Agnes and the Hitman Read online

  “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.