Second Thoughts (26 page)

“Oh. Yeah.” She fumbled with the key, then the window release, and finally got it rolled down.
Good going
, she thought,
now get hold of yourself before you blurt out how guilty you are.

It wasn’t Kevin who stooped to peer inside, but she wasn’t sure if that circumstance should be positive or negative. “Yes, officer?” she asked in a voice so shaky that if he didn’t already know what she’d been up to, he might start wondering.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he said without pulling out his handcuffs. That much was positive. Then she realized that her driver’s license was buried in the pocket of her jeans, so she was going to have to ask him to back up so she could get out of the car to get it.
Oh, gee whiz.

But he didn’t ask for her license. He looked across her at Derek. “Hello, Mr. O’Reilly. It’s nice to meet you. I watch the news every morning and would’ve recognized you anywhere.”

Connie blinked. He’d pulled them over to get an autograph?

Derek nodded politely. “Nice to meet you, too. Is there a problem, officer?”

Connie began to feel like a third wheel as she sat in the middle of the two people and their nice conversation. Now that it didn’t appear she was going to be arrested, her wits were making a comeback.

“No, sir,” the policeman said. “No problem. Your brother simply requested that if anyone saw your car—”

“It’s my car,” Connie pointed out.

His attention returned to her. He was young, freckled, and redheaded. His eyes were brown and confused. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“It’s my car. As you can see, I was driving it. Thank you for telling my passenger there wasn’t a problem with my driving.”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. I’d been given the description and license of this car as well as Mr. O’Reilly’s convertible. And, as I said, you didn’t do anything wrong.” He waited a beat, brow furrowing, then his face cleared and his gaze again skimmed past her.

“Your brother requested that you and your wife—”

“Ex.”

“Er, excuse me?”

“I’m his ex-wife. I mean that
he
is
my
ex-husband.”

There was a long pause. “Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.” She could tell that he was adding up reasons for their divorce. Then again he looked beyond her, again dismissed her. “Would you, and, er…”

“Robertson.” Her voice was tired and pained. “My name is Connie Robertson.”

After taking a deep breath, he started all over again. “Mr. O’Reilly, your brother requested that you and Ms. Robertson stop by his house tonight. As soon as possible. Can you do that, sir?”

“Yes,” Derek said evenly. “We will.”

The officer nodded. “I’ll radio it in. Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome,” Connie said.

When she spoke, the man halted for an instant in his move to stand upright, then he straightened and left. She faced front as he walked back to the patrol car, and she continued to stare straight ahead as he pulled out and passed them.

Derek’s gaze never left her. “I was wondering if you were going to produce a pair of boxing gloves, Ms. Robertson. Was all that necessary?”

“He was talking over me and around me, and was too insensitive even to know it. Excuse me. Insensitive? May I change that to stupid?”

“You want to fight with me now, or do you want to save it for Kevin?”

“Oh, hell.” She rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

“I don’t suggest you get in his face like you did with that cop.”

“Go up against your brother?” She sat back and looked across at him as if to plead. “Derek, there’s no way I can go up against your brother.”

“You did it once.” He’d already eased up, it appeared. Apparently he’d dismissed the interlude with the redheaded cop as easily as the cop had dismissed Connie. “You held your own then, and you will again.”

Then he added, “It could be worse, you know. What if that cop had stopped us before we let Moose off? We’d have still had him, the comic book, and Hayworth’s gun.”

She collapsed, folding her arms across the steering wheel and laying her forehead on them. “Oh, crap,” she breathed, silently thanking Moose for his foresight in insisting upon his own car. And wondering how she was going to handle herself once school started in September. Her vocabulary needed attention. With her head on her arms, she slanted a look at Derek. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”

“Can’t say I’m exactly thrilled with it.” Derek
slouched in his seat, tilted his head back and stared at the visor. He drew in a breath and let it out noisily. “Kevin shouldn’t have even been out there tonight. This is his day off. And the chief wouldn’t respond to calls like that anyway. So he must’ve specifically requested to be informed of anything going on at the Hayworth house.”

“Yeah, I’d already figured that out. He was expecting something and was suspicious of us.” She scrunched her face up. “With good cause.”

Now she also leaned her head back and stared at her own visor. To a passerby, they might’ve looked like tired travelers taking a nap. “I’m sorry, Derek. For getting you into this.”

“I’m not. I did nothing wrong tonight, and I’m not sorry for any of it.” He frowned, staring into space. “I’m surprised I did it,” he said slowly, as if just now examining his feelings and being surprised all over again. “But not sorry.”

A long silence followed. Then Connie asked, voice dull, “What are we going to do?”

“Face him. What else? He can’t prove anything. And
, hopefully, he doesn’t want to. He probably just wants to push a little bit. If I were in his shoes, I’d want to push a whole lot.”

She straightened up and pressed her hands against the steering wheel, bracing herself for the coming ordeal as much as repositioning herself in the driver’s seat. She had to work for a second or two until she was able to swallow, and then she turned the key in the ignition.

* * *

Kristy let them in, appearing friendly, but it looked like she was working hard for neutrality. She’d been doing a lot of that lately, Connie realized. The strain was showing in everyone. Kevin was on the phone, and his wife motioned for their guests to sit. She was barefoot and wore a different robe. This one was a knee-length, candy-striped duster, buttoned demurely to the neck. Connie figured it had to be new. It would’ve been a better choice for her to borrow if she could’ve found it.

“Tied up with his own shirt,” Kevin said, supposedly repeating what he’d just been told over the phone line. One elbow was propped on the arm of the chair as he held the receiver to his ear. His other hand lay loosely in his lap. He had the look of a weary man, and he didn’t even glance at Connie and Derek. His attention seemed to be on the ceiling.

