First Grave on the Right

  “You wanted to see me, Ms.—?”

  “Mrs. … Magenta. Violet Magenta,” I said. While keeping a straight face.

  The bodyguard stepped forward and placed the video camera he’d found in my handbag on Price’s desk. “She told me her name was Lois Lane.”

  Sadly, I think he believed me.

  Price stood and picked up the camera. His very stance was meant as a threat, meant to belittle and intimidate. I knew plenty of women his tactics would work on. I was not one of them.

  I sat down opposite him as he opened the LCD monitor and played the video on the camera.

  “My name is Donna Wilson,” I heard myself say from the other side. Well, not the other side …

  “I have sent this video to ten people, including my lawyer, a coworker, and my pedicurist.” Pedicurist. I tried not to giggle. “If I do not call each and every one of these people by nine P.M. today, they will take the tape directly to the police. I have irrefutable proof locked in a safety deposit box that Benny Price, owner and operator of the Patty Cakes Strip Clubs, is trafficking children and selling them as slaves in foreign countries. One of the ten persons mentioned has the key to the box and will give it to the police if I do not return unharmed within the allotted time.”

  Benny stood stunned for a moment before closing the monitor and handing my camera back to me. Since I seemed to have his complete attention, I started the act. Breathing heavy, I curled my fingers into my handbag—a gorgeous silk clutch Cookie let me borrow—and leveled a determined, and slightly naïve, stare on him.

  Clearly, I would not win the Patty Cakes Club’s fave person of the year award. Though he hid it well, Price was angry. He forced himself to stay calm as he sat back behind his desk. “And what kind of proof do you have?” he asked, his voice like ice water.

  I let my gaze dart to my purse then back up, hoping I wasn’t overdoing the nervous damsel-in-distress bit. I had to sell it, not cram it down his throat.

  “I have a USB flash drive I obtained from my employer, a lawyer who was shot a couple of days ago. He said it had everything we would need to put Benny Price—you—behind bars.”

  Price calmed then. The corners of his mouth twitched, and I knew he had the flash drive. Maybe he would be just stupid enough to …

  He opened his desk drawer and withdrew a flash drive. “You mean this one?”

  Yep. He was precisely stupid enough. While my insides were doing a Snoopy dance, my outsides were starting to panic. Angel and Sussman had stepped from the room behind Price with a thumbs-up. The camera was recording.

  “Can I go watch the strippers now?” Angel asked.

  With teeth gritted, I shot him a quick glare, then continued to hyperventilate. Price smiled one of those superior smiles of Mafia bosses and nursing home directors. Sussman stood back, glared at him.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Angel said. Hopping over to me, he popped open the top button on my too-tight blouse, giving Price, and hopefully the camera, a nice shot of my cleavage. Price’s gaze landed instantly on the erotic zone. Danger and Will Robinson. Distractions extraordinaire. When he looked back up, a few strands of my hair had magically fallen to frame my face just so.

  I pushed up my glasses in a nervous gesture. “I can assure you, that’s not the same one.” After licking my lips slowly in thought, I said, “He handed me a flash drive.… I know it has … he said it had evidence. It was encrypted, but—”

  “Perhaps he handed you the wrong one?” Price offered politely.

  “No, that’s not possible. He has … I mean, he has several thousand flash drives on his desk at any given moment, but…”

  “I promise you, little beauty, my man took this directly off your lawyer. Seconds after he died.”

  Little beauty? What was I? A racehorse? You’d think a man who hung around beautiful women all day could come up with something a little less corny.

  While I was doing my best to hyperventilate without actually hyperventilating, Price stood, walked around his desk, and leaned against it in front of me. Partly, I was certain, so he could look down his nose while watching his newest victim squirm, like watching an ant burn through a magnifying glass. But a bigger part of the partly was so he could check out the girls.

  Taking advantage of the situation, Angel went for another button, an evil smirk glittering on his face. I pretended to close my blouse and slapped his hand away in the process—the little perv. Angel frowned in disappointment.

