Page 55 of Guilty as Sin
She laughed. “All right. Maybe it was.”
They’d reached his place, and he swung into the driveway, hit the garage door opener, and said, “Hang on.”
She didn’t. She climbed down and headed into the garage with him, where an overhead light illuminated—what else—organization. Virtually every item in it was hanging from a rafter, stowed on a shelf, or stuck onto a peg, like he had a cross-referenced diagram somewhere.
He said, “Thought I said to hang on. I’ve got this.”
“High-handed,” she said.
He opened a parts organizer, took out a handful of nails, then put them into the top tray of a business-sized red toolbox. “You’re cold.”
She took the toolbox from him and said, “You can get the plywood. I’m not that cold.”
He took a not-subtle-enough look at the front of her pj top. “Oh, I’d say you’re cold.”
“And yet I survive,” she said. “I’m guessing that if I put my hand on your chest, I’d feel the exact same thing. I’ll tell you what. I’m putting this in the back of the truck, and then I’m climbing in and waiting for you to come help me with my problem while I let Tobias warm me up. Aren’t I lucky that he’s such a big, strong dog?”
She was messing with his head. He didn’t let anybody do that, but she wasn’t asking permission. He was as sexually frustrated as a man could get, he was narky as hell, he wanted her hand on his chest, and you couldn’t have kept him out of that truck if you’d tried. He pulled on a pair of work gloves, tucked another pair into his jacket pocket for her, and picked up two sheets of plywood. A moment spared to be thankful that she hadn’t decided she could carry those as well, and he tossed the sheets into the bed of the ute and climbed in.
She was quiet on the way down, like she’d said too much. Once at her shop, she collected a copy of the police report from the cop and tossed it into her car. The cop said, “I’ll take off, then,” and she nodded like she wanted to say,I won’t expect much, and then I won’t be disappointed.It was a lot like Jace’s stalker. A brick through a shop window, a loss covered by insurance. A nuisance call.
Once the bloke was pulling away, Lily was all business, pulling on the gloves Jace handed her, then taking the other side of the plywood sheets to pull them out of the bed. The wind was stronger now, trying to take it out of their grasp, but she held the first sheet against the window frame as Jace drove the nail, leaning her weight against the wood to keep it there.
He said, “I should’ve got you a jacket from the house.”
“This will only take a minute,” she said, not looking at him. “Doesn’t matter.”
He drove another nail on the other side of the sheet. “You’re thinking about that bit of paper,” he guessed.Not about you, mate.“About the brick. Same words you got before, but sending it through your shop window sends a different message.”
“Yes.” She stood back and let him finish hammering the plywood into place. “Although the handwriting’s odd.”
He glanced at her. Her hair was whipping in the wind, and he heard the low rumble of thunder, felt the first icy touch of rain on his cheek, and picked up the second sheet of wood. “The handwriting?”
“If I were sending a message like that,” she said, helping him maneuver the plywood over the second half of the window, “I’d write it big. Across the whole paper. Practically stabbing through, the ink bleeding. Aggressive. I’d maximize the impact, go for menace. That neat little writing doesn’t fit with the action. It’s an anomaly, and that’s interesting.”
As she spoke, the street lit up. Briefly, and faintly. Lightning, but all the way to the north, up over the mountain. He drove another nail as he considered what she’d said. “You could be right. Pretty subtle distinction.”
“The subtle distinctions are generally the difference between finding the answer and not.” Another rumble of thunder in the distance, and the spatters of rain picked up.
“Could be,” he said, and thought for the twentieth time since he’d met her,Whoareyou?“Heaps of psychology in retail, I reckon. Not so much for me. But then, I’ve focused on trying to make bad people dead. Not so subtle.” He picked up the pace on the hammering. “Deluge about to start,” he said over the noise of the rain spattering against the wood, the sidewalk, his back. “Let’s get this done.”
He was halfway there when the rain began for real. He shouted, “Get in the truck,” and of course she didn’t. She waited until he was done, tested the plywood for security while he tossed the hammer back into the toolbox, and only then ran for shelter.
He turned the windscreen wipers to full, pulled out into the street, and watched the night light up as the jagged fork of white struck the mountain. The thunder followed, louder now even in the truck, the clouds burst, and the heavens emptied.
Beside him, Lily was shivering, and she was also pulling her phone out of her purse. He stopped for the light and glanced across at her. She said, “Oh, no,” and there was something new in her voice. Something worse.
“What?” he asked. “Another text?”
She looked across at him, the assurance gone from her face. “It says,How are your animals doing?”
He swore, and she said, as if she were talking to herself, “The window was a diversion. I should have known. I thought when you were following me that I’d been lured somewhere. I should have realized.”
The light changed, and he headed out of town. He wanted to go faster. He couldn’t, not in driving rain that reduced visibility to a couple meters. Beside him, Tobias’s warm body had tensed, reacting to the humans, and now, the dog sat up and whined, low and urgent.
Lily said, “I left my car down there. I should have taken it.”
“Good job you didn’t, or Tobias and I wouldn’t be here to help.” He had to say it loud, or she wouldn’t have heard him. He picked up the pace as much as he dared. Blackness up here except for the silver streaks of the rain in the headlights, another jagged flash lighting up the interior. The drumming of rain on the hood, the bone-jarringboomof a thunderbolt, much closer now.
