Read Online Irish Eyes by Mary Kay Andrews - Free Book Online Page A

she’d been working on our taxes for the past several weeks. I winced when I saw the numbers. In my old liberal college days, I’d railed against capitalist pigs. Now I was one, although only a very small-potatoes capitalist pig. Still, I hated paying taxes as much as old John D. Rockefeller himself.
    A door opened and a woman with blond upswept hair poked her head out. “Miss Garrity. Could you come back now?”
    I stood up and followed her down the hall past a warren of small offices and smaller cubicles. She was in her early to mid-thirties, trim, with heavily muscled calves, like a runner or a career tennis player maybe. She wore a conservative navy suit that looked on the expensive side for somebody making a secretary’s salary at city hall. The skirt was a hair on the short side, but not aggressively so. She stopped at a door at the end of the hallway and gestured me to go inside. But nobody was behind the desk.
    She stepped in behind me, closed the door, and sat down at the desk. That was when I noticed the nameplate on the battered city-issue metal desk.
    “Capt. L. E. Dugan,” it said. Bucky’s new girl.

8
    L isa Dugan was not the kind of cupcake Bucky Deavers usually went in for. I’d never known Bucky to date a woman born in the same decade he was born. Hell, come to think of it, he’d never dated a woman before, just a series of girls. Cute, fun-loving, airheaded girls were the Deavers type.
    Captain Dugan was beautiful, but she was no girl. There were fine worry lines at the corners of her hazel eyes, dark circles under those same eyes, and just a hint of sag to her chin. I couldn’t help it. What did he see in this chick? I wondered.
    She sat back in her chair and watched me watching her. The office was nothing special, just a desk, two chairs, a computer, and a phone. There was a bank of file cabinets behind her desk. A green plant, maybe a philodendron, draped limp leaves over the edge of the cabinet. There were some framed photos, snapshots of Lisa Dugan holding a puppy, Lisa Dugan and a little boy, and another picture of just a little boy. No photos of Deavers. I felt glad about that. Finally the phone rang. She picked it up, listened, said, “Thanks,” and disconnected.
    “That was the hospital,” she said. “There’s been no change.” She bit her lip. “Last night I talked to one of the doctors.I guess he figured, since I’m a cop, I could take bad news. He said there isn’t going to be a change. Not unless Bucky gets an infection, or pneumonia, something like that.”
    “Bullshit,” I said hotly. “He has no right to say something like that. There are other doctors in this town. This guy doesn’t know everything. Bucky talked to me last night, did you know that? He opened his eyes and looked at me and talked. So don’t tell me he’s brain dead. ‘Cause I was there. And I know Bucky. I know how goddamn stubborn he is.”
    “Stubborn.” She said it with a sigh. Then she stuck out her hand and I shook it. “I’m Lisa,” she said. “Bucky told me all about you. He kept saying we had to get you over for dinner. Only I suck as a cook. And I felt sort of, I don’t know, funny, about meeting you.”
    “He took me to that party last night so that we could meet,” I said. “He talked about you all night long. To tell you the truth, I was getting a little jealous.”
    She raised an eyebrow.
    “We were buddies. Pals. It’s just that I hadn’t seen much of him in the past few months. I had no idea he was seriously involved with somebody. But it’s not like I was his girlfriend or anything. I never slept with him. He told you that, didn’t he?”
    “We didn’t talk a lot about who he had or hadn’t slept with in the past,” Lisa said. “We’re both adults. I knew he’d had a life before me, and I certainly had one before I met him. We didn’t talk about the past at all. But I figured you were special in a different way.”
    She was trying to butter me up. Why?
    “You