With my gun held in both hands, I rounded the bedroom door. The overhead light was on, and Olga was on her knees, thrashing her head and howling in agony. Ghost was still on her head with his claws embedded in her skull. Her face was shredded, with so much blood spilling from it that her features had disappeared. Carl Winnick stood beside her with a gun trained on Ghost, probably the same gun Phillip had used to shoot himself.
“Be still!” he shouted to Olga. “Stop moving!”
I yelled, “Drop the gun, Winnick!”
He turned his head toward me, wide-eyed and ashen, then swung the gun in my direction.
A shot rang out and his throat burst in a flare of red blood. Ghost screamed and jumped from Olga’s head and streaked from the room. Winnick crumpled to the floor beside Olga, and a geyser of blood shot toward the ceiling. Covered with her own blood and his, Olga leaned over him and shrieked a sound so full of grief and rage that it will live in my head forever.
Suddenly, the room was filled with people running past me. In a daze, I turned toward the doorway where Guidry was holstering his Sig Sauer.
“Your brother called us,” he said. “When you didn’t answer your cell, he knew you were in trouble.”
His gray eyes were calm, watching me closely.
“I had it under control,” I said, but my voice warbled.
“You had it under superb control, Dixie.”
The next thing I knew, my face was buried in his chest, and his arms were holding me close. Except for Michael and Paco, I hadn’t felt a man’s arms around me since Todd died. I hadn’t thought I wanted a man’s arms around me, but this felt very familiar and comforting.
Thirty-Four
Sunlight glittered on the sailboats rocking at anchor in Sarasota Bay. A few seagulls strolled along the sidewalk, hoping for handouts. Phillip and I sat quietly, the way people do when there’s too much to say to trust yourself to speak. Phillip’s forehead still bore an ugly channel from the bullet he fired with the intention of killing himself. If he hadn’t jerked his head back just before he pulled the trigger, he would have hit the frontal lobe of his brain. If he’d jerked it forward instead of backward, he would have hit the cortex. As it was, he was physically and neurologically intact. Psychologically, he had a lot of healing to do.
A bold seagull stepped forward and pecked at Phillip’s shoelace. Phillip waggled his foot and the gull fluttered its wings in a show of sassiness and then took flight, sailing out over the boats in a graceful swoop.
I said, “How do you like living with Ghost?”
The corners of his mouth twitched in something close to a smile. “He’s funny. He curls up in Greg’s violin case while he practices. I never was around a cat before, but I think I’ll actually miss him when I leave.”
“Did you get things squared away with Juilliard?”
“They said I could enroll next year.”
“That’s good. You’ll be completely healed by then.”
“Yeah.”
We both heard the lie in our voices and fell silent. Plastic surgeons were going to try to smooth the deep groove in his forehead, but he would always bear the emotional scars of his parents’ actions.
Do any of us ever escape those scars?
Keep reading for an excerpt from the next
Dixie Hemingway novel
DUPLICITY DOGGED
THE DACHSHUND
Coming soon in hardcover from
St. Martin’s Minotaur
1
It was a few minutes past six when I got to the Powells’ house on Monday morning. A pinkish-gray sky was beginning to be brushed with apricot plumes, and wild parakeets were waking and chattering in the branches over the street. It was the last week of June, a time when everybody on Siesta Key was slow and smiling. Slow because June is so hot on the key you may keel over dead if you hurry, and smiling because the snowbirds had all gone north and we had the key to ourselves. Not that there’s anything wrong with snowbirds. We like snowbirds. We especially like the money they spend during the season. But the key goes back to being a quiet laid-back place when they leave, and we all go around for weeks with sappy smiles on our faces.
I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you know who. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, but something happened a little over three years ago that made the department afraid to trust me with certain parts of the population. Now I take care of pets while their owners are away. I go in their homes and feed them, groom them, and exercise them, which works out well for all of us. They don’t ask a lot of questions, and I don’t run the risk of doing something I’ll regret.
Siesta Key is an eight-mile barrier island that sits like a tropical kneecap off Sarasota, Florida. Running north and south, it lies between the Gulf of Mexico on the west and Sarasota Bay on the east. Our powdery white beach is made of quartz crystal that stays cool even when the sun sends down lava rays, and it magnetizes poets and painters and mystics who believe it’s one of the planet’s vortexes of energy. Lush with hibiscus, palms, mangrove, bougainvillea, and sea grape, Siesta Key is home to about seven thousand sun-smacked year-round residents and just about every known species of shorebirds and songbirds and butterflies. In the bay, great bovine manatees with goofy smiles on their faces move with surprising grace, eating all the vegetation in their path and keeping the waterways clear. In the Gulf, playful dolphins cavort in the waves, and occasional sharks keep swimmers alert.
There are other keys off Sarasota, but they tend to look down their proper noses at Siesta. She’s the slightly rebellious daughter whose conservative family is always afraid she’ll do something to embarrass them. Nubile maidens dance on her beach while drummers sound down the sun, tourists young and old shed their inhibitions and thread her streets with bemused smiles on their faces, and the natives don’t overly concern themselves with the histories of some incredibly wealthy residents who have no discernible talents.
I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
Judge and Mrs. Hopewell Powell had just left for their annual three-week vacation in Italy, putting Mame, their elderly miniature dachshund, in my care. Mame had a more formal official name, but when she was a puppy she had been such an inquisitive little snoop that Judge Powell—he wasn’t a judge anymore, but he’d sat on the Florida Supreme Court so long that everybody still called him Judge—had begun to sing, “Put the blame on Mame, boys, put the blame on Mame,” and the name had stuck. They still sang the song to her, and until lately Mame would stand on her hind legs and wave her front paws in the air as if she were dancing.
Siesta Key only has one main street, Midnight Pass Road, so you either live on the Gulf side or the bay side. The Powells lived near the north end, in an exclusive bayside neighborhood called Secret Cove. Secret Cove is actually a one-lane bricked street that traces an irregular north-south ellipse squeezed between Midnight Pass Road and the bay. Mossy oaks, pines, sea grape, bamboo, palm, and palmetto hide it from Midnight Pass Road, maintaining the illusion of an area unspoiled by human habitation. Live oaks form a canopy over the lane, and frequent signs warn that the street is for residents only; outsiders will presumably be drawn and quartered. In the event two cars meet, occasional bulges in the street allow the less expensive car to back up and pull aside.