Agnes and the Hitman

by Jennifer Crusie

  Shane grabbed the rumpled sheet and went to drape it over Agnes, but paused, taking in her soft, round naked body for a few seconds, then carefully placed it over her. He reached down and grabbed his pants and put them on, fastening the holster for his Glock in place. He slid his feet into his boots.

  A figure wearing a straw hat walked down the dock, a tackle box in hand, casting a long shadow over the water to one side. Shane opened the screen door, and Rhett shambled down the path to greet the invader.

  They met near the gazebo. “Detective Xavier.”

  “Mister Shane Smith.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Saw the scrapbook your uncle keeps in the diner under the counter. Saw that picture of you in the hospital bed, getting the Silver Star when you were in the Rangers. Your uncle talked some about you.”

  “My uncle has a big mouth.” Joey has a scrapbook on me? “Not big enough. So you were a war hero and got wounded?”

  “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Shane said. “Don’t want to have that happen again,” Xavier said. Rhett peed.

  Shane said, “So where is Detective Hammond this fine morning?”

  “He volunteered to get some background on the wedding,” Xavier said. “See if that might explain the unfortunate break-in. I believe he knows the bride.”

  Rhett continued to pee.

  Shane noted the tackle box. “Going fishing? Water’s back where you came from.” He nodded to the small boat tied off at the floating dock.

  “What I’m fishing for is in the house.” Xavier tried to get around Shane.

  Shane moved to block his way. “And that is?” Xavier halted. “I don’t like that basement.”

  “It is dank and dark.”

  “I don’t like that crime scene.” He made to get by once more. Shane folded his arms. “You said it was an accident”

  “It was.”

  “Then?”

  “I want to poke around.” Xavier tried to step around once more, and Shane edged into his way.

  “Poking around can be dangerous.”

  Xavier looked up at him, exasperated. “What are you trying to say, son?”

  “Already said it.”

  Rhett finished peeing and came over and sniffed Xavier’s shoes, seemed satisfied, and ambled toward the house. Great guard dog, Shane thought.

  Xavier looked at Shane’s outfit of pants, pistol, and no shirt, and then glanced up at the porch. “You sleep outside?”

  Shane turned and looked through the screen door. There was no sign of Agnes or the sheets that had been tumbled there. A woman who could wake up fast and then remove evidence silently. His kind of girl.

  “Yep. I like fresh air.”

  Xavier nodded, his exasperation evaporating into amusement. “Right. Miss Agnes up yet?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Right.” Xavier gave a lazy grin and walked around Shane. “Quite a woman, that Miss Agnes.”

  “Yep,” Shane said, following him up the walk. “Bit sharp-tempered, though.”

  “I’d call her fiery.”

  Xavier turned his head toward Shane and nodded amiably. “Fiery. That’s good.”

  They walked up the path, Rhett ambling with them. Xavier trooped up the steps to the porch and spared a glance at the air mattress and Shane’s T-shirt, crumpled in a ball. “Restless night, son?”

  “Slept like a baby.”

  “I bet you did,” Xavier said, and went into the kitchen.

  Agnes had awoken slowly to voices out by the gazebo and then quickly to the realization that she was naked on her back porch with a teenage boy imprisoned in her basement and a cop walking up to her back door.

  Shit. She grabbed for her sundress and slipped it on, trying to stay below the screens while gathering up as much of the bedding as she could carry, then did a low dash into the house to get Three Wheels out before Xavier saw him. She shoved the table away from the basement door, pushed the door open, whispered, “Wake up down there,” and dropped one of the kitchen chairs into the opening. “Climb on that and boost yourself up here.”

  She stood back as Three Wheels clutched and clambered out of the hole, skinny and dirty, seemingly made entirely of elbows and knees with a shock of reddish-blond hair sticking out from under his old Confederate army cap. When he was on his feet, she grabbed his shirt.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “In about half a minute, Detective Xavier is gonna come through that door and ask who the hell you are. You agree with everything I say, and you won’t go to jail for threatening me with a deadly weapon, you understand?”

