“Somebody’s going to see us sitting here and call the cops.”
Carmen and I had pushed the seats all the way back on the Cherokee. We were parked on the same block as the night before, diagonally across from Holly Malone’s house. But this time we were a couple of houses farther away. It wasn’t a neighborhood where people sat in cars parked on the street. Inconspicuous we weren’t.
“That’s always a risk on this kind of stakeout, Sam.”
“This is different, though. Usually you and me, we’re the cops. Here we’re persona non grata.”
“Okay, you’re a Craftsman-style expert, and you speak Latin. What do I have on my hands here?”
I went through the list in my head: Fat-ass cop. Iron Ranger with man-boobs. Schlub whose family dumped him for the holidays. Post-MI jerkface who’s running around the country like he has the heart of a teenager.
Don’t know why, but right then I reminded myself that Gibbs liked me. It helped a little, as sad as that fact was.
“I am what I am.” Until the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t realize I was quoting Popeye.
Carmen tried hard to swallow a laugh.
I laughed first. She followed immediately. “Go ahead,” I said. “Say I’m a complete idiot.”
“A cop who’s a Renaissance man. Quick as a wink from Frank Lloyd Wright to Popeye-I’m impressed.”
“You done?”
She was wiping tears from her eyes. “Yeah, I’m done. Almost. So what are we looking for exactly?”
My neck was as far out as I was planning on sticking it. “This was your idea, Carmen. Remember?”
She reached into her bag and took a reprinted five-by-seven from her purse and stuck it to the center of my dashboard with some gum I didn’t even realize she was chewing.
The photo was of Sterling. He and his buddy Brian looked like a couple of male models.
“Who names her kid Sterling?” Carmen mused.
I didn’t know the answer to that question. “He’s pretty, right?” I asked. “Holly called him pretty.”
Carmen gazed at the picture as though she’d never really looked at it before. “Yeah. He’s pretty-boy pretty.”
“Not your type?”
“No, unfortunately, he is my type. My type-historically speaking-could best be described as ‘assholes.’ And from everything I hear about his life until the moment his rental car crossed that bridge over the Ochlockonee River, Sterling Storey was an asshole. Is an asshole.”
“Assholes?” It wasn’t much of a response, but it was the best I could do.
“Sad as it sounds, that about covers it. If I’m into a guy, he’s going to turn out to be a bona fide asshole.”
“Assholes have bona fides? Like diplomats?”
She found that pretty funny. “The ones I fall for do. I only take them in if they’re credentialed.” Her laughter stopped as fast as it started. “That’s what happened in San Jose. My asshole that time was a judge. He had credentials up his wazoo.”
Carmen had pushed open the front door. I walked in. “Yeah? What did he do to you?”
“My daughter and I had just moved in with him, were just getting settled in his house. I was in love.” She spread out the lone syllable of “love” so that it sounded like a crowd. “She called me from school, said she’d forgotten her calculator-it was one of those fancy ones with all those buttons, you know? I gave her a hard time about her irresponsibility and then I went home to get it for her. I’m a softy.”
“He was there?” I asked. The fact that he was there was necessary to the story, but it wasn’t sufficient to explain walking away from a pension. I knew there would be more.
“With my daughter’s best friend’s mother. I’d introduced the two of them at a volleyball game a couple weeks before.”
Nasty situation. But it still wasn’t sufficient.
“On the stairs of all places,” she added. “He was doing her from behind.”
Interesting detail, though it didn’t compare with what I’d heard about Holly and the basilica. But that wasn’t it, either. “It got ugly?” I asked.
“You could say that. I went berserk-I could take what he was doing to me, but what he was doing to my daughter and her friend? Shit! I screamed the woman’s naked ass right out of the house, but that was just a warm-up for what I wanted to lay on him. I started yelling and cursing-did I tell you I have a temper? Well, I do. And he took one step forward and… the asshole hit me. A hard slap right across the face. It was such a shock, it took me a second to recover, but then I started up again, and he slapped me again, harder still. I couldn’t fucking believe it.”
“That’s when you should’ve left, huh?”
“Would have been better, yeah. But I didn’t, I wasn’t ready to walk yet. So I started yelling all over again. He made a fist, showed it to me-shook it at me, really-and came at me again.”
“You shot him?”
“You already know this story?”
“No. But I know if you just beat the crap out of him, you’d still have your pension, and you wouldn’t be living in Orange County.”
“I shot him.”
“Nuts?”
“Foot. Nuts was tempting, though. Real tempting. Think I might’ve gotten time for shooting him in the nuts.”
“He’s still on the bench?”
“Of course.” She sighed, the exhale carrying a full cargo of cynicism. “He was indifferent to hurting me, Sam. He didn’t care. About the affair, about the slaps, about the pension. None of it. He didn’t care.”
“How’s his foot?”
She smiled just a tiny bit. “He doesn’t play squash anymore.”
Across the way a car pulled to a stop in front of the Malone house. An SUV, one of those little stubby Lexus SUVs that were scampering all over Boulder like Japanese roaches. I hated them less than I hated the really big ones, the Fords and the Cadillacs and the Lincolns, but I hated them nonetheless.
