Drop Dead Gorgeous Read online

  I went through the drive-in at the bank, then threaded my way through traffic back to Great Bods. I kept an eye out for that green Nissan, and Buicks, which is why I noticed the white Chevy again. Well, a white Chevy, and it was driven by a woman, but that isn’t uncommon, so I couldn’t say it was the same white Chevy. What were the odds the same woman would be reversing her earlier path and would get behind me again? Not very high, but hey, I was reversing my path, wasn’t I?

  When I got to Great Bods I turned down the side street to go to the rear parking lot, and the white Chevy continued going straight. I breathed a sigh of relief. I either had to get over this newfound paranoia or start paying more attention so I’d know if the same car or just a look-alike turned up behind me. There was no point in imprecise paranoia.

  My head was still pounding from being jerked around, so I went to my office and popped a couple of ibuprofen. Ordinarily I love what I do, but today hadn’t been a great day.

  Around seven-thirty, the end-of-the-day influx was beginning to outflux, to my relief. I got a pack of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine in the break room, and that was supper. I was so tired, all I wanted to do was sit down and not move for, oh, ten hours or so.

  Wyatt showed up at eight-thirty, to stay with me until closing. He gave me a sharp look that made me think I probably didn’t look my best, but all he said was, “How did you make it?”

  “I was doing okay until I went to the bank, almost rear-ended a nitwit who cut in front of me, and had to slam on my brakes,” I said.

  “Ouch.”

  “How did your day go?”

  “Pretty normal.”

  Which could mean anything from dead bodies turning up in a dump to a bank robbery, though I was pretty certain I’d have heard if one of the banks in town got robbed. I needed to get my hands on his paperwork to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

  The last client left, and the staff began cleaning up and putting everything to rights. I employ nine people, counting Lynn, with at least three people on each seven-and-a-half-hour shift, and four on each shift on Fridays and Saturdays, the busiest days. Everyone gets two days off, except me. I get one. That would have to change soon, and with that in mind I wrote a note to remind myself to hire an additional person.

  One by one the staff finished and called out their good-byes as they left. Yawning, I stretched, feeling the echo of soreness caused by my collision with the mall parking lot. I wanted a long soak in a hot tub, but that would have to wait because most of all I just wanted to go to bed.

  I did a walk-through, checking that everything was in order, double-checking that the front door was locked. I always left a couple of dim lights burning in the front. Wyatt waited at the back door for me. I set the alarm, then he opened the door as I turned out the hallway lights and we stepped outside. The motion sensor lights came on immediately, and I turned to lock the door. When I turned back around, Wyatt was crouched beside my car.

  “Blair,” he said, his voice taking on that flat tone cops use when they don’t want to give anything away. I stopped in my tracks, panic and fury both rising in equal force and making a potent mixture. I’d had enough of this crap, and I was damn tired of it.

  “Don’t tell me someone has put a bomb under my car!” I said indignantly. “That’s the last straw. I’ve had it. What is this, let’s-kill-Blair season? If this is just because I was a cheerleader, then people need to get a grip, there are a lot worse things in this world—”

  “Blair,” he said again, this time with rueful amusement.

  I was on a roll, and I didn’t like being stopped. “What!”

  “It’s not a bomb.”

  “Oh.”

  “Looks like someone keyed your car.”

  “What? Shit!” Furious all over again, I rushed to his side. Sure enough, a long, ugly scratch ran down the entire driver’s side of my car. The motion lights were bright enough to plainly see it.

  I started to kick the tire. I’d already drawn back my foot when I remembered my concussion. The headache probably saved me from broken toes, because have you ever really kicked a tire, hard, as if you were trying to punt the car between the goalposts? Not a good idea.

  Nor was there anything else around that I could kick that wouldn’t break my toes. The wall, the awning posts, things like that were my only available targets, and they were all even harder than the tires. I had no way of relieving my temper, and I thought my eyes would bug out from the internal pressure.

  Wyatt was looking around, assessing the situation. His police-issue Crown Vic was sitting at the end of the row; the staff’s cars would have been parked in the slots between his car and mine, effectively blocking his view of the damage, when he arrived.

  “Any idea when this could have been done?” he asked.

  “Sometime after I got back from the bank. That was about three-fifteen, three-twenty.”

  “After school was out, then.”

  It was easy to follow his line of thinking. A bored teenager, walking through the parking lot, might have thought it’d be fun to mess up the Mercedes. I had to admit that was the most likely scenario, unless Debra Carson was on the warpath again, or the psycho bitch in the Buick had somehow tracked me down. But I’d been through those possibilities before, when I got that weird phone call that had creeped me out, and they were no more plausible now than they had been before. Okay, Debra was a stronger possibility, because she knew where I worked, and she knew which car was mine. The Mercedes had been a big sore point with her, because Jason had thought it would look good with the voters if she drove an American-made car.

  She would be taking a risk, though, because she was already up on a charge of attempted murder—though God only knew when it would get to trial, given Jason’s family connections—and harassing the victim wouldn’t win her any points.

  On the other hand, she was nuts. Anything was possible.

  I said as much to Wyatt, but he didn’t leap on it as a brilliant theory. Instead he shrugged and said, “It was probably some kid. Not a lot you can do about it, since there aren’t any surveillance cameras back here.”

  Since he had mentioned surveillance cameras when he installed the motion lights, and I’d said there wasn’t any need going to that expense, there was a slight edge to his tone.

  “Go ahead,” I said, and sighed. “Say ‘I told you so.’”

  “I told you so,” he said with grim satisfaction.

  I couldn’t believe it. I gaped at him. “I can’t believe you said that! That was so rude!”

  “You told me to say it.”

  “But you weren’t supposed to! You were supposed to be magnanimous and say something like there’s no point in crying over spilled milk! Everybody knows you don’t actually say ‘I told you so’!” Well, there was an item for his troublesome list of transgressions: rude. And unsympathetic. No, I’d have to scratch “unsympathetic,” because after all the man had just spent his weekend taking care of me. I’d settle for “Gloated about my car.”

  Rising from his crouch, he dusted off his hands. “I take it this means you’ve giving in on the surveillance system.”

  “Fat lot of good it’ll do now!”

  “If anything else happens, you’ll be able to tell who did it. With your track record, I think you can pretty much count on another incident.”

  Wasn’t that a happy thought? I glared at my beautiful little black convertible. I’d had it just a couple of months, and now someone had deliberately damaged it.

  “All right,” I said sulkily. “I’ll have a surveillance system installed.”

  “I’ll take care of it. I know what works best.”

  At least he hadn’t said “If you’d listened to me before…” I probably would have screamed right in his face.

  He said, “If you’d listened to me before—”

  “Aaaaaaa!” I screamed, so frustrated I thought I’d explode. Now I could add “rubbing it in” to his list.

  Startl