Limbo (3 page)

It was his turn to laugh. ‘
That’s
on your bucket list? What a boring-ass list.’ Asses were now officially on his brain.

‘Well actually…
doing
a P.I.
in
his office is what’s on the list, but near enough right?’

Then she turned away, stepping up onto the kerb on the other side and with his brain temporarily flatlining there was no hope of higher function. His gaze fell to her ass again.

An image of his hands on those cheeks as she
did
him in his office rose rather unhelpfully in his mind.

Yep. Dirty-old-man hell
—
do not collect two hundred dollars.

‘Come on Dash Dent,’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Show me where the magic happens.’

Dash left that one well alone and reluctantly caught her up. They walked up his stairs side by side. He used his key to open the door, indicating for her to precede him. ‘Prepare to be underwhelmed,’ he warned.

He switched on the light and shut the door as Joy wandered around the front room that was his office. It was no Sam Spade outfit, that was for sure. No front room with a busty secretary half in love with him typing up his notes and fielding his calls.

It was three by three metres and consisted of a large wooden desk so damn heavy it had taken two guys to heft it up the stairs, two chairs and a couple of filing cabinets with a bar fridge between them. An old Turkish rug Liz had thrown out of the house about the same time as him lay underfoot.

Katie’s attempts at decorating the office were everywhere. There was her school art on walls that were some shade of beige he’d never been able to identify, her lovingly cared-for two-metre rubber plant in one corner and a goldfish called Ralph swimming around in a bare round bowl on top of the fridge next to the permanently switched-on coffee percolator.

He’d said yes to the fish because he’d figured it’d be dead within weeks and they’d flush him down the loo and that would be the end of the goldfish chapter in their lives.

But six months later Ralph had turned out to be indestructible.

‘What?’ she asked, as she took a second tour of the space. ‘No hat stand for your trenchcoat and fedora?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ Humouring her kept his mind off her ass
and
her bucket list.

She turned to face him, folding her arms and resting her butt against his desk. ‘Got a gun? Is it a forty-five?’

Dash laughed. ‘You’ve been reading far too much Mickey Spillane.’

‘Every single one.’

‘Well, this isn’t America. Only cops are allowed to carry weapons. Not P.I.s.’

‘So you had one when you were a cop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was
it
a forty-five?’

He laughed again. ‘No. It was a Glock.’

‘Do you miss it?’

Dash sighed. ‘Every damn day.’

He watched her as she wandered over to the fish. She picked up the nearby container and leaned over the bowl as she tossed in a few flakes. ‘This fish looks like it could use some scenery.’

Her ass taunted him. If they went for it on his desk Ralph would have more scenery than he knew what to do with.

She turned abruptly again and looked at him in that direct serious kind of way of hers. ‘You got beer in this fridge?’

‘Yep.’
Christ.
She was making him monosyllabic.

She grinned, turned, opened the fridge,
leaned over
— seriously, that
ass
— and pulled out two beers.

He moved closer, keeping the desk between them as she passed him one, and he took it, thankful to have something to do with his hands other than putting them all over her. ‘What time is your flight leaving?’

‘Five a.m.’

‘Oh…’ Seven long hours. ‘So…’

She nodded as she cracked the lid then took her first swallow. ‘I have all night.’ She walked around the desk towards him then and Dash, not for the first time, wished his office was bigger. She stopped right in front of him, only millimetres separating them and looked up at him. Considering he was six three and she couldn’t be more than five four, she had to tip her head back quite a ways.

‘Whatever shall we do?’ she asked.

Dash had two options. Play it coy and extricate himself, or tackle the elephant in the room.

Or the pixie, as the case may be.

‘Don’t you think I’m a little too old for you?’

She shrugged. ‘Too old to marry, sure. To fuck? Not necessarily.’

Dash swallowed as her deliberate profanity went straight to his dick. ‘Are you always this direct?’

A small smile played on her otherwise serious mouth. ‘Am I shocking you?’

‘The last time I saw you, you were a kid with your head buried in Edgar Allen Poe.’

