The Brush Off Read Online Free Page A

to mask it in politeness. I was beginning to get the hint that this was no crank caller. I wondered what he was trying to sell.
    He blew a big breath that sounded like a hurricane in my right ear. “Let me talk to Claude. Please, ma’am.”
    Oh, a male chauvinist salesman. I’m not sure that was better than a crank caller. “He’s not available at the moment. And if you’re selling something, we’re not interested.”
    “The only thing I’m selling you, ma’am”—he nearly choked on that last word—“is a trip to the Bexar County cooler unless you begin to cooperate.”
    A trip as in vacation? Something about the place rang a bell. A new resort? One of those chic restaurants over at the trendy Quarry Market shopping complex? But I was digressing. Back to the subject at hand. Who was this guy? And what was this insistent, hard-sell attitude? Where did he think he was calling, the Bronx? This was friendly San Antonio, Texas, mister. Wait—how did he know Ricardo called me, anyway? Had telephone tracing technology become so common that any telemarketer could get hold of it? I felt fresh anger building. There are few things in life I hate more than telemarketers. I looked around for a pen to write down the company name. All I could find were some fingernail clippers and a Q-tip. I poised the little cotton wand like a pen—hoping the pose would make me somehow sound more threatening—and asked, “And with whom am I supposed to be cooperating?”
    “Ma’am.” He sighed heavily as if I were the one who woke him up. “I apologize. I identified myself at the beginning of our conversation, but it’s, ah, early. Your ‘whom’ is the police. SAPD. I’m afraid you’re required to cooperate with me.”
    Oh, that Bexar County cooler.
    Just as my mouth fell open, “I Feel Good” screeched from across the bedroom. James Brown on my customized alarm, designed to shock me out of bed in the right frame of mind every morning.
    …you know that I would now…do, do, do-do, dodo-do…
    “That Claude now?” he asked.
    I ignored his heavy sarcasm, not only because I’d been caught in a lie—by the cops, no less—but because my mind was galloping off in a thousand different directions, and I was trying to keep up with eyelids that still refused to open fully.
    …I feel good…
    “Sounds like someone had a good night,” he observed. Could you despise someone you didn’t even know? I wondered. Someone with this deep and rich a voice? Even politely pissy, he sounded pretty damned sexy. With a flush that seemed to precede conscious thought, I remembered him blowing into my ear—more accurately, into the phone and into my ear, and, to be fair, it really was a sigh of frustration. But if a pissed-off sigh was that good, just imagine what an amorous sigh would do to me.
    “Well, it wasn’t me,” I snapped, suddenly irritated with the implications of my own thoughts as well as those in his tone. He was sneaky, this detective, couching his pointed sarcasm in ma’amy politeness. Plus, I didn’t like the fact that he could evidently read my hormones long-distance. “How do you know I was talking to Ricardo last night?”
    “Ma’am, I’m a detective; I’m paid to figure out these things. Plus, when we got here, Ricardo was holding the phone, and your number’s the one it rang on redial.”
    “Great investigative work,” I muttered with a frown at the image of Ricardo sitting in his office chair, snoring, holding the phone for hours. Had he been drunk enough to pass out? I hoped he’d gotten dressed after his lady friend left. Maybe he’d called so I could drive him home. What a jerk I was.
    How right I was, and I still didn’t know the half of it.
    “And why didn’t Ricardo hang up the phone?” I finally asked, hating to hear that my vain friend, so concerned with appearances, would end up with his customers titillated by an embarrassment in the Express-News ’s gossip columns.
    “Because he’s