I said, “Aren’t you working tonight?”
“Nope, called in sick. Let’s roll.”
The best sushi in Sarasota is at the Pacific Rim on Hillview. As we followed the young sari-clad hostess to a spot in the center of the room, female jaws fell open all over the room at the sight of Paco, and some women at the sushi counter nearly toppled off their stools. Jealous eyes sent me viperous looks that hoped I’d eat bad blowfish and die. If they had known that Paco’s heart beat fast only for my brother, their ovaries would have lain down and wept.
A waiter skimmed over the floor with twin baskets of cold damp towels and cups of tea. We wiped our hands on the towels and told the waiter we didn’t need to see a menu, we knew what we wanted: Thai beer, sashimi, the chef’s selection of sushi, spiced noodles, and cucumber salads.
When the beers came, Paco held his glass up in a toast. “To the woman who stood down a monster truck and won.”
I grimaced and clicked his glass with mine. “You heard about that?”
“Honey, every cop in Sarasota County has heard about that. Nobody can remember anybody else doing what you did. That took some fast thinking.”
“Todd told me to hit the dirt, Paco. I heard his voice in my head clear as day.”
I tapped the right side of my head to show him where I’d heard it, but I could tell he wasn’t sure he believed me.
Our waiter brought the sashimi, fresh, delicate, thinsliced, and served with raw vegetables and citrus-flavored ponzu sauce. I added a lot of wasabi to my ponzu, and Paco shuddered.
I said, “I like things hot.”
“That’s because you don’t have any sex. It’s compensation.”
It was a familiar refrain. For the last year, Michael and Paco had been on a dedicated campaign to get me to find a man. They had loved Todd like a brother, but they both thought it was time for me to live like a normal woman. They didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t have a button I could push that would make me stop imagining Todd by my side.
I pointed a chopstick at him. “Never antagonize a woman with a sharp pointy thing in her hand.”
Paco grinned and popped a slice of amberjack in his mouth, then followed it with a dab of shredded daikon, tossing it back as deftly as an Egyptian eating a rice ball without letting it touch his lips. Paco uses chopsticks the way he does everything else, gracefully and surely. When I eat with chopsticks, I’m slow and careful because I’m mortally afraid I’ll accidentally miss my mouth and poke myself in the eye. I’d get a lot more eaten if I used a fork. I personally believe that’s why Asian women are so dainty and petite. They’re malnourished, poor things, because women’s hands aren’t made for handling chopsticks. If Asian women ate with forks, they’d be as big and gawky as Caucasian women.
The waiter brought our sushi, and I put my chopsticks down and ate a cucumber roll with my fingers.
I said, “The guy in the truck is still out there.”
Paco used his chopsticks to pinch a tuna roll and dip it in soy sauce.
He said, “People are looking for him. There aren’t that many jacked-up trucks around here. They’ll find him.”
“Paco, I can’t identify anybody. I can’t identify the driver of the car I saw after Conrad Ferrelli was killed, and I can’t identify the driver of that truck.”
He grunted and concentrated on the sashimi and sushi.
After the noodles arrived, he said, “You think they were the same people?”
“Who?”
“The car and the truck, doofus.”
“Oh. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“As long as you’re sure.”
He leaned back to let the waiter put down chilled vinegared cucumber in thin green strips.
I said, “Paco, Guidry said that Denton Ferrelli was playing golf with Leo Brossi and two other guys at the time Conrad was killed. A state senator named Wayne Black and a banker named Quenton Dyer. You ever hear of Brossi or the other men?”
Paco’s jaw tightened and he leaned across the table and looked fiercely at me.
“Dixie, I want you to listen to me very clearly: Keep. Out. Of. This. There are things about this killing that are a lot bigger than just a murder. A lot bigger. If you go around asking questions, you will be hurt. I don’t mean you might be hurt, I mean you will be hurt. Let the cops handle it. You understand?”
