She shifted her weight. And then her voice hardened, and she said, “Open it.”
“I’m telling you the truth—”
“Open it right now. You open it. I’m not going to—I’m not going to fall for it, whatever it is.”
“Fall for what?”
“Whatever it is!” The shout ripped through the darkness. “You open it!”
I showed my hands in surrender again and moved over to the panel. With the latch released, it had opened a quarter inch—barely enough, really, for me to get my fingertips in the seam. I eased the secret door open. Indira had shown me this one; God only knew how she’d learned about it. On the other side, absolute darkness waited for me.
“Quit stalling!”
I found the inside handle of the door—a simple old brass knob. It didn’t even have anything cool about it like a poison pin that killed you if you turned it the wrong way. And then, after a mental three-count, I darted through the doorway and yanked the door shut behind me.
Hands caught me by the shoulders, forcing me to the floor. I squawked, and a hand went over my mouth.
“Hey!” Jen shouted. And then, outrage turning to fury, “Hey!”
I squawked again.
The hand tightened over my mouth, and Bobby whispered, “Quiet.”
This had definitely not been part of the plan.
“You’ve got two seconds before I start shooting!” Jen shouted. She pounded on the paneling. “Open this door! Open—”
Sirens blatted in the distance, and then the sheriff’s voice ordered, “Drop your weapon! Drop it! Drop the gun!”
Jen’s silence had a frozen quality.
“Drop the gun!” the sheriff shouted.
Something thunked against one of the thick rugs.
“On the floor! Hands behind your head!”
Through the old house’s thick walls came the sounds of movement. And then, voice still tight, the sheriff said, “All clear. You can come out now.” Without missing a beat, she began to mirandize Jen.
For one heartbeat more, Bobby and I lay on the floor: his body wrapped around mine, the weight and heat of him like the world’s best electric blanket. He breathed out slightly as he pulled his hand from my mouth, and the infinitesimal tension of his body eased.
“What,” I asked “are you doing here?”
Chapter 17
The sheriff’s station wasn’t going to win any awards for interior decorating. The sheriff’s office itself was nice enough, if you were into that sort of thing: a desk, a computer, plaques for awards and recognitions, photos of two children (a boy with a gap-toothed smile, and a girl who could have been Sheriff Acosta in miniature). The blinds were down, not that there was much to see this time of night. It would have been nice, of course, to see one more sunrise before the sheriff executed me, probably with her bare hands.
After the sheriff had arrested Jen, everything had happened with that hybrid mix of urgency and delay that seemed to accompany anything official. More deputies arrived. Jen was taken away. Deputy Bobby and I were separated, and deputies took our statements. The sheriff hadn’t said a word to either of us, but she hadn’t looked happy. And when the deputies had finally seemed to decide that they’d had enough of Indira’s coffee and cookies, the sheriff told them to take me with them. And now here I was. Sitting in her office. I wondered if I’d get a blindfold and a last cigarette. Oh, or a last meal.
The door opened, and Sheriff Acosta entered. She looked tired, but then, I looked like a wreck. (The floor of that secret passage had been dusty, and apparently, tricking a confession out of a murderer makes me super sweaty. The result was that I looked like a walking dust bunny.) Maybe something similar crossed the sheriff’s mind, because as she settled into her seat, I thought she was trying not to smile. Then, in her most official voice, she said, “Mr. Dane.”
“Don’t punish Bobby.”
Sheriff Acosta stared at me.
“I mean please,” I said. “Please don’t punish him. Or arrest him. Or whatever.”
She kept staring.
“I didn’t tell him about my plan. He wasn’t part of it. And he didn’t know I was going to call you and—please. He wasn’t supposed to be involved.” Although, since Deputy Bobby had been inside that secret passage, waiting for me—and, doubtless, watching through the hidden peepholes that looked in on the billiard room—I had a good idea who had told him I might need help. “Please don’t take it out on him.”
“It’s sheriff’s office policy not to discuss ongoing investigations—”
“Please!” And then genius struck. “I’ll go to the media! I’ll talk to the press! I tell them he caught Jen, and he’ll be a national hero, and if you go after him—”
“For God’s sake, Dash, knock it off.” It wasn’t quite a shout. She didn’t even sound angry—at the end of her rope, maybe, but with a kind of good-humored vexation that took me by surprise. “I’m not going to do anything to Bobby. You should be more worried about him killing you, by the way. He’s not happy with you. And, for the record, neither am I.”
I caught myself before I could continue my in-defense-of-Deputy-Bobby rant. And then I said, “He’s not in trouble?”
“I’d like to give him a stern talking-to, but there’s not much point if he’s still planning on leaving.”
The best I could come up with was “Oh.” Was Deputy Bobby still leaving? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, actually. He’d avoided me the day before, in spite of my best efforts to check on him. Maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he and West had patched things up. Or maybe he just couldn’t stay here any longer. Maybe he was going to move to California and be a beach bum.
Whatever the sheriff saw on my face softened her expression. “And since you seem to be so invested in Bobby’s future, I’ll tell you that I asked him to reconsider. Again. Tonight. He’s a good deputy, and he’s got a lot of potential, and aside from his taste in men, he seems to have his head screwed on straight.” There were a lot of ways to take that last sentence, but before I could try to decipher it, the sheriff continued, “Mr. Dane, we need to have a talk.”
This was it, I thought. Maybe she wasn’t going to execute me personally (no last meal, tragically), but there’d be an arrest, charges of some kind, punishment. She’d warned me, after all, not to interfere with her investigations.
“I…understand that you have been a significant part of several recent investigations. And I’d be ungrateful not to acknowledge that, in some instances, you’ve helped identify culprits who might, otherwise, have evaded justice. And I also want to acknowledge that even though you did something stupid tonight, you tried to…involve the sheriff’s office.”
Which was true. I had. All that time I’d spent at the sheriff’s station? I’d been convincing Sheriff Acosta to keep an eye on the house. Personally. And when Jen had shown up in the middle of the night and snuck into the house dressed in all black, well, the sheriff had, naturally, been curious. Curious enough, in fact, that she’d overheard my conversation with Jen and Jen’s confession. So, in the most technical sense, my plan had worked. Perfectly. I was going to keep repeating that phrase because I wasn’t sure Deputy Bobby or Sheriff Acosta saw it that way.
“If you’re going to arrest me—”
“This is a small town,” Sheriff Acosta said over me.
But that was it. I watched her. And then I felt a tiny smile. “Is this a version of ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us’?”
“No, Dash. This is me telling you we’ve got to find a way to live together. I don’t want civilians jeopardizing my investigations. But I’d be an idiot not to recognize that you’ve been an asset—albeit, of the pain-in-my-rear kind. And I’m not an idiot. From what I understand, you’re planning on staying. Is that right?”
I didn’t answer. I’d thought—well, I’d thought something. But I’d thought a lot of things. And I was starting to suspect I hadn’t been right about any of them.
Once again, that look of compassion softened Sheriff Acosta’s face. “Well, I’m not planning on going anywhere. And if you’re going to be here, then we need to find a way to do things so that I don’t have to arrest you, and you don’t make the sheriff’s office look like a horse’s behind.”
(She didn’t say behind.)
I said cautiously, “I’m not planning on getting caught up in any more murders.”
