Page 23 of Open Season

SEVEN

Glenn Sykes was a professional. He was careful, he paid attention to details, and he didn’t let himself get emotionally involved. He’d never spent a day in jail; in fact, he even had a clean driving record, without so much as a speeding ticket to his name. Not that he hadn’t had a speeding ticket, but the driver’s license he’d presented had been in a different name, an alternate identity he’d prudently set up for himself some fifteen years previously.

One of the reasons he was successful was that he didn’t draw attention to himself. He wasn’t loud, he seldom drank—and never when he was working, only when he was alone—and he always kept himself neat and clean, on the theory that law-abiding people were more likely to keep an eagle eye on anyone hanging around who looked dirty and unkempt, as if dirt somehow translated into shiftiness. Anyone who saw him would automatically categorize him as Joe Average, with a wife and a couple of kids, and a three-bedroom house in an older subdivision. He didn’t wear an earring, or a chain, or have a tattoo; all those, however small, were things that people noticed. He kept his sandy brown hair cut fairly short, he wore an ordinary thirty-dollar wristwatch even though he could afford much better, and he watched his mouth. He could and did go anywhere without drawing undue attention.

That was why he was so disgusted with Mitchell. The dead girl wasn’t anyone important, but her body, when it was discovered, would still draw attention. The resultant investigation probably wouldn’t amount to much, and he’d been careful to make certain the cops wouldn’t have anything to go on, but mistakes happened and even cops got lucky occasionally. Mitchell was jeopardizing the entire enterprise; Sykes had no doubt that if Mitchell was ever arrested in connection with those girls’ deaths, he’d drop every name he’d ever known in an effort to strike a deal with the D.A. Mitchell’s stupidity could get every one of them a prison sentence.

The hell of it was, if Mitchell couldn’t get it up with a conscious woman, there were other ways to do it. GHB was a crap shoot; you might take it one time and be okay, with just a gap in your memory. The next time, it could shut down your brain. There were other drugs that would work; hell, booze would work. But, no, Mitchell had to slip them GHB, like he was getting away with something and no one would notice when the girls didn’t wake up.

So Mitchell had to go. If Mayor Nolan hadn’t given the word, Sykes had already decided it was time for him to be moving on, before Mitchell brought them all down. But the mayor, for all his southern-fucking-gentleman manners, was as cold and ruthless as anyone Sykes had ever met; he didn’t pretend that he couldn’t sully his hands with murder—though Sykes didn’t exactly call killing Mitchell murder. It was more of an extermination, like stepping on a cockroach.

First, though, he had to find the bastard. With a cockroach’s talent for self-preservation, Mitchell had gone to ground and hadn’t turned up at any of his usual haunts.

Since Mitchell was already spooked, Sykes decided to play this low-key. While it would have been satisfying to simply walk up to the bastard’s trailer and put a hole between his eyes as soon as he opened the door, again, things like that tended to attract attention. For one thing, Mitchell had neighbors, and in Sykes’s experience neighbors were always looking out the window just when they shouldn’t. He could dispose of Mitchell in far less dramatic ways. With luck, he could even make it look like an accident.

Mitchell knew his car, so Sykes borrowed one from a pal and cruised through Mitchell’s neighborhood, if you could call two ramshackle trailers and one dilapidated frame house, surrounded by junk, a neighborhood. They were the types of places inhabited by women with frizzy hair who wore tight, stained tank tops that showed their dirty bra straps, and by men with long, straggly hair, yellowed teeth, and an unshaken belief that life had done them wrong and owed them something. Sykes didn’t openly look at any of the three places as he drove by; with his peripheral vision he searched for Mitchell’s blue pickup, but it wasn’t there. He’d drive by again after dark, see if any lights were on, but he didn’t really expect the cockroach to turn up again so soon.

Seeing how Mitchell lived always reminded Sykes of how narrow his own escape had been. If he hadn’t been smarter, made better decisions, he might be Mitchell. Now, that was a scary thought. But he came from the same trashy background; he knew exactly how Mitchell thought, how he operated. In his work that was a plus, but Sykes never wanted to actually live that way again. He wanted more. Hell, Mitchell probably wanted more, too, but he was never going to get more because he kept making those stupid decisions.

With an eye to the future, Sykes salted away every dollar he could. He lived simply, but cleanly. He had no expensive habits or vices. He even played the stock market a little, with conservative stocks that didn’t perform spectacularly, but nevertheless always posted a gain. One day, when he had enough—though he wasn’t certain exactly how much was enough—he would walk away from everything and move where no one knew him, start a small business, settle down as a respected member of the community. Hell, he might even get married, have a couple of rugrats. His imagination couldn’t quite conjure up that picture, but nevertheless it was possible.

