Deadly Gamble

by Linda Lael Miller

  “You really ought to check in at the emergency room,” Crowley said. “You probably need antibiotics, not to mention something for the pain.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be okay until tomorrow,” I said, wondering if I would. I planned on heading for Sunset Villa at first light, with or without Greer and Jolie. I wanted to see for myself that Lillian was really on the mend. Stopping off at my HMO for a long stint in the waiting room and a handful of drug samples was not my primary objective.

  It was the middle of the night when the cops trailed out, and by that time I was so tired I couldn’t sleep.

  Plus, I kept remembering what Heather had said, about a man letting her into my apartment and essentially telling her that if she killed me, she’d save him the trouble.

  He wouldn’t have to get his hands bloody.

  I coaxed Russell out from under the coffee table with a piece of lunch meat, only a little curled on the edges, and took him downstairs for a poop tour of the parking lot. Back in the apartment, I wedged a chair under the knob on the outside door, double-checked that all the windows were locked and fired up my computer.

  I did billings until just before sunrise, then made coffee.

  While I was waiting for the machine to chug its way through the usual cycle, I took a shower with the curtain most of the way open, taking care not to get the bandages on my right shoulder wet. A little floor-swabbing after the fact seemed a small price to pay for a non-Psycho experience.

  I found Chester lying across the foot of my bed. I’d searched the apartment for him after the police left the night before, but to no avail. He’d vanished, along with Nick.

  The bloodstains on his coat had disappeared, but he looked less substantial somehow, and I knew he’d undergone some kind of severe energy drain, attacking Heather the way he had.

  My heart ached, and tears were imminent.

  Seeing me standing there in my after-shower underpants and T-shirt, complete with bandage-bulge, Chester lifted his head and gave a soft, almost apologetic meow.

  I blinked a couple of times, trying to compose myself, and stretched out beside him on the mattress, shimmying as close as I could get. I stroked him lightly, and he purred, content.

  “Cat Avenger,” I said, with a sniffle. “That was some kind of last hurrah, wasn’t it, pal?”

  “Meow,” Chester replied sadly, and butted my chin a couple of times with the top of his head.

  My vision blurred. “God, Chester, I am going to miss you so much.”

  “It’s not as if he’s dying,” Nick put in.

  By then, I was so used to my ex’s sudden appearances that I didn’t even start. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, a watery image leaning against the dresser in front of the bedroom window. Sunlight rimmed his lean frame and cast his features into shadow.

  “But he’s going away,” I murmured.

  “Inevitable,” Nick said, not unkindly but with a quiet matter-of-factness that I didn’t even try to understand. I think a person would have to be dead to follow ghost logic, and I wasn’t ready to empathize quite that much.

  “Will I see him again, Nick?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  I looked up at Nick. He could have taken the easy way out, said Chester would be waiting to wrap himself around my ankles when I croaked and stepped out of the tunnel, into the Light, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. But he hadn’t.

  “Don’t call me ‘sweetheart,’ you coward,” I said. The fur at the back of Chester’s neck was matted with my tears. “Chester saved me. You just stood there, like a big lump. Never send a man to do a cat’s work.”

  Nick chuckled. “I told you about the maniac hiding behind your shower curtain,” he pointed out. “Not that she could have killed you with those manicure scissors. I see you sustained a few puncture wounds, but that’s probably as bad as it would have gotten.”

  Chester was beginning to fade. It was all I could do not to hold on with a death grip, crush his little body to me in the futile hope that he could stay.

  It was all too much.

  I sobbed.

  Chester turned his head, nuzzled my cheek and blinked out. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Cat here, cat gone.

  Nick’s hand rested lightly on my hair. “I’m a bastard,” he said, “but I wish you’d cry like that for me when I take the last bow.”

  I sat up, rubbed my wet cheeks with a swiping motion of both hands. “Is that on the schedule?”

  “Don’t be so eager,” Nick scolded, but he was smiling. “I’ll be a long time gone.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I need to get my life back to normal, and for a start that means no ghosts.”

