Brody & Hannigan 02 - Grand Theft Lotto (3 page)

Chapter Three

If Brody thought his partner's change in attitude about her mother's secret-keeping extended to him, he was mistaken. The look she shot him as they walked out to their cars was as frigid as the morgue.

"This wasn't some conspiracy to keep you in the dark," he began.

Her head snapped around so quickly that her bob of dark hair swept into her eyes, making her grimace. "Because you always keep secrets with my mother?"

He pressed his lips to a thin line. "She asked for my discretion. I gave her my word but I did try very hard to convince her she should tell you."

"I can't believe she thought I'd go all judgmental on her about buying a lottery ticket. It's not like she makes a habit of it." She stopped short of the car, finger-combed her hair away from her face and turned her gray-eyed glare on him. "Does she?"

"How would I know? I don't think so."

Hannigan slumped against her car door. "I'm sorry. I guess this is sort of a volatile subject for my family."

She looked worried and tired, making him wonder what other troubles she had on her mind. She'd been distant over the past couple of weeks, careful around him, as if she didn't trust herself—or him.

Ever since that damned make-out session at Magnolia Park Overlook.

"Are we never going to talk about it again?"

She looked up at his question, danger glittering in her sharp eyes. "Brody…"

"It's not going away just because you will it so."

Her expression shifted gears, became less formidable and more frustrated. "I don't know what to say."

He didn't like the sound of that. "If you regret it, say so. If you find me repulsive sexually, you can say that, too."

She looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "No heterosexual woman could possibly find you sexually repulsive, Brody. Don't even pretend you don't know that."

"Well, I like to think that's true," he admitted with a half smirk.

"Your slobbering pack of badge bunnies should have clued you in." She turned and opened her car door.

"They're not the ones who matter."

She froze with her back to him. "What exactly do you want from me?"

He wasn't sure how to answer. There was a part of him that wanted everything. Sex, babies, joint checking accounts and a big house on the east side with an enormous yard for the kids and the dogs—and those were the thoughts that made him freeze in terror and lose his ability to answer her very simple, very reasonable question.

"Go home, Brody. I'll let you know what my cousins had to say for themselves." She got behind the wheel of her car and started to close the door.

His tongue unstuck itself. "I wouldn't mind going to Magnolia Park Overlook with you tonight."

She looked up at him through the open door. "So, you want to have sex with me in a car is what you're saying."

He sighed. "You make it sound so tawdry."

With a glare that might have killed a weaker man, she shut the door and drove away, leaving him standing by his car, staring at her taillights and wondering how the hell things had gone so suddenly, terribly wrong.

"Sex screws up everything."

The voice carried across the beauty parlor, greeting Hannigan with a well-timed slap of wisdom the moment she walked under the tinkling bell. There were only four clients in the shop at that time of afternoon, most of them blue-haired and teased out. If they found the red-haired manicurist's blunt statement scandalous, they kept it to themselves.

The manicurist looked up at the tinkle of the bell and shot Hannigan a surprised grin. "Estella Jane, is that really you? I thought you'd gotten too fancy for Pearl's Cut and Curl."

Hannigan rolled her eyes at her cousin. "Becky, you're about to buff that poor woman's nails to the nub."

Becky Barlow stopped buffing with a gasp. "Oh, I'm nowhere close to the nub," she said, making a face. "Say, I heard about Aunt Ruby Nell's good fortune."

"Yeah, actually, that's why I'm here." Hannigan glanced at Becky's client, a woman about her age with ridiculously long acrylic nails. "Do you know where I can find Dwayne?"

Becky's eyes narrowed. "What's he done now?"

"I can't rightly say yet," Hannigan answered, kicking herself mentally as she heard her accent broaden to full-blown redneck. One minute around one of her cousins, and all the hard work she'd done toning down her hillbilly twang went right out the window.

Then she kicked herself for giving a damn in the first place. Why should she change herself for other people? Brody would never ask it of her. In fact, she suspected he found her accent a big part of her charm. Sometimes she even laid on the accent a little thicker than usual, just to see his eyes darken with appreciation.

She did a lot of things to make his eyes darken these days. It wasn't fair to him, really, since she still hadn't decided what to do about That Night at Magnolia Park Overlook, as she'd come to think of it.

"Well, when you find out where my brother is, let me know if you need any help kickin' his ass," Becky drawled, shooting an apologetic look at the woman whose acrylic fills she was currently buffing. "Pardon my French."

The woman with the acrylic nails smirked. "That ain't French."

"I might take you up on that," Hannigan promised. "So you don't know where I might find him?"

"I never said that." Becky glanced at her watch. "Let's see. It's after noon. He's probably at Bug Swallows."

Hannigan swallowed a groan. Bug Swallows was what everyone on her mother's side of the family called Bigelows, a family-run bar down near the railroad tracks. Unfortunately, the family who ran the place were burly, surly and covered in homemade tattoos. And that was just the women.

On the up side, Hannigan reflected as she drove out past the warehouse district and pulled up next to a row of tricked out motorcycles, Hannigan happened to get along with the Bigelows better than she did her own extended family. For some reason the patriarch, Big Sam Bigelow, had taken a shine to her way back when she was a little freckle-faced, gap-toothed kid following her daddy around during the summers while he looked for extra jobs to supplement the family income.

Big Sam used to stand her up on the bar and coax her to sing "Old Joe Clark" to his customers in exchange for a Sprite and a new dollar bill. He spotted her the second she walked into the bar and hollered out, "'Old Joe Clark!' Shiny new dollar, girly, for your trouble!"

