The Brush Off

by Laura Bradley

  “You’re serving dog meat, why not be it?” I shook my head. I couldn’t believe she’d lost the cops twice in one evening by mistake. Only Trudy.

  “I know you don’t like carne guisada, which is why you’re not invited.”

  Carne guisada aside, if Daffy were coming, I was eternally grateful to not be invited. Daffy was Trude’s mother, and if anyone ever lived down to her name, it was Daffy. She made Trudy look like a Rhodes scholar on Trude’s worse day.

  “How did you know about this shortcut?” I asked as the Miata poked its nose out on North New Braunfels between two white-bloom-filled crepe myrtle trees.

  “One of the drapery seamstresses I use told me about it.”

  “How does she know about it?”

  She dropped her voice. “She had an affair with one of the famous residents.”

  I held up my hand. “Don’t tell me what guy it is. I can’t handle any more intrigue right now.”

  Trudy flashed a grin. “It wasn’t a guy.”

  “I lead a sheltered life,” I muttered.

  Trudy snorted as she snaked through another back road on the way to my neighborhood. “Right. One of your best pals is murdered with a brush, you stick yourself in the middle of the investigation—”

  “Hey! The cops did that by calling me to identify him.”

  “And instead of sitting back and letting them do their job, you have to threaten a psychic, break into the victim’s house, taunt the killer into coming after you at the funeral, and accuse the wife of one of the most powerful men in America of having an illegitimate child. This is all pretty extreme just to get some attention from a cute cop.”

  We’d arrived at my house, Trudy having used so many shortcuts even a bird couldn’t have flown a more direct route from the Villita house to mine. I was sure we’d beaten Scythe and Crandall, who no doubt would be showing up in minutes. I’d pretend I wasn’t home. Trudy pulled into the driveway.

  I glared at her. “I’m not the one obsessed with him, you are.”

  “Methinks you protest too much.”

  I was caught. I couldn’t protest now, could I, or I’d be proving her right. Bitch. I got out of the car. “Okay, so I can obsess some more—what’s the deal you made with him?”

  “You’ll know soon enough,” she said as she backed out without waiting for me to close my door. It swung open, then shut as she floored the gas and zoomed up McCullough.

  I considered going through the salon just to check that everything was hunky-dory but decided I would just get distracted by the paperwork there waiting for me. I wanted to concentrate on the killer. Daisy locked up on Wednesdays, and she was the most reliable one I had working at Transformations, so I didn’t worry about the lights and fans being turned off and the alarm set. Instead, I walked around to my kitchen door, running through the conversations I’d had with Celine and Jon. The girls came up, Cab sniffing me over to see where I’d been, Char whining because she’d been abandoned all day, Beau rolling her tongue out to show how starving she was.

  I was so busy placating them I didn’t see the man waiting in the shadows until it was too late. I jumped, spun, and would’ve run except he wrapped one arm around my waist.

  He whispered roughly into my ear, “No way you’re getting away again. Not even if I have to tie you up.”

  “Promises, promises,” I muttered. I couldn’t believe he caught me.

  “Ah, so your compadre told you about our deal?”

  “I didn’t agree to any deal. Especially anything involving being tied up or whips and chains!” I shouted.

  Scythe put his hand over my mouth. “Hush, Big Mouth, or I’ll shoot you with a stun gun just to shut you up until I can get you into the house.”

  I struggled, but it was like fighting a brick wall. He used his body to push me forward past the dogs and up the stairs. I burned a reproving look at the three canine faces. Only Char had the grace to appear embarrassed that they’d let Scythe trespass. Cab and Beau were too busy panting adoringly at Scythe. Usually, they were first-class watchdogs—strange men always sent them into peals of threatening barks. He must have bribed them with doggie treats or something. See, I knew he was sneaky.

  “Open the door,” Scythe ordered.

  “You wish,” I said into his palm.

  “While I would love to be a gentleman and open the door for you, I don’t seem to have an extra hand to dig up your keys. Of course, I can call to action my trusty handcuffs, and that would free up one of my hands.”

  “We can talk out here,” I told his hand. It sounded more like “Wick and tackle ho,” but he seemed to understand, not that it did me any good.

  “No, we can’t, because I don’t want any witnesses when I collect on my end of the deal.”

  Gulp. “What if you don’t collect?”

  He’d leaned down near my mouth to hear what I said behind his hand. He smelled like fresh-cut cedar. “Oh, don’t worry, I always collect. Remember, I carry a gun.”

  The adrenaline was wearing off, and I was beginning to feel the contours of his body along my back and rump. Uh-oh. Time to go inside so I could get some space.

  “Come on now, Miss Sawyer. Don’t make me employ my favorite method of torture.”

  “What’s that?” I imagined thumbscrews and guillotines.

  “Tickle torture.”

  I found my keys in record time, shoved the right one into the lock, and twisted so hard I nearly bent it. As I turned the knob and pushed the door open, he let his hand slip off my mouth, a half second too slowly. I broke his grip on my waist and fell into my kitchen. He followed, shooting the dead bolt behind him.

