Dead Eye (A Tiger's Eye Mystery Book 1) (7 page)

“Would you like to go visit his grave?”

Jack’s eyes darkened. “Later. When I can bring him justice. For now, I need to get back to my bike so I can get some things done. Can you give me a ride back to the bakery?”

“Sure. Let me go say goodbye.”

Aunt Ruby, who had a keenly honed ability to peek out of windows without being seen, popped out onto the porch when we started back up to the house. “Do you want to come in and have some more coffee?”

“No, ma’am, but thank you again for the amazing breakfast and the hospitality.” Jack flashed a smile that was so charming it nearly blinded me, and Aunt Ruby all but fluttered.

“Oh boy,” I muttered, before bounding up the stairs to give Aunt Ruby a hug. Uncle Mike stepped out of the house, and I hugged him too.

“Stop worrying so much,” I whispered in his ear. “I promise to be careful.”

“You better be.” He hugged me back and then frowned at Jack. “You be careful.”

Jack nodded. “Yes, sir. Careful is my middle name.”

“I doubt it,” Uncle Mike said dryly.

Jack’s face took on a dangerous cast. “You’re right. But the person who killed my uncle needs to be careful, because I’m coming for him.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Uncle Mike said, and then he stood on the porch and watched us leave. He was still frowning when I glanced back at him in the mirror.

Jack wasn’t in a talkative mood, and we drove along in silence for a while.

“The visions,” Jack said abruptly, when we were almost to town. “Does it happen every time you touch a person? I noticed you had no problem touching Mike and Ruby.”

I glanced at him, startled. “No. Once and done. Also, it doesn’t happen with everyone, and there’s no rhyme nor reason as to who or why, as far as I can tell. When the witches came out after Jeremiah was killed to do that magical resonance thing to see if they could pick up any trace of magic—”

“What? They performed magical resonance testing at the shop? You didn’t tell me that.”

“I’ve been a little busy,” I said dryly. “They didn’t find anything, anyway, and Olga Kowalski came herself, even though the sheriff didn’t ask her to do it. It was a long shot. If a witch or other magic user had been involved, why would Jeremiah have been shot? They wouldn’t need guns to kill anybody.”

“Olga Kowalski? Any relation to Walt and Hank? They were idiots. Bruisers on the football team, but idiots,” said Jack, the former quarterback for the Dead End Manatees, a team name that was only slightly more unfortunate than our losing record. We’d had one brilliant year, until somebody’d figured out that one of the tight ends had enchanted the footballs, but that had been after my high school years.

“They’re her sons. Olga is the local coven leader, or high priestess, I think they call it, and she’s crazy powerful. If anybody could pick up the slightest traces of someone using magic on Jeremiah, it would have been her. But it was just an ordinary shooting.”

“Right. A drifter. You told me.” Jack shook his head. “Even if I’d been inclined to believe it before, I wouldn’t believe it now.”

“Anyway, she said that she didn’t know how to explain the random nature of when my visions strike. Just another one of the weird things we have to put up with these days, I guess.” I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, but I doubted he was fooled.

I pulled up outside of the bakery, next to Jack’s bike but not too close. The last thing I needed was to back up and run him over when I was leaving and—sadly—it wasn’t out of the range of possibility for me and my lack of spatial skills. “You know, the keys to Jeremiah’s truck are in the drawer next to the sink in his kitchen, if you want to drive that. It’s yours too. It has pretty good gas mileage, and it’s not too old. It’s an F-150. Jeremiah shared Uncle Mike’s car prejudices.”

He laughed. “I know. You do realize I drive a Harley instead of a foreign bike? It’s ingrained in the blood if you’re a man in Black Cypress County.”

“Not just the men,” I said, with a rueful grin. “I’ve been lusting after a sweet little Ford Mustang for years.”

“Does the famous Owen know about all of these dark lusts his girlfriend harbors?” Jack mockingly started counting on his fingers. “Doughnuts, fast cars, and dare I hope, fast men?”

“Not on your life, pretty boy. Get out of my car and don’t darken my door again until you have an actual, you know,
plan
or something. I have to get to work.”

He raised his hands in apparent defeat, a ploy I didn’t fall for one bit, not for a second. “Whatever you say, boss. Your wish is my command.”

