She made a trapped-animal sound behind the tape and kicked at me. She was way past scared, deep into pure terror. Her bruised, swollen eyes glinted when they fixed on the scissors in my hand.

I cut the tape at the back of her head and scrambled backward when she launched herself out of the closet, snarling like something rabid. I tossed the scissors as far as I could, so she wouldn’t get hold of them, and braced myself to sustain a few defense wounds.

Sheila landed on me.

We rolled.

Jolie screamed.

I had serious concerns about her future in law enforcement.

Brown uniforms surged around us, hands dragged us apart.

Russell barked his brains out.

Somebody righted an overturned chair and sat me down in it. I realized, with some relief, that it was Jolie.

The room swam.

Jolie forced my head down between my knees.

EMTs arrived, sedated Sheila and took her away.

“Well, Ms. Sheepshanks,” a familiar voice said, “we meet again.”

I blinked.

Andy Crowley came into focus, went out again.

“I think she’s hurt,” Jolie fretted, from somewhere off to my left.

“Are you hurt, Ms. Sheepshanks?” Crowley inquired mildly. He was sitting, facing me, our knees almost touching.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m okay.”

“Then maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me what the hell happened here.”

I fumbled my way through the events of the evening, starting with Russell heading for the door of the saloon when we got home from Greer’s, my noticing the broken padlock when I went to pull him back, right through to finding Sheila hog-tied on the floor of the storage closet.

“And the victim attacked you because—?”

Everything came into clear focus. “I guess she was scared. She thought whoever beat her up had come back.”

Crowley nodded, but his face was impassive, and I wondered if he believed me. In the next moment, he cleared that right up. “Two violent incidents,” he said, “in the same place. And you’re there both times. That’s quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not really,” I reasoned. “I live upstairs. And I’d say it’s a damn good thing I came in to investigate when Russell raised a fuss, because Sheila might have lain in that closet for a long time if I hadn’t.”

He looked around at the wreckage. “Quite a toss job,” he said. He ran his eyes over me with dispatch. “As you said, you live upstairs. The first time there was a problem in this bar, you heard noises. So I’m wondering why you didn’t hear anything this time. That woman has been worked over pretty thoroughly. She must have screamed. And smashing a place up like this is loud business.”

“I wasn’t home,” I said, not for the first time. Maybe he was checking to see if my story changed.

“That’s right,” Jolie put in bravely. “We were out all evening.”