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“Hell, Agnes, you almost killed me.” Shane picked up his pillow.
“Humor. Har.” Agnes gathered up the comforter and opened the door, turning back to get her clothes. “I?—”
Shane pointed a gun and fired straight at her twice, the muzzle flash lighting the room, bullets cracking past her ear, then a thud?—
Shane went by her, his face expressionless, his hand on her shoulder, pushing her down. “Stay there,” he said, and she turned on her knees and saw a guy lying in the moonlight in the kitchen, his arms splayed out at his sides, a gun in one open hand, and Shane, firing twice more into the man’s chest as he went past on his way out the back door.
Agnes nodded, even though he was gone.
As near as she could tell, the guy with the bullets in him was big. Older. Not skinny like the kid who’d died in the basement last night. This one outweighed her. He’d have shot her even if she’d thrown raspberry sauce at him.
Not that it was a problem now. He was dead.
She saw her glasses on the floor there, where they’d fallen off when she’d been fighting Shane on the way into the bedroom. She crawled forward gingerly and picked them up, not sure why she was being careful since the guy had four bullets in him. He wasn’t getting up again.
She put her glasses on.
Those last two bullets. Just fired right in as he went by. Agnes put her head on her knees and shook.
After a while Shane came back in and said, “He did something to the power. We’ll get it back tomorrow.” He went over to the body and put the flashlight on the face. “You know him?”
Agnes stood up very carefully and went to look, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. He was older, grizzled hair, broad ugly face, two bullet holes in the center of the forehead, two more in his chest. Two holes. Like in Taylor’s neck. “No.”
He leaned down and picked up the guy’s gun. “Shouldn’t you wait for Xavier for that?” Agnes said. “We’re not calling Xavier.”
“Oh.” Agnes put a hand out to steady herself but there was nothing there. “You sure?”
Shane looked at her. “What do you think Xavier is going to do about another body here after the kid in the basement?”
“Well...” Be pretty suspicious about it, but that wasn’t why they weren’t calling him, Agnes was pretty sure. Still she wasn’t going to argue with the guy with the gun, even if she had just had sex with him. She just didn’t know him that well.
“What are we going to do with the body?” She had visions of dragging it into the swamp, whispering, “Here, gator, gator,” and she made a little sound of distress at the thought.
“I’ll take care of it. From now on, I take care of anything like this. No more Xavier.”
“What do you mean, ‘from now on’? You think there’s going to be more of this?”
“It’s possible.” Shane rolled the dead man over on one hip, found his wallet, and flipped it open. “Wallace Macy.” He pulled out five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and frowned.
Well, he wasn’t the only one frowning. He should be having her evening. Jesus wept.
Shane pulled out his fancy phone and punched in a number. “Carpenter,” he said into the phone. “I have some woodwork.” He listened for a moment, then flipped it shut.
“Who is Carpenter?”
“He’s a man of many talents.” He looked up at her, and she remembered she was naked. “You might want to get dressed. He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
“Is he going to try to kill me?”
“No.”
“Already I like him,” Agnes said, and went into the bedroom.
She picked up her sundress, patted Rhett, straightened the bed, went into the bathroom, took off her glasses, washed her face, and combed her hair. Then she threw up until it felt as though she’d lost everything she’d ever eaten in her entire life.
When she was done, she splashed cold water on her face again and realized she’d been crying the entire time, ever since Shane had fired those two shots into the dead guy, ever since she’d seen those two holes in his forehead.
“Two holes,” she said to her reflection. “I almost killed Taylor. Just like that. Only that didn’t seem real. This was real. I could have done this. Oh, God.” She put her forehead on the cold mirror and swallowed hard and tried to think what the hell had happened to her life. She’d been writing a successful food column, and engaged to a terrific chef, and living in a great house, and now she was sleeping with a killer, and somebody was trying to take her house, and she’d almost killed her fiancé. ...
