Alexandra went down on one knee next to the fallen bad guy and reached out. I tensed, ready to bring the poker down on the back of his head if he tried to grab her.
He didn’t. A second later, Alexandra breathed a sigh of relief. “I didn’t kill him.”
Good to know. “Is he conscious?”
“He doesn’t seem to be,” Alexandra said.
“Go find something to tie him up with, please. I’m afraid if I hit him with this, I really will kill him. It’s heavy.”
She opened her mouth, took one look at my face, and went to do as I said.
“What about me?” Jamal asked. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. He had a piece of duct tape across his mouth, so he couldn’t say much at all, or nothing very intelligible.
I glanced at him. “We’ll cut you lose once she comes back.” We hadn’t noticed it when we looked through the window, but the reason he hadn’t moved from the chair was that his ankles were also duct taped to the legs.
I raised my voice. “Alexandra? Bring a pair of scissors, please. And look for the duct tape. There has to be some somewhere.”
“Got it.” Alexandra was already on her way back, spinning a roll of duct tape around her finger.
“Cut Jamal lose first.” I waited until she had, and then added, “Let him tie the guy up. He’ll do a better job than you.”
Alexandra nodded, seemingly happy to relinquish the responsibility. Jamal was obviously itching to rip off the piece of duct tape covering his mouth, but he obliged me by kneeling beside the bad guy first.
I kept the poker raised until the bad guy’s hands were taped behind his back. By the time I was able to lower it back into the stand, the muscles in my arms were shaking.
The rest of me was shaking a little, too. Adrenaline, I guess. Jamal got awkwardly to his feet and started picking at the duct tape on his face, grimacing and moaning. When Alexandra moved to help him, he twitched her off. She looked hurt, but took herself off in the direction of the bathroom to look for rubbing alcohol, which was supposed to help dissolve the glue on the tape.
Just when I thought it was safe to relax, there was the squeal of brakes outside, and a second later the slam of a door and the pounding of feet up the walkway.
Jamal glanced out the front window and winced. He made a sort of aborted move toward the kitchen.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’re in enough trouble already. And you got the bad guy. That has to count for something. And besides, you look pathetic. That probably counts, too.”
He grunted something from behind the tape, but I don’t know what it was. Out front, someone tried the doorknob, and when the door didn’t open, I knew what was about to happen.
“No!” I shrieked and threw myself at it. It was a beautiful, original-to-the-house, solid wood door with a round top, very unique, that Rafe would kick in in a couple of seconds if I didn’t stop him. And once the lock splintered, there’d be no way to fix it. “Don’t! I’m coming!”
He didn’t. But when I threw the bolts back and flung the door open, he scowled at me. “Where’s your phone?”
“In my car,” I said. “Did you try to call?”
He didn’t bother to answer, since the answer was obvious. Now I felt bad for having worried him.
He gave me a searching look. “You OK?”
“Fine. He didn’t hurt anybody. Except maybe Jamal.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the young man, who was still picking at the duct tape, and wincing every time a section of it came off.
“Here,” Rafe said and moved past me. “I’ll do it.” He reached out and grabbed a corner of the tape before Jamal could stop him, and yanked the whole thing off. It took some of Jamal’s skin with it. Jamal shrieked like a little girl, and clapped both hands to his face as tears flooded his eyes. A litany of four-letter words followed.
Alexandra came running, and stopped in the doorway to stare at Jamal with wide eyes.
Rafe gave him a minute to recover. When the curses slowed, he asked, “You OK?”
Jamal nodded, still wincing a bit. “He was having too much fun telling me that he was gonna kill me, and why, to actually do much to me.”
“So when you were slumped over the table...” I said.
“I was providing you with a distraction,” Jamal told me.
Ah.
Alexandra sniffed. “I thought you were dead.”
Jamal glanced at her. “Sorry.” And then he seemed to realize that something more was called for, so he put out a tentative arm. When Alexandra stepped into it and turned her face into his chest and began sobbing, he patted her back awkwardly.
“Gonna have to learn to do better than that,” Rafe told him, but I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the way Jamal was—or wasn’t—comforting Alexandra, or the whole fiasco.
His attention moved to the body on the floor. “This the guy?”
We all nodded. Or Jamal and I did. Alexandra was still crying.
“He dead?”
“We don’t think so,” I said. “He was still breathing when Jamal taped his hands.”
“What happened?”
I let Jamal tell it. What it boiled down to, was that the guy had showed up after Alexandra left to get the hamburgers, and he had kept Jamal quiet and cooperative by threatening to shoot her when she walked through the door again. Then he’d seen us in the mirror behind Jamal’s head, and realized we were outside. He’d slapped a piece of duct tape over Jamal’s mouth so he couldn’t yell and alert us, and then he had left Jamal sitting at the dining room table, and had gone outside. He had rounded us up and brought us inside, and then, as Jamal put it, all hell had broken loose.
“I pretended I was dead, ‘cause I thought it might give somebody a chance to do something. Alexandra screamed, and your wife went for the gun.”
Rafe arched a brow at me, but didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t pointed at me,” I told him. “I wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“Sure.” He turned back to Jamal. “Then what?”
