I put one hand on the door and took a deep breath. “Door, I’m talking to you. Listen to me. In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to open.”
I heard a snicker behind me. I whipped my head around to see Viv staring at the ceiling, her lips a very thin line.
I glared and took hold of the knob again. I turned it and with great confidence I shoved all my weight against the door.
They say God has a sense of humor. Seeing me fly through the air and thud to the ground must have been a real knee-slapper for Him.
“You’ve got the spirit of something in you, I’ll grant you that,” Viv said from the doorway.
When I got my breath back I rolled to my feet. “That Pookums thing wasn’t an idle threat. You’ll end up on the fifth floor with a very special friend to keep you constant company.” The fifth floor at Belle Court was reserved for dementia patients. I happened to know Viv’s greatest fear was that she’d end up there and lose every last bit of her freedom.
“You don’t have to be such a grouch,” she said, toeing Stump’s box into the doorway so I could lift it out. “God finally answered one of your prayers. I would think you’d be happy.” She squatted with a groan and climbed out of the door. I closed it quietly behind her, although I figured my launch into the backyard had caused at least some noise. If Bobby was paying very close attention there was a possibility he would be heading our way any second.
I decided if he was, I was just going to be honest. He didn’t like me snooping around, but he couldn’t very well stop me, could he? As long as I wasn’t under arrest I was free to leave my own house. I tiptoed to the corner of the trailer and peeked around. From what I could tell, he was still in his car. There was a span of about five yards where Viv and I would be in open ground before we could duck behind a short bushy pine. If we made it that far, I had fairly high hopes we could get out.
I turned back to Viv. “We have to make it quick between here and the bush. Should we run together, or one at a time?”
She peeked around the corner, too, then turned big eyes back to me. “You go first. I’ll wait a few seconds then I’ll cross.” From the excitement in her voice you would have thought we were sneaking past guards at Alcatraz.
I got down as low as I could and scurried across to the bush. It wasn’t easy, lugging Stump with me. I dropped the box on the ground a little harder than I’d intended and Stump grumbled. I put a hand in to soothe her. “Shhhh. I warned you this wasn’t going to be all fun and games.”
Viv, however, seemed to think differently. I turned back to motion her to come on and saw her doing some kind of weird bowing, shaking thing. I realized after a moment she was laughing.
“Would you get over here!”
She bent over and lurched across the yard. There was no way we were getting away with this. She looked like that old cartoon buzzard, and she cackled as she fell against me behind the bush.
“What is your deal?” I hissed as I helped her regain her balance.
“This is the most fun I’ve had in fifteen years,” she said, hooting behind her hand.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. It’s about to end, if you don’t keep it down.” I couldn’t help it. I giggled a little, too.
I crept to the side of the bush and peered through. No sign of movement from Bobby. Unbelievable. Maybe he’d fallen asleep.
“Okay, you get in and make sure the car’s in neutral.” I said. “I’ll push. Steer into the alley behind my trailer. After we get a few lots down I’ll drive us out of the trailer park.”
“I get to drive the pickle-mobile.” She clapped softly.
We crept to the car and eased the doors open. I popped the passenger seat up and slid Stump’s box into the back seat. I still hadn’t taken out all those old pictures and junk that G-Ma gave me, and I had to shove them aside to make room for Stump’s box. I handed Viv the key. She was still laughing. I knew how she felt; I had the same reaction to stressful situations from time to time. Still, it was kind of irritating to watch.
“Are you in neutral?” I whispered.
She nodded, unable to speak.
“Are you going to be able to steer?”
She nodded again.
I had serious doubts, but we were in too deep to back out now. I got behind the car and pushed.
I don’t know why I’d thought it would be easy. I guess because the car was so small, like something that came inside a Happy Meal box. But still, it was a car. I shoved and my feet slid in the gravel. I almost bonked my chin on the bumper.
