If somehow he is persuaded to ask you, I want a promise that you will go. With him. Out. Somewhere.” She paused, her shiny, fruity lips spreading in a mischievous grin. “Or in somewhere.”
“Ha ha. You oversexed married women have to turn everything into potential nookie.”
“Reyn.” Trudy assumed her lecture tone reserved for times when she was about to quote one of the many women’s magazines she memorized every month. “It’s a fallacy that as a rule married women get more sex than unmarried women. Sex in marriage is only less complicated and more available, and hence only seems more frequent.”
“Where’d you read that? In the latest Cosmo?”
In that new magazine YOU! as a matter of fact.” Trudy’s lower lip pooched out. I’d hurt her feelings. She was always so proud of her newly garnered facts, whatever they may be. I felt a little guilty, if only briefly.
“Well, you can tell YOU! that your informal survey shows that if you’ve had sex even one time in the last six months, you have not only had it less complicated and more available but also more frequently than your unmarried friend.”
“The article also said that contrary to popular belief, women get just as irritable as men when forced to be celibate for a long period of time.”
“Oh, please. Everyone’s ill temper can be blamed on lack of sex? What man wrote this article?”
“If you’re going to be so hard to get along with, I’m going to need to get you a dildo.”
“Trudy!” I shouted. From the backseat of my crew cab, Beaujolais woke and stretched over the seat to lay her black head on my shoulder. Chardonnay groaned. Cabernet rose, sighed, turned once around, and settled back down. I took one hand off the steering wheel and patted Beau on her sleek black head. “It’s okay, girl. Go back to sleep.” After licking my earlobe, she retreated to her place, where she leaned her head against the window.
“I don’t know why you insist on bringing those damned dogs with you everywhere you go.” Trudy tolerated my Labs, and they ignored her. Most of the time, anyway. I looked in my rearview mirror to see Cab tilt her head that was lying on her paws, open one eye, and glare at Trude.
“I feel guilty when I limit their entire lives to my house and the yard. How would you like to live like that?”
“I wouldn’t mind if I was a dog,” Trudy retorted. “You know, this could be another reason you never have a date. The percentage of men who might be attracted to you and not repelled by dog slobber is probably lower than the percentage of men merely attracted to you.”
“I wouldn’t want a man who didn’t love my dogs.” The vitamin salesman had a dog—a yappy, pin-headed toy fox terrier—but at least it proved he liked pets. “Listen, Ricardo is more dead than my love life.” I ignored Trudy’s challenging stare. “So, can we just concentrate on finding his killer this week and a date for me next week?”
“Promise?”
“I promise anything just to keep you on the subject at hand.”
“Goody, goody.” She clapped her hands together so enthusiastically that I wondered just how much she’s worked Scythe already. I felt a brief pang of panic at the thought but then brushed it off. After all, Trudy was an eternal optimist. Which was why we made the ideal pair—I was an eternal pessimist. The two of us together were perfectly balanced. Although I have to point out that I consider pessimism another word for realism. I pressed the volume on the radio back up to one of the Dixie Chicks begging for a cowboy to take her away. Oops, springing into my mind’s eye came the image of Scythe in his way-too-talkative Wranglers. Quickly, I switched the station to one where Faith Hill was whining about her lover putting her through emotional torture. Ah. I relaxed. If that didn’t just justify my celibate lifestyle, I didn’t know what did. The only torture my life partners put me through was some occasional bad canine gas, which I seemed to have evoked with the simple thought. Trudy made a gagging noise. I rolled down the two front windows to clear the air.
“You know,” Trudy shouted over the radio and the whistling wind. I braced for the worst, but she surprised me by changing the subject as I’d requested. “We haven’t gotten very far, besides figuring out that Ricardo was meeting on the sly with a prepster in tennis whites at a transvestite club.”
“I think that’s a pretty big clue. It’s more than the police know, anyway,” I added defensively.
Trudy laughed. “You are so competitive, Reyn. You’d think you had something to gain from beating the police on this investigat
ion. But no, you just can’t stand to lose, at anything.”