“He dropped the gun. It went skidding across the floor. He went after it. Your wife went for the fireplace poker. And when his back was turned, Alexandra brained him with the... thing. The bowl. It was on the dining room table.”
Alexandra sniffed and raised her head. Jamal had a big, wet spot on his shirt. “I made that bowl in fifth grade.”
“Nice work,” Rafe told her, either about the solidity of the bowl or cracking someone’s head with it. Or both. Or possibly about soaking Jamal’s shirt with her tears.
Alexandra straightened. Jamal’s arm fell away, and she stood on her own. “What’s wrong with your teeth? And your hair?”
I couldn’t help it. I giggled. Rafe gave me a look before turning back to her. “Undercover work ain’t always pretty. This time I got to pretend to be this guy’s cousin.”
He nodded to Jamal.
Alexandra gave him a long look. Then she gave Jamal one. Jamal squirmed. And then he braced, obviously waiting for some kind of verdict.
It didn’t come.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Alexandra said. “My face is wet.”
She didn’t wait for anyone to say anything, just walked off. Rafe grinned appreciatively. “Hit him with the bowl, huh?”
“She did. Hard enough to make a sound.” I glanced down at the prone body, still out cold. “His skull might be broken. I’m not sure. I didn’t check. I was still holding the poker. But I definitely heard a crack when she hit him. And it doesn’t look like anything happened to the bowl.”
“No hair to soften the blow,” Rafe agreed, squatting next to the trussed-up gang banger to run his fingertips over the back of the guy’s head. “He’s getting a nice goose egg right here, anyway. I don’t feel anything moving, though, so he’s prob’ly all right. But he’s gonna have a hell of a headache when he wakes up.”
“Good,” I said. “He deserves it. He scared us.”
Rafe straighten
ed. “That his car across the way?”
I told him we assumed so. “That’s what I noticed first. That’s Maybelle’s house, and she’s in prison. Nobody’s supposed to be parked over there. That’s why we didn’t just unlock the door and walk in.”
Although who knows; things might have turned out the same either way. Unless he’d been serious about shooting Alexandra when she walked through the door.
“That’s the kind of car you told me had thrown the firebomb into the duplex,” I added, “isn’t it?”
He nodded, and turned to Jamal. “We got some talking to do. When you’re part of a team, you can’t go off on your own like this and don’t tell nobody where you are.”
Jamal hung his head. “Are you gonna fire me?”
“It ain’t up to me to fire you,” Rafe told him. “I didn’t hire you. Wendell did. And let me tell you, he ain’t real happy. Between now and when he gets here, you better come up with a real good story to show him why he’d be stupid to let you go.”
Jamal winced and lowered his voice. “She’s pregnant.”
Rafe nodded.
“She’s seventeen!”
“Not real smart.”
Like he had any room to talk. Elspeth had been that age when he’d knocked her up. I looked at him, and he looked back at me, and I knew he knew what I was thinking. He made a face and turned back to Jamal. “We’ll figure it out.”
“You must think I’m an idiot,” Jamal muttered.
Rafe snorted. “I was eighteen when David was born. And in prison. You ain’t the first idiot, and you ain’t gonna be the last. But you got options. More than I did back then.”
Unquestionably.
The sound of more engines and the slamming of more car doors outside heralded the arrival of the rest of the rescue team.
“You must have flown to get here this far ahead of everyone else,” I said to Rafe.
“I was motivated.” He pulled me in close. Jamal looked away, politely, and then, after a few seconds of awkwardly shifting his feet, he went to greet the newcomers.
“Don’t leave your effing phone in your effing car so I can’t get hold of you again,” Rafe said into my hair.
“It wasn’t really a conscious decision,” I told him. And I was a little breathless, since he was holding me kind of tight, and also because, after a year, he still affects me that way. “I saw the car across the street, and I had to stop Alexandra before she walked into a potentially bad situation. It wasn’t so much that I chose to leave the phone in the car. It was more that I was in too much of a hurry to remember it.”
“Either way. Just keep it in your pocket after this.”
The scene became chaotic after that. Wendell arrived, and so did José and Clayton. All three descended on Jamal to make sure he was OK. Once they knew he was, they all started berating him for not getting in touch.
Meanwhile, Officers Spicer and Truman showed up, and a minute later, so did Tamara Grimaldi, to collect her murderer. After much discussion, it was decided that he should probably be seen by a paramedic first, so someone put in a call for one. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance from the fire station two blocks away rolled down the street, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Now we had TBI, police, and fire all parked in the driveway and up and down the street.
And in the middle of it, a cab pulled up and deposited Steven Puckett.
He looked around at the crowd gathered in his front yard. “What on earth...?”
“Alexandra,” I said, since she was out of the bathroom by then. “Your dad’s home.”
She turned pale.
“Look at it this way. He’ll be so relieved that you’re OK that the fact that you’re pregnant probably won’t bother him that much.”
“You don’t know my dad,” Alexandra said, but she ran to throw herself in his arms anyway.
They disappeared inside the house, and left the cleanup to everyone else. At some point I’d had enough—it had been a big day with a lot of excitement, starting with Audrey’s revelation this morning, which felt like a lifetime ago—so I told Rafe I was going home. He gave me a distracted nod.