I considered commanding it to move the way I had the back door, but reconsidered on the off chance that Viv and Stump would go sailing through the double-wide across the alley. I straightened and pushed again, groaning with the effort. It didn’t budge.
I leaned my cheek against the back window, panting. Why did saving Tony’s life have to be so frigging hard?
“Ooops,” I heard Viv whisper. I looked in to see her putting the emergency brake down.
After that it was easy. The tires rolled over the gravel, and we made fairly quick time down the alley, past Frank’s place, and down two more spaces, until I felt fairly sure that Bobby wouldn’t hear us start the car. I came around and tapped on the door. “Okay, I can drive now.”
“Please can I drive? This is fun.”
I might have mentioned that Viv is not the safest driver in the world. In fact, I believed she might be the unsafest driver, at least in Lubbock. I didn’t want to think about what adding a pickle bucket to the mix was going to do. But she had this look in her eye that if I didn’t let her drive, she was going to kick up a fuss. Plus, I was kind of tired from pushing.
I climbed into the passenger seat and fastened my seat belt. I kept one eye on the side view mirror, but no headlights followed us. Once we got onto the street, I watched the streetlights behind us, but if Bobby was following us with his lights out, he was too far back for me to see. “I think we actually pulled it off.”
“Woohoo!” Viv gunned the motor. It made a wheezing sound and the speed increased maybe three miles an hour. “Now, where are we going?”
I should have known breaking into a shooting range would be impossible. We stood looking at eight-foot fences covered with razor wire and padlocks, the adrenalin of our escape wearing off in the face of our ineptitude.
“What would Columbo do?” I stared down a concrete alley between storage buildings.
“He’d put two and two together and get Rey,” Viv said. “I’ll bet you can climb that.”
“Forget it.” I sighed and put one hand on the fence. It shocked me. I shouted a couple of bad words and jumped back.
“Electric fence?” Viv asked.
That made me want to cuss more. This had not been a good week for my resolution to keep only what was good on my tongue. I clamped my mouth shut and stomped back to the car, settling on the bucket.
Viv didn’t argue, she just silently handed over the key. This whole thing was making me mad, and I wanted to cuss a whole lot more. I wanted to beat the steering wheel and rail my frustration and fear and go get a drink to even everything out. I shoved the gas pedal down and had to hang on for dear life when the bucket rocked under me.
Instead I drove back to PakASak and borrowed Virginia’s phone book. She and Viv discussed the latest developments in light bladder control products while I hummed loudly in my head to block them out. I looked up Ricky Barlow’s home address. Barlow, Richard and Cynthia, 4524 38th Street. Richard, huh? He was husband of the cheery-looking blonde Cynthia, family man and business owner, and he was bursting with pride over his pixie step-daughter. He’d come a long way from his days of playing drunken pranks on his friends.
A part of me wondered if I wanted Rick to be guilty of something for the same reason I wanted Rey to be guilty of something: I didn’t like them, and I wanted something bad to happen to them. Another part of me thought there might be something bigger behind my seemingly irrational determination. I wanted to
believe that I had a hunch, that I was being led by intuition or the Holy Spirit or something. I was probably just chasing rabbits, but in the absence of anything else to chase, it would have to do.
Ricky lived halfway across town, and Viv and I were silent on the drive over. Her giggling jag was far behind her, and I glanced at her as we drove under the orange glow of a streetlight. Viv didn’t usually look her age. She didn’t look thirty-five, like she wanted to think, but she looked no more than sixty or sixty-five. Right then, she looked every bit of the eighty-something she was. I felt a pang of guilt. I shouldn’t get so wrapped up in my own drama that I forget other people had needs of their own. Viv might be bored, she might want excitement, but she was still an old lady, and I didn’t have any business dragging her around in the middle of the night. I wondered if I should turn back.
