Agnes and the Hitman Read online

  “Go on,” he said, but he blushed just the same. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she told him. “Kind of. This has been a really lousy day, but it’s almost over, the cops are going to take the body away, I’m not in any trouble… right?” She looked at him, trying not to seem anxious.

  “Right,” Joey said firmly, but his eyes slid away from hers. Oh, God. Agnes smiled at him as sanely as she could and headed for her bedroom, not relieved at all.

  Once in the housekeeper’s room, Agnes clutched her frying pan tighter and felt her way toward the bedside lamp.

  “I told you nothing happened in here,” she called out, looking around for the cop. “It was all out in the kitchen.” Not that I’m upset with you, sir. Please don’t arrest me.

  The wind blew the curtains away from the window by the bed, and she saw that the bedside table was tipped over, and then a hand clamped over her mouth and somebody said, “Shhhh,” and she swung the pan up over her head hard and connected with a smack that reverberated into her shoulders.

  He wrenched the pan out of her hand. “Stop it.Joey sent me.”

  She yanked away from him, and he let her go so that she tripped, falling against the bed, and then she fumbled on the floor for the light and clicked it on, breathing hard.

  He loomed up over her as her heart pounded, a big guy, dressed in black-black pants, black T, black denim jacket-looking like he’d been hacked out of a block of wood: strong, weathered face; black, flat eyes-shark eyes, she thought-cropped dark hair going gray at the temples, now a little bloody on the right; tense, hard, squared-off body, all of it alert and concentrated on her. But the thing she noticed most, as she tried to keep from having a heart attack, was that he looked like Joey. Younger than Joey, bigger than Joey, but he looked like Joey.

  She swallowed. “Who are you and what the hell are you doing in here?”

  “I’m Shane. Joey sent me.” He jerked his head toward the kitchen, no wasted movement. “Who’s out there?”

  Agnes got to her feet, wishing she had her frying pan back. “Shane. Okay, Shane, thank you for scaring the hell out of me, but this is my house, so I’ll ask the questions.” She took a deep breath. “Joey sent you. Why?”

  “I’m here to protect some kid. Little Agnes?”

  “That’s me,” Agnes said.

  There was a silence long enough to hear crickets in, and Agnes thought, If he makes some crack about me being not little, I’m gonna hit him again, and then he spoke.

  “I’m here to protect you,” he said, sounding resigned. “Unless you hit me again, in which case, whoever I’m supposed to save you from can have your ass.”

  “Protect me.” That wasn’t good. She’d been worried about the police finding out about her record, but Joey thought she needed to be protected from something else, something only somebody like this guy could stave off. Which meant something was seriously wrong. Not that the guy who was now a corpse in her basement hadn’t been a tip-off, but if Joey thought something was so bad that she needed this guy, it must be really bad, because a guy like this could protect her from… Anything.

  Out in the front hall, Brenda’s ugly black grandfather clock began to chime the hour in big gongs that sounded like Death’s oven timer, and Agnes looked at Shane again.

  Big. Broad. Dark. Strong. Handsome if you liked thugs. Looked like Joey. And he was here to keep her safe.

  How are you feeling right now, Agnes?

  Could be worse.

  “Okay, Shane,” Agnes said as Brenda’s clock gonged midnight. “I got Joey in the kitchen, a cop in the front hall, a dead body in the basement, and you in my bedroom. Where do you want to start?”

  tuesday

  cranky agnes column #62

  “Just Like Mother Used to Fake”

  Many of us have a recipe passed down to us by our mothers that pretty much sums up our childhood memories in an ingredient list. In my case, it was “One chilled glass, two parts Tanqueray, wave at the vermouth bottle, stir clockwise if you’re north of the equator, and for God’s sake, Agnes, don’t bruise the gin.” Yours was probably a can of cream of mushroom soup poured over a can of green beans. That mother who made baked Alaska from scratch? She also screamed, “No wire hangers!” Those overachievers always have a dark side.

  Shane had started in the kitchen, a big warm room with red walls and white counters that smelled of chocolate and raspberry, quiet except for the rumble of voices from the hall.

  “That’s Detective Xavier and Joey,” Agnes said, looking worried.

  Everything in Agnes’s kitchen was neat and professional, but nothing said big money, ransom kind of money. In fact, the only thing that had caught his eye was the row of gleaming razor-sharp knives stuck to the magnetic bars on the wall, and next to them long-handled forks that looked sharp as spikes, and beyond those more sharpened, shiny tools, every damn one of them lethal as hell.

  Agnes worked in the Kitchen of Death.

  “You hit him with a frying pan,” he said to her. “How come you didn’t grab a knife?”

  “The frying pan was closer.” Her eyes slid away. “It’s not like I had time to pick a weapon. It’s not like the frying pan is my weapon of choice.”

  He nodded and moved to look at the revolver on the counter, stopping when he saw the dirty white tape around the pistol grip, an old mobster’s trick. Any old mobster in Keyes, South Carolina, was going to be somebody Joey knew. Fuck. There went any hope of getting out of there and back to work fast. Wilson was not going to be happy.

  Well, that made two of them.

  “Where’s the body?” he asked her, and she went over to the hall door and pushed on the wall next to it, and a concealed door swung back and forth while she watched. He reached inside his jacket and under his T-shirt and pulled a mini-Maglite out of the pocket sewn onto the outside of his body armor. “Can you stall this Xavier while I go down there and get a look?”

  “Sure,” Agnes said, not sounding sure.

  He moved past her to put one foot through the door onto the two-by-eight on the inside where the stairs had once been attached, and tested to make sure it was solid. Then he swung into the void until both feet were on the board. He bent down, put his fingers on the same piece of wood, and then slid his feet down the wall. Halfway down, he let go and landed lightly in the basement, and then went over to the body and put his mini-Mag on it.

  Angry welts on the face. Agnes and her hot raspberry sauce.

  Blood underneath the dirty hair. Agnes and her frying pan.

  Neck twisted and broken. Agnes and her unknown basement with no stairs.

  Joey’s Little Agnes didn’t need protecting, but he might stay and put up some warning signs for unsuspecting intruders. Something like BEWARE OF THE COOK or AGNES KILLS.

  He heard voices and waited to hear the door open wide, but instead he heard Joey say, “Xavier, this here is my little Agnes, Cranky Agnes, from the newspaper. You probably seen her picture over her column.”

  Shane bent down and began to go through the boy’s pockets.

  Upstairs he heard a Southern drawl say, “Pleased to meet you, Miss Agnes. Now, you do own this house, ma’am?” and Agnes, so clear she must have been right by the door, say, “Yes. I bought it from Brenda Dupres four months ago. I’ve been rehabbing it, but I’m still finding things. Mostly dry rot and bad plaster, so the basement was actually a step up. Well, not for the dead guy. Are you sure I can’t get you some coffee, Detective? I make a truly delicious cup of coffee.” Good girl, he thought, and played the flashlight around the room.

  An old pool table in the center, good solid mahogany, the felt now peeling up from the slate. A small bar tucked in one corner, fully stocked, as if somebody had just left it yesterday, the wood now coveredwith dust and mold. Behind it, a ceiling-high, four-foot-wide wine rack, still filled with bottles, now covered with dust and cobwebs. And a five-foot-high replica of the Venus de Milo tucked into the corner, now speckled with mildew. You’d have thou