than me, who else knows about your sister Colleen living in San Francisco?”
“Nobody. As far as I know, she didn’t keep in touch with anybody after she left here.”
“Who else has a key to this house?”
“Chester’s mama and daddy, but they don’t come around that much. His mama never did like me. That old heifer! Besides, they went to Birmingham for the weekend.”
“So nobody would be looking for Chester for a while? What about his boys, Duke and Nick and Perry…and…that detective Clyde?”
Desiree shrugged her shoulders. She was leaning on the back of the sofa, looking like an old woman. She was only a few months older than me. “Those dogs all went fishing this evening for the whole weekend. Chester stayed behind so he could—go with me to your wedding.”
“Shit. When he doesn’t show up for work on Monday, his goddamn cop buddies will be snooping around here,” I mumbled. My agitation had doubled, and I could not hide it. I couldn’t stop wringing my hands and shifting my weight from one foot to the other.
“He had planned to take Monday and Tuesday off to go fishing in Mobile Bay. Nobody will miss him for a while,” Desiree said firmly. “Carmen, I am scared as hell,” Desiree muttered, wringing her hands, too.
I nodded, again looking at the bloody weight that had slain Chester. It was hard to believe that such a small item was capable of taking a man’s life. Even though it was only a five-pound weight and not a sword or a gun, he was still dead.
“We have to think this thing through. If we call the cops now, they might buy our story and they might not. Do you want to take that chance?” I said sharply.
“What are our options?” Desiree asked, her voice hard and demanding.
“Options? We don’t have any options,” I snarled, giving her the most incredulous look I could manage.
She dismissed my hot look with a casual wave of her hand, glaring back at me out of the corner of her eye. “Aw, shuck it! If we stay here and call this in and if they don’t buy our story…that he fell…somebody goes to jail.”
“Yeah. Somebody goes to jail.”
“But even if we leave, once they do find him, they will come looking for us anyway.”
I nodded. “They will.”
I was aching all over. I was tired. All I wanted to do was lie down in my own apartment and take a long nap. And that’s just what I would have been doing if Desiree had not called me to come pick her up. If I had not been stupid enough to go.
“When they find us, we’ll go to jail anyway,” she mumbled, her voice cracking.
“If they find us,” I said firmly.
The thought of never seeing my family again, or at least not seeing them for a very long time, made my head swim. I couldn’t imagine the pain Mama would go through just over my sudden disappearance. She used to cry when I was late getting home from school. Daddy, with the weak heart he was convinced he had, would finally have an excuse to have the heart attack he had been predicting for twenty years. But as much as I loved my family, my freedom seemed more important at the time.
Without warning, Desiree hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe. After a few seconds I pulled away from her and said, “Let’s get the hell up out of here.”
CHAPTER 4
Times had changed. From watching almost every episode of America’s Most Wanted, Unsolved Mysteries, and Cops, and from reading too many true-crime books, I knew that criminals didn’t have a leg to stand on anymore. Something I had supported whole-heartedly.
Until now.
I didn’t tell Desiree, and I had a hard time believing it myself, but I didn’t think we would make it to California—or even out of the state of Alabama, for that matter. I didn’t even think we would make it to my apartment after we left the house Desiree had shared with Chester for the past seven years. But at least we would try. All that mattered to me was staying out of jail no matter what it took, and the longer we remained free the better. Even with my confused state of mind, I believed that there was a slim chance we would get away with murder. There was a chance that people might believe that Chester had fallen or that someone else had attacked him. Being a policeman who had helped put dozens of criminals in jail, he had made a lot of enemies over the years. Even his ex-wife had threatened him a few times all the way from Texas. At the time, another suspect didn’t seem that farfetched, but it seemed too weak and I wasn’t willing to rely on it.
The bloody weight was in my purse, where it would remain until I figured out what to do with it. We had passed a lot of Dumpsters and bushes. I had thought about tossing the murder weapon out the window of my car, and it would have been the smart thing to do. But nothing we had done so far could be called smart.
The rain had stopped; traffic was light, but my mind was not on driving. I went down the same street twice and sideswiped an abandoned car in an alley. I finally pulled over to the side of Patterson Street and placed my head on the steering wheel.
“Let me drive,” Desiree said, pulling my arm off the steering wheel.
I lifted my head and told her, “I’m all right.”
“You’re not all right. You’re in no shape to drive. You want to kill us, too?” Desiree didn’t wait for me to respond. She flung open the passenger’s door and hopped out of the car. Before she even made it around to the driver’s side, I slid from under the wheel onto the passenger’s seat.
With Desiree driving like somebody being chased by the devil, we arrived at my apartment in less than five minutes, a fraction of the time it normally took from where she had taken over the wheel.
This was one night I didn’t like having nosy neighbors.
As soon as we parked the car in front of my building, lights went on in the apartment below mine and a pair of shiny, catlike eyes appeared in the front window. Jimmie Lee Cross, the busybody middle-aged homosexual who lived in the apartment, kept a chair in front of that window. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that old queen hold up a pair of glasses to his eyes as he boldly watched every move we made. Curtains moved at the window in the house across the street, and a large, beefy red face appeared.
“I thought you said this was a nice neighborhood,” Desiree said thoughtfully.
“It is a nice neighborhood full of nice, nosy people. Nothing gets past this hawkeyed bunch. We don’t even have to lock our doors around here,” I announced proudly.
We took the stairs to my second-floor apartment. Because I had left all of the gifts I had received at my bridal shower on my living room floor, I had locked my front door when I left to go pick up Desiree.
“The police hardly ever have to come out here.” As soon as I said that, I lowered my head and started fumbling with my purse, trying to locate my house keys. I was one step away from being delirious. I thought I heard a car alarm go off. I knew that my mind was playing tricks on me, but I still panicked and dropped my purse. The weight inside made a tremendous noise when it hit the concrete landing. Desiree lifted the purse.
“You—you got blood on your shoe,” she whispered and pointed to my feet.
I gasped and hopped like I had just stepped on a piece of hot coal. As careful as I had been, I had still stepped in Chester’s blood. The rim on my right house shoe looked like somebody had taken a dark-red crayon and outlined it. “Shit!” There was not much light coming from the streetlights or the lights on the outside of my building. I couldn’t really tell if I had tracked an incriminating trail of bloody footprints when I turned around and looked down at the steps. It felt like an invisible noose had wound itself around my neck and was getting tighter by the minute.
“It’s all right. You probably left the rest of the blood on the lawn at Chester’s house,” Desiree assured