Free Cut to the Quick by Dianne Emley Page B

their homes, loaded weapons at the ready. T. B. Mann had changed that. She’d grown accustomed to the slight, reassuring hardness of the Walther beneath her pillow. The princess and the pea. Only this princess would blow T. B. Mann’s head off if she had the chance.
    She’d said as much, promised herself as much, dangled sweet vengeance in front of herself like chocolate cake in front of a diabetic—the very thing that would fulfill her would likely kill her. Yet over the past few months, she’d put her rage on ice. She’d let her incipient private investigation into other possible victims of T. B. Mann go dormant. She hadn’t even sufficiently followed the one promising lead she’d turned up: Johnna Alwin, a Tucson police detective murdered a few years ago under circumstances that were jarringly like Vining’s ambush.
    Peeling off her panty hose, finally free of that cloying second skin, soaked with perspiration after the hot day, she carried them into the bathroom and shoved them into a net bag that already held several other pairs. She seriously had to do her laundry. She took off her bra and grabbed her light summer bathrobe from a hook on the back of the door.
    Instead of hauling the laundry hamper into the garage to get a load started, another matter lured her attention. From the back of the dresser drawer where she kept her few pieces of good jewelry in satinette bags or boxes inlaid with squares of padding, she took out a box. From it, she withdrew a necklace, a string of pearls with a pendant. The pendant had a large pearl in the middle circled by glittering imitation diamonds. The pearls were imitation too, but good quality, and the necklace was well crafted. Only a trained eye could discern that the gems were not genuine.
    Five years earlier, after Vining had fatally shot a famous man in a high-profile event that had taken on a life of its own, the pearl necklace had shown up in her home mailbox. A panel card was attached to it with a ribbon. She retrieved the card. The satin ribbon was still attached through a hole made with a paper punch. The ribbon was bloodred. The message had been handwritten with a fountain pen:
    Congratulations,
Officer Vining
    Through a bizarre chain of events distinguished by seemingly otherworldly influences, Vining had come to believe that the necklace was a gift from T. B. Mann. If so, she had attracted his lethal attention a full five years before he had attacked her in the house at 835 El Alisal Road. Pearl was the birthstone for June. It was not her birthstone, however. She was born in April, with the diamond as her birthstone. She and Emily had deciphered a different significance for the pearls. Both of the most deadly events in Vining’s life—the day she killed thecelebrity and the day she was ambushed—had happened in June. Pearl was her death stone.
    Leaving the necklace on the dresser, she proceeded with her nightly routine of making sure the house was secure. She closed and double locked the sliding glass doors and turned off the central air even though the house was barely cool. The electric companies had jacked up the rates during the power shortages a few years before. After the crisis, the rates had not gone down, but had only shot up further. Vining pinched pennies where she could. Wes contributed toward Emily’s support, but keeping up the other expenses was tough on Vining’s salary alone. She made sure Emily never went without, but she often did herself. She hardly noticed it anymore.
    In her bedroom, she opened the windows a few inches each, only as far as they would go before hitting the wood dowels she’d set inside the window frames. She plugged her cell phone into the charger atop her night-stand. In case something happened to her landline, she’d still have her cell.
    Such were the more obvious ways that T. B. Mann had changed her life. She’d resisted at first, and then decided she was being as stubborn as if she’d resisted treatment for