by Kit Frazier
“Come on,” Logan said, rising to his feet. “Let’s go sit on the porch. Crime scene techs are on the way.”
On the porch, we waited. I sat on the porch swing. Logan stood on the porch, eyes sweeping the street, Marlowe at his side.
“Didn’t someone send a bird to Puck, too?”
Logan nodded, his jaw working. He looked like he wanted to break something.
“Speaking of the devil, where is Puck?” I said, in a feeble attempt to change the subject.
“Left him at the field office. He hit the dirt when he heard you had a visitor,” Logan said, looking over my shoulder as the cop cars began to pull in. “You call Cantu?”
“What? No,” I said, following his gaze.
Cantu was climbing out of his ten-year-old station wagon, which had the entire cast of Dora the Explorer dolls strewn about the dash. As he exited the car, he looked like he was ready to spit nails.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered.
Behind him, the forensics van jumped the curb, the driver overjoyed at the opportunity to use the lights.
Cantu’s eyes sparked, dark and angry as he stormed up the walk, a look he’d sported only once before.
“What the hell is going on?” Cantu snarled. He squared off on Logan, which was pretty ballsy, considering that Logan had almost five inches on him. “You have anything to do with this?”
Logan took a step toward Cantu.
Life as I knew it flashed before my eyes.
My friendship with Cantu was complicated. He was about ten years older than me, and once upon a time I’d had a terrible crush on him. I was eight, and he was a dashing young beat cop when my dad was a detective. When my father died, Cantu stepped up to fill in some of the empty spaces.
“It’s the Obregon trial,” I stammered. “Just some nut trying to spook me. Whoever it was didn’t take anything, and they didn’t do any real damage.”
Except attack me, kill a poor, innocent bird, ruin one of my steak knives, leave a creepy note in red magic marker, and make me be afraid in my own home…
Cantu took a deep breath like he was counting to ten, and Logan did, too.
“You take prints?” Cantu said, and Logan said, “Waiting on the geeks.”
Cantu nodded.
Then they both turned toward the van, where the crime scene techs were tumbling out the doors, big black toolboxes in tow.
“You take the kitchen, and I’ll do the bedroom?” Logan said.
Cantu nodded, and the two of them headed into the house like they’d been best friends for life.
I stood on the front porch, bewildered.
“What just happened?” I said to the forensic photographer who trotted up the stairs and dropped to one knee, taking shots of the doorjamb.
“War buddies,” he said, and then he shouldered his camera and headed through the front door.
“Fine. Now I’m a war zone. This was so not on my list of fiveyear goals.” I sighed. “Come on, Marlowe,” I said, and realized he’d followed Logan into the house.
Marlowe had defected.
Months of male drought, and now I had a veritable battlefield of men marching down the driveway to ransack my house.
The crime scene techs left my house a wreck. Cantu set up increased patrols in the area and put a guy on my house. The boys in blue were out making the city safe for civilians, so I felt marginally better.
Turned out my lock was broken, so Logan made a call to have one of his buddies come change my locks, and Cantu said Marlowe and I could be excused from the demonstration, but I didn’t think that was fair. If Marlowe and I were going to really do this search and rescue thing, people were going to be counting on us, no matter what was going on at home.
Plus, Marlowe had actually found Muse. Okay, so she was just in the closet, but still…it was a glimmer of hope, and I intended to grab it with both hands.
Logan fetched Muse from Beckett and Jenks’ house right before he left. I glanced up at the clock. I had time to clean the print dust off every imaginable surface, and a little time to look into the file Tanner had given me.
I set about getting rid of the graphite with my mother’s lemon-scented industrial cleanser and mopped up the footprints the boys left all over the hardwoods, stopping periodically to take a peek through the curtains to make sure there were no ear-chopping maniacs circling the block.
The only thing out of the ordinary was a couple of young cops circling the block. They were in an unmarked car, but they were easy to spot. The only cars that make that many rounds are soccer moms looking for their wayward offspring, not two grownup Boy Scouts in dark sunglasses.
