Foul Play - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,25
sorry we stopped.”
Jake grinned at her, his smile devilish in the darkness. “I bet you’re not as sorry as I am.”
“Oh yeah? Just how sorry are you?”
He sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Very, very sorry.”
Amy laughed softly and pushed herself up to a sitting position. “Good heavens, what must Veronica Bottles think?”
Jake looked surprised. “Veronica Bottles! I’d forgotten all about her. What the devil is she doing visiting Turner, anyway?”
He trained the binoculars on the front window, but he couldn’t see anything through the narrow slit in the draperies. “Come on, Amy, let’s do some snooping. I want to see what they’re up to.”
Amy adjusted her clothing and got out of the car. Snooping. Great. Well, nobody could say her life was dull.
“Jake! What are you doing?” she whispered. “Get out of those bushes!”
Jake had his nose pressed against Turner’s front window. “Damn, I can’t see a thing. They must be in the back part of the house.”
He grabbed Amy’s hand and pulled her down the sidewalk, to the last house in the row. They skirted the end house and started making their way through dark yards.
“The fifth house,” Jake said. “This is it.”
Glass sliding doors opened to a cement patio. Gas barbecue, round wood picnic table with umbrella, red geraniums in oak casks. The downstairs rooms were dark; above them, light poured from a bay window, making checkered patterns on the black-looking grass.
“I can’t see from here,” Amy whispered.
“You’ll be able to see perfectly when I get you up in this tree.”
Amy’s eyes widened. “No.”
“Yes,” Jake said, hoisting her above his head. “Grab the limb.”
Amy scrambled to get a hand hold and swung her leg over the lowest branch.
“Can you see them?”
“Perfectly. They’re in the kitchen. Oh, goodness,” she gasped.
“What goodness? What are they doing?”
“They’re kissing, and … um, fondling. Right in front of the window. Holy cow, this is embarrassing.”
“Well, now we know how she got your job, don’t we. Do you see a rooster in there?”
“No rooster,” Amy whispered. “They’ve stopped kissing, and they’re talking. Wow, he didn’t like something she said. Hey, this is really getting good. He’s pacing around, waving his arms. Now she’s mad. Now she’s crying. Now they’re back to kissing. Now they’re … Oh, geez. She just put her hand on his—”
“She put her hand on his what?” Jake whispered.
“I’m getting down, and don’t you ever tell my mother I did this.”
Jake caught her as she dropped out of the tree. “On his what?” he practically shouted.
“On his what do you think!” Her cheeks were burning. She put her hands to them to cool them off. “Veronica Bottles doesn’t waste much time on preliminaries.”
Jake smiled and gathered Amy to him. “I’m sorry. I was hoping you’d see Red … not an X-rated love scene.”
A light flashed on in an upstairs bedroom, and the shades were drawn. “I think they’ll be busy for a while,” Jake said.
He peered into the dark, ground-level windows. Nothing. He walked the length of the yard, carefully checking flowerbeds.
Amy stood behind him while he inspected the mulch around a small dogwood. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure nothing’s been buried here,” he said grimly. He took Amy by the hand and led her to the front of the buildings, back to the car. “I think this would be a good time to check out Veronica Bottles. We’ll stop by the clinic and get her address from the files.”
Amy took one last look at the town house and shivered before getting into her car. “Veronica Bottles and Brian Turner together. In bed. Yuck.”
“Not a nice mental image, is it?”
“I feel like I need a shower. Geez, you should have seen them groping at each other.” Amy made a face. “Not very romantic.”
Jake turned onto the highway. “I suspect romance isn’t an important part of their relationship.”
Oh hell, he thought, watching Amy. She was comparing what she’d seen in the window to her own little groping session in the car. She stared stonily out the front window, a small frown hovering in her eyebrows, her mouth compressed.
In retrospect, their one shot at unbridled passion didn’t exactly score a ten on the romance scale, Jake decided. In fact, now that he thought about it, there wasn’t anything romantic about their relationship at all. He’d met her in the supermarket; she’d run him into the ground on the jogging trail; and now he’d practically jumped her bones in a cramped two-seater sports car … in a public parking lot. Wow. Amy