Miraculously, March didn’t seem to have broken anything else—not even the glass he’d been holding when he went over, though the drink in it had vanished somewhere along the way. He set it down on the grass, felt his body to make sure all vital parts were present and accounted for. They were—but his holster was empty.
“Shit!” he shouted. “Shit! My gun—”
He went down on all fours, pawing the grass, searching for his missing firearm.
Behind a nearby tree, a flicker of movement startled him. A woman in a canary-yellow dress peeked out from behind a branch. “Jesus,” he said, “you scared me.”
The woman didn’t say anything. She had brown hair, was about so high—
March squinted. “Do I know you?”
She looked frightened.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said, getting to his feet again, palms extended placatingly. “I’m just looking for my gun.”
She bolted, racing away from him through the trees as fast as she could go.
Had that been…?
He took a few steps in her direction, hit something with his foot, bent down. His gun. “I got it!” he shouted, but she was long gone.
He checked the gun for damage—as well as he could in the darkness—and slid it into his holster. Then he sat back against the nearest tree, cracked out a battered cigarette from his jacket pocket, and lit it.
Something at the edge of his vision caught his eye, something revealed in the flickering flame. He turned to get a better look.
A dead body stared back at him—or would have stared if it hadn’t been missing half its face. What should’ve been a staring eye, albeit a dead one, was a bloody exit wound, the remnants of a gunshot to the back of the head. It looked like raw steak. March felt bile coming up his throat.
The guy had on a frilly tuxedo shirt. He had a little spade beard, like a college professor. And half his head was blown away.
March found himself hyperventilating.
Why? Why did these things happen to him?
Why couldn’t Healy have found the dead body instead?
Speaking of the devil—
From the balcony he’d pitched headfirst off, he heard a familiar voice calling his name. “March? March?”
Healy, god bless him, it was Healy. But he sounded so very far away.
March tried to muster the strength to call back to him. “Hhh…”
That was all that came out. He tried again: “Hhhh….”
He felt like Costello in an old Abbott and Costello movie, trying to tell Abbott he’d just seen a ghost, or Boris Karloff or whatever. “Hhh…Hee…Heeeallly!”
“March?” Healy was up by the pool, and he ran over to the railing now, peered over into the darkness.
March got to his feet somehow. “Healy! Come on! Come down here!” He didn’t like the pleading note in his voice, but sometimes you just couldn’t worry about such things, and this was definitely one of those times.
Healy looked down at him. “What the fuck are you doing down there?”
“Get down here!”
Healy took a more careful route, climbing over the railing where the lawn was walkable, and slowly walking it. When he got to the tree, March jabbed an arm toward its roots, which were lost in shadow.
“What?” Healy wanted to know.
March just pointed again, and Healy took a closer look. “Fuck…”
“I’m going to be sick now,” March said.
Healy went over to the body. “Who the fuck is that?” He clearly didn’t much want to do it, but there was no alternative. He pawed through the dead man’s jacket, coming up at last with his wallet. A Master Charge card told him who the fuck it was.
“That’s Sid Shattuck,” he said.
March squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t tell me that. Oh no. Shit.” He pounded a fist against his leg. Which, you know, hurt. He made a mental note not to do that again.
“What’s going on here?” Healy said. “Everyone who worked on this Amelia flick…the boyfriend, and Misty, now Sid…they’re all dead.”
“Before we go solving the crime of the century,” March said, “let’s deal with the fucking rotting corpse!”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve got to get rid of him,” March said.
“Why?”
“I lost my gun, there was a girl, she can place me—”
“Right,” Healy said. Looked around. His eyes settled on the fence. “I’ve got a plan. You throw up, then we’ll get rid of the body.”
March went to a tree and threw up.
* * *
Upstairs, Holly was wandering the corridors of Sid Shattuck’s mansion, poking her nose in here and there. She’d already seen some things she knew her friends would never believe, and she was looking forward to regaling them, but what she hadn’t seen any sign of was Amelia. She also hadn’t seen any sign of her dad, thank goodness, or of Healy since the projection room, but how long could her luck hold out?