He looked so vicious that I shrank back in my chair. This was a side of Paco I rarely saw, the undercover cop side that knew things and went places and did things I couldn’t even imagine.
I said, “I’m not going around asking questions.”
“Did you or did you not go to see Virgil Stephenson today asking questions about the truck?”
Birdlegs is Virgil?
“How do you know about that?”
He sighed. “Once again, Dixie. This is a lot bigger than a murder. Please, please, please listen to me. Keep your mouth shut, don’t talk to anybody, don’t ask any questions. Got it?”
Sloppily, I used my chopsticks to pluck up some sweet-tart cucumber salad. I felt like a mother bird gathering worms to feed her nestlings. The salad was cool, delicious, creamy. When I put my chopsticks down, my hand was trembling.
Paco reached across the table and covered my hand. “Dixie, I love you. I don’t want to see you hurt. Okay?”
I blinked a couple of times to get rid of stupid tears before I raised my head and looked at him. His dark eyes were intent and determined and kind. I looked away toward the sushi counter, where several women thought Paco and I were having a lovers’ quarrel. They were watching us with hope on their faces, each one poised to grab Paco if he dumped me. Paco realized what they thought at the same moment, and we both burst out laughing.
When we got home, I said good night and started up the stairs to my apartment, but Paco followed me.
I said, “What’re you doing?”
“I’m spending the night with you.”
I turned and looked down at him, for a hysterical second thinking maybe I’d accomplished every woman’s fantasy and converted a gay guy.
“Guidry told you to stay with me, didn’t he?”
“Who?”
I slammed my hand on the railing. “Damn it, Paco, I don’t need a babysitter!”
He passed me, leaving me glaring at his beautiful buns as he continued to climb the stairs.
“Didn’t say you did, babe. Like I told you, this is bigger than a murder, so I’m spending the night here. Anyway, Michael would crunch my balls with a lug wrench if I let anything happen to his little sister.”
I looked around, at the silver sea and pale shore behind me and the towering dark trees on either side. I didn’t have anything to fear from the sea, but the trees could shelter more than birds and squirrels. For the second time that day, I heard Todd’s voice. This isn’t about you, Dixie.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t Todd’s voice. Maybe it was the memory of his voice and my grandfather’s voice and Michael’s voice and Sergeant Owens’s voice and every other male voice that had caught me up when I was beginning to think the world revolved around my concerns and reminded me that it didn’t. Paco knew things I didn’t know. Guidry knew things I didn’t know. Conrad Ferrelli’s murder was somehow involved in something even darker and more sinister than murder. I just happened to be a tiny little grain of grit in a large dirt ball.
I followed Paco up the stairs and got the door keys from under the gun in my purse.
I said, “Do you want me to unfold the sofa bed?”
“Nah, just give me a pillow.”
I went to find him a pillow and sheet, and when I came back he was in the kitchen looking at the iron bell thing hanging in front of my window.
He said, “Bitchin’ alarm, babe.”
“You’re not going to take off your clothes and walk around my apartment naked, are you?”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
“Damn.”
“When we catch the guy, maybe you can see him naked.�
�
I wondered if he had said “when we catch him” on purpose, or if I wasn’t supposed to guess that the SIB was involved in a murder investigation. In either case, I intended to play dumb. Not that I would have to pretend very hard, but I wasn’t quite as dumb as I seemed.
I also wasn’t as obedient as I seemed. While I appreciated that law-enforcement officers were the only ones who could or should be doing the investigating, they weren’t the ones who had faced a homicidal truck bearing down on them like a nightmare from hell. Furthermore, they weren’t the ones who had only recently clawed their way from victimized weakness to a semblance of self-respect. If I slunk away in meek silence, all the gains I’d made in the last year would be lost, and I would once again be at the mercy of forces larger and more powerful than myself.
I would be careful. I would not tread on the law’s toes. But I would not wait for the sheriff’s department to find the person who had killed Conrad and wanted to kill me.
