| Avy grimaced as Dave squeezed her bottom—how
she'd love to break his metacarpals for that—but
she forced her body to stay passive. He would
be expecting her to get woozy within minutes,
as she drank more of the drugged Daiquiri.
They went through a few painful minutes of the smallest of small talk, during which she managed to distract him enough to pour some of the drink into a potted orchid.
Then she put a slightly trembling hand up to her temple. "Um, Dave?" she asked, laying her southern accent on thick. "Do you have some saltine crackers or somethin'? I feel kind of . . . funny. Prob'ly just too many cocktails on an empty stomach."
He made an effort to appear sympathetic. "Sure, babe." Dave unstuck his fingers from her tailbone and lumbered off to the kitchen, where he rooted around, giving Avy the opportunity to pour more of the Daiquiri into the potted fern near his terrace doors. When he came back with a plate of crackers, she swayed a little, which he noted with satisfaction.
"Do you want to lie down?" he asked, with more false concern, as he set the plate on the coffee table.
"No, no. I'll just sit here on the sofa for a minute."
Dave shrugged and looked at his watch. "Be my guest. Listen, I'll be back in a few, babe—I've gotta make a phone call."
Avy nodded and sank down onto his inflexible, black-leather sectional, leaning back against a prickly hair-calf pillow. She closed her eyes until his footsteps retreated, his hard-soled shoes echoing on the white ceramic tile that lined the whole house. Unfortunately his cloying cologne hung like a fat cumulo-nimbus in the air and refused to blow away.
Avy opened her eyes, turned her head and stared straight at the ancient Chinese bronze Dave had arranged to have stolen when the owner had refused to sell. Imprisoned in a Lucite box, the bronze looked utterly out of place in this house.
A serene, dignified T'ang dynasty Buddha in the classic lotus position, the figure's hands were clasped under his chin. He seemed to be praying for release—not only from the box, but from Pomeroy's ugly, stark, contemporary interior and its stink of polyurethane and too-fresh paint.
This particular Buddha was worth a cool million, but the little guy didn't seem to know or care.
Avy eyed the Buddha in sympathy. Hang on for a few more minutes, okay? I'm about to get you out of here and back to your rightful owner.
"Gwen," she said softly into her wrist unit, which was disguised as a chunky gold-plate bracelet. "Confirm that alarm is still off." Dave had disarmed it when they'd come in the front door, but she couldn't be sure that he hadn't turned it back on when she was in the powder room. You couldn't be too careful in this business.
"Alarm off. Avy, watch out. The sick twist isn't making any phone call. He's setting up a video camera in the bedroom."
Nice. Avy slid something that looked like a pink
cell phone out of her big, shiny pleather bag.
She stuffed the phone behind the calf-hair pillow.
"Heads up. He's walking your way, now."
Avy slumped a little lower on the uncomfortable couch and let her head roll back. She channeled linguine as Pomeroy's heels slapped back across the tile. Eyelids half-closed, she made a good show of struggling to a sitting position as he approached.
"Dan?" she murmured blearily, locks of teased hair falling into her face.
"That would be Dave," he said.
"Dave . . . I don' feel s'good. C'you take me . . . home?"
"Darlin', I'm not taking you anywhere," he said in a voice like used WD-40. "Except to bed."
She nodded. "'Kay. Wanna . . . go sleep."
"Yeah, that's it. You go to sleep."
Avy slid her hand under the calf-hair pillow and curled her fingers firmly around the pink plastic cell phone she'd hidden there. Then she let her eyes fall closed and her limbs go limp.
"Stupid girl," Dave said. Then he bent forward and yanked down her bra and top to check out the goods.
Avy shot into motion, whipping out the pink cell phone and pressing it to his chest. Dave howled as 900,000 volts of electricity knocked him backwards to the floor. He lay there immobilized, eyes bulging, as Avy furiously righted her clothing.
"Self defense, Dave," she said. "A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do."
Avy walked calmly over to Pomeroy and set the toe of her plastic shoe against his chin. "You're a real sad sack, buddy. You know that?"
All he could do currently was drool like a baby, which was perfect since she was about to take his ill-gotten candy away from him.
Avy resisted the urge to kick Pomeroy and removed her shoe from his chin. "They make tasers in all shapes, colors and sizes now. Cute little thang, isn't it?" Avy dropped the pink "phone" back into her pleather bag and made her way to the Lucite case. She lifted the cover off its stand and picked up the Buddha with care.
"Dave," she said, shaking her head. "Didn't your mama ever teach you that it's wrong to steal? This doesn't belong to you, honey, and the insurance company that wrote the policy on it--" she shrugged. "Well, they want it back. So does the owner."
Dave just lay on the floor like a large, diseased catfish that had floated, belly-up, to the surface of a dirty Miami canal. She smiled sweetly at him, as she'd been taught to do almost from birth in her home town of Atlanta.
"I'm a high-class repo man, honey, and I show up just when people like you least expect me." |
