Red Planet Blues

THIRTY-SEVEN

My heart was jackhammering, and my eyes were stinging. I took a step toward Diana’s body, but then Lakshmi’s voice said, “Freeze.”

I froze as much as I could, but I was quaking with fury.

“Drop your gun,” Lakshmi said.

I had no proof that Lakshmi herself was holding a gun, but the hole in Diana was pretty good evidence that someone around here was packing. I let my Smith & Wesson go, and it fell gently to the floor.

“God damn it,” I hissed. “You didn’t have to kill her.”

“She was dead when I got here,” Lakshmi said.

“Oh, come on!”

“She was dead when I got here,” Lakshmi repeated. “I’m not going down for this.”

“How’d she get in, if you weren’t here?” I demanded.

“Same way you did, I suppose. Through the rear window.”

“I’m not buying that,” I said. “And neither will the NKPD.”

“Persis?” Lakshmi said into the air.

But there was no response from the Shopatsky House computer. I heard Lakshmi moving around behind me. I imagine she’d ducked her head into the room with the roll-top desk. “Someone took Persis,” she said.

“How convenient,” I replied. “No record of what went down. But you won’t get away with it.”

“I didn’t shoot her,” Lakshmi said again. “She was already dead when I arrived.”

“Bull!” I said. “She had an appointment to see you!”

“And I was running late for it. She let herself in—through the hole where my window used to be, which she could only have known about because you must have told her. And someone else must have been in here, having gained access the same way—someone who’d come to rob me, I suppose—someone looking for the O’Reilly diary, perhaps. Whoever it was clearly was startled by Diana and let her have it.”

“It’s a neat story, sister. But it doesn’t hold water.”

“Mister Lomax,” she said sharply. “I’m a professional writer. My plots most certainly do hold water.”

“May I turn around?” I asked.

“All right.”

I did so. She was dressed in red slacks and a tight-fitting silver top that showed a little cleavage. And she did indeed have a gun—a Morrell .28 revolver that seemed larger than it really was because her hands were dainty. Or maybe all guns look bigger when they’re aimed at you.

“I should put a bullet through you right now,” she said. “You’ve already broken into my place once before, and now you’re here again.”

“I’d advise against it,” said Juan calmly from behind her. “In fact, if I may be so bold, I suggest that you drop the gun.” I doubt Juan had heard any of our previous conversation from outside. His tone, although excited, didn’t contain the rage that I knew would be in it if he were aware of what had happened to Diana.

Lakshmi had nerves of steel, I’ll give her that. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, still facing me, “but you can’t shoot me fast enough to prevent me from firing at Lomax first.”

Juan was new to this sort of thing. Of course, he should have shot her without announcing his presence—what I get for bringing an amateur along. And I doubted he had it in him to fire at Lakshmi—under normal circumstances, that is.

“Nobody needs to die here,” I said. You get good at calculating other people’s lines of sight in my game. We were all pretty much in a row: Juan in the room with the missing window, Lakshmi in the open doorway to that room, me facing them both, and behind me, not yet really visible to Juan, Diana’s dead body, seated on the couch.

I went on: “I mean, nobody else has to die here.” I was speaking to Lakshmi but looking beyond her at Juan. “Diana was a good woman, Lakshmi. You had no right to kill her.”

That did it. Juan’s normally calm face twisted in rage. Just as he pulled the trigger, I dove for the floor—there was a good chance that the bullet would go right through Lakshmi, after all, and it could have gone on to take me out, as well. The moment she was hit, Lakshmi squeezed her own trigger, but I was already out of her line of fire, and the projectile sailed past where I’d been and lodged in the green couch next to Diana. Juan’s bullet didn’t make it all the way through Lakshmi’s body—which was a good thing; poor Juan wasn’t made of particularly stern stuff, and he’d have been tortured if one of his slugs had gone into Diana even though she was already dead.

Lakshmi, though, was still alive. Juan’s aim was lousy; he’d merely hit the writer in the shoulder. Still, she was discombobulated enough that I was able to spring up from the floor, retrieve my gun, and then wrest hers from her. I then knocked her down and stood over her, my pistol aimed right between her breasts.

Juan rushed over to Diana, in some desperate hope that she was only injured and not dead. I heard him making small sounds.

Lakshmi looked like she was falling into shock from the gunshot wound. If I was going to get any additional information out of her, it would have to come soon. “Stick with me, sweetheart.”

But she didn’t. Her eyes fluttered up into her skull.

I didn’t want to plug Lakshmi if it wasn’t necessary, not because she didn’t deserve it but because it would result in too much of a hassle with the cops—not to mention the administrators of the writer-in-residence program. She could have been faking being in shock, but the ever-widening pool of blood behind her suggested she wasn’t. I shoved Lakshmi’s little gun into my waistband, then looked for something to tie her up with. I supposed I could use my belt, but I’d spent enough of this case running around naked; I didn’t want to end up in a big chase with my jeans around my ankles.

Juan was still on bended knee in front of Diana, as if he couldn’t believe she were dead. “Cover Lakshmi,” I said to him. He seemed a bit shocky himself, but he nodded, rose, and lifted his weapon. I saw he wasn’t really pointing it at Lakshmi, but about a half meter from her; amateurs like Juan always found it hard to pull the trigger again after they’d seen up close the sort of damage a bullet could do.

I stepped into the other room and found a white terry-cloth bathrobe hanging in the closet. I pulled the sash out of the loops, brought it to the living room, and used it to bind Lakshmi’s wrists. The cloth soaked up blood from the surrounding puddle, the red stark against the white fabric.

Then, as it often does, fate took a hand. The doorbell sounded. A portion of the living-room wall changed to the view from the front-door camera. Standing on the stoop was none other than Sergeant Huxley of New Klondike’s Finest.