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Dot leaned close and whispered, “She’s a stubborn old thing and insists on picking out her own color, even though she don’t know nothin’ about it. Last time, her hair was blue as the sky, and I’m not lyin’. She got mad and swore she wouldn’t come back, but there she is.”
Mrs. Colder was ancient. At least a thousand years old, with serious wrinkles and a hunchback. Dressed in a colorful silk blouse and red knit pants, she stood behind the operator chair, her spidery hands clutching the grips of her walker, her sharp, blue eyes staring at the mirror and her thin lips pressed into a straight line. “I want my money back!” she yelled, making me start again. Amazing that such a small person could pack so much punch into a shout.
Her hairdresser, a harried woman who didn’t look much younger than her client, murmured something I couldn’t hear, which appeared to send Mrs. Colder over the edge.
“Been comin’ here for nigh on forty years, paid Mabel scads of money, and this is the thanks I get!”
She had a big, black leather bag, big enough to carry a month’s supply of Depends. Or a 747. It was huge, and bulky. With an incredible show of strength, despite her thin, scrawny appearance, she hauled the bag up and rested it on her walker. Reaching inside, she thrashed about for a bit, then withdrew a cell phone. “I’m callin’ my lawyer, you hear?”
“Miz Colder,” her hairdresser said in a firm voice, “we can’t give your money back because you haven’t paid yet!”
Ignoring her, Mrs. Colder made her call.
The entire shop had gone quiet, even the ladies under the hair dryers switching them off so they could hear what was going on. The only sounds were Buck Owens’ twangy tune and Mrs. Colder’s intermittent shouts.
We were all so focused on the old lady, I never noticed the presence of a sinister figure until something dark caught the corner of my eye and I glanced in the mirror. In the place where Dot was supposed to be stood a man in a black jump-suit with a ski mask over his face. Before I could do anything, like run, or scream, he clamped one hand over my mouth, grabbed me with his other arm and hauled me out of the chair. Looking wildly about for help, I saw that Dot had moved close to Mrs. Colder, and the rest of the shop was focused toward the front. No one was looking, no one knew I was being abducted in broad daylight!
I was so frightened, I guess my body went on autopilot, and without consciously thinking about it, I kicked out and my toe connected with Dot’s little cart. It crashed to the floor, scattering rollers and hair pins and cans of Aquanet.
Everyone turned toward me, including Mrs. Colder. “Let her go,” she shouted, still holding the phone.
The man only held me tighter, squeezing the wind out of me, causing sparkles in my vision, forcing me to stop kicking and squirming. If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget just how Mrs. Colder looked as she reached into her black hole of a bag and pulled out a small, silver gun. An old lady with a walker and a pistol. Jesus, that blew my mind.
“Let her go, swine, or I’m gonna blow a hole in you!”
I don’t think the guy believed her. He never slowed down.
He should have believed her. She fired the gun and the small fax machine on the counter at the back of the shop exploded into a thousand flying pieces. I heard him mumble, “Holy shit!” But still, he kept going.
While I watched in horrified fascination, Mrs. Colder aimed the gun right at the man, which meant the gun was pointed directly at me. Jesus God, I was going to die! An old lady with pink hair and a shaky hand was about to end my life, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
She fired again and I flinched, then hit the floor when the man dropped me. Had she shot him? Was he dead? A little dazed, I glanced behind me and all I saw was the exit door as it closed. The man was gone.
Drawing in a deep breath, I noticed three drops of blood on the avocado linoleum. Wide-eyed, I turned my head and looked at Mrs. Colder. “You shot him!”
“’Course I did, but he’ll live ’cause I only nicked him. Been shootin’ since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Reckon I could pick the wings off a fly at fifty feet, if I was of a mind to.” She shuffled over with her walker and looked down at me from piercing blue eyes. “You okay, little missy?”
I was scared and shaky and completely freaked out, but I’d get over it. Offering the old lady as much of a smile as I could muster, I nodded. “Thank you, ma’am.”
