“I know,” Agnes said, and held out her hand to him.
Garth took it and pulled her up the embankment. “Is she goin’ to jail?”
“If she doesn’t,” Agnes said, looking soberly into his eyes, “we’ll make her pay. I swear to you, we will.” Garth nodded. “All right, then.”
“Shane?” Brenda called. “Could you give me a hand, please?”
“No,” Shane said without looking at her, and followed Agnes up the embankment. He put his hand on Garth’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Garth nodded. “Miss Agnes is gonna make her pay if the law don’t.”
“I beg your pardon!” Brenda said from her car. “But I am injured.”
“Shut your ugly mouth, you bitch-faced yap, you tried to kill our Agnes,” Doyle yelled at her as he reached the top of the bank.
“We’ll all make her pay,” Shane said to Garth.
“The team,” Garth said. “Like you said in the swamp.”
Agnes looked at Shane, who winced and then said, “Yeah. The team.”
“You are neglecting a wounded woman,” Brenda shrieked from her car, practically strangling herself on her seat belt. “God knows, there’s not one gentleman among you!”
“Call on the devil to save you, you limb of Satan,” Doyle yelled down at her. “God couldn’t see you if he tried, you black-hearted whore.”
“The team thing works for me,” Agnes said, holding her bruised ribs, and went to call the cops while Doyle stomped back to his house painting, Carpenter took Garth aside to talk to him soberly and give comfort, Shane took a shaken Joey to get the weapons out of sight, Brenda continued to shriek from the cut, and Four Wheels moldered beneath her ruined Caddy.
Shane leaned against the front rail of the Two Rivers porch, watching a couple of deputies try to make a crime scene of the remains of the old bridge under Hammond’s direction. Hammond did pretty well, once he stopped asking if Maria was around. An ambulance was parked nearby where an EMT had just finished wrapping Agnes’s ribs and was now trying to check out old Doyle, who was resisting removing his shirt with all the vigor of a maiden aunt, while Xavier focused on Agnes, which made Shane tense.
“Go arrest Brenda,” Agnes told Xavier. “She just murdered that old man.”
“I talked to her,” Xavier said. “Now I’m talking to you.” His eyes slid around to look at Shane, and Shane stared back, biting back the urge to drag him away from Agnes. Any fool could see that Agnes wasn’t the one the law should be talking to, and Xavier was no fool. And yet…
He looked over at Brenda, who seemed unconcerned that she’d just killed a man. She was sitting on the swing twenty feet away, drinking deeply from something a lot stronger than lemonade, her shapely legs kicking back and forth, and smiling tensely at a clueless young deputy whom Shane had a feeling Xavier was going to smack upside his crew cut head as soon as he got him out of sight.
“Mrs. Dupres says Thibault was threatening you with a shotgun, Miz Agnes,” Xavier went on. “She seems to think you were in imminent danger.”
Shane spoke up at that. “We had it under control.”
Xavier looked up at Shane. “You did now, son?”
“There was no need for Mrs. Dupres to kill the old man,” Shane said.
“She says it was an accident,” Xavier said. “What?” Agnes almost fell off the porch.
Xavier continued. “She was so horrified because that old man was going to shoot you that her foot slipped off the brake, and when she went to stomp the brake back on to keep the car from rolling into you, she hit the gas instead.”
“Fuckin’ bitch,” Joey said.
“She lies,” Agnes said.
“She wouldn’t be the first person on this porch to do that,” Xavier said, looking at her with intent.
Shane moved closer. “You throw a lot of accusations around, Detective. You accused my uncle of killing his best friend. Now you’re going after Agnes. I think it’s time to drop the good ole boy bullshit and do some real police work.”
Xavier stiffened as if he’d been punched. “You think you know how to do my job?”
