Returning from the boardwalk, Maya noticed that the house lights in the front part of the house were all dark. She paused for a second, letting John-Michael catch up with her.
“You think they’re all in the backyard?” he asked.
“But why no lights?”
In the doorway, they listened for a moment. Nothing. Maya turned the key, pushed against the wood. That’s when she knew for sure that something was terribly wrong. The door wouldn’t move. Paolo was inside and was resisting their combined efforts to push it open.
“Paolo, it’s me and John-Michael, let us in!” she said, a little desperate.
He let them inside then, held a finger to his lips, and frowned until they fell silent.
Maya’s attention went instantly to Lucy, who was crouching on the floor beside the new red couch. A strange man lay crumpled on the checkerboard-patterned rug, his head neatly framed on a russet-colored square. The man wasn’t moving.
Lucy looked up, an imploring look in her eyes. “Maya, JM . . . what are we going to do?”
Breathing a Mexican curse through pursed lips, Maya approached. John-Michael, she noticed, hung back with Paolo, who seemed frozen in position by the front door. She stopped short of the body, noting the approximate height of the man, his gray slacks, black leather jacket, and clean but cheap-looking brown leather shoes. There was a pistol in his right hand; a revolver of some kind. He looked like a respectable, middle-aged, off-duty policeman.
Or maybe a private investigator. Maya’s heart began to plummet.
This man had to have been sent by Dana Alexander.
“He shot at me,” Lucy was saying, pleading, tears in her eyes and her whole body shaking. “It was self-defense.”
“I didn’t mean for it to kill him,” came Paolo’s voice. It sounded dull, disconnected, and vague. As though he didn’t quite believe what he was saying. “I swung for him with the shovel.”
“You thought he was a burglar,” Lucy insisted. “It was self-defense.”
“I thought some kind of intruder, yeah,” agreed Paolo. “He was going to shoot you.”
“Obviously an intruder,” Maya said briskly. “No one invited him, right?”
“And he shot at us. That’s definitely self-defense, right? It’s open and shut,” Lucy said, almost pleading.
Not if Dana Alexander has anything to say about this, Maya thought. But she only asked thoughtfully, “Did you find the bullet?”
Paolo and Lucy glanced at each other, apparently mystified.
Maya repeated herself, a little louder. “Paolo? Did you see where the bullet went? Think. It’s important.”
Paolo straightened up a little, making an effort to pull himself together. “Um, I guess it went over by the stereo.”
“Find it,” Maya instructed, “but don’t touch it.” While Paolo hunted, she joined Lucy in kneeling beside the corpse. The man’s head had been visibly damaged by Paolo’s strike with the shovel. One whole side had been dented. Maya sat back, wondering why she wasn’t more repulsed. But the truth was, it felt a lot like seeing a dead body on TV. She rocked back on her heels and turned her head to examine the rug below the man’s head.
“We moved him onto the brown square,” Lucy explained. “More or less right away, actually. I figured the bloodstain would show up less.”
“Cops don’t need much blood to connect this rug with his body,” Maya said. “Too bad you didn’t put a piece of plastic wrap underneath him.”
The boys and Lucy were still for two seconds, staring at Maya. Then John-Michael made a dash for the kitchen. “Get some paper, too,” Maya called after him. “Something we can burn when we’re done.”
Looking at Maya incredulously, Lucy said. “What are you talking about?”
Maya ignored her. “Hey, Paolo, d’you find that bullet yet?”
Paolo glanced up from where he was squatting by the baseboard on the wall adjacent to the floor-mounted audio speakers. “Not yet.”
“Did you look at the gun?” Maya said.
“Did I look at the gun?” echoed Paolo. “Are you crazy? You think I’m going to tamper with a crime scene?”
Maya said, “You mean aside from moving his head onto the brown square of the rug?”
“That was basic housekeeping,” Lucy tried to say, but stopped, gawping as Maya leaned over to remove the revolver from the corpse’s fingers. “Omigod, Maya! You touched a dead man!”
The man’s fingers were still warm and pliable. It hadn’t even occurred to Maya that he’d feel any different than a living person. She noted with surprised detachment that he wouldn’t go stiff for a little while. She had no idea how long. But it might be useful to know.
“John-Michael, can you find out how long it takes before rigor mortis sets in?”
John-Michael was already taking out his phone when Maya cried out, “Actually, no, stop!”
Everyone stared at her. “What?” John-Michael asked in a voice that betrayed more than a little fear.
Maya said, “We can’t do any suspicious searches on the internet! We can’t behave any differently than we might behave on the night before the Fourth of July.”
