Agnes and the Hitman

thursday

cranky agnes column #92

“Eating for Your Beating Heart”

There are very few recipes that couldn’t be improved by the addition of three-quarters of a pound of butter and a cup of heavy cream, but this is cold comfort when you’re laid out like a slab of beef in intensive care, listening to the blood pound in your ears as you seriously consider going toward the light. Think before you eat, people: Food should be the life of you, not the death of you.

At eight thirty the next morning, Shane cradled a cup of Agnes’s good coffee in Carpenter’s van as his partner looked at the mug shot on the computer screen and then at the real mug on the body on the floor of his van lying in the unzipped body bag and said, “He looks better dead.”

They were parked away from the house. Carpenter had come back to eat the omelets Agnes had made for them, complimenting her on the food to the point where Shane thought he’d have to add to the body count. Agnes had smiled through all of it in spite of the bruise on her jaw. That was another thing he loved about her: Sex made her cheerful as all hell.

The bruise on her jaw made him want to kill the guy all over again, though. He’d have to settle for making the moron who’d sent the guy sorry he’d ever been born.

He heard another vehicle pull up, and he glanced out the small one-way bulletproof window and saw Joey’s pickup. He opened the back door and gestured, and the old man came over and hopped in, pausing when he saw the body wrapped in thick black plastic on the middle of the floor. Shane slammed the door shut.

“Who the fuck is that?” Joey demanded.

“The guy who came to whack Agnes last night,” Shane said. “The second one. The first was night before last, some guy named Macy.”

“What the fuck?” Joey exploded.

“Good question,” Shane said. “What we got here, Joey, is a food chain of hitmen, and I need to know who got the original contract and who let it. And I need to know it fast, before some pro shows up here instead of these amateurs. So you got any idea who would try to have Agnes hit?”

Carpenter was typing on his computer, but Shane knew he was listening to everything.

“Hold on,” Joey said. “You’re saying someone’s trying to whack Agnes?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“No idea.”

“Shit.” Joey sat down and passed his hand over his face. “Is she okay? Is she in there alone?”

“She’s never alone now,” Shane said. “Lisa Livia’s in there, Garth’s in there, Doyle’s working on the bridge. Now answer my question.”

“Right.” Joey nodded. “Jesus. Well, Four Wheels probably ain’t too happy about Two Wheels moving on to the afterlife and Three Wheels disappearing.”

“I don’t see Four Wheels sending Garth and Macy on the same night,” Shane said.

“Or somebody might not like you guys trying to open up that shelter and might figure whacking Agnes will stop that.”

“Nobody knows we’re opening that shelter,” Shane said.

Joey stared at him like he was stupid. “Lots of people know about the basement being opened. Stanley Harrison, the health inspector, was down there yesterday. He’s been telling everybody about some acid thing you’re doing down there. There ain’t many secrets here in Keyes.”

You’re keeping some, Shane thought, but he shook his head. “I still don’t see how killing Agnes is going to stop us from opening up that damn shelter.”

“Excuse me,” Carpenter said. “But as I understand it, if Agnes dies, Taylor inherits the house as part of the partnership agreement because of a survivorship clause.”

“What?” Shane said, taken aback. “How the hell did you find that out?”

“Lisa Livia told me last night,” Carpenter said. “What I’m saying is, maybe the hit isn’t about stopping us from entering, maybe it’s about allowing someone else to enter if they think there’s five million dollars in that bomb shelter.”

“That fuckin’ hairball is tryin’ to hurt my little Agnes? I’ll kill the bum.” Joey pulled his gun out. “Let’s go whack him.”

“No,” Shane said, though it was tempting. “We have to stop the immediate threat. Agnes can take care of Taylor with a toothpick, she doesn’t need us for that.” He turned to Carpenter. “What do you have on the stiff?”

Carpenter read from the screen. “One Vincent Marinelli, aka Vinnie ‘Can of Tomatoes’ Marinelli.”

“Oh, fuck,” Joey muttered.

“I thought you didn’t know him,” Shane said.

“I never met him,” Joey corrected. “But I heard of the mutt. Small-time muscle man out of Savannah. Works for the Torrentino brothers sometimes. They’re the closest thing to the mob down in the low country since Frankie disappeared. They kick up, when they remember, to the boss in Atlanta, and the boss in Atlanta collects when he remembers those guys exist in Savannah. Small-time stuff.”

Carpenter’s fingers had been working the keyboard while Joey was talking. “The Torrentino brothers. Your uncle is right. Small time, but somewhat connected.”

“So somebody put out a hit on Agnes, and whoever got it subcontracted it to this Marinelli guy, who subcontracted it to Macy,” Shane said.

Carpenter looked over from his computer. “The package that I disposed of Monday night in Savannah was also affiliated with the Atlanta mob. I’ll print you out the information.”

“What the luck is he talking about?” Joey asked. “What package?”

“Put the gun away, Joey,” Shane said absently. A plan. He needed a plan. He turned to his uncle. “You gotta level with me, Joey. It’s important. Are you planning to rat out the Don when he comes here? Or whack him?”

“Hell no. Why would I do that?”

Shane rubbed his forehead, trying to forestall the headache that was growing. He was starting to sympathize with Wilson. “There’s a rumor someone is planning on ratting out the Don when he comes here for the wedding, and that the Don has hired somebody to hit that person in return. I want to know who that person is. And I want to know if any of that can be connected with these amateurs who are showing up here to hit Agnes.”

“How?” Joey asked.

“Are you going to answer any of my questions with anything other than a question?” Shane asked.

Joey sighed. “Rat the Don out about what?” He held up a hand. “Sorry. The Don’s been doing bad stuff for decades, and he’s never gotten caught.”

“There’s no statute of limitation on murder,” Shane said. “If the Don had Frankie killed and someone here has evidence on that, the Don would want that person silenced.”

Joey rubbed his hand across his chin. “Agnes wasn’t here then.”

“You were,” Shane said.

Carpenter leaned forward. “If there’s evidence in the vault pointing to the Don, he might be trying to keep us from getting in there.”

Shane looked at his uncle. “I was in Savannah to take out a professional painter named Casey Dean that the Don had brought in to take out this rat. A preemptive strike. The job got screwed up, and Casey Dean is still out there.”

Joey pointed at the body on the floor. “This mutt ain’t a professional and Macy sure wasn’t. And a professional wouldn’t subcontract. Especially on a job ordered by the Don.”

Shane was trying to fit the pieces. Think like Wilson. “That means we’re dealing with two contracts. One from the Don, put out on the rat. The other from somebody put out on Agnes. Plus we got Four Wheels sending the little Wheels out here looking for the necklace and the five million.”

“What a fucking mess,” Joey muttered.

“No shit,” Shane said. “Carpenter, stay here with Joey and watch Agnes. I’m going down to Savannah and talk to the Torrentino brothers and explain to them that either Amateur Night gets canceled or they do. I’ll be back in time to see what’s in the bomb shelter when the acid burns through the lock.”

“Any instructions?” Carpenter said.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “Shoot anybody who looks at Agnes funny. And anybody else you don’t like. I’m getting tired of this shit.”

“Somebody needs a hug,” Carpenter said. “Humor,” Shane said. “Har.” Then he left the van and headed for Savannah.

The Dixie Chicks were singing “Goodbye, Earl” on the stereo, Rhett was asleep under the kitchen table, and the Venus was standing unscathed by the basement door as Agnes made her sixth omelet, this one for Lisa Livia, and tried to write her column in her head.

“The hall is really clean,” LL said, taking her toast out of the toaster. “I’m sure some luminol would beg to differ, but the man is good.”

“Carpenter? Very good.” Agnes flipped the omelet closed. Okay, wedding cake, there must be something original to say about wedding cake. Maybe if she led with the Romans bashing the bride with it-

“Probably because he’s a man of the cloth.”

“You know, I find that so hard to believe.” Agnes slid the omelet onto a plate.

“I don’t see why.” Lisa Livia buttered her toast. “He’s a Spiritual Humanist. I think he’s very spiritual. He’s ordained and everything.”

“Uh-huh.” Agnes thought about saying, Do you know what the man does for a living: and then remembered that she was talking to Lisa Livia Fortunato. Of course she knew what he did for a living.

She handed LL her omelet as the phone rang and then answered it.

“Agnes,” God intoned.

“Good morning, Reverend Miller.”

Lisa Livia stopped with her fork poised above her omelet.

“I’ve been wondering,” Reverend Miller said. “Does Maria intend to have children?”

You putz. “Yes, Maria definitely plans to have children. Palmer wants enough for a foursome at least. Although what business that is of yours, I have no idea. Good-bye.” Agnes hung up and said to Lisa Livia, “Don’t even start, I know he’s an idiot.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lisa Livia said. “Carpenter’s ordained. Let’s keep him on as backup for the wedding.” She cut into her omelet.

“Yeah, I’m sure Evie Keyes will go for a Spiritual Whatsis performing her son’s wedding ceremony.” Agnes began to break eggs into her blue bowl for her omelet. “You haven’t seen my To Do List, have you? It has my cake order on it, and I don’t think I’m going to make it into Savannah today, so I’m going to have to call it in and then rush in tomorrow and pick it up-”

“Why don’t we both go later today?” Lisa Livia said. “I need to get some stuff to clean the mildew off the Venus anyway. And we can sell Taylor’s ring then, too. Pay for some landscaping if Garth can’t steal what we need.”

Agnes frowned at her as she began to whisk. “Garth is not stealing anything. We are not contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I’ve got to go talk to his grandpa to see if he can stay in school. And I’ve got to get him some better clothes. He went home last night and snuck some out of his trailer, but they’re worse than the ones he was wearing.”

“Considering the minor in question, I doubt we’d be contributing much.” Lisa Livia forked up more omelet. “I think he’s fully funded his juvie trust. This omelet is really good.”

The phone rang and Agnes answered it and then heard silence.

“Hello?” she said, and then Brenda said, “Agnes. I was just calling to see if Lisa Livia was all right. We had a disagreement and-”

“She’s right here,” Agnes said, thinking youtreacherous bitch.

“That’s all right, then,” Brenda said. “As long as she’s safe. Everything okay out there?”

“Yep,” Agnes said. “Wedding’s on schedule. Everything’s fine. Here’s LL.” She held out the phone to Lisa Livia. “Your mother.”

LL rolled her eyes and took the phone. “Hello, Ma. Yes, I’m fine. Agnes gave me my old bedroom back. Just like old times. What? Yes, I know it isn’t like old times unless you’re here, but Agnes is making me breakfast, so it’s damn near. Okay.” She frowned at the phone and then handed it back to Agnes. “I have no idea what that was about, but she cut me off and hung up on me when she heard you were making me breakfast. Jealous much?”

“I really don’t care.” Agnes dropped butter into the omelet pan for her own breakfast and watched it melt. “Listen, Garth is not a juvenile delinquent. He’s really smart. I know he’s not educated,” she said when Lisa Livia looked like she was about to sneer, “but he’s a fast learner, he’s picked up everything that Doyle has thrown at him so far, and he was amazing with the flamingos. I bet his mama was smart. That whole naming him Garth because of the ‘Shameless’ song makes her sound like our kind of people, you know? And when it comes to cunning, you can’t put anything past a Thibault. I’m thinking Garth could really be something if he gets a chance. And good clothes are a start, give him some pride.”

“Oh, God.” Lisa Livia sighed. “You’re going to save Garth.”