  Three Wheels looked tired, scared, and mad, but when he heard Xavier’s voice, his eyes widened and he nodded.

  Agnes shoved him into the nearest seat and said, “I’m making you breakfast. You’ll eat it.”

  “Yes’m,” Three Wheels said.

  Agnes started to put coffee on and then shifted course to the fridge and poured Three Wheels a glass of milk instead. She put that in front of him, stuck bread in the toaster to get him started-if his mouth was full of food and drink, all the better-poured coffee beans into the grinder, turned the gas on under the griddle, fired up her CD player, and then got out her bowl to make pancake batter. The toaster heated up, so Carpenter must have fixed the electricity. That was-

  Three Wheels was staring at her.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Nothin’,” he said, looking away, blushing.

  She looked down and remembered: no bra. “Oh, for the love of…” She reached over and grabbed her Cranky Agnes apron and put it on to cut down on the shifting problem under her dress. Then the toast popped and she loaded four slices up with butter and jam and put it all in front of Three Wheels. “Chew, don’t talk.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Three Wheels said, and began to eat as if he’d never seen food before.

  She almost felt sorry for him, but he’d broken into her kitchen, pointed a gun at her, and tried to take her dog, so the hell with him.

  She started the coffee brewing and melted butter in the microwave, then dumped flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl just as Shane and Xavier came through the back door from the porch, followed by Rhett, who immediately flopped down in a patch of sunshine and fell asleep. Well, it was a long walk up from the yard. She smiled at Xavier-see how friendly and unworried I am?-and said, “Detective Xavier, what brings you out here so early in the morning?”

  “The smell of that wonderful coffee brewing in your kitchen, Miss Agnes.”

  “It reached all the way into Keyes, did it?” Agnes smiled wider at him, trying to make the words warm instead of sarcastic. “Well, then I’ll pour you a cup as soon as it’s ready.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” Xavier nodded to Three Wheels, who crammed the rest of his piece of toast in his mouth. “And who might this be?”

  “This is-” Agnes began, and then Doyle came in from the front of the house, calling “Top of the morning!” Agnes crossed her fingers mentally and then said to Xavier, loud enough that Doyle could hear, “This is Doyle’s assistant. He’s helping with the painting, trying to get the house finished for the wedding.” She turned to Doyle. “Pancakes coming right up, Doyle.”

  Doyle’s bushy white eyebrows had shot up, but she met his eyes and he nodded. “All right, darlin’. I could use… some pancakes.”

  Thank you, Doyle, she thought, and turned back to Xavier. “Did you come for breakfast, Detective?” Please God, say no. Three Wheels will never be able to fake it through a whole breakfast.

  “No, Miss Agnes, I came for your basement,” Xavier said. “I’ll just be going down there now.”

  Agnes looked at Shane.

  “I’ll just be going with him,” Shane said.

  Agnes nodded. It was a real shame she wasn’t going to be sleeping with him anymore. A man that fast on the uptake was a treasure. Of course, given his line of work, a man slow on the uptake was dead.

  Xavier lo
oked into the hole. “Why is there a chair in here?”

  “I put it in there so people could get in and out,” Agnes said. When Shane and Xavier both looked at her as if she were insane, she added, “It seemed like a good idea.”

  “I’ll go get the ladder,” Doyle said, and left.

  Xavier set the tackle box on the kitchen counter, and Agnes went back to her pancakes. Anything was better than just standing there, looking Xavier in the eye.

  She went to the fridge and got buttermilk, sour cream, eggs, and ham while Xavier gestured to the box and said, “This is my crime scene investigation kit.” He held up a can. “Luminol.” He looked at Agnes. “It detects blood even if someone’s cleaned it up so you can’t see it with the naked eye.”

  Agnes cracked an egg too hard and got shell in the bowl. “Blood?”

  She picked the shell out and thought of how she’d spilled Taylor’s blood right about where Xavier was standing. She glopped in the sour cream and began to whisk. Whisking was very good for nervous energy, especially with “Tortured, Tangled Hearts” twanging as back-up music.

