The Housewife Assassin's Garden of Deadly Delights (16 page)

My son is lying to me.
 

And that, dear reader, is the icing on the cake of my day.

I can’t deal with it now, so I run upstairs to get ready for Jack’s inevitable call to arms.

Chapter 10

Leaching

Leaching is the process in which excess salts or nutrients are removed from your garden’s soil.

Sometimes, this is a good thing. For example, should you determine that your plants have been over-fertilized, you can use large quantities of fresh water to “wash” the soil.

It can also be a bad thing. In areas of extremely high rainfall, sometimes natural leaching takes place. In this case, in order for plants to thrive, an abundance of nutrients have to be introduced to the soil.

Leaching can take place in humans too. In Medieval times, it was presumed that leeches—used for the purpose of bloodsucking—could save one from a fatal illness by freeing your body of tainted blood.

This particular theory has been disproven.

That being said, however, putting a few of those leeches to work on those annoying busybodies who (metaphorically speaking) suck the life out of you may provide you with exactly what you need: nutrient-rich corpses that can help your garden grow.
 

“How’s Lee?” Jack asks, oh so casually, while we’re on the 405, heading into Beverly Hills.

“As you might expect—worried that this whole thing might blow up in his face.”

He shrugs. “You’re just saying that to make me happy.”

“No, I’m not. I’m saying it because it’s true.” Okay, now to prove that the best defense is a good offense. “I told you before the mission started that I was happy to let you keep Lee up to speed. If you—or for that matter, Ryan—changed your mind, you could have at least told me.”

“Ryan set up the call to Lee, and told me about it just as I walked in. His next call was to be to you.” He shakes his head angrily. “But, apparently, you already knew about the call, or you wouldn’t have been there with Lee in the first place.”

“Wrong again,” I retort. “Janie invited Trisha for a sleepover. I was dropping my daughter off when the president came out to invite me in on the call.”

“Oh? I thought he invited you in
for dinner.
At least, according to Aunt Phyllis.”
He turns toward me just in time to see my face go bright red.

“I…I couldn’t say no, how could I?” I look out my side window. “I mean, would you have said no?”

“Probably not,” he conceded. “But, then again, Lee has never asked me to dine with him.” He pulls up in front of the butcher shop and stops the car.

“You’re wrong,” I declare blithely. “We’re invited to dinner tomorrow night. Perhaps I should bow out, so that you two can come to some kind of understanding as to your roles in my life.”

“That’s for you to say,” Jack says quietly. “Not him—or me. That is, unless you say yes to my umpteenth proposal of marriage. So, what do you say?”
 

Oh, brother.
“Really, Jack Craig? You’re asking me
now
?”

“I’m just trying to catch you between flirtations. Between missions, near-death experiences. Or between, quite literally, catching you.”

“Why don’t you try quote-unquote catching me when it’s just the two of us, enjoying each other’s company without a care in the world? Maybe you’ll get the answer you want!” I jump out of the car, slamming the door after me.

This guy better not give us any grief. Seriously, I’m not in the mood.

It’s after hours at the Beverly Hills Meat Market, but there’s a light on in the rear of the building.

We walk around to that side. Through the frosted transom of the back door, I can make out a shadow of someone swinging something: a cleaver. It’s a one-man operation and the owner’s name is Jimmy Pennypacker, so that must be him.

“I guess we got here just in time,” Jack murmurs.
 
He raps on the door.

The figure’s arm is raised. He freezes when he hears the knock. For the longest time, he does nothing. Finally, the cleaver rattles onto the table as he shuffles toward the door, but he doesn’t open it. “Who the hell is it?” he growls.

“Federal agents, Mr. Pennypacker,” Jack responds. “May we come in?”

“Not until you show me some ID.” The man’s tone is belligerent.

Jack holds up his badge.
 

Eventually, the man unlocks the door, but he stands in the threshold, making it hard for us to look past him.

He’s big, brawny, and bucktoothed. The bib apron wrapped around his wide girth used to be white, but now it’s so coated with blood that it’s almost black.
 

“What’s this about?” he mutters.

“Mr. Pennypacker, you purchased some beef this morning, from Farris Ranch. Unfortunately, it’s tainted. We’ve come to retrieve it.”

“It hasn’t yet been distributed to customers, has it?” I ask.

For a second, Pennypacker’s mouth hardens into a snarl. But, just as quickly, it curls back into a bucktoothed grin.
 

He shrugs. “It’s on the table now, for a dinner tomorrow night. So, who’s going to reimburse me for it?”

Jack hands him a card of one of the FDA agents. “You can take it up with him.”

“Sure, whatever.” He stands aside. Sweeping his hand through the air, he murmurs, “
Entrez vous
.”

There’s a chill in the air, and it’s not just the air-conditioning.

“That’s one of them, there on the counter.” He points to the carcass he was cutting when we knocked on his door. It’s small, so definitely that of a calf.