  Nick rocked on his heels, hands caught behind his back. “In that case,” he said, “your life will never get back to normal.”

  I stiffened. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “I’ve told a few people about you. Back at the train station, I mean.”

  “You’ve told—”

  “They need help, Moje.” Nick actually looked as if he gave a rat’s ass if anybody else was in trouble. Amazing.

  “Why me?”

  “Why not you?”

  “I’m not psychic. I don’t commonly see dead people—”

  “Don’t worry,” Nick said. “You’ll only have to deal with murder victims.”

  I was speechless.

  No, really.

  Nick reached out, cupped my chin, and gave it a hoist, ostensibly to close my dangling mouth.

  He leaned down, kissed the top of my head lightly.

  I finally found my voice again. “What did you do, write ‘For a good time, call Mojo’ on some celestial men’s room wall?”

  There was no answer, of course.

  I had plenty of reasons to forgive Nick, I realized. I could think of three hundred and fifty thousand good ones, right off the top of my head. But if I forgave him, he would vanish forever, the way Chester had.

  So what if he did? I asked myself. I was falling for Tucker Darroch, in a big way. Maybe I was even a little in love with him. He was a flesh-and-blood man. He could hold me, make love to me and, on top of all that, he cooked.

  Nick, on the other hand, was a ghost, if not a hallucination. He morphed in at disconcerting times and had a way of getting on my very last twitching nerve.

  I wanted him to disappear, once and for all.

  Forever.

  Didn’t I?

  CHAPTER

  15

  S ticking to the plan, I left for Sunset Villa at daybreak, with Russell riding shotgun. The puncture wounds in my shoulder ached, still stinging from the mouthwash I’d applied before replacing the EMT bandages with little round stick-ons. I was going to have to bite the proverbial bullet and check in with my HMO, since there might be some muscular damage, not to mention potential infection, but that was priority number 2. Number 1 was seeing Lillian.

  I felt a little guilty about not calling Greer and Jolie before I left, or even in transit, but I rationalized that it was too early to call. My foster sisters were grown women, they had access to reliable transportation and they knew something big was going on with Lillian. Besides, if it had been up to me, we wouldn’t have left her in the first place.

  Hunger struck, midway down the 101, so Russell and I took an exit, whipped through a drive-through and breakfasted on sausage biscuits, with cheese and eggs.

  When we arrived at the nursing home, there was an ambulance parked in the side-bay, lights whirling, motor running, back doors open and waiting, like a giant mouth, to swallow somebody.

  An instant and elemental panic seized me.

  I buzzed a window partway down for Russell’s breathing convenience, slopped a bottle of water into the bowl I’d brought along for the purpose, locked the Volvo and bolted for the main entrance.

  I’m not psychic, regular ghost interactions and slot machine mojo aside, but somehow I knew the bell was tolling, and it tolled for Lillia
n.

  I ran past the reception desk and along the corridor, repeating a frantic litany under my breath.

  No, no, please, no…

  Every nurse in the place must have been in Lillian’s room, along with two EMTs who’d arrived with the ambulance. The stillness was terrible; nobody was moving. It was an underwater scene, everything blurred.

  My cry was like a stone, shattering fragile glass.

  “Lillian!”

  I rushed toward her bed, where she lay with her eyes closed, mummylike, ready to crumble at the slightest touch. Rotika, looking some the worse for wear, caught me in a two-arm body hold.

  “She’s gone,” she said.

  I struggled, but I was no match for Rotika. “No!” I screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” Rotika said, without slackening her grip. The woman could have been a bouncer at Bad-Ass Bert’s, she was that strong.

  The room came into sharp focus, with an abruptness that made me queasy. The colors were brighter, the lines knife sharp. One of the EMTs was still holding a pair of defibulator paddles. He set them back in their holders with a sigh of resignation.

  Rotika shuffled me out of the room. I didn’t struggle; by then, I was counting on her to hold me up. All the starch had gone out of my knees, and my backbone had melted like beeswax left in the Arizona sun.