16
I slept hard until four o’clock, when the alarm went off, and woke knowing I’d felt safer with Paco in the living room. I hit the alarm and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, trying to be quiet so Paco could sleep. But when I had brushed teeth and hair, pulled on clean shorts and a T, and laced up fresh white Keds, Paco was up and at the door waiting for me.
He said, “You have your gun?”
“Sure. Oh, wait, I forgot my keys.”
I did a U-turn back to the closet to retrieve the client keys from the floor safe. I knelt in the corner of my closet and pulled up the loose floor tile. I opened the top of the floor safe and then leaped backward, screaming. I collided with Paco in the closet door, and for a second we did a crazed dance while I tried to get past him and he tried to come in.
Then he looked over my shoulder and yelled, “Holy shit!”
A pygmy rattler had slithered out of the floor safe and was streaking toward us like lightning.
Paco began running, pulling me with him. I didn’t need any help, I was moving fast.
Pygmy rattlers are aggressive and mean, especially when they’ve been confined in a tiny space like my floor safe. Their venom can be lethal, or it can cause you to lose a foot or a hand. The snake was dark gray, about twenty-five inches long, with a thick body, distinctive triangular head, and dark blotches along a reddish brown stripe running down the center of its back. It was pissed, its rattles sounded like a bumblebee.
Paco and I raced for the living room sofa and climbed on it. We watched the floor for the snake, which didn’t appear. My heart was lurching crazily, and I kept remembering the folk myth that snakes always travel in pairs. But this snake hadn’t traveled on its own, it had been placed in my floor safe while Paco and I were eating sushi.
After a while, I sat down on the arm of the couch. “I don’t hear it, do you?”
He sat down on the other arm and listened. “No. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I guess it means it’s not shaking its tail.”
“But it could be lying in wait.”
“Yeah. What’re you going to do?”
“What do you mean, what am I going to do? I’m not a snake handler!”
“Maybe you could just run in the closet and get my keys so I can go take care of my pets. Then you could call somebody to come get it.”
He gave me a round white-eyed glare.
“If it comes in here, I’ll shoot the son-of-a-bitch, but I’m not going in that closet.”
Paco spent his life infiltrating mobs and gangs ruled by vicious killers. He went into situations that would make the Terminator pee himself, but he seemed about as freaked by the snake as I was.
“Sissy.”
“Shit, Dixie.”
“Michael would get it.”
“Michael’s a fucking fireman. Snakes don’t bother him.”
We sat morosely for a couple of minutes, and then Paco stood up and gave me a desperate look.
“I’m going in there and get your keys, Dixie. But I swear if that snake bites me—”
I gave him a tremulous smile and a perky thumbs-up.
He took long strides, setting his feet down as quietly as he could, and disappeared from view. In a few seconds I heard a metallic jingle and Paco came sprinting back, carrying my key ring.
He climbed back on the couch and said, “You owe me big-time, Dixie.”
“I do.”
He dropped the keys in my open palm. I tried not to think about snake spit on them.
Paco said, “Okay, go walk your dogs. I’ll call somebody to come get the damned snake.”
I stood up on the sofa and gave him a cautious hug, both of us nervously watching the floor. I took my gun out of my pocket, slid off the end of the sofa, and scurried to the French doors, anxiously waiting while the hurricane shutters folded upward.
As I opened the doors, Paco said, “Dixie? You understand what this means, don’t you?”
“I understand, Paco.”
“Okay. I love you, kid.”
I smiled at him. “Me too.”
The sky was taking on the pearly sheen of false dawn, and a sleepy sea was halfheartedly lapping at the shoreline. A few mourning doves were beginning to check their voices to see if they still worked, and some early-waking cranes were stalking along the beach looking for breakfast. I said a silent good morning to the day and clattered down the stairs to my Bronco.
