Culprits

by Richard Brewer

  Halfway down, she hesitated. “Is it safe?”

  Martinez almost smiled. “You think I’d be down here if it wasn’t?” And she noticed he’d dropped the “ma’am” now they were alone.

  At the bottom of the steps he moved aside and indicated the blown safe behind the swing-out door, as if she might miss it.

  Gracella hardly had to feign her surprise, but at the damage that had been wrought rather than the safe itself. She took a step closer, gaped convincingly, and turned bewildered, dewing eyes on the deputy. “But…I don’t understand. What is this?”

  “It looks like a hidden strong room,” Martinez said. “You didn’t know it was here?”

  Gracella shook her head. “No, but fine wines are my husband’s thing. Clovis is always fussin’ around down here. I hardly ever come down.” She wrinkled her nose, leaned in conspiratorially. “To be honest with you, I’m a little clumsy, and I guess I’m always kinda afraid of breaking a bottle of somethin’ real expensive.”

  The deputy smiled again, a little condescendingly this time, and Gracella finally began to relax. He may not be of the right sexual orientation to want to fuck her, but at least he was beginning to see her as a wide-eyed—and innocent—niña estúpida.

  “So you don’t know what might have been taken?”

  She gave a helpless shrug. “But how could I?”

  “Is anything else in the house missing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. There are other safes I do know about—in my bedroom for my jewelry, of course, and in my husband’s study—but nothing like this.”

  Whatever the deputy might have been about to say next was lost in the sound of commotion from above. Martinez mounted the stairs first, leaving Gracella to admire his tight uniformed butt as she followed.

  They emerged into a crowd of ranch hands carrying three injured men into the hallway. The first person Gracella saw through the confusion was her husband. His harsh features were clenched into a scowl that only deepened when he laid eyes on her.

  “Clovis! What happened?”

  He strode through the men like he was cutting through cattle, stood over her, looming down. “I was about to ask you that very same question…honey.” And from him, the endearment sound like a threat.

  “We were robbed! They wore masks and carried guns. Lottie has a busted ankle. It was terrible.”

  He folded her into his arms, for all the world the loving husband, but his hands on her were hard where they should have been soft, his grip unforgiving.

  “I’ll get to the bottom of this—you can take that to the bank,” he said, his voice rumbling through his chest and into her body. “Nobody fucks with me or my property and gets away with it, y’hear me? Nobody.”

  Gracella knew that as his wife he counted her part of that property. She barely suppressed a shiver.

  “Mr. Harrington?”

  With a last cruel squeeze, Harrington released her and turned. Gracella recognized a doctor her husband kept on beck and call. Lebermann—a trauma surgeon who favored the roulette wheel a little better than it favored him. He was wearing latex gloves and his hands were bloodied.

  “Sir, it’s vital the worst of the burns victims is gotten to a hospital. I don’t have the equipment here to—”

  “Didn’t I already tell you no hospitals?” Harrington’s tone brooked no argument. “Do what you can. And remember, boy, I’m relyin’ on you.”

  Lebermann swallowed. His shoulders slumped as he scurried away.

  Martinez stepped forward. “I appreciate you want to deal with this your own way, Mr. Harrington, but if the man dies…”

  Harrington stared him down. “If he does, José, then I’m sure you’ll manage to write a real convincing accident report.”

  Gracella tried to use the distraction to ease out of her husband’s reach, but Harrington grabbed her arm with iron fingers.

  “Where d’you think you’re going, honey?”

  “Up to her room.” Susan Treacher appeared resolutely by Gracella’s shoulder. “The doctor says she’s in shock and she needs to rest.”

  Harrington threw a narrow-eyed glare at Lebermann, hovering in the doorway, and released Gracella with a grunt.

  “Okay, but don’t think this is over. Later you and I are gonna have a little talk about this here robbery, and you’re gonna tell me everything you know…”

  . . .

