ease, big boy,” she snapped at him. “Put your gun back where it belongs,” she ordered the other cop. “Can’t you see the poor child is terrified?”
“What’s your name?” Hector barked.
Gwen stared at the gun pointed at her heart. Her throat worked but no sound came out.
“Gwen Rinkert,” Bitsy supplied. “She works here.”
The policemen didn’t lower their weapons.
“Go ahead,” Bitsy encouraged. “Tell them all about the ‘corpse’ that came in earlier today.”
Gwen looked from the gun to Bitsy to the police. Trying to avoid looking at the aimed guns, she said, “I came on about nine tonight. The corpse was already here.”
“Was it dead?” Hector demanded.
Gwen’s incredulousness momentarily eclipsed her fear. “Officers, with all due respect, that is the definition of a corpse.”
“He wasn’t dead,” Bitsy contradicted. “Less than twenty minutes ago, he sat up right here.” She pointed at the gurney. “And said, ‘Something tells me this isn’t the Pearly Gates.’ He was blond, blue-eyed, tall. I’d say six-two, like the report. He was well built. He obviously worked out.” She stared at the empty metal bed. “He had a good smile.”
“He couldn’t have gotten too far,” Hector said to his partner. “Get on the radio and see if there’s immediate backup in the area. Call the station and tell them we’re going to need more men. He could be to the border by the time we get done checking every masked person out there.”
By the time Hector had ushered the women upstairs, Bitsy heard the wail of an approaching siren. When the other cop came back from the squad car, Hector pointed at Gwen and said, “I’ll stay here with her until back-up arrives.” His finger swung to Bitsy. “You take her downtown for further questioning.”
“What for?” Bitsy demanded as the older cop grasped her upper arm. “Am I being charged with something?”
“We just want to ask you a few more questions,” the older cop reassured her, steering her toward the front door.
Bitsy glanced over her shoulder as she was ushered out the door. She called to Gwen, “Get ahold of Grey.”
The cop opened the car’s door and she slid into the back of the cruiser with its unique odor of heavy, desperate sweats.
Costumed children came around the far corner, headed to the first house at the end of the street. In the split second before the car door slammed closed, Bitsy heard the night’s calling card.
“Trick or treat.”
Chapter Two
“An APB, Arthur?” Mick asked. His last identity had been Michael James, but he had quickly become known as Mick and preferred it. Only Arthur insisted on the more formal name he’d last christened the man.
Arthur opened the white van’s side panel. The metallic sign on the driver’s door said Frieda’s House of Flora and Fauna. Arthur was a spare man, elegant in body and movement. Forbearance in his stance and natural expression, he stood by the openmouthed van and waited.
Mick’s gaze shifted from the black insides of the van to the tempered features of his mentor. “I need an explanation.”
“An explanation?” The older man employed the same economy of speech as he did in physical appearance.
“I wake up, not at the arranged location with instructions for my next assignment, but—” he gestured at the building behind them “—at a funeral fun house greeted by the beautiful Bitsy of the mortuary business and her glad bag of embalming tools.”
“Bitsy.” Arthur tested the name.
“You descend from Mount Olympus or whatever lofty peak Central occupies these days, complete with a chariot. Not to mention, thanks to San Francisco’s boys in blue, my identity has been compromised up and down the California coast.”
A siren wailed through the night.
Arthur looked at Mick. He smiled pleasantly. “Shall we go?”
“What’s going on, Arthur?”
The other man had rounded the front of the van and was climbing into the driver’s seat. He buckled and adjusted his seat belt, smoothed his pants’ creases and started the engine. He turned in the seat, and with genteel features and a civil smile, he looked at Mick. “Get in, Michael.”
Something was very wrong.
Mick climbed inside the back of the van, slamming the side door shut behind him. The van was dark, no overhead light, no seats in the back. Arthur waited until Mick arranged himself on the cool metal floor, then eased the van out from behind the funeral home’s storage shed.
Mick’s questions started immediately. “Did last night’s operation go down as planned?”
“Shh.” Arthur raised a tapered finger. “Let me have my Mel Gibson getaway moment here.”
Mick shook his head, a smile starting as the van smoothly accelerated to thirty miles per hour and held steady. “Yeah, you’re one big bad ass, Arthur.”
“Yes,” was all the other man would concede.
They drove in silence, away from the sirens. It was futile to ask any more questions. Arthur would give him the answers when he was ready. Mick saw Arthur touch the pearl-gray streak at his temple. Beneath that rakish silver wave, there was a scar. Beneath that a metal plate.
“Congressman Kittredge was shot this evening,” Arthur said.
Mick listened and waited. The old man had never uttered an unnecessary word in his life.
“He was leaving a late dinner at a Bay Area restaurant when a man wearing a Halloween mask approached. The valet saw the gun and pushed Kittredge out of the way. The bullet hit the congressman’s shoulder instead of his heart. The valet’s a hero. The assassin got away.”
The sheet was loosening about Mick’s body. He pulled it tighter. He could feel the texture of the road through the van’s bare floor.
“They’re going to say you did it,” Arthur told him.
Mick closed his eyes. There was a rolling, soothing movement to the blackness.
“I issued the APB, tipped off the locals about the location of the funeral home.”
Mick’s eyes opened.
“If the local police had found you sooner, it could’ve provided an alibi. At the very least, protection. Until I could get to you, you were safer in the company of the police than our own men.” The old man’s hands were steady on the wheel, his gaze aimed straight into the night.
“I didn’t mean to involve the woman. Bitsy.”
The name sounded across the empty van. Mick saw
