"Too many people," Riley said. "It should be just you, but I'm not going to be yapped at for the next half hour, so the mouth goes, too."
"I do not yap," Suze said.
The waitress brought the hamburger, and Riley handed it to Nell. "Use that to lure the mutt. Make sure you take its collar off before you leave the yard. All these places have those invisible fences, and you don't want the dog yelping as you drag it through an electromagnetic field."
"What if it bites her?" Margie said. "We don't know anything about this dog."
"That's her problem," Riley said. "I'm just trying to keep her from getting arrested and fired."
"He'd really fire me?" Nell said.
"If you dragged the agency into this? Hell, yes, he would. So would I. We have a reputation to protect."
"Hard to believe," Suze said coolly and was rewarded when he flushed a little.
"Don't take shots at the family business, lady," he said to her. "How would Jack feel if you dragged the law firm into this?"
Suze felt herself grow red. "How do you know about Jack?"
"I know everything." His face softened when he turned to Nell. "You know, this is really not a good idea."
"I know," she said. "But I have to. This is bigger than the dog, although the dog is enough."
"Okay." Riley stood up and nodded toward the parking lot. "It's quarter to eleven. If you're going to do this, we go now."
Nell stood up, too, and took the hamburger. "I'm going to do this."
"Wonderful," Riley said and headed for the door. "What about the check?" Suze said. "Pay it," he called back. "This is your party."
"I don't like him," Suze said to Margie.
Margie slid out of the booth. "Think of him as a growth experience."
"Oh, good, I've been wanting one of those," Suze said and tossed a twenty on the table. It was too much, but she was in a hurry to steal a dog.
Riley dropped them at the corner, and as Nell shut the door, she heard him say, "So tell me about yourself," to Margie. She and Suze walked across the lot lines until they found the address. Her watch said five till eleven when they ducked under the firs at the back of the dog's lot, and ten minutes later, the door to the huge glass sunroom at the back of the house opened, and a man shoved a shaggy, cowering dachshund out into the yard with his foot. "Go on," he said, sounding bored. "Make it fast."
He stood there in his expensive landscaping with his arms folded, and Nell whispered, "Oh, damn, he's going to watch it." She grabbed Suze's arm. "Go ring the front doorbell. Go."
"I don't wanna," Suze said, but she ran off into the dark, looking like a rogue beauty queen in her low-cut black tank top, and Nell zeroed in on the trembling dachshund, now squatting not ten feet away from her, elongated and frumpy. She unwrapped the hamburger and waved it around, hoping the darkness under the trees hid her from Farnsworth, still standing in the doorway. While she watched him, he turned to look back into the house, and then he swore and went inside.
"C'mon, SugarPie," she cooed softly into the darkness, waving the hamburger in front of her. "C'mere, baby."
SugarPie froze in midsquat, her eyes sliding back and forth over her long narrow nose as if she were trying to decide between the house and Nell and wasn't liking either much.
"C'mere, sweetie," Nell said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice, and SugarPie began to creep back toward the door.
"No, no, no!" Nell swooped down on the dachshund who squatted even closer to the ground in terror as Nell grabbed her around the middle, both ends sagging as she picked it up. "Shut up," she said, balancing the flopping animal on her hip as she took off, leaping over hydrangea and low boxwood to get to the darkness of the trees while SugarPie squirmed like a stretched, greased pig. The dog flinched when Nell dashed across the lot line-"Sorry, " she said. "Forgot about the collar"-and then it bounced on her hip, quivering but silent, its back legs scrabbling to find purchase on Nell's butt as she sped through the dark backyards. She heard Farnsworth yell, "SugarPie, you little bitch, where are you?" behind her, and then she was out onto the street, changing course to get as far away as she could, forgetting entirely where she was supposed to meet Riley.
Anyplace was better than here.
