Wild Wild Death (15 page)

Anger pounding through me like each of my boot-shod steps in the dusty soil, I marched to the front of the house.

the house.

“Son of a bitch,” I grumbled. “He’s in there, al right, and he just found the bag. My bag. Your bones aren’t in it,” I added when Goodshot’s eyes lit up. “So he must be looking for them in the house. Or for something else. Whatever it is, he’s planning on taking it out of there in my tote bag.”

I wasn’t exactly surprised when Goodshot gave me a blank look in answer to this impassioned narrative. Not so Kitty. Her eyes narrowed and her painted mouth thinned. “Your bag, right? And it’s something you took a fancy to the first time ever you laid eyes on it? That man in there has it?”

“You got that right, sister, and I’l tel you what, it proves Norma must have been the one who swiped Goodshot’s bones when the lights went out, and she kept my bag as payment for her effort. Only I don’t know what she did with the bones, or why Brian wants the tote bag.” I sent a laser look at the door. “I do know there’s no way that lowlife’s getting out of here with my Jimmy Choo!”

With the ghosts trailing behind me, I stationed myself in front of the door. Of course, it didn’t take but a couple seconds for me to come to my senses and realize Brian wasn’t going to come out that way.

He was going to leave the way he’d gotten in, through that broken window out back. En masse, we headed that way, and I’d just turned the corner to the back of the house when—

Wel , I can’t say exactly what happened because it happened so fast.

I only know that something came out of nowhere, something that felt like a piece of lumber. It smacked me right over the head.

My knees crumpled and I hit the dirt. The last thing I remember hearing was Brian’s footsteps as he ran away. The last thing I remember seeing…

Goodshot, Kitty, Anarosa, and Suzanna hovered over me, wringing their hands and looking around for help they wouldn’t have been able to summon even if they could find it. At least I think it was them. The ghosts faded, but not a little at a time like they sometimes do when I’m talking to them and they don’t want to be bothered. They burst like bubbles, right in front of my eyes. First Suzanna. Then Kitty.

Then Anarosa.

My eyes spun in my head and a burst of lights, like a galaxy of exploding supernovas, erupted across my field of vision. Through the blinding brightness I saw Goodshot. There one second. Gone the next.

I was al alone.

“W

here’s… Goodshot?”

That was my voice. Maybe. It sounded like it came from a cave, al muffled and echoey. Since it was barely more than a whisper, listening to it shouldn’t have made my head hurt, but each word pounded through my brain in steel-toed boots.

“Goodshot?” In my smal , rasping voice, I cal ed out to him, but I didn’t get an answer. My eyes were closed, but I turned my head against something warm and nearly fel right back into the blackness I’d been wrapped in. I was safe, only I didn’t know safe from what. I was cared for, only I didn’t know why or who could make me feel this way. I was comfortable.

So comfortable, I was tempted to let myself float back into the blackness and forget whatever it was that was tapping at my brain, trying to get my attention. Too bad that whatever wouldn’t let me.

“Where…? Goodshot? Kitty? Ana… rosa?”

“Whatever you’re talking about, it doesn’t matter right now.”

Jesse’s voice. Only it couldn’t have been, because the last I remembered anything at al , I was back in the Laundromat pretty much tel ing Jesse to get lost. He drove away. Right before I went—

Norma’s house.

Like a tsunami, the memories washed over me: Goodshot and the girls standing lookout at the front door. Me, going around the back, watching Brian take my tote bag out of Norma’s closet. I was pissed. I remembered that loud and clear. I was al set to confront Brian, about the bag and about what the hel he’d done with Dan. And then—

Though they felt as if they were weighted down by bricks, I forced my eyes open. I was lying on the dusty ground, my head in Jesse’s lap, and he was looking down at me. This close, I saw that his eyes were flecked with amber. Cool color. In a hot sort of way. Too bad it did nothing to brighten the worry that wedged a vee between his eyes.

Nice. It was nice to have someone worry about me. But even Jesse’s apparent concern wasn’t enough to deflect what my scrambled brain had decided was the most important thing for me to figure out.

“Where… ? What… ?” When I tried to sit up, he put a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down. But not before I had a chance to take a quick look around. I didn’t see any sign of Goodshot or the other ghosts. And Jesse…

“You weren’t here,” I told him and reminded myself. “You… you drove away. And Goodshot came with me to Norma’s, and he was here, but now he’s gone and—”

A metal ic noise to my left made me flinch, and Jesse shot a look that way.

“Sorry, Chief.” This voice belonged to someone else, someone I didn’t know. When I turned my head to see who it was, Jesse stopped me, one hand on my cheek.

“It’s just the paramedics,” he said. “They’re going to take you—”

“Oh, no!” I might have been knocked senseless, but I knew enough to know I wasn’t going to the hospital. Hospitals cost money and I was unemployed, remember. When Jesse put a hand on my arm, I slapped it away. Or at least I tried. The fact that I missed by like a mile said something about my current state of uncoordination. “I can’t—”

“You’ve got no choice.” He moved aside, careful y turning me over to the paramedics. “Head injuries are nothing to fool with.”

“And this is a crime scene.” This comment came from a middle-aged guy with a bushy mustache who bent over me and gave me an eagle-eyed look.

Sheriff by the look of his uniform and badge, and a rush of panic coursed through me. Maybe I wasn’t going to the hospital. Maybe I was going to jail.

“I didn’t go in the house,” I said. It might have been a more convincing statement if my words didn’t wobble and I didn’t have to press my eyes closed at the end of the sentence. It was that or watch my brain pop out my forehead and go bouncing through town.