  She sat me down in the same chair Fred had pressed me into the night before. “You gotta stop breathin’ so shallow and so quick,” she said. “You’ll hyperventilate.”

  I nodded.

  About that time, Felicia came in through the main door, carrying a brown-bag lunch in one hand and wearing a glare of indignation, along with pink-and-white striped scrubs that made her look like a neon zebra. “Somebody done left a dog locked in a car out there in the parking lot. That’s inhumane, and I’m callin’ the cops.”

  It’s strange, the things people think and say when they’ve just lost a loved one. “Please,” I whispered, “don’t have Russell arrested.”

  “Bring the dog inside,” Rotika said quietly to Felicia. Her big hand landed lightly on my shoulder. “You give Felicia the keys to your car now, honey. We’ll look after your pet until you pull yourself together.”

  I managed to find the keys and hand them over to Felicia, whose eyes had gone big and round. “That ambulance—” She stretched the word out, into three distinct syllables. Am-bu-lance. “Don’t tell me it’s Mrs. Travers they’ve come to fetch. Not when she was doin’ so good.”

  Rotika didn’t say a word, and neither did I. We watched as the realization that she’d been right dawned in Felicia’s face. She fumbled, took a firmer grip on the keys and rushed back out to collect Russell.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rotika told me.

  “What happened?” I asked miserably. One of the EMTs must have slipped out the side door; he returned shortly pushing a gurney. A body bag lay folded on top. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Felicia bring Russell through the front door and shut him up in a room.

  He yowled in protest.

  Rotika gave a heavy sigh as she dropped into the chair next to mine. “I don’t know what happened,” she said wearily. “The rotation nurse came in to make rounds, maybe an hour ago. Everything was all right then. He left, and the next thing I knew, Mrs. Travers’s heart monitor took to beeping like crazy. I called for an ambulance—that’s in the policy manual—and I tried to help her. I really tried.”

  Even through the fog of grief, the word ‘he’ struck me like a bus. Knocked the breath out of me.

  My intuition screamed Geoff.

  “What was his name? Is he still here?”

  “I don’t know his name,” Rotika said, hoisting herself to her feet. By that time, the other nursing home employees had trailed out of Lillian’s room. “We get whoever the health department sends over, and he came and went, like they all do. Must have signed in and out, though. You gotta sign in and out. That’s the rule.”

  I got to my feet. “I want to see the record—now.”

  “I can’t just go showin’ you records,” Rotika told me patiently. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”

  Geoff, my brain chugged along the same track, faster and faster. Geoff, Geoff, Geoff!

  “Murder isn’t ethical either,” I argued, headed for the nurses’ station. I’d watched ER. I knew sign-in sheets were kept on clipboards, and the clipboards were either on or behind the desk.

  “You stop,” Rotika said, with firm hopelessness.

  I found the clipboard, scanned the entries.

  Geoff hadn’t signed his real name, of course, or even the alias, Steve Roberts. I wouldn’t have recognized his handwriting, after all those years, but the line might as well have been written in blood, the way it stood out from the other entries. He’d scrawled, U.R. Dead, on the signature line, and drawn a tiny smiley face after it.

  I clutched the clipboard to my chest.

  Rotika tried to wrest it away.

  The EMTs rolled Lillian’s body out of her room, zipped up in that black vinyl bag I’d seen earlier.

  Everything stopped again, with a lurch, as surely as if the hand of God had reached out and grabbed the planet in a death grip.

  I collapsed.

  The clipboard clattered to the floor.

  The EMTs left Lillian and rushed to me, kneeling on either side, the way Rodriguez and his partner had done the night before, after Heather stabbed me with the manicure scissors.

  “Shock,” one of them said.

  “Call—the—police—” I pleaded.

  I heard the front doors whoosh open, and for a crazy, disconnected moment, I thought the gurney had rolled outside on its own.

  Then I saw Jolie’s face peering down at me, over the shoulders of the crouching paramedics, shining with tears.

  “Lillian?” she said.