With the fingerprint surfaces newly fresh and shiny, I was caught up in a full-on, adrenaline-inspired cleaning blitz. I tackled the shower and then buckled down to battle the dust bunnies behind the fridge, but it turned out they were armed to their fuzzy little teeth, so I settled for making a pot of tea and going over the paperwork in Tanner’s file.
Mama had taught me that busywork was the best way to forget about my problems.
I settled in on the sofa and flipped open the file Tanner had given me, wondering where in the world I should begin and what questions I should ask Soliz about this evening.
“Well, Marlowe,” I told the dog. “We can add today’s little adventure with ear-chopping maniacs to our stack of research.”
The dog didn’t say anything.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll work on this myself.”
Legal pad in hand, I scribbled possibilities turf wars, disrespect, anything that could be a link between El Patron and Texas Syndicate. Muse hopped up on the sofa, leering at the pristine pages like a juvenile delinquent looking at a sidewalk of fresh wet cement.
Because I always think better with the black-and-white clarity of noir rolling in the background, I zapped on the Turner Classic Movie channel and found a Charles Vidor director’s marathon. To my delight, Gilda was showing a flick about a sultry, if somewhat tainted, nightclub singer, her horrible husband, and the man who loved her. It’s a story about a doomed triangle of a woman and two men, complicated by love, lust, and the danger of obsessive desire.
It was a study in greed, cunning, and the age-old question of honor among thieves the perfect backdrop to looking for clues in an escalation between El Patron and Texas Syndicate. Plus, I could get a few tips on the art of stripping without taking anything off something I planned to take notes on.
I spread out the pages Tanner had given me on the coffee table and narrowed my eyes. A lot of the info on El Patron was stuff I’d dug up over the summer.
And Tanner thought I couldn’t handle working downtown. As I flipped through the file, I made three piles one for El Patron, one for the Syndicate, and one for anything that looked like it might connect the two. Muse, meanwhile, made a concerted effort to stomp on every sheet of paper until she found the one I was trying to read, at which point she turned around three times and settled in on the paragraph I’d been studying.
“Muse,” I growled, fixing to move her fat little calico butt off my research, when she blinked her big yellow eyes at me.
She sat there, wide-eyed, staring at me. In that moment, my lack of sleep hit me like a loaded cattle car. I’d had a restless night followed by an adrenaline-packed morning of faking an obituary, interrupting a breaking and entering in my home, and having an unattractive man wrestle me to the floor. To top it off, he left me a nasty note meant to discourage me from testifying at the trial.
I stared at the cat, who sat staring back at me, and I realized I was so tired I couldn’t have kept my eyes open with a crowbar.
“You can take a nap without me,” I told the cat, who blinked very slowly back at me and jumped to the coffee table.
I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “Just a short nap.”
I pulled the quilt from underneath Marlowe, who’d already staked out his end of the sofa, and wriggled beneath the soft patchwork, worn smooth as silk from generations of MacKinnons snuggl
ing beneath it.
Marlowe opened one eye.
“I’m just going to lay down for a minute,” I said to the dog. “There’s plenty of time to take a shower and get us a sandwich…’
Marlowe eyed me skeptically. Then he sighed and laid his head on my feet. Muse leapt from the coffee table and slipped beneath the quilt, turned around twice and settled beneath my chin. Within moments, her loud, rusty purr vibrated against my chest.
“All right,” I yawned. “But just for a minute.”
And then I closed my eyes and dreamed of Logan.
*
The phone trilled, jolting me out of a truly excellent PG-13 dream that started with Logan bare-chested on the banks of the Pedernales River. I’d had this dream before, but it never got past that mind-numbing, pulse-pounding kiss we’d shared at the Fourth of July picnic.
In the dream, my heart was hammering and I was about to ask him a question when Marlowe grumbled low in his throat.
A real growl punctured the dream, and it was not the sound of a heart pounding.
With one eye twitching, I fished through the sofa cushions in search of the phone. One of these days I’m going to get organized. But probably not today.
“This better be good,” I snarled into the phone. “Hey chica, que pasa?” chirped Mia’s cheerful voice. I grimaced. I was not in the mood for cheerful.