“I was just walking by and—”

“Didn’t say nothing about Norma’s crime scene.”

The sheriff gave Jesse a look that told me they had already discussed me, and the sheriff had expected already discussed me, and the sheriff had expected me to come up with a half-baked story like this to explain what I was doing there. “Talking about
your
crime scene, Ms. Martin. Somebody assaulted you.

Do you remember what happened?”

“No.” I shook my head. Or at least I tried. Since the paramedics were in the process of slipping one of those goofy neck braces on me, it was kind of hard. Even that little bit of motion made my head hurt like hel . Maybe it was the pain that dredged up a memory. “Wait! Yes. I remember. It was Jimmy Choo. No, Jimmy Choo was my tote bag. It was Brian. At the stadium watching the basebal game.

And in Norma’s house. And—”

“And this Brian, he’s the one who hit you over the head?” The sheriff had pul ed out a little notebook and a pen and he stood above me with it, waiting for the details and looking a bit put out that he’d written down the whole thing about Jimmy Choo, then ended up crossing it out and starting again.

I hated to admit I didn’t know anything for sure.

Yes, I’d seen Brian in the house. But I hadn’t seen who’d come at me with the California redwood that had smacked me over the head. Goodshot had been there, though. Along with his lady friends. I was sure of that, and I struggled to sit up so I could look around and find them and ask them exactly what had happened, but there was stil no sign of the ghosts.

“Goodshot… He was here,” I muttered. “He must have seen everything. He could tel you… No, he couldn’t tel you, he could tel me, because he can’t tel you, of course. But if he told me, then I, I could tel you.”

I saw the look the sheriff and Jesse exchanged, but before I had a chance to tel them I wasn’t as crazy as their glances seemed to say, the paramedics lifted me onto a stretcher and I was so busy wincing from the pain that shot through my head and shoulders, I didn’t have a chance to say anything at al . They wheeled me to a waiting ambulance.

“No, real y.” Maybe Jesse couldn’t hear my feeble protest. Maybe that’s why even though he was walking along beside me, he ignored me. “I don’t want to go to—”

He squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry. I’m coming with you to La Jara,” he said, and when the paramedics slid the stretcher into the ambulance, he hopped in and sat down beside me.

It wasn’t until we’d started on our way that I realized he was stil holding my hand. My brain might have been scrambled, but I got the message. It went something like this: hand holding had to be some Southwestern

touchy-feely

police

procedure

designed to get a victim talking. Little did Jesse know, it wasn’t going to work on this particular victim.

“I can’t tel you what happened because I don’t know what happened,” I said as if he’d been fol owing what I was thinking. “I came around the corner and I didn’t see—”

“Of course you didn’t. The guy probably came up behind you. But you said someone else was there.

Goodshot? Weird name. There’s a story in my tribe.

About an old-time Indian named Goodshot. He was

—”

I pretended to drift off to sleep.

A good idea, yes?

Apparently not what the paramedic riding in back with us wanted to see. She put a hand on my arm. “I need you to stay awake, Ms. Martin,” she said. “Just for a while. Are you dizzy?”

I tried to shake my head no, but since it made me dizzy, that wasn’t very smart.

“But she is confused, right? I mean, she must be with the way she’s talking.” She was looking over me and at Jesse when she said this. “You said she talked about someone else being there with her, but

—”

“He was.” If Jesse wasn’t going to stand up for me, I had to do it myself. “Goodshot was there and Kitty and—”

“No footprints in the dust except Ms. Martin’s and the attacker’s.” This from Jesse, and I had to give him credit, even though he was using al that police-y logic to prove I was talking out of my head, he didn’t do it in an arrogant sort of way. Not like Quinn would have done. In fact, when Jesse looked away from the paramedic and back at me, there was a sort of hot chocolate warmth in his eyes that made the pain inside my head disappear. At least for a couple seconds. “You were probably seeing things. You know, because of that smack on the head.”

“I didn’t… I wasn’t… He was there before…”

Before I was hit on the head. That was the last time I saw Goodshot clearly. Because after I was clunked…

Another wave of memory crashed into my brain.

Another wave of memory crashed into my brain.

Ghosts popping like soap bubbles. Not out of existence. I may not be a philosopher, but I am enough of a thinker to know that my getting whacked on the head or not getting whacked on the head can’t possibly affect the way the Other Side works.

It could, though, have an impact on how I see the Other Side.

Or didn’t see it.

These thoughts spent some time swimming around inside my brain. They were on a third lap when I realized Jesse was watching me careful y, an expectant sort of look in his eyes. Like he was waiting for me to make sense. Or to not make sense. And like whichever way I went would help determine the outcome once we made it to the ER.

No-insurance girl did her best to get her act together.

“Goodshot was there before…” Had I been feeling more like myself and less like somebody with a head ful of jel y, I might have remembered that there was no use arguing with Jesse, even when he was trying to lead me into talking by echoing what I’d said earlier. For one thing, he was Jesse, and it wasn’t going to work. For another, I couldn’t explain Goodshot and the other ghosts even if my head wasn’t whirling.

It was best to change the subject. Easy. Even woozy, I had questions that needed to be answered.

“You.” Since Jesse stil had a hold of my hand, it wasn’t hard to tighten my hold as a way of letting him know this was important. “You were at the Laundromat. Oh, and my good jeans!” There was no way I wanted those jeans to spend the day in the dryer and maybe walk off with someone who wasn’t me. I tried to sit up, to tel the driver we had to turn around and go back to the Laundromat so I could pop inside and save my jeans, but both Jesse and the paramedic pressed me back into place.