She squeezed past a woman who was saying, “I know, right?” to a man who was weighing her breasts on the palms of his hands, and made her way down the hallway outside. One more wing of the house and then she’d have been everywhere—
A figure loomed up before her, a woman who gave the impression of being twice Holly’s height, and only some of that was due to her impressive platform shoes. When she spoke, it was in a posh British accent that reminded Holly of her mom. If this amazon’s height hadn’t been enough to intimidate her by itself, that would’ve sealed the deal.
“Hey,” the amazon said.
“Uh, hi.”
“Are you the one who’s been asking about Amelia?” the amazon said.
“I, uh, may have said something,” Holly said.
“What do you want with her?”
What would dad say, what would dad say—
“She’s my sister,” Holly said, “see, and yeah…I need to warn her. These two freaky guys were coming around, they were all like, ‘Where is she, where is she?’ It scared me, kind of.” She swallowed hard. Playing scared wasn’t so awfully difficult right at this moment.
The amazon scrutinized her and appeared to reach a decision. “You seem like a decent kid. I’ll take you to her.”
Holly gave a nervous nod and an uncertain smile, and followed the amazon toward the front door.
* * *
Healy had pulled the short straw and was carrying Sid Shattuck by the shoulders, one hand lodged in each of his armpits. The ruined head lolled against him, leaving bloodstains on his shirt. March had Shattuck’s knees in his hands and was standing between them, walking backward. He was urging Healy to go faster.
“What I can’t figure out,” Healy said, “is how you saw him, from all the way up there.”
“Come on, just go,” March said.
“You didn’t fall down the fucking hill, did you?”
March just grunted, kept moving toward the fence.
“Did you fall down the hill? Are you fucking drunk?”
“I had two, three drinks, tops.”
“Yeah, that’s why you can’t walk straight.”
“Oh, excuse me. I’m carrying a dead body and I have his schvantz in my face, I’m sorry I’m not Bakishnirov—”
“You can’t even say ‘Baryshnikov.’ ” They were at the fence, and Healy laid down his end of the load, leaving March holding Shattuck’s legs up in the air by himself. “You did, didn’t you? You fell down the fucking hill. You get drunk, you lose your gun, you take a header off the balcony, and now you’re gonna tell me it’s like a, a hallowed, time-honored detective ploy, right?”
“It was very slippery up there, okay? I was in the pool, I—”
“You were in the pool?”
March dropped Sid’s legs. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I had to question the mermaids. What were you doing while I was working?”
Healy was speechless. Couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to say.
“Thank you,” March said.
“Let’s get rid of this guy,” Healy muttered.
When they had Shattuck aloft again, they carried him right up to the fence at the edge of his property. Over the side he’d go, and then he’d be someone else’s problem. With any luck, he’d lie undetected under a tree for a good long time. Hell, maybe the neighbors were out of town; maybe they never came to this remote corner of their property; maybe he’d never be found.
With any luck.
On the count of three, they pushed him up and over the top. Waited to hear him land with a thud on the other side.
He landed—but not with a thud. Instead, they heard the sound of smashing glass and splintering wood and shattering plates and tumbling cutlery. And screams—lots of screams.
Peeking over the fence, they saw Shattuck lying sprawled on the wreckage of a long dinner table, with one, two, three, four, five, six people seated around it in fancy dinner wear. Well, not seated. Not anymore. And was that…a bride?
Healy and March pulled their heads back to their side of the fence and fucking ran for it.
* * *
“Hop in back, sweetie,” the amazon said, and opened the door to a stretch limo idling in the driveway.
Holly wasn’t sure this was the best idea. Why would Amelia be in a limousine? But she didn’t know what else to do. So she climbed in. “This one says she’s Amelia’s sister,” the amazon said to someone inside. Then the door shut behind Holly with a click.
Her eyes took a moment to adjust, but even before they did, she knew she was in trouble. There was only one person in the car with her, and it wasn’t Amelia. It was a man, not a woman. And as he leaned forward, she saw that his face was stained a vivid shade of blue.