“Nooo!” the woman screeched, and ripped one arm away from Robin’s grip. “Keeller!”
“Jesus, shut up!” Robin shouted.
True to California life, people were staring at us, but not stopping. Heck, in this neighborhood they probably thought we were doing a street performance.
She whipped her arm away from my grasp and turned to slug Robin again. I came from behind and shoved my knees into the backs of her legs, causing her knees to buckle. Robin pushed her down to the ground and sat on her back, straddling her so she couldn’t escape. But she bucked and rolled, making it look like Robin was riding one of those mechanical bulls.
“Call the police!” Robin shouted.
“Already got them,” I said, and rattled off my address to the 911 dispatcher.
The crazy cow kept trying to buck Robin off her. She tried swinging her arms around to smack Robin, but it was useless.
I noticed Robin’s eye was beginning to swell badly. Her strength was ebbing.
I heard sirens. “Police are on their way.”
That news caused the woman to bellow and rear up again, so I sank down and sat on her legs to keep her from kicking. Together Robin and I managed to hold her down.
But the woman wasn’t finished. She swung her elbow back and connected with Robin’s thigh. Robin howled in pain but didn’t give an inch.
Robin was usually the nicest human being on the face of the planet, but she’d had a hard week and wasn’t willing to be pushed anymore. She grabbed a thick clump of the woman’s hair and yanked at it. “Chill out or die, bitch.”
Over an hour later, Robin lay on my living room couch, her left eye swollen closed and most of her cheek dark red and bruised. She was holding a bag of frozen peas to her face and whimpering only a little. I knew I had bruises, too, but nothing compared to Robin’s. Her face would turn black and blue and purple over the next twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t going to be pretty for a week or so.
I walked to the kitchen sink and filled a plastic bag with ice and wrapped it in a soft cloth. When I laid it on the other side of her poor face she grimaced, then whispered, “It’s too cold.”
“That’s why we call it ice.”
“Funny,” Robin murmured.
“We want the swelling to go down, sweetie,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry it hurts.”
“Me, too.”
“We’ll only leave it on for about ten minutes at a time.”
She gave a determined nod. “I can take it for ten minutes.”
“We shouldn’t have gone outside,” I lamented. “You wouldn’t be hurt if I hadn’t insisted on getting out of here for a while.”
“Who knew she was watching the place? Freakazoid.” She groaned. “Hurts to talk.”
“Then stop talking.”
“You wish,” she murmured, but then settled into the couch and let the ice pack do its healing.
The first thing I’d done once we got inside was call my mother to ask for the best remedies for Robin’s wounds. After getting a full list of items from Mom, along with lots of woo-woo advice to purge Robin’s karma of bad juju, I quickly called Derek to tell him what had happened. He offered to stop at the health food store on his way home to pick up everything Mom recommended.
I read off the list. Sage tea, good for both drinking and soaking with a compress to reduce swelling and heal bruising; vitamin K cream to accelerate healing; arnica to banish bruises; and chunks of fresh whole pineapple, which contained an enzyme that also helped reduce bruising.
Mom also recommended grinding up parsley for its anti-inflammatory properties, but I blew that one off and slipped Robin a couple of ibuprofen instead. And as a bonus, I still had some Vicodin in the medicine cabinet to help knock her out later.
Personally, I’d popped a Xanax as soon as we got inside. I was a nervous wreck.
I expected the whack job who attacked Robin to be behind bars very soon. Earlier, two policemen had arrived on the scene to find Robin and me still squatting on top of her. After taking our statements and the statements of several brave people who’d stepped forward as witnesses, they’d arrested and handcuffed her. She might’ve revealed her full name to the police, but she kept glancing at us, noticing we were listening to her every word, so she would give them only her first name, Galina. All we were able to glean in the short but really fun time we spent with her was that she was a friend-lover?-of Alex’s and clearly blamed Robin for his death.
An ambulance arrived and two paramedics rushed over to check out our battle wounds. Despite her everswelling eye and bruised cheek, Robin refused to go to the hospital and had to sign a waiver to that effect.
As the EMTs packed up their gear, a black Lincoln Town Car cruised by slowly, then stopped on the opposite side of the street. The windows were blacked out, so I couldn’t see inside the car, but I knew instinctively that whoever was sitting there was watching us. It gave me the willies.
Robin noticed the car, too, and so did Galina, who began screaming like a banshee at them. The driver drove off slowly, and Galina, despite being handcuffed, turned around to flash her middle finger at it. I had to give her points for her passion.
The car was too far away for me to make out the license plate number. The driver might’ve been an innocent lookie-loo, but I doubted it, given Galina’s reaction.
I asked the policeman to contact Lee or Jaglom and let them know that they would want to interview Lunatic Galina in connection with Alex’s murder. The one officer got Inspector Lee on the phone right then, and I could hear her barking orders through the officer’s earpiece.
Galina fought the officer who tried to push her gently into the back of the patrol car. So it wasn’t just us; she was angry at everyone. Her anger and passion reminded me of someone else in my life, but my head was so full of strange puzzles and weird facts at the moment, I couldn’t remember who it was.
As I watched both police officers struggle with her, it occurred to me that maybe she was the one who had killed Alex. Maybe she was a jealous lover who’d seen him going out on a date, followed them back to Robin’s place, where she killed him in a rage, and trashed the apartment. Now she was stalking Robin. She might’ve even trashed Alex’s apartment.
Of course, if Galina had killed Alex in a jealous rage, surely she would have killed Robin, too. She didn’t seem like the type to rein in her emotions at a time like that.
So she probably wasn’t Alex’s killer, but she might’ve been the one to ransack Alex’s apartment. Now she was stalking Robin because… she thought Robin killed Alex? Or she thought Robin knew something? Or she thought Robin had something of hers? Or Alex’s? Why?
The jealous-lover scenario worked for me. I just wished I knew what she was yelling in Russian or Ukrainian or whatever language she’d been spewing.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the jealousy angle worked only until I got to the part where Alex had drugged Robin. Why? I played it out a few more times but couldn’t get Galina to fit into the bigger picture, and I wound up back at the beginning of the puzzle.
Really, nothing made sense when combined with the fact that Robin had been drugged by Alex. Maybe I was trying too hard or overlooking something obvious. I couldn’t figure it out, and I found myself rubbing my temple to rid myself of the headache that was cropping up. It was a minor ache compared to Robin’s, though, and as I watched her struggle to find relief in sleep, I vowed to track down the bastard who’d killed Alex and ruined Robin’s life. And I would make him pay.
Chapter 8
That night, after I’d made sure Robin was asleep, I walked into my bedroom and stumbled into Derek’s arms. I didn’t know I was so close to the breaking point until my eyes blurred with tears and I felt myself shaking.