She was about to say something, but before she could speak, I heard Ed’s voice. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“Ed?” I peeked around Mrs. Colder’s red pants and saw him rushing toward us. He was dressed in another pair of faded jeans and a black T-shirt that was exactly like the red one. He looked like a guy who rode a Harley and had sex with girls with gigantic breasts. Ed looked mighty fine. He didn’t look anything like a lawyer.
“You know Ed?” Mrs. Colder shouted.
I decided she had a speech problem and that’s why she spoke with intermittent shouts. “He’s my attorney.”
She slapped the handle of the walker. “Mine, too!”
“I was in the car when Mrs. Colder called, and heard everything, but I had no idea what was going on.” Ed bent to lift me to my feet and held on to me when I swayed. “What happened?”
Before I could say anything, Mrs. Colder gave him the blow-by-blow, her voice rising and falling with her odd, shouting cadence. I noticed the rest of the shop was staring, eyes wide, mouths hanging open in stupefied shock. No doubt, Mrs. Colder’s showdown with the bad guy was destined to become a legend at Mabel’s House of Beauty.
Ed insisted on taking me to lunch, so after the police came, asked a lot of questions, took some of the blood off the floor, and Dot finished my haircut, we took off in his old 4-Runner.
He turned to look at me when he stopped at a red light. “I talked to Santorelli this morning and advised him I’m now your counsel.” His voice was low and solemn. “He told me the Marvel legal team filed a request for injunction to keep your disk from being admitted as evidence. They’re claiming it’s inadmissible because you obtained it illegally.”
“What will happen if they get the injunction?”
Ed stared at me for a moment before answering. “Santorelli says he’d have no choice but to withdraw your immunity because it’s based on you turning over the disk.”
“If there’s an injunction, that’s not my fault. Besides, I was the one who went to the SEC. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
He shook his head, sending my heart into my shoes. “It might be a mitigating factor if they prosecute, but just like a crook who turns himself in, your honesty after the fact doesn’t alter your involvement.”
How stupid I’d been to naively believe I could do the right thing, that I could be open and honest, and the bad guys would pay. I read the writing on the wall, and it told me I was going down. Lowell and the Marvel guys could afford enough legal muscle to weasel out of any charges the government could lay on.
I, on the other hand, had Ed. He was bright and good-looking, and probably enough of a shark to make the big time. But he was inexperienced and unconnected to anyone in Washington. Looking across at him, I swallowed hard. What choice did I have? No way I could afford a lawyer like Mr. Dryer. I’d have to take my chances with Ed.
“Cheer up,” he said as he reached out and rubbed a tear from my cheek with the pad of his thumb. “I’m gonna help you.”
I know it’s awful, but that only made me cry harder.
Chapter 3
Midland is known for oil and rich white men and Baby Jessica, but it should also be known for Mexican food. There are forty-seven Mexican food restaurants in Midland, and the population is right about ninety-five thousand. That’s a Mexican restaurant for every two thousand people. That’s a lotta enchiladas and tamales and tacos. That’s a Mexican food lover’s wet dream.
I have personally eaten at all forty-seven, and do have a few favorites. Bettina’s House of Enchiladas is one. So is El Corazon, which means The Heart, and makes no sense, because they don’t serve any kind of heart, and nothing in the place is a heart, or resembles a heart, but a white guy who spoke no Spanish opened it in the fifties and I guess he thought El Corazon sounded cool.
Ed took me to Bettina’s and I nearly had an orgasm right there in the corner booth, beneath a pi?ata shaped like SpongeBob SquarePants, because the hot sauce was so good. That’s another thing. In Midland, in all of west Texas, nobody calls hot sauce, salsa. That’s a foreign, sissy word. It’s hot sauce, and we have chips and hot sauce. Not chips and salsa.
Bettina outdid herself and I practically ignored Ed while I dived into the awesome food. There are undoubtedly a lot of women who’d have lost their appetite after what happened at Mabel’s, but I wasn’t one of them. It was almost as though I enjoyed it more, could fully appreciate being alive.
That’s not to say the guy planned to kill me. The part of my mind that keeps the fires of hope burning wanted to believe he’d only intended to rough me up a little, to convince me to lose the disk.
