Driving Mr. Dead Page 6

  “But that’s so mercenary!”

  “On the contrary, the families I did business with desperately needed the money I offered them. I was helping them.”

  “You were helping yourself!”

  “I was using the tools I was provided with to make my way in the world. I was raised in a fine house with carefully chosen furnishings. And although I didn’t stand to inherit any of it, I was taught their history, their value. I can’t be faulted for using that knowledge.”

  “And the fact that you believe that is what is so very troubling.”

  Eyebrows raised, I glanced at the case securely wedged against his side in the booth. That certainly changed my guesses about the case’s contents. Crown jewels? Priceless art? Ancient coins?

  That would be sort of exciting, to know that I was helping complete some Council project or bringing scary-ass Ophelia, the forever-teenage head of the local Council branch, her personal art collection. Maybe that would make her more lenient when I inevitably ran afoul of the local vampires.

  “Why live out in the middle of nowhere?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been much of a joiner. And as technology has improved, I’ve felt less and less alone. Thanks to the telephone, color television, the Internet, I’ve been able to keep up with current events, terminology. I’m not left entirely out of the loop.”

  “Why haven’t you left your house in so long? Is it because you were traumatized in the crash? Do you have PTSD?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. That was an interesting change in role. “Not exactly.”

  The tone of his voice didn’t invite further questions, so in the interest of the progress we’d made so far, I chose to shut up. He glanced down, as if he could see my carefully bandaged hand through the table, despite the fact that I’d kept it folded in my lap and out of his sight. It seemed rude, otherwise, like waving a Twinkie in front of someone on Atkins.

  “What’s happened to your hand?” he asked. “Why are you being so careful with it?”

  “Nothing,” I said, tucking the injured hand under my jeans-clad leg.

  His lips twitched in disapproval as he leaned forward, his voice sultry and persuasive. And I had to clamp my thighs together, because that was just unfair. “Miss Puckett, do you honestly think I can’t sense fresh blood? Even in an environment as foul as this, I can smell it on you. Frankly, its pleasant distraction is the only thing keeping me from losing my mind in this crowded restaurant. Now, be a good girl and show me your hand.”

  “Are you trying to hypnotize me?” I asked, my eye narrowed. “Vampires can do that, right? Control people like puppets? Are you going to make me cluck like a chicken in this foul, crowded restaurant?”

  For the first time, he gave me a true, sincere smile. It was as if the clouds parted, the room lit up, and I was able to see what Mr. Sutherland looked like when he was human. Well, human and in a really good mood.

  “No, I don’t have that particular gift. I am merely concerned about any tendencies you may have to injure yourself while I’m asleep. Will I wake up tomorrow night to find you have knocked yourself unconscious against the steering wheel and veered into a river?”

  “That won’t happen,” I grumbled. “Again.”

  His jaw dropped.

  “I’m kidding!” I exclaimed, laughing as I held up my hand. “I caught my fingertip in the lock of a bathroom stall. It sort of snipped the tiniest bit of the fingertip off.”

  “That cannot possibly be true.”

  I held the finger up for his inspection. “There’s a reason we carry a suitcase-sized first-aid kit in the backseat. I manage to injure myself in increasingly inventive ways. I’ve been burned by a peanut salesman with bad aim at a Cubs game. I got a jellyfish stuck in my bikini top in Jamaica, which required some interesting ointment placement. Once my fian—a friend was opening a bottle of champagne in the next room, and the cork ricocheted around a corner, off the ceiling, and hit me right in the eye. I had a shiner for a week. My neighbor slipped brochures for a women’s shelter under my door.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” he said.

  “Would you like me to show you the scars?”

  He grinned. “Where exactly are these scars?”

  Was I suffering from a French-fry-induced high, or was Mr. Sutherland flirting with me?

  I grinned cheekily, trailing my (uninjured) fingertips along the buttons of my blouse, as if I was considering loosening them. His blue eyes tracked the motion of my hand, up and down, up and down. I stopped abruptly, and he shook his head, as if clearing it from some fog.

  “On second thought, a lady needs to keep a bit of mystery about her,” I said, lifting my sandwich from the plate and taking a bite.

  Mr. Sutherland seemed deflated at my sudden change in course, which was a balm for my ego. He sighed, toying with a packet of Splenda. “Oh, trust me, Miss Puckett, you are an enigma.”

  We came so close to having a pleasant evening. Mr. Sutherland even managed to restrain his comments when I ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie, although I’m sure it smelled awful to him. I stopped badgering him with questions and made light conversation about our schedule for the next night. We walked out of the diner, and he actually opened the door for me with a little smile on his face.

  “Isn’t that heavy to cart around with you everywhere we go?” I asked, nudging the silver briefcase with my fingers.

  He gently spanked my hand away. “What did we say about touching the case?”

  “Did we say, ‘If you smack my hand again, I will wedgie you until your underwear comes up over your head’?”

  He gave me an arch look.

  “I would try,” I muttered.

