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  “With a lobster pick?”

  I glanced at my weapon of choice, returned my attention to him. “Yeah.”

  He exhaled, careful, slow. “I don’t think we actually—”

  “And if you tell me you didn’t actually sleep, I’m going to shove your tongue down your lying throat.”

  He stood his ground, canted his head. His eyes gleamed, almost as if this entire episode was somehow entertaining. As if I were amusing him. “Just for the record, is there a scenario where you’re not planning to lop off some part of my anatomy?”

  “Not if you laugh,” I warned. “One chuckle . . . one titter . . . one fucking grin and I’ll . . . ” My voice betrayed me, wavering with emotion. “I’ll rip your heart out of your chest.”

  “Come on, McMullen.” He sighed, deep and heavy. “Calm down. Let’s talk about this,” he said and reached out again.

  I slashed at him, ripping his sleeve. He jerked back, crashed into the waiter behind him. Dishes clattered, but I barely noticed. Insanity rushed in. I leapt forward, slashing again.

  “God damn it!” he snarled and came at me.

  I spread my Manolos and growled a threat, but just then someone grabbed Rivera from behind.

  “You will let her be.”

  “What the hell!” Rivera rasped, but he didn’t struggle. “She’s the one with the lobster pick!”

  “Are you well?” The waiter who’d caught Rivera’s arms was a couple inches shorter than his captive, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in unadvised tenacity. “Are you okay, senorita?”

  Maybe it was a stranger’s concern that opened the gates for sanity. Maybe I finally realized I was mere inches from slicing one of L.A.’s finest with a lobster pick. And maybe it was the fact that I was wearing an original Christian Dior. Whatever the reason, I dropped the pick and stumbled like a drunken debutant from the restaurant.

  Two

  I doubt there’s been an instant in the history of male-female relationships when the words calm down have done anything short of inciting a riot.

  —Professor Frank Meister, Chrissy’s psychotropic medications professor, and a man who acquired physical scars prior to learning this valuable lesson

  * * *

  I awoke slowly, groggily. My head felt too large for my body. My body too big for my bed. Of course, most of the mattress was occupied by Harlequin, a dog too large for anything. Scattered around him, beneath him, atop him, was the leftover detritus from my late-night junk food binge. Sometime before two a.m. I’d devoured, among other things, a six-count package of Oreos, a canister of sour cream Pringles, and oh yeah, that still-smirking bucket of Häagen Dazs ice cream. But at least I hadn’t ferreted out my stash of Virginia Slims, the deadliest of my considerable list of bad habits.

  Harley opened his eyes and whapped his tail once against the scattered bed sheets.

  “You okay?” My voice sounded rusty, like metal on metal. Harley didn’t look much better than I felt. Unfortunately for him, he had shared in my late-night depravity. At least I hoped he had, since an empty bag of Pup-Peroni lay crumpled near a demolished container of black licorice. I made a face. I didn’t like licorice. I wasn’t that fond of dog treats either.

  He whapped his tail again and rolled adoring, sadder-than-though eyes toward my face. Besides Brainy Laney Butterfield, my gal pal since fifth grade, he was the best friend I’d ever had. The fact that he had been a gift from Rivera made me want to throw up and die. Or maybe that was the dog treats.

  Reaching out a salt-encrusted hand, I stroked his left ear. It was as big as a pillowcase.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Harley,” I said, caressing that satiny ear. “But your father’s an asshat.”

  He sighed heavily, as if he knew it to be true but still hated to hear it.

  “Worse than an asshat,” I admitted. “A duckwit. And a cheating son of a . . . ” I paused, having no desire to besmirch the females of Harley’s species. “Cockroach.”

  He tilted his head at me, attesting to the fact that the term lost something in revisions.

  From the little table beside my bed, my phone vibrated. I pulled open the drawer, felt through the contents (notepad, tissues, nail file, another vibrating device I call François), and pulled out my cell. It jiggled in my hand. I was kind of hoping it was Rivera so I could have the dubious satisfaction of ignoring him. But Laney was the person most likely to assume I’d been murdered if I didn’t pick up. I’d like to say it’s a foolish conjecture, but alas . . .