No particular reason. I just did. Actually, it was one of the few things that my friend Alan and I agreed upon.
“I bet that’s Artie.”
“Who’s Artie?”
“The brother-in-law I told you about. He’s an asshole.”
Carmen perked up. “Really?”
“Not your kind of asshole, I’m afraid. No bona fides, and I suspect that Artie’s the kind of asshole who doesn’t like his women to be packing heat.”
She sat back again. “Ahhh. One of those.”
While we chatted, I was checking the parade of clowns climbing out of the little silver Lexus. Artie had been driving, no surprise there. A slightly older, severely less perky version of Holly climbed out of the front passenger seat, and three way-too-well-behaved, way-too-well-dressed children exited the rear.
Carmen said, “No Sterling in that bunch.”
“Afraid not. We wait.” I touched her hand. “Sorry about San Jose.”
“Yeah.”
Twenty minutes later I said, “Shit.”
We’d been silent the whole time, and Carmen was startled by my exclamation.
“What?” she asked. She was staring out the windshield as though she figured she’d missed something important at the Malone house.
“I forgot to turn my phone back on. Damn.” I hit the little on button, and the phone came alive and immediately started probing the atmosphere for a cell tower to mate with. Once the slutty little thing had finished getting intimate with some new anonymous electronic partner, I checked my voicemail.
The first message was from Simon.
“Hey, Carmen,” I said. “Give me a minute? I want to call my kid.”
“Sure, be good to stretch my legs. I’ll walk around the block again, see what I can see.”
Simon and I talked football and relatives and hockey and snowmobiles-that part was new for us; he’d never ridden one before this trip-for about three minutes, which was about all the conversation he could ever manage on the phone. But the contact with him eased something inside me that desperately needed easing. When he was saying his version of good-bye, he asked if I was going to be at his grandpa’s in time for turkey, and the question almost sliced me in two. In my heart I felt that awful sucking thing you hear when the cranberry sauce is sliding reluctantly out of the can.
To distract myself from the reality of the fact that I was in South Bend and Simon was up in Minnesota, I went back to my cell phone and scrolled through the other messages.
Lucy, just wishing me a happy Thanksgiving.
Yeah, you too.
And Gibbs. Sounding a little frantic, letting me know she was in Vail. I tried her back but didn’t get an answer.
No call from Alan. That surprised me.
Carmen climbed back in the car. She was shivering just a little. She should have worn her coat.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing. No Sterling, no Brian.”
I said, “Gibbs called, left me a message. She’s anxious. One of us should be watching her, you know.”
I expected Carmen to disagree with me. She didn’t. “Probably. She’s as much at risk as Holly is, but she wasn’t as cooperative about being watched as Holly is. Gibbs should be in Safe House.”
“Yeah, she should. Maybe Holly should be, too.” I liked that idea. Hell, if we could talk Holly into going to South Bend’s version of Safe House, I could drop off Carmen at O’Hare and maybe-just maybe-get to Minnesota before Simon crawled into bed. I could read him a Bialosky or two, and he could explain to me what he found so fetching about that little bear.
But Holly wasn’t about to go to Safe House. Part of me knew that a part of Holly was enjoying the current situation. Where sex was concerned, she was a roller-coaster, bungee-jumping freak. In this situation there was more than enough danger to get her sexual heart really pumping. Add in a heavy dose of anticipation-it was clear that anticipation stirred something in her that had been dormant in me for a long, long time-and for her this could be almost as big a rush as sneaking into the pope’s bed in the Vatican.
Carmen and I cooling our heels out here on the curb meant that there were strangers watching Holly’s every move and, even better for her, the possibility of judgmental Artie walking around any corner. Yep, the setup was almost as good as that afternoon in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
All that, and a turkey in the oven, too.
No Native Americans. No Pilgrims. But nonetheless, for Holly it had the makings of a Thanksgiving to remember.
The dashboard clock informed me that it was exactly three minutes after four o’clock.
Why was that important? Sometime in the last couple of hours, a world or two away from South Bend, Mary Ellen Wolf had carved a long slender knife through the crisp skin on the outside of a beautiful Georgia turducken. After a little downward pressure-it would take just a little because after eighteen hours in a slow oven those nested birds would be as tender as a grandmother’s whisper-the sequential beauty would be revealed. Turkey, duck, chicken, followed by some dark andouille, and then all the glorious components of oyster stuffing.
There are times in life when you just know that the train has left the station without you and that it’s not coming back around, ever. A county fair and a girl you could have kissed. A job and a promotion you might have had. Some friends in a beat-up old car and a trip you might have taken.
Twins, and a meal you might have eaten.
The Wolf sisters and that turducken were going to haunt me for a while. I was 110 percent sure about that.
A foot away from me Carmen was doing something with her fingernails and a sharp wooden stick. Sherry did the same thing occasionally, but Sherry doing it never captured much of my attention. Carmen doing it did. She distracted me even more when she started humming the melody of one of those tunes she’d sung the night before at bedtime in the Days Inn.