  I’d parked on the far side of the parking lot, beyond the truckers’ area, because I wanted to give us some space if Mr. Sutherland needed to do something vampire-y. Also, the last thing I needed to do was ding some tourist’s car. But as we walked to the car, I could see from a distance that was the least of my concerns. There was something on the hood. Weird, circular shapes with—

  “Oh, for the love of Pete!” I cried.

  Someone had spray-painted a pair of neon pink breasts on the hood of the car. Big, round, obscenely realistic breasts that were most likely visible from space. I glanced around the parking lot and saw that ours was not the only vehicle to receive a makeover. A Ryder moving truck, a tractor-trailer, and a minivan were all decorated with twin sets of their very own. I noticed that each was parked in a dimly lit area of the lot, giving the vandals the cover of darkness. I scanned the lot for signs of the kids—please, Lord, let this be the work of teenagers and not grown men—but couldn’t see so much as a mist of spray paint. The phantom graffiti artists were long gone.

  “Fuck a duck!” I exclaimed.

  “Language,” Mr. Sutherland admonished weakly. He was stricken, trying like hell, but failing, to avoid looking at the “art.” “Was it like this before we went into the diner?”

  “No, I would have remembered our car having boobs,” I said, staring down at the Batmobile’s generous triple-Z cups. We were transfixed, caught in the thrall of trompe l’oeil cleavage. That was a first for me.

  Several awkward, silent moments passed. As I snapped shots of the hood for Iris’s insurance agent—and Mr. Sutherland’s face, for posterity—I considered several options. Calling Iris and telling her she would need to send the National Guard to retrieve Mr. Sutherland. Going back into the diner to inquire whether they served hard liquor. Attempting to paint over the boobs with black nail polish.

  Hey, it worked when I scratched my mom’s car in high school.

  I realized that Mr. Sutherland had moved on from staring at the car to watching me intently. “Are you waiting for me to know what to do here? Because this was not covered during my orientation.”

  “Should we call the police and report this?”

  “Do you really want to file another police report? That will just slow us down that much more. We’re running ju
st shy of ‘on time’ as it is.”

  “You make a good point.” He nodded. “We’ll just tell Miss Scanlon to add the cost of repainting the car to my bill.”

  “Really?” I asked, lifting a brow. “That’s very nice of you.”

  “Contingencies, Miss Puckett. They happen,” he said, echoing my words earlier. “Particularly when you’re around. But you shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of mammary-minded juvenile delinquents.”

  I searched his face for some hint of derision or deception. I found none, just unearthly blue eyes and an unsettling amount of sincerity. He really wasn’t angry or annoyed with me. He was incredibly embarrassed, however, and trying very hard not to look me directly in the eye.

  Men, vampire or otherwise, were so strange when it came to boobs.

  “Perhaps we can paint over the, er, additions with black paint so it’s less noticeable.”

  “I thought about it, but adding another layer might make it harder for the professionals to fix. I’ll call Iris in the morning and ask her if we have some sort of vandalism roadside-assistance plan,” I said. “Let’s just get on the road, shall we?”

  I reached into the car and popped the hood. As I propped it back over the windshield, Mr. Sutherland frowned. “I don’t think this is the best way to keep other drivers from seeing them, Miss Puckett, unless you plan to cut eyeholes in the hood.”

  “Funny.” I snorted. “I just want to make sure our friendly neighborhood car decorators didn’t diddle with my engine.”

  “Diddle?”

  “I would use the f-word again, but cursing seems to upset you,” I said, peering down at the gleaming inner works of the car.

  “Isn’t this just a bit paranoid?”

  “It might be, if I hadn’t been stranded outside a mall in Poughkeepsie once, believing my car was completely dead, only to find out that some smartass had taken advantage of a faulty outside hood latch and unscrewed my distributor cap. The tow-truck guy laughed his ass off at me. So now, I just like to make sure everything’s in order.”

  Mr. Sutherland peered over my shoulder. “Do you know what you’re looking at?”

  I cut my eyes at him. “Would you ask a man that same question?”

  “Yes, because I have no clue what I’m looking at.” He looked affronted, which made me laugh, despite the situation. “Why would said smartass do something like that?” he asked as I checked the obvious spots, the spark plugs, the alternator, the battery cables.

  “I think I was being set up for a mugging in Poughkeepsie, but the tow truck got there before anything could happen. But in this case, I don’t know—just in case the automotive boobs weren’t demoralizing enough?”

  I gently nudged his hands out of the way before snapping the hood shut. Remembering the incident with the car door, he flexed his healed fingers. “Are you demoralized?”

  “Are you kidding?” I scoffed. “This is just Tuesday for me.”

  “But it’s Thursday.”

  “It’s an expression.”

  “How do you know about engines?” he asked.

  “I helped crew a yacht in the Caribbean one summer in college. I was friends with the ship’s mechanic, and he taught me the basics. It comes in handy when you travel as much as I do.”

  “What did you do on the crew?”

  “General dogsbody. I ran lines, cleaned cabins, cooked on occasion. The yacht belonged to my very well-off roommate’s dad, so he was pretty easy on us, on the rare occasions he was actually on the boat. It was one of the best summers of my life.”

  It was also the precursor to my dropping out of school after just one year. It turned out that returning for school two months into the semester was frowned upon in some academic circles. Who knew?