Shane could see Carpenter looking at him, eyebrows raised in question. Yeah, Wilson wouldn’t be happy about him getting involved with the local law. But it was Agnes and Joey on the line here-
There was a stir at the end of the porch as Brenda stood up, taking in everyone on the porch. “Can I go now?” she asked. “I have had a terrible day, a terrible accident, trapped in my car for hours, left unaided by callous, uncaring-”
“Go to hell, you fucking bitch,” Doyle called from around the corner, where he was painting the house.
“-inhuman people, and I really am simply unable to continue.”
“Yes, Mrs. Dupres, you can go, but don’t leave town,” Xavier warned her.
Brenda blinked at him. “How could I, Detective Xavier? My little Maria is getting married Saturday. Although how the wedding can take place here, after this gruesome accident, I simply do not know.”
She met Agnes’s eyes for a long moment, and then she added, “Of course, with the bridge out, it’s impossible to have the wedding here anyway.” Then she went down the steps and around the side of the house away from Doyle, heading for the path to the dock. “Where’s she going?” Xavier said.
“She’s docked her boat out back,” Agnes said with blood in her voice.
The honking in the background got louder. “Flamingos?” Xavier said to Agnes. “Yes. They hate her, too.”
Xavier turned to go. “The boys will be here awhile, getting things in order, but I think I have everything I need to do some real police work.”
Agnes looked at him steadily. “You’re not going to arrest Brenda, are you?”
“Do you have proof she did it on purpose?”
“No,” Agnes said.
“Neither do I, Miss Agnes,” Xavier said, putting on his hat. “Neither do I. I will be forwarding my notes from the investigation to the DA, however. He should be interested.”
He tipped his hat to her and then walked toward the porch steps and stopped when he was opposite Shane.
“You think you know how to do my job, son? You think you know the politics involved when you have to follow the law to get your results? When you have to care about something besides just getting those results?”
Shane glared at him. “You think I don’t care about anything but results?”
Xavier grinned slyly up at him. “I think you do now,” he said, and walked down the steps.
When the police had gone with Four Wheels’s body, Garth had turned to them and said, “The paintin’s done. What’s next?” and somehow, offering him a couple of days off to mourn hadn’t seemed like a good idea. So Agnes had said, “Uh, we need shutters,” and shown them the pictures from Brenda’s house book, and then gone on to explain the idea of the house book, how Brenda had wanted the house to look like this and how this was the best revenge Lisa Livia had been able to think of, that Brenda would see the house she’d always wanted and know she’d never have it, and suddenly four men were determined to get black shutters on the house before dinner.
When Lisa Livia came tottering down the stairs two hours later, two hitmen, a handyman, and a kid from the swamp had shutters unloaded and ladders at the ready, along with new carriage lights for the porches and stone planters for the bridge, exactly like Brenda had planned.
“What the hell?” she said as Carpenter and Shane went up the ladders on each side of her bedroom window. “This racket woke me up, which is saying something, considering Cerise and Hot Pink.”
“We’ve almost got Butch tracked down,” Agnes said, watching Shane wrestle his shutter into place on the brackets. “Once we find him, we’ll get the birds back where they belong.”
Shane looked really good lifting heavy things, she thought. And the shutters, those were really nice, too. She was willing to think about damn near anything to take her mind off the mess to her right, where her bridge used to be.
She could tell Lisa Livia that her mother had murdered an old man with her car later. It wasn’t like Lisa Livia would be surprised.
Lisa Livia frowned. “So you have Shane and Carpenter hanging Brenda’s black shutters.”
“It’s like the HGTV Hit Squad,” Agnes said.
“Designed to Kill,” Lisa Livia said.
Shane turned around and yelled, “Is this where you want it?” Agnes gave him two thumbs up.
Lisa Livia shook her head. “I hope he’s getting a lot of sex for this.”
“Not anymore,” Agnes said. “But he had some good times before. And you’ll like this part: He paid for everything with the money he took from the two guys who came out here to kill me. So whoever hired them just redid the outside of my house. It even paid for the paint.”
“Do we know who that is?” Lisa Livia asked. “Some woman, Shane said.”
“Brenda.” Lisa Livia looked up at the windows. “Damn fine shutters.”
