Page 29 of Property of Bull
“You know it wasn’t your fault, right? You kept saying that last night and it isn’t true,” I tell her.
“You don’t know that,” she says after a moment.
“Why would you even think it?” I ask.
“Because I killed a man. His brothers have either figured it out, or they will, sooner or later, and then they’ll come after me.” She’s utterly calm as she relays this information, so much so that I almost start to laugh, until she looks up at me and I know she’s dead serious.
“What did you do with the body?” I ask. Disposing of corpses is kind of our specialty after all.
“He’s pretty well scattered. I used lye, also. Like you did last night, or whoever picked up the truck did.”
“We are talking about the man who broke your arm, correct?”
She nods, tilting her head to the side, studying me as intently as I am her. “Apparently, between my broken arm and the restraining order, I ruined his life.”
“Do you have a gun you need me to get rid of?”
“No. I bashed his head in with a hammer,” she confesses, finally shedding some light on her reaction to finding her grandfather the way he was.
Of course, seeing his death practically mirroring her ex’s death would make that the most reasonable explanation.
“Where’s the hammer now?” I continue to pepper her with questions, wanting to make sure she didn’t miss any details.
“I cleaned it up and left it on a hook in a hardware store in Nebraska.” Her answer pleases me more than it should, being a pretty damn clever way to hide a murder weapon.
“Does anyone else know?” I’m trying not to sound frustrated—I’m happy she confided in me, but wish she’d just tell me the whole story without making me play twenty questions.
When she simply nods, I firmly place my hands on her shoulders and silently encourage her to keep talking with a look.
“My dad,” she replies with no further explanation.
“Why didn’t he call the cops?”
“That’s not entirely my story to tell,” she says after a moment, and my exhale betrays my frustration.
Just when I felt that we were making progress, she pulls back again.
“What’s the short version?”
“There isn’t one, not really.”
“Woman…” I growl out the word, trying to stay calm.
“My mom left my dad for David’s uncle, and he wasn’t especiallykindto me,” she says in such a way that I suddenly want to stuff that entire bloodline in my cremation chamber while they’re still breathing. “Dad hated them, and it just got worse after Mom died. I didn’t know the half of it until that day.”
“So, you knew David for a long time?” I ask, wondering why the hell she’d agree to date him in the first place.
“No, he grew up near Tulsa and had a different last name, he was working at the airfield when we met.”
“Margo, you’re sexy as fuck, funny, and well, there are a lot of things I like about you, but you need to start telling me the whole story and not make me drag it out of you with a hundred questions.” I realize that she just lost her grandfather and that I’m butting into her business, something that I wouldn’t appreciate if the situation was reversed, so I lay a few light kisses on her by way of apologizing.
“I was getting certified to give flight lessons and he worked at the airfield as a mechanic. We went out for a couple of months, but it was just, he was too intense, so I tried to break things off. He didn’t take that well and I already told you he broke my arm, so after I got a restraining order and got ahold of Dad, he figured out who David was. Does that clear everything up?”
Rolling onto my back, I’m both amused and terrified that this woman has her pilot’s license but that dulls in comparison to the other dozen or so questions flooding my mind.
“When do you think your dad will get here?”
“Probably tomorrow night or the day after,” she replies like that was common knowledge. “And before you growl again, he’s down in Florida and doesn’t like to fly, so he’s driving up.”