She placed a hand on his chest and he felt it all the way to his groin. ‘I’m twenty-three. Welcome to the future.’

Twenty-three.
Christ!
‘I’m thirty-five years old, Joy. Maybe you should be playing with boys your own age?’

‘I don’t like to limit myself.’

Her hand dropped to the button of his jeans and he quickly grabbed it before it went any lower. ‘I thought I wasn’t your type.’

She shrugged. ‘What can I say? I’m fickle.’

‘I thought you said you weren’t fucking me tonight?’

‘Hence the aforementioned fickleness.’

Dash was trying damn hard to be a gentleman here. She was Pete’s little sister for crying out loud. ‘I don’t think Pete would approve,’ he said, clutching at mental straws now. ‘There is a guy code, you know.’

‘And when was the last time you saw Pete? Fifteen years ago?’

Yeh. He sucked at keeping in touch.

‘I think,’ she said, raising herself up on her tippy toes and tilting her head until their mouths were almost touching, their drinks trapped between their combined bodies, ‘there’s a statute of limitations for guy code stuff and you are well and truly absolved from your responsibilities. It’s just sex, Dash. Recreational sex. I’m getting on a plane to the other side of the planet in seven hours. I’m not interested in
anything
past tonight.’

And she planted a beer-infused kiss on his mouth that was like rocket fuel to his groin.

Screw it
. He removed the beers, plonked them on the desk beside him then reached for the cheeks of her ass and hauled her up his body, slamming his mouth into hers, welcoming the feel of her legs as they locked around his waist.

Her tongue pushed into his mouth as he took three paces, pushing her against the wall near the door, groping for the light switch, plunging them into darkness.

‘Fuck me,’ she muttered against his lips.

He didn’t need to be asked twice.

Three years later.

The moment Joy had been dreading since her return to Brisbane five months ago occurred as she was busy packing putty into a gaping hole in a dead woman’s head. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people her age were doing on a Saturday night in a big city but then Joy wasn’t most people.

She paused what she was doing, her gaze flicking to the wall-mounted television in the corner of the sparse, clinical room.

She watched herself, acoustic guitar firmly strapped across her chest, walk onto the stage of
The
X Factor
. She picked up the remote control in her gloved hand and increased the volume as Ronan Keating asked her name with that charming Irish brogue of his.

Joy remembered how at ease he had put her, which had been a freaking miracle given how nervous she’d been. She’d played to crowds bigger than four thousand in the States but she’d never had this much at stake. It had felt like her very last chance.

Turned out, it
had
been.

Joy watched as she strummed the first note on her guitar. Her heartrate accelerated. Thankfully not quite as much as it had on that day four months ago when it had felt like it was racing at a million miles a minute.

Then she’d started singing and everything melted away — like it always did. She’d sung ‘Jolene’ and slowed it right down so it was haunting and mournful and by the time she’d finished she’d known she had the crowd in the palm of her hand. Known the way all seasoned performers knew.

And even if she hadn’t known it then, she knew it now watching it on playback.

But auditions for
The
X Factor
were not an inclusive democratic event and the audience didn’t get a vote. They weren’t the arbiters of who succeeded and who didn’t.

Four people got to decide that and they were split.

Great vocals. Conflicting style.

The story of her life.

Country stars didn’t wear Doc Marten lace-ups, favour black and have a long blue segment of fringe in their otherwise cropped hair. They wore cowboy boots, fringed jackets and let their natural locks grow long and free.

We just don’t know how to package you, Joy.

Joy flipped the television off with the remote before it got to the vote. Being rejected was hard enough to witness in person — she didn’t need to see it again in full technicolour.

At eight at night, with most of the staff gone for the day, it was quiet in the treatment room. This job had come in late and Joy had decided to stay behind and work on the gaping wound in the side of the head, courtesy of what was assumed to be a shotgun, to give it a chance to set overnight. The first viewing was tomorrow afternoon, which would give her plenty of time to have the woman — Hailey Richardson — all prettied up.

Joy glanced down at the woman. At Hailey. Even with a large section of her skull blown away and the waxy pallor of the
very
dead, Joy could tell she’d been beautiful.