“I am not.” Agnes poured her eggs into the melted butter. “But it’s not exactly saving a kid to make sure he gets to go to high school. Come on, LL. And if he wants to live here in the barn as a caretaker where there’s heat and plumbing and a computer for his homework, and his grandfather says it’s okay, then I don’t see the problem.”

“He’s a teenaged boy,” Lisa Livia said. “Try sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

Agnes shook her head. “Like he wasn’t going to get those in the swamp. At least here he’ll go to hell with the Internet and hot water.”

“Okay,” Lisa Livia said. “I’ll put Palmer on the clothes. It’ll give him something to do. Grooms are useless before a wedding anyway. But you’re not fooling me-you just like feeding him. You like having a lot of people milling around that you can cook for. If you could get Cerise and Hot Pink up here, life would be perfect.”

Agnes grinned at her, feeling all sunny and warm inside around the dark hollow parts she was trying not to look at. “You know as hellish as this week has been, and even considering I have to wait until last to get my omelet, this has been the happiest I’ve ever been. I mean people are trying to kill me, but this house is full of the best people and they’re all eating my food and watching out for me and… I’m happy. Is that crazy?”

“Maybe,” Lisa Livia said. “But I’m loving the omelet, so I’m not arguing.”

“I like having you here,” Agnes said, throwing grated cheese onto her eggs. “I like it that Joey shows up every day and that Carpenter wanders through and that Garth is putting in hydrangeas right now even though he has no receipts.”

“And?” Lisa Livia said.

“And what?” Agnes said, keeping her eyes on her eggs.

“Shane,” Lisa Livia said. “God, are you transparent”

“Shane.” Agnes nodded. “He’s a good friend, but that has to be it I mean, he’s a hitman, and I’m giving up violence, and he’s never going to be stable, and my next guy is going to be permanent, a nice regular guy, you know? But Shane’s a good guy, a good friend.” She caught Lisa Livia looking at her with contempt. “What?”

“You’re insane, that’s what”

“I don’t see why that’s insane. I think that’s a good plan. Dr. Garvin would approve.”

“No, you’re insane.” Lisa Livia cut into her omelet again. “There’s nobody I’d go to faster in a crisis, but you are nuts. And not in a cute way. You have been since I met you.”

Agnes looked at her, stunned. “I was fourteen when I met you.”

Lisa Livia nodded, chewing omelet. “And everybody in that damn boarding school was scared of you. You know what the first thing they told me was? Don’t make Agnes mad. Seniors told me that.”

Agnes looked down at her omelet and began to lift the edges automatically. “They said that? I thought they thought I was an untouchable because my dad and mom never came back.”

“They never got that far. Evidently something happened the first week you were there and they saw the red light in your eyes and you became legend. Anyway, by the end of the first week I was there, I knew exactly who you were. My kind of people. And I asked to be your roommate and here we are.”

Agnes swallowed. “They were afraid of me?”

“Agnes, it was a good thing,” Lisa Livia said. “Because otherwise, they’d have made your life hell because you had no parents and wore cheap clothes. Thank God they thought you were Carrie.”

“Oh, God.” Agnes turned off the heat under the omelet pan because she’d lost all concentration.

“Look, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to ruin your day-”

“Somebody tried to kill me last night, Lisa Livia,” Agnes snapped. “Ancient boarding school news is not likely to ruin my day today.”

“-I’m just trying to explain why finding a nice guy is not in the cards for you,” Lisa Livia finished. “What the hell are you going to do with a nice guy?”

“I can be nice,” Agnes said.

“Why would you want to be?” Lisa Livia said.

Agnes stopped, dumbfounded.

“Agnes, you’re furious and fascinating and wonderful. You should probably not stab anybody with a meat fork again, but why be nice when you can be Cranky Agnes?” Lisa Livia pointed her fork at the red glasses logo on Agnes’s apron. “You think you’re syndicated in a hundred newspapers because you’re nice? You think you’d be in any newspaper if you wrote a column called ‘Nice Agnes’?”

“I’m talking about my personal life-”

Lisa Livia slapped her hand on the table. “I’m talkin’ about you. Stop pretending you’re normal. You’re insane. Make that work for you. That Dr. Garvin shit where you step on yourself all the time, that’s not good. Forking people isn’t good, either, but jeez, Agnes, you talk about finding some normal guy-hell, that’s how you ended up with Taylor, remember? You talked about nice he was, how normal he was, how easygoing he was. You went out and found the most white-bread guy in America, and he turned out to be a jackal. Maybe that’s not a good plan for you, Agnes.”

“Well, hell, Lisa Livia,” Agnes said mildly. “Maybe a hitman isn’t a good plan, either.”

Lisa Livia picked up her fork again. “Well, he sure put a smile on your face this morning.”

“That’s just sex,” Agnes said, and thought, That’s a lie, and then Rhett woke up and barked, and Agnes realized somebody was standing on her back porch looking at her through the screen door. “Hello?”

“I knocked,” the woman said, her drawl more of a chirp. “I truly did, but you all didn’t hear. I’m Kristy. From Wesley’s Wonderful Wedding Memories.”

Lisa Livia rolled her eyes.

“Come on in, Kristy,” Agnes said. “This is Lisa Livia, the mother of the bride, and I’m Agnes.”

Kristy opened the screen door and came in, cute as a bug with her pixie face, short dark hair, and tight little body strung with cameras and bags and a lot of other stuff that looked professional but could have been garbage for all Agnes knew. Rhett looked at her and barked again, and Agnes shushed him, so he sighed and went back to sleep as Kristy smiled at Lisa Livia.

“You can’t possibly be the mother of the bride,” Kristy said to her. “You must be her sister.”

“Right,” Lisa Livia said, and kept eating omelet.

“Have you had breakfast?” Agnes said to Kristy, looking at her cheese omelet with longing, but ready to give it up for hospitality’s sake.

“No, ma’am, but thank you for the offer,” Kristy said, and Agnes liked her better.

“Well, feel free to look around,” Agnes said. “The wedding is going to be in the gazebo and the reception is in the barn, which you’ll find if you follow the flagstone path off to the right of the porch there. Anything you need to know?”

“I’ll just wander around taking some trial shots,” Kristy said, batting her big blue eyes. “Any of the wedding party present besides Mrs. Fortunato?” She nodded to Lisa Livia.

“Miss. Never married.” Lisa Livia picked up her toast.

Kristy nodded again, having evidently given up on bonding.

“Nope,” Agnes said. “Unless you count the flamingos.”

Kristy nodded, smiled, and escaped through the back door.

“I’m just saying,” Lisa Livia said when she was gone, “you have a lot more in common with Shane than with some normal guy. Taylor freaked when you attacked him with a meat fork. Shane took it away from you and made you come your brains out. I think that’s significant.”

“He kills people,” Agnes said. “Lucky for you,” Lisa Livia said.

Agnes picked up her omelet and took it to the table and sat down across from Lisa Livia. “I’m definitely not going to have sex with him again.”

Lisa Livia nodded. “I’m definitely going to sleep with Carpenter.” Agnes sighed.

“Agnes, stop fighting your nature. You’re a killer. Accept that and you’ll be a lot happier.”

“I’ve never killed anybody,” Agnes protested, and then stopped, realizing that might have sounded holier than thou, considering the people she was hanging out with.

“And with the grace of God you never will,” Lisa Livia said. “The important thing is, we know we can if we have to.” She finished her omelet and pushed her plate away. “So what are we doing today?”

“I have to bake the wedding cakes,” Agnes said, “and call in that cake supply order to the bakery in Savannah. And write my column. Clean up the Venus with you. And sometime in there, I’d like to go through your mother’s boxes and find something that will completely destroy her life so that she’ll never again feel the warmth of the sun on her face or know a happy moment.”

“There you go,” Lisa Livia said, and got up to take her plate to the sink.

“And then I have to make lunch,” Agnes said, and began to eat her omelet.

Shane pulled up to the old warehouse on the edge of the swamp on the east side of Savannah. He’d already decided subtlety was not the desired course of action. He just didn’t feel like it. He kept his sunglasses on and got out of the Defender into the humid heat just as a stocky man with the rippling muscles of a steroid-injecting weight lifter and the sloping forehead of Cro-Magnon man stepped out of a personnel door set in the larger sliding doors in the front of the steel building. He wore flip-flops, swim trunks, and a black muscle shirt, which showed off not only the aforementioned muscles, but also a dazzling array of tattoos from his wrists to his shoulders.

“Whaddya want?” the man asked.

“You speaking to me?”

“Yeah, I’m speaking to you.”

Shane shook his head. “You’re supposed to say: ‘I don’t see nobody else standing there.’“ “What?”

Shane sighed. No one watched the classics anymore. “The Torrentino brothers in?”

The man’s head jerked in what Shane assumed was a negative. “No, and you ain’t going in there.”

“Wrong,” Shane said, and hit the weightlifter in the throat with a quick strike of his fist, avoiding all the layers of muscles elsewhere on the body. Weightlifter’s hands flew up his neck as he gasped in pain.

Shane snap kicked into his groin, eliciting a squeal of pain, and the weightlifter went to his knees, curling over, his hands going from neck to balls. Shane did an elbow strike to the back of the man’s head and he was out, prostrate on the ground.

Shane checked the unconscious body for weapons and found none, but he did find a money clip, with “Rocko” picked out in rhinestones, holding twenty-eight crisp hundred-dollar bills. He flex-cuffed Rocko’s bulky arms behind his back just in case he came to before the business inside was done, and then went inside the warehouse, but the weightlifter had been telling the truth, the place was empty. He did a quick search and found evidence that the Torrentinos had been there, including two La-Z-Boys and a large-screen TV with an impressive collection of porn videos stacked to one side.

The Torrentinos as the masterminds behind the hits began to seem less likely than ever. But Rocko with those hundred-dollar bills…

Shane heard cursing and abandoned the warehouse. Rocko was sitting up, moaning, for which Shane was grateful, doubtful he could toss that much unconscious weight into the Defender. It also meant Rocko had a very thick skull, which wasn’t surprising.

“On your feet,” Shane said, giving Rocko a quick poke in the back with the muzzle of the dock.

Rocko muttered something, but staggered to his feet. Shane guided him over to the Defender and shoved him into the passenger seat, his hands still awkwardly secured behind him with the plastic flex-cuff. Shane got in the driver’s seat. He threw the truck in gear and drove out of the parking lot. Then he remembered something. He dug in his pocket and pulled out Agnes’s To Do List.

Shane reached down and turned on the navigation system and punched in the address for the bakery in downtown Savannah. He was glad for the tinted windows as he drove into the city. Rocko was becoming more agitated as consciousness seeped into his brain, so after Shane double-parked in front of the bakery, he whacked him on the head again.

Then he walked into the bakery.

“Can I help you?” the woman behind the counter said.

Shane checked the list. “I need fifteen pounds of fondue and-”

The woman said, “Excuse me?”

“It’s for a wedding cake.”

“You mean fondant.”

“Whatever. And…” He handed Agnes’s To Do List over to her. She squinted at it. “Is this the Agnes Crandall order?”

“Yeah.”

She handed it back. “She called it in. I thought she was going to pick it up later. Doesn’t matter. It’s ready.”

Ten minutes later, two bags of miscellaneous cake stuff and three five-pound tubs of icing heavier, the Defender was heading north.

He glanced over. Rocko was blinking the blood out of his eyes from the second whack. He had an incredibly thick skull.

“Try not to get blood on that cake stuff.”