  I cleaned my hands with some Wet Wipes as he climbed into the backseat. Sliding into the driver’s seat, I turned toward him. “Look, we’re riding around in a car with tits. I think normal social constraints have gone out the window. Can you just call me by my first name? And sit up front?”

  He was silent while he mulled it over.

  “You be nice, or I’m going to set the station to Radio Disney and leave it there,” I warned him.

  “Fine.” He climbed over the seat, unwilling to get out of the car, I supposed, just in case the gathering crowd had torches and pitchforks handy.

  “Could you take off the jacket and relax a little?” I asked, reaching down to silence another of Jason’s calls on my phone.

  “Don’t push it,” he said, adding, “Miranda.”

  Despite myself—and the enormous jugs on my hood—I smiled as we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

  LAID BARE … AND NOT IN THE FUN WAY

  5

  Collin—whom I was calling by his first name without explicit permission—was surprisingly easy to talk to when he didn’t have that enormous stick up his ass. I won’t say that we had a life-altering, soul-baring exchange, but he managed not to lecture me when I left a soda cap in the console. And I didn’t say a thing when he insisted on keeping the radio on the classical station. I considered that progress.

  He was still as intimidating as ever, with the whole leisurely predator thing, lounging on the front seat in perfect, unwrinkled elegance while I drove. But he was attempting to make conversation, even if it was because he wanted to hear more of my embarrassing history.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “You’re only twenty-three human years old?”

  “I’ll be twenty-seven in March, but thank you.”

  “Why does your family allow you to drift about the country in this fashion?” he asked.

  I laughed. “They hardly allow me to do anything.”

  “Then how are you supported?”

  I snorted. That was the million-dollar question. I’d moved out of my apartment with Jason after the Lisa fiasco and was living with my parents again. I was still technically in the firm’s employ, but even with the continual disasters we were suffering, I found that working for Iris was much more pleasant. I was more entertained on the road than in months at Puckett and Puckett. And that included the time one of my dad’s clients tried to use an iguana as a character witness in a divorce trial.

  There were too many strings attached to my parents’ support, and most of those strings had hooks on them. I’d known I was making a mistake, borrowing the money from them. After I dropped out, I was working two or three jobs to keep my head above water—almost all of which ended in disaster. But when the studio deal presented itself, the temptation to be “legitimate” in my parents’ eyes was too great. I wanted to do something that they would consider respectable, that didn’t involve working for them. I’d wanted what I wanted, right away, instead of waiting until I had enough credit to get a bank loan. So I took the easy way out. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  It’s not that I didn’t appreciate what they’d done. And I understood that paying them back was the moral, responsible thing to do. Accepting that money meant losing my right to make decisions for myself, to live without my parents scrutinizing every decision I made. Every time I did something my parents didn’t approve of, there was a comment about “all they’d done for me.” If I bought something frivolous, my dad reminded me of the balance due on the loan. Being with Jason had shielded me from all of that temporarily. Was I ready to go back to living without that protection?

  And why was that the first thought I’d devoted to Jason all day?

  “Are we going to talk about you anytime soon?” I asked, clearly stalling. “I’d like to know more about this plane-crash thing.”

  “It’s a simple question, Miranda.”

  “OK, but we’re coming back to you,” I promised him.

  “Miranda.”

  I was enjoying the way he said my name just a little too much. I shook it off, waving the thrall of his voice away like smoke rings drifting around my head. There was no way I was going to admit to him that I worked for my mommy and daddy, so I hedged. �
��I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I work for a living. I am, in fact, working right now.”

  Unfazed by my snippy tone, he continued. “Miss Scanlon mentioned that you were a recent hire. What did you do before?”

  “Iris didn’t mention?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him. Was this some sort of conversation setup? Had he become so irritated over the painted-boobs thing that he’d decided to make me confess all of my professional dumbass-ery? Was he trying to prove something? Because I was not above tossing that cup of leftover coffee into his face.

  Eyeing me carefully, he took the cup out of the console, opened the window, and dumped the coffee. He sealed the foam cup in the little trash bag he’d insisted on after the Great Hamburger Wrapper Scandal. He looked really pleased with himself, smirking and crossing his arms over his chest. I arched my eyebrows. I scowled at him. How did he know? And why did he seem to think of coffee disposal as a personal triumph?

  “I’m only asking because I’m curious,” he assured me, holding up his hands defensively. “Honestly, beyond your penchant for violence and preference for nutritionally bankrupt food, I know very little about you.”

  “I did lots of things,” I said, vaguely … and realized that made my history sound far more porn-ish than it was.

  “What was your last job before this one?”

  “Look, I told you I crewed a yacht that summer? It hit a commercial fishing boat and sank—not when I was at the wheel, thank you very much. I worked at a camp for troubled kids, and I was actually pretty good at it. But the kitchen staff nearly killed some of the kids with food poisoning, and the camp was shut down. I was working to get my masseuse license through an on-the-job training program, but the cops closed the spa down because my coworker got handsy with a health inspector in the wrong anatomical area … She was a little high at the time.”