“What am I doing?” I said, blinking at the pile of paperwork that had spilled over the coffee table and onto the Turkish rug. “Committing career suicide.”
“Oh, good. Then I didn’t disturb you,” she went on. “Want me to come by and pick you up?”
“Why would I…” I glanced at the clock blinking on the DVD player and then down at Marlowe.
“Oh, holy hell!” I hissed.
“If you’re ready to go, I could come get you,” Mia said, and I shook my head, stumbling out from beneath the quilt, which caught under my foot, and I fell flat on my ass.
“Ouch!” I yelped.
“Are you okay?” Mia said.
“No…yes…I mean, just go on without me. I’ve got a meeting with Dan Soliz after the rally anyway.”
“You know it’s media night…”
A primal scream bubbled up in my throat, and I pounded it back with a great deal of effort. “Yes, I know that, Mia. Thank you for the reminder.”
“I’m just saying…”
I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear and staggered to the bathroom for a look in the mirror and immediately wished I hadn’t.
Cantu had decided that since we still hadn’t passed our test, Marlowe and I would be the communications team for Team Six. Hopping around and wrestling with the phone, I struggled into my black SAR gear, scrunched my hair into a ponytail and slapped on the black SAR baseball cap.
“Want to go out after?” Mia said, and I sighed.
“I would, but I’m interviewing Soliz, and Tanner dumped a bunch of research on me and I gotta get it done before the grand jury thing.”
Plus, there was some house-breaking, woman-attacking, bird-killing maniac running loose in the city who now had an up-close-and-personal visual of the floor plan of my house…
There was a silence over the line in which I knew I was being disapproved of, but life is like that sometimes. “Esta bien, chica, see you at the rally,” she said.
“Right,” I said, and disconnected.
“Crap, crap, crap,” I growled, scrambling through the leaving routine, trying to be on time for a change, which Muse made nearly impossible by yowling and doing figure eights around my shins.
I freshened the water in her champagne glass a little compulsion my aunt started years ago grabbed my purse, leashed the dog, and skipped down the steps and hopped into the Jeep.
I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror and groaned. There is nothing like trying to weasel information out of a cop while dressed in black Army surplus gear. Sighing, I cranked up the engine. Nothing. “Shit!” I swore.
I cranked again and got rusty, metallic ratcheting from under the hood. It was a little after five and still hotter than hell, and I was beginning to sweat.
Marlowe watched with something that bordered on interest as I jumped out of the Jeep, hustled to the back cargo area, and grabbed the hammer I keep behind the spare tire.
I jogged around to pop the hood, where I proceeded to beat the starter within an inch of its measly little metallic life.
A big wham! sounded near the front fender, and I jerked up to find the obnoxious neighbor kid staring at me over the fence.
I wiped my forehead and glared at him. He was about nine, and worse, he was one of the notorious neighborhood Bobs. I like most of my neighbors, especially Beckett and Jenks, the guys who cohabitate in the bungalow on the left.
The Bobs are a different story.
Bob, Mrs. Bob, and the baby Bobs routinely steal my newspaper, let their dog crap on my porch, and generally remind me why abstinence can be a good thing.
“What?” I said irritably as the kid looked me up and down.
“You’re scary,” he said.
Narrowing my eyes, I marched around to the driver’s side, leaned in over the seat, and cranked the key again. The engine stuttered twice, thumped, then grudgingly engaged.
I threw the hammer in between the seats and stalked back around to slam the hood.
“Kid,” I said, bending over to lob his ball over the fence. “You don’t know the half of it.”
Chapter Seven
A twinge of foreboding sprinted up my spine as I pulled into Fiesta Gardens and slid into a parking space behind a familiar white van that was hogging three parking spots. My sense of foreboding had been correct.
“Miranda,” I swore.
Miranda Phillips was issuing orders to her television crew, her perfect platinum hair oblivious to the humidity, her perfect body oblivious to gravity. Her boob job had taken nicely, I guess, if you like breasts you could eat hors d’oeuvres off of. Apparently she’d skipped the silicone and gone straight for helium.