“Wait till you see the carriage lights,” Agnes said.
Carpenter smiled down at them and waved with his free hand, the other one supporting about twenty pounds of shutter.
Lisa Livia smiled and waved back, trying not to wince from her hangover. “They used to be grim killers who moved silently through the night, answering to no one. Now they’re checking with you for proper shutter placement.”
“I like to think of it as, ‘Do a window treatment, save a life,’” Agnes said, and went closer to tell them how great the shutters looked.
Three hours later, after the shutters were up, and after a dinner of peppermint tea and whole-wheat toast for Lisa Livia and chicken marsala and new peas for everybody else (the chicken cutlets pounded flat with the back of her frying pan, making Shane roll his eyes but stay out of her way), Agnes started toward the dock with bourbon and coffee only to see the Brenda Belle sitting there like a big wart on the landscape. Shane wasn’t on the high dock, which just confirmed his good sense. She went back through the house where Carpenter was talking softly to Lisa Livia, and then out onto the front porch, where Shane was sitting on the wicker love seat, his hands behind his head, staring down the road, Rhett at his feet, also staring down the road.
“Waiting for something?” she said, setting the coffee and booze down in front of him.
“Yep.”
“Want some coffee while you wait?”
“Yep.”
“Talkative devil.” Agnes poured two cups of coffee and then offered him the bourbon bottle, but he kept his eyes on the road, so she poured that, too. “Got plans for after you’re finished road watching?”
“Yep.”
Agnes nodded. “Anything I should know about?”
“Sex with you.”
Agnes nodded again. “Okay, I know I said this yesterday and then, you know, changed my mind, but I really think since we don’t have a future together, that us sleeping together…”
He didn’t seem to be paying attention, still listening for something, so she gave up and sipped her coffee, staring out at the ruined bridge, and after a minute he said, “You okay?”
She shook her head. “She killed him, Shane.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to get away with it.”
“No.”
“How are you going to stop her?”
He turned to look at her, his eyes flat, and she remembered what he did for a living.
“You can’t kill her,” Agnes said. “No.”
Agnes nodded, relieved. “Then what?”
He turned back to the road. “Something will come up.”
“Just like that.”
“She’ll make it happen.”
“Why?”
“Her type always does.” He went still, the way Rhett went still when he heard something she couldn’t hear, the way Rhett was going still now, and Agnes listened, but there wasn’t anything.
She sighed. “Okay, listen, what I was trying to tell you is, as much as I have enjoyed getting naked with you, I really need something permanent and solid in my life. And no offense and please don’t kill me for saying this, but somebody who shoots people for a living probably isn’t going to blink about cheating on his girlfriend. I’d rather be alone than lied to again.” That sounded pathetic, so she shut up, but it was true.
“Agnes, I eliminate only the targets I’m assigned,” Shane said.
“Yes, but compared to that, cheating doesn’t seem that bad, right? I mean, you shoot somebody in the morning, a little nookie on the side must seem like jaywalking. I need to be with somebody who understands that love is serious business, that I am serious business, someone who will stay forever, someone who won’t betray me and then come around with a ‘Hey, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again’ the next day and think that makes everything just dandy. I’ve got a hole in my heart here. I’m not taking any more chances.”
His eyes were still on the road, and she stumbled on, trying to make him understand.
“Look, I just cannot afford that kind of pain again, okay? I can’t do it. I have to find some good, kind, boring guy who would rather slit his throat than hurt me because I can’t take another shot to the heart. It’ll kill me and I’m not kidding. I can’t do it again. I have to choose really carefully this time. And a hitman, well, that kind of doubles my chances for the shot-to-the-heart thing.”
Something rumbled down the road, and Rhett barked as Agnes turned to look. A big-ass truck came into view carrying what looked like a big-ass tank except there was no turret on top, just a scissors-shaped thing, all of it painted army green.
Agnes looked at Shane, not concerned, because he was there, but definitely puzzled. “Are we being invaded?”