  “Were you after money?” Price asked, so cool an inferno wouldn’t have melted his bravado. He gestured for blondie to leave.

  I gulped, unable to meet his stare any longer—in theory—and nodded.

  He reached down and pulled off my glasses. Guilt, utterly remorseless guilt, oozed off him and pooled at his feet. “And you just decided to waltz in here and demand some from me?”

  “Yes. I’m … in trouble. With the deaths of the lawyers at my firm, there’ll be an audit.”

  “Ah,” he said, folding the glasses and placing them on his desk. “And you’ve been a naughty girl.”

  “You … killed them? It was you?” Without raising my chin, I looked up at him through my lashes. He seemed to enjoy it.

  “Of course not. I have men for that.”

  Damn. Could he be any more evasive? I needed a confession, not a paltry assertion any lawyer worth his weight could weasel him out of.

  I struggled to get to my feet, but he was ridiculously close. I brushed against him, making sure my shoulder grazed over his erection. “You sent men to kill my bosses? Why would you do that?”

  As with most criminals, his arrogance was his downfall. He wrapped a hand around my arm and helped me up. “Because I can.”

  After sucking in an appalled breath, I tried to wrench free of his grip. I pretended to pretend like I was pretending to be confident when I said, “I’m leaving.” He had just confessed to conspiracy. No way on Earth was I getting out of that office alive.

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “If I don’t show up by nine o’clock tonight, you will go to prison.”

  Price glanced at his watch, then pulled me closer, encircled my waist with his arms. “That gives us almost three exquisite hours to find out who your friends are.”

  Oddly, I was finding it easier and easier to act afraid. With a toss of my head, I gave Angel the signal. He nodded and took off, but Sussman stood there, cemented to the spot, a peculiar hatred seething in his eyes.

  “So, in answer to your question, yes, I did kill those three lawyers.” He ran a finger along my collarbone, dipped it into my cleavage. “But you don’t have to be next.”

  Yeah, right. I pushed against his chest all helpless-like. Seriously, how long can it take to storm into a room? All Angel had to do was tug on Uncle Bob’s tie, thus giving the signal for Ubie to send his men in with guns blazing. It wasn’t brain surgery.

  “You mean we could work something out?” I asked, my voice breathy with fear.

  A sleazy smile widened across his once-handsome face. The face of a killer and a kidnapper who sold children as slaves. Or worse. He wrapped a confident hand around my throat, dipped his head to access one corner of my mouth. I was beginning to wonder if I’d underestimated him.

  Suddenly a red light on Price’s desk started flashing. He straightened in surprise as his bodyguard rushed into the room.

  “Cops,” the guard said, and Price turned an astonished gaze on me.

  I could have been a smart-ass and said something like, Don’t drop the soap. But the look on Price’s face convinced me to bite my tongue. For once. He seemed, I don’t know, annoyed. His face reddened within the span of a heartbeat.

  Before I could warn him about the dangers of sudden acute spikes in blood pressure, he wrapped a hand around my arm with enough force to break it and pushed me back against the wall. Only it wasn’t a wall. It opened to a dark hallway lined on one side with two-way mirrors. We could see directly into his office.

 
As I struggled with Price, the tactical team smashed into the room and tackled the bodyguard to the ground before scanning the area for me. I took a deep breath, readying myself to scream as Price dragged me down the hall, but his large hand clamped down on my face none too gently. It cut off my scream and my air supply. Which sucked. Blue was not my best color.

  Then I felt Reyes. I felt him even before I saw him. A heat wave rushed over me, and I watched as he materialized in front of us. A swirling dark mass of smoke, thick and palpable. The air was suddenly drenched in his anger, bringing the water molecules to a boiling point that prickled hotly over my skin. Panic clutched my throat. How would I explain another severed spine?

  Since I could hardly scream what I was thinking—which was basically, Down boy!—I formed the command in my mind. He had read my thoughts before. Maybe he would again.

  Don’t you dare, I thought. Really hard. Trying to project my sentiments past the wall of his anger and into his head.