“Fuck you,” Rocko said, shaking the blood off his face and onto one of the tubs of fondant.

Shane sighed. “You set up the Two Rivers hit. Who hired you and who was the target?”

Rocko turned his beady little eyeballs toward him. “Who are you?”

Shane sighed. “My name is Shane.”

Rocko spit on him. “Fuck you, Shane.”

“Rocko, we can do this hard or we can do this easy. You got paid five thousand for a contract You subcontracted Vinnie ‘Can of Tomatoes’ Marinelli two thousand to do the actual job. He subcontracted it to a dumbshit named Macy for five hundred. Both Vinnie and Macy are dead. I killed them. The job isn’t done. So whoever paid you isn’t gonna be happy. Who paid you?”

“Fuck you.”

Shane crossed an old turn-bridge over the Savannah River. He saw a sign for the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge and turned off, drove down a one-lane dirt road, then onto what could barely be called a track until he was pretty sure they were deep into the swamp. Then he stopped the Defender, got out, went around to the passenger side and opened the door, quickly stepping back, Glock at the ready. “Get out.”

“You going to kill me?” Rocko demanded.

“Not if you tell me what I want to know.” Shane reached into his pocket and pulled out an airline voucher. “Then you take this to the Savannah Airport, get on a plane, and no one around here ever sees you again. Got it?” He slapped the voucher down on the hood of the Defender.

Rocko’s eyes shifted from the voucher to Shane. “Bullshit.”

“Who gave you the contract and who was the contract on?”

A very large alligator basking in the sun about fifty feet away was eyeing them, perhaps sizing them up for a snack. Shane squinted. The gator had a scar where one of its eyes should have been. It was a hard life everywhere, even in the swamp. The one-eyed reptile slid into the water with a splash and began to lazily move toward them.

Rocko heard the splash and glanced over his shoulder. “I took an oath. I ain’t violating it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Rocko frowned. “To make my bones with the mob, I gotta stick with the oath, right? I can’t violate the contract. It’s like, ya know, that doctor-patient thing. Or when a lawyer talks to a client.”

Spare me from idiots, Shane thought. “That’s movie bullshit.” A mosquito landed on his neck and took a bite. Halfway from its resting spot, the gator had paused, sizing up the situation with one eye. Shane figured it had more brains than Rocko.

Rocko’s head moved back and forth on his bull neck. “Can’t squeal. Mob oath.”

“Mob oath. You telling me Don Fortunato hired you?” Shane asked.

Rocko’s eyes widened. “You from the Don?”

“If I was from the Don, would I be asking you if the Don hired you?”

The furrow appeared in Rocko’s forehead as he tried to figure that out. “I’d like to work for the Don.”

Scratch the Don, Shane thought. He saw the muscles in Rocko’s shoulders begin to bulge and he knew what he was doing and he also knew that the plastic flex-cuff probably wasn’t going to hold. The tattoos on Rocko’s arms were rippling now from the effort. A naked woman on the right bicep was swaying seductively.

“Rocko,” Shane said with a deep sigh. “I really don’t want to kill you. But I will if you come at me. Think, damn it. There’s no mob oath if you’re not working for the mob. So you can tell me.”

The flex-cuff went with an audible pop and Shane shot Rocko in the left thigh as he started to charge at him. Cursing, the weightlifter grabbed the leg and hopped about.

“I told you not to do that,” Shane said.

The gator was moving forward again, smelling blood.

Shane moved toward the truck. “Rocko, we need to get out of here.”

“Fuck you,” Rocko said, hopping away from the Defender. “I can’t believe you fucking shot me.”

“I’ll shoot you again if you don’t tell me who the contract was on. Agnes Crandall?”

Rocko was in too much pain to hide the look of recognition that flickered across his face at the name.

“Okay, got that. Now tell me the guy who hired you and I’ll get you back to the truck before the gator gets you,” Shane said, and when Rocko looked even more stubborn, he added. “I’m telling you, you dumb fuck, there is no mob oath.”

“Hey, she made me take it, right there on the phone. I took the mob oath-”

“She?” Shane said.

Rocko glared at him. “Fuck you, I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ and I ain’t breakin’ the oath, neither.” He turned and began a limping run along the edge of the swamp.

“Damn it, Rocko!” Shane yelled, but it was already over, the gator came out of the water, an explosion of green scales and big teeth, and closed the ground between them in seconds, its jaws snapping shut on Rocko’s leg. Rocko screamed, and Shane fired a couple of rounds into the gator, feeling bad for it, but the bullets seemed to have no effect as it rolled with Rocko into the dark water, dragging him into the depths.

The surface of the water boiled for a few seconds, then became still.

Shane waited to see if Rocko would reappear, but after a couple of minutes he knew Rocko was sleeping with the gator.

He got back into the Defender, pulled onto the dirt trail, and accelerated, heading for the refuge exit. They don’t make ‘em like Rocko anymore, Shane thought as he drove back toward Keyes. Darwin had pretty much explained why. He’d have felt bad except that Rocko’s next stop would have been heading to Two Rivers to drill Agnes in exchange for five large after having sent two assholes to terrify her two nights running. For that, the dumbfuck deserved the gator.

And now nobody else would be showing up to shoot Agnes.

One more stop at a jeweler Joey knew to cash in Agnes’s engagement ring for top dollar and then he could go home and see what was in the bomb shelter. First guess, Frankie’s body. Second guess, five million dollars. Third guess, a bunch of bad survival food and a dozen Playboy magazines from 1982. The third one was the most likely-

Shane’s sat phone rang, the tone designating the cut out number he had used to call Casey Dean. Shane looked at the text message:

sorry i missed your call.

enjoy the wedding.

see you there. cd.

“Humor,” Shane said to the phone. “Har.” He punched the jeweler’s address into the GPS and wondered what Agnes was making for lunch.

“I know a little more than I did before I left,” Shane said as he drank the tall glass of lemonade Carpenter had brought out onto the porch after lunch. “I know the Marinelli/Macy contract was let on Agnes. I don’t know who let the contract, except that a woman made the call, and Rocko thought it was mob related. Whatever that means.”

“Well, that’s a help,” Joey muttered.

Shane turned on his uncle. “Don’t start with me, Joey. You called me into this mess and you’re still holding something back from me. I think the contract is defunct, given that I’ve taken out the food chain, but I still want to know who hired Rocko in case whoever it is decides to try again. Plus we’ve still got your old pal Four Wheels out in the swamp sending his descendants in here.” He looked at Carpenter, who was leaning back with his lemonade, smiling as he listened to Agnes and Lisa Livia talk in the kitchen. “And then I got this.” Shane handed his cell phone to Carpenter, letting him read the text message from Dean.

“Interesting,” Carpenter said.

“What’s the status of the hatch?” Shane asked him.

“The lock’s burned through,” Carpenter said. “I rigged a hydraulic jack to pull it open when you got back, so whenever you’re ready.”

“Who’s in there?” Shane asked, nodding toward the house.

“Agnes, Lisa Livia, and some woman named Kristy,” Joey answered. “Wedding photographer. A box came full of flamingo pens with pink feathers on their heads, and they’re lookin’ at ‘em.” He seemed bemused by that.

“Why-” Shane stopped when he spotted Xavier pull up to the bridge and park just short of it and Doyle come crawling out from underneath the bridge like some kind of troll. “What the hell is Xavier doing here?”

“Damned if I know,” Joey said.

Xavier got out of his car and came over the bridge, where Doyle met him, but the detective’s focus was on the house as he crossed the lawn, Doyle following, yammering at him.

“Let’s just invite the whole damn town.” Shane looked at his uncle. “You know, Joey, if we find Frankie in there, and anything at all points to you having killed him, there isn’t much I can do to keep Xavier off your ass.”

“I ain’t worried,” Joey said. “I didn’t kill him. I just want to know what happened that night.”

Xavier came up the porch steps, Doyle stomping up next to him.

“What can we do for you, Detective?” Shane asked.

“I understand there’s been some excavation work in the basement,” Xavier said. “I even heard a rumor there’s some sort of bomb shelter out there in the backyard and a tunnel that leads to it. And I heard that you fellows have opened up that tunnel and are getting ready to open the hatch to that bomb shelter.”

“You sure heard a lot,” Joey muttered.

“And where is Detective Hammond?” Shane asked, not wanting that doofus wandering around unsupervised.

“Detective Hammond appears to have taken a long lunch break,” Xavier said. “I believe at the marina. Missing all the excitement, that boy is. Sort of like when they opened Capone’s vault on TV.”

“There was nothing in Capone’s vault,” Shane noted.

“I’m hoping for better results here,” Xavier said.

“Some could say you was trespassing,” Joey said.

“Some say you might have some trouble if that bomb shelter gets opened,” Xavier said.

“Like who?” Joey demanded.

“Oh, there’s been a lot of talk.” Xavier pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his white coat. “For example. This here is Miz Agnes’s criminal record. I was quite surprised to note the contents. Turns out she’s wielded a frying pan before with violent effect.”

Shane looked at Joey and noted that shut the old man up for the moment.

“I also heard your Miz Agnes is pretty handy with a cooking fork to the neck.”

Fucking Taylor, Shane thought. There was going to be one fewer chef in the world shortly.

“Somebody swear out a complaint?” Joey said, still cool.

“No,” Xavier admitted, and Shane thought, Not Taylor then, somebody Taylor told. The detective scowled toward the river. “What the hell is that noise?”

“Flamingos,” Joey said. “So all you got is some gossip and some old paper, I don’t-”

Agnes came out onto the porch with Lisa Livia and a trim brunette draped in cameras. Opening the shelter was not going to be the clandestine affair Shane had had in mind. He had indeed forgotten what Keyes was like. He looked toward the bridge, expecting to see the local high school marching band come across with cheerleaders and the rest of the town population.

“I brought a flashlight” Xavier cheerfully held up a heavy-duty light

“I rigged lights,” Carpenter said. “You won’t need it”

“Can we get this over with?” Lisa Livia said, and Shane could feel the edge coming off her, nothing like her usual voluptuous vibe. He glanced at Agnes and she nodded curtly, but her tension was for LL, standing at her elbow, and he remembered that for Lisa Livia, Frankie wasn’t some dead mobster, he was her father, and they might be about to open his tomb.

“You sure you want to-”

“Yes,” Lisa Livia snapped, and Shane led the way into the house, past the kitchen table that held a box full of lurid pink pens with feather tops, and down the ladder, holding it in place as everybody else climbed down.

They all waited in the rec room while he and Carpenter went down the fifty-foot tunnel and manned the hydraulic jack. It was a complicated arrangement of cables and blocks of wood that Shane didn’t even attempt to figure out He had enough of a headache trying to figure out who was trying to kill who and why.

“Grab that,” Carpenter said. Shane grabbed the lever indicated. “Ready?” Carpenter asked. Shane nodded. “Let’s do it.”

In concert, they began to apply pressure. At first there was no obvious result except a tightening of the steel cables. Then an ominous creaking of the wood blocks, the cables ran over. “Don’t worry,” Carpenter said. “I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

“Opened twenty-five-year-old bomb shelters?”

“I opened a bank vault once that had been shut for sixty years.”

“What happened?” Shane said as he leaned into the level.

“Wall cracked a little,” Carpenter said, and Shane looked up at the arched ceiling above him.

“How much is a little?”

“I got it open. It’ll pop, just like-”

The hatch popped open with a whoosh and a creak of rusty hinges that echoed down the tunnel and through the house.