When I got to the end of the long curvy drive and turned north onto Midnight Pass Road, an unmarked car that had been parked on the shoulder pulled behind me. I would have been scared if it hadn’t been such a nondescript car. No self-respecting murderer would drive a car like that. Guidry must have assigned a deputy to follow me. He wasn’t making any effort to be invisible either, so the department wanted me to know I was being guarded. I gave a sentimental gulp until I realized that it wasn’t just for my safety that Guidry wanted me tailed. I was like a little fish around a killer whale. Conrad Ferrelli’s killer was after me. If the cops followed little me, they had a better chance of catching big dangerous him.
At the Sea Breeze, the tail pulled into a space at the far corner of the lot and waited while I ran with Billy Elliot. When I left the Sea Breeze, it left too, staying about half a block behind. It was with me for the rest of the morning, dropping farther back as traffic began to move on Midnight Pass Road, always parking well away from the site I went to. After a while I sort of forgot about it. I followed my usual routine, zigzagging back and forth between the Gulf side and the bay side of Midnight Pass Road, either to a condo on the main thoroughfare or down a short tree-lined lane to a private home.
I was on a lanai pulling my slicker brush through an American shorthair’s gray coat when I realized the full significance of the snake in my safe. The safe had originally been installed to hold valuables like jewelry or money, but since I didn’t have any valuables, I used it as a kind of unlocked fireproof holder of important papers. The person who put the snake in the safe had wanted to let me know he was familiar with my apartment and its secrets.
I finished grooming the cat and set him on the floor; then I pulled out my cell phone and called Paco. The phone rang several times before he answered, and his voice sounded breathless.
He said, “They’re here now—the snake guys. They’ve got him.”
I said, “Paco, before they leave, have them pull my bed out from the wall. There’s a drawer on that side of the bed. Ask them to open the drawer, but tell them to do it carefully.”
There was a pregnant silence on the other end of the line. Then I heard Paco’s muffled voice as he held the phone to his chest and called to the men in my apartment. I waited. In a minute or two the line became clear, and I heard thundering footsteps and shouts in the background.
A man yelled, “Use the hook! Use the hook! Goddamn it, use the hook!”
Somebody else laughed, and another man yelled, “Wahoo!”
Paco said, “Sweet Jesus.”
I said, “I slep
t on top of rattlesnakes last night, didn’t I?”
“Just one.”
“Are you standing on the couch?”
“You bet your sweet ass.”
“Are the guns still in the compartment?”
He held the phone to his chest again and yelled a question, then came back to me.
“They say there are three guns in Styrofoam niches. A nine-millimeter Glock, a Colt three-fifty-seven, and a Smith and Wesson thirty-two.”
A cold shiver ran up my spine. The gun drawer hadn’t exactly been a secret, but I hadn’t told anybody about it, not even Michael or Paco.
He said, “Those were Todd’s personals, weren’t they?”
“The Glock and the Colt were. The thirty-two is mine.”
Paco’s voice was grim. “I’ll have them check every inch of the place, Dixie.”
I said, “More than likely they won’t find anything. Somebody just wanted me to know I don’t have any secrets.”
There was more shouting in the background, and Paco began speaking in a rush.
“Michael just got home, Dixie. He’s a little bit—uh, rabid. I’ll call you later.”
He clicked off, and I grimaced in sympathy for him. Every man gets in a bad mood when he feels that he’s failed to protect his loved ones. When Michael gets in a bad mood, he’s like Godzilla on steroids. I was glad I wasn’t there to hear it.
I pressed the hang-up button on my phone. Now the phone showed only two batteries on its screen. As if I didn’t have enough stress, my stupid phone was nagging me to charge it. You’d think some electronic wizard could design a battery-free phone so our lives wouldn’t be controlled by little passive-aggressive boxes and their blinking demands.
I told the cat good-bye, gathered up my grooming equipment, locked the front door behind me, and went out to the Bronco. I felt numb, too scared even to work up a decent case of the shakes. I started the motor and let the AC run while I called Guidry. Surprisingly, he answered on the first ring.
Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund Page 13
