“Where’s Jo?” I said. “Is she okay?”
“She’s okay.” He added something that I’ll leave off.
“Where is she?”
He flung out his arm, pointing toward the trailer I had stolen the gnome from. On one of the webbed chairs sat Lacey Corinda. Jo sat in the woman’s lap, her arms around the woman’s neck. The woman held her tight and rocked back and forth. The bloody T-shirt was gone and Jo was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, three sizes too large. The two pugs were planted in the garden among the gnomes, wondering when refreshments would be served. As Jo was out of range of Wanderley’s cursing, I let him vent.
“How bad am I shot?” I asked.
“You’re not shot.” He kicked the side of the trailer and Baby Bear barked at him. At that, a tall young woman appeared at the door of the trailer. She was backlit—all the trailer’s lights were on now. I peered up at her. It was Chloe, Molly’s mom.
“Was that you?” she asked Wanderley.
“Sorry.”
“Chloe?” I said. “What’s Chloe doing here?” Baby Bear climbed the steps to the trailer door but Chloe pushed him away.
“She wouldn’t stay behind, that’s what she’s doing here and don’t you dare say a word to me about it because none of your women listen to you.”
“They listen to me.”
“They listen and then they ignore what you say.”
“When will the cops be here?” Chloe said.
And far off, we heard the whoop of the siren.
“Soon,” he said. “Will he live?”
“Long enough to die of alcoholism.”
“Thank God,” I said. “If Jo had killed him—”
“Jo didn’t shoot him, you idiot. I did. You stood there like a moron and let her hold that gun a foot away from the man—he took it from her, don’t you remember? She hadn’t even cocked the pistol, for God’s sake, don’t you know anything?” Wanderley was mad.
“Oh.” I got to my feet. Even though Wanderley had told me I wasn’t shot, I pulled my T-shirt up and checked to be certain. I wasn’t bleeding. “Did you shoot at me, too?”
“No, Bear. I didn’t shoot at you. Though if you hadn’t been carrying your daughter, I’d have been tempted. Do you want to tell me why you saw fit to bring a pack of dogs with you?”
I ignored him and looked around. We had again gathered a crowd of interested onlookers. “Someone shot at me.”
“No one shot at you. I shot DeWitt through the kitchen window. He had the gun. I had to take the chance. On your way out, you tripped over a shotgun and the shotgun went off. Some moron laid a shotgun right outside the front door.”
“Hey,” I said, “that must’ve been a different moron. I didn’t do it.” I got one of Wanderley’s unibrow stares. “I didn’t bring the dogs, either. Jo did.”
“That would be a detail you forgot to mention.”
“It wasn’t topmost in my mind.”
Baby Bear at my heels, I walked over to Lacey Corinda and gathered my child up. Jo was crying so hard I don’t know that she noticed. I stuck half my hand out to the woman, the rest being needed to hold Jo.
“We haven’t met properly. Walker Wells,” I said.
She shook my hand then held on to it as she hefted herself out of her chair. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Wells.” She had a soft purr of a voice. “I’m Lacey Corinda. Your daughter tells me Hilliard gave his life to save hers. He would have liked that.”
Oh, dear God. I’d gotten someone else killed. “Hilliard?”
“The gnome.”
“Oh.”
A cop car followed by an ambulance followed by two more cop cars screamed into what space there was in Green Vista. The pugs leaped to attention and started that yapping they do when they want to alert you to new arrivals. Baby Bear felt remiss, so he added his voice, too.
I said, “Miss Corinda, I’m going to excuse myself. But I owe you a gnome. I’ll see that you get it. I’ll get this shirt back to you, too.” I patted Jo’s flannel-clad back. The pugs hopped out of the raised flower bed and joined me as I made my way back over to Wanderley. I was kind of hoping that he could keep me out of a jail cell this time. I was determined that he would keep Jo out of one.
A uniformed officer came up to me, his police baton at the ready. “That your dog?” He pointed the stick at Baby Bear, who was staying close to my side.
“Jo?” I said, “Let me put you down. You’re too old for this. I’m too old for this.” I put her on her feet. The flannel shirt hung to her knees. I lifted her face to mine and examined it. I turned her around, squeezed her arms and patted down her legs.
