It had been a genuine hardship preparing for today’s color choice; there was no doubt about that. She’d had to rush to the salon first thing this morning to get a black rinse in her hennaed bob, because there would never, ever be a day when Annie Belinsky wore red highlights with her periwinkle silk kimono; but as she looked around the cantina at the thirty pairs of male eyes ogling her, she decided it had been worth the effort. How on earth working women with families ever managed to keep themselves looking presentable was beyond her.
She smiled – just a wee bit wickedly – and wriggled her big, silk-clad fanny a little deeper into the bar stool and swore she heard the sound of thirty sighs of longing.
There were women with some of the men, of course, and Annie suspected that several of them were plotting her demise. Everything they ever saw in magazines or on television had taught them that there was absolutely nothing remotely alluring or fashionable about being overweight, and a lot of them probably spent a lot of time doing aerobics and calculating calories to ensure they would never achieve such a state. For the most part, they were all tanned and slim and athletic-looking in their butt-hugging jeans and little bitty T-shirts. But Annie’s presence – her open flaunting of every excess inch as if it were gold – had them totally flummoxed, and totally pissed, since men who normally lusted after Barbie dolls in bikinis were now in drool stage two over a fat woman.
Annie could have told the miffed women that men didn’t respond exclusively to any particular body type – in her opinion, the gay male designers had perpetrated that myth – they responded to how a woman used her body and her eyes and her voice, and oh, honey, Annie had that down pat.
‘Miss Belinsky?’
Lord in heaven, she’d never seen him coming, and Annie rarely missed anything. He’d just sneaked up right behind her and nearly knocked her off the stool with that earthy, cowboy, slow-motion way of talking. The accent of the Deep South, like Annie’s, was syrup on a platter, but it only sounded good coming from women. If you were a man and wanted your voice to work for you, you just had to come from cowboy country.
‘Well, hello, Mr Stellan. You are one of the few men who ever succeeded in startling me.’
He stood there with his cowboy hat held respectfully at his chest, looking for all the world like Gary Cooper in some of the old movies – except his eyes were too intense. ‘Miss Belinsky, I will use any method available to plant myself in your memory.’
Annie gave him a tiny smile of mystery, rewarding his appropriate response. Not that the man had a chance with her, of course. He had the look and the voice and the manners, but he was, after all, a real estate agent. Sleeping with a real estate agent was a ride down the slippery slope to mediocrity – almost as bad as sleeping with a lawyer. ‘So tell me, Mr Stellan. Do we have the hacienda?’
‘Indeed you do, ma’am, terms and price that you specified.’ He laid a rental agreement on the bar for her to sign. ‘The owners were a little reluctant to lift the no-pets clause, until I explained about him being a police dog ’n’ all. He doesn’t attack on sight, or anything, does he?’
Annie touched the corner of her mouth with a periwinkle-tipped finger. ‘No. He most definitely is not an attack dog.’ She signed the agreement with a flourish.
‘Well, that’s surely good news. I suspected he was a tracker, being that you’re here to help the chief find his daughter.’
Annie smiled at the notion of Grace’s dog tracking anything except Grace, which was almost as funny as the notion of Charlie as an attack dog. ‘You’re a well-informed man, Mr Stellan. I don’t recall mentioning that we’d be working with your fine local police department.’
‘Ah, heck, everybody in town knew that about three minutes after you showed up. It’s a real small place, Miss Belinsky.’
A real closed place, Annie thought as she strolled down the sidewalk toward the chief’s office a little later, feeling a lot of eyes on her. If one little old heavyset woman in a dress could turn this many heads, these locals would purely have a fit when they saw Harley on the streets.
Chief Savadra was the single exception so far, and the minute he gave her his standard morning sad-smile, she felt totally at ease, free to be herself. He was surely the ugliest man in town, with his rough-cut, sun-seamed face and a wiry body that didn’t seem to know where most of its parts were going at any given time; but there was something special about him Annie had liked the minute they met.
‘I hear you got the hacienda.’
Annie went straight for the watercooler she’d had delivered on her second day. ‘I swear, news travels faster in this town than I can walk.’
‘The way I hear it, you do not walk at all, Miss Annie. You sashay.’
Miss Annie. She liked that. Reminded her of Mississippi. Liked it especially because there was no flirtation behind it; just a friendly tease. ‘Wait till this town sees the other three. I’m the conservative one.’
Chief Savadra leaned back in his creaky wooden chair and watched her start packing files into her briefcase. ‘I thought you weren’t leaving until Friday.’
‘I’ve done about all I can do before the computers get here. Now that I’ve signed on the hacienda, I can head back a little early.’
‘You miss your people.’
Annie gave him a sidelong glance. ‘I didn’t expect to, at least not this much, but I do. Don’t tell them.’
The chief smiled. ‘I’ll take a run out to the place next week; make sure the a/c is turned on and the pool is filled before you get back.’
‘Thanks, but Joe Stellan has some people coming out to take care of that.’
‘I’ll still take a look, flash my badge in front of the help, put the fear of God into them.’
Annie smiled. ‘That’s nice of you.’
‘Are you kidding? No way in this world I’ll ever be able to repay you all for what you’re doing for me. What I don’t get is why you’re doing it. What prompts a group of people to travel halfway across the country to give away technology that’s probably worth a million bucks?’
‘That’s kind of a long story.’
‘I look forward to hearing it.’
28
Gino was quiet until they’d passed through Wayzata and were on the freeway, probably because he was afraid Jack Gilbert might jump out of the back if they started questioning him again at anything under seventy miles an hour. He actually leaned over to look at the speedometer before unsnapping his seat belt and turning around to face Jack.
‘Okay, Jack. I’m going to give you another chance to do the right thing. Who do you think is trying to kill you?’
Jack’s head lolled back against the seat. ‘I knew you guys were going to do this. “We’re just offering you a lift” my ass. You wanted to get me alone in this crappy piece of shit car with no air-conditioning and try to sweat something out of me.’
Gino managed a puzzled expression. ‘Gee whiz, Jack. I’m pretty confused here. Now if I thought somebody was hell-bent on putting me in the ground, I’d be tickled pink to have a couple of cops driving me around, keeping me safe. And you know what else? I’d be telling them everything I knew, helping them any way I could so they’d have a chance to nail the guy before he nailed me. But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re just sitting back there all quiet and hostile with your lip zipped, and I gotta tell you, Jack, I can only think of one reason for that kind of attitude, and that’s if you’re the shooter we’re looking for. Maybe you just staged that dog-and-pony show back there to throw us off.’