The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [82]
Her voice flattened somewhat. “Oh, in the Executive Building somewhere. I had a little time between meetings. I’d rather be where you are.”
That was perhaps a little richer in meaning than either of them wanted. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said lamely. “Bennington hasn’t changed much.”
She played along. “Big case there?”
“Maybe. We have something percolating we need to figure out, but right now we’re just fumbling around.”
In fact, this was his favorite part of an investigation, when not just he but the whole team had the pull of a strong scent encouraging them. They were largely ignorant, that was true, but motivation was taking care of itself.
“You still having fun up there?” he asked, moving the conversation along, its emptiness palpable. They were being guarded to an extent that they’d never been before. Their past involvement had epitomized intimacy, and had included their jobs, where each of them had found the other to be a natural sounding board. It was the aspect of their relationship that Joe missed the most—and which was now making him feel awkward. In fact, the depth of his ignorance about what she was doing these days was startling.
“Oh,” she said with no great enthusiasm, “I wouldn’t call it fun. Worthwhile, though. Definitely that.” She paused before adding, “There are times, though . . .”
“Right,” he said, not knowing where to go next. Looking out at the parking lot, oddly mirroring this conversation in his head, he envisioned two picnickers in a minefield.
“I miss you, Joe,” she said after a long silence. “I miss us.”
“I know,” he admitted, thinking back to his night with Beverly. He didn’t regret it, not even now. But he missed what would have accompanied it had the woman been Gail. It reminded him how much he was in limbo.
“Well,” she added sadly, interrupting his thoughts, “I guess I only have myself to blame.”
He knew that deserved some response, a one-liner designed to make the jagged edges less painful. But for the life of him, he couldn’t come up with it, not to his own satisfaction.
“I don’t see blame going anywhere,” he said, not liking how that sounded.
But it seemed to work. “You were always very sweet that way,” she said.
He wasn’t sure he had been, or even exactly what that meant.
Mercifully, he heard some feeble electronic sound in the background of her phone, a bell of some sort, that prompted her to say, her voice defeated, “I have to go. Thanks for talking. You sound good.”
“You, too,” he lied. “Knock ’em dead.”
He replaced the phone, checked his rearview mirror, and returned to the road.
Time to get back to something he knew how to do.
“I never liked that look,” Willy said, glaring at her from the passenger seat.
Sam stared at him. “Is that what’s been bugging you all the way over here? My hair?”
“That, the tight jeans. You look like a hooker.”
She laughed at him. “No hooker you ever knew. What I look like is fashionable. These are sixty-dollar jeans. And the blond hair works like a charm to open guys up. You just don’t like how other men appreciate me,” she added in a teasing, lilting voice.
He shifted his gaze to the scene outside. They were parked on a side street in Bennington, not far from Piccolo’s, the bar that their local PD contact, Johnny Massucco, had told them was a likely watering hole for men like Mel Martin.
“They don’t appreciate you,” he said sullenly. “They just want to jump your bones.”
“And you don’t?” she asked.
“Not the same.”
She watched his profile, knowing what was bothering him. Her change in appearance wasn’t new. She’d used it before, once when she’d masqueraded as a ski instructor, and again when she’d pretended to be a drug dealer in Holyoke, Massachusetts. On both occasions, he’d become surly and aloof. Over time, she had come to understand both his insecurity and his deep conservatism, and how they combined sometimes to wind him up tight. It was a pain—he was difficult enough to live with when he was feeling