  A Year Ago

  The first punch landed high in the vee under Gracella’s ribcage, hard enough to blast the air clean from her lungs. The blow dropped her to her hands and knees on the cowhide rug, roiling from the pain and gasping for breath. Her beaded evening purse was plucked from her arm and tipped out onto the floor in front of her.

  The purse held the usual contents—lipstick and powder, pocket book, keys, gum, her compact Smith & Wesson 640, and three condoms. The bare essentials for a night on the town.

  She’d been out clubbing downtown and one thing had led to another. It was two a.m. and while she hadn’t exactly crept back into the ranch house, she’d hoped her early-rising husband would be asleep in his bed when she did so.

  It was a surprise to find him by the lit hearth in the great room, a crystal tumbler of Michter’s sour mash whiskey by his elbow, waiting for her. That was nothing to the surprise of when he’d hit her for the first time.

  He nudged through the contents of the purse with the caiman-skinned toe of his handmade Tony Lama’s. The revolver raised no comment—he’d bought it for her as a wedding gift, after all. But the condoms were something else again.

  Something with a purpose that could not be easily excused away.

  Gracella had been married to Clovis Harrington for eighteen months at that point, of which only the first three had held any kind of contentment. If it didn’t have four legs or dollar signs printed on it, she’d discovered, then her husband tired of it quickly.

  But that didn’t mean he was prepared to share.

  He picked up the three brightly-colored foil packets and fanned them like cards in his leathery hand.

  “You had a half dozen of these in here when you went out,” he said with a calm that was eerie after his sudden burst of violence. “So, you fuck one guy three times, or three different guys?”

  “What do you care?” Gracella threw at him when she had the breath to speak. “And how the hell do you know what was in my purse before I went out? Are you spying on me?”

  “With good reason, it seems…wife.” He grabbed a handful of her hair, twisted her head back to meet his eyes. “I got a dozen classic automobiles in my garage. Just ’cause I don’t drive ’em every day don’t mean any damn fool can take ’em out for a spin whenever he feels the urge.”

  “How dare you compare me to a car!” Gracella shrieked her outrage.

  Harrington gripped harder, discomfort becoming pain. Then his other hand snapped out, striking her across the face hard enough for starbursts to explode behind her eyes. Instant tears blurred her vision.

  “Because I own you, honey. Body and soul. And because I’ve got a reputation to maintain.” He slapped her again, letting go this time so the weight of it sent her sprawling into the side of the buckskin sofa. “And I won’t have nobody laughin’ behind my back because my goddamn wife will spread her legs for any cockhound comes sniffing.”

  When he unbuckled his belt, Gracella’s first thought was that, finally, he was riled enough to want to fuck her. Then he began to wind the thick leather around his hand and fear pooled in her belly.

  She hid it behind a lifted chin and defiant tone, brain working overtime. “Don’t you want to know what it was I told that cockhound before you accuse me of ruining your fancy reputation?”

  “To use your own words, honey, what do I care?” He took a step toward her, intent and merciless.

  “Because I made sure the last thing he would do was laugh at you,” Gracella said desperately, edging away on her rump.


  That made him pause. She grasped the chance offered to her with both hands and appealed to the only thing that really mattered to Clovis Harrington.

  His pride.

  “I told him you are hung like un toro—a bull—and like to fuck all night until I can barely stand,” she tossed at him. “That I am forced to look elsewhere because you are too much man for me to handle.”

  Harrington was utterly still for several seconds, then his arms dropped, allowing the belt to uncoil slowly. He not only cracked a grim smile, but he laughed. A deep belly laugh of genuine amusement.

  He picked up the whiskey tumbler and took a sip, savoring the mingle of flavors that cost over thirty-five hundred dollars a bottle, while Gracella’s heart thundered against her breastbone and her swelling face throbbed in suit.

  “Honey, if that’s the kinda crap you’re sellin’, you can keep spreading those pretty thighs often as you damn well please,” Harrington said. He shook his head. “I never should’a married you, Gracella. I should’a just hired you as my PR.”

