With the back of one hand, Absalom pushed me out of the way. “I’ll do it,” he said.
“You’re too big to reach around the mechanical dog and see what’s inside that car.”
“Then I’ll do it.” Delmar stepped forward.
“You don’t need another ding on your record if you get caught. None of you do.” I rubbed my hands together like I couldn’t wait to get started. It was partly for show, partly because I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t going to fall and end up dead on the hood of the ’98 Accord parked nearby. “All I’m going to do is climb up, take a look inside the car, and see if the mechanical Bad Dog is sitting on anything. Nobody’s going to see me. Nobody’s going to notice a thing. At least not if you all clear out and stop standing around like you’re casing the place. I brought reinforcements.” I pulled the voodoo doll Absalom had given me out of my pocket just to show I meant it. Before my courage faded, I had to move, and I had to move fast. I stepped closer to the pole. “Help me up, will you?”
They weren’t happy about it, but they gave me the boost I needed, and before I could talk myself out of it, I had one foot on the lowest metal rung and my hands clasped around another rung two feet above my head. I steadied myself. I swore I wasn’t going to look down. I took a deep breath, and I started to climb.
Really, the pole wasn’t all that high. At least that’s what I told myself. Twenty feet is what, maybe as high as the top of a house? It felt like I was climbing to the moon.
One hand over the other, one foot carefully planted before I dared to lift the other, I made my way toward the dog sitting in the car at the top of the pole. Big points for me, I froze only once, and that was only because a car cruised by. It didn’t slow down, and that meant the driver hadn’t seen me. Really, I wasn’t all that surprised. Who in their right mind expects to see a woman climbing a pole in the middle of the night? Who would even bother to look? With that car gone, everything below me was quiet. I hoped my team had listened and hightailed it around the corner, but I didn’t have the nerve to look. Instead, I continued my ascent.
I’d like to think I made it to the top in record time, but truth be told, it took longer than it should have. Once my nose was on the same level as the handle on the door of the car and that mechanical dog arm was waving right over my head, I breathed a sigh of relief. A couple more cautious steps and I was grasping the window frame of the car. From the ground, I hadn’t realized how big the mechanical dog was; I needed to be careful, or his waving arm would clunk me. I also needed to stay out of the glow of the spotlight that was trained on the dog. I lifted one foot off the metal rung where it was perched and pivoted sideways. Hanging on with one hand, I peered into the car.
The mechanical dog was no more than the head and arm that stuck out the window. He was built on a wooden frame; his motor whirred from the floor on the passenger side of the car. Technically, he didn’t have an ass, but that didn’t stop me from looking on the driver’s seat, anyway. That spotlight outside illuminated the dog, but the interior of the car was dark.
I inched closer. The wooden frame the dog was set on had a heavy, solid bottom. If I could reach under it…
I stretched, but the way I was standing, my reach wasn’t long enough. I kept my place, watching the mechanical arm swing back and forth and timing my next move. When the dog’s arm was farthest from its body, I swiveled, grabbed the frame of the car, and squeezed myself into the front seat.
I guess my timing was perfect.
No sooner was I sitting next to the dog, and cursing because of the scrapes I’d gotten as I squashed myself flat to get past his wooden frame, than every light in the car lot came on.
“This has nothing to do with you, Pepper. It can’t.”
I consoled myself with these brave words, but at the same time, I hit the floor and stayed there.
“There’s no way anybody knows you’re up here. There’s no chance anybody would even think to look. Nobody would be crazy enough to climb that pole and end up in this car with this dog.”
Nobody but me.
And it would be a shame to waste all that crazy effort.
I bent my head, listening for sounds from down in the car lot, and when I didn’t hear a thing, I got to work, feeling my way through the dark to the wooden platform that supported the dog. I slid my hand under it.
“Sitting on evidence,” I reminded myself. “He said Bad Dog was sitting on the evidence.”
But the only evidence I felt was evidence that the mechanical Bad Dog had been there long enough for the seats in the car to get damp and moldy. I grumbled, wiped my hand on my jeans, and tried again. This time, I poked my hand into the elbow where the bench met the back of the seat-and touched something that crinkled.
Encouraged, I reached in a little farther. With my index finger, I could just feel the corner of what felt like an envelope. I stretched, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Not without twisting myself into a pretzel between Bad Dog and his motor.
I pulled out my hand, squirmed around so that I was kneeling squarely between the motor and the dog, and tried again.
Again, I felt the envelope, but I couldn’t grab it.
I stretched just a little more, and when that didn’t work, I raised up from my knees, extended my right leg, and… kicked the motor.
It stopped dead.
So did Bad Dog, frozen in midwave.
Without the constant whirr of his motor in my ears, it was awfully quiet. I was awfully glad. With no distractions, I was able to try again, and this time, with a little more room and a lot more stretching, I grabbed hold of what was stuffed into the seat and brought it out from its hiding place.
It was one of those big manila envelopes, and it was wrapped in some plastic material that was probably meant to make it waterproof. I slid my finger under the tape that held it closed, and when that didn’t budge it, I resorted to my teeth. What my mom would say if she knew that nearly five thousand dollars of orthodontic work was being put to the test chewing through tape, I didn’t want to know. The only thing that mattered was that it worked.
I slid the envelope out of its protective casing, opened it, and tipped out the contents. There wasn’t much. But then, there didn’t need to be. I found what I was looking for and I positioned myself so that I could catch a bit of the light from outside the car and stared at the Polaroid picture in my hands.
The black and white photo showed Vera’s lifeless body on the floor of room 12. It was taken long before the police and the crime scene photographer arrived. How did I know? Well, there were a couple of clues. For one thing, in this photo, Vera was still wearing the locket that Lamar said contained a picture of her grandmother. She wasn’t wearing it in the photos in the crime scene files. To me, that could mean only that the killer took it. For another, though the dresser mirror was cracked, there was no mistaking the fact that the man who took the picture had caught his own reflection in the mirror.
I was staring into the face of a killer, one I recognized.
It looked like Bud had other talents than just selling used cars. Mack Raphael was in Central State at the time of the murder, so of course he would have had to have hired a hit man, and apparently the two were still together. Bud had done his job well. He must have stolen Lamar’s gun, then followed Vera and Lamar to the Lake View and waited for his opportunity. This picture, the locket, and the blood oozing out of the gunshot wound to Vera’s chest was all the proof he needed to show Raphael that he’d done his job and done it well.