When she was six blocks away, she stopped to catch her breath and shifted SugarPie off her hip. "Sorry about that," she said, and the dog looked at her, its eyes peeled back, huge as golf balls, shuddering in her arms until it almost vibrated free. "No, really, it's okay." She bent down and put it on the smooth, white sidewalk under the streetlight, keeping one hand on its collar in case it decided to bolt. Instead, SugarPie collapsed, rolling over on her back to let her head fall back against the sidewalk, limp with fear, giving out a high-pitched moan that sounded like air escaping from a balloon.
"Good grief, don't do that," Nell said, trying to prop up the dog's head. If things got any worse, she was going to have to give it mouth-to-mouth. She could see herself explaining to Deborah Farnsworth, "Well, the good news is, I got your dachshund back. The bad news is, she fibrillated on the sidewalk."
"Come on, SugarPie," she said, looking uneasily back over her shoulder. "Pull yourself together. Be a woman."
She picked up the dog and cradled it in her arms and began to walk down the block toward the highway. "You'll be okay," she said to the dog. "Really, you just had to get away from that awful man. We'll have you back to the lady who loves you in no time."
SugarPie didn't seem convinced, but now that they were moving again, she tuned her vibrating down to an intermittent shudder.
"I swear," Nell said, walking faster, "you're looking at a life of hamburger and no yelling." She held the dachshund closer, and it sighed this time and put its head on her arm, and she stopped to look down into its eyes. "Hello," she said, and SugarPie stared back, pathetic and wide-eyed in the glow from the streetlight, her eyelashes fluttering like a Southern belle confronted by a Yankee. "I swear to you, everything is going to be all right."
A car pulled up beside her and she leaped in fear, starting SugarPie's shudder reflex again, but it was only Riley. She climbed in the backseat next to Suze, and Riley said, "Oh, good, you got the dog," with no enthusiasm whatsoever and drove them away from the scene of the crime.
"You were great," she told Suze as she put the dog on the seat.
"No, she was not," Riley said, watching them in the rearview. "She actually talked to this guy, and when he files the police report, he's going to describe her, assuming he ever looked at her face."
Suze tugged up on her tank top but it didn't do much good.
"Maybe he won't realize she was in on it," Margie said. "Maybe he'll never know."
"He'll know," Riley said. "And he'll remember her."
"There are a lot of thirty-something blondes in this city," Suze said.
"Not like you," Riley said. "You stick in a man's mind."
SugarPie sat on the seat between them, shaking like a maraca.
"Could you knock it off?" Nell said. "You're scaring the dog."
"I can relate," Riley said. "You scare the hell out of me, too. From now on, you dognap alone."
Gabe had already left for his first appointment when Nell arrived the next morning at nine-thirty, ready with an explanation for her lateness that didn't involve taking SugarPie over to Suze's and then explaining things to an angry Jack. That was just like Gabe. She'd gone to all the trouble of constructing a good explanation and then he wasn't there to appreciate it.
"How's the dog?" Riley said when he came out for his coffee, and Nell said, "Suze has her," and dialed SugarPie's mother to tell her the good news.
"I can't take that dog," Deborah Farnsworth said when Nell had explained the situation. "I think it's marvelous that you got her, but I can't take her. This is the first place he'd look."
"But she's your dog," Nell said, feeling the cold clutch of panic in her stomach. "Don't you-"
"To tell you the truth, I don't like her much," Deborah said. "She was a cute puppy, but then she grew up and got sneaky, and frankly, I'm just not a dog person. My husband was the one who wanted her."
Nell clenched her jaw. "Then why-"
"Because he was yelling at her," Deborah said, her voice righteous. "And also, I didn't want the son of a bitch to have her. How much do I owe you?"
"Nothing," Nell said, facing ruin.
She hung up and thought, I stole a dachshund for nothing. Another grand gesture shot to hell. Plus now she had a dog to cope with. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that at least SugarPie was unabused now, depending on what Suze was doing to her, but the fact remained, she had a hot dog on her hands. Maybe she could give it away. To somebody in another state.
