Jo shivered.
Brian, who looked so much like the older Buddy when the pro trainers pumped him full of steroids and he damned near went to prison for pounding the shit out of a guy in a bar . . . .
David stepped in front of her. "Jo, give me your keys."
The door stuck like it always did, jerky across the humped floor. Then Jo saw more blood--blood on the floor tile, blood on the white porcelain of the refrigerator, blood on paper towels wadded up on the table. She saw a man slumped in the corner between the refrigerator and the wall, head in his bloody hands, blood on his shirt, blood in his hair.
His curly blonde hair.
Jo froze. She knew she should scream. She knew she should rouse the neighbors, call the cops. Instead, she growled deep in her throat like a feral cat.
She remembered, with a sudden flash, that she'd ended up hating Buddy Johnson--that sex between them had become war rather than love. Cops weren't good enough, personal enough; cops wouldn't allow her to tear this scumbag apart with her bare hands.
"You bastard, you've killed her!"
She flung herself past David, raging to claw the man's eyes out, sink her teeth into his throat, stomp his head until it popped like an overripe tomato and spilled his brains all over the floor. Her mind and sight and hands focused on a single thing.
Vengeance for Maureen. Vengeance for her baby sister.
Something grabbed her arm and spun her. A fist flashed at her face, a fist backed by red hair and a snarl.
Chapter Eleven
Maureen's glare nailed David to the wall.
He felt like a frog that she planned to dissect, pinned to the wax bottom of the tray and spread out belly-up waiting for the scalpel. Alive.
Jo groaned and stirred, blood trickling from her lip, and David knew he should go to her, defend her, comfort her, help her up. The air smelled bitter with electricity. He couldn't move.
Insane.
Maureen was insane. It had just been a word, before. Here in the blood-spattered kitchen with a man's body slumped against the cabinets and a gun lying on the table, the words grew substance.
Psychotic. Demented. Deranged. Homicidal maniac.
Stone-ass crazy.
She had murdered that man. She was going to murder Jo.
And then the corpse moved. The corpse shoved itself up to sit against the wall and cradled its arm in its lap and groaned. The corpse wore undershorts and undershirt, not what a corpse should be wearing if it had forced its way into an apartment and gotten shot. Other clothing lay in a sodden heap in one corner, leaking a thin trail of red.
David's eyes finally passed details on to his brain. A long slash gouged across the man's left arm. Black thread ran up it in a ragged line of stitches. A bowl of red water sat on the floor. Little white boxes with red crosses on them lay scattered around. Gauze rolls and gauze pads and flesh-colored tape mixed among bottles, peroxide and iodine.
The static died and he smelled a doctor's office, antiseptic and blood and freshly opened bandages. She hadn't killed him. She was patching him up. The poor bastard had gotten himself into a hell of a mess.
Maureen grabbed a lump of white and threw it at David. His fingers told him it was a roll of paper towels.
"Don't just stand there like a fucking idiot! Take some water and clean up that crap out in the stairwell."
Whatever pinned him against the wall vanished. David stumbled over to the sink, rattled a saucepan under the faucet, and splashed water in it. He still couldn't go to Jo. Maureen's aura forbade it.
He felt like he'd walked into a coven of witches. First Jo damn near pulped his wrist with her tiny hands, then Maureen knocked Jo clear across the kitchen with one off-balance punch. Neither woman weighed more than a hundred, in winter clothes and sopping wet. What the hell was with these Pierce women?
Maureen told him to clean up, he went to clean up. No choice. Maybe Jo would wake up enough to battle her sister for his soul.
Blood and water and sodden red paper towels--it seemed like he wiped up enough blood for a minor war. A puddle of blood affects the eyes differently than a puddle of water, connects to different nerves, works deep on the brain stem. And the damned stuff spreads around like thick paint. One drop will smear to cover a whole floor-tile.
It still was what Maureen or Jo would call a fucking mess, no doubt about it. Sometimes you could tell they were sisters from a typed transcript. Fucking this, goddamn that, assorted obscenities and blasphemies as add-on adjectives and adverbs at a rate of two per sentence.
His mother had always said that the casual use of profanity indicated a poverty of intellect. Someone with half a brain could come up with sharper and more compelling words that wouldn't blush a Baptist preacher. And besides, the way they used foul language, it lost all effect. It faded into background noise after the first ten minutes.
Speaking of brains . . . where was his? He stared down at the saucepan full of thin spaghetti sauce and the wad of crimson paper towels. He was mopping up blood on the stairs while Maureen played EMT.
What the hell was she doing? That man needed an emergency room. Knife wound in the arm, livid bruises on face and shoulder and leg, the spaced-out pupils of a concussion victim--the guy was seriously hurt.
He grabbed everything and legged up the stairway two steps at a time, into what felt like psychic molasses. The closer he got to Maureen, the less absurd everything seemed. He wrestled with his sense of outrage, holding on to an image of punching 9-1-1 on Jo's phone.
The voice of reason yammered on in the back