Ed talked while he worked through the Plato Grande, which means Big Huge Plate of Everything in the Kitchen. “Is there any way at all to get your hands on that disk before Mrs. Bohannon gets back home?”
“Not unless I break into her house, and even if I did, I can’t be sure the box is there.”
He shook his head as he polished off his taco. “I really thought the guy was just bluffing, but now I think he’s serious about hurting you. Your mom has a good security system, doesn’t she?”
“The best, but it’s not going to do me much good while I’m living in an apartment.”
“Pink, you can’t move to an apartment. It’s too dangerous.”
“Maybe so, but I’m moving anyway. Besides, I already rented one.” Seeing an argument forming in his expression, I said quickly, “Living with Mom is not an option. After what happened this morning, she’ll follow me everywhere I go and fret about it and keep harping on me to blow off the disk. It’ll be bad enough at the office all day, but listening to her around the clock will make me a raving maniac.”
He conceded the point, but he still didn’t look too happy about it. Then he asked, “What’s it like to work for your mom?”
“I can’t say for sure since this is technically my first day, but based on how I grew up and the relationship we have, I’d say it’s going to be great sometimes, difficult sometimes and absolutely awful the rest of the time. I love Mom and I’m so proud of what she’s done with her life, but she’s very different from most moms. When I was four, she wanted to teach me to swim, and because she’s a big believer in just doing it, she tossed me in the deep end and shouted, ‘Swim!’”
“And you swam, I bet.”
Looking across the table at him, I realized he was a member of Mom’s Fan Club. Not that I thought that was a bad thing. It just made it harder for him to see, well, certain realities about my mother. “No, Ed, I didn’t swim. The lifeguard pulled me out and did mouth-to-mouth, then threatened to call the cops on Mom for child endangerment. I know you wanted me to say, yes, I swam, and all was well and Mom did the right thing by shoving her four-year-old into the deep end of the Midland Country Club pool. But all was not well, and I was too afraid of the water to go swimming again until I was twelve, when Brandy Hernandez had a pool party and invited Lucky Barnes. I was hot for him and didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I took lessons, but even now, I’m not real hip on bodies of water any bigger than my bathtub if I don’t have a flotation device.”
“You were hot for Lucky Barnes? The guy’s a loser.”
“Maybe now he’s a loser. In sixth grade, he was hot. Besides, he had a cool bike and listened to Def Leppard.”
“Did you go out with him?”
“Not a chance. He went with Brandy because she jumped in the pool and lost her top and he was wowed by her boobs.”
“He wasn’t wowed with yours, I take it.”
“Well, no, because I didn’t jump in and lose my top like Brandy did. That’s not to say he would’ve been wowed if I had lost it, because I was only twelve.”
“So was Brandy.”
“True. But she was obviously a wild child, losing her top like that, and Lucky being Lucky, he went for the wild thing.”
“You weren’t a wild child?”
“I had my moments, and I probably would have jumped in and lost my top and given old Brandy a run for the money, but I was too afraid of the water, so I just stood there and watched Lucky take her around the side of her house to make out where her parents wouldn’t see.”
“You wanna know what I think? I think Lucky was probably a lousy kisser and you’d have been disappointed.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I’ve seen the guy eat and it’s not pretty. He’s probably one of those wet kissers. You know, the slobbery kind.”
“Ed, how sensitive of you,” I said with a smile. “I bet you’re right. And he probably tried to cop a feel off Brandy.”
“No doubt about it.” He returned my smile, making his handsome face look good enough to eat. Or kiss. “So you see, your fear of the water turned out to be not such a bad thing. In a strange way, what your mom did turned out okay.”
My smiled died. “No wonder you’re an attorney. That was friggin’ amazing.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t actually mean it as a compliment.”
His smile morphed into a grin. “I know.”
The man was just way too good-looking for comfort.
He stood and handed me his keys. “You can go on out to the car if you like. I’m going to stop off in the men’s room.”