I cast a quick glance into my rearview mirror and sighed. Standard SAR gear isn’t my most flattering look. In addition to the unfashionably high-necked, black long-sleeved tee shirt, I had on black jeans and black hiking boots, which were neatly accessorized with a whistle, webbed utility belt, black nylon gym bag, and a fanny pack not exactly a Chic Magazine Glamour Girl moment.
Miranda, on the other hand, looked flawless. Miranda is the Martha Stewart of journalism but with better shoes. She has her own wildly successful syndicated column at the Austin Journal, the Sentinel’s bigger, better-funded rival newspaper, and it is rumored that she landed the television gig by letting KFXX’s big fat producer snack on her mackerel in the middle of Interstate 35 during a live shot of a hostage standoff. The rumor might have been hard to believe, except that I’d caught her doing the very same thing with my ex-husband, Dr. Frank Peters, aka Dr. Dick, in the middle of my living room sofa. Same ho, different hoedown.
Today her ho-ish charms were cranked up to “obliterate” and aimed at detective Jim Cantu, who was waiting for her to set up the shot. Cantu had taken over SAR training right after Amy Bracken left because her burgeoning pregnancy had finally forced her to quit scaling fences and rooting around in drainage ditches.
My main job for the evening would be to explain how search and rescue worked and let people see the kinds of tools we take into the field. But mostly it was to let little kids pet Marlowe.
I lugged the bag out of the Jeep’s back cargo area and was passing between my Jeep and the cop car when a giant brown shark with legs threw himself at the car’s rear passenger window, snarling and scrabbling and looking for blood.
“Jeez!” I yelled, yanking hard on Marlowe’s lead as he bristled, looking to return the favor. “Hey, Napalm, take a Milk Bone! It’s just me and Marlowe!”
The dog settled, and his snarl spread into a big, dopey doggie smile. I looked around, wondering where his equally dopey owner was. I
t was entirely too hot to leave a dog in a car for even a few minutes.
Shaking my head, I tried the door. Since it was unlocked, I undid my fanny pack and hooked it on Napalm’s collar. The dog capered about like a giant set of jaws on four legs. Trying to get both the dogs under control, I let Marlowe drag us to the staging area, where we hurriedly signed in with Olivia Johnson, the team’s operation leader, at base camp, which consisted of a card table lined with ID tags and clipboards and a big white RV outfitted with first-aid supplies, radios, a satellite dish, a generator, and enough maps to wallpaper my entire house.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered as Olivia handed me my ID badge. Her eyes were nearly as dark as her skin, and she gave me a look she reserved for criminals and people who don’t pay their parking tickets.
She shook her head. “Girl, you better get your act together. All the other units are here.”
“I’m working on it,” I said, looking around. She was right, of course. The gang unit was there passing out tee shirts, SWAT had the big black van, and the forensics guys were laying out a practice crime scene, complete with yellow tape and chalk marks.
Olivia looked at me. “What’re you doin’ with Hollis’s dog?”
“He left him in the car, windows rolled up. Will you take him?”
“Hollis,” Olivia growled and muttered a string of very inventive
curses as she fished an extra lead from a large plastic box under the table. “Tryin’ to train a Malinois fuckin’ attack dog to search and rescue people…that dog ever manage to find somebody to rescue, they prob’ly die of a heart attack at the sight of those big ol’ teeth.” She attached the lead, brought him around to the other side of the table, and poured him a bowl of water. “You can’t help it, can you, baby?”
“Thanks, Olivia. I owe you,” I said over my shoulder as I hurried over to the staging area.
“You owe me nothin’,” she said, petting the dog. “You see Junior Hollis, you tell him he owes me an explanation.”
I’d sure hate to be Hollis after Olivia got ahold of him. And he thought his dog was scary.
Dan Soliz was already onstage, giving out awards to kids who’d made a difference in the community. I watched him for a moment. He may be the head of the gang unit, but you’d never know it if you met him on the street. He was wiry, but it was a tough wiry, and he wore his usual uniform of ostrich boots and worn Wrangler jeans that fit him well. For the occasion, he wore a black DARE tee shirt and his trademark grin that had been known to make women take their clothes off.