  Glancing at the screen, I could see the number was unknown, but I swiped in a kind of what-the-hell gesture anyway.

  “Hello?”

  There was a moment of dead air, then, “Is this that meddling bitch psychiatrist?”

  A generic denial popped into my head but refused to leave my lips because, seriously, I am a bitch, and I do tend to meddle. “Psychologist,” I corrected.

  He paused for a moment, as if trying to riddle that out, then growled, “I don’t care what the fuck you are.”

  “Who is this?” My words sounded wooden, though I tried to exude confidence.

  “We were great together.”

  My fingers felt numb against the phone’s hard surface. “You and—?”

  “Soul mates, you know?” He choked up for a second. “You ruined everything.”

  “Listen.” He sounded too broken up to be truly frightening, and maybe I was too tired to feel the appropriate amount of terror, even though I’d had an uncomfortable number of weird hang-up calls recently. “I know a good therapist if you—”

  “Shut up!” The sadness was gone now, consumed by rage.

  My mind was racing, but it didn’t outdistance my heart. I couldn’t identify the caller’s voice, but there was no shortage of possibilities. I’d recently had a spate of clients whose lives would be improved without their significant others, and I wasn’t necessarily shy about saying so.

  Neither was I the kind to take abuse in silence.

  “The police can trace this call,” I lied. “If you don’t want me to take legal action, you’ll—”

  “If you don’t want your body to be found floating in South Bay, you’ll quit messing with people’s lives!” he growled.

  “Who—?” I tried again, but he had already hung up.

  My hand shook a little as I did the same, steadied some as I placed it on Harley’s broad head.

  Still, I squawked when the phone buzzed a moment later. Breath held, I glanced at it. A picture of fifth-grade Brainy Laney in truly unattractive braces graced the screen. Somehow the image made me feel better. Exhaling gustily, I took the call.

  “Hey,” I said, trying for all I was worth to make it sound as if I hadn’t just crashed, burned, and scattered ashes on the way to my own personal hell. My upbeat yet casual tone implied that I hadn’t recently accosted my on-again/off-again boyfriend with a lobster pick before following up the show by consuming enough calories to feed a good-sized village of Inuit. Nor that an anonymous nutjob had just threatened to dump my body in South Bay.

  “Maybe it’s not his,” Laney said.

  I scowled, missing our usual song and dance about how nothing was wrong, everything was fine, before I dissolved into a puddle of goo and admitted everything.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said, relaxing a little. “How much do you have to pay to have someone keep tabs on me around the clock?”

  “Ulysses buses tables so he can afford voice lessons.”

  Gibberish. Life was gibberish.

  “He said you threatened the lieutenant with a steak knife.”

  “Well . . . ” I plucked an AWOL gummy bear from my bedspread. It only put up a half-hearted resistance but tasted a little fuzzy when I stuck it in my mouth. Harley made a face as I swallowed it. Perhaps the fact that a poop-sniffing Great Dane found me disgusting should have been a cautionary tale. “I’m afraid the good general is mistaken.”

  “Ule’s not a . . . ” she began, then sighed. I cou
ld imagine her curling her perfect little feet under her perfect little body and settling in for the long haul. Laney was still on sabbatical after the birth of Baby Mac. She was semi-resting in an ungodly expensive (but seriously ugly) mansion she’d married into just a couple of years ago. When we’d first moved to L.A. she’d been the worst actress in the history of mankind. But since then she’d devised a method of immersing herself in a role that was both fascinating and , frightening. She could virtually become the character she was playing. Maybe that’s the reason for her phenomenal success. But I kind of suspect it’s because her pores are microscopic.

  “Okay. Fine.” Her patient tone was back. Laney is almost always patient, considerate, and confident. If I didn’t love her so much, I’d hate her. If not for her innate confidence, then at least for her phenomenal (aka weird-ass) success as TV’s world-famous Amazon Queen. Since that success, she’d bought Tranquility, a ramshackle farm in Agoura Hills, trucked in a buttload of needy animals, and hired a bunch of well-meaning but perhaps unprepared people to run the place. “What kind of knife was it?”