  Doyle came back with the ladder.

  “You know,” Xavier said as the ladder clattered into place, “it is kind of strange that those stairs are missing. Seems like someone was trying to hide that room for some reason.”

  Agnes kept whisking. “Brenda said she boarded it up because it made her think of her poor departed Frankie and she wanted to forget”

  “Poor old widow woman,” Doyle said, his voice full of Irish.

  Xavier shrugged. “It was mighty convenient that old Two Wheels-”

  Three Wheels choked on his milk.

  “-hit right here where he would fall through and-”

  “You said Agnes was clear,” Shane interrupted.

  “I said I believed her story about the events of the other evening,” Xavier said. “Other stories I am not so certain of. Your uncle Joey, for instance…”

  Three Wheels crammed in more toast.

  Agnes tried to tune Xavier out, whisking the cooled butter and buttermilk into her eggs and then pouring her wet ingredients into her dry. She folded them together with a spatula and then poured pancakes onto the griddle, sprinkling them with pecans as she thought about hooks for her column-the rise of the two-thousand-dollar wedding cake: a sign of the apocalypse?-but it was all too clear that Xavier was loaded for bear and he’d decided the bear’s name was Joey. Damn it, Joey, what have you been up to? She grated cinnamon on top of the pancakes and was watching them carefully for bubbles, worried for Joey, angry with everybody else, trying to figure out what the hell had happened to her life, when she felt a gentle tug on her sleeve over the counter.

  “Ah have to go to the bathroom,” Three Wheels whispered.

  “Out in the hall, under the stairs,” she said, talking low. “But you come back, we’re not done with you. You hear?”

  “Ah will,” he said, looking down, and she realized he was looking hungrily at the pancakes.

  She flipped them, and they landed perfectly golden, the pecans studding them like garnets.

  He sighed.

  “Okay, then,” she said, and let him go.

  She looked over to see Shane at the basement door, holding the dinette chair she’d dropped into the basement, rolling his eyes because she was letting Three Wheels leave the room.

  I got Three Wheels covered, she thought. You take care of Xavier.

  He pushed the chair under the table and disappeared into the hole, and she put the pancakes on a plate and poured the next batch as Doyle said, “So you be having the law in the basement, I be having an assistant in the bathroom, and somewhere we be having a grieving widow who sealed everything off from devotion?”

  “That’s about it.” Agnes looked around her kitchen, saw that everything was under control, and picked up her cell phone.

  “You’re a very trusting lass, Agnes,” Doyle said.

  “Not so much anymore,” Agnes said, and punched in Lisa Livia’s number.

  Shane held the ladder steady as Xavier climbed down, tackle box in one hand, but when he got to the bottom, he ignored the center of the room to detour over to the ancient bar, nodding to the mildew-speckled Venus as he passed her.

  Shane pointed at the concrete floor. “The boy hit there.”

  Xavier nodded. “Thank you, son. My concern today, though, is what happened twenty-five years ago in here.”

  Fucking Joey, Shane thought as he watched Xavier open up the tackle box. “Twenty-five years ago?”

  “Long ago in the mists of time, son, your uncle ran arm in arm with the manwho owned this house, one Frankie Fortunato.” Xavier took out the can of luminol and began walking slowly around the room, spraying. “Who subsequently disappeared. As mobsters are sometimes wont to do. You do know your uncle Joey was once with the mob?”

  “Yep. But he left that behind a long time ago. He’s an honest man, my uncle.” Maybe.

  Xavier laughed with genuine amusement as he sprayed. “Joey the Gent? He’s got more stories than the library. And most of them are indeed fiction, but I’m interested in the nonfiction ones.” He put the luminol can down on the old bar and reached into the kit and pulled out a bulky light, which Shane recognized as infrared. “Care to turn off the overhead?”

  Shane flicked off the light as Xavier flipped on his own.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Xavier said.

  No, you won’t, Shane thought, looking at the dragged blood trail that led straight into the wall. But Joey might well be.

