Deserves to Be Dead (Alvarez & Pescoli)

She checked her watch and frowned.

That feeling again.

Time to stop by the house and feed the baby, or find an out-of-the-way place to pump her breasts.

“Look, I gotta go work the phones for a while. Thanks for this. I might need to come back and talk some more.”

She started for the door, but Johnson raised a hand and said, “I kinda need to tell you something. May be nothing, but I’m worried.”

She asked, “About this?”

“Yeah.” Johnson looked down at the floor, guilty of something but she couldn’t guess what. “The shooter might have made a mistake. I’ve been thinkin’ about it, and I believe that maybe he thought he was shooting at me.”

“Why’s that?” she asked.

Flowers was shaking his head and staring at his fishing buddy, reading the other guy, guessing something, and it wasn’t good.

“Johnson,” Flowers said, “what have you done?”

• • •

They all took chairs around the kitchen table and Johnson, appearing slightly shamefaced, rubbed his knees nervously, looked at Regan and said, “First, I’ve got to tell you about a break-in we had here at the ranch. Somebody stole six hundred dollars from the lodge owner’s daughter.”

She listened as Johnson told the story of the theft, how they’d gone to Weeks’s mobile home, meeting Bart, who’d thrown them off his property. How they’d stopped at the Drake residence and met Michael Drake, the rich dude who owned the log cabin. How he’d looked at the high-end Rosestone RV parked nearby, and how Weeks had shown up later in the day to repay the stolen money.

“What in God’s name does all that have to do with the shooting?” Flowers asked. To Regan he said, “Johnson has a tendency to bullshit a little.”

“Okay,” she said, but sensed the guy was getting to something. To Johnson she said, “I’m listening.”

Johnson turned to Flowers and asked, “You remember that woman who screamed at me from the RV? What was her name? Cheryl?”

“Because you were peeking in the window. Yeah, I remember.”

Johnson’s face reddened, which surprised her. For one thing Johnson was so tanned that a blush would normally have been invisible. “I didn’t mean to peek,” Johnson said to Regan. “I’ve thought about buying an RV like that and I wondered how it was finished inside. I’m tall enough that I could see through the window, and when I looked, there was this girl, and she didn’t have much clothes on. She wasn’t naked but pretty close.”

Flowers said, “Uh-oh.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said. “I probably woulda never said anything to anybody, because it was embarrassing. I was peeking, even though I didn’t mean to. But I’ve got this image in my head of this kid, she was maybe twelve or eleven. Shit, maybe even younger. But she was wearing one of those things that you see at Victoria’s Secret, this red thing, real low V in front, almost down to her crotch.”

He waved his hands around, trying to demonstrate, and finally Regan helped him out. “A teddy.” She took out her cell phone, tapped a bunch of keys with her thumbs, waited, then turned it around so Johnson could see the photos that came up.

He nodded. “That’s it. It was one of those. And the thing is, she was all made up, you know. Rouged cheeks, eye shadow, lipstick.”

“Jesus, Johnson,” Flowers said. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because it was embarrassing, and you know how it is with girls these days, all made up, you can’t really tell how old they are, but it bothered me. I was going to tell you after I thought it over some more. Anyway, I’d decided to let you know, today, I swear. Later. When we got back.”

Flowers glared at him, and Johnson went on, “Anyway, so we’re out on the river this morning, right? All of us. All wearing rain suits, and fishing and all.”

“Yeah?” Regan said, wondering where the hell this was going.

“The thing is, Cain, he looked like me, if we were all in rain suits and geared up, you know? Big guy, my size, staying at the ranch to fish.”

“Oh, man,” Flowers said, leaning back in his chair.

Regan glanced at Flowers. “If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, that our shooter was aiming for Johnson, here, and not Cain and it’s because of what he saw, then we’ve got ourselves a motive and it’s not pretty.”

“I hate this shit,” Flowers said.