"You'll have to pay me a hell of a lot more than a dollar to get my ass up on that bar these days, Big Sam." She grinned at him, settling on an empty bar stool in front of him. "How's business?"

"Hell, sugar. Pure hell. Too many punks around these parts figured out how to brew their own back during the recession and they've been slow coming back." He pulled a clean glass from beneath the bar and set it in front of her. "Isn't it a little early in the day for you to be drinking?"

"Not if you'll give me a Sprite and a little information." She'd already scanned the bar for her cousin Dwayne without any luck. "Seen Dwayne yet today?"

"No, ma'am, he ain't been by yet." He filled the mug with ice and handed her a can of Sprite. "You want me to tell him you're lookin' for him?"

"Actually, I'd just as soon you not. But could you give me a call?" She handed him her business card.

He looked at it, his lips curving slightly as he read the information there. "Can't quite bring myself to remember you're one of the police." He put the emphasis on the first syllable. "I reckon your daddy was real proud of how you turned out. Guess hanging out with old Sam Bigelow didn't ruin you after all like your mama worried."

She smiled back at the bar man. "You were never the problem, Sam."

He gave a nod. "Your daddy was a good man. He worked hard, as hard as anyone I've ever known. But he also enjoyed life, and there's not a damned thing wrong with that, I say."

"No, there's not," she agreed with another smile. Her parents had worked as hard as any two people could. They'd both come from poverty, with no hope of coming up with the money for college. They'd gone straight to work in factories, until her mother had gotten pregnant. From there, her father had doubled his shifts so their mother could stay home and raise the kids. All five of them. A lot of mouths to feed, but somehow her father had done it without ever making them feel as if they were poor.

But Stella had known. She'd seen beyond the smiles and the cheer and known that her parents were struggling, worrying at night after the kids were asleep and there was nothing between them and the fear but the remnants of their cheery façade.

And she'd be damned if she let that good-for-nothing, thieving dog Dwayne Barlow take her mother's financial security away from her now.

"Sure I can't talk you into singin' 'Old Joe Clark'?" Sam asked. "This place is deader'n a cemetery, and that's bad for business."

"You don't want to run everybody out of here," Hannigan said with a laugh. "What's cute when you're a snaggle-toothed kid doesn't really translate when you're thirty—"

"Well, shit." Sam's gaze went to the front door of the bar. "Wonder what regulations we broke this time."

Hannigan followed his gaze. Well, shit indeed.

Lee Brody stood in the doorway, looking like some leading man making his big scene entrance, from the Armani suit to the Italian leather shoes. Every head in the place swiveled. All conversation stopped.

"Relax," Hannigan murmured. "He's here for me."

Brody spotted her and crossed the room, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was now the bar's main attraction. His gaze was locked on her like a homing beacon; the rest of the room might as well have disappeared.

She found his focus both flattering and unnerving. "Did you follow me?"

"Yes." He sat on the empty barstool beside her. "I didn't like the way we left things."

"Sam, this is my partner, Lee Brody." Hannigan nodded toward Big Sam. "Brody, this is Sam Bigelow, the owner and proprietor of this fine establishment."

"Pleased to meet you, Officer Brody." Sam wiped his hand on his apron and offered it to Brody.

"Detective," Brody corrected with a smile, shaking the barkeeper's hand. "The pleasure is mine."

"I was hoping to run into my cousin Dwayne here," Hannigan told Brody as Sam put a mug on the bar.

"What can I get you?" Sam asked

"Nothing for me, thanks." Brody looked at Hannigan. "So, Dwayne's the culprit?"

"Maybe. Probably. He has the longest rap sheet." Hannigan slid off the bar stool and reached into her purse to pay for the Sprite.

"On me," Brody said, pulling his wallet from his jacket.

"I can pay for my own drink."

He shot her a look. "Consider it my penance."

She sighed and closed the flap on her purse. "You don't need to do penance, Brody. I'm not angry at you."

His brow creased as he paid Sam for her drink. "Since when?"

"Since about a minute after left my mom's house."

"That's what I like about you, Hannigan. You don't hold a grudge."

She gave him a nudge toward the door. "Don't get overconfident. You've never really gotten on my bad side."

He opened the heavy wood door, squinting as bright afternoon light invaded the cave-like interior of the bar. "Remind me to never get anywhere near your bad side."

Hannigan took a step outside the bar and stopped short, staring across the narrow parking lot at the dark-haired man who had frozen in place just a few feet away. His gray eyes, so like her own, widened at the sight of her.

Then he started running.

"Son of a bitch!" She took off after him.

"Dwayne, I presume?" Brody asked, his long legs catching up to hers in a couple of seconds.

"Who else?"

The bar was a stand-alone building on a small, unkempt lot, but it was only a half a block from a tightly-packed section of the south side, where old brick storefronts lined both sides of the road, separated here and there by alleys too narrow to accommodate any vehicle larger than a motorcycle.

It was out of one of those alleys that a black Kawasaki Ninja 650 roared across their path, nearly slamming into Brody. Hannigan's heart caught in her throat as she saw her partner throw himself out of the way, crashing against the brick wall of the cobbler shop on the other side of the alley. The Ninja blew past her, whipping her hair into her face.

"Was that your cousin?" Brody called from the other side of the alley entrance.

Hannigan shook her head, her gaze drawn down the narrow gravel alley from which the Ninja had just come. "No."

Brody dusted himself off and limped to her side, turning his head to look down the alley as well.

At the other end of the narrow passageway, in a crumpled heap, lay her cousin Dwayne, in a spreading puddle of blood.