To Die For Read online

  “They’re checking now for a list of people who bought black wigs,” I lied. He gave me another nervous glance. Actually, it wasn’t much of a lie. When Wyatt found my notebook with the word wig circled, he would definitely check it out.

  “People saw me leaving with you,” I pointed out. “If you kill me, how are you going to explain that?”

  “I’ll think of something,” he muttered.

  “What? How can you dispose of my body? Besides, they’ll hook you up to a lie detector so fast your head will spin. Even if they can’t find enough evidence to bring you to trial, the publicity will ruin your career.” See, I know Jason; he has nightmares about anything that might threaten his career. And even though he’d cut my brake lines, I simply couldn’t see him killing me in person.

  “You might as well just let me go,” I continued. “I don’t know why you’re trying to kill me—wait a minute! You might have cut my brake lines, but you definitely didn’t shoot at me last Sunday. What’s going on here?” I jerked around to stare at him and the car swerved. He cursed and I hurriedly straightened the wheel.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, staring straight ahead and forgetting to keep me covered with the pistol. See? Jason is just not cut out for a life of crime.

  “Someone else shot at me.” My brain was racing, and all the separate little links were knotting together, forming a chain. “Your wife! Your wife tried to kill me, didn’t she?”

  “She’s crazy jealous,” he blurted. “I can’t stop her; I can’t reason with her. This will ruin me if she gets caught, and she will, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  That made two of them.

  “So you thought you’d sort of kill me yourself so she wouldn’t have to? Beat her to the punch?”

  “Something like that.” Frazzled, he raked a hand through his blond hair. “If you’re dead, she’ll stop obsessing about you.”

  “Why on earth would she obsess about me? I am so totally out of your life; this is the first time I’ve spoken to you since our divorce.”

  He mumbled something, and I threw a glare his way. “What? Speak up.” He mumbles when he feels guilty about something.

  “It might be my fault,” he mumbled, slightly louder.

  “Oh? How’s that?” I tried to sound encouraging, when what I really wanted to do was beat his head against the pavement or something.

  “When we argue, I might say something about you,” he confessed, and now he was staring out the passenger window. Really. I thought about simply reaching over and taking the pistol away from him, except he had his finger on the trigger, which is so totally stupid if you aren’t an expert, and Jason wasn’t. If he had been, he would have been watching me like a hawk instead of staring out the window.

  “Jason, you dummy,” I groaned. “Why would you do something stupid like that?”

  “She’s always trying to make me jealous,” he said defensively. “I love Debra, I really do, but she isn’t like you. She’s clingy and insecure, and I got tired of the way she tried to make me jealous and I started firing back. I knew it made her mad, but I didn’t know she’d flipped out about it. Last Sunday night, when I got home from playing golf and found out she’d actually shot at you, we had this huge argument and she swore she’d kill you if it was the last thing she did. I think she’s been staking out your house or something, trying to find out if there’s something going on between us. Nothing I said made any difference to her. She’s crazy jealous, and if she kills you, I probably won’t even be reelected as state representative. I can kiss the governorship good-bye.”

  I mulled all this over for a minute.

  “Jason, I hate to tell you this, but you married a nitwit. That’s fair, though,” I added judiciously.

  He looked at me. “How’s that?”

  “So did she.”

  That made him sulk for a few minutes, but finally he groaned and said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to kill you, but if I don’t, Debra is going to keep trying and she’ll ruin my career.”

  “I have an idea. How about you have her committed to a mental institution,” I suggested sarcastically. I meant it, too. She was a danger to others—namely, me—so she met the criteria. Or criterion. Whatever.

  “I can’t do that! I love her.”

  “Look. It seems to me you have a choice: if she kills me, it may ruin your career; but if you kill me, the results will be way more serious because you’ve made a prior attempt and this shows premeditation, which will get you in serious hot water. Not only that, I’m engaged to a cop, and he’ll kill you.” I took my left hand off the steering wheel and held it over for him to see the ring.

  “Wow, that’s a rock,” he said admiringly. “I didn’t think cops had that kind of money. Who is he?”

  “Wyatt Bloodsworth. He questioned you the other day, remember?”

  “So that’s why he was so nasty. I get it now. He was the football player, wasn’t he? I guess he has plenty of money.”

  “He gets by,” I said. “But if anything happens to me, he’ll not only kill you—and the other cops would look the other way, because they like me—he’ll burn your village and sow your fields with salt.” I thought I’d throw in a little biblical warning just to impress him with the seriousness of the consequences.

  “I don’t have any fields,” he said. “Or a village.”

  Sometimes Jason could be stupendously literal. “I know that,” I said patiently. “It was a metaphor. What I meant was, he’ll totally destroy you.”

  He nodded his head. “Yeah, I can see that. You’re looking hot these days.” He tilted his head back against the seat and groaned. “What can I do? I can’t think of anything that will work. I called in that murder/suicide to get the cops out of the building, but not all of them left. You were right; there were witnesses. If I kill you, I’d have to kill them, too, and I don’t think that would work because by now the cops have probably found out that call was a false alarm and they’re back at the station.”

  As if on cue, my cell phone rang. Jason jumped a foot. I started to fish around in my bag for the phone, but Jason said, “Don’t answer it!” and I pulled my hand out.

  “That will be Wyatt,” I said. “He’ll go ape shit when he finds out I left with you.” That wasn’t biblical, but it was accurate.

  Sweat beaded on Jason’s brow. “You can tell him we were just talking, right?”

  “Jason. Get a clue. You’ve been trying to kill me. We have to get this settled or I’m telling Wyatt you made a pass at me, and he’ll take you apart all the way down to your molecules.”

  “I know,” he groaned. “Let’s go to my house so we can talk, come up with a plan.”

  “Is Debra there?”

  “No, she’s watching your folks’ house, figuring you’ll turn up there sooner or later.”

  She was stalking my parents? I’d scalp the bitch for that. Hot fury zipped through me, but I controlled it, because I needed to keep my head. I had talked Jason around, but I knew Jason and I wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. Evidently his wife was crazy as a loon though, and I didn’t know what we could do about her.

  I drove to Jason’s house, which of course is the one we’d bought together, and which I’d given him in the divorce. It hadn’t changed much in five years; the landscaping was more mature, but that was about it. The house was red brick, two-story, with white shutters and trim. The style was modern, with interesting architectural details, but there was nothing about it to make it stand out from the rest of the neighborhood. I think developers have at the most five house plans and styles that they use, so subdivisions have a cookie-cutter look to them. The garage doors were down, so Debra wasn’t at home.

  When I pulled into the driveway, I said thoughtfully, “You know, it might have been smart to move rather than expect Debra to live here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Like I said: clueless. “Because this is where we lived when we were married,”