Sometimes my sweet but dimwitted friend could read me so sharply it hurt. Or maybe I was just so damned easy to read anyone could do it. Ouch.
“It’s not that at all. I owe it to Ricardo.”
“Whatever,” she answered with a knowing smile.
We lapsed into silence for a while as we left the San Antonio city limits, climbing in elevation as the terrain began to change dramatically. San Antonio sits on the cusp of four different topographies. South of downtown was flat, sandy prairie. The farther east you went from the Bexar County Courthouse, the more rich red-clay farmland you’d find. Westward travelers on Highway 90 toward the Mexican border encountered limestone-imbedded mesquite that eventually gave way to desert, and due north, the direction we were headed, became a hilly limestone, cedar-dotted, aqua-crystal-stream-lined paradise known as the Texas Hill Country.
Being 180 miles from the Gulf Coast and the center of all these geographic patterns made our weather changeable, to say the least. Winters could be hot and humid one day and ass-chilling cold the next. One esteemed politician who was running for governor in the nineties likened Texas’s weather to rape, recommending that if people didn’t like it, they might as well sit back and enjoy it. Charming, huh? Well, he didn’t win the governor’s race, if that is any consolation. And, though his comment was in extremely bad taste, he was right about the weather in the Lone Star State.
Still, most of us sit back and complain about it, instead of enjoying it.
The four-lane highway narrowed to two, and I had to slam on my brakes suddenly to avoid the ten-point white-tail buck that picked that moment to visit the ranch across the street. My bumper missed him by inches. The girls were thrown into a whining, scuffling, growling heap on the floorboard. I’d glanced back to make sure they didn’t need help untangling their legs, when Trudy screamed. I looked up and swerved, barely missing an 18-wheeler that had drifted a few feet across the solid yellow lines into my oncoming lane. The girls were left to themselves as I waited for my blood pressure to return to normal. Trudy’s knuckles, which had wrapped around the grab bar at the dashboard in front of her, had just begun to look flesh-colored again, when a big black cloud came out of nowhere and dumped grape-size raindrops on our front windshield. Just as I began to wonder if nature weren’t conspiring against us, I recognized the small clearing off to the right that was Zorita’s driveway. I cranked the wheel, and the truck bounced down the gravel road into a patch of cedar trees, unseating the grumbling dogs yet again.
We hadn’t gone a hundred yards when the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sun’s rays shone through the trees in long, thin, illuminated paths that made the close, low woods seem otherworldly. I looked at Trudy, who met my expression with her own raised eyebrows. Were we being weird, or was there something weird going on? I checked the dogs. Animals respected that sixth sense that we humans probably all still possess but tend to overanalyze or completely ignore. Maybe it was nothing more than the survival instinct we think we don’t need because we’re so smart. Anyhow, mine was definitely too hard to read, so I was relying on the girls to tell me. All three dogs held their ears pricked and their necks stiff, and their eyes roamed out the windows with obvious purpose.
Trudy still wasn’t talking, which for her was sign enough of trouble.
The wind picked up; branches shook; shadows danced.
My foot had eased so far off the accelerator that the truck was barely crawling down the driveway.
I shook off the shiver that was slithering down my back, blew out a breath of frustration at my ridiculous imagination, and pressed on the gas. Too hard. The truck leaped forward, spewing white gravel in our wake and scattering whatever spell we’d put ourselves under. Trudy wrapped her raspberry talons around the grab bar at the dashboard and held on tight as her cotton-candy-colored booty bounced wildly on the seat. The dogs, knocking heads against the windows and each other, alternately growled and moaned. I gunned it more as the driveway headed in a sixty-degree angle up a hill. Whatever might have been eerie in the woods would have to chase us. I pressed harder on the gas, and now the truck complained with a suspicious engine whine. The cedars ended abruptly, and we climbed to the pinnacle of the now bare hill, where a structure stood.
“Wow,” Trudy intoned, wide-eyed. “Weird.”
