21 Second Watch by J A Jance

Author:J A Jance [Jance, J A]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

The next thing I knew, I was dancing—dancing the way I used to before my knees went south. I wasn’t doing what passes for dancing these days, but the old-fashioned kind of ballroom dancing. I had been good enough at one time that my partner and I had won a prize in a dancing competition aboard a cruise ship.

The dance was a tango. As I held my partner close, I assumed I was dancing with Mel. But then I noticed that the hair next to my cheek was brown rather than blond. It wasn’t until I held the woman at arm’s length to spin her around that I saw who it was—Delilah Ainsworth, not Mel. She was wearing a low-cut white floor-length gown, laughing and smiling despite the blood pouring out of the bullet hole in her chest.

“Where’s your vest?” I demanded, pulling her back against my body. “Why weren’t you wearing a vest?”

She was still laughing when she answered. “It didn’t go with my dress.”

I awoke with a start. Two hours had passed. The dream had been so lifelike, so real, that I more than half expected to find blood on my clothing. There wasn’t any. The only thing visible on my chest was my cell phone, still where I’d left it, lying under my hand. I could hear the sound of the front door opening with a key, followed by the rustle of bags of groceries being deposited in the kitchen. Soon I was treated to the sound of banging pots and pans accompanied by Marge’s tuneless humming.

Knowing it was time to face some music of my own, I turned on my phone. There were a total of five missed calls from Mel. I called her back.

“What the hell?” she demanded. “Where are you? The hospital said you had been released, even though they weren’t supposed to let you out without having someone at home to look after you. And why has your phone been turned off? I’ve been worried sick, but we’ve made an arrest in the Bellingham case, and I couldn’t just walk away.”

“You don’t need to,” I reassured her. “I hired a nurse, a friend of Bob’s. She’s looking after me.”

“Bob who?” Mel wanted to know.

“Bob, the doorman. Her name is Marge Herndon. She brought me home. In fact, she’s out in the kitchen cooking right now.”

“In our kitchen?” Mel demanded incredulously. “We don’t have any food.”

“We do now.”

That seemed to satisfy her concerns on that score. “Tell me about Detective Ainsworth.”

With the bloody dream still dancing in my head, that was harder to do.

“She went back to see Mac MacPherson late last night, to ask more questions about the Monica Wellington cold case. He shot her dead right there in the living room. Then he rolled his wheelchair out to his garage and turned on the engine in the car. He was still alive when they found him, but he didn’t make it.”

“This isn’t your fault,” Mel said.

I said nothing, which, between the two of us, was answer enough.

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