“Dad,” she said.
She seemed okay to me.
“Sir! Is that your dog?”
“He’s mine,” said Jo. “He doesn’t bite.”
“Leash him, please.”
I reached down and caught Baby Bear’s collar. “I don’t have a leash. Not on me.”
Before the officer could call me a moron, an onlooker stepped forward.
“I’ll getcha some rope—got some back of the trailer.” The young man was back in a minute with a thin rope looped over his arm. He pulled a pocketknife out of his pocket and cut off three lengths. He dropped to his knees in front of Baby Bear, hesitated and said, “He won’t bite me?”
Jo said, “He won’t bite you. He only bites bad guys.”
The guy paused a moment more and then searched through Baby Bear’s heavy coat for his collar. “Beautiful boy. What is he?”
“He’s a Newfoundland. He’s mine,” she said.
The young man smiled at her. “I heard. He always know the good guys from the bad?” He tied the rope to Baby Bear’s collar and passed the end of it to Jo.
“So far.” She smiled at him and nudged the pugs forward with her toe. The man must have had something savory for dinner because the pugs crawled right up into his lap in their eagerness to smell his shirt. He got them secured, too, and gave all three makeshift leashes to Jo.
Jo and I watched as the EMS squad gingerly hoisted DeWitt out of the trailer on a stretcher. When they had him secured in the ambulance, and the ambulance had backed out of the park and sped away down Telephone Road, I said to Jo, “I’m thinking about sending you to a military academy. You know that, don’t you?”
She sat on the gravel and pulled Baby Bear against her. The pugs fought over her lap. “No you aren’t, Dad.”
“I am, too.”
“You’d miss me.”
“I’ll miss you more if you go off and get yourself killed.” I had to cover my eyes. It had been too close. This time, it had been way too close. If I had gotten there five minutes later—if Wanderley had gotten there five minutes later.
Jo put her small hand on the middle of my back. “It’s okay, Dad. I’m okay.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t okay. It was too close. I couldn’t talk.
Chloe, freed from taking care of DeWitt, sat down next to Jo. “Let me see your eyes, Jo.” She shone a tiny flashlight into Jo’s eyes, approved of what she saw there, took Jo’s arm and pushed the sleeve up and put two fingers on her wrist. She nodded.
The inspection had given me some time to pull it together. “Are you a doctor, Chloe?” I asked.
“I’m a physician’s assistant.”
I helped her to her feet. She had been pulled from bed in the early hours and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She wore a pair of jeans, a jacket that was too big to be hers and loafers on her feet. And she was still beautiful.
“Huh,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Only, you and Wanderley are both in the business of saving people. I think that’s interesting, is all.”
Chloe opened her mouth to respond but closed it. Wanderley had pulled himself loose from the Houston polic
e officers.
“You owe me, Preacher.”
“I know I do.”
“We’re all going to the station. Um, the dogs are a problem. They’ll call animal protection for the dogs.”
Oh, no. Not for my dog. Not for Rebecca’s pugs, either.
I took the leashes from Jo. “Wait a minute.”
Lacey Corinda was still watching from her trailer. I took the dogs over to her and explained about animal protection.
“You want me to watch them for you?”
“Would you, please? It won’t be more than a couple of hours,” I fibbed, knowing it would likely be more than a couple of hours. “I’ll pay you.”
“You’re a preacher, aren’t you? That’s what that boy called you?” She was talking about Wanderley.
“I am, yes.”
“You don’t have to pay me. I’ll do you the favor. Maybe you’ll do me a favor in return.”
Ah. “What would that be?”
“We’ll talk about it. Go on, they’re waiting for you.”
I gave the dogs some love, told them to stay, and started off. The pugs had a meltdown. Baby Bear wasn’t too happy, either.
“You know what Miss Lacey has in the house?” I heard Lacey Corinda tell the dogs. “Miss Lacey has some ham bone and beans. You like ham bone and beans?” All three were sure they would. I should have warned her about the beans.