I glanced over again. Her chin rested against her chest and her eyes were closed. I chewed my lip and decided that, since she was asleep anyway, I’d just drive by the Barlow’s house and see if anything was up. Viv could sleep through that. She had told me she had a hard time sleeping, so best to let her get what she could, even if it was sitting up in the pickle-mobile.
I was so focused on finding 4524 38th that I almost sideswiped a parked car. I hadn’t been able to read the curb number because a low-slung sports car was in the way. I drove east until I came to 4522, then 4520 and pulled over.
I twisted in my seat, then checked my watch. It was almost three in the morning. Kind of late for Barlow, Richard and Cynthia, to be entertaining guests on a weeknight. They had the little girl, after all. But there they were, two male figures standing on the front porch, heads bent low as they discussed something. One was silhouetted in the doorway; that was probably Rick. The other was a little shorter, stockier, his hands in his pockets, nodding as Rick spoke.
Something about the guy made me uneasy. He moved up half a step, nodding still, then stuck out his hand to shake Ricky’s. He clasped it firmly, his other hand on Ricky’s elbow, kind of holding Rick there while he talked. Something about the way he stood, the constant nodding, the almost captive way he stood, made me think he was doing his best to persuade Rick of something.
He made me nervous. Or maybe it was just the situation that made me nervous. The guy pumped Rick’s hand a couple more times then moved down the steps and toward the car parked at the curb.
He stepped under the streetlight and I got a better look at him. I didn’t know him, but my blood went cold anyway. He had a paunch. The guy who’d attacked me in my bed had a paunch, too. The height was about right. The age was about right, although I was only going by the voice I’d heard last night and the feel of the body that had knelt on mine to guess at his age.
What I needed was a witness. I lifted Stump’s box so she could look out the window. “See that guy? Does he look familiar to you?”
She growled. Of course, that could either mean he was the attacker, or it could mean she didn’t want me picking up her box. The guy dug in his pocket for his keys, turning in our direction as he did.
Stump went nuts. She jumped up and bayed like a hound after a fox. The guy looked in our direction.
“It’s him!” I yelped. I dropped the box and dove into the seat beside Stump. She growled again but didn’t bark. The box of pictures and junk cascaded to the floorboard.
Viv snorted. “Wha…?”
“It’s the guy who attacked me,” I whispered from the backseat. The bucket rolled beneath me and I did my best – unsuccessfully – to right it without getting up. “He just left Ricky Barlow’s house. I think he saw me looking at him.”
She craned her neck to see down the street. “The guy getting in that car back there?”
“Yes. Duck down! Is he coming this way? What are we going to do? Maybe we should call the police. Hey, I know. Get your gun!”
“Would you relax?” But she picked up her purse and began to dig through it. “What did I miss?” She pulled out a gun that was a whole heck of a lot bigger than I expected it to be.
“Just Rick standing on the porch talking to that guy. But I think that’s the guy who broke into my house.”
“I thought you didn’t get a look at him.”
I didn’t, but Stump did.” I rose a little and looked at Stump. She looked scared. Well, actually she looked the same as she always did, but around her eyes she might have looked a little scared. “She positively identified him as the assailant.”
Viv was too busy fiddling with the gun to give much thought to how credible a witness my dog might be. “I knew that Barlow guy was fishy. This proves that he’s connected somehow.” She made something on the gun click and my blood went cold.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” I tried to rise and succeeded in rolling completely off the bucket and onto the runners were the seat was supposed to be. “Do you really know what you’re doing with that thing?” The glow of headlights lit the windshield. “Oh no, is he coming? Is he coming this way?”
Viv held the gun like she shot at people every day. “You don’t handle pressure very well, do you? He’s going on past.”
I wanted to sit up but my heart was hammering too hard. I tried to catch my breath. Obviously I wasn’t quite as cut out for this stakeout stuff as I thought I was. One look at a bad guy, and I’m a basket case.
“Which way do we go?” Viv asked. “Back to Barlow’s to put the squeeze on him? Or after this joker?” She waved the gun around.
