“I’ll make you a deal,” Doris said. “Hit the target and you win a free shower.”
I adjusted my grip.
“And if I miss?”
“Then I get to laugh at you guilt-free. That’s a twelve-gauge—it’ll be like hitting the side of a barn with another barn.”
“That’s it? You get to laugh at me?”
She thought it over.
“And I get a night’s free labor. You cover the dinner shift for nothin’. Sound fair?”
“Plenty fair.”
Come on now, Sarah, I told myself. You can do this.
And I did. I held myself steady and squeezed that trigger. And Lord knows if I hit the target, because the recoil landed me flat on my ass. I looked up to see Doris holding her sides.
“Hot damn,” she said. “I didn’t know it was possible to miss from this close. I mean, you must’ve hit something somewhere, but I’ve never seen those cans so still.”
She reached out to take the gun back.
“I was gonna let you have it for two hundred, but—”
I held on to the barrel.
“Let’s up the stakes,” I said. “One more shot. If I make it, you put me on as chef for a day. If I miss again, you get a free waitress for a full week.”
She backed up a step.
“Go for it,” she said. “But I can’t say I like your odds.”
I took careful aim, concentrated with everything I had, promised myself the battle was already won…and then fell on my ass a second time. When I got back up, I saw the coffee cans hanging undisturbed.
“Well,” Doris said, “you better nap some after your shower, ’cause Thursday’s a busy night at the Diner Things in Life.”
Chapter 22Detective Sean Walsh
I SAT parked outside Símon’s place until sunup. Serena didn’t show. She must have packed an overnight bag and headed to a local motel in case Símon got lucky. Chances were she’d be back by breakfast, but I couldn’t risk hanging around any longer—I had a 7:00 a.m. shift to make.
I thought about calling in sick, but knowing Heidi, she’d have sent someone to check on me. Though she had yet to say it out loud, I was a top suspect in her high-profile case, and I couldn’t afford to draw attention to myself. I stopped home for a shave and a change of clothes, then gunned it for the station house.
I had plenty of practice hiding sleepless nights from my superiors, and this particular sleepless night would be easier to hide than most. Heidi wanted me to chaperone a rookie assigned to his first homicide. Busywork, pure and simple. For once I didn’t mind.
The kid’s name was Randolph. He was short and lean, almost frail-looking, and tried to hide his bad skin under a layer of cover-up that seemed likely to melt right off in the Florida sun. He’d been some kind of celebrity on the beat, risen through the ranks at lightning speed. At twenty-six years of age, he was biologically young enough to be my son. That wasn’t his fault, but there were other reasons not to like him. Randolph was a smug little company man, the type who’d rat you out for parking too far from the curb if he thought it might endear him to the brass. Any detective on the squad who had more than a year or two until retirement was sucking up to him already, thinking one day soon he’d be signing their OT slips.
The case was a stone-cold whodunit: a homeless man found knifed to death under a pedestrian bridge near the Tampa Riverwalk. We rode over in a department-issue sedan, Randolph behind the wheel. I’d have been fine with quiet, but Randolph wanted to chat. He wanted to know all about the Costello case. Mostly he wanted to know about Sarah. What was it like having my wife in the box with my ex-partner? He didn’t know how I could concentrate. I must be worried sick. How was Sarah holding up? Had she ever run off before? Had she been acting differently in the days leading up to the murder?
“You know, they say some women can sense a natural disaster before it happens. Earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes. Not that they know exactly what’s coming—only that it’s big. Maybe it’s the same with homicide?”
The little bastard was fishing, looking for a tip he could pass on to Heidi, something to raise his profile and ruin my life.
“Listen, Randy—”
“It’s Randolph.”
I smiled, knowing that from this moment forward his name would forever be Randy. I was about to tell him where to go with his thinly veiled interrogation when it dawned on me that two can play this game.
“What’s the over-under in the office pool?” I asked.
“What office pool?”
“Don’t you mean which office pool? There has to be more than one. Does homicide detective Sean Walsh’s wife go to prison for murder? Does Detective Walsh keep his job? Hell, I bet there’s even one on whether or not I set the whole thing up. Everybody knows I had a relationship with Anthony Costello. Maybe I’m framing my own wife?”
I’d raised my voice without meaning to. That’s what an absence of sleep will do for you: your ideas might be good, but the execution falls apart.
“Nobody’s saying you framed Mrs. Walsh.”
Mrs. Walsh? That small sign of respect told me I had him running scared. His biggest fear, I knew, was that I’d ask for names—a tally of who was for me and who was against me.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
“Not much,” he lied. “I mean—”
“Nobody’s saying I was on the Costello payroll? Nobody’s saying I got in so deep there was only one way out?”
He started hemming and hawing. I cut him short.
“Because if they are, you can tell them this: I was working Anthony. That’s what the golf games were about. That’s why I put Sarah in his house. I wanted to be the one to read Vincent Costello his rights. Anthony always