Twenty-four
It was four o’clock in the morning when I called Annie Laurie to tell her that Jo and I were on our way to the police station. Again. If Annie hadn’t fallen asleep holding her phone while playing Scramble on her iPhone, I never would have woken her. The Bose headphones are that good. The iPhone’s vibration woke her.
“Are you serious?”
I said I was. I told her where the dogs were and heard her swing her legs out of bed.
“I’ll go get them,” she said.
I explained that she couldn’t do that because I had taken my car and Jo had taken hers. I told her the dogs would be fine.
“Are you serious?” she said again. “Jo took my car? Jo can’t drive.”
“She can apparently drive well enough to get to Telephone Road,” I said. “Call Brick and tell him he’s the pulpit minister this morning. Three services. Tell him he has my prayers and he’ll do fine. Tell him no jailbird preacher jokes.”
“Bear,” Annie said. “All this? This is from your side of the family. Stacy and I never gave our folks a minute’s worry.”
• • •
James Wanderley was right. I owed him. If Jo and I hadn’t been accompanied by a police officer, albeit a Sugar Land police officer, I’m sure I would have gotten to know a whole new cell full of strangers and Jo—well, I’m not going to go there. The idea of my girl behind bars . . .
As it was, an officer herded Chloe, Wanderley, Jo and me into a room with a big table and lots of hard plastic chairs. Someone brought in a tray with a thermos of hot water, cups, plastic stirrers and an offering of instant coffee, hot chocolate packets, and tea bags. I made Jo some tea. She sat with her legs tucked under her. Even with the heavy flannel shirt, she gave a shiver now and then. After a good while, two plainclothes detectives came in. The tall, beefy one introduced himself as Detective Gustav Ruiz and the thin, weedy woman who looked like she should be teaching economics to college freshmen told us she was Detective Bianca Dabriel.
Ruiz said, “Where do we start? Mr. Wells, you first called Detective Wanderley at . . . what time would that have been?”
I took my phone out, pulled up my call history and told Ruiz, “Two twenty-eight this morning.”
Wanderley took over, relaying the gist of my phone call and the story behind it. I was glad he did. He was concise and clear and I wouldn’t have been. I was tired and aching and the cop coffee I’d drunk was sitting in my stomach like a cup of pickle juice.
Ruiz and Dabriel asked few questions. They both took notes. When Wanderley had finished, Ruiz looked down the table at Jo.
“Tonight’s story starts with you, Miss Wells.”
“Jo.”
“Jo. Want to tell us what happened?”
Jo uncurled her legs and sat up straight. She twisted her hair into a rope, tied it in a knot and pushed it behind her shoulder.
“Mrs. Pickersley, Phoebe’s stepmother, died today. Yesterday. And Dad came home and told us, and he said how Phoebe’s grandfather got all Phoebe’s money and the trailer, too, when she died, and I remembered how her grandfather was so mad at Phoebe’s dad and said that Phoebe’s dad would get his and he did.”
Dabriel said, “Can you please be more clear?”
Jo sighed. “Mr. DeWitt, Phoebe’s grandfather? He blamed Phoebe’s dad for Phoebe’s mom dying. She was Mr. DeWitt’s daughter. And then Phoebe died—so Mr. Pickersley did ‘get his’ if you saw things that way, right?” She looked up at us to see if we were following and everyone nodded. “Then when I asked Dad again about how Phoebe had died, and he said she drank the Diloudid but the thing is, I don’t think she did, you know?” Jo gulped the last of her tea and put the cup on the table. “But Dad, remember how I told you that Phoebe’s grandfather would make her his disgusting power punch? That Phoebe made it for me and Alex, and it totally stains your mouth? I started thinking about how if someone said those bad things to me like her stepmom said to Phoebe, and I wasn’t the kind of person who would kill herself—and Phoebe wasn’t—then I would want to go be with someone who liked me. Phoebe thought her grandfather loved her. Only I don’t think he did, which is really sad.” She looked up again and we all nodded, less certainly, but still, we were with her.