  . . .

  Twenty-three Hours Earlier

  “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck, FUCK!”

  Gracella stabbed a thumb on the end call button of her burner phone and redialled yet again. Alone in her private en-suite bathroom, she had been trying to reach Zach Culhane for the past twenty minutes. Ever since she’d escaped her husband’s clutches and sought sanctuary upstairs.

  Finally, she had to admit the inevitable—that while she’d been aiming to take Culhane for a ride, maybe he’d taken her for one instead.

  A part of her even admired him for that. Oh, he would have to suffer, of course, but even so…

  Unless something had gone wrong with the getaway. Committing any kind of crime was the easy part, she knew. It was the getting away clean that was the problem. And the bigger the score, the bigger the effort put into making sure that didn’t happen.

  In this case, it wasn’t law enforcement they had to worry about—except the ones who’d sold their soul to Clovis Harrington, or had it stolen and held for ransom by him, like Deputy José Martinez.

  No, she knew her husband had other men on call. Men who frightened her by the lack of pity in their eyes. She had caught glimpses of them coming and going from the ranch in the past, but no more than that. She had not wanted to see more.

  Gracella bit her lip, indecisive for a moment, weighing up the risk versus the reward.

  I have to know.

  She hurried to her walk-in closet, dived through the racks of designer gowns right to the back, where disguised in a dry cleaners bag was the same drab black dress, apron, and cap the maids wore. She’d persuaded Cassie Warner to let her “borrow” her spare outfit. In return, Gracella turned a blind eye to the weed the woman smoked when she was supposed to be cleaning.

  She stripped and dressed, adding the black hi-tops she wore for her step aerobics classes, and coiling her hair so it was hidden by the cap. She shoved a change of clothes into a bag and took the back stairs to the kitchen, then out to the lot where the staff parked. Harrington liked to keep their compacts, SUVs, and pickups well out of sight of the house. Lord preserve us from any of his high-falutin’ guests seeing such inferior stock.

  Gracella knew the ranch hand, Traynor, left the keys to his Ford pickup tucked into the sun visor and the doors unlocked, and she reckoned he’d have too much on his plate right now to worry about going anywhere. She took the side road out of the Crystal Q and headed for Fort Worth.

  She drove as fast as she dared without getting a ticket, stopping only at a down-at-heels gas station to ask for the key to their restroom. It was unisex and stank, the cracked tile floor sticky with dirt. The faucet ran constantly into the oil-stained sink. For a moment, Gracella stood and stared at her slightly distorted face in the scuffed stainless steel mirror.

  If this doesn’t work out, I could be wearing these clothes for real. Either that or a shroud…

  She changed quickly into jeans and a blouse, and got back on the road. All the way over, she see-sawed between anxiety and anger. It was hard to say which emotion came out on top. By the time she arrived at Zach Culhane’s rented house, she was strung so tight she was ready to snap.

  There was no response to her hammering on the front door. Peering through the side glass, she saw the living room was now devoid of furniture. Not that Culhane owned much, but even the little he’d had was gone.

  Swallowing back the rising nausea, she circled the property, pressing her face to all the windows. The house was completely empty.

  As Gracella stepped back onto the front porch, she noticed one of the neighbours—a short black woman who must have weighed in at two hundred fifty pounds—standing by her open screen door, watching her.

  “He’p you?” the woman asked in a voice that implied she had no desire whatsoever to do so.

  “I was looking for Zach.”

  “Ain’t here no more.”

  “Yes, so I see. When did he go?”

  “First thing. I wuz just turnin’ on ma TV for Jerry Springer when I heard the U-Haul backin’ up to his door.”

  More in hope than expectation, Gracella asked, “I guess he didn’t leave no forwarding address?”

  The woman shook her head, looking almost regretful.

  “He run out on you, huh?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “Ain’t it always so. Men! Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em and bury ’em in the back yard, huh?”