A little bemused by him, I watched him walk away, then got to my feet and headed for the door. I was halfway there when the Marvel CFO walked in, followed by the COO and a guy who’s the corporate attorney, but looks more like a bald bodyguard in a pinstriped suit. Roy Kipper brought up the rear. He looked as awkward and uncomfortable as a nun in a whore-house, and when he caught sight of me, he turned bright red, all the way to the top of his bald head. He mumbled something about taking a leak and scurried off to the men’s room.
Panic set in. I wasn’t sure whether to ignore them, be polite and say hello and keep moving, or stop and speak like the friends we used to be.
In the end, what I wanted didn’t make any difference. The CFO, a tall, lanky guy named Larry Sparks, but whom everyone knows as Sparky, stepped in front of me before I could get to the door.
“Hello, Pink,” he said in a neutral voice.
“Hi, Sparky.” I nodded at the COO and the lawyer, then looked at Sparky, waiting for him to say something.
“Saw you on C-SPAN.”
I nodded again.
“Just curious, Pink, how does it feel to fuck a senator?”
Oh-ho, so that’s how it was gonna be. “Just curious, Sparky, how does it feel to be a greedy bastard, commit fraud and ruin thousands of people’s lives?”
Sparky took a threatening step closer, his nostrils flaring and his cheeks pink with either anger or too many of the martinis I could smell on his breath, which was hot on my face. “If you turn over that disk, you’ll be the one who ruins their lives.”
“I have no choice. Even you can see that.”
“We all have choices. You just seem to be inclined to make all the wrong ones.” His angular face formed into a dark frown. “Like sleeping with Santorelli.”
“If you believe everything in the news, then you must believe that you and Lowell Jaworski set up a plan to defraud the state of Texas out of millions of dollars of past oil and gas overrides.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Yeah, Sparky, just like I know it’s not true I sleep with a senator.” I caught his look of pure hatred before he schooled his features into mild dislike. I admit, it unnerved me and I decided I needed to leave. Immediately. “I have to go,” I said, stepping aside to move around him.
He stepped aside at the same time, blocking my way.
“Look, Sparky, you’re not going to intimidate me. No matter what you say or do, I’m handing that disk over to the finance committee.” With a firm grip on my nerves, I stepped aside again and made to walk out.
Again, he blocked my way. Then he went one worse and grabbed my arm. “Not so fast, sister. I just want to hear you explain how it is you never caught any discrepancies last year, or the year before that.”
“Get real,” I said, now thoroughly furious and disgusted. “You know I was promoted to senior manager in December, and this was my first year to head the Marvel audit. I didn’t have access to the memos and spreadsheets before this year.”
“Do you seriously expect anyone to believe you? Don’t you get it? By squealing to the feds, you’re digging your own grave. They’ll throw you in jail same as the rest of us.”
His hand on my arm tightened painfully and I flinched, wanting to kick him, knowing I couldn’t cause a scene. I cast about for some kind of a comeback, anything to make him let go of my arm. For once in my life, I was at a loss.
While the COO and the refrigerator-size attorney mumbled something from behind him, Sparky took advantage of my muteness. He leaned closer. “Here’s a little advice, for old time’s sake. Don’t hand that disk over, or something very, very bad will happen to you.”
Every hair on my head stood on end. I glanced down at his hand, still holding my arm in a bruising grip, and saw a white bandage. Mother of God! Was Sparky the Dog Doo Stalker? He didn’t seem the type, but he’d just threatened me, and his hand was wounded. Maybe from a gunshot?
Shocked and tongue-tied, beyond freaked, I was about to cry out and get someone’s attention when I heard Ed say, “I suggest you let go of my client before something even worse happens to you, Mr. Sparks.”
Looking as though he’d just awakened from a trance, Sparky’s eyes widened, he let go of my arm and stepped back. Jerking his head to his companions, he walked toward a table and they all took a seat, smiling and talking as though he hadn’t just been a major asshole.
Ed nudged me and I walked outside, sucking in the dry, hot air. I was more shaken than I wanted to admit. “Ed, his hand was bandaged. I think he’s the guy who grabbed me at Mabel’s.”