I’d remembered Zorita’s house as odd, but it was worse than that. Worse than weird. It was bizarre. The last time I’d come, I’d only seen it from the driveway, where Zorita had met me. Close up, it looked to be about a thousand square feet built in a circle. Would that be circular feet, then, instead of square feet? I wondered. My gazelle mind in action. Anyhow, the shape wasn’t the bizarre part. The walls were glass from three feet up to the ten-foot ceiling. All the way around. From ground to three feet was limestone and mortar, an attractive complement to the sandstone-colored tile roof, so someone had taste that took a big detour when it came to the glass deal. No curtains of any kind lined the windows, which made the contents of the home visible from where we stood. There were no interior walls. A single beige parson’s chair sat squarely—and it seemed especially square in that round environment—in the middle of the room.
Okay.
Trudy had been watching my reaction, I suppose, because she looked a little impatient when I finally turned to her.
“Does she really live here?” she asked.
I shrugged, glancing around for another building. Nada. I began walking toward the house, stepping over stray limestone rocks, cedar bark, and a baby prickly pear. So much for landscaping. “Maybe it’s some kind of observation hut.”
“A hut that costs more than my retirement fund.”
“I thought you used up your retirement fund with your boob job.”
“Mario’s got to have something to look at when the rest of me goes. I call that a retirement fund,” Trudy returned rather defensively—for her.
I slid her a look. “So why didn’t he use his retirement fund for it?”
Trudy glared. We didn’t fight often, but when we did, we went for the jugular—the advantage of knowing someone as well as you know yourself. “What’s your point, anyway?”
“Everybody has different priorities, that’s all,” I offered judiciously as I approached the front door. Or side door or back door. The house was round, after all. The door was beige. I knocked. Somebody really liked beige. That occurred to me only because I absolutely despise beige. It’s such a gutless color.
“I didn’t see anyone home,” Trudy stage-whispered.
“And it’s not like they could hide real well.”
“Then why are you whispering?” I asked loudly.
The door flung open. Trudy jumped and knocked me off the limestone rock on which I’d been balanced. Zorita stood—all four feet, ten inches, hundred and eighty pounds of her—in the doorway, dressed in a beige rough-weave linen shift. She wore beige Birkenstocks on feet that looked like a pair of rolls that had been left to rise too long. Even her feet were beige. Her long, straight hair was beige—no kidding. That had been no easy task for her stylist, either, because her skin tone told me she was a natural black-brunette. I could understand why, as a psychic, she’d beiged herself—it drew all attention to her dark eyes. I resisted their hypnotic effect, because all the beige was beginning to piss me off.
“I saw that red spike, so don’t try to hide it,” Zorita directed at me, left hand extended, fingers wiggling, off to my right about a foot. Instinct won over intellect, and I glanced into the space indicated. I saw nothing but more beige—beige rock, beige sand. Of course.
“Where?” Trudy twisted her body around mine so she could see in the space beyond me. “Oh, yeah…”
“Oh, yeah, what?” I followed her searching gaze. More beige.
Poker-faced Zorita was nodding sagely, the lowest of her three chins echoing the gesture. She had been looking at me. Rather, not precisely at me but near me, all around me. It wa
s disconcerting.
“You see it, then?” She turned her face and looked directly at Trudy. Why did she rate the direct treatment and I got the dog-searching-where-to-pee look?
“I think I do. A red flash…there! Another one, coming from her chest!”
“Oh, come on. Now I’m Supergirl about to be transformed into my costume to save the world?”
Trudy and Zorita both ignored me. At least half a minute ticked by before Trudy finally shook her head. “That’s it. I don’t see another one. What did it mean?”
“A red spike like that is the sign of sudden deep emotion. Did you notice it being dull red or vibrant red?”
Trudy was thinking so hard she looked like she might hurt herself. A raspberry fingernail tapped her temple. “Dull, I guess. But deep, rich.”
Zorita nodded once. “Excellent! A spike of dull, deep, or, as you said, rich red indicates a sudden flash of anger. Spikes are showing us only a temporary emotion, but if it had been brighter, it would’ve revealed sudden violent tendencies. Like those of a murderer.”
The Brush Off Page 13
