Sometimes, no matter how much you love and respect your relatives, you should just say, "Are you
crazy?
" and run like the wind.
Instead, I had said Okay. As a reward, I was now lying someplace dark as pitch, in funny-smelling dirt, on Halloween, with a guy who obviously had excruciatingly bad taste in friends. My head felt like a small elephant was sitting on it. My hands, for some reason that I couldn't figure out, were completely non-functional.
"Where are we?"
I heard small sounds that I hoped were those of my date stirring around near me - the leather jacket I had admired earlier sliding against wood, possibly? - and not of some creeping lower life form.
"Best guess?" He spoke softly. More sliding sounds. A masculine grunt. "On the back of Steven Pico's estate in Paradise Valley."
"Steven... Pico."
I sounded like a stupid idiot because I felt like a stupid idiot. I had been walking with my blind date through the Arizona Center after the Suns game (Suns won), trying to decide whether to get yuppie pizza or upscale barbecue, when something approximately the size of a '57 Buick had hit me in the side of the head. The sidewalk, I think. I still had the vague memory of some kind of ruckus taking place above and around me before the lights went out. That made sense. My blind date was six-foot-five if he was an inch, and had the kind of arms often associated with tattoos and cigarettes in a rolled-up tee-shirt sleeve. It would probably have taken something more the size of a Mack truck to make
him
cooperative.
"My head," I said comprehensively. Someone was jabbing it with an ice pick, or possibly a sharpened telephone pole.
For a moment the darkness was completely silent. Then my date said, "I'm sorry. I should have seen this coming. It's possible I could have prevented it."
"How?"
"Are you hurt anywhere else?"
The noises and the rather breathy quality of his voice made me think he was very busy. He had not answered my question. I decided not to answer his. Fair was fair.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying...." Some small thing fell over in the darkness with a little
chink
. "To get loose." Silence hovered as the obvious occurred to him. "You
are
tied up, too, aren't you?"
So that's why my hands hadn't been cooperating. "No. I just
like
lying with my head wedged under a shelf, or whatever this is, and my knees jammed up against something with a little wheel on it - a lawnmower, maybe?
Yes
, dad rat it, I am tied up! What is this place? It smells like - bug spray."
"It probably - is. It's a garden - shed at the back - of Pico's estate." He was busy again, his words coming in spurts with his efforts. "There's - herbicide, etcetera, in here."
"How do
you
know?"
"I poked around in here a couple of weeks ago. I recognize the smell."
Wait a minute.
"Could we back up and start over, because I'm extremely confused - and I don't think it's this headache that's causing it." I paused, giving him a chance to start on his own. He didn't.
"Who is Steven Pico?"
"Steven Pico is...." He stopped, and I'm not entirely sure it wasn't for dramatic effect. This tall, somewhat unknown quantity near me had been well behaved all evening, but there was something - the dark hair almost long enough for a pony tail, maybe, and the black motorcycle jacket and boots - that seemed a bit theatrical. Of course, he did ride a motorcycle, a not-small, not-inconspicuous, not-cheap one. My brother, Matthew, who knows about these things, calls it a "bitchin' Hawg."
"Steven Pico," he finally continued, "is a drug distributor. A major drug distributor. Of the Columbian variety."
For some stupid reason, I hadn't really been afraid until that moment. I suppose I thought it was some big Halloween prank, something cooked up by Matthew The Matchmaker. Up until that moment, my primary emotion had been a profound hankering to commit fratricide. At the words "drug distributer," it suddenly felt as if a couple of Civil War re-enactment groups were rehearsing inside my chest.
"A - drug distributor?"
"Yeh." He was panting a little. Something he was doing kept making a metallic
bump
.
"And you were here, at his house - assuming, of course, that that's where we are, at his house - recently."
"I was."
"And you were here - why? Never mind," I said immediately. "I don't need to know. What you do is your business. I don't
want
to know. What?
He'd said something, but I'd been too busy babbling. He repeated it, but very,
very
softly.
"I'm a cop."
"What?"
"You heard me," he said.
A cop. My brother had set me up on a blind date with a cop. I was locked in a shed behind a drug dealer's house with a
freakin' cop
.
"I'll. Kill. Him," I said succinctly.
"Sure you - want to say that - in front of a cop?" He was grinning obnoxiously. I could hear it.
"I'll kill Matthew for this. He knows how I feel about cops. It wasn't enough that I had to be engaged to one for a miserable year, but now I have to
die
