She smoothed her hair and got up. She took a step, stumbled, then straightened up, walked over, and picked her purse up off the couch. Then she walked over to him and stuck him with something below his rib cage.
His body jerked and seized and he fell to the ground. He choked with laughter as his muscles jerked. She’d fuckingTasered him.
“I’m going to go now,” she said. She tossed him a black pouch. “Here’s a package. A few special presents, plus a flash drive on the
table with everything I know about Ryan Motley on it. You might want to do something about him.” She took a few steps toward the door and then turned back. “You thought you had a little friend, didn’t you, darling?”
She knelt down next to him, the smell and heat of her again filling his senses. “Here’s something to remember him by,” she said, and she put something wet and slippery in Archie’s clawed hand.
He continued to jerk and twitch as she slid her fingernail up his arm, across his shoulder, and down his spine to his tailbone, and then he couldn’t feel her anymore.
The back door opened and closed.
Archie rolled onto his back and the cat padded over and started licking his face. It took Archie several minutes to force his muscles to relax enough to open his hand, revealing her parting gift to him—two white orbs the color of spoiled milk, threaded with red vessels and slippery with blood.
He reflexively pulled his hand back and Jeremy’s eyeballs rolled out of his palm and onto the floor.
The cat cocked its head.
Archie struggled to his feet, and backed away from them, looking at his hand, smeared with Jeremy’s blood. Then he turned, went to the front window, pulled back the curtain, and searched for the patrol unit Henry had stationed in front of the house. The car was there. The dome light was on and the officer was inside. Alive.
Archie leaned his head against the glass, caught his breath, then stumbled into the bathroom and held his hand under the sink faucet, the water as hot as he could stand it.
Had Jeremy killed Isabel?
Or was this just another one of Gretchen’s lies?
He had to know. Archie was calm now, his heart rate settled. Twin red bite marks already showed on his side where the Taser’s
projectiles had made contact. A purple bruise would rise soon, matching the opposite side.
Archie turned the water off and dried his hands. Then, moving slowly and painfully, he put on clean clothes. By the time he was done, he had stopped shaking.
He went back out into the living room. One of the eyes was gone. So was the cat. Archie scooped up the keys to Claire’s car off the sideboard, picked the empty gun up off the floor, and made a call on Henry’s landline.
“It’s me,” Archie said. “I need to see you.”
Archie could hear the beat of club music in the background. “You know where I am,” Leo Reynolds said.
Archie hung up and picked the phone up again. This time he dialed Henry. He carried the receiver into Henry’s bedroom and opened the closet.
“Jeremy’s dead,” Archie said when Henry picked up.
“Where are you?” Henry asked.
Archie scanned the closet shelf, looking for the box the gun would have been in. “At your house. Gretchen was here. You’ll find Jeremy’s eyes on your living room floor.” He paused, remembering the cat. “Or under the couch.” He saw a box and dumped the contents out on the floor. Photographs. “Where do you keep the bullets to your gun?” he asked.
“Stay there,” Henry said. “I’m on my way.”
Archie moved to Henry’s dresser and starting pulling open drawers. He had to get out of there, before Henry sent in the cop out front. “Goddamn, Henry. Where are the fucking bullets?”
“Night table,” Henry said quietly. “Top drawer.”
“Thank you,” Archie said. He hung up the phone and tossed it on the bed, and then went to Henry’s bedside table and opened the drawer. The bullets were in a box next to a pair of reading glasses. Archie loaded the gun and kept a handful of extra bullets. He
needed something to keep them in, so he went back to the bathroom, to his overnight bag from the hospital, and dug out the brass pillbox he had kept his painkillers in. He’d missed it.
He opened the pillbox, dropped the bullets in, and went out the back door.
He was never going to let Gretchen catch him unarmed again.
C H A P T E R 60
The bouncer at George’s Dancin’ Bare had his nose in a book. Behind him, pinned on the wall, was a flyer advertising a Gretchen Lowell lookalike stripper contest.
“I’m looking for Leo,” Archie said.
“Room three,” the bouncer said, not looking up.