Killing Time

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER ONE

“DROP YOUR PANTS.”

Today certainly wasn’t the first time a woman had told Mick Winchester to take off his pants. From playfully suggestive, to wickedly sultry, the sentence conjured up a variety of pleasant memories. Of women. Lots of women.

He just loved them. And he was a lucky enough son of a bitch that they usually loved him back. Usually.

A lot of people had told Mick that women would be the death of him. He’d heard it from ex-girlfriends, from his mother, from buddies who envied his romantic success. Hell, just yesterday his own grandfather had given him a lecture on settling down before some female went Fatal Attraction on him.

He’d laughed off the warnings. How could something he loved as much as women bring about his downfall?

Unfortunately, as he stared down the five-inch barrel of an old Colt .45 handgun, he was beginning to see the possibilities.

“Louise, you don’t want to do this,” he told the woman holding the gun. “Whatever’s wrong, we can work things out.”

“Drop ’em, loverboy.”

She didn’t say another word, merely waiting patiently, watching him the way a hawk might study a tempting bit of prey—with stoic determination and a bit of outright hunger.

He wished he’d opened the blinds as soon as he’d gotten into the office this Monday morning. Perhaps then someone outside might have noticed something odd. Unfortunately, since he had an appointment with an out-of-towner looking for a room to rent, he’d come in early and hadn’t opened the office. He’d left the blinds down and the lights dim in the reception area. No one outside would notice a thing. And his secretary wouldn’t be in for a little while yet.

The out-of-towner wasn’t due for an hour. So whoever the Hollywood woman was, she’d probably walk in after Louise Flanagan finished whatever the hell it was she was trying to do here.

“What are you waiting for?” she finally said, sounding so perfectly reasonable, as if they’d just bumped into one another at the diner or the bank. “I know you’re not hard of hearing.”

“I’m trying to understand why you want to kill me.”

Hell, of all the women in Derryville, this one had the very least reason to hate his guts. And that was saying a lot, since he could easily name several females who would probably like to see him strung up by the nuts.

But Louise? He’d always been polite to the woman, giving her a smile when other people had laughed at her. He’d been nice to her in the old days, when the high school hierarchy had liked to crucify the farmers’ daughters who wore their coveralls to school and smelled of their daddy’s dairy farm.

She gave him a small smile. “Oh, Mick, you old silly, I’m not gonna kill you. Now get naked. Pretty please?”

This was beyond ridiculous, even for him. Oh, sure, he’d been caught naked with women before, once even in the coat-check room of an upscale Chicago restaurant. But never so close to home. Never in his own realty office. Never with a local girl whose family would riot at the thought of their darling hooking up with the wickedest playboy in Derryville, Illinois.

And never, never with Louise Flanagan, his lab partner from tenth grade biology. Louise not only outweighed him by forty pounds, she was the four-time champion hog wrestler at the state fair. Plus, Mick’s and Louise’s grandfathers were long-standing enemies.

“Louise, I’m not going to take my clothes off.”

She cocked the hammer.

“Shit.” He tugged his shirt from the waist of his pants.

“That’s good. Shirt first, that’s proper. But no more cursing,” she said with a tsk. “That’s one of your bad habits. That, your drinking and your cigar smoking are going to be the first things you give up when we get married.”

That one nearly made him choke. “Married?”

She nodded. “Yessir. And soon. Got to get you tied down and rescue you from your overactive manly urges.”

Manly urges. If he’d ever had any in his life, the image of marrying Louise wiped them out of his memory banks.

She continued. “I mean, I knew when I heard about those TV people coming here to do their show that I had to step in before it was too late. I can’t have you losing your head and giving this whole town more reason to think you’re just a good-for-nothing playboy. Not when I know better.”

She gave him a worshipful smile that told him he’d been residing on a pedestal and had never known it. That almost distracted him from the fact that she’d called him a good-for-nothing playboy. But nothing was distracting him from the loaded gun, which she wagged suggestively toward his body.

“Louise…”

“Come on, your shirt’s easy. Just pretend it’s Saturday.”

The twisting turns in the conversation were giving him a headache on top of his hangover. “What?”

“Half the women in this town make a point of driving down your street on Saturday afternoons because they know you’re gonna be mowing your lawn,” she explained.

Half the women in town? No wonder his street was like Daytona during Pepsi 400 weekend when he cut the grass. “So?”

She sighed heavily, explaining as if he were a six-year-old and she a weary parent. “So…you always do it sooner or later. It’s usually after four, when you’ve finished the cutting and you’re just doing the edging and cleanup. And by the way, Mick, you do such a nice job on your lawn, much better than when the Edgertons owned your house.”

“What do I do, Louise?” he asked, still wondering whether she liked him or hated him, wanted to marry him or wanted to kill him. Hmm…when he thought of it that way, she suddenly reminded him of just about every other woman in his life.

“You know what you do,” she said. “You know when you’re almost done, and you’re ready to cool off with a long, wet soak from your garden hose…? That’s when traffic’s the heaviest.”

She gave him a look that said he was supposed to understand what the hell she was talking about. He didn’t. Rolling her eyes, Louise said, “You weren’t this thick in high school.”

“Somehow my brain doesn’t work well when it’s envisioning taking a bullet.”

“Sorry, it can’t be helped. I know even as nice as you are you won’t get naked and be forced to marry me by my daddy unless I force you to get forced first.”

He began to see, as crazy as it was. Louise, the girl he’d been nice to back in high school, wanted to force him to get forced into marrying her so she could help save his unsalvageable reputation. “My head hurts.”

“Stop drinking so many beers on Sunday nights with the fellas after your football games.”

“So, you know my entire weekend schedule, not just my Saturdays in the yard?”

“Oh, yes, Saturdays. Back to the shirt. You always take it off when you hose yourself down after you’re done. Then you get a beer from the fridge on your porch and you pop open the bottle and guzzle the thing down while you’re all wet and shiny.” A pink flush rose in her plump cheeks. “Tons of women plan their Saturday shopping around your yard work. Except, of course, on rainy days. Then they meet in the basement of the dress shop and play cards.”

Welcome to small-town life. Christ, why the hell did he live here again? “That’s crazy.”