“His body will feel normal for three or four hours,” John-Michael said. His voice was suddenly hard, frosty.
Maya noted the confidence of his response. It was pretty obvious what everyone was thinking.
No one in the house said a word. They couldn’t even look at him.
John-Michael had seen his father’s body when it was still warm. Which probably put him in the room with his recently dead father. The rest was easy to conclude: John-Michael’s arrest for the murder of his father might be a whole lot more serious than he’d led them to believe. But Maya wasn’t going to be the one to voice any suspicion. At least not right now.
She examined the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson model 60, she noted, being careful to point it away from anyone and to keep her finger far from the trigger. She opened the revolving cylinder. Inside were five cartridges and one collapsed, metal casing.
“Maya, why are you touching the guy’s gun?”
She turned the revolver around so that Lucy could see the inside of the cylinder. “You ever seen a casing all crumpled up like that?”
“Maya, I haven’t ever seen a real bullet,” Lucy said.
“My mom has a handgun,” Maya said a little reluctantly. “She’s not just a driver—she’s also Dana’s bodyguard. In Mexico, Mom was a police officer. Maybe you know how things are with the cops and the narcos in Mexico? It was safer to leave the country. And believe me—with some of the enemies my mother made as a cop, she’d better not go back. I’ve been to the range with her a few times. Mom made sure to teach me how to handle a gun. I never fired a shell like this one.”
Exasperated Lucy said, “Goddamnit, Maya! D’you have any other secrets you want to share right now? Or you think you’re about done for the night?”
Paolo stopped his hunt for the bullet. He straightened up and faced her abruptly. “Maya, just tell us what it is you think you’ve figured out.”
Maya shrugged. “My guess? Mr. Private Investigator here was trying to scare the bejesus outta you both. That was his first tactic. That casing is from a blank cartridge. And I’m betting you won’t find a bullet. Maybe a wad of cotton somewhere closer than the wall where Paolo’s looking. Yeah, might be a good idea to find that.”
Paolo’s jaw was slack as he spoke. “A blank? Why would he fire a blank?”
“Like I said,” Maya muttered as she removed the collapsed casing from the cylinder. “To threaten Lucy. The rest of the bullets are real enough, though.” She slammed it back into position and proceeded to wipe the whole gun carefully with the edge of her shirt. Once she was satisfied that it was clean, Maya handled it through her own shirt and replaced it in the dead man’s outstretched hand.
“What the hell did you just do?” Lucy said, her words heavy with accusation. Maya moved over to the futon, where she felt her knees buckle slightly. Her heart was starting to thud painfully hard as her body responded to the decisions she’d just made.
“Yeah,” Paolo said, but quietly. There was an unmistakable note of hope in his voice. “What did you do?”
John-Michael had been standing stock-still through the last few minutes of Maya’s actions. Now he knelt beside the dead body and handed Lucy the roll of plastic wrap, still inside its box. “Pull a sheet out and get ready to slide it under the guy’s head. Okay?”
Quietly, Lucy did as he asked. Then John-Michael lifted the head and Lucy placed a yard-length sheet of plastic wrap beneath the corpse. With a nod, he was on his way back to the kitchen.
Maya watched for a few seconds and noted with a nod the moment when blood began, now very obviously, to ooze around the dead man’s head. She sucked in a few breaths, willing her heartbeat to slow down. Lucy and Paolo were obviously dazed, quite possibly unable to think straight. Lucy’s shock was understandable. If Maya’s own mind was already beginning to run through the implications of all this to her life and Lucy’s, the consequences for Paolo had to be even scarier. Paolo’s would be even worse.
A sharp cry from Lucy made Maya gasp. “Omigod. He just moved.” She stared at the man on the floor. He didn’t budge. She slid off the sofa and once again knelt beside him. This time she listened at his mouth. She gulped down a chunk of air and held it for several seconds, listening. When Lucy made a sound, Maya raised one hand to silence her. Paolo crept closer. Maya released her breath.
“I can’t hear . . .”
The man’s empty hand twitched. All three of them jerked back at the movement. John-Michael brought a tray and four mugs of steaming cocoa from the kitchen. He alone continued to move. He placed the tray on the wooden folding table near the French doors, then calmly paced over to where the man lay.
As Maya watched, the man began to regain consciousness. First his hand moved, then his whole arm. His chest started to visibly rise and fall.
“Holy crap holy crap holy crap,” Lucy intoned.
Maya couldn’t drag her eyes off the impossible sight of an apparent corpse returning to life.
“He’s not dead,” she whispered in a tone of wonder.