  The high-pitched ring of his blade being drawn halted, and Reyes paused. Though I couldn’t see his face, I felt him staring at me from behind the hood.

  Don’t even think about it, Reyes Farrow.

  He leaned over us and grumbled at me, but I held my ground. With legs flailing and lungs burning, I thought, Do it and I will kick your ass.

  The mass stepped back, seemingly surprised that I would threaten him. But I didn’t have time to worry about that. Or contemplate how exactly I would go about carrying out such a threat.

  Clawing at Price’s hands was getting me nowhere. Time to tap into my inner ninja. The first move of what I’d hoped would be many was to kick my assailant in the shins. Well-placed kicks could bring down the stoutest of opponents. And with heels? Forget about it.

  As my mind raced to prepare for the kick and figure out my next move, I felt a sharp pain shoot from my neck down my spinal cord, saw a burst of white-hot light, and heard a loud crack echo against the walls. I turned to jelly in the blink of an eye. In the seconds before I felt consciousness slip completely away, I realized Price had broken my neck. Asshole.

  * * *

  I semi-expected to hear trumpets blaring, or angels singing, or even the sound of my mother’s voice welcoming me to the other side. I mean, I was a fairly good person. All things considered. Surely I would head in the general direction of up.

  Instead, I heard water dripping, slow and steady like the beat of a heart that barely had the endurance to continue. I smelled dirt under my face, cement, and chemicals. And I tasted blood.

  It took only seconds for me to realize Reyes was near. I could feel him. His strength. His biting anger.

  I blinked my eyes open and glanced around without moving, just in case Benny Price was nearby. I didn’t want him to see that I was awake and have him try to finish what he’d started. We were in a small storage room. Shelves with equipment and cleaning supplies lined the cinder block walls. Reyes was perched on one of them, balancing himself on the balls of his feet like a bird of prey, not so much gazing out the open door as refusing to look down at me.

  Yep, he was angry. Still enshrouded in the dark mass of his cloak, he had laid the hood back, his face and hair now visible. The cloak had settled around him. It was calm, waiting, as was his blade. The lethal weapon was drawn, and he held the shaft in his powerful grip as the tip rested on the cement floor. It was the first time I’d really seen it. It had a straight blade like other swords, only much longer, and its edges were curved, with vicious-looking spikes. It reminded me of two things: a medieval torture device and his tattoo.

  “I’m alive,” I croaked when I realized Price wasn’t in the room with us.

  “Barely,” he said, still refusing to look at me.

  But how? I brought up a hand and rubbed it over my throat. “He broke my neck.”

  “He tried to break your neck.”

  “He felt pretty successful to me.”

  Reyes finally turned toward me. The force of his gaze took my breath away. “You’re not like other humans, Dutch. It’s not that simple.”

  And you’re not like anything I’ve ever met. Our eyes stayed locked a long moment as I tried unsuccessfully to fill my lungs with air. Then we were interrupted by a male voice.

  “Who’s there?”

  I struggled to a partially sitting, partially wobbling position and turned to see a bound man with a cloth tied over his eyes huddled in a corner of the room. He had a graying beard and thick dark hair. He also had the Roman collar of a Catholic priest.

  “Father Federico?” I asked.

  He stilled, then nodded his head.

  Score!

  He was alive. I was alive. This day was just getting better and better. Till I felt the gun at my temple.

  Before I could even turn toward Price, I heard the swing of a blade slice through the air. The gun fell harmlessly to the ground, and Price doubled over with a sharp cry of pain.

  Well, crap. Dad was going to kill me.

  I scrambled out of Price’s reach, dived back for the gun, then rescrambled out of his reach again. But he was writhing in pain, holding his wrist, and rocking on his knees. Most men with severed spinal cords couldn’t rock on their knees. I glanced up, but Reyes went all dark and smoky and disappeared before I could say a thing. And I could have sworn he was wearing a grin when he did it.

  “What … what did you do to me?”

  That was a good question. What had Reyes done? As usual, there wasn’t a drop of blood.

