She stared at me, as if she were reading my thoughts. Her eyes were bottomless, as dark and unfeeling as the black leather she wore. Her hand moved across her chest and toward the inside of her jacket. Certain it would emerge gripping a gun, I closed my eyes and began to pray.
I heard the hum of my refrigerator. A short mew from Wila in the bedroom. And the even breathing of Ms. Sunglasses.
What I didn’t hear was the crack of a gunshot. Slowly, I opened my eyes. “Jane Smith” assessed me from across the room. An amused smile curved up one corner of her mouth.
“Are you going to whack me?” I asked her.
Her laughter softened the hard planes of her face. Holding up a hand with a pack of matches in the palm, she made a show of slipping them back into her inside jacket pocket.
“What makes you think I’d whack you?”
I spun a convoluted story about how we’d had some strangers and a series of unusual crimes in our little town over the last couple of years, and how everyone was waiting for the next awful thing to occur. Finally, I told her she reminded me of Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
“Angelina played an assassin,” I said.
“Thanks for the compliment.”
Her finger traced her teardrop tattoo. My heart made a reappearance in my throat. When she rose from the chair, I backed up against my front door. But all she did was pick up a book from my coffee table and open it to the first chapter. It was Patrick Smith’s A Land Remembered.
“Any good?”
“Yeah. It’s all about Florida history.”
Tucking the book under her arm, she made a circle around my living room. She leaned close to the wall to look at a picture of my sisters and me with Mama, when we rode the Florida Cracker Trail. She paused at another photo, this one of my grandparents squinting in the sun in an orange grove. Putting the book down, she pulled out the top drawer on my TV cabinet. She lifted and inspected a couple of DVDs, and then a spare remote, and then a lopsided vase Maddie did in ceramics class. The vase only comes out when I know my big sister is going to visit.
When Ms. Sunglasses stooped to slide out a box of CDs from under my stereo, annoyance outweighed my fear. “Can I help you with something?”
“I wouldn’t turn down one of those Heinekens you have in your refrigerator. I think we both could use a beer.”
“You snooped around in my kitchen?”
She shrugged.
Would this turn out like that scene in every crime movie, where the killer allows the victim a final drink before blowing him or her away? I went after the beers anyway because she was right. I could use a little something to take off the edge.
As I grabbed the bottles and a couple of napkins, I kept my ears fine-tuned. Would I hear her unholster a gun? Take off her jacket so she could move more freely with that garrote she surely had to strangle me? Walk into my bedroom and leave a bomb under the bed?
But the only sound from the living room was her humming the Britney Spears oldie, “Oops! … I Did it Again.”
Britney Spears? What kind of self-respecting hit woman would hum Britney Spears? I relaxed a little.
“Here you go, Jane,” I said, returning to hand her a beer.
“Thanks.” She clinked her bottle against mine, and then returned to studying the gator head on my coffee table. “How big was this thing anyway?”
“Ten feet.”
I told her the Reader’s Digest version of my sideline, and how my trapper cousin and I captured the alligator from a newcomer’s pool.
She stuck a hand in the gator’s mouth, felt the multitude of teeth. “Weren’t you scared?”
I shook my head, deciding not to reveal she scared me a lot more than any alligator. With a gator, at least I knew what to expect.
She shuddered, gave me a nervous smile. “All those sharp teeth? I’d have been terrified.”
Now she sounded more like a girlfriend at a pajama party than a hired killer. What was this woman’s game?
When I said nothing, she swigged the beer, straightened in the chair, and got to the point of her visit. “How well do you know Anthony Ciancio?”
The flatness was back in her voice. It was hard to tell where she was headed. Was she a jealous girlfriend? Was she sent by a rival family to murder the Ciancio heir? Was she herself the rival?
“Why?” I hedged.
Leaning in, she put her elbows on her knees. “Look, I’m going to be straight with you, Mace. Carlos Martinez says you’re good people.”
She extracted a black wallet from her inside pocket, flipped it open, and revealed a badge. I was trying to read her agency’s name when she flipped it shut again.
“We think Tony Ciancio committed a murder back in New Jersey.”
A chill crawled down my spine. It had nothing to do with the open window.
“What makes you think Tony did it?”
“Evidence.” She had the same terse cop tone I was used to hearing from Carlos. “It’s possible he’s linked to this killing here, too. Time frame makes sense.”
“No. Tony didn’t even get here until the day after Ronnie Hodges was killed.”
She tilted her head, skeptical. “You sure about that?”
C’ndee had said her nephew drove all night to get to Himmarshee. But the snake-wary newcomer said she saw a green Lexus a day earlier. Was it Tony’s? He said no. And I didn’t know him well enough to say if he was lying.
Finally, I shook my head. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, no.”
“That’s what I figured.” She rose from the chair. “Thanks for the beer.”
She was just about to step through the front door when I called out, “How’d the New Jersey victim die?”
“Stabbed in the back. We found his body in his restaurant kitchen.”
_____
I didn’t even wait for the sound of Ms. Sunglasses’ motorcycle boots to cross my porch before I bolted and locked the front door. I slammed shut the living room window, and grabbed the spare key she’d left on my coffee table. I hid it in my purse and stashed the purse on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. I vowed to go shopping after the wedding for a hide-a-key that looks like a rock. I’d plant it at the third fencepost from the gate to the back pasture, where no one could find it.
The motorcycle roared to life from its hiding place in my backyard. Peeking out the bedroom blinds, I wanted to make sure she was really leaving. I watched until her red taillight disappeared around the curve my drive took toward State Road 98.
“You can show yourself again, Wila. The coast is clear.”
A Siamese nose poked out from beneath the bedspread close to the floor. Satisfied the intruder was gone, the cat slunk out of the bedroom and padded into the kitchen to be fed. I wished food was all it took for me to forget coming home to find a stranger in my living room.
While Wila ate, I checked and double-checked the locks on doors and windows. Kind of like putting up the shutters after the hurricane already hit. I straightened the picture on the wall that “Jane Smith” had touched, and tossed her beer bottle into the kitchen recycling bin. Wila startled at the clatter.
“Sorry, girl.” I stroked her sleek coat. “What do you make of somebody who breaks in—okay, uses a key—and makes themselves so at home like that? A lot of nerve, huh?”