“On the video, Mrs. Pickersley said she had some of the medicine, that stuff that killed Phoebe. She didn’t say she had it all. So some of it could’ve still been at the trailer and Phoebe’s grandfather could have made her power punch and put that stuff in it and when Phoebe was in my room she didn’t know she was dying, she only wanted to prove to me that the bad things she said about her stepmother were true and that’s why she left me her phone only she got too sick to leave. I looked it up online and that stuff can make you hallucinate. Right. It makes you itchy and hot, too, if you take too much—I think that’s why she took all her clothes off.” This time only Chloe nodded.
“Go on, Jo.”
“So I wanted to know. Even though I still think Mrs. Pickersley really did want Phoebe to kill herself, she really did want her dead, and that’s the same thing as killing someone.”
“Not in a court of law, it isn’t,” said Ruiz.
“It is in the Bible. Ask my dad.” Five heads turned my way.
“She’s paraphrasing, but, yeah. First John, three fifteen—‘anyone who hates his brother is a murderer.’”
With her thumbnail, Jo prized half-moon chips from her foam cup. She did this methodically, with concentration, her head down. “I didn’t want Mrs. Pickersley dead, though. For what she did.”
Detective Dabriel said, “Tell me why you broke into Mr. DeWitt’s trailer again, Jo.”
Jo’s head came up. “I didn’t break in. Not the second time.” Her brow creased. “Oh, wait. Not the third time.”
I said, “What?” and Wanderley made a slicing motion with his hand. I shut up.
“So, the first time I used Phoebe’s key which she said I could, so that wasn’t breaking in. And tonight, first I used the key and I went in and got his gun and put it outside so he wouldn’t shoot me . . .” Meaning that Jo was the other moron Wanderley had referred to—I gave Wanderley a smile so he would know there were no hard feelings. “. . . and then I locked the door behind me and I knocked on the door. So that can’t be breaking in at all, since he let me in. Really, it never was because I used a key the other two times and that doesn’t count.”
Jo used the side of her hand to sweep the cup chips into a pile. “Did you know it’
s seriously better for the environment to use those cardboard paper cups with little handles on the side? Plastic foam is a total Earth-killer. It won’t decay. Five hundred years from now you could pull any of these cups out of a landfill, wash it out and use it all over again.”
Ruiz gestured to the pile in front of Jo. “Not that one, you couldn’t.”
Dabriel put her hand over Jo’s, stilling the sweeping and flattening and mound-shaping Jo was doing with the chips. “A man was shot tonight, Jo. You directly precipitated that shooting—”
I said, “Hold on, now—”
Dabriel cut her eyes my way. “Be quiet, Mr. Wells.” I shut my mouth. She gave her attention to Jo. “We’re taking that very seriously. I want you to stop waffling and give us an answer. Why did you go to Mr. DeWitt’s trailer tonight?”
Tears leaked out from under Jo’s lashes. I said, “Come here, honey,” but Dabriel pressed her hand down on Jo’s and kept her in her seat.
“I wanted him to tell me,” Jo said.
“Tell you what?” Dabriel let go of Jo and picked her pen up. Wanderley uncapped his pen and stuck the cap in his mouth.
“I wanted him to tell me if he had killed Phoebe.” Jo closed her eyes.
The three detectives put on smug, adult smiles.
“He said he did,” she continued.
The smiles vanished. “What did you say?” Dabriel asked.
Jo opened her eyes. Her mouth was twisted. “He said he did.”
Ruiz pushed his chair closer to the table and the chair screeched on the floor. “Start at the beginning and tell it to the end.”
Jo nodded. “After I moved the gun outside, I knocked on the door and Mr. DeWitt took a long time answering but I knew he was in there because I’d already heard him snoring and, anyway, he smells bad and I could smell him. But finally he comes to the door and he opens it and he stares at me like he’s never seen me before and he says ‘What the hell do you want?’ and I introduced myself because I didn’t think he remembered me from the first time. Probably because he was really drunk. But I introduced myself and said, ‘Remember, I was Phoebe’s friend.’ Which I was once, but not a good friend. She wasn’t, either.” Jo looked around at us again. “I’m only saying. Dying doesn’t make you all perfect.” She shivered.
Safe from Harm (9781101619629) Page 32
