The Perfect Couple (Last Stand #4)(62)
Author: Brenda Novak

She blinked, then focused on her husband. "What’s wrong with me?"

She tried to control her voice, but it went shrill anyway. "You just killed your father! You’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison, just like my brother!"

"Shut up!" he cried. "Do you want someone to hear you?" Raising his fist, he loomed over her as if he’d hit her, but she didn’t cower. She was too bewildered to be afraid of him.

"Why, Colin?" she murmured, struggling to come to terms with what she saw. "Why would you do such a terrible thing? I–I loved him."

His lips curled back from his teeth. "Oh, give me a freakin’ break, will you? You hardly knew him."

As always, she’d taken off her shoes when she entered the house. The air in the shut-up garage retained the heat of an unseasonably warm day, but her bare feet felt like blocks of ice on the cool concrete. "I did too know him."

"Only how he was in later years. He wasn’t so nice before. He always took my mom’s side. When I was in high school, she tried to have me institutionalized, and he nearly went along with it."

"No, he left her. That was the last straw, he said."

"He almost went along with it before he left her."

She reached out to touch her father-in-law, fingered the rough calluses that distinguished his hands from anyone else’s. It took actual contact to convince her it was really him. His face was barely recognizable after what Colin had done. "So…that’s why you did it? Because…because you’re still angry about the past?"

Mindful of the neighbors, Colin kept his voice low, but his harsh whisper revealed his panic. "He walked in on me, Tiffany." He began to roll his father’s body in a blanket. "He’d seen Zoe on the news, crying about losing her daughter. And he’d put it all together."

She let go of Paddy’s hand as Colin tucked it into the blanket.

"But…how? That’s not possible."

Breathing hard from the exertion, he straightened. "Are you stupid? I explained it before I brought you out here. You know how he figured it out."

"Rover told him about Master." She remembered that much, but the rest, the part where Paddy had connected the name Colin had made his sister use with the fact that Rover had disappeared from his neighborhood and Sam had disappeared from theirs–from the house next door–seemed unfathomable. She couldn’t comprehend Paddy being involved in this most secret part of their lives. He’d always been so removed.

Colin bent to cover Paddy’s feet. "Rover didn’t tell him. It was on the news!"

"Rover had to tell someone. Does that mean he’s come out of the coma?"

Finished, Colin wiped the perspiration at his temple and accidentally smeared blood on his forehead. "I don’t know. But we have to act fast."

"Act fast," she repeated, mesmerized by that streak of blood. "What should we do?" Paddy was gone. Their lives would never be the same. Why did Colin have to do this? Why Paddy?

"Listen to me." He pulled her up by the shoulders and shook her. "I need you. Don’t flip out on me."

"But…"

"But nothing," he said. "This is your fault. If you hadn’t let Rover get away, we wouldn’t be in this mess."

"I couldn’t stop him!"

"Then what about Sam? She wasn’t supposed to be conscious. How was she capable of raising such a ruckus?"

Tiffany remembered finding Sam passed out on her mattress. "I don’t know. I ground up two pills and put them in a shake, and she drank it. I saw her! And the last time I checked on her, she was out cold."

"She couldn’t have drunk it. Two pills would knock out a man my size–for hours. That makes this even more your fault."

Her fault Paddy was dead? Tears burned behind Tiffany’s eyes, clogged her throat. "But I loved him," she whispered again.

"He didn’t love you. He didn’t even love me."

"That’s not true!"

Colin shook her again. "I don’t give a rat’s ass, do you hear me? If you do as I say, everything will be fine. If you don’t, we’re going to prison.

Understand?"

She told herself to wipe off the blood he’d gotten on his forehead, but she couldn’t make herself touch it. "I just…I don’t know what to do," she said. "Nothing will bring him back."

He released her and began dragging his lifeless father away from the door. "We’re not trying to bring him back. I’m going to bury him where he’ll never be found. But right now I need you to help me carry Zoe down here and get her in the trunk."

Zoe’s name cut through Tiffany’s shock and panic. "So you can bury them together?"

"No, so I can drive her to the motel room you rented and leave her there."

"Alive?"

With a final grunt, he shoved Paddy against the wall. "Yes."

"But then she’ll wake up in the morning."

"That’s what we need her to do."

"You said you’d kill her, but you killed Paddy instead!"

"What do you want from me?" he said as he came back toward her.

"You’re the one who let Rover get away! I’m doing the best I can here, trying to save both our asses."

"But you said you were going to kill her." Tiffany couldn’t get beyond that because she didn’t want Paddy dead; she wanted Zoe dead. Then Colin would be as attentive to her as he’d ever been. She had to get their lives back on track, back to normal. She could do that with a pet. Colin had had pets before. It was Zoe who’d made this situation different, more difficult–frightening.

Once again, he wiped the sweat rolling down from his hair, smearing Paddy’s blood even farther. "I can’t! Don’t you get it? That private investigator of hers came by only thirty minutes ago. He’s already looking for her."

"So? He won’t think we have her."

"He will when he finds out she’s not in her motel room." He grabbed one of the towels he used to wash the cars and mopped up the blood. "This is exactly where he’ll come because it was the last place he knew her to be."

Tiffany watched him work, watched as each swipe seemed to make a bigger mess. "But how will he find out she’s not in her motel room? He doesn’t know which motel I chose."

"He can figure it out easily enough."

"How?"

He squirted some cleaner on what remained of the blood. "By calling every motel in Sacramento. He can do that in maybe an hour. And then, when he reaches the one where you registered her, they’ll ring her room."

"And she won’t pick up."

He got out a garbage bag and put the bloody towel inside it. "So then he’ll drive over and go door to door until he finds her. Or he’ll use his ID or some cop contact to make the clerk give him her room number. We have to get her where she’s supposed to be before that happens."