“No,” Shane said. “You’re being invaded. Later. By me.” He stood up as the truck stopped and then backed up in line with the ruined bridge.
“What is that?” Agnes said, postponing for the moment her exasperation because he wasn’t listening to her.
“It’s an AVLB,” Shane said, as the tank rumbled off the flatbed it had been on.
“Of course it is.”
“An armored vehicle launched bridge. The army uses them to put in bridges during an attack. Watch and learn.”
“A bridge?” Agnes lost her breath. “That’s a bridge? Why is the army giving you a bridge?”
“The army isn’t giving it to me. It’s more of a loaner. To get us through the wedding. Then we’ll work on something more permanent.”
Us. We. “We will?” Agnes said faintly.
The tank moved up to the edge of the cut, making more racket than Cerise and Hot Pink multiplied by twelve. Black smoke puffed out into the darkening evening sky as Rhett howled and the flamingos honked, and Agnes cringed at the way the tracks tore up the gravel roadway but it wasn’t the time to point that out. She was getting a bridge. She squinted, trying to understand how she was getting a bridge as the folded-over sections on top of the tank body slowly began to extend upward into the air.
Carpenter and Lisa Livia came out onto the porch.
“I was going to complain about the noise,” Lisa Livia said, still looking fragile but much better than she had before, “but now I’m just impressed. Leave it to the army to mechanize an erection.”
“Laugh now, funny girl,” Shane said. “That’s gonna be a bridge in about a minute.”
“And that bridge can hold over sixty tons,” Carpenter said.
“So it’s a strong erection,” Lisa Livia said, looking at Carpenter.
“Oh, yes,” Carpenter said, standing more erect himself.
“Do you mind?” Agnes said, watching the miracle of her bridge literally unfold. “I’m having a moment here.”
The road sections reached their apex and began to go down, the hydraulic arm in the center scissoring them apart. Within a couple of minutes, the near end touched down and the far end was in place; then the tank driver disconnected the bridge from the body of the tank and drove back onto the transporter, and the transport
er drove off into the gathering darkness.
Rhett settled down, secure in the knowledge that he’d driven off the invaders.
“Wow,” Agnes said, looking at her bridge.
“Was it good for you?” Lisa Livia said. “It was good for me.”
“That bridge was built for tanks,” Shane told Agnes proudly. “It’ll take your wedding traffic and then some. It’s even better than what you had.”
“Thank you,” Agnes said to him, trying not to sound hero-worship-y.
“But it’s temporary,” Lisa Livia said, warning in her voice. “It’s a bridge,” Agnes said. “It’s right here. And it’s even better than what I had.”
“Good point,” Lisa Livia said, leaning on Carpenter a little. Carpenter put his arm around her.
“And I’m thinking the price is right,” Agnes said, and sipped her coffee as Shane settled his arm around her.
“And my mother is going to have a stroke,” Lisa Livia said.
“It’s a beautiful bridge,” Agnes said, and tried to forget all the hell swirling around her and the need to be practical and not get hurt.
She could be smart tomorrow. Tonight she had a bridge and she was holding on to him.
Three hours later, Agnes heard laughter from Lisa Livia’s room next door, rolled over, put her chin on Shane’s chest, and said, “It really is a beautiful bridge.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, in postcoital stupor.
“It’s nice about Lisa Livia and Carpenter, too. I mean, it’s a little bit Bobbsey Twins-you and me, her and Carpenter-but then neither one of you is sticking around after the wedding anyway, so it’s not as tidy as it seems, right?”
“Mmmhm.”
“I mean, basically, Lisa Livia and I are just extended one-night stands, it’s not like we’re anything special. I’ve known that from the beginning, that’s why I kept making those pathetic attempts to end this before you ended it and left me. Which I’m giving up, by the way. You got me a bridge, you got me. My God.”
Shane lifted his head, waking up more, and frowned at her. “What?”
Agnes gave up. “Thank you for my bridge.”
“Yeah. Before that.”
Agnes and the Hitman Page 24
