Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon Read Free Book Online

was a strange, controversial character … that his background is still undetermined and his motivation uncertain. Current location unknown.”
    “Current location unknown!” She repeated the phrase with a kind of ferocity, leaning toward him over the little table, placing her palms on the moist metal surface. Her wedding ring was a simple platinum band, but her engagement ring was crowned with the largest diamond he’d ever seen. “You summed it up perfectly,” she went on, her eyes as wildly bright as the stone. “ ‘Current location unknown.’ That’s not acceptable. Not endurable. I’m hiring you to put an end to it.”
    He sighed softly. “I think we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” The pressure of her hands on the tabletop had turned her knuckles white.
    He answered almost sleepily, an inverted reaction he’d always had to displays of emotion. “I don’t know yet if it makes any sense for me to get involved in a situation that’s the subject of an active police investigation.”
    Her lips twitched into an ugly smile. “How much do you want?”
    He shook his head slowly. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”
    “What do you want? Name it.”
    “I have no idea what I want, Mrs. Perry. There are a lot of things I don’t know.”
    She took her hands off the table and placed them in her lap, interlacing the fingers as though it were a technique to maintain self-control. “I’ll keep it simple. You find Hector Flores. You arrest him or kill him. Whichever you do, I’ll give you whatever you want.
Whatever you want.
”
    Gurney leaned back from the table, letting his gaze drift to the asparagus patch. At the far end of it, a red hummingbird feeder hung from a shepherd’s crook. He could hear the rising and falling pitch of the buzzing wings as two of the tiny birds swooped viciously at each other—each claiming sole right to the sugar water, or so it seemed. On the other hand, it might be some strange remnant of a spring mating dance, and what looked like a killer instinct might be another instinct altogether.
    He made an effort to focus his attention on Val Perry’s eyes, trying to discern the reality behind the beauty—the actual contents of this perfect vessel. There was rage in her, no doubt of that. Desperation. A difficult past—he would bet on that. Regret. Loneliness, though she would not admit to the vulnerability that word implied. Intelligence. Impulsiveness and stubbornness—the impulsiveness to grab hold of something without thinking, the stubbornness to never let it go. And something darker. A hatred of her own life?
    Enough
, he said to himself. Too easy to confuse speculation with insight. Too easy to fall in love with a wild guess and follow it over a cliff.
    “Tell me about your daughter,” he said.
    Something in her expression shifted, as if she, too, were putting aside a certain train of thought.
    “Jillian was difficult.” Her announcement had the dramatictone of the opening sentence of a story read aloud. He suspected that whatever followed would be something she’d said many times before. “More than difficult,” she continued. “Jillian was dependent on medication to remain merely
difficult
and not utterly impossible. She was wild, narcissistic, promiscuous, conniving, vicious. Addicted to oxies, roxies, Ecstasy, and crack cocaine. A world-class liar. Dangerously precocious. Horribly attuned to the weaknesses of other people. Unpredictably violent. With an unhealthy passion for unhealthy men. And that’s with the benefit of the finest therapy money could buy.” Oddly excited by this litany of abuse, she sounded more like a sadist hacking at a stranger with a razor than a mother describing the emotional disorders of her child. “Did Hardwick tell you what I’m telling you about Jillian?” she asked.
    “I don’t recall those specific details.”
    “What
did
he tell you?”
    “He mentioned that she came from a