Voices rose from the other end of the basement, a babble of questions and some contention.

“It’s all right,” Shane called back.

“No, it isn’t,” Agnes yelled back to him. “Brenda’s here.”

Brenda’s voice floated down the tunnel. “Is the shelter open?”

“No,” Shane called back, but she came tapping down the long tunnel in her heels, and the rest of them followed her. He sighed and turned toward the open hatch and stepped over the lower edge.

The first thing he saw was a safe, its door wide open.

Inside the safe was a frying pan, its rim crusted with very old blood.

Inside the frying pan and piled around it in the safe were empty money wrappers. Lots and lots of them. Enough, Shane thought, to go around five million dollars.

“Oh, my God!” Brenda said, her voice full of drama.

“That’s not my frying pan,” Agnes said from behind him, and he turned and saw them, crowding the door, Brenda with her head turned away, Xavier and Agnes behind her, and next to Agnes, Lisa Livia looking pale and the thin brunette holding up her camera.

“I told you,” Brenda said to Xavier, her voice rich with distress. “I told you. Joey and Four Wheels killed him. I can’t bear to look.”

“Look at what, Miz Dupres?” Xavier said.

“At…” Brenda turned to look into the shelter, at first with dread and then with disbelief. “What… Where’s Frankie?”

“He’s not in there,” Lisa Livia said, her voice as stunned as Brenda’s, and Agnes put her arm around her friend.

Lisa Livia turned and walked back down the tunnel.

“She wanted her dad dead?” Shane asked, and Agnes shook her head, giving him a look that said she’d tell him later.

“Joey came in and moved the body,” Brenda was saying to Xavier, grabbing his sleeve. “Him and Four Wheels. They moved it!”

“How?” Xavier asked, but Carpenter had already moved past the safe and was looking up.

“Hmm,” Carpenter said, and began to climb up an old metal ladder welded to the side of the shelter.

Shane went to see what his partner had seen and realized that there was a door at the top, and when Carpenter pushed on the door and flipped it open, sunlight poured in, and above that, a ceiling, blue with gold stars.

“That’s my gazebo,” Agnes said from beside Shane.

Shane turned back to where Xavier was looking at the frying pan.

“Well, someone got whacked a good one,” Xavier said, and looked at Agnes.

“That is not mine,” Agnes said again.

“This is now a crime scene-” Xavier began and then the earth began to shake. “What the hell?”

“Did you order some trucks?” Carpenter said to Agnes from the top of the ladder.

“Trucks?” Agnes said.

“Five of them. Dump trucks. Heading for your bridge.”

“No,” Agnes said, running for the tunnel.

Shane went to follow her and caught a glimpse of Brenda. She looked like the news about the trucks was making her feel much better.

Agnes ran through the kitchen, past the Venus and Lisa Livia, who said, “What now?” as if she didn’t care, then out through the hall and across the lawn, waving her hands and yelling, “Stop, no, go back,” but the dump trucks kept rolling across the bridge; first one, bumping over the fragile supports, onto the drive, across the lawn and down to the riverbank, where Cerise and Hot Pink honked their rage; then another, the bridge groaning before the truck went to the river; then a third, the supports screaming this time before the truck went on; and then, inevitably, the fourth hitting the bridge, the supports splintering with a crash, that truck sinking into the cut, leaving the fifth and last truck marooned on the other side.

“What are you doing?” Agnes screamed as she got to the bridge, but the driver was just as furious, waving his paperwork at her, asking what the hell business she had ordering five trucks of sand to cross a substandard bridge. “I’m suing you people,” he yelled.

“I didn’t order this,” Agnes yelled back. “What the hell is it?”

The driver pulled out an invoice. “Eighty cubic yards of pink sand, for a wedding at Two Rivers mansion.”

“Pink sand?” Agnes said, dumbfounded.

“Who ordered it?” Shane asked, and she jerked back, surprised to find him beside her.

The driver squinted at the invoice. “A Brenda Dupres.”

Agnes turned and yelled, “Brenda,” but Brenda was already tapping down the steps in her spike heels, looking enraged, a tiny blond D-cup tigress.

“What did you do to my clock?” she said, stamping across the grass, pulling her spike heels out of the earth with vicious energy.

“Some shithead showed up last night to kill me,” Agnes said to her, “and he shot up your damn clock instead. Now what the hell is all this pink sand?”

“Maria wanted a flamingo-themed wedding,” Brenda said, reining in her temper as she drew herself up. “I thought pink sand would fit right in with everything else here. I know how nasty the shore can look when the tide is out. But I never dreamed it would break the bridge.” She looked down to the river, where the first three trucks were dumping their sand on the shore, Kristy dutifully snapping pictures of it all. “One, two, three…” She blinked her eyes at the truck stuck in the cut. “Four. There should be another truck-oh, yes, there it is.” She waved at the driver on the road to the bridge. “Five.”

“There ain’t nothing more coming out here, lady,” the driver from the wrecked truck said, “except a tow truck.”

“Oh,” Brenda said, sadly. “Looks like it’s the country club for the wedding then.” She smiled at Agnes. “Fiddle-dee-dee.”

Agnes turned on her. “No, it is not the country club.”

Anger is not your friend, Agnes.

Neither is Brenda Fortunato, Dr. Garvin.

Brenda smiled. “Agnes. Honey. The baker canceled. The florist canceled.” She took a step closer. “The photographer sent an assistant who doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing. The health inspector won’t let you serve dinner. You tried to kill the caterer.” She took another step closer. “The house is only half-painted. The bridge is out. Your kitchen is a crime scene. And you owe me for a very expensive antique grandfather clock.” She was almost nose to nose with Agnes now. “You simply can’t do it, Agnes. You’re finished.” Her eyes narrowed. “Give up.”

Agnes felt her breath go, felt the old dizziness take hold as the red washed over her again, and then she heard Lisa Livia in her head again, saying, Face it, Agnes, you’re a killer, thought of Shane, putting those two bullets in the guy in the laundry room, walking through the kitchen firing at the guy in the hall until his gun was empty, never losing his temper, no expression on his face at all. Another part of her brain knew that Shane had his arm around her waist, ready to haul her off if she went for Brenda’s throat, but the part of her brain where the red mist lived was changing course, looking at Brenda now, knowing that professional killers did not get mad. They just ended things.

“You listen to me,” she said to Brenda, her voice like ice. “On Saturday at noon, the cake will be beautiful, the flowers will be magnificent, the photographer who is taking pictures of the sand right now will be taking pictures of the bride, the catering will be amazing and legal, and the bridge will not only be back, it will be so strong that twenty trucks could cross it. And the house will be the house you have always dreamed of having, and, as God is my witness, will never have because I will defeat you utterly and completely, I will grind your face in the dust, I will make you nothing before the world, Brenda Dupres, and my kitchen will not be a crime scene because I will have proved that you picked up that goddamned frying pan in that goddamned bomb shelter and whacked your goddamned husband with it twenty-five years ago, and you will spend the rest of your life in an orange jumpsuit in prison where there is no moisturizer and your face will look like old luggage and the only man you’ll be able to seduce is a guard named Bubba with no teeth, so go back to your boat and pray, Brenda, get down on your knees and pray to whatever obscene and vicious god that made you that you do not cross me again because I will destroy you.”

Brenda had stopped, her mouth open, gaping, and Shane had loosened his hold on her, and a silence had fallen over the landscape in general.

“Agnes Crandall,” Brenda said finally, her voice tremulous, “I do declare, you’re insane.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Agnes said, and walked back toward her house.

When Agnes was gone, and a shaken Brenda had picked her way across what was left of the bridge supports to her Caddy parked on the far side, Shane found Carpenter. “Stay here. Check out that shelter. See if you can figure out anything about who came and went via that hatch in the gazebo. And keep an eye on Agnes.”

“Roger that,” Carpenter said, but he didn’t sound happy. “Where are you going?”

“The swamp. I stopped Rocko, now I’m going to stop Four Wheels from sending any more kin to upset Agnes.” He looked back at the house. “I think she’s really upset. She was… different.”

“What about Casey Dean?” Carpenter looked as close to exasperated as Shane had ever seen him.

“Dean isn’t going to make his move until after the wedding,” Shane said, ignoring Carpenter’s real question, What about the mission?

“How do you know that?” Carpenter said. “Because he sent you a text message and you believe it?”

“Because the Don told him not to do anything until then.”

Carpenter’s face was as impassive as ever, but his eyes said, Uh-huh.

“Fine,” Shane said. “You observe the situation and develop a theory that will get me a line on Dean, I’ll go after him.”

“All right,” Carpenter said. “I’ll work on that. Does that mean you don’t want me with you going after Four Wheels?”

Shane nodded toward the house, where one of Thibault clan was spraying paint with abandon as he finished finishing the house at last. “I’m taking Garth. He knows the terrain.”

Carpenter looked even more doubtful. “I don’t think he’s going to be much help if you run into trouble.”

“I think I can handle one old man in the swamp, even if he is surrounded by his family.”

Carpenter shook his head. “So far we haven’t handled much of anything.”

Shane bristled. “I’m doing all right.”

“You’re not focused. You haven’t been since your uncle called you in Savannah. Have you tried to figure out the big picture in this mission? Because there’s something about this that I don’t like-”

“Wilson’s given us an op to run,” Shane said, ignoring the instincts that were telling him the same thing. “Take out Casey Dean. I know I screwed up-”

“Twice.”

“I know I screwed up twice,” Shane said, his voice tight, “but I will take out Casey Dean. I’m going after Four Wheels to close out the problems that have been distracting me.”

Carpenter glanced over the house. “You think Four Wheels Thibault is your distraction here? If you don’t get focused, you’re going to end up in a body bag. Casey Dean has also screwed up by not taking us out. There’s something wrong with this whole mission, and it’s going to come down to whichever side stops making mistakes and does the job right. Soon. Don’t forget that.”

“I’m not,” Shane said, not looking back at the house. “I’m closing out one loose end, finishing the job here. Then we take down Casey Dean and move on.”

Assuming we can convince the general population that there’s no five mil at Two Rivers, Joey didn’t kill Frankie, and I can leave Agnes.

Better not to share that with Carpenter.

He went to get Garth.

Lisa Livia was sitting on the counter stool, her feet on Rhett and her forehead on the counter, when Agnes got back to the kitchen.

“I was so sure she’d killed him,” she said into the counter as Agnes went around her to get the bourbon bottle out. “I was positive. I’d seen her driving the damn Caddy away that night. I knew she’d done it. That’s her damn frying pan down there.”

“Well, don’t give up.” Agnes grabbed a glass and poured Lisa Livia two fingers of bourbon and slid it across to her. “You haven’t thought this through. Just because the body wasn’t there today doesn’t mean it wasn’t there last week.”

“You think she could have gotten a twenty-five-year-dead body up that ladder and out through the gazebo?” Lisa Livia said, skepticism thick in her voice.

“I think she’s capable of chopping a twenty-five-year-dead body into paperweights, carting them out in a basket, and selling them to the Daughters of the Confederacy as memento mori.” Agnes poured herself a glass. “We’re talking Brenda here. Do not give up hope. It is still entirely possible that your mother bashed your rather with that frying pan twenty-five years ago, and that he’s still deader than a doornail today.”

Lisa Livia’s lips quirked as she straightened and picked up her glass. “Yeah. No point in hoping that my mother’s innocent and my father’s alive.”