  I hated to admit it, but it was the sexiest sound I’d ever heard. I was in real trouble. I’d tell him anything to get him out of there before I made one muy grande mistake.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “I’m trying to save the world by keeping you inside.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” I deadpanned as I moved as far away as possible from him without actually leaving the room. I needn’t have bothered, because he walked straight for the front door, where I heard him check the lock, then into the salon, where I presume he was checking the doors were locked there, too. He certainly was making himself comfortable in my home. It grated on my already frayed nerves. Sexual electricity will do that, you know. Maybe I needed to get a vibrator so every time I got near a halfway decent-looking man I didn’t get all goofy about him just out of hard-up desperation.

  It was full dark by now, and I reached up to flick on the homey Tiffany knockoff I have to light the kitchen. His hand closed over mine to stop it. I jumped.

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack,” I scolded.

  “Use your head, would you, before someone uses it as target practice?” he snapped, dropping my hand.

  “I think you’re being a little melodramatic again.” I walked over to the refrigerator and yanked open the door, because I needed to do something to keep my mind off its sudden penchant for various sexual positions. My distraction failed when he suddenly reached around me, brushing me in all the wrong places, to get his finger on the button at the door junction that operates the light. It went dark again, blinding me until my eyes could adjust after the brief flash of sixty-watt light.

  “Don’t tell me,” he finally said in the silent dark, “that you’re hungry?”

  Oh, dear. It was the way he said it. And he was way too close. And it was way too dark. And it was way too hot, even with the forty-degree air blowing on us from the refrigerator. He kissed me. Okay, maybe I kissed him. Well, we kissed each other.

  Oh, boy, did we.

  I’m not sure how long it lasted, because I stopped thinking for a while. That’s hard for me to do. I can’t remember when it last happened.

  At some point, his finger came off the refrigerator light button and moved with the rest of his hand to my right breast, because that’s where it was when I started thinking again. I did that only because he said, “What the
hell is this?”

  His hand was molding my breast, and we could hear the crunching of paper. He ran his thumb back and forth. Crunch. Crunch. Uh-oh. With the speed of light, his fingers unbuttoned my pocket and extracted Zorita’s list. I tried to escape, but as his other hand had been cradling my head and now grabbed my hair, I couldn’t go far.

  “Would you please let go of my hair, you Neanderthal?”

  In all the nonthinking activity, my hands had somehow migrated to his chest, which I now pushed at with all my might, then swiped for the list. He held it easily out of my reach, while trying to read it.

  I got fixed with the twin torpedoes. “What is this?”

  “A list of Ricardo’s customers he did personally.”

  “Gerald Akin couldn’t tell us whose hair Ricardo styled. His receptionist said Ricardo handled that all on his own, and most of them came in after hours. Where did you get this?”

  “Ricardo’s cunandero.”

  “I didn’t know he had one.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Listen, Smarty Pants, you don’t treat a cop that way and expect to get away with it.”

  “How about kissing a cop that way and expect to get away with it?”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” He shook his head and pinned me so hard with those blue eyes that I thought I might have to step back. “Don’t even get started. That was a mistake.”

  “You can say that again.” Crossing my arms over my chest, I glared right back.

  “I don’t have to say it again. Because it won’t be discussed again ever. It didn’t happen.”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  We stood there not speaking—I’m not sure I was breathing—for at least a full minute.

  Scythe seemed to make some internal decision, because he nodded to himself and then looked over the list again. “I don’t see any of the Villitas’ names on this list.”

  “No.”

  “Why did you go see them?”

  I decided not to lie, because Scythe expected me to.

  “She’s an old friend of Ricardo’s. I thought she might be able to shed some light on his past.”

  Scythe looked at me like he wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. “And did she?”

  “Not exactly. She was threatened by my questions, though, so she’s hiding something. Then I met her son. I think Ricardo is his biological father. Jon doesn’t appear to know that, however.”

  “Come on. You think one of them killed Ricardo to keep a twenty-five-year-old secret? This is the family of a U.S. senator. Something like this nowadays wouldn’t prevent him from being reelected.”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “What did the cunandero say?”

  “She said I have lots of red spikes in my aura that make me really, really scary and dangerous, so you’d better watch out.” I narrowed my eyes and tried to look bad-ass.

  Scythe blew out a hard sigh. “Dangerous to yourself,” he muttered. “I need to talk to this cunandero myself. How do I get to her house?”

  Goody, was I really going to get rid of him? I pulled open a drawer and scribbled the instructions on a piece of notepaper. I held it out to him, careful that we didn’t accidentally touch.

  “If we’re exchanging information, what do I get from you?”

  “I didn’t know it was an exchange.”

  “Well, I have been very cooperative and forthcoming with you, seems you could have something for me.”

  His smile developed ever so slowly. I tried not to let it affect my erogenous zones. “What do you want from me?”

  Uh-oh, I stepped right into that one, didn’t I? I cleared my throat to get our exchange back on a business footing. “I want to know what the autopsy said.”