Connie took one end of the sofa, and Derek took the other.

Kristy questioningly raised her coffee cup, gaze traveling between them. “It’s decaf,” she assured them. They shook their heads. She sat in the armchair near Connie’s end of the couch, tucking her feet under her. She smoothed the robe over her knees, sipped her coffee, and along with her guests watched and listened to her husband’s end of the phone conversation.

“…yeah, changed his story a couple of times. Doubt that we’ve got the whole thing yet, and we may never get it. Keep me posted.” He hung up.

He closed his eyes, leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, and massaged his forehead with both hands. “How tall are you, Connie?”

“Huh?” She’d wanted to keep a low profile and let Derek deal with his brother, but that snapped her head up.

“You heard me.”

“Five-two and a half,” she answered guardedly.

“She’s stretching that,” Derek said.

Kevin snapped his eyes open and nailed them both with a hard stare. He’d lost the weary look. “I have never known anybody as
stupid
.
And
as reckless.
And
as incredibly lucky, as the two of you.”

Connie couldn’t hold the flinch back.

“Please note that I am not going to be asking you anything else,” he went on. “I don’t want either of you to tell me anything. Not a damned thing. I do the talking. You do the listening.” He waited a beat. He looked like a firecracker in human form, one with a very short fuse. “Can you handle that?”

The two people on the sofa didn’t respond. Derek didn’t appear intimidated but seemed to have lost his flippancy. Connie folded her hands in her lap and returned her ex-brother-in-law’s stare. She was back in the principal’s office, but as Derek had told her she would, she was handling it.

Kevin rested his elbows on the arms of the recliner and made a tent with his fingers. “Okay, here goes. About thirty minutes ago, three people with a gun broke into Julian Hayworth’s house—”

At the look that crossed Connie’s face, Kevin stopped and stared at her. So did his brother. If he’d been close enough, she believed Derek would’ve kicked her.

Closing his eyes, Kevin shook his head. “Oh, Connie, please don’t enter a life of crime. You’d never make a living at it.”

When he again looked at them, it appeared he’d lost some of his heat. Then he went on. “So that part of it wasn’t true. It was his gun, he held you at gunpoint, and somehow you got it away from him. That makes more sense. I couldn’t see either one of you entering with a gun and waving it around.”

Again he closed his eyes and shook his head. “I just heard what I said. I’d accepted the fact you’d broken into that house, but not that you did it with a gun. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this whole, stupid night.”

Connie stared at the rug. From the corner of her eye, she saw Derek pick up Andy’s favorite toy that had been peeking out from under the sofa, a cloth turtle. He ran his thumb over the speckled green and black back.

“Okay. His gun.” Wearily, Kevin nodded to himself as he supposedly put the pieces together to make sure they fit. “He probably doesn’t have a permit for it, so didn’t want to admit ownership.”

Then, his attention returning to the two people who sat on the sofa, he resumed his narrative. “Judging by Hayworth’s description, one of the three was undoubtedly Moose, but we still have no more information on him than we had before. Hayworth was certain, however, that neither of the Maxwell brothers was part of the group. Although one man was near Max’s build, the resemblance stopped there. Whoever he was, he communicated by speaking in an irritatingly poor imitation of John Wayne.”

His eyes rested pointedly on his brother. Derek didn’t look up from the turtle.

Kevin’s gaze fixed on Connie. “The most interesting character, however, was the third guy. According to Hayworth this…
man
…was about five-five or so and was built sparingly, but was exceptionally strong. He’s convinced he was a jockey, a very well-conditioned one. And this guy was the most gutsy and nervy of the trio. At one point, Hayworth was able to get hold of the gun—he wasn’t at all clear on how this came about, but he was quite clear on the fact that the jockey had then manhandled him and wrested it away by force.”

Kristy’s face grew pale. She sipped coffee and stared at the slate blue carpet.

Relentlessly Kevin continued. “However, my dear Connie, unlike the guns the Maxwell brothers used, this one was undoubtedly loaded.”

The following silence was almost deafening. Connie guessed she’d also paled. She was having difficulty believing she’d done what she’d done and was carefully avoiding Derek’s eyes. Everybody’s eyes.

“That’s the one thing that’s going to save you, and I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life how you pulled it off. But because of the gun incident, he’s convinced the short one was male, so the two of you will never be suspected.” Kevin’s expression hardened. “But this evening’s caper could’ve had any number of lasting—and tragic—consequences.” When he spoke next, his voice rose and his words rushed together. “And that makes me so damned mad, and so damned scared, that I’d like to knock your
idiotic heads together
.”

He took several deep breaths, clearly
to rein himself in, and ran his hands down his face. “Right now you’re sitting across from me. And I can vent. But we came close, that close,” he paused and held up thumb and forefinger, no space showing between them, “to all three of you being arrested by me. That would’ve broken my spirit. And my heart. And Kristy’s and Christopher’s.”

He stood and crossed to the fireplace. It appeared he was too tense to sit. The fire screen hung at a slant, and he jerked it to close it. It promptly opened again. “Got to fix that,” he mumbled.

With his gaze remaining on the fireplace, Kevin said, “That loose light bulb bothered me. A lot. But I thought I’d missed you. Maybe only by a hair, but I figured you were already out of there. But then Hayworth said the next time he entered the study, the bulb was gone.”

He looked across at them. “He had something in his safe he didn’t want me to see, so he ushered me out. That saved your necks, and mine. But I have to have your word, right now, that you’re through with this. Under no circumstances will either of you ever go after that comic book again. And you’re not leaving this house tonight until I have that promise.”