  Sussman popped in, assessed Price’s condition, nodded toward me in approval, then popped back out again.

  “I can’t move my fingers.” Price was crying and slobbering. It was fairly grotesque. Reyes must have severed the tendons in his wrist or something. Cool.

  I kept the gun aimed at his head as I scooted back toward Father Federico. Just as I started to untie him, Angel rushed into the room, followed by a disheveled Uncle Bob, and I had to wonder how Angel managed to lead him here.

  After two other uniforms stormed in and took Price down, Uncle Bob knelt beside me. “Charley,” he said, worry lining his face. He brushed at my mouth with his thumb. It probably had blood where Price’s grip had been. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked, struggling with Father Federico’s blindfold. “I totally had this.”

  Then there was this odd moment. Like a reality check or something. Uncle Bob took the gun from me, then helped me with the Father’s blindfold, lifting it off him—and the look on the man’s face, the gratitude and relief, overwhelmed me. Uncle Bob looked back at me, his expression so soft, so concerned, that I jumped into his arms and held on as long as I dared. He wrapped me in a hug that was like heaven, only less glitzy.

  It must have been the relief. Of being alive. Of finding Father Federico. Of bringing Price down. While I let myself wallow in the warmth of Ubie’s hug, I fought the tears that threatened to surface with every ounce of my being. This was no time for tears. I could be such a girl.

  Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I knew it was Garrett’s.

  “So, can I go watch the strippers now?”

  I peeked over Ubie’s shoulder at a grinning, wingless Angel. I would have hugged him, too, but it looked odd when I hugged the dead in public.

  * * *

  “He pulled my tie,” Uncle Bob said when I asked him how he found us.

  “Angel pulled your tie?”

  “Led me right to you.”

  We sat in the conference room at the station, watching the tape of Benny Price’s confession. It was ridiculously late, and we’d replayed the video about seven thousand times already. I think Garrett was watching it for the shots of the girls. They seemed to get along well.

  “I gotta tell you, Davidson, I’m impressed,” he said, his eyes glued to the screen. “That took balls.”

  “Please,” I said with a snort, “that took ovaries. Of which I have two.”

  He turned to me, a new appreciation lighting his face. “Have I m
entioned that I’m a licensed gynecologist? If your ovaries ever need anything…”

  With a roll of my eyes, I rose from the table and hobbled barefoot to the door. While I was hiding the fact that I’d pretty much had my neck broken during Price’s attempted getaway, I couldn’t hide the fact that I’d twisted my ankle walking back to the van. Damned stilettos. So now my neck and my ankle were killing me.

  In the meantime, Barber and Elizabeth popped in to say they’d found Father Federico. He was at the hospital. They were only a little disappointed when I told them he was there because we took him there. He wasn’t in the best condition, but he’d live.

  All in all, it had been a very good day. We had the flash drive, the video, and Father Federico’s testimony. Benny Price would likely spend the rest of his life in prison. Or at least a healthy chunk of it. Of course, he’d have to learn to use his left hand, I thought with a chuckle.

  And Uncle Bob would take all the credit, but that was simply how it had to be. Still, my becoming a private investigator really helped in the cover department. We no longer had to make up excuses to explain why I was at a crime scene or what kind of consultant I was, exactly. I was a PI. People pretty much stopped asking questions after that.

  “You never told me their names,” Garrett called to me.

  I turned back and raised my brows in question.

  An evil grin spread across Garrett’s face. “You introduced me to Danger and Will Robinson, but you neglected to acquaint me with the other two.” His gaze strayed down to my abdomen.

  “Fine,” I said with an impatient sigh. “But you can’t make fun of their names. They’re very sensitive.”

  He showed his palms. “I would never.”

  After I subjected him to a warning scowl, I pointed in the general vicinity of my left ovary, “This is Beam Me Up.” Then to my right. “And this is Scotty.”

  Garrett chuckled and buried his face in his hands. He asked.

  “Wait for me,” Uncle Bob said. He’d offered to drive me home, since my foot was wrapped and packed in ice.