Charming Grace Read Free

make a movie about her husband. I know she does. What’s not to like?”
    I shook my head. “Boss, you agreed to let me handle the introductions. You promised Kanda, too. For her and the kids. Besides, if you go up there and Grace Vance shoots you, it’ll make me look bad. I might have to give up my parking spot at the bodyguard union hall.”
    Stone glared at me the way gorillas do when they’re about to rip a banana off a tree, but he knew I was right. I’d done a good job taking care of his and his family’s safety at home, on movie sets in jungles and on mountaintops, and even at the Oscars (he was afraid of Joan Rivers, so I had to body-block her while he walked up the red carpet.) Finally, he sighed and nodded. “All right, but this better work. I’m getting an itch in my hair plugs. You get up there and sweet-talk Grace Vance. Get the gun away from her, then I’ll pop out of the woods and make nice. Go.”
    I got up and began climbing through the laurel. Inside orthopedic Hush Puppies, my left foot ached like a hangover. A beady-eyed parish cop had shot me in the foot when I was twelve. The bullet broke the joint of my big toe and it never healed right. Armand had cried over it. Ah, the glamour of the criminal life. Twenty-five years later, my foot throbbed its Hail Mary’s .
    When I reached the edge of the road I stopped in awe. Grace Vance. My first unhindered look at her. Mon Dieu , she was incredible—a long-legged redhead in hip-hugger jeans and a heavy blue sweater that held on like a glove, with a face like a good-looking stripper, a houseful of body with plenty of back porch and attic, and the smart green eyes of a bayou wildcat. She’d been crowned Miss Georgia in the late 1980’s. If she hadn’t ducked out on the pageant biz to marry Harp Vance, she’s have probably won Miss America , too. I didn’t doubt it. Grace Vance was every fine woman I’d ever regretted losing. Every classy meal I’d ever stolen from a New Orleans dumpster as a kid. Every ideal I’d hung onto in prison. Every dream of the good life I still dreamed.
    La femme, la joi, la vie . Woman, joy, life.
    But armed. Sad-looking. Dangerous. Beautiful. Maybe crazy. Sitting on a queenly mountain of pulverized stone. Next to a wild pink orchid. In a pot.
    I took one life-changing breath in rhythm with her, then stepped into the open road and headed for her gravel pile.
    If she shot me, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad way to die.

    We turn our best face to the world every morning. We look toward what we expect is coming our way, and we put on a stoic smile, and we hope no one guesses how scared we are. Every day since Harp died, I’d been afraid to look at the future. So I focused on the road below my gravel pile, waiting for the Senterra limo caravan I expected.
    “Mrs. Vance. Your husband only killed to save other people, and so I’m bettin’ you won’t shoot me in his name. I hope .”
    I jabbed the stock of G. Helen’s shotgun into my shoulder and swung toward the voice. Its owner stood at the base of my gravel mountain, his long legs ending in the gravel-dusted weeds. He’d walked out of the forest like a hunter, without rustling a leaf, big and lean and dark-haired, dangerous-looking. His face was both rough and handsome; everything about him was a little tailored but rumpled, from his wrinkled brown leather jacket to his dark trousers, ending in suede lace-ups that would have looked tame and academic on a man who didn’t have an alligator tattooed on the back of his right hand.
    A man.
    You have to understand—there was no such thing as a man in my world anymore, only people of the opposite sex who weren’t Harp.
    The stranger seemed just as transfixed by me as I was by him. He frowned up at me sadly, more troubled looking than aggressive, as if someone had forced him to wash his dirty laundry in front of me. “If you shoot,” he drawled, “make it a clean kill. I’m a fan of old-fashioned open-casket