“Exactly.” Agnes lifted her glass. “Why look for a silver lining when there might be a cloud? If South Carolina has the death penalty, there could be an orphanage in your future yet.” She clinked her glass with LL’s and drank, and Lisa Livia laughed shortly and drank, too.

“Okay,” she said when she’d drained her glass. “There’s still hope.”

Agnes looked at LL’s empty glass. “I don’t suppose you’d want to pace yourself.”

“I don’t suppose,” Lisa Livia said, putting her glass on the counter. “Hit me, I’m having a bad day.” She looked over at the Venus. “Hit her, too.”

“She has enough problems.” Agnes looked for something to distract LL from more bourbon, went over to the CD player, and punched up the song she’d been playing that morning before breakfast. “Remember this song? You had this on when you bailed me out after I cracked Rich with the frying pan. You made me sing it with you in the car on the way home, remember?”

Lisa Livia bit her lip and looked away.

“There is no good reason,” Agnes sang as she leaned over the counter to LL, “we should be so all alone.”

LL took Agnes’s bottle of bourbon and poured herself another glass and then joined in, and they belted out the Chicks paean to self-pity. “God, I love the Chicks,” Agnes said when the song was done and she’d moved the bourbon out of LL’s reach. “And God do I need them this week.”

“They’ve gotten us through some real bad times,” Lisa Livia said, pushing her empty glass across the counter as “Hello Mr. Heartache” began. “Hit me. Again.”

“If you could slow down a little,” Agnes said, “I could use some help destroying your mother.”

“Right, the house.” Lisa Livia nodded. “How’s that goin’?”

“I’ve decided to take your advice and embrace the killer within, and I’m trying to be a colder, more effective murderous bitch. No emotion. Run silent, run deep. The female Shane.”

“Oh,” Lisa Livia said. “Well. Glad I could help.”

They looked at each other and Agnes poured them each another drink while they tried to work out a plan. All of Lisa Livia’s ended up with “and sink her damn boat,” so Agnes eventually called a halt to both the planning and the liquid refreshment.

“I can’t get drunk,” she said as she sipped her last one, knowing she was well on her way. “I have to write a column and make wedding cakes and write a column today. And you have to prepare to be a mother of a bride. All of this mess is making us forget the wedding. Our little Maria is getting married to a rich kid who loves her. To Maria!” She lifted her glass to Lisa Livia.

“I can get drunk,” Lisa Livia said, and then added, “To Maria!” and knocked the rest of her drink back.

“Okay, then.” Agnes put her drink aside and got out her mixing bowl, trying to keep her mind from sliding back to the chaos of real life, because she was going to stay cool and calm. She thought of Shane, walking through the kitchen the night before, firing that gun with no expression on his face. Yeah, that was gonna be her from now on.

“Speaking of Maria…” Lisa Livia slid her now-empty glass across the counter and picked up Agnes’s full one. “Are you ready for this? Brenda’s been sabotaging Palmer, too. Remember I told you she’s been telling Maria that Palmer is just like his daddy, the drunken whoremonger?”

“Right.” Agnes went to the refrigerator for butter, sour cream, milk, and eggs.

“Well, she’s been telling Palmer that Maria’s marrying him for his money.”

Agnes stopped and turned around, her arms full. “And he believes this garbage?”

“She’s subtle. She just tells him how excited Maria is about living in a big house and having great cars and lots of clothes and big diamonds. He asked me about it, trying to be discreet, poor dork, and I told him Maria doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that, but Brenda’s been working on him for a while. He really believes it, and it’s giving him cold feet. And having that moron Hammond hanging around isn’t making him feel any better.”

“Crap,” Agnes said, transferring ingredients to the counter. “Okay, so I’ll fix that, and then we’ll have the wedding, and Brenda will lose the house and die screaming, ‘I’m melting, I’m melting.’“ It sounded like a plan to her, but Lisa Livia looked skeptical.

“I don’t think my mother’s going to be that easy to defeat. Not without holy water and a stake.”

“Reverend Miller will call again tomorrow morning to ask if Maria’s ever been a whore,” Agnes said. “I’ll ask him to bring some holy water to the wedding to sprinkle on Brenda. He’s met her. He’ll understand.”

Agnes went to the sink to fill her measuring cup with water, glanced out the window at the sun sparkling on the water, and froze.

There was an old paint-peeling yacht easing up to the shore, bobbing up and down in concert with the floating dock, taunting her. It banged clumsily against the rubber bumpers and then the engine cut, and Brenda climbed over the side onto the dock to secure the mooring lines.

“Fucking bitch,” Agnes said, and dropped her measuring cup. “What now?”

“Your mother has her goddamned yacht moored off my dock!”

“What?” Lisa Livia came around the counter to look out the window. “I’ll be damned.” She shook her head in reluctant admiration. “She’s getting ready to move back.”

“Bitch,” Agnes said again, staring at the boat. “We’re sinking that damn thing.”

“Now?” Lisa Livia said, sounding sedated but ready.

“No, I have to make cake now.” Agnes went into the pantry and then began taking ingredients off the shelves-cake flour, sugar, baking powder, coconut, plus the supplies that Shane had brought back from Savannah-and then brought them out and dumped them all on the counter.

Lisa Livia caught one of the tubs of icing as it almost rolled off.

“Ick,” she said. “What’s on this? It’s sort of sticky.” She looked closer. “This is blood.”

“Well, Shane picked it up for me.” Agnes got a paper towel and wiped off the tub.

“Thoughtful of him.” Lisa Livia went to wash her hands several times and then poured herself another shot of bourbon. “So, you serious about him?”

“No,” Agnes said. “I’m not even going to sleep with him anymore.”

“Right.” Lisa Livia tossed back her drink, tried to sit down on the stool, and fell on the floor.

“So how we doin’ here?” Agnes went around the counter and helped her up.

“My mother is a liar and a cheat and a murderer,” Lisa Livia said when she was back on the stool. “And she’s had her face lifted. Twice.”

“Well, now I’ve lost all respect for her,” Agnes said.

Lisa Livia regarded her seriously. “You really have changed.”

“I’ve matured,” Agnes said, looking out the kitchen window at Brenda’s yacht. I have a lot on my plate right now and I’m holding on by my fingernails. But as soon as I get a grip here, which is going to be shortly, I swear, Brenda and her boat are going down.

That’s a felony, Agnes. You’ll need a really good plan.

Dr. Garvin?

“Agnes?”

“We’re going to be all right, LL,” Agnes said, and took the glass away from her.

“This ain’t such a good idea,” Garth said, peering around the Defender at the swamp.

Another critic, Shane thought as he opened the back of the truck. “I just want to talk to your grandfather.”

“He ain’t the talking type.”

Shane looked down the thin trail, too narrow to drive down, squinting to see where it disappeared into the gloomy green. Slightly higher forested ground competed with lower areas covered with black water full of reeds, trees struggling to stay alive, and who knew what kind of nefarious wildlife. Besides the Thibault clan.

He opened the locker in the back of the truck and lifted out a plastic case. Flipping it open, he pulled out a gun that resembled a submachine gun, except it had a large plastic hopper on the top.

“You going to use a paintball gun?” Garth asked in disbelief as Shane screwed a C02 canister on below the barrel and poured small round balls into the hopper. “My cousins ain’t gonna think that’s funny. They use real guns.”

Shane cocked the weapon. “This isn’t loaded with paintballs.” He picked up one of the small round balls and held it out for Garth to see. “These are pepper balls. They hold hot pepper and break on impact. Stings to get hit by the projectile in the first place; then the hot pepper is an irritant that causes coughing and a burning on the skin in the eyes and mouth. Pretty much incapacitates anyone it hits. You don’t want me killing all your relatives, do you?”

Garth seemed to take the question seriously for a few moments. “Nah.” He was still looking at the gun. “You got one for me?”

Shane surveyed Garth. He appeared lost in the coveralls Carpenter had given him, the cuffs rolled up around his ankles, his bony arms sticking out. Reluctantly, Shane pulled out a paintball pistol and loaded it. “You’ve got ten rounds,” he told Garth as he handed it to him. “So don’t waste your shots. And use it only if someone’s threatening you. And don’t shoot unless I do.”

“I’ve shot a gun before,” Garth said indignantly as he brought the gun up and aimed into the swamp. “Pow, pow, pow.”

“Let’s go.” Shane moved forward toward the trail. He had the stock of the gun tight against his shoulder, scanning, the muzzle following his eyes, finger on the trigger.

“I’ve got to tell you something,” Garth said in a harsh whisper.

“What’s that?” Shane was sliding his left foot forward when he sensed something. He looked down and noted a thin piece of fishing wire across the trail. “There are booby traps,” Shane said without looking over his shoulder. “That what you wanted to tell me?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were waiting to tell me because?” Shane didn’t expect an answer. He knelt and traced the fishing line with his eyes. On the right side it disappeared into a bush at the base of a tree. “What’s it hooked to?”

“Branch with spikes, most likely.”

“No alarm? Can tied to a string, that sort of thing?” Shane looked up and saw that someone had pulled back a branch, tying it off with more line. Several sharp sticks were tied off to the branch. Cheap, rudimentary, but it would hurt like hell if it hit you.

“Nah. Grandpa don’t kill people, he just don’t want no strangers sneaking up on him without them getting hurt. He figures the screams when they get stuck’d be enough warning. Jimmie, he got stuck once, and boy did he scream. I told you this weren’t no good idea.”

“Step back.” Shane triggered the line with the tip of gun. The branch whooshed across the trail just in front of him and then came to a halt. “Any more traps you know about ahead?”

“My cousin Fred sets ‘em,” Garth said. “He ain’t much good for much else, but he’s a good trapper. Caught a gator once.”

“I take that as, you don’t know whether there are more and where they are.”

“That’s what I said. Fred knows. But Fred don’t like me none. Once he-”

“Silence.” Shane moved forward, eyes moving, body light as he walked on the balls of his feet. He was sliding his feet along, not lifting them, alert for the slightest abnormality.

He safely sprang two more traps in the next quarter mile as they went farther into what Shane wouldn’t exactly call the heart of darkness-more like the bowels.

“There’s Fred’s place,” Garth said after Shane had disarmed the third one.

A battered trailer sat forlornly underneath a large oak tree. There was no sign of life.

“Fred usually sleeps during the day,” Garth said. “The rest of the family is spread out from here to Grandpa’s place. There shouldn’t be no more traps.”

“All right,” Shane said. “You lead the way to your grandpa’s place.”

Garth held the paintball pistol out in front of him, dramatically sweeping it back and forth in front of him, half the time the gun pointing one way while his eyes were looking another. Too many cop movies, Shane thought. More broken and battered trailers appeared, spread out in the thick green vegetation like alien pods. A poor alien race that loved cheap beer and booze, based on the number of empty cans and bottles scattered about.

Shane caught movement out of the corner of his right eye and smoothly turned. A skinny young man with a shotgun in his hands was bringing the weapon up to his shoulder when Shane pulled the trigger, firing a burst of five, the projectiles hitting the guy in the chest and exploding in puffs of hot pepper.

The youngster cursed, dropping the shotgun as his hands went to his chest, where he’d have ugly welts developing soon. Of more immediate concern was the gas that clung to him. He doubled over and began hacking and coughing.

“Let’s go,” Shane ordered, shoving Garth forward.

“That’s Jimmie,” Garth said. “He ain’t gonna be happy.”

“I’m not happy,” Shane muttered. “Worry about me.”