  I considered denying everything, but it hardly seemed worth my extremely offensive breath. Brainy Laney is the personification of truth serum.

  “I believe it was a lobster pick.”

  “Jack sprung for lobster?”

  “You may be missing the point.”

  “You once said you’d give a kidney for a pint of melted butter and—”

  “He’s got a kid!” Outrage, frosted with embarrassment, launched me from the bed. Or would have if my foot hadn’t gotten tangled up in the 630-thread-count sheets. I stumbled, fought free, and righted myself. “A son! A child! A—”

  “Alleged,” she said.

  “Actual!” I countered.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that! You know how I know that?”

  “The mother told you?”

  “The mother told me!”

  “And no one has ever lied about the paternity of their—”

  “He cheated on me!” I snarled. “Didn’t even bother denying it.”

  Laney took a deep breath, as if gathering her patience. Laney, by the by, has the patience of a saint, but even saints can be tested. I feel some pride in having ascertained this to be true on more than one occasion.

  “Were you, or were you not, dating someone else during the time of conception?”

  I looked out the window. Dawn was creeping like an insidious viper over the eastern horizon.

  “Well, I didn’t have his baby,” I said.

  “But I believe you were sleeping with the good doctor.”

  Was I? My memory of the months I’d spent with the psychiatrist/author seemed rather faint. In fact, my whole relationship with him had always been oddly bland. I don’t know why. He had an intelligent quotient of 142 and wore tweed jackets with leather patches at the elbows. Class, that much-sought-after element, sloughed off him like skin from a snake. The fact that he had spouted poetry as boring as rice cakes hardly ever made me long to be catatonic. “So?”

  “So, it doesn’t seem quite fair, or rational, for you to expect Jack to remain celibate while you were sleeping with . . . What was his name again?”

  I thought for a moment, then pursed my lips with prudish obstinacy and shook my head. It felt as if a Slinky had taken residence in my hair. Long gone was my stylish coiffure. “I don’t wish to talk about it. That was a very difficult time for me. Breaking up—”

  “What was his name, Mac?”

  “You know his name.”

  “I do,” she admitted. “I’m just wondering if you remember it.”

  “Of course I remember it. We were together for . . . ” Good God, I had no idea how long we’d been together. A millennium, maybe. The most boring millennium of my life. “Quite some time. And I don’t think it’s very nice of you to dredge up difficult memories when—”

  “Marshal,” she said. “His name was Marshal James.”

  “I know that,” I snapped. Sometimes that second bag of caramel corn with candied pecans can make me kind of snippy. Perhaps a little hair of the dog would offset that testiness, I thought, and glanced around my bed, hoping to spy a couple stray kernels. “I just don’t know why you’re being so mean. It . . . ” I stopped, sighed. “His name wasn’t Marshal, was it?”

  “Marcus Jefferson Carlton.”

  “Shit,” I said. It was the strangest thing. Even while dating him I’d rarely remembered his name, and he’d been so intellectual. So articulate. So snooty. A man so horrifically boring I had been certain life with him would keep me on the straight and narrow. Maybe even reduce the incomprehensible number of attempts to murder me. Someone always seems to want to kill me. It’s weird.

  “You owe it to Jack to learn the truth,” Laney said.

  “I don’t owe Jack jack,” I said and chuckled a little at my own cleverness. “Jack jack. Get it?”

  I could almost hear her wince. “How bad was the binge?”

  I glanced across the battlefield of my bed. “What binge?” I asked. I’d carried the ill-advised loot straight into my bedroom on the previous night, bypassing the kitchen, where I hadn’t made more than a handful of meals in all my time as a homeowner.

  “Were there Pringles involved?”

  I lifted an empty canister, winced at the other one. “Maybe a few.”

  “Cheetos?”

  “He has a kid!” I reminded her.

  “Maybe. Maybe he has a kid.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed. “I can’t,” I whispered. “Not this.”