He shut the car door behind him, leaving me steaming behind the wheel. I pushed the button to lower the passenger window and called out to him. “What do you mean by that? I’m not your boss.”

“That’s not how I see it. We share the pawnshop, which I know nothing about, so until you teach me, and I get up to speed, you’ll be my boss.” He gave me a shark-like grin and put on his helmet. “I hope I can be teacher’s pet.”

With that, he peeled out of the lot, leaving me fuming, and leaving way too many Dead Enders staring at me speculatively. I didn’t even want to go in the bakery and get round two of doughnuts, which goes to show how rattled he had me.

Jerk.

Mrs. Quindlen toddled over from where she’d been putting cake boxes into the back of her Buick for her granddaughter’s baby shower. “Who was that?”

“That’s Jack Shepherd, Jeremiah’s nephew, Mrs. Q. Is everything ready for the party?” They’d invited me, but I had to work, since Eleanor couldn’t manage the afternoon shift today. A grandkid had to go to the dentist or something.

“Yes, and you get a chance, you stop by, you hear? I’ll put a piece of cake by for you. And you bring your hot new man, he got you so flustered—whoo-hoo!” Mrs. Quindlen’s Cajun accent got thicker when she was excited, apparently.

“He’s not—we don’t—oh, never mind.”

“You don’t want that hot burnin’ piece of man, you send him my way, okay? I still got it.”

I tried to keep from wondering what
it
she was referring to. Gout? Varicose veins? Depends?

I thought about Jack for a minute. I could kind of see the Depends.

Argh!

I couldn’t yell at myself while Mrs. Quindlen was still staring at me with such interest, so I did the next best thing. I smiled politely and excused myself, and then I drove to the shop, parked, and proceeded to bang my head against the steering wheel a few times. I had a feeling that I was going to be in constant danger from self-inflicted concussion if Jack kept hanging around Dead End and me.

I should look at the bright side. Maybe I could blame my lack of parking skills on head injury.

E
leanor was with
a customer when I walked into the shop. Jeremiah had always said that Eleanor was our secret weapon. She was in her early sixties, not very tall, and she looked like everybody’s favorite next-door neighbor. She was smart, one of the nicest people on the planet, and the best negotiator I’d ever seen. While I focused on profit margins and averages, and Jeremiah had focused on what he coveted with his collector’s eye, Eleanor saw it as a hugely exciting game to get the best possible deal on every single item that came into the pawnshop.

Not in a shady or dishonest way, just in a way that made every transaction into a high-stakes poker game for her. We made sure to treat our customers fairly, both because it was the right thing to do and because a pawnshop that cheated people would never survive. Eleanor’s customers, in fact, loved her so much that they came back over and over. She had a way of making the simple act of pawning the family guitar until after payday seem like a bit of fun and excitement in an otherwise humdrum day.

This morning, though, she was talking to a man I’d never seen before. He turned to look at me when the little bell over the door tinkled, and his eyes narrowed.

“You are the one who discovered the body?” His accent was definitely not from around here.

I took a quick inventory of the stranger, who was totally hot. Black hair, rich brown eyes, and deep caramel skin. Okay, that didn’t exactly help identify him.

Suit too expensive to wear to a pawnshop? Check. Shoes way too nice and shiny for any kind of local or state law enforcement? Check. Expression too open and honest for a journalist? Check. Or maybe that last one was just my own personal prejudice. I’d hated reporters ever since the incident with Annabel Yorgenson. Somehow, that story had made its way onto the CNN website, and I’d been a seven-day wonder. Everyone in town had gone into overdrive, trying to portray Dead End as a normal, sleepy, southern town to the press who’d bothered to come in person. We’d succeeded, mostly, but there were some who were still ticked off at me about the whole thing.

So who could he be? A fed? But why would the feds be investigating Chantal?

“I’m Tess Callahan,” I said, not exactly answering his question. “And you are?”

“Special Agent Alejandro Vasquez,” he said, with that liquid accent that would have made Molly melt into butter if she’d been here. He held out his hand, but I shook my head. No way was I taking the chance of seeing a federal agent’s death. He didn’t seem surprised though; maybe lots of people avoided shaking his hand in his line of work.

