Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

dress.
    “Where did that bundle come from?”
    “I found it in the fern.”
    I never saw his free hand move, but I found out about it soon enough. At least I don’t have a glass jaw. I didn’t even stagger, even though the side of my face felt like the piano had fallen on it. “Don’t mess with me, Rebecca,” said someone about three counties away.
    I figured out it was Frank and shook my head violently, which hurt a lot. “You don’t have to hit me,” I said. “I swear to God I don’t know how it got there.”
    “Oh yes you do. And you’re gonna tell me in the next three minutes. Because that’s about how long it takes to drown, and you don’t want to drown, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He used his gun hand to twist my right arm around my back, and he pushed me over to the aquarium without a wasted movement. By pulling up on my arm and digging his elbow into my back, he forced me to bend over into the aquarium.
    But I’d had a hint about what was going to happen, and there was time to take a breath. So at first I didn’t have to deal with a mouthful of water. Only the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life, or the two worst—one in my shoulder and the other in the wrist he was gripping.
    I tried to flail out with my free arm, but I couldn’t move it. It was caught between our bodies. For a little while—maybe only seconds, I don’t know—I clenched my eyes shut as tightly as my teeth and concentrated on not hollering.
    He was twisting my arm higher and higher up my back, and I figured it wouldn’t be long before it came out of the socket. This would hurt even more, and if I hollered when it happened, my mouth would fill up with water, and this would cause my lungs to do the same, and this would cause death. I told myself that if I hadn’t screamed at the sight of a dead prostitute on my rug, I could make it through a little thing like a dislocated shoulder. I clenched my teeth even harder.
    And for some reason, I opened my eyes. My hair danced with the anemones, and it was rather beautiful, so I watched awhile. I don’t know if my shoulder and wrist were getting numb or if I just managed to distract myself, but it didn’t hurt quite so badly anymore. Perhaps I was on the verge of passing out from holding my breath.
    I caught sight of something red and realized it was my dress. Outside the aquarium. With some fascination, I took in the whole scene out there: part of Frank’s body, turned sideways against me, and part of mine, all red and dry, twisted against his. Those two bodies seemed about a million miles away from my aqueous quarters, which were beginning to be rather pleasant.
    Some tiny part of what I laughingly call my mind was working, though. I saw that Frank and I were situated nicely for the oldest trick in the world to work.
    I kneed him in the groin.
    I may not have a glass jaw, but Frank had a glass whatever. He fell backwards, letting go of my wrist and roaring like he was shot. The gun went flying, and so did I. Out the door and down the steps, my wicked-woman shoes clacking daintily as you please. That scream I’d been holding in came out along with half a dozen of its siblings, but I didn’t even mind that I’d lost my dignity. Didn’t notice, in fact. I just clacked and hollered to the bottom of the stairs and pressed the buzzer that opened the front gate. I took a moment to close the gate, hoping Frank would have to stop and figure out where the buzzer was. I heard him behind me already.
    I picked up the pot of geraniums on the little stoop outside the gate and ran toward Frank’s car, still screaming, and not even realizing it until people started looking out their windows. I heaved the pot through the front window of the car, got in, and picked up the microphone for his police radio. I was breathing so hard I must have sounded pretty ragged. “Help!” I shouted at about nine hundred decibels. “Two-eighty-two Green Street. This is Rebecca Schwartz. Emergency! Help!” I was thinking of saying “ten-four” next, but Frank was clutching at me through the hole that used to be his window, so I just gave it one last “Help!” The radio operator was saying something, but I didn’t hear it.
    Suddenly Frank disappeared from the window, and I saw that a couple of men in bathrobes were hanging on to him. A woman opened the car door and asked me if I was all right. I guess they were neighbors, but I didn’t know them. I couldn’t answer the woman. I