‘I need my keys.’ He glanced briefly at his mother, then at Marty. ‘Where are they?’

Marty looked blandly at the bruise on Jack’s cheek and the bandage on his forehead. ‘You mouth off to the wrong person, Jack?’

‘Ran into a tree.’

‘Figures.’

‘Trying to get away from the person who was shooting at me.’

Lily’s eyes jerked toward her son, and for the first time, Magozzi saw the mother inside the woman. ‘Who tried to shoot you?’ the words snapped out.

Jack almost shuddered. His mother hadn’t addressed him directly in a very long time. ‘I don’t know.’

And now the old woman straightened, and her eyes grew hard again.

Shit, Magozzi thought. She knows something, too.

Marty was staring at Jack, wearing a lot of expressions on his face. Anger, disgust, frustration, and maybe a little fear, too; but there was concern behind all of them. It surpised Magozzi a little to see that Marty Pullman actually cared for Jack.

‘What do you know about this?’ Marty asked Gino.

Gino eyed a woman in purple capri pants approaching the register with her cart. ‘Let’s take a walk. I’ll give you what we’ve got.’

‘Keys,’ Jack demanded just as they started to move away.

Marty turned around and pointed a finger at Jack. ‘No keys. You’re staying right here.’ He looked straight at Lily as he added, ‘All day, all night, from now on, until I say otherwise.’

Jack and Lily both blinked at him like startled children.

‘I mean it,’ Marty warned as he and Gino went out the door.

Jack opened his mouth to speak just as the woman in purple capri pants tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me if this is the right fertilizer for rhododendrons?’

Almost without thinking Jack turned around and looked at the green plastic jug she was holding. ‘Oh no. That’s too alkaline. You need something more acidic for a rhododendron. Should be something on the same shelf where you found this.’

‘Really? Do you think you could show me? There were so many brands of fertilizer there…’

Jack pinched his nose while he slipped from one dimension into another. ‘Okay. Yeah. Sure, I can show you.’

‘Sounds like he knows the business,’ Magozzi said to Lily.

‘He should. He grew up with it,’ she said absently, her eyes following her son past a crowd of customers overloading their wagons from a sale table of impatiens. ‘So tell me about this shooting business. Who was shooting at Jack?’

‘Maybe you should ask Jack about that.’

‘I’m asking you.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘Jack thinks somebody took a shot at him in his driveway this morning, so he shot back.’

Lily turned her head slowly to look at him. ‘He thinks? He’s not sure?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘He is. We’re not. At least not yet. There were a lot of slugs and casings around, but they might all be from Jack’s gun. We’re checking on that.’

Lily was giving him one of her Yoda stares through her thick glasses. ‘Jack doesn’t own a gun. He hates guns.’

‘He says it was Morey’s, and that he took it home from here last night after he heard Ben Schuler was killed.’ Magozzi watched her face carefully as he asked, ‘Did you know Morey had a gun?’

Her stare never faltered. ‘If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.’

Magozzi leaned his forearms on the counter, which put his eyes on a level with hers. ‘Listen, Mrs Gilbert,’ he said quietly. ‘We think Jack knows something about these murders – including your husband’s.’

Lily’s eyes flickered at that.

‘He almost fainted at the reception yesterday when he heard Ben Schuler was shot, and not just because he was shocked. He was scared to death, and we think it was because he knew he was next. He knows something, Mrs Gilbert, and we can’t help him unless we know it, too.’

‘You want me to talk to him,’ she said flatly.

Magozzi straightened and spread his hands. ‘He won’t talk to us. Maybe he’ll talk to his mother.’

Outside, Gino and Marty were perched on the front bumper of the unmarked, slamming bottled water Marty had pulled out of a cooler near the entrance. ‘He’s all we’ve got at this point,’ Gino was saying; ‘and he won’t give us diddly squat. My preference, slam him in a cell with a couple of Bubbas until he decides to talk, but Magozzi’s got this ethics problem. I was thinking because you were family and all, you could get away with beating the shit out of him.’

Marty started a smile, then thought better of it and just shook his head. ‘I tried last night, Gino, and I pushed hard. I know he’s holding something back. The funny thing is, I get the feeling he thinks he has a damn good reason. But I’ll try again. Later tonight, after Lily goes back to the house.’

‘You’re really going to keep him here?’

‘If someone’s really trying to kill him, he’s probably safer here than anywhere else.’

‘How do you figure? Morey wasn’t very safe here,’ Gino pointed out.

Marty turned to look at him squarely. ‘Because I’m not leaving, and I’m carrying. Last night Jack asked me to go home and get my gun. He was worried about Lily. Now I’m worried about both of them. I think he’s really scared, Gino.’

Gino nodded. ‘So do we. But he might have shot up his yard all by himself, Marty. We won’t know until we get something back from Ballistics, and maybe not even then. If we get a positive on something that came from a gun other than the one Jack was waving around, we can put a car out here.’

They stopped talking when they saw Jack rushing across the lot toward them.

‘Where the hell are the Big Boys, Marty? They’re supposed to be on the same table as the Early Girls, and I’ve got a customer freaking out back there because she can’t find any.’

Marty rubbed at his forehead, trying to shift gears from murder to plants. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Jack.’

‘I’m talking about fucking tomatoes, for chrissake. Now where are they?’

‘Oh. I think I put a bunch of those in the shade over there by the small greenhouse.’

Jack gaped at him. ‘You put tomatoes in the shade?’

‘I guess. If those things over there are tomatoes.’ He jerked a thumb to the right, and Jack looked in that direction.

‘Oh my God.’ He started to hurry off, then turned around and walked back to Gino. ‘I think I forgot to thank you for the ride, Detective.’

‘Yes, you did.’

Jack nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets and looked off to one side. ‘And there’s another thing.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Sometimes I’m kind of a prick.’

‘You think so?’

‘And in spite of everything, you and your partner have been pretty decent to me. I wish I could help you out.’ He raised his eyes to meet Gino’s. ‘I really mean that.’

Gino watched him walk away with a miserable expression. ‘Goddamnit. Now I’m really conflicted.’

Marty chuckled. ‘Jack turns everybody upside down.’