Or maybe that was just all the coverage this particular case had garnered. The endless pictures of Hailey in her wedding dress smiling at her husband. Hailey laughing with her gorgeous nearly-six-month-old daughter snapped the day before they’d both disappeared.

Her freshly murdered body turning up last week on the side of the road six hundred kilometres north of Brisbane, six months
after
she’d gone missing, had caused a media frenzy, with endless speculation as to the whereabouts of baby Isabella.

That question didn’t seem to matter right now as Joy tried to put her head back together. The bigger question was, who could
do
this?

Was it her husband, as every person with a mobile phone and a twitter account had speculated? Or was it some lover that she’d run away with? Were there drugs involved? Was the husband even Isabella’s biological father?

Joy glanced down at the white sheet covering Hailey’s nudity, her bare arms anchoring it against her body. The autopsy suture line that erupted violently from the top of the sheet seemed obscene amid all the snowy white. Joy wasn’t sure why exactly she had to be cut from A to B when clearly the cause of death was a little further north.

Whatever had happened to Hailey Richardson, Joy hoped they found whoever had done this. And someone shot
them
with a bloody huge gun.

Joy heard a noise behind her and rolled her eyes. Gary, the new janitor at Brentwood Funerals, thought it was hysterical to creep up on her. Little did he know dead people didn’t creep her out, nor did things that went bump. In fact a funeral parlour was where Joy felt most at home.

She turned. ‘Bugger off, Gary.’

But it wasn’t Gary standing there. It was Hailey Richardson.

In the flesh.

Not all see-through and woo-woo like the movies but dressed in the clothes she’d been found in, her head remarkably intact.

‘Please,’ she begged, her eyes large and pleading, wringing her hands in front of her. ‘You have to help me. My baby…they’ve got my baby.’

Joy supposed it was her cue to scream or something. But ghosts had never scared her either. Sure, her pulse had spiked but there’d been enough ghosts hanging around her house when she’d been a kid that she didn’t feel any real alarm.

And just because no one else had seen them didn’t mean they hadn’t been there.

Granted, it had been many years since she’d had a close encounter and none of them had ever
talked
to her before, but what was the difference between a talking ghost and a non-talking one? People thought you were crazy whether they spoke to you or not. Joy had learned
that
very early on.

She stepped away from the table with dead Hailey and turned towards ghost Hailey. ‘Isabella?’

Hailey nodded. A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘They have her.’

Joy blinked. While the ghost thing didn’t faze her she certainly hadn’t expected that.
They?
‘She’s…alive?’

‘
Yes!
Please, you have to hurry,’ she implored, coming up close to Joy and reaching for her as if she might like to shake her but then dropping her hands by her side as if suddenly realising she wouldn’t be able to manage it in her current metaphysical state.

Apparently. Although who really knew?

More tears flowed down her face and she used her hand to scrub at them as she started to pace. ‘You have to t…tell the police.’

‘Do you know where she is?’

‘No. They put a balaclava over my head. All I know is the grapes of wrath.’

Joy frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ she sobbed. ‘I was kept locked up in a room. The bathroom window was boarded up but on the inside it had this sign thing that said Grapes of Wrath.’

Joy contemplated her next question carefully. ‘How do you know…?’

‘How do I know she’s alive?’ Joy nodded, feeling lower than pond scum as Hailey’s face bore her anguish not at all well. ‘I just do,’ she whispered.

‘Can you…see her?’

‘No.’ The dead woman shook her head, shifting from foot to foot, agitated. ‘I can just feel it in here.’ She tapped her chest, a sob slipping out of her mouth. ‘A mother
knows
.’

‘Is she in any danger?’

Hailey shook her head. ‘No.’ Her voice cracked. ‘They love her…but she needs to be with her father.’

A thump outside startled both of them. ‘Please,’ Hailey begged again, looking desperate as she watched over Joy’s shoulder. ‘You have to get the police. You have to. Promise me.’

Joy felt helpless in the face of her distress. ‘I…promise.’