Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [67]
“Frank,” she said. He had dyed his hair and lost some weight, but it was him. The one-time boyfriend and associate of Ariel DiCello, an unstable woman who had hired Ruby to find out that Frank was not only cheating on her but was a for-hire horse assassin as well. After the whole unpleasant thing had come to a head and the Feds had stepped in, Frank had been convicted of fraud and shipped off to prison. What he was doing out already, Ruby couldn’t imagine. Nor did she understand why he was holding her to blame.
“I’ve been waiting for this.” Frank narrowed his eyes.
“Waiting for what?”
“To get revenge.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Ruby said.
Ed was standing right by Ruby’s side, speechless. Even the cop who’d escorted them over seemed fascinated and was letting Frank babble on.
“That’s not how I see it,” he said. “Now you know what it feels like.”
“What what feels like?”
“To lose everything you value. To live in fear. To have everyone doubt everything you say and do.”
“You sent those pictures to Ed?”
“Sure.” Frank actually smiled.
“And you stole money from the museum?” She asked, keeping an eye on the gun.
“Couldn’t resist.”
“How’d you get in there?”
“Paid my admission like everyone else. You were sitting right there at the register.”
Ruby felt her mouth opening and closing. She’d been doing a lot of that lately.
“You were the guy who told me the trash was on fire?”
“Yes.” Frank smiled even wider, proud of his work.
Ruby remembered wondering about the weird-looking bearded man at the museum a few weeks back. He’d told her the bathroom trash was on fire. She’d gone in to find a cigarette butt smoldering in the wastebasket and had wondered if the guy who’d told her about it had actually been responsible. Then figured that was silly. But Frank had done it. He’d started a fire, drawn her away from the register, and apparently pilfered the large bills Bob kept stashed underneath the cash drawer.
“Why?”
“You fucked up my life.”
“All I did was tell someone else about some of the things you were doing.”
“It wasn’t any of your business. Now you know what it’s like having someone meddle in your business, don’t you? It’s not that pleasant, is it? You feel like you’re going to snap, right?”
“How did you find me here?” Ruby felt she might be pressing her luck with the twenty-questions routine, but she needed all the facts.
“The wonders of modern technology. GPS tracking system. Slapped one on that pretty little Mustang of yours.”
By now, two more cops had crammed into the security office, and one of them, a detective, stepped in.
“All right, miss, so this is the guy?”
“Yeah,” Ruby nodded. She felt numb and sick.
“Go on outside. I’ll finish up here and tell them what we know about Frank,” Ed said, gently guiding Ruby and Spike to the door.
“Okay,” Ruby nodded.
Outside, she leaned back against the wall of the office, then slowly sank down to the ground. Spike licked her cheek.
BY THE TIME ED walked Ruby back to Nancy Cooley’s shed row, where he’d parked his car, the fire had been brought under control, and the firefighters were slowly pulling back the charred pieces of bungalow. As Ruby stood there, gaping, she saw a leg, disembodied and blackened. Ruby thought it a particularly sick irony that the last thing she should see of her psychiatrist was a leg, detached from the body it had once supported.
Ruby vomited again.
“Come on, you don’t need to see this,” Ed said. Nancy Cooley had appeared and now ushered Ruby, Ed, and Spike into her barn office.
“Sit,” Nancy said solicitously.
Ruby let herself collapse backwards onto a chair.
RUBY DECIDED SHE would make Ed jump through quite a few hoops before she’d forgive him, but he did make her life a whole lot easier over the next few hours. He could talk the talk with all the law enforcement officials, and he monitored the people questioning Ruby.
Ruby had just finished giving her statement to yet another official and was alone in Nancy’s office when her cell phone rang, the ominous unidentified caller showing up on the screen. She guessed