  Agnes listened to Lisa Livia’s cell phone ring as she put the pancake platter on the table, the phone crammed between her ear and her shoulder.

  Doyle said, “This lad who is now my assistant?”

  “I know,” she told Doyle. “I’m grateful. And I don’t think you’ll really have to-”

  “H’lo?” Lisa Livia said, her voice slurred with sleep.

  “I know, I know,” Agnes said to her. “I know it’s way too early, but I thought you should know, you were right, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.” She took down a frying pan, unwrapped the ham, and dropped the slices into it to fry, then turned back to pour more batter on the griddle, lowering her voice. “Brenda is swindling me on the house.”

  “Well, duh,” Lisa Livia said around a yawn. “You couldn’t wait until noon to tell me that?”

  “There’s more,” Agnes said, and then Three Wheels came back in. “Hold on.” She looked at Three Wheels. “Did you wash your hands?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Pancakes are on the table,” Agnes said. “Maple syrup’s in the pitcher. Butter’s in the dish. Ham’s coming right up. Are you allergic to nuts?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Because there are pecans in the cakes and I don’t want you swelling up and turning blue on me.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you swear on the Bible you washed your hands?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Eat.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Agnes turned back to the phone and began to slice more ham. “So there’s more.”

  Lisa Livia said, “Tell me that wasn’t Shane you were talking to.”

  “That wasn’t Shane.”

  “Are those your sour cream buttermilk pancakes?”

  “Yes.”

  Lisa Livia stopped yawning. “I’m coming over.”

  “Fine, but about Taylor. He’s in on the swindle.”

  “You’re kidding me. He signed the papers, too. How dumb is he?”

  “Not that dumb. He-”

  “So what’s your name, me lad?” Doyle said to Three Wheels as they both helped themselves to pancakes. “Three Wheels.”

  “No, it is not,” Agnes said to him, and then into the phone she said, “Hang on a minute.” She turned back to Three Wheels. “Do not say that around Detective Xavier, because he will make the connection that you’re related to Two Wheels, understand?”

  Th
ree Wheels nodded.

  “That’s not the name on your birth certificate, right?” Agnes said, not sure. The Thibault clan didn’t seem to be wound real tight; it was entirely possible Three Wheels had a cousin legally christened Steel-Belted Radial.

  “Nah, that’s what Two Wheels called me when I fell off’n my tricycle when I were little,” Three Wheels said, semi-morosely. “He were always makin’ fun.”

  “Well, those days are over,” Agnes said. “What’s your given name?” When Three Wheels looked confused, she added, “Your real name, the one on the birth certificate?”

  “Garth.”

  Agnes nodded. “Garth.”

  “They kept tell in’ my momma she was shameless, and that was Garth’s big hit that year plus she just really liked his music so-”

  “Garth it is,” Agnes said. “How are those pancakes?”

  “Grade A, Miss Agnes.”

  “Excellent,” Agnes said, and went back to Lisa Livia and the cakes on the griddle, flipping them as she cradled the phone, and then moving on to turn the ham. “You still there?”

  “Getting dressed,” Lisa Livia said, her voice muffled. “I’m trying not to miss any of this. Who the hell is Garth?”

  “The kid who pointed a gun at me and tried to steal my dog last night.”

  “What?” Doyle said, looking sharply at Garth. “I’m real sorry about that,” Garth said, forking up another pancake.

  Agnes double-checked the cakes on the griddle, took the empty platter, and filled it again, then filled another with the ham.

  More batter, she thought, and began a second bowl. Garth must not have eaten in a week. Or he was a teenage boy.

  “He tried to steal Rhett, so you’re feeding him sour cream pecan pancakes this morning,” Lisa Livia was saying. “Makes perfect sense to me. I’ve missed you.”

  “Wait’ll I tell you the next part,” Agnes said. “Taylor-”

  Somebody knocked on the back door, and she stepped back to see who it was.

  “Morning, Miss Agnes,” Carpenter said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Carpenter,” Agnes said, surprised. “Thank you for my electricity. Would you like breakfast?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and came inside, pretty much filling the kitchen.