  She cackled at her own joke and waddled back inside, letting the screen door bang behind her.

  If your back yard is big enough, oh, yes, you can…

  Gracella drove back to the Crystal Q on autopilot, her mind revving. By the time she returned Traynor’s truck to its space on the rear lot, she was no longer angry, or anxious, but functioning with a coolly logical mind.

  Only last month she’d read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in eBook form, prepared to tell her husband, if he asked, that it was just some trashy romance. He never asked.

  In a battle, she knew the general who managed to follow their original strategy most closely would win, but also that no battle plan survived first contact with the enemy. What mattered was how you adapted to circumstance, used the forces at your disposal, and how decisively you counterattacked.

  Well, Zach Culhane was about to find out what kind of a general Gracella would have made.

  Back in her bedroom, she changed again into linen pants and blouse, took a last bracing look at the portrait of the multi Marilyn Monroes, then went downstairs. It was too quiet. The injured men were gone from the front roomto where she had no idea and was reluctant to ask—and the house had returned to its stiff normalcy.

  But as she crossed the hall, Harrington’s voice stopped her in her tracks.

  “In here, honey. You didn’t think I’d forget about our little chat, now did you?”

  The doors to his study were partly open and she could see him slouched behind the huge mahogany desk. Cautiously, she pushed the doors wider and stepped inside.

  At once, she saw Harrington was not alone. On the other side of the room sat a guy in his early thirties, pleasant faced and pale eyed. One leg was up on a stool, a bloodied bandage wrapped around his mid-thigh. He was dressed in city clothes, casual but stylish. Gracella did not recognize him.

  Not one of our men hurt in the attack. So who is he?

  For a moment, the position of his leg reminded her of the maid, Lottie Amaya. Certainly, the guy seemed in as much pain, but it wasn’t just physical, she realized. There was a bitter resentment about him too.

  Behind the injured man’s shoulder stood one of the cold-eyed men her husband occasionally had call to use. He was big, wide, muscular, with a military buzz cut. There was a pistol in his right hand, held casually, the way some men might hold a glass or a phone.

  A click behind her made Gracella gasp. Another man with the same demeanor had just closed
the study doors, and now stood in front of them, blocking her escape. She felt the sweat prickle along her hairline, but managed to turn back to Harrington with one eyebrow raised in calm enquiry.

  “I didn’t realize we had guests.”

  “We don’t,” Harrington said. He indicated the three men with a flick of his fingers. “They were never here.”

  Gracella said nothing. Harrington regarded her with hooded eyes for a long time, then said abruptly, “What do you know about a thief called O’Conner?”

  “Who?”

  Her response was automatic. So, it seemed, was that of the man behind her. She never heard him move from his position by the doorway, but the next moment a fist travelling with the size and speed and weight of a small truck hit her in the back, just around her right kidney.

  Her legs gave out instantly. The pain was a separate entity, a monster that screeched in her ears and robbed her of sight and breath as it thundered over her in sickening waves.

  When she came back to herself, she was slumped on the polished wood floor. Somewhere above her head she heard a tutting sound, realized it came from her husband. She swiveled her eyes—the only part of her body she dared move—and found he’d rounded the desk to crouch in front of her.

  “I know you were in on this, honey, and the longer you hold out on telling me what I want to know, the more this man is gonna hurt you. And he can hurt you real bad—you can take that to the bank.”

  Gracella had to moisten her lips before she could whisper a denial.

  “Cl-Clovis, please, I don’t—”

  The man who’d punched her grabbed her arm at the elbow, dug in with cruelly scientific force. Gracella’s skin suddenly lit on fire, electric shocks sizzling down the nerve pathways into her hand. She convulsed, screaming.

  Harrington continued to watch without emotion. When she subsided again, he said, almost gently, “I know you ain’t as stupid as you care to make out, honey. Oh, you play the part well enough, but you think I didn’t have you investigated a’fore I married you? Be sensible now, and use that brain I know you got inside that pretty little head.”