The Heart Heist

by Alyssa Kress

  "Kerrin ‑‑ " Matt was used to feeling helpless, but this was worse than most times.

  "Oh, Matt," Kerrin sighed out between sobs. "Gary couldn't ask me to come with him. He went to prison."

  Prison?! Matt's jaw dropped open as his sister sank onto the floor by his feet. His hands automatically clutched her hair as she put her head in his lap and wrapped her arms around him. He'd often joked to himself that his sister was out to lunch, but this was much too far out there. Gary gone to prison!

  "What for?" Matt asked, determined to steer the woman back to rationality. "Why'd Gary go to prison?"

  "Oh, I don't know." Kerrin sniffed, gaining some control over her sobbing. She kept her head in his lap while her hand played with the loop for his belt. "Grand theft or some such thing. I wouldn't know the exact charges."

  "Grand theft," Matt repeated, grimly certain now that his sister had gone around the bend. "And just what did he steal?"

  "Who knows? It was over five years ago." Kerrin sniffed again and tugged lightly on his belt loop. "Something big, probably. He's pretty much a career criminal."

  A career criminal. Matt looked down at her tear-splashed face and cleared his throat. "Um, are we talking about the same Gary Sullivan here? The guy who bought and paid for a telephone directory?"

  Kerrin leaned back from his lap and rubbed her nose, sniffling some more. When she looked up, Matt could see that her eyes were clear, utterly rational. Could she be serious here?

  "He's spent the past five years in Chino," she said. "I think he made some decisions during that time, about how he wanted to run the rest of his life."

  Hell on ice, she was serious. "Gary was in Chino." It was almost impossible for Matt to believe this absurdity.

  "Is in Chino," Kerrin corrected. For a minute Matt was afraid she was going to burst into tears again. "For another ten years!"

  "Holy Moly." If what Kerrin was saying could possibly be true, then this was completely horrible. Matt hadn't even kissed Elaine, and he knew how he'd felt when he'd thought she might be moving out of town. That separation would have been nothing compared to this.

  "It was going to be twenty." Kerrin stopped a sob. "But they knocked ten years off for this special job he was doing for the Department of Water and Power."

  Kerrin was veering back into the twilight zone. "The Department of Water and Power?" Matt echoed. "What do they have to do with this?"

  "Everything. They're the ones who had the clout to get Gary out of prison. They wanted him to try finding holes in the security system at the plant just outside of town. Gary's supposed to be good at that sort of thing."

  Kerrin was shifting gears much too fast for Matt. "What about teaching summer school?"

  His sister gave him a wry look. "I believe that was your idea."

  Matt cast his mind back to the Independence Day parade. "Oh." The initial annoyance with which Gary had met him began to make some sense now. A few other things clicked into place as well. "Why'd the DWP want to find holes in their security system?"

  Her eyes were guileless. "Isn't it obvious? This is an important junction. Most of Los Angeles' water flows through here."

  "Yeah, but why now?" Matt persisted. "Why all of the sudden they're worried?" The Los Angeles aqueduct had always been a controversial project. The battle over water rights between the major metropolis and the Owens Valley had heated up courtrooms for almost a century now. Matt tried to beat down his growing excitement. Nah, it couldn't be.

  But why not? This was just the sort of project the Holiday Bomber latched on to. Just the kind of thing he loved.

  "Who knows what moves the small minds at the DWP." Kerrin shrugged. "Nobody around here has ever figured them out."

  She was right. Forget it. Nothing this exciting ever happened in Freedom. "Besides," Matt sighed out loud. "They already caught the Holiday Bomber."

  "What did you say?"

  "Nothing." Matt looked down at his sister, sitting on the floor. Her dejection wasn't hidden any more. She was purely miserable, and he couldn't blame her. Sheesh, Gary Sullivan was in prison. It boggled the mind. "How long has it been since you last saw Gary?"

  Kerrin toyed with an eyelet of the lace on her bed. "Three weeks." She made it sound more like three hundred years. "And five days." The muscles around her eyes tightened and Matt could see she was only inches away from crying again. He was quickly discovering there wasn't much worse in the world than his stars-in-her-eyes sister breaking down into tears.

  "Well, hell, Kerrie, if it seems like forever to you, imagine what it must feel like to Gary."

  Her hand clenched in the lace. "I don't want to imagine that."

  "For the love of heaven, you ought to go visit him."

  She raised her eyes, and he saw all the longing in the world shining out. "There's nothing I want to do more. It's all I can think about." Her eyes lowered again, as did her voice. "Gary made me promise I wouldn't."

  Noble little idiot, and just like him too. A career criminal, huh? That must have been in another dimension. Matt reached down and grasped Kerrin's shoulder. She looked up at him in surprise.

  "If he isn't bitterly regretting that promise right now," Matt said, "I'll ‑‑ I'll eat my hat!"

  Kerrin looked like she'd stopped breathing. "Do you...really think so?"

  "I know it. At least that's how I'd feel. Jesus, Kerrin. He'd be so happy to see you he wouldn't be able to walk straight."

  "Oh, I don't know." Kerrin bit her lower lip. "Gary's pretty...adamant about things."

  Matt's hand tightened around her shoulder. "What about you? Aren't you adamant about anything?" He looked deeply into her watching eyes. "Or are you just planning to move on with your life? Forget about him and go on to the next man?"

  A light of fire finally came into her listless eyes. "I don't mean to sound melodramatic about this, Matt, but there isn't going to be another man."

  "That's kinda what I thought." Matt used his hold on her shoulder to give her a small shove. "So, what are you waiting for?"

  "Oh, Matt, it isn't that easy."