  “Oh, honey.” Her tone slipped into support mode. “I know it—”

  “You know? You know?” I straightened, incensed and so filled with saturated fats I thought I might actually vomit. “What do you know, Laney? How it feels to be humiliated and cheated on and lied to? I don’t think so. I think you only know what it’s like to have every man with a couple functioning brain cells and a dollop of testosterone willing to give his left nut to—”

  “I know you want to have his baby,” she said.

  I sucked in my breath, appalled, outraged. “You shut your dirty little mouth!”

  There was a moment of silence, and then she laughed.

  “You’ll make a good mom, Mac.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Intuitive. Caring.”

  “Has marriage to Solberg finally driven you mad?” I asked.

  “Mad with happiness. With feminine contentment. With lust,” she whispered.

  I gagged. Jeen Solberg (more often known as J.D. or Mr. Icky) is the homeliest, most irritating, most infatuated dweeb on planet earth. The fact that the best woman in the world allows him to speak her name has, in the past, made me queasy without the aid of four million greasy calories contributing to my indigestion. “Holy hell, Laney, you want me to barf right here on my bed?”

  She laughed again. The sound was musical. Baby Mac, her bald little dweeblet, had finally begun sleeping through the night, allowing her to return to her prepartum cheeriness. “What’d he say?”

  “Who?”

  “Jack. The supposed father. What did he have to say about the situation?”

  “It doesn’t matter what he said. When has the dark lieutenant ever been honest?”

  “He’s a pretty good guy, Mac. It’s just . . . you two are like . . . ” I could almost hear her shake her ridiculously gorgeous head.

  “Fire and gasoline?”

  “I was going to say crazy people.”

  I sighed. Glanced outside. I’d have to get up eventually. Shower. Dress. And head off to work, where I would, as a licensed therapist, counsel the good citizens of the greater L.A. area. As I shifted my gaze to the chaos spread across my bed, the irony of the situation was not lost on me.

  “I think she was a stripper,” I said.

  “The alleged mother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where at?”

  “Someplace called the Snugg
le.”

  “The Snuggle Club?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “It’s an odd hybrid kind of place. Aspiring actresses often wind up there. They put on plays.”

  “At the Snuggle Club?”

  “Yeah, well, they’ll invariably end up naked in said plays, and generally the girls watch their dreams get squashed like cockroaches, but once in a blue moon one of them will manage to squiggle out of the mire.”

  “She insisted she was a serious actress,” I said and wondered how often Laney had been instrumental in helping said girls become mire-free. She’d made a good-sized fortune as Hippolyta, Amazon Queen, and felt the need to give back. Thus, the favors she bestowed on the entertainment community: tutoring struggling thespians, bonuses given to hairdressers, referrals for little-known makeup artists. If Laney ever called in her markers, she could have an army at her beck and call. Albeit an army more likely to break into song or apply really kick-ass bronzer than go to battle.

  “What’s her name?” Laney asked.

  “Velvet.”

  “Please tell me she has another.”

  “Veronica something.”

  “I don’t remember ever meeting her.”

  “You probably would if you saw her boobs.”

  “Impressive, were they?”

  “Big as torpedoes.”

  “Mark sevens or Mark thirteens?”

  I paused, confused for a second, then, “Seriously? You know torpedo sizes?”

  “I’m reading a biography of Robert Saderback, World War II veteran.”

  “Please don’t tell me about it,” I begged. It’s not that I’m unintelligent. I’m smart. Really. It just so happens that my taste in literature runs more toward the trashy than the intellectual.

  “Did you know he was a pacifist before the attack on Pearl Harbor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that he only became involved in the war after he saw images of the prisoners at Darmstadt?”

  “Yup.”

  She laughed. “You’re such a liar.”

  “Want to hear what I’m reading?”

  “The heart-palpitating story of a rugged but sensitive hero, Rafael Swoonworthy Blackriver, who saves the damsel in distress and ends up making sweet love to her on a sunset beach somewhere?” Her tone was rife with drama.