He showed me his badge, which looked real enough that I’d probably offer him cash if he’d been there to pawn it, but you could never really tell with badges or anything else. Run a pawnshop for long enough, and you’ll realize that everything that
can
be forged
has
been forged. Even the sheriff himself, an avid gun collector, had been fooled at gun shows a few times.

“Agent Vasquez is from Guatemala,” Eleanor said, smiling broadly and adding a little extra drawl to her voice. “Couldn’t you just listen to him talk all day long?”

“Fluttery southern woman” was one of Eleanor’s favorite personas with tourists. She claimed it got her an extra ten percent added to the top of every transaction.

“Originally from Guatemala. Currently from the FBI’s Paranormal Operations division,” he said, slanting an amused glance at Eleanor.

I had a feeling she didn’t fool him at all. Actually, I had a feeling that not much got by Special Agent Vasquez.

“Not to be rude, Agent Vasquez, but what are the feds doing here? You know you don’t have any kind of jurisdiction in Dead End.”

His eyes gleamed, and now I had the impression that I was the one amusing him. “You’re right, of course. I’m simply here as a courtesy. Is there anything you can tell me about the circumstances under which you found Ms. Nelson?”

I had a feeling he already knew exactly the circumstances, and everything else about Chantal, me, Jeremiah, and anybody else in town that he might have been interested in. P-Ops didn’t mess around when they were investigating something.

The question was—why were they investigating this?

“Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for,” I said. “Anything in particular? Not that any murder is ordinary, but somebody shot Chantal and dropped her off on the porch. She wasn’t clawed up like in a shifter attack, she wasn’t a drained-dry husk like in a vampire attack. I know there must be other kinds of supernatural murderers out there, but I bet not many of them make a habit of shooting grocery store clerks with guns and dropping them at pawnshops. Surely we would have heard about that in the news by now.”

Eleanor pulled out a duster and started to swipe the countertops, but never took her eyes or ears off the two of us.

“So you do confirm it was a gunshot wound? You saw it yourself?” The agent seemed particularly intent on hearing the answer to this question.

I shrugged. It was an easy answer. “Yes, I saw it. And I’ll probably never forget it. Deputy Gonzalez took pictures, and I’m sure she’ll share this with you. And the sheriff was here. Shouldn’t you be talking to him?”

“Funny thing about those pictures. They somehow disappeared off your deputy’s camera,” he said slowly, all traces of amusement gone from his face. “In fact, the entire camera seems to have disappeared before she managed to transfer or upload the photos.”

I didn’t know how to take that. To stall for time before I answered, I walked over to the counter and put my purse down before turning to face him. “If you’re suggesting that Susan deliberately…what? Tampered with evidence? Is that the way you say it? Then you are completely wrong.”

“I didn’t say anything about Deputy Gonzalez,” he replied. “How well do you know the sheriff? And what do you know about the upcoming Blood Moon?”

Oh boy. Now we were getting into dangerous territory. I didn’t know whether I should answer, call my lawyer, or throw the very pretty Agent Vasquez out of my pawnshop for asking me about the sheriff. The Blood Moon question I didn’t get at all. What could that possibly have to do with anything?

I stared at him, and he stared right back, and I could see that he must be very good at getting criminals to talk. But I wasn’t a criminal, and I had nothing to say.

“I know Sheriff Lawless to say hello to, just like everybody else in town. If you want to know anything else about him, you should ask him,” I said evenly. “And the Blood Moon? All I know about that is that it makes some supernatural creatures go kind of nuts, like the full moon supposedly does to normal humans. There’s one coming up in a week or so, I think?”

He just looked at me with those intense dark eyes, and I realized he was good at getting non-criminals to talk too.

“We’re all just plain, vanilla humans here. No shenanigans on the Blood Moon, or any other moon, right, Eleanor?”

She was staring at me like I’d grown another head. I wasn’t usually the babbling type, but Very Special Agent Alejandro Vasquez was getting to me. Maybe he had some kind of magical truth-getting ability. Everybody knew that P-Ops preferred to hire agents with supernatural talents.

Or maybe I was just losing it. It had been a rough couple of days.

The tension in the room was clearly getting to Eleanor, who was brandishing the feather duster about so wildly I was afraid that she was going to destroy half our inventory.