  I nodded, tried to sit up. Failed.

  “Take it easy,” one of the EMTs said, taking my pulse, while his partner pressed a stethoscope to my chest.

  “It was murder, Jolie,” I said. “They’re going to say it was natural causes, but it was murder—”

  A blood pressure cuff squeezed my upper arm.

  “Through the roof,” one EMT told the other.

  “Let me up!” I protested.

  “Take her to the emergency room,” Jolie said.

  “No!” I choked out.

  “I’m her sister,” Jolie insisted, “and I want her checked over.”

  Everyone looked up at her in disbelief. My mind took a bumpy little side road, bouncing over the ruts. I wondered where Greer was.

  “You’re black,” Rotika told Jolie.

  “Yes,” Jolie said tartly. “I know.” She swept everybody up in a fierce glance, including me. “My sister needs medical attention.”

  That was how Lillian and I ended up sharing an ambulance ride.

  I learned later that Jolie and Greer followed, with Russell in the back of Jolie’s rig.

  In the E.R., I was examined and sedated, and when I woke up, hours later, I found myself in a hospital room, hooked up to an IV and a couple of monitors.

  At first, I didn’t remember that Lillian was gone, and Geoff had killed her.

  When I did, I let out a howl and tried to pull out the IV needle, so I could go after him. So I could tell somebody, anybody, what had happened.

  A nurse rushed in and knocked me out again with some mega-drug, sent me spiraling into a twilight world where my eyes wouldn’t focus.

  I saw Jolie and Greer leaning over me.

  Then I saw Lillian.

  The pharmaceutical miracle sucked me under again, and I flailed my way back to the surface.

  It was dark in the room.

  A shadow moved beside my bed, and I felt a cold rush of fear.

  “Shhh, little sister,” Geoff said, smiling down at me, fiddling with the IV bag suspended above my head. “It’ll be over soon.”

  I shrieked and jerked the needle out of my arm, scrambled out of bed, trying to escape. Was it a nig
htmare?

  Please, God, let it be a bad dream!

  I heard running feet, felt Geoff rush past me, like an icy breeze.

  Arms gathered me up, held me tightly.

  Tucker.

  I knew his scent, knew the feel of him, the hard substance of his chest.

  Words spilled out of my mouth in a frantic rush, and I clung to him. “Tucker—it was Geoff—he killed Lillian—he was here—”

  “Shhh,” Tucker said.

  “The bag,” I said. “He put—something in the IV bag—”

  “Stay back,” I heard Tucker say. I saw no one, but I was aware of others crowding the room. Lights went on, dazzling me to a temporary blindness, and I felt myself rising in his arms.

  “The IV bag,” I pleaded. Geoff might still be in the room, innocuous in his hospital garb, waiting for his chance to finish me off. “Don’t let them—”

  “It’s okay, Moje,” Tucker told me. “Nobody’s going to hook you up to anything.”

  Great, shuddering sobs rolled up inside me, tore their way out of my throat. I clawed at Tucker’s arms and shoulders—anywhere I could get a grip—as he laid me on the bed.

  “He killed her—he killed Lillian—”

  “Babe,” Tucker said. “I’m here. Everything’s all right. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  I believed him.

  I gave in to the darkness rising up around me, and when I woke up, the room was full of light so bright that, for a second, I thought I’d died after all.

  Then I saw Tucker grinning down at me. He needed a shave.

  “Russell,” I said, remembering.

  “He’s at Allison’s,” Tucker told me. “Safe and sound.”

  “How did he get…?” Once again, I tried to sit up.

  Tucker held me gently but firmly to the pillows. “Bethany came and picked him up, after Jolie called the clinic to make arrangements. He’s all right, Moje. The question is, are you all right?”

  “No,” I said. I was sure of that much, at least. “Lillian—”

  He smoothed my hair. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was murder, Tuck.”

  “The report says natural causes,” Tucker told me carefully.

  “Look at the sign-in sheet, at Sunset Villa—Geoff was there—he wrote—”