At the entrance to my lane, I stopped at the row of mailboxes to pick up mail. I riffled through it and tossed the entire lot into the passenger seat to transfer to the recycle bin under the carport. Most of it was junk mail or ads from posh stores promoting expensive jewelry or designer clothing like outrageously pricey jeans. I made a scornful snort at a photo of a curvy model wearing designer jeans. Even if they were real and not counterfeit, jeans exist to make a woman’s butt look good, and cheap jeans do the trick as well as expensive jeans.
Driving slowly so as not to alarm the parakeets in the trees overlooking my lane, I could see wind surfers on the bay and hear the waves moaning before they slapped the shore. Overhead, a scrawl of white and black gulls wheeled against a clear blue sky. On the beach, little sandpipers scurried back and forth on the sand like kindergartners at recess. Through the open car window I could hear the twittering of songbirds in the trees and the sad lament of a mourning dove somewhere in the distance. I was back in my own world, and for the moment I could forget everything about Briana.
Rounding the curve to the carport, I saw that Michael’s car was gone, and so was Paco’s. A small branch had fallen from one of the oak trees beside the carport and landed on the shell in front of Michael’s parking spot. Old oaks drop branches like that, sort of like a cat shedding hair. I pulled into my own spot and slid out of the Bronco, looking at the branch for the best place to grab it to throw it out of Michael’s way. It was about the thickness of a baseball bat, around five feet long, with a multitude of leafy twigs at its end.
I stooped to grasp it somewhere around its middle. As my fingers closed around it, I heard a scuffling noise in the shell. I turned my head to look toward it and saw a pair of black-clad legs running toward me. Jerking upward, I swiveled toward the running figure, and my move caused the leafy end of the branch to scrape across Lena’s outstretched hand. The twigs caught the hypodermic needle in her fingers and flipped it to the ground.
From the corner of my eye, I caught a spot of red at the edge of my porch. Looking up, I saw a pair of long milky white legs in bright red high-heeled pumps. The legs were sprawled at the top of the stairs.
Lena made a guttural sound and moved away from the branch, but she continued to come toward me, and she held a long knife in her hand. The knife flashed silver in the sunlight, but its cutting edge was stained wine red. She leaped toward me, her teeth glittering like the knife. In seconds, I was in a fight for my life.
Curiously, a red curtain seemed to descend over the world. Through the red haze, I realized that Lena was determined to kill me. The hypodermic needle had been intended to inject something into me to make me immobile while she slit my throat with her knife. Without the needle, she had to overpower me. Lena was hard and wiry and mean, but sheer terror gave me a burst of strength.
I kicked toward the knife and felt a searing pain in my ankle. Blood rushed onto my white Keds, and Lena smiled. Holding the branch with both hands, I swung it at her. I wiped the smile off her face, but she still had the knife, and my ankle was cut badly enough to fill my shoe with blood.
Irrationally, I thought how awful it would be for Michael and Paco to come home and find me dead in the yard.
I swung the branch again, and while Lena was adjusting her stance, I managed to swing it back the opposite direction. The second swing took her by surprise, so I kicked at the knife again. This time I connected. The knife flew out of her hand, and her head raised with a shocked glare. We both dived for the knife. I got to it first, but before I could stand up with it, she fell on me and her arm circled my neck in a steel vise.
Facedown, I clutched the knife under my midriff, but my victory had become a defeat. With her arm so hard against my throat that I feared the hiatal bone would break, I knew there was a good chance that Lena would strangle me to death.
Dimly, I heard the sound of a car racing to a stop nearby, then running footsteps crunching across the shell.
A man’s voice shouted, “It is finished! Let her go!”
Lena screamed, “Fool, she has the list!”
I felt a struggle above me, and then Lena’s arm slipped away from my throat and my face fell forward into the shell. A second later, Lena’s weight left my back, and I scrambled to a sitting position with bits of shell sticking into my flesh. My heart was racing, my ankle was pouring blood, and my nose was leaking.
Lena crouched a few feet away, her face twisted into a grimace of pure hatred. Peter held a gun to Lena’s temple. He looked resolute and devastated.
Peter said, “It’s over, Lena. Too many people have been destroyed.”
Lena said, “You are a fool, Peter. You have always been a fool.”
They both spoke English, as if they were speaking to each other through me.
Through my ruined lips, I said, “I gave the list to the FBI.”
Lena inclined her head toward my stairs. “She said you made copies of it. I want those copies.”
“I lied when I told her that. There are no copies. The FBI agent has the only copy that existed.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Call the FBI and ask. I have the agent’s number on my phone. Would you like to call him?”
Peter made a slashing motion with his hand. “I said it’s over!”
Lena said, “You do not decide what is over and what is not over! That is for me to decide!”
I struggled into a more comfortable position against the carport wall and looked toward Briana’s body. I wondered if the blood came from a vein or an artery.
I said, “Is Briana dead?”
Lena nodded with no more emotion than she would have shown if I’d asked if a plant needed watering.
“You killed her?”
“She ruined my business.”
“The counterfeit business was yours?”
She raised her head proudly. “The company that manufactures the merchandise is mine. You think that stupid woman could have run a company like mine? No brains, no business mind, no sense! Who takes a pair of shoes and leaves them on a man’s bed? I ask you, who? A crazy, stupid woman bringing down the police on our heads, that’s who! And who breaks into a house when she knows the police are watching her? If I had not saved the fool, we would all have been caught!”
I said, “You killed the FBI agent, too. You injected a muscle paralyzer into her and then slit her throat.”
“Who else? I could not trust my weak husband to do it. Like everything else, I had to do it myself. Men are fools! Soft, stupid fools like pretty women!”
Peter made a soft sound, as if he swallowed a sob.
I tried to remember what I’d been taught in the police academy about talking to irrational people.
“It must have been very difficult to kill that agent and get away so quickly.”
She looked proud. “I didn’t make a sound. I’m good at that. I slipped in the door the fool had left unlocked, and I moved through the house. But you had already come and spoiled it all. After you left, she ran to put on clothes. She was like a chicken, no brains. I waited to guide her to the car where Peter waited like a faithful dog. But the other woman came in the same way I had, through the back, her badge and guns ready to arrest Briana, arrest me, ruin our work and our lives. She was a fool, too, to come alone. She was arrogant, wanted the glory of the arrest without assistance from her colleagues. She never saw me before I killed her.”