Free Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) by G.M. Ford Page A

she does and doesn’t like about herself. It’s uncanny. He’s like a lion looking at a herd of zebras and immediately being able to pick out the slow and the weak.”
    “Rebecca’s neither of those.”
    “Neither was I,” she said.
    I believed her but didn’t want to say so. My silence seemed to make her uncomfortable, so she began to talk. Seemed Patty Franklin was from L.A. Learned to play piano from her grandma. Worked the L.A. club circuit. Wasn’t getting rich but playing jazz beat the hell out of bag lunches in a cubicle. She’d been here in the tulles for about three months, tending to an estranged father who was dying of colon cancer. Back then, his doctor claimed he had a month to live, but the old man seemed hell-bent on defying theodds. No telling how long he was going to be with us. She hated the Alderbrook, the state of Washington, the weather, and every other damn thing around here and was going to be back in SoCal about five seconds after her old man cashed his chips. Whenever in hell that turned out to be.
    Pops had a sister who came over most nights and helped out, so Patty took the gig at the hotel just to keep her chops honed and her spirits uplifted. An old friend of hers had once said that the most miserable creatures on earth were people who got stuck caring for other people. At the time, she’d thought he was just being mean-spirited. Lately, though, she’d changed her mind.
    Teddy Healy was nothing like her type. Not even close. She didn’t do rural. Back in L.A., she’d have sent him on his way without a second look. But she was bored and horny and miserable about being stuck out in the woods so she let him buy her drinks. Listened to his pathetic redneck chatter for a month or so before…before she had a few too many one night and found herself at his place.
    She caught herself running off at the mouth and looked away from me. I could feel the ambivalence churning inside her. Part of her wanted to cough it up like a fish bone. To finally tell somebody what had happened between them, and how she’d been forever damaged by the experience. Another part of her was so consumed by shame and self-loathing that the very idea of anyone else knowing the details was more than she could bear.
    “All the more reason I need to find Rebecca,” I said, hoping we could keep this thing on track.
    The rush of feet and the sound of voices pulled my attention over toward the desk, where the last toothy knotof dentists was checking out. A parade of bellboys and car jockeys was carting their baggage out through the big front doors. They toodel-ooed the hired help and followed their belongings into the great outdoors.
    “He’s got a place on Prescott Creek.”
    “You think that’s where they went?”
    “I know that’s where they went. That’s what he does. He gets you out there where nobody’s going to interrupt his…” She censored herself. “By now he’s got her so coked up she’ll…”
    “How do I get there?” I interrupted.
    “You’d never find it. It’s a driveway off a dirt road. Way the hell out there.”
    “Show me.”
    “Pffffft,” she scoffed. “Like I’m gonna get involved with that.”
    “Maybe it’s time Teddy got what was coming to him,” I suggested.
    I watched as the idea took a bite out of her. As I’d hoped, the prospect of retribution held a certain primal appeal. Human beings are like that. You do them wrong enough and they start making up little seek-and-destroy Clint Eastwood movies in their heads. Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing happens because, first of all, the opportunity never presents itself, and secondly, because they don’t really have the balls to do anything about it, even if it did. Tonight, however, Patty Franklin found herself traipsing among the other one percent. Here she was, face-to-face with the possibility that her revenge novella could, quite possibly, come true, a prospect that excited her in a way and to a degree with which