Jack opens the duffel and takes out two of everything: HazMat jumpsuits, pairs of gloves, facemasks, goggles, booties, and large zip-up body bags. Pennypacker leans up against the wall, as if watching us putting on these duds is part of some sleazy floorshow.
 

I say sleazy because he’s practically salivating when I wiggle into my jumpsuit. “Need help with that zipper?” he offers with a wink.

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Does he notice that I shudder? Yes. Does he give a damn? No. Instead, he giggles.

A big man with a girlish squeal and a bloody apron. Something tells me he doesn’t date much.

Jack breaks the mood by asking, “Where’s the second one?”

Pennypacker points to the walk-in refrigerator. “In there. Hook Eight.”

“Donna, grab that one, will you? While I take this one out to the van.”

I nod, take the second bag, and head toward the refrigerator.
 

The door is made of heavy frosted glass. I open it, aligning the knob to a hook that allows it to stay open until I can drag out the carcass.
 

The refrigerator is cold and large. It’s really two rooms, not one, because it angles around a corner. All the meat hooks have numbers scrawled above them. Besides the carcasses, it holds a rolling table.
 

I unzip the body bag, leaving it that way on top of the table. Next, I push the table until I’m in front of Number Eight. It is the last one on the left-hand side, before turning the corner.
 

I have to angle the carcass up a few inches before heaving it onto the table. It’s heavy enough that when it lands, the table slides around the corner—

When I turn the corner to retrieve the cart, I discover the body of a naked young woman hanging from one of the hooks. Her lips are frosted, and her eyes are open.

“Ooops! You weren’t supposed to see that,” Pennypacker hisses behind me.

I turn to find him standing not ten feet away. He holds a cleaver in his hand.

I shove the rolling cart at him as hard as I can. The calf carcass gives it extra momentum. He grunts as it hits him square in the gut. It hurts enough that he’s still bent over when he pushes it away, but it doesn’t stop him from hurling his cleaver at me.
 

I duck just in time, and it pinwheels over me, creasing the wall just a few inches over my head.

I reach for it, but it’s stuck firmly in the redwood paneling.

“I don’t have time for this crap,” he mutters. He yanks an empty hook off the wall.

Great idea. I do the same.
 

He’s smart enough to keep the table between us. We circle each other like sumo wrestlers, looking for the perfect hold. His reach is longer than mine, so when he swipes his hook at me, I have to move fast.

Unfortunately, every time I take a step back, he moves the table even closer until I’m cornered against the wall, at which point he shoves the table away. “Sorry, bitch, but you and Muscles can’t take the meat. It’s got a date with destiny.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,” I say. “By the way, is it working for ya?”

My sass puts him over the top. He charges me with his hook.

I grab hold of the two directly over my head, so that I’m hanging on them. Quickly, I bend my knees, raise my legs, and with all my might, I kick as hard as I can—

Catching him in the chest.

I’ve shoved him so hard that he smacks into the rolling table. It breaks his momentum and throws him off balance. It doesn’t help that the bloody sawdust beneath his feet has him slipping and sliding backward across the floor, like a skater who has lost his balance while attempting a C-Cut. His hands twirl like pinwheels, but he can’t stop his fall, slamming his head into the hard concrete floor.
 

At one point, he must have let go of the hook because it flies high over his head—

And ricochets off the ceiling—

Directly into his right eye.

I guess it doesn’t matter, because I think he’s already dead.
 

I ease myself down off the hooks and walk over. Had it not been for the sawdust soaking up the blood from the crack in his head, he’d be sporting a perfect halo of deep-red blood.

Jack sticks his head through the door. Seeing Pennypacker on the floor, he says, “Uh-oh.”

“Frankly, I don’t think he’ll be missed. At least, not by her.” I jab a thumb at the woman hanging on the wall.

Jack walks over to the dead woman. Staring up at her, he murmurs, “I wonder what his relationship, if any, was with her?”

“This guy was behaving weirdly from the moment we walked through the door. Her body might be a big part of the reason.”
 

He shakes his head. “Let’s grab the tainted carcass and get the hell out.”

“But there’s more to this than a dead body, Jack. Pennypacker said that the Exodus carcasses ‘have a date with destiny.’ Why would this guy want to hold on to tainted meat?”

“Good question.” Jack walks out of the refrigerator, toward the desk. He rummages in the drawers until he finds what he’s looking for: a delivery slip.
 

Attached to it is a check stub. The check is made out to cash, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. It is drawn from the same Cayman Islands bank we found in Wellborne’s computer.

I look at the delivery address. “Oh, my goodness! It’s supposed to be delivered to POTUS’s house—for the dinner party he’s throwing tomorrow night!”

Jack laughs. “If you want it, you now have the best excuse in the world to skip dinner at Lee’s place again.”