Someone stepped out of a trailer to their right, and Shane fired another quick burst, hitting the man, causing him to disappear back inside as fast as he’d appeared.

A half-burned trailer was on their left, and Garth skidded to a halt as he saw a scrawny, middle-aged woman appear like a wraith in the burned-out portion. “Mary-Louise!” Garth hissed. “What’re you doing in my house?”

The woman blinked, rubbed bleary eyes, saw Garth and Shane, and then screamed at the top of her lungs. Shane cursed, then fired, hitting her in the stomach with three rounds. The screaming was abruptly cut off and she staggered backward into the darkness of the intact part of the trailer.

“Leave for just a couple days and they grab your home,” Garth was saying. “No respect.”

Shane could see why Garth wanted to stay at Two Rivers. He had no time to reflect on this as he saw four people moving toward them among the foliage, weapons in hand. Shane fired, squeezing off three rounds bursts, ignoring a bullet from one of the shooters that cracked by. He hit all four, incapacitating them as Garth blindly blasted away with the pistol, one of the pepper balls exploding on a tree less than five feet in front of him.

Shane heard a car engine start to his right front. Ignoring Garth, who was still pulling the trigger of the empty paintball gun and coughing from the near round hit, Shane ran forward around a trailer and hurtled over one of the gasping shooters.

A battered replica of the General Lee was pulling away from a double-wide trailer. Shane was about to drop the paintball gun in exchange for his Glock when he caught movement to his left and the sound of a shot being fired in that direction. He turned, firing, and then released the trigger when his uncle Joey cursed as a pepper ball hit him in the chest and exploded.

“Damn it!” Joey swatted at the mess on his T-shirt and then began coughing.

The General Lee disappeared in a cloud of dust and dirt.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Shane demanded.

“Same thing you,” Joey coughed. “Trying to get Four Wheels. And you just fucked it all up.” He hacked and then spit. “Fucking Brenda told Xavier that Four Wheels and I whacked Frankie.”

Nothing has gone right since I hit Keyes, Shane thought. He amended that thought-there was Agnes. He shook his head. Mind on mission.

“Dumb shit is probably heading for Agnes now that we got him riled up,” Joey said.

Fuck. “Let’s go.” He grabbed Joey, who was reaching up to rub his eyes. “Don’t do that.” He looked around to see a blinded Garth walk into a tree and almost knock himself out.

“Great.” Shane grabbed Garth with the other hand. “My team.” A Spiritual Humanist cleaner, an old mobster, an addled swamp rat, and an angry food columnist.

“We’ll get ‘em next time,” Garth said between coughs.

“Wasn’t all your fault,” Joey said, trying to get his shirttail up to his eyes.

Go team, Shane thought, and pointed them in the direction of the Defender.

The tow truck had arrived and pulled the wrecked sand truck out of the crumpled bridge, and as a bonus had taken Brenda away, too; she’d hitched a ride to get her Caddy from town now that she’d moored the Brenda Belle at Two Rivers. Kristy had toured the grounds to “like, take some background shots and get the hang of the place,” and then she’d come back in time to help Agnes get LL’s bourbon-sedated body upstairs into bed to sleep it off, abetted by a curious Rhett, who had followed them up the stairs to see what they were going to do with her. He’s seen way too many bodies moved lately, Agnes thought, and then her cell phone rang and she answered it.

“Hey.” Joey said hoarsely. “Somebody might be coming to the house who might be dangerous.”

“Really?” Agnes said. “Because that almost never happens here. With advance notice. Should I get my frying pan?”

“No joking, Agnes, it’s Four Wheels.”

“This would be Grandpa, right? The guy who drove for your robbery and then went out to the swamp to breed the rest of the Wheels?”

“That’s him.”

“Great.” Agnes crossed the second-floor hall from Lisa Livia’s room into one of the front bedrooms, now full of Maria’s wedding gifts and the dress form with Maria’s newly arrived white wedding dress, and looked down the lane. Nothing. Rhett peered out the window, too, unperturbed. “It looks peaceful out there now. Should I call the police?”

“Shane says Carpenter can handle it, and we’re on our way.” A bolt of red came shooting down the lane in a cloud of dust, swerving to make the turn, and Rhett barked. “Whoops.”

“What?” Joey called out from the phone.

“Spoke too soon. I think Four Wheels is here,” Agnes said as the car spun out, a decrepit, rusted-out, engine-misfiring red rattletrap, the Stars and Bars painted on the hood.

“Stay inside and lock the doors,” Joey ordered. “Let Carpenter handle him.”

“Carpenter’s in the basement, and Doyle’s out there all alone.”

Doyle walked out onto the front lawn, holding his paint sprayer on his hip like a six-shooter.

The driver’s door flew open as the car rocked to a halt in front of the ruined bridge, and an old man spilled out onto the gravel, face-first, struggling to get to his feet, a bottle rolling away from him.

“This might not be the trouble you’re afraid it is,” Agnes said into the phone. “He’s drunk. Standing up seems to be beyond him at the moment.”

“Is he armed?” Joey asked.

“I don’t see a gun.”

Doyle shouted something and stomped across the lawn toward the bridge, waving the paint sprayer.

“Oh, hell,” Agnes said. “Doyle’s going after him. Hurry up, Joey.” She turned off the cell phone, told Kristy to stay inside with LL and keep Rhett with her, and ran down the stairs to save her handyman, yelling for Carpenter as she went.

“I ain’t tellin’ you again,” Doyle was yelling as she came out the front door. “Get off me lass’s land or I’ll pummel you.”

The old man had managed to pull himself up to one knee. He was bleary eyed and blinking, trying to focus.

Another car turned down the lane: Brenda Dupres coming back to Two Rivers in her baby blue Caddy.

“Fabulous,” Agnes said, and then yelled, “Doyle, get back here!” as the handyman walked across the remaining support beam of the bridge.

“Where the hell is-” Four Wheels bellowed. “Where the- Where is-” He kept stalling out, his brain refusing to get in gear. Agnes saw him look up into Doyle’s face and blink. “Who?”

Doyle grabbed the old man’s overalls in one meaty fist and hauled him upright, pointing the sprayer at him. “Where’s what, boyo?”

Four Wheels seemed to gain some degree of sobriety as he lost the flow of oxygen to his brain, and he grabbed a shotgun from inside the door and swung it into Doyle’s groin. The Irishman grunted and dropped the old crook and the sprayer, and Four Wheels shoved him hard, toppling him past the smashed bridge and into the inlet. Agnes yelled, “Doyle,” and ran for the cut just as Brenda turned her big car in a wide loop and pointed it at them.

Four Wheels spun about, shotgun in hand, screaming, “Who the fuck is Agnes?”

Agnes reached the muddy inlet and looked down to see Doyle trying to climb up the side, still gasping from the blow to the groin. “Stay there, Doyle,” Agnes said. “He’s got a gun.” Four Wheels shifted the large double muzzle so it was pointing down at Doyle. “Try it, you dumb mick. I’ll blow your ugly mug right off.”

Doyle stopped, breathing hard, his nostrils flaring in anger, but he smartly took several steps back down into the cut. Agnes saw Brenda’s car creep a little closer and then stop again, about forty feet away, Brenda invisible behind her tinted glass, probably praying that Four Wheels would pick off Agnes.

Oh, hell, Agnes thought, realizing for the first time that this could be her plan. She might even have sent the old drunk to Two Rivers, and if she had, she was going to be sorry, the dumb bitch-

Oh, shut up and be smart, Agnes. You’ve wasted enough time swaggering around stupid.

Dr. Garvin?

Four Wheels straightened and looked at her and then slowly brought the shotgun up and pointed it at her. Calm and smart, Agnes. Think.

“Hi,” Agnes said to Four Wheels. “I’m Lisa Livia Fortunato.” The sound of wheels on the dirt road made them both look around, and she saw Shane’s truck coming down the lane. She heard footfalls behind her and looked over her shoulder and saw Carpenter running across the lawn toward her. Okay, better odds.

The relief was gone as the shotgun swung back toward her. “You ain’t Lisa Livia. You’re that Agnes. I seen your picture in the paper.”

“Uh…”

“You killed my grandson.”

“No, I didn’t. He fell.” Agnes took a step closer. “It was an accident, I swear. I’m really sorry for your loss.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Doyle start to climb up the bank toward Four Wheels.

“Bullshit.” Four Wheels twisted his head as he heard Shane’s truck stop.

Shane opened the driver’s door and got out, gun pointed at Four Wheels. Joey got out of the passenger side, gun pointed at Four Wheels. Carpenter was at Agnes’s side, gun pointed at Four Wheels.

Agnes looked at Four Wheels and wondered if he was in any condition to gauge odds.

Carpenter put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her back.

“What the hell are you doing here, Joey?” Four Wheels called out.

“You leave my little Agnes alone,” Joey yelled. He was moving to Four Wheels’s right while Shane was moving to the left and toward them. And Doyle was taking another shuffling step up the embankment.

Four Wheels staggered slightly, the muzzle of the shotgun wavering. He got a tighter grip on his cane as his head swiveled, back and forth, trying to keep track of everyone. “Everyone just fucking stay still!”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Joey said. “You got two shots, and I bet it’s just buckshot anyway. Then you’re done.”

“And you’ll never get the first one off.” Shane had his pistol up at eye level, aimed right at Four Wheels. The muzzle of his gun wasn’t wavering at all.

The old man was perspiring now, booze and sweat, his eyes wide. “I just want some answers. Where’s Three Wheels? What’d you do with him?”

“He’s fine,” Shane said, still heading her way. “Put the shotgun down and tell us why you sent him here with a gun.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. Where’s my boy?” the old man yelled, and Agnes thought, Wait a minute, he’s got a right to know that.

“It’s all right,” she said, and took a step forward.

“Agnes,” Carpenter said, but she pushed his hand back and said, “Stay there, you’re scaring him,” and walked carefully across the remaining bridge support to Four Wheels.

“I swear Garth’s all right, Mr. Four Wheels,” she said when she was next to him, standing beside the shotgun instead of in front of it. “I think he’s probably in the truck. He’s helping Doyle paint the house and do odd jobs for me. He can leave whenever he wants to.” She leaned a little closer, in spite of the alcohol fumes, seeing Shane moving closer out of the corner of her eye. “I think he likes the food.”

The old man’s eyes were bleary. “Food?”

She turned in the direction of the Defender. “Garth? You in there?”

Garth’s head came up slowly from the backseat, and he waved cautiously.

“Your grandpa’s worried about you,” Agnes called. “You want to come tell him you’re all right?” But don’t tell him about the food because I don’t want him to stay.

Garth nodded and opened the door of the truck, and Four Wheels began to put the shotgun down.

And Brenda gunned the Caddy and drove straight for them.

Agnes froze, but Shane yanked her toward the bridge, where they both fell into the cut, landing hard in the mud, Shane cushioning the fall for her as the Caddy hit Four Wheels square on, the old man screaming as the car smashed into the inlet, crushing him into the mud on the other side of the bridge.

“Don’t look,” Shane said, pulling her head to his chest, but Agnes said, “Doyle,” and she heard the handyman say from under the bridge, “Fucking bitch!” which sounded about damn right. Shane held her tight while she shook, and she said, “She killed that old man, Brenda killed that old man, why did she do that?” and he said, “She wasn’t aiming for him, Agnes,” and held her tighter while the truth sank in.

Then Brenda opened the door of her wrecked Caddy that was nose down in the cut, hanging suspended in the seat by her safety belt, and Agnes turned in time to see her say, “My God, that man almost killed our Agnes!” her blue eyes wide with innocence.