I grasped the steering wheel and pulled myself up. I thought for a minute I was going to break it completely off. But I knew if I didn’t put myself back into play Viv was bound to shoot something or someone.
I flopped around in the floorboard until I managed to get the bucket back in place, bruising both knees and scraping my back on the steering wheel in the process, while I decided. Rick was still speculation, but I was almost positive the other guy was the one who’d attacked me. As much as I didn’t want to, I knew where we needed to go.
“Let’s follow that guy,” I said.
“We’re probably going to lose him now, you took so long getting back up.”
All the better, I thought. “I’ll drive fast.”
We caught up to him three blocks later. He was headed back toward the loop and it wasn’t hard to fall into the sparse traffic and tail him from a quarter mile back. As I drove I focused on two things: keeping the bucket upright and wondering what we’d do if we actually learned the guy we followed was the killer. I decided I’d let the woman with the gun make the decision on that one.
He got off at Slide and drove north. I stayed back as far as I felt comfortable doing, and had a small heart attack when I saw his brake lights flare. He turned into a parking lot and Viv shrieked.
“It’s the laundromat!”
My eyes bugged and I didn’t know what to do. He’d turned into the parking lot at Sylvia’s laundromat. Surely that couldn’t be a coincidence.
We drove past and Viv shrieked again. “He’s going around back. Kill the lights and pull to the other side of the building.
I did as I was told. The pickle-mobile bounced into the parking lot and I crept to a stop on the north side of the building. Viv and I opened our doors as quietly as we could and I scurried around to plaster myself to the side of the building. My heart beat so hard it was making me nauseous, but Viv looked completely in her element. Probably because she felt secure with her protection. I was definitely going to get a gun before we did this again.
She slid along the wall and peeked around. “He’s banging on the back door,” she turned back to whisper. She watched for a few more seconds. “He’s going in now.”
We stood and looked at each other for a couple of seconds. “What do we do now?” I asked, having a feeling I knew what she was going to say.
“We go down there and see what we can see.”
I put a hand on my stomach. “Okay. Let’s do it, then.”
She crept around the building, looking again like that cartoon
buzzard. She came back a few seconds later. “What are you doing?”
“My feet won’t seem to move.”
She raised her hands, the gun dangling from one finger. “Well don’t poop out on me now. This is the big moment, our chance to shine. True adventure. Besides,” she lifted her right hand and the gun swung. “What are they going to do to us? We’re well protected.”
That got me going to the edge of the building. I froze again there until I remembered Tony, sitting on that cot in the hospital, crying his heart out over a baby he’d never seen. That got me past three metal doors, all closed up tight, all the way to the laundromat’s back door.
I’d had some vague notion that the back door would be open, Sylvia and the paunchy guy would be inside talking about how the murder had taken place, who was guilty, how we could find proof, etc, and then Viv and I would sneak back, alert Bobby from the safety of the pickle-mobile, and the case would be solved. Instead we faced a very solid, very silent metal door and a short concrete stoop.
Again Viv and I looked at each other. “Okay, what now?” I asked.
She put her ear to the door. “I can’t hear a dat-blamed thing.”
“Well, we tried. I guess we’ll just have to call it –”
She took off down the other direction, checking the door on the next space.
I shrugged and put my ear to the door. Maybe since I had younger ears…I did hear something. Not voices, but a weird kind of moaning, high-pitched and choppy. Kind of like one of those Indian battle cries you hear in the old Western movies. It grew louder. I drew back, realizing that the sound wasn’t coming from inside the building.
It hit me the same time Viv whirled around, a panic-stricken look on her face.
“Stump!” I hissed. I took off back for the car.
I heard Viv running behind me. Good grief, once Stump got going you could hear her for blocks. The sound carried a lot better at night. The unholy keening was like a siren going off.
The Middle Finger of Fate (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 1) Page 27
