“Maybe…maybe he’s right. Maybe it was my fault.”
“ Your fault?”
She was shaking her head. “I shouldn’t’ve made him mad. I mean, I knew about his temper. When you touch a hot stove and get burned, you can’t blame the-”
Connie put her hand over Janet’s mouth and leaned in closer.
“Talk like that,” she said, “and I’ll send you to the emergency room.”
Then Connie withdrew her hand from Janet’s mouth and cupped her friend’s chin with that same hand and leaned in close. I had to lip-read now, but I got it. Probably I’d have got it just from the busty one’s compassionate expression and the other’s chagrined one.
“Do you hear what I’m saying, Janet?”
“I do. I do. I’m not seeing him anymore.”
“And if he hurts you-the police?”
A laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “What good would that do, in this town?”
Connie’s features were stone. “They have to write it up. And you can see a lawyer if you need to. There are ways to deal with jerks like Rick.”
She was right about that.
Connie said, “Word to the wise,” and shook a mildly scolding finger, got up, and moved away, guiding the wheeled chair back to wherever the hell she got it.
A few moments later, Janet left the help desk and I followed her, a half room of shelved books between us, me seeing her flickeringly as I moved along, strobe style. Or maybe I was just getting punchy spending all this time around so many books.
Finally she stopped at a water fountain.
Nervously, she put something in her mouth-a pill?
She bent at the fountain and, when she pressed the handle to create an arc of water, her sleeve rode up a little, and revealed part of a purple bruise.
I shook my head.
Rick might have been somehow important or connected in this town (as the busty librarian had indicated), but that didn’t make him any less a brutal dunce. Takes a lot of awful people to make up this old world.
From another conversation Janet and Connie had, I got the drift that my target’s work day was drawing to a close, so I gathered my jacket from a chair at a reading table and headed outside into the cold, clean-if thin- mountain air.
Homewood reminded me a little of Boulder, Colorado, minus the heavy tourism. Thirty thousand or so had the privilege of living in this idyllic little burg, where mountains edged a sky so blue, clouds should’ve paid rent for the privilege. I felt lucky to have a contract take me to such pleasant if dull surroundings; it helped make up for having to kill somebody as harmless as Janet Wright seemed to be.
Dusk was settling when Janet emerged from the library with her friend Connie and another librarian, whose name was Don, my surveillance had gathered. A nerd.
From my rental vehicle-a blue Taurus (was that all these fucking rental agencies had these days?)-I watched as the librarians paused to chat and then go their separate ways.
Janet’s vehicle was parked on the street-I’d observed her going out and feeding the meter every two hours, during the six I spent in the library. She got into the little yellow Geo, mid-’90s vintage, started it up and pulled away, moving right across my line of vision.
Her rear bumper had stickers that I could have predicted-she was still advertising KERRY/EDWARDS 2004, among other lost leftist causes-and started my own car and took off after her, in slow pursuit.
I followed her, usually with a few cars between us, through sleepy Homewood, from the downtown and on through a quietly affluent residential section; it was the kind of place Norman Rockwell could have painted, though had he spent much more than an afternoon here, he might have hanged himself out of boredom.
Soon the town had disappeared, as had my cover traffic, and she was out into the countryside, making my job harder.
Already my point was proven about the staleness of my client’s research: Janet Wright was not headed in the direction of her own apartment, the address for which was the first place I’d checked out getting to town. Nor was there anything in the written reports indicating that anything out this way was a regular stop of hers.
When Janet Wright turned down a lane into a deeply wooded area, I almost missed it; then I caught the tail of her Geo between the trees, and drove on. Pulled into a driveway half a mile later, turned around, and followed.
In five minutes, I caught sight of her pulling off the lane into a private drive. Cutting my speed to almost nothing, I waited until she was well out of view, then moved on by, and parked alongside the road, what there was of it. I walked back and slipped into the trees along the private drive; the snow on the ground was minimal, my shoes crunching on leaves and twigs underneath the dusting, and I was in no danger of earning my Inconspicuous Tracker Merit Badge. But I didn’t worry about that-I could see her getting out of her Geo, fiddling for her keys in her purse, clearly oblivious to my presence.
Still, my hand was on the nine millimeter in my jacket pocket. You never knew.
The Geo was parked in front of a secluded, expensive, sprawling home, not quite a mansion but oozing money, modern in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner, a story and a half with lots of wood and stone blending in nicely with the surrounding naturescape.
At the front door, she stooped on the stoop to pick up a newspaper, then gathered mail from the mailbox.
I was closer to the house now, and watched through a side window as she entered, mail and paper bundled in one arm, entering via a key in her other hand, pushing the door open-it was a little stubborn. A security tone kicked in, and a dog began to bark…from the sound of it, a small one, lapdog likely.
Which was good. A pinscher or a pit bull can ruin your day.
Janet went to a touchpad by the door and entered a code. I had an angle through the window that showed me her fingertips doing it, and I committed the numbers to memory, even if I did have to move my lips.
At a table near the door, already piled with rolledup newspapers and stacked magazines and envelopes, the librarian stood and sorted through the mail, putting individual items into their respective piles. Throughout, two things were a constant: I watched; and the dog barked.
She spoke to one of us, in a loud firm voice: “Just a sec, Poochie! Gimme a sec.”
Housesitting, most likely.
Through a kitchen window I watched as she unpenned the small dog-a little black-and-white rat terrier-who danced and yapped and danced and yapped for Janet. She knelt and petted it and it stood on its hind legs and lapped her face and whimpered orgiastically. About thirty seconds of good-girl-good-doggie talk followed. This I did not commit to memory.
I’d missed it, but while she was down there, Janet had attached a small leash to the dog, and when she and the doggie headed toward the back door, near the window I was peeking through, I damn near blew it.
But I got behind a tree in time, and then she was walking the terrier in the expansive, unfenced back yard, being careful not to walk in spots where the pooch had already made a deposit.
Over the next fifteen minutes, I kept watch as the woman and dog returned inside, and the woman put water and food down for the dog, re-penned it, then went around the house, watering plants.
Housesitting, for sure.
She was in the dining room when she finished the watering, and that’s where and when she began unbuttoning her blouse.
I kept watching as the blouse came open and a pinkish excuse for a bra was revealed; then the blouse and bra came off and nice breasts were revealed. Though she was in her thirties, no sag at all was apparent, full almost-C cups with half-dollar-size areolae and nipples that extended perhaps a half inch, soft.
She dropped the blouse and the bra to the floor, casually, and walked back into the kitchen, topless. There she stepped out of her skirt and revealed a half slip, which she also shed, letting me in on one of Victoria’s best secrets: lacy-edged pink panties cut high on the hip. Then she stepped out of those, as graceful as a dancer but so much more natural, moving on, leaving the clothes behind, littering lingerie. Her ass didn’t sag, either, her back beautifully dimpled above the firm roundness.