“It’s safe, right?”
“What...? Oh. Yeah. This was the guy we were looking for. Nothing else is gonna go wrong now.”
I wasn’t so sure. I still had Carmen to tell him about. But there’d be time for that later.
“I’ll see you when you’re done cleaning it all up, then.”
He nodded.
“I love you.”
“Love you too, darlin’. Drive carefully.”
Right. I got in the Volvo, maneuvered my way carefully around all the squad cars, ambulances, and TBI vehicles, and skirted a TV truck on its way down the street as I headed for home.
Twenty-Two
Nobody jumped out at me when I got back to the house on Potsdam. Sorry if that sounds anti-climactic, but truthfully, it was nice.
I was careful, of course. I went through the house from top to bottom, just to make sure I was alone, and I didn’t relax until I knew I was. But the house was empty and quiet. It was just me, with the doors locked and nobody gunning for me.
The body was gone, and so was the kitchen table. It had either been taken away by the cops, as evidence, or Rafe had decided to get rid of it and had José and Clayton haul it out. I was a little sad to see it go—our unborn child had been conceived on that table—but after seeing someone’s blood and brains spattered all over the surface, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to eat there again, so it was just as well.
The first thing I did was dump all my dirty clothes from the past couple of days into the washer. Then I poured a bunch of bath salts into the old clawfoot tub and had myself a leisurely bubble bath. After that, barefoot and in clean clothes, I moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer, before deciding that I needed to cook dinner.
We eat out a lot. It’s easy, and during the months of morning- (and afternoon-, and evening-) sickness, when the smell of food turned my stomach, it had probably saved my life, or at least my sanity. But tonight I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted privacy for the conversation we had to have.
So I defrosted chicken and chopped vegetables and set the table with nice dishes and stemmed glasses—even though I couldn’t drink wine and Rafe much preferred beer. A table with stemmed glasses just looks more festive than a table without.
While I was in the middle of it, the phone rang.
I glanced at the time. Six-fifteen.
It might be Rafe telling me he was going to be late.
I glanced at the display. It wasn’t.
“Dix.” I tucked the phone under my cheek and kept working. “Hi.”
“Hi, yourself,” my brother said. “I just wanted to give you an update.”
“Go ahead.” A lot had happened here too, but it probably wasn’t something he was interested in. I hadn’t talked much about Rafe’s case while I was down in Sweetwater. And it couldn’t compare to this morning’s revelations. Not for our family.
“Mother survived the afternoon,” Dix informed me, “but she looks like death. I’ve never seen her so pale. Not even after Dad died.”
In a weird sense, she probably felt like he’d died again. Or maybe like Audrey had. A thirty-three year old friendship, down the drain.
“I’m sure it’ll take time for her to get used to it,” I said. “But I’m glad she didn’t end up in the hospital having her stomach pumped.”
My brother grunted agreement. “She’s still very upset—”
“Naturally.”
“But she isn’t drinking anymore. And I don’t think she will again. Not for a while. She’s feeling pretty miserable.”
And not just because she was hung over. “Did she say anything about me?”
“No,” Dix said. “Why? Is there something you haven’t told me?”
Rather a lot, but nothing to do with this. “I just wondered whether she felt bad for kicking me out of the house.”
“I
f she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But then she has other things to worry about.”
Yes, indeed.
“How are you?” he added.
“Fine,” I said. “The undercover sting is over. Rafe is coming home soon. I’m making dinner. Everyone we care about is alive and well. Everyone else is in prison or dead.”
“That’s good,” Dix said. After a second he added, “I guess.”
“It’s good. Everything’s back to normal.” Or as normal as my life ever is, with someone like Rafe in it. “I can’t wait to see my husband again. Without the long hair and those awful teeth.”
Although that probably wouldn’t be tonight. It would take time to get those things taken care of, and I doubted he’d had any to spare this afternoon.
“Have you spoken to Darcy?” I added.
“She worked until the end of the day and went home. Business as usual, pretty much. It’s going to take her a while to process it all.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to give her a raise.”
I smiled. “She’s a Martin, too, it seems.”
“Christ,” my brother said, not a sentiment I hear from him often. We’ve all been brought up not to take the Lord’s name in vain. It doesn’t mean we always do—or don’t—but Dix doesn’t swear a lot. It probably comes from having children.
I lowered my voice. I don’t know why, since there was no one around to hear me, but it seemed appropriate. “You’re OK with this, right?”
“With what? Darcy? I’m going to have to be, aren’t I? She’s Dad’s daughter whether we like it or not.”
Yes, but... “That wasn’t what I asked. I know she’s Dad’s daughter whether we like it or not. But how do you feel about it? Do you like it? Or not?”
“I like Darcy,” Dix said. “I wouldn’t have hired her otherwise. And I wouldn’t have kept her on for two and a half years. But having her as a sister is a little different from having her as a receptionist.”
Yes, it was. “I think it’s going to take all of us some time to get used to this. Especially Darcy. This can’t be easy for her, either. And at least we have each other, you know? She has nobody.”
Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12) Page 26