Doyle picked himself up out of the mud under the bridge and looked at Brenda with so much loathing that it was a miracle she didn’t melt from the corrosion. “Burn in hell, you miserable hag of witch,” he said, and began to climb out of the cut.

Agnes met Brenda’s eyes and saw them narrow.

“She tried to kill me?” she said to Shane, her voice a whisper. “With her car?”

“Can you make it out?” Carpenter said from above them, and Shane nodded and sat up, bringing Agnes with him.

Agnes stood up slowly, holding on to Shane as he stood, too. “She tried to kill me with her car?”

“Climb out of the ditch, babe,” Shane said, his voice telegraphing steady, steady.

“She killed that old man!” Agnes looked up the embankment, and saw Garth standing beside Carpenter, looking sheet white. “Oh, God, Garth, did you see-”

“Weren’t no call to do that,” Garth said soberly. “He was puttin’ the gun down.”

“I know,” Agnes said, and held out her hand to him.

Garth took it and pulled her up the embankment. “Is she goin’ to jail?”

“If she doesn’t,” Agnes said, looking soberly into his eyes, “we’ll make her pay. I swear to you, we will.” Garth nodded. “All right, then.”

“Shane?” Brenda called. “Could you give me a hand, please?”

“No,” Shane said without looking at her, and followed Agnes up the embankment. He put his hand on Garth’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Garth nodded. “Miss Agnes is gonna make her pay if the law don’t.”

“I beg your pardon!” Brenda said from her car. “But I am injured.”

“Shut your ugly mouth, you bitch-faced yap, you tried to kill our Agnes,” Doyle yelled at her as he reached the top of the bank.

“We’ll all make her pay,” Shane said to Garth.

“The team,” Garth said. “Like you said in the swamp.”

Agnes looked at Shane, who winced and then said, “Yeah. The team.”

“You are neglecting a wounded woman,” Brenda shrieked from her car, practically strangling herself on her seat belt. “God knows, there’s not one gentleman among you!”

“Call on the devil to save you, you limb of Satan,” Doyle yelled down at her. “God couldn’t see you if he tried, you black-hearted whore.”

“The team thing works for me,” Agnes said, holding her bruised ribs, and went to call the cops while Doyle stomped back to his house painting, Carpenter took Garth aside to talk to him soberly and give comfort, Shane took a shaken Joey to get the weapons out of sight, Brenda continued to shriek from the cut, and Four Wheels moldered beneath her ruined Caddy.

Shane leaned against the front rail of the Two Rivers porch, watching a couple of deputies try to make a crime scene of the remains of the old bridge under Hammond’s direction. Hammond did pretty well, once he stopped asking if Maria was around. An ambulance was parked nearby where an EMT had just finished wrapping Agnes’s ribs and was now trying to check out old Doyle, who was resisting removing his shirt with all the vigor of a maiden aunt, while Xavier focused on Agnes, which made Shane tense.

“Go arrest Brenda,” Agnes told Xavier. “She just murdered that old man.”

“I talked to her,” Xavier said. “Now I’m talking to you.” His eyes slid around to look at Shane, and Shane stared back, biting back the urge to drag him away from Agnes. Any fool could see that Agnes wasn’t the one the law should be talking to, and Xavier was no fool. And yet…

He looked over at Brenda, who seemed unconcerned that she’d just killed a man. She was sitting on the swing twenty feet away, drinking deeply from something a lot stronger than lemonade, her shapely legs kicking back and forth, and smiling tensely at a clueless young deputy whom Shane had a feeling Xavier was going to smack upside his crew cut head as soon as he got him out of sight.

“Mrs. Dupres says Thibault was threatening you with a shotgun, Miz Agnes,” Xavier went on. “She seems to think you were in imminent danger.”

Shane spoke up at that. “We had it under control.”

Xavier looked up at Shane. “You did now, son?”

“There was no need for Mrs. Dupres to kill the old man,” Shane said.

“She says it was an accident,” Xavier said. “What?” Agnes almost fell off the porch.

Xavier continued. “She was so horrified because that old man was going to shoot you that her foot slipped off the brake, and when she went to stomp the brake back on to keep the car from rolling into you, she hit the gas instead.”

“Fuckin’ bitch,” Joey said.

“She lies,” Agnes said.

“She wouldn’t be the first person on this porch to do that,” Xavier said, looking at her with intent.

Shane moved closer. “You throw a lot of accusations around, Detective. You accused my uncle of killing his best friend. Now you’re going after Agnes. I think it’s time to drop the good ole boy bullshit and do some real police work.”

Xavier stiffened as if he’d been punched. “You think you know how to do my job?”

Shane could see Carpenter looking at him, eyebrows raised in question. Yeah, Wilson wouldn’t be happy about him getting involved with the local law. But it was Agnes and Joey on the line here-

There was a stir at the end of the porch as Brenda stood up, taking in everyone on the porch. “Can I go now?” she asked. “I have had a terrible day, a terrible accident, trapped in my car for hours, left unaided by callous, uncaring-”

“Go to hell, you fucking bitch,” Doyle called from around the corner, where he was painting the house.

“-inhuman people, and I really am simply unable to continue.”

“Yes, Mrs. Dupres, you can go, but don’t leave town,” Xavier warned her.

Brenda blinked at him. “How could I, Detective Xavier? My little Maria is getting married Saturday. Although how the wedding can take place here, after this gruesome accident, I simply do not know.”

She met Agnes’s eyes for a long moment, and then she added, “Of course, with the bridge out, it’s impossible to have the wedding here anyway.” Then she went down the steps and around the side of the house away from Doyle, heading for the path to the dock. “Where’s she going?” Xavier said.

“She’s docked her boat out back,” Agnes said with blood in her voice.

The honking in the background got louder. “Flamingos?” Xavier said to Agnes. “Yes. They hate her, too.”

Xavier turned to go. “The boys will be here awhile, getting things in order, but I think I have everything I need to do some real police work.”

Agnes looked at him steadily. “You’re not going to arrest Brenda, are you?”

“Do you have proof she did it on purpose?”

“No,” Agnes said.

“Neither do I, Miss Agnes,” Xavier said, putting on his hat. “Neither do I. I will be forwarding my notes from the investigation to the DA, however. He should be interested.”

He tipped his hat to her and then walked toward the porch steps and stopped when he was opposite Shane.

“You think you know how to do my job, son? You think you know the politics involved when you have to follow the law to get your results? When you have to care about something besides just getting those results?”

Shane glared at him. “You think I don’t care about anything but results?”

Xavier grinned slyly up at him. “I think you do now,” he said, and walked down the steps.

When the police had gone with Four Wheels’s body, Garth had turned to them and said, “The paintin’s done. What’s next?” and somehow, offering him a couple of days off to mourn hadn’t seemed like a good idea. So Agnes had said, “Uh, we need shutters,” and shown them the pictures from Brenda’s house book, and then gone on to explain the idea of the house book, how Brenda had wanted the house to look like this and how this was the best revenge Lisa Livia had been able to think of, that Brenda would see the house she’d always wanted and know she’d never have it, and suddenly four men were determined to get black shutters on the house before dinner.

When Lisa Livia came tottering down the stairs two hours later, two hitmen, a handyman, and a kid from the swamp had shutters unloaded and ladders at the ready, along with new carriage lights for the porches and stone planters for the bridge, exactly like Brenda had planned.

“What the hell?” she said as Carpenter and Shane went up the ladders on each side of her bedroom window. “This racket woke me up, which is saying something, considering Cerise and Hot Pink.”

“We’ve almost got Butch tracked down,” Agnes said, watching Shane wrestle his shutter into place on the brackets. “Once we find him, we’ll get the birds back where they belong.”

Shane looked really good lifting heavy things, she thought. And the shutters, those were really nice, too. She was willing to think about damn near anything to take her mind off the mess to her right, where her bridge used to be. She could tell Lisa Livia that her mother had murdered an old man with her car later. It wasn’t like Lisa Livia would be surprised.

Lisa Livia frowned. “So you have Shane and Carpenter hanging Brenda’s black shutters.”

“It’s like the HGTV Hit Squad,” Agnes said.

“Designed to Kill,” Lisa Livia said.

Shane turned around and yelled, “Is this where you want it?” Agnes gave him two thumbs up.

Lisa Livia shook her head. “I hope he’s getting a lot of sex for this.”

“Not anymore,” Agnes said. “But he had some good times before. And you’ll like this part: He paid for everything with the money he took from the two guys who came out here to kill me. So whoever hired them just redid the outside of my house. It even paid for the paint.”

“Do we know who that is?” Lisa Livia asked. “Some woman, Shane said.”

“Brenda.” Lisa Livia looked up at the windows. “Damn fine shutters.”

“Wait till you see the carriage lights,” Agnes said.

Carpenter smiled down at them and waved with his free hand, the other one supporting about twenty pounds of shutter.

Lisa Livia smiled and waved back, trying not to wince from her hangover. “They used to be grim killers who moved silently through the night, answering to no one. Now they’re checking with you for proper shutter placement.”

“I like to think of it as, ‘Do a window treatment, save a life,’” Agnes said, and went closer to tell them how great the shutters looked.

Three hours later, after the shutters were up, and after a dinner of peppermint tea and whole-wheat toast for Lisa Livia and chicken marsala and new peas for everybody else (the chicken cutlets pounded flat with the back of her frying pan, making Shane roll his eyes but stay out of her way), Agnes started toward the dock with bourbon and coffee only to see the Brenda Belle sitting there like a big wart on the landscape. Shane wasn’t on the high dock, which just confirmed his good sense. She went back through the house where Carpenter was talking softly to Lisa Livia, and then out onto the front porch, where Shane was sitting on the wicker love seat, his hands behind his head, staring down the road, Rhett at his feet, also staring down the road.

“Waiting for something?” she said, setting the coffee and booze down in front of him.

“Yep.”

“Want some coffee while you wait?”

“Yep.”

“Talkative devil.” Agnes poured two cups of coffee and then offered him the bourbon bottle, but he kept his eyes on the road, so she poured that, too. “Got plans for after you’re finished road watching?”

“Yep.”

Agnes nodded. “Anything I should know about?”

“Sex with you.”

Agnes nodded again. “Okay, I know I said this yesterday and then, you know, changed my mind, but I really think since we don’t have a future together, that us sleeping together…”

He didn’t seem to be paying attention, still listening for something, so she gave up and sipped her coffee, staring out at the ruined bridge, and after a minute he said, “You okay?”

She shook her head. “She killed him, Shane.”

“I know.”

“She’s going to get away with it.”

“No.”

“How are you going to stop her?”

He turned to look at her, his eyes flat, and she remembered what he did for a living.

“You can’t kill her,” Agnes said. “No.”

Agnes nodded, relieved. “Then what?”

He turned back to the road. “Something will come up.”

“Just like that.”

“She’ll make it happen.”

“Why?”

“Her type always does.” He went still, the way Rhett went still when he heard something she couldn’t hear, the way Rhett was going still now, and Agnes listened, but there wasn’t anything.

She sighed. “Okay, listen, what I was trying to tell you is, as much as I have enjoyed getting naked with you, I really need something permanent and solid in my life. And no offense and please don’t kill me for saying this, but somebody who shoots people for a living probably isn’t going to blink about cheating on his girlfriend. I’d rather be alone than lied to again.” That sounded pathetic, so she shut up, but it was true.

