"Okay, let's try this. Write down all the people you know were there for sure. You and the day crew. Okay?"
"Okay, but it can't have been—"
When the first person screamed, Timmie looked up. When it was followed by a growl of outrage that sounded a lot like "Don't fuck with me!" she damn near forgot Gladys altogether.
Sheena had escaped her lair. She'd also escaped her clothing, which just proved that that Adam's apple wasn't an illusion. Sheena had run off with Tarzan's equipment. She'd also broken out a defibrillator, and was brandishing the paddles at one of the techs. Unfortunately, they were charged and blinking, ready to discharge.
"Gladys?" Timmie asked. "I'll call you back."
Timmie hopped off the desk, and Sheena turned his attention to her. "These are deadly," he threatened, "and I'm not afraid to use them. Now, I want out of here."
Fighting hard not to give in to a silly grin, Timmie shrugged good-naturedly and pulled the tech out of the way. "Sure. What the hell? Have a ball."
"You crazy?" Mattie demanded behind her.
"Nah," Timmie assured her under her breath. "That's not the Fry Daddy he has, just the Fry Baby. Doesn't have as much battery power. He'll run out of juice in half a block."
"By then he could roast a sheep with those things."
"He'll freeze his own little weasel long before that."
"Timmie Leary, line one. Mr. Murphy. Timmie Leary!"
Eyeing the large, hairy, naked man who was holding the crash cart hostage, Timmie sighed. "Tell him I'll call him back."
And then, like the second float in the National Cardioversion Day parade, Timmie followed Sheena out the door.
* * *
Timmie didn't think she'd laughed this much in weeks. She and Mattie were sliding around the sidewalk on the way to her house like Sheena hitting the driveway with a loaded crash cart. After the evening they'd just survived, they'd decided it would be pushing their luck to try and get to Mattie's, so they'd called the Rev, whose phone still worked, to tell him to meet them at Timmie's the next morning. Then, like mountain climbers without pitons, they had slithered all five blocks to Timmie's house.
The storm had stopped after depositing some four inches of ice across the western third of Missouri. Trees glittered and glistened, bushes hung over like old men, and electrical wires spat sparks and snaked across the gleaming streets from where they'd simply broken under the weight of the ice. Half the town was without power, and the rest without salt or traction on the steep, winding streets. The city lights reflected in a low, gray sky, and the world shimmered. It was a beauty Timmie had all but forgotten out on the coast. It was a cold that soaked right through her jacket.
"I will never forget the look on your face when Sheena walked out of that room without his fur," Mattie chortled.
"He had his fur," Timmie disagreed, wiping tears away. "He just forgot his clothes."
Mattie's laugh was high and shrill. "Girl, you know we never gonna get over havin' our defibrillator kidnapped."
Timmie laughed even harder and almost landed right on her butt. "I could already envision its picture on the side of a milk carton. Holding today's paper in its little paddles..."
Mattie smacked her on the head. "Stop it! I thought you was crazy when you let him go outside. But, girl, the minute he hit that ice, he turned that crash cart into a bobsled."
"Woulda made a helluva run, too, if he hadn't broadsided that ambulance at the bottom of the hill." Timmie pulled her key out and blew on her cold, chapped fingers. "Be careful of the steps. I haven't salted any better than the county."
They clung to each other and the ice-slick porch posts to keep themselves upright. Timmie strode over the creaky step and pulled open her screen door.
"You get some answers about your old people tonight?" Mattie asked.
Timmie smiled almost benevolently. "I did. I see a light at the end of the tunnel, and this time it isn't a freight train."
Not a freight train. A superliner that smacked Timmie full in the face when she opened the door to her house and realized that her lights were on.
"Get out," she instinctively urged, hand back against Mattie.
"What?"
She hadn't left her lights on before leaving. She hadn't let anybody in her house. But somebody was there.
"What..."
Timmie stopped pushing. She'd just caught sight of the wall.
Her grandmother's cabbage rose wallpaper, spattered in gore.
"No. Oh, no."
Her first thought was that her father had gotten here. Sneaked out of Restcrest while she was busy with normal mayhem and completed his attempt to blow his brains out with that huge old .45 she'd hidden high in the front hall closet.
"Timmie?" Mattie, right behind her, didn't see it yet. She didn't hear the sudden, startled thudding of Timmie's adrenaline-stoked heart. No emergency room nurse could mistake the smell, though. Sweet, cloying, coppery. The smell of tissue and blood and destruction.
"Sweet Jesus..."
Timmie saw feet in tasseled loafers. Gray pinstriped pants. Long legs. She couldn't move. She couldn't look.
She couldn't stop.
His brains and his blood were spattered on her wall. His body lay across her living room floor where it had fallen, his pants dark with urine, his eyes wide and sightless, the right side of his head simply gone. And lying just beyond the reach of his right hand, her father's old .45.
"Oh, my dear sweet Jesus," Mattie whispered in sick dismay. "Timmie, who is that?"
Timmie choked. She tried to suck in a breath and sobbed instead. "Jason. My ex-husband."
Chapter 23
"What am I going to tell Meghan?" Timmie asked no one in particular.
In a room packed to the ceiling with police, evidence technicians, and paramedics, no one thought to answer. So Timmie didn't bother to ask again.
Jason was dead. Jason, who had been the focus and fuel of her life for the last ten years. The man Timmie had attracted, loved, loathed, left, and tried to survive, who had gone from designing her engagement ring to selling it for cocaine. Lying on her floor, his wide blue eyes still seeming to accuse her of her failings, as if she should have been here to prevent this somehow.
His wide blue eyes that had been so perfectly reborn in Meghan. Who didn't know. Who slept at Mattie's, still expecting her father to sweep back into her life and reclaim the family he'd thrown away. Well, he'd sure as hell swept back into their lives.
"Here, baby," Mattie crooned, easing into the chair next to Timmie's. She had a jelly glass in her hand half filled with something amber, the smell of which Timmie could have recognized at forty yards. The two of them had taken up position at the far edge of the dining room, as far away from Jason as they could get while a photographer snapped pictures and the transport crew leaned against the stairs, waiting their turn.
"Where'd you get that?" Timmie asked, not bothering to take the glass.
"At the back of your kitchen cabinet. Come on."
Timmie shook her head. "I thought I'd found all his bottles. Thanks, Mattie, but I don't drink."
"Neither do I," Mattie reminded her. "This is shock medicine. Goes down easier'n Thorazine and don't leave you so fuzzy."