Mitchell wasn’t jeopardizing just Sykes’s immediate future, but all of his plans. Those plans were what had gotten him out of the trash dump of a house where he’d grown up, what had given him a goal when it would have been so much easier to just let himself drift in the sea of waste. It was always easier to do nothing. Don’t worry about cleaning the house or cutting the grass, just drink another six-pack of beer and smoke another joint. Never mind there’s no food in the house for the kids; when that monthly check comes in, first thing, you gotta get your booze and drugs, before the money gets gone. It was easy. It was always easier to blow the money rather than spend it on things like food and electricity. The tough ones, the smart ones like him, figured out that the hard road was the road out.

No matter what, Sykes would never go back.

Once he took on a project, Todd Lawrence was an unstoppable force. Between trying to get her house ready to move into and Todd commandeering every other spare minute she had, Daisy felt as if she had been caught up in a tornado that refused to let her drop. The only thing that kept her from collapsing was the visible change she could see in herself.

She didn’t have the nerve to try for the sex kitten image, and she had no idea what “old money” entailed, so she opted for the nature girl. She could handle that, she thought. Todd, however, had other ideas.

“I think we’ll go for old money,” he said lazily when she presented herself at his house on Saturday for their shopping expedition and trip to a beauty salon in Huntsville. Hands on his hips, he looked her up and down. “Your face will look better with that kind of hair-style.”

“Old money has a hairstyle?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course. Simple, uncluttered, very good cut. Never too long, just to the top of your shoulders, I think. I have something in mind that you’ll like. Oh, by the way, we’re going to get your ears pierced today, too.”

Protectively she grabbed her earlobes. “Why? I don’t think a makeover should include bloodshed.”

“Because clip-on earrings are hideously uncomfortable, darling. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”

She peered at his own earlobes, hoping they were hole-free so she could refuse on the basis that he didn’t know what he was talking about. No such luck; both lobes sported small indentations. He smiled and patted her hand. “Be brave,” he said cheerfully. “Beauty always comes at a price.”

Daisy didn’t think she was brave so much as totally unable to stop this train she had started in motion. She was still trying to come up with a compelling reason why she didn’t need any body parts pierced when Todd bundled her into his car and they set off for Huntsville.

Their first stop was a beauty salon. Daisy had only ever been in Wilma’s beauty shop, and there was a definite difference between a “shop” and a “salon.” For one thing, she was asked what she wanted to drink. All Wilma ever asked was if you were in a hurry. She started to ask for a cup of coffee, but Todd, with a twinkle in his eyes, said, “Wine. She needs to relax.”

The receptionist, a striking woman with short platinum hair and a pleasant smile, laughed as she fetched the wine. It was delivered into Daisy’s hand in a real wineglass, instead of the plastic disposable glass she had expected. On further reflection, though, she supposed Todd wouldn’t give his patronage to any salon so gauche as to serve wine in plastic or Styrofoam.

The receptionist consulted her book. “Amie will be right with you. She’s our top stylist, so you can just relax and put yourself in her hands. You’ll look like a million dollars when she’s finished.”

“I’ll just have a word with her before I leave,” Todd said, and disappeared through a door.

Daisy gulped her wine. Leave? Todd was leaving her here alone? The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Oh, God, she couldn’t do this.

She had to do this.

Three hours later, on her third glass of wine, she felt as if she had been tortured. Sharp-smelling chemicals had been swabbed on her hair, chemicals that bleached her a bright yellow-white and made her look like a punk rocker who had been frightened by a television evangelist. After that stuff was washed out, then more chemicals were applied with what looked like a paintbrush, on one strand at a time, and each strand was then wrapped to keep it from touching the other strands. She morphed from a punk rocker into something from outer space, wired to receive satellite transmissions.

While this was happening, her eyebrows were waxed—ouch—and she was kept busy receiving both a manicure and a pedicure. Her nails were now all the same length, polished a transparent rose with pale tips. Her toenails, though, sported a wicked shade of red. Daisy tried to remember if she had ever painted her toe-nails before; she didn’t think so, and even if she had, she would have chosen some pale pink shade that was barely noticeable. She would never, never have chosen look-at-me red. The effect was startling—and wonderfully sexy. She kept holding her bare feet up and staring at her red-tipped toes, thinking they didn’t even look like her feet now. Too bad she didn’t have any sandals to show them off. She had some flip-flops, but she couldn’t wear those to work.

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