“Yeah,” she said absently. “At least we know where to start with Janelle York. Should I call your uncle on this one? And maybe the medical examiner?”
“Absolutely,” I said supernonchalantly. “So, then, where did you buy it?”
She looked over at me, her brows knitting. “Buy what?”
I shrugged and looked out the window. “Your car.”
“At Domino Ford. Why?”
I flipped my palms up. “Just wondering. One of those weird things you think about on the way home from investigating a missing persons case.”
Her eyes widened in horror. “Oh my god! There’s a dead person in my backseat, isn’t there?”
“Wait, what?” I said in stuttering astonishment. “Not even. Why would you assume such a thing?”
She fixed a knowing gaze on me a heartbeat before she pulled into a gas station, tires screeching.
“Cook, we’re five seconds from home.”
“Tell me the truth,” she insisted after nearly throwing me through the windshield. She had really good brakes. “I mean it, Charley. Dead people follow you everywhere, but I don’t want them in my car. And you suck at lying.”
“I do not.” I felt oddly appalled by her statement. “I’m an excellent liar. Ask my dentist. He swears I floss regularly.”
She threw the car into park and glared. Hard. She would do well in a prison setting.
After transforming a sigh into a Broadway production, I said, “I promise, Cook, there’s not a dead person in your backseat.”
“Then it’s in the trunk. There’s a body in the trunk, isn’t there?” The panic in her voice was funny. Until she flew out of the car.
“What?” I said, climbing out after her. “Of course not.”
She pointed to her white Taurus and stared at me accusingly. “There is a dead body in that trunk,” she said. Really loud. Loud enough for the cop sitting next to us with his window down to hear.
I rolled my eyes. It was late October. Why the hell was his window down? When he opened his car door and unfolded to his full height, I dropped my head into a palm. Thankfully it was my own. This was so not happening. If I had to call my uncle Bob, an Albuquerque Police detective, in the middle of the night one more time to get me out of one of these ridiculous altercations I tended to have with random cops, he was going to kill me. He told me so himself. With an orange peeler. Not sure why.
“Is there a problem here, ladies?” the officer asked.
Cookie scowled at me. “Why don’t you tell him there’s not a dead body in that trunk? Hmmm?”
“Cook, really?”
She threw her hands on her hips, waiting for an answer.
I turned back to Dirty Harry. “Look, Officer O. Vaughn,” I said, glancing at his name badge. “I know what Cookie said sounded bad, but she was speaking metaphorically. We would never really h-have…” I’d looked back at his face, at the almost contemptuous expression lining his mouth, and a vague familiarity tingled along my spine. In a Stephen King’s It sort of way. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Owen Vaughn?”
His mouth thinned. “I am Owen Vaughn.”
No way. For reasons known only to him, Owen Vaughn tried to kill me in high school. With an SUV. Though he later told the police he was only trying to maim me, he refused to tell them why. I’d apparently rained buckets on his parade, but for the life of me, I never figured out what I’d done.
I decided to play it cool. No need to throw past criminal activity in his face. Time to let bygones be bygones. Mostly ’cause he had a gun and I didn’t.
I smiled and socked him in the arm like we were old friends. “Long time, no see, Vaughn.”
It didn’t work. He tensed, took a moment to examine the place where my fist had made contact, then let his gaze wander back to me, zero in on my eyes like he wanted nothing more than to strangle the life out of them.
Awkward.
Then I remembered he’d been friends with Neil Gossett in high school. I’d recently become reacquainted with Neil, and decided to use that bit of info to break the block of ice Vaughn was encased in. “Oh, hey, I just saw Neil the other day. He’s the deputy warden at the prison in Santa Fe.”
“I know where Neil Gossett is,” he said, the contempt in his voice undiluted. “I know where all of you are.” He leaned toward me. “Don’t ever doubt that.”
I stood in shock a solid minute as he turned and walked to his patrol car. Cookie stared, too, her jaw slightly ajar as she watched him drive away.
“He didn’t even check the trunk,” she said.
“Is it just me,” I asked, gazing at his disappearing taillights, “or was that a really stalkery kind of thing to say?”
“What the hell did you do to him?”
“Me?” I placed a hand over my chest to demonstrate how much her words hurt. “Why do you always assume it’s my fault?”
“Because it always is.”
“I’ll have you know that man tried to maim me in high school. With an SUV.”
She turned to me then, her expression incredulous. “Have you ever considered moving to another country?”
“Oddly, yes.”
“Trunk. Dead body.” She walked to the car and unlocked the trunk lid.
I dived toward her, closing the lid before the dead guy could see me.
“I knew it,” she said, backing away from the car again. “There’s a dead body in the trunk.”