She went back to work, trying to keep her mind off SugarPie, only surfacing two hours later when the phone rang. It was the cleaners, confirming that they'd be in the following Wednesday since they'd gotten payment for the previous two months. "Thank you," Nell said and apologized again. "Administrative mix-up."
She hung up and thought, Lynnie. Lynnie and Deborah and Farnsworth-the-dog-kicker and Tim…the world was full of selfish people lying and cheating and getting away with murder and letting other people clean up after them. And everything she'd done to make things right had left her with nothing but some vague guilt over vandalism, a slight glow after irresponsible sex, and a traumatized dachshund she didn't want.
If she went after Lynnie, at least she'd get the money back. She'd have something concrete to show people, to show Gabe. She'd be doing something useful again, something professional, something that was part of managing a business.
After some thought, she put the answering machine on and went out to visit her predecessor.
When Gabe got back to the office, Nell wasn't there again. He spared one thought for what she could possibly be doing to complicate his life this time and then went into his office, leaving his door open in case she came in.
She didn't, but the police did.
The door rattled and popped, and when he went out to look, he saw a man and a woman in uniform. Not anybody t, he knew. That damn landlady must have called them, and now he was going to have to come up with a good excuse for stalking an ex-employee.
"We're looking for Eleanor Dysart," the woman said, smiling at him while her partner slouched behind her.
"Not here right now," Gabe said cheerfully. "Can I help?"
"We'd like to talk to her," the woman said, just as cheerfully. "Do you know when she'll be back?"
"I don't even know where she is," Gabe said. "What did she do?"
"That's- "
"You're Gabe McKenna," the man said.
"Yes," Gabe said.
"She vandalized her ex-husband's office," the man said. "His new wife swore out a warrant."
Jesus H. Christ, Gabe thought. I hired a maniac.
"Nice, Barry," the woman said, but she didn't seem too upset. They'd been partners for a while, Gabe realized, and wondered what it would be like to work with somebody you didn't want to strangle half the time.
"She smashed a bunch of awards," Barry said. "The husband didn't seem too happy about the warrant, but the new wife…" He shook his head.
"She's mad," the woman officer said.
"I can make this go away," Gabe said. "Give me a couple of hours."
"We would be grateful," Barry said.
"We would be surprised," the woman said. "The new wife is not a cream puff."
"Neither is the old wife," Gabe said. "Give me until five."
He went back in the office and called Jack Dysart and got his administrative assistant, a smart, tough woman named Elizabeth.
"Jack's not here," Elizabeth told him. "He got a call and left."
"Tell me it was from his brother, Tim," Gabe said. "No," Elizabeth said. "I can have him call you."
"No," Gabe said. "Find him. Tell him his new sister-in-law, whatever her name is-"
"Whitney."
"Tell him Whitney has sworn out a warrant for Nell's arrest on vandalism charges."
"Nell?" Elizabeth sounded doubtful. "That doesn't sound like her."
"That sounds exactly like her," Gabe said. "Tell Jack we're going to have to lean on Tim until he drops the charge."
"God, yes," Elizabeth said. "Jack will have a fit."
"He likes Nell that much?"
"Suze likes Nell that much," Elizabeth said. "Jack will have Tim arrested if Suze is unhappy."
"Tell him I'm on my way," Gabe said and hung up. Interesting day, he thought and went out to OD to see what he could do to save his secretary's butt before he fired her.
Nell knocked on the door to the old brick duplex that matched the address in Lynnie's file, trying her best to look vague and unthreatening. When no one answered, Nell looked around the narrow porch and knocked again and then again and yet again, and finally a woman came to the door, a pretty brunette in her thirties sporting a low-cut red sweater. Nell said, "Lynnie Mason?" and the brunette said, "I'm not buying anything, thanks," and began to close the door.