  “Dead from a pierced aorta. He bled to death. Of course, the collapsed lung didn’t help anything, but it didn’t kill him, either.”

  “Could he have lived if someone would’ve gotten to him sooner?”

  Scythe was watching me carefully. “Maybe if that someone was right outside the door and called 911 immediately. It doesn’t take long to die with a hole in the biggest artery in the body.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t buying it. I think he knew I felt guilty and was bending the truth to make me feel better. Probably just because he didn’t want to deal with an emotional female.

  “Any mention of pudding in his stomach contents?”

  Scythe gave me a funny look. “No, only the remnants of what the coroner surmised was a Cajun blackened tuna, some kind of roasted potatoes, green beans, and coffee. Why?”

  “Just wondering. Ricardo mentioned pudding to me on the phone that night.”

  “What about pudding?”

  “He said, ‘The proof was in the pudding.’ ”

  “What is that, some kind of code between the two of you?”

  “We had no code. I don’t know what it meant. I thought he was drunk and goofy.” I sucked back a sob that threatened to erupt. I swear, I never knew when I’d go all mushy over Ricardo. I hated it.

  Scythe strode to the door, pretending not to see the glimmer of tears in my eyes. He put a hand on the door-knob and turned. “Lock it behind me. I’ll be back later to collect on my deal.”

  I still didn’t know what the deal was, but I wasn’t about to beg right then. I jutted my chin out. “Maybe I won’t be here.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll know where you are. We’ve assigned two teams to your tail. One’s parked out front, the other out back.”

  I smiled. I knew they wouldn’t keep me from doing what needed to be done next.

  twenty-two

  I DON’T LIKE CLIMBING TREES, NEVER DID, EVEN AS a kid, even as a self-professed tomboy. So scaling a tree to get out of my house showed just how badly I wanted to get to Illusions that night. I could’ve tried to waltz right out of the house and hope the cops stationed outside would let me mosey on over to the transvestite club at midnight. They might have, I don’t know, but I didn’t want to take the chance that they would stop me from finding out what I needed to know.

  Scythe hadn’t returned, and was I ever relieved. That kiss was going to complicate an already complicated relationship. I know he thought it was a mistake, and I said it was a mistake, but while I didn’t think at all during the kiss, ever since our lips came unlocked, I couldn’t think about much else. I finally told myself that in a couple of days, when I had the case all solved for them, this badge-slinging cowboy could ride off into the sunset in his black sedan, never to be seen again, and I could go back to fantasizing about the vitamin salesman.

  It would be ever so much safer.

  Speaking of safe, I was sitting on an oak branch looking at a ten-foot drop and wondering how hard the ground was. It’s really cool to live in a hundred-and-fifty-year-old neighborhood with trees that are taller and older than the two-and three-story houses, until, that is, one is sneaking out of one’s house and needs a low branch to carry one safely to the ground.

  I’m not a complete idiot. I had tried to go out the front door; the cop out on the street had waved through his car window. I tried to go out the back door, and the cop who sat with a view of the salon door and the kitchen door waved. I opened the upstairs window, and no one waved, so I turned on my bathroom light, set up my Spurs’ Tim Duncan bobblehead doll behind the frosted glass window, and turned a box fan on high to keep the bobblehead bobbing.

  Looking up now, I realized it might not fool Scythe, who expected me to do stuff like this, but it was probably good enough for these guys.

  I sucked in a deep breath, wiggled my heinie off the branch, and dropped to the ground, rolling to a stop in an ungraceful heap. I have to admit I worried about my back, but, amazingly, the jolt seemed to pop something back into place, and I walked a little more freely than I had before. Maybe my luck was turning.

  I hoped it was dark enough in Illusions so the grass stains on my jeans and T-shirt wouldn’t show. I tip
toed over to my next-door neighbor’s house. Rick Ugarte is a songwriter whose muse is only awake from midnight to five A . M . and only when nourished by fresh air. I know this because when he and his attorney wife first moved in, I had a little trouble sleeping, what with his office being right below my bedroom window and some of his songs being hard rock boosted by a synthesizer. Rick and I had a little talk, and I told him I’d try to be tolerant if he’d try to write country music to a guitar. The next week, he sold his first song—to an up-and-coming country music star out of Austin. I haven’t heard the synthesizer or hard rock since. If I’d known it was that easy, I might have bought the damned song the week before.

  Anyhow, I hunkered down next to Rick’s open window and waited for him to finish his verse. “You lost him today…but girl it’ll be okay…”

  “Ricky,” I whispered.

  He looked up, completely unfazed by a face in his window. I love creative airheads. “Reyn, what’s up, girl?”

  “Can I borrow your van?”

  “No problemo.” He reached into his pocket and threw me the keys.

  “Thanks, I’ll have it back in a little while.”

  “Whatever. Just don’t transport any dead bodies in it.” He grinned.

  “Ricky, you know—”

  He waved off whatever denial I would’ve delivered.