“Agnes, I eliminate only the targets I’m assigned,” Shane said.

“Yes, but compared to that, cheating doesn’t seem that bad, right? I mean, you shoot somebody in the morning, a little nookie on the side must seem like jaywalking. I need to be with somebody who understands that love is serious business, that I am serious business, someone who will stay forever, someone who won’t betray me and then come around with a ‘Hey, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again’ the next day and think that makes everything just dandy. I’ve got a hole in my heart here. I’m not taking any more chances.”

His eyes were still on the road, and she stumbled on, trying to make him understand.

“Look, I just cannot afford that kind of pain again, okay? I can’t do it. I have to find some good, kind, boring guy who would rather slit his throat than hurt me because I can’t take another shot to the heart. It’ll kill me and I’m not kidding. I can’t do it again. I have to choose really carefully this time. And a hitman, well, that kind of doubles my chances for the shot-to-the-heart thing.”

Something rumbled down the road, and Rhett barked as Agnes turned to look. A big-ass truck came into view carrying what looked like a big-ass tank except there was no turret on top, just a scissors-shaped thing, all of it painted army green.

Agnes looked at Shane, not concerned, because he was there, but definitely puzzled. “Are we being invaded?”

“No,” Shane said. “You’re being invaded. Later. By me.” He stood up as the truck stopped and then backed up in line with the ruined bridge.

“What is that?” Agnes said, postponing for the moment her exasperation because he wasn’t listening to her.

“It’s an AVLB,” Shane said, as the tank rumbled off the flatbed it had been on.

“Of course it is.”

“An armored vehicle launched bridge. The army uses them to put in bridges during an attack. Watch and learn.”

“A bridge?” Agnes lost her breath. “That’s a bridge? Why is the army giving you a bridge?”

“The army isn’t giving it to me. It’s more of a loaner. To get us through the wedding. Then we’ll work on something more permanent.”

Us. We. “We will?” Agnes said faintly.

The tank moved up to the edge of the cut, making more racket than Cerise and Hot Pink multiplied by twelve. Black smoke puffed out into the darkening evening sky as Rhett howled and the flamingos honked, and Agnes cringed at the way the tracks tore up the gravel roadway but it wasn’t the time to point that out. She was getting a bridge. She squinted, trying to understand how she was getting a bridge as the folded-over sections on top of the tank body slowly began to extend upward into the air.

Carpenter and Lisa Livia came out onto the porch.

“I was going to complain about the noise,” Lisa Livia said, still looking fragile but much better than she had before, “but now I’m just impressed. Leave it to the army to mechanize an erection.”

“Laugh now, funny girl,” Shane said. “That’s gonna be a bridge in about a minute.”

“And that bridge can hold over sixty tons,” Carpenter said.

“So it’s a strong erection,” Lisa Livia said, looking at Carpenter.

“Oh, yes,” Carpenter said, standing more erect himself.

“Do you mind?” Agnes said, watching the miracle of her bridge literally unfold. “I’m having a moment here.”

The road sections reached their apex and began to go down, the hydraulic arm in the center scissoring them apart. Within a couple of minutes, the near end touched down and the far end was in place; then the tank driver disconnected the bridge from the body of the tank and drove back onto the transporter, and the transporter drove off into the gathering darkness.

Rhett settled down, secure in the knowledge that he’d driven off the invaders.

“Wow,” Agnes said, looking at her bridge.

“Was it good for you?” Lisa Livia said. “It was good for me.”

“That bridge was built for tanks,” Shane told Agnes proudly. “It’ll take your wedding traffic and then some. It’s even better than what you had.”

“Thank you,” Agnes said to him, trying not to sound hero-worship-y.

“But it’s temporary,” Lisa Livia said, warning in her voice. “It’s a bridge,” Agnes said. “It’s right here. And it’s even better than what I had.”

“Good point,” Lisa Livia said, leaning on Carpenter a little. Carpenter put his arm around her.

“And I’m thinking the price is right,” Agnes said, and sipped her coffee as Shane settled his arm around her.

“And my mother is going to have a stroke,” Lisa Livia said.

“It’s a beautiful bridge,” Agnes said, and tried to forget all the hell swirling around her and the need to be practical and not get hurt.

She could be smart tomorrow. Tonight she had a bridge and she was holding on to him.

Three hours later, Agnes heard laughter from Lisa Livia’s room next door, rolled over, put her chin on Shane’s chest, and said, “It really is a beautiful bridge.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, in postcoital stupor.

“It’s nice about Lisa Livia and Carpenter, too. I mean, it’s a little bit Bobbsey Twins-you and me, her and Carpenter-but then neither one of you is sticking around after the wedding anyway, so it’s not as tidy as it seems, right?”

“Mmmhm.”

“I mean, basically, Lisa Livia and I are just extended one-night stands, it’s not like we’re anything special. I’ve known that from the beginning, that’s why I kept making those pathetic attempts to end this before you ended it and left me. Which I’m giving up, by the way. You got me a bridge, you got me. My God.”

Shane lifted his head, waking up more, and frowned at her. “What?”

Agnes gave up. “Thank you for my bridge.”

“Yeah. Before that.”

She sighed. “Nothing.”

Shane put his hand on the back of her head, pulled her to him, and kissed her, fighting his way to full consciousness, “You’re welcome. Can we talk about whatever that was in the morning?”

“No,” Agnes said. “Forget it, it was dumb. Four Wheels didn’t send those guys to kill me, did he?”

“No,” Shane said, letting his head fall back on the pillow.

Agnes moved back to her own pillow. “Then it’s Brenda.”

Shane yawned. “Or somebody else who thinks you’re sitting on five million and killing you is the way to get it, but since everybody knows we opened the shelter and there was no five mil, yeah, I think it’s Brenda.”

“I’m going to sink her yacht.”

“She can probably swim.”

“I don’t care. She’s gone crazy. It was selfish and horrible to try to swindle me out of the house, but what she did today to Four Wheels, that was just insane. So I believe she’s trying to have me killed. And I’m glad you’re here to stop her. And I’m going to sink her yacht.”

“You’re not a one-night stand.”

Agnes caught her breath. “Just ignore that I said that.”

“I don’t know what you are, but you are not a one-night stand.”

His voice was so insistent that she went still, as if everything would go wrong if she moved.

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Shane said, sounding tired. “Four days ago, I knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. Tonight, all I know is that I want you.”

“You’ve got me.” The words were out without her thinking, and she wouldn’t have taken them back if she could.

“Not just tonight.”

“I know,” Agnes said. “You’ve got me. I know you’re going to leave. Just come back when you can. Make Two Rivers home base. Don’t get killed. Come back to me.” She heard the need in her voice and felt ashamed for a minute. “If you can’t, just say so, don’t lie about it, but-”

“I wouldn’t lie,” he said.

“Of course you would,” Agnes said, annoyed. “You work for the government. You’d have to lie. Just tell me you can’t tell me or something. Don’t lie

He rolled over on his side and slid his arm around her waist, and the weight of him there felt good, secure, pulling her in. “Agnes, I don’t know who lied to you in the past-”

“Taylor, my two fiancés before Taylor-”

“-but it wasn’t me.”

“-and my father,” Agnes finished.

“Your father,” Shane said. “That one’s new. Tell me you didn’t hit him with a frying pan.”

“I was ten,” Agnes said. “He told me he and my mom were going to work for the Peace Corps for a couple of weeks, and then he dropped me off at boarding school.”

“The Peace Corps for a couple of weeks?”

“I was ten,” Agnes said. “He was my dad. I believed him. Sue me.”

“And then he didn’t come back for a year?” Shane said.

“He never came back. Fortunately, I had a court-appointed psychiatrist to explain the significance of that to me later.” She refused to meet his eyes. “Do not feel sorry for me. My dad loved me. He called me his baby girl. And then he took me to boarding school and that was the last time I trusted a man. Until Paul. Paul asked me to marry him in college. I was crazy in love with him. Lisa Livia didn’t like him, Maria cried whenever he came over to the apartment, but I was sure he was the one. Then I stopped by his apartment and caught him doing some other woman against the kitchen wall. So I picked up the frying pan on the stove and hit him with it. Broke his nose. You’d have thought that would have cured me, but no, I met Rick. Rick was terrific, smart as hell, an investigative reporter at the paper where I was doing lifestyles. He’s the one who talked the editor into giving me a column, and when some guy wrote in and said, ‘I like that cranky Agnes woman,’ he’s the one who told the editor to call the column ‘Cranky Agnes.’ He’s also the one who found out that my dad went to prison for securities fraud and died of a heart attack six months later. Well, he’d always been a fool for high-fat food, and the prison cooking wasn’t healthy, plus the stress, you know. It was inevitable.”

Shane put his hand on her waist and she talked faster. “That was a bad day, the day Rick told me that. Then I came home a week later and found him doing my student intern on my kitchen table. So I picked up my cast-iron skillet and hit him on the back of the head. I don’t think I hit him because of my dad; I’m pretty sure it was for the bimbo intern.” She looked at Shane finally. “It’s like I’m standing to one side watching myself. The world goes red and there’s this screaming and I have to kill them. You wouldn’t know about that. You’re always calm when you kill them.”

She rolled over away from him, feeling stupid. They’d had perfectly great bridge sex and then she’d gotten weird about the one-night-stand thing and now there Dr. Garvin was, in bed with them, along with her entire life’s history. Nicegoing, Agnes.

She looked back. “I’m fine, really. But I should probably live alone.”

Shane pulled her back, close against him.

“What happened to your mother?” he said in her ear.

“Oh, she kept writing me.” Agnes sighed and let herself relax against his warmth. “Telling me how wonderful the Peace Corps was and signing my dad’s name. Then six years later she showed up at school, telling me my dad had been killed by the native tribes, offering to take me home to mix her martinis for her. But by then, I was sixteen and I liked school and I was spending summers here with LL and Brenda, and I just wasn’t interested. And neither was she, really. She married again, to somebody with money. She’s where she should be; I’m where I should be.” Here, with you.

Shane was quiet behind her, so quiet that she thought he’d gone back to sleep, and then he said, “I won’t lie. I won’t leave you. I don’t know what’s happening in the future. There’s a chance my job will change some, that I’ll have more of a desk job. Maybe more of a life.”

A desk job. Agnes swallowed and rolled back over so she could look at him. “I could move.”

“What?”

“I could move. To wherever you have the desk job. I could “You’d leave Two Rivers?”

“It’s just a house,” Agnes said. “I love it, it’s great, but it’s not Tara, for God’s sake, it’s just a house.” Home is with you. It was a terrible thought, the final betrayal, betraying herself.

“No,” he said, and she flinched and thought, You moron, why did you leave yourself open like that?

“Right, sorry,” she said. “That was-”

“I’ll come here,” he said. “I’ll come back.”

The whole world went still, and then she realized she wasn’t breathing and took a deep breath, tears stinging behind her eyes-Do not cry-and she said, “Oh,” and tried not to clutch at him. “That would be good. This would be a good place to come back to. A place to come home to. Whenever you could.” The tears were coming and she couldn’t stop them, so she tried not to breathe so he wouldn’t hear her crying in the dark.

He nodded. “Can we have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said on a sob, and then she did wrap her arms around him and held on to him, tighter than she’d ever held on to anybody as he pulled the blanket up over them and smoothed back her hair and rocked her as she cried, and she thought, He’s coming back to me, he’s coming back, and gave up being smart and just loved him.