Dance of the Bones

Ava held the wineglass to her lips, but she didn’t swallow so much as a drop.

“Is that a new car out there?” she asked. “I don’t believe I’ve seen that one before.”

Her mention of the car was intended as nothing more than an icebreaker. She hoped that if Henry was upset, a little light conversation along with the booze might relieve some of the tension without his necessarily noticing how much liquor was going down the hatch. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that settling on the car as a topic must have been a good idea. Henry quickly poured another slug of tequila into his glass and downed it in a single gulp, following it with a long suck on a wedge of lime. She had worried earlier that even in tequila the barbiturates she’d added might be discernible. Now she could relax. If it tasted strange, Henry Rojas wasn’t a sophisticated enough imbiber to notice.

“I know I promised you a bonus,” Ava continued, reaching for the purse that was parked beside her chair. “I took the liberty of counting it out in advance. Forty thousand dollars should cover it, don’t you think?”

The tension she had noticed in Henry before seemed to evaporate. She didn’t know why, exactly. Maybe the tequila was already doing its job. He leaned back on the sofa, looking relaxed, and actually smiled at her. “That should just about do it,” he said.

Ava reached into her purse, just as she’d done many times before, but Henry Rojas seemed to be reaching for a weapon of his own. Ava didn’t hesitate and Henry never had a chance. The first bullet caught him full in the chest. He tried to rise to his feet. Ava fired twice more, which made for three more shots than she had wanted to discharge. Obviously her carefully laid plans of making his death look like suicide had come to nothing.

Worried that a neighbor might have heard the racket and started peering out windows, Ava abandoned the walker and raced through the kitchen to the garage. She needed to have Henry’s car off her driveway and concealed inside her garage before anyone else came snooping around. Outside, she breathed a sigh of relief. No lights had come on in neighboring houses. No one was visible out on the street.

Ava hurried to the vehicle and was dismayed to discover that the door was locked. She had to go back inside and search Henry’s bloodied body for a key fob. She pressed the unlock button as she came through the garage a second time. It wasn’t until she was seated inside and trying to figure out how to operate the engine that Ava realized with numbing shock that she was not alone. There was someone else in the car with her—-a woman.

Ava’s fingers went stiff and clumsy as they searched for the ignition button. Once the engine started, she sped into the garage so far that she banged the front bumper on the far wall before braking to a stop.

Ava leaped out of the car and hurried to close the garage door behind her. Then she went to the passenger side of the car and wrenched the door open. As she did so, the interloper was pulled out of the vehicle, landing hard on the concrete floor. Her hands were cuffed together and they had somehow been affixed to the door itself.

“Who are you?” Ava demanded. “What are you doing here?”

Momentarily stunned, the bound woman didn’t answer immediately. “Help me,” she whimpered finally. “Please help me.”

“Of course,” Ava said. “Just a minute.”

There had been an abandoned workbench complete with tools in the garage when Ava had bought the place. She’d mostly ignored the tools as she came and went, but there was one thing there on the bench that she needed now in the very worst way—-duct tape. She picked up the roll, ripped off an eight--inch--long strip, and returned to the passenger side of the car.

Ava kept the tape out of the victim’s sight until she knelt down beside the woman who, half in and half out of the car, was struggling desperately against her restraints.