  She was despairing, and that wasn't like Kerrin either. What had gotten into her lately? Matt watched her slowly rise to her feet. He hated to see her like this.

  "Ker?"

  She went over and picked up her tea. "Hmm?"

  "Are you going to go to L.A. and see him?"

  She frowned over the lukewarm liquid. "I'll think about it."

  She wasn't even going to try. How could she just give up? Matt gritted his teeth, wondering how far he was prepared to go to force her to do the right thing. "Kerrin, I'll make a deal with you."

  She looked at him over her tea.

  "You drive to Los Angeles, and take me with you." Matt's heart skittered around in his chest as he hesitated just this side of safety, of ignorance. "While you go on to Chino and see Gary, I'll stay and see that neurologist at UCLA."

  Kerrin slowly lowered her mug of tea. "Why do you want to see a neurologist?"

  "I'll tell you...after I talk to him myself. Do we have a deal?"

  "If you have to see a doctor, Matt, you'd better go whether or not I visit Gary."

  Matt's voice was like steel. "Do we have a deal or don't we?"

  She looked properly scared, but that couldn't be helped. At least Matt was keeping this from his parents. They'd had enough grief from his situation. "All right," Kerrin said, "we have a deal."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The din in the mess hall was overpowering. The smell wasn't much better, redolent of over-boiled vegetables and tasteless potatoes. To Gary's right, where Willie used to sit, he now enjoyed the company of Hickey, who ate with slurps and guzzles. To his left was Souter, a weasel of a man who never met anybody's eye. Across the table was the new kid, not so new anymore. Not so new at all, in fact. He'd made a point of letting Gary know his curriculum vitae, which included an impressive list of the toughest prisons in the country.

  Now he regarded Gary across the table wit
h that look. It was a look worthy of the devil himself, shrewd and knowing, as though he were privy to the weakness that could make you his slave. The yellowish cast to his eyes had whitened in the two months Gary had been gone and now his dark pupils seemed to bore at one out of his ebony face.

  "You." Eldridge's voice, though low, carried like a church minister. "You aren't going to make it, man."

  Ignoring him, Gary set to work on his mealy potatoes. He was concentrating on his starches in an attempt to get his weight back up.

  "You got soft out there. What you've gone and done is turned straight." Eldridge said this as though it were a bitter scandal. "You're straight now, man, and straights can't make it in this place. You're going down."

  "What do you care?" Gary was provoked enough to reply. There was enough truth to the guy's words to raise a wall of anger inside. He wanted to be normal. He still wanted that so badly he could cry. But Eldridge was right. Normal people didn't live in prison.

  "I can take care of you." Eldridge's voice went soft. "Just like I took care of Willie."

  Gary's head shot up. On the surface this sounded like a simple request for sexual relations. Nothing so rare or surprising around here. But he suddenly wondered if Eldridge didn't mean something deeper, more sinister. Willie had ended up dead.

  Eldridge's eyes met his with a cool, cunning darkness.

  "Sullivan?" A screw appeared behind Gary's right shoulder. "If you're finished eating, you got a visitor."

  Gary regarded his half-eaten meal. "Who?"

  The screw checked a piece of paper. "Kerrin Horton."

  A part of Gary's soul that should have been dead leapt back to instant life. Kerrin. He'd tried to put her, and the rest of it, behind him, tried to pretend it had been nothing more than a dream. Life on the outside had to become a dream for a con. Any obligations he'd still owned regarding the bomber he'd discharged by putting on Marty's shoulders. The only thing Gary could do now was his time. He couldn't think beyond that or he'd go crazy. Seeing Kerrin was going to stir up a host of tormenting wants and desires. Heck, that's why he'd made her promise not to come!

  "I'm done eating," he told the screw anyway, rising from the bench.

  Kerrin was dressed in a professional style navy blue skirt suit. Whatever care she'd taken with her makeup couldn't disguise the dark circles under her eyes or the fact that, thin as he remembered her, she'd lost weight. She also looked every day of her twenty-seven years, and then some. Gary remembered how young she'd looked that day in June they'd first met here, how full of energetic self-righteousness and blissful innocence.

  Looked like he'd had a real good effect on the woman.

  But did Gary do what he should, and turn right around, go back into the lock-up? Ha! He didn't have the will to do anything that noble. Instead he sank into the seat opposite her at the counter, letting his eyes drink her in. Just looking at her was like...medicine; soothing, healing medicine. Touching her, though, would have been something he couldn't bear, so he didn't attempt it.

  Fortunately, she didn't try touching him either, but left her hands clutching the purse in her lap. Her eyes, however, glittered at him with a longing brilliance.

  "Are you mad I came?"

  Gary shook his head. This visit was going to set him back months. He needed to get back into prison culture, not dote on the past. But seeing her now ‑‑ how could he be mad?

  "You don't look too good," Kerrin observed.

  "Neither do you."

  She bit her lip. "They almost didn't let me see you, said you'd lost your visiting privileges. I had to speak to the warden."

  Kerrin and her red tape dancing. It was almost enough to make Gary smile. "Oh yeah, and what did he have to say for himself?"

  Sure enough, indignant fire lit her eyes. "He claimed you hadn't shown up for work in two months. Can you believe it, Gary? The nerve!"

  Oh yes, Gary could believe it. But watching Kerrin's innocent outrage only ended up making him smile after all.

  "As if you'd never been gone," Kerrin sputtered. "Well, I made him see the light pretty quick." She huffed and settled in her chair like a flustered hen.

  Gary couldn't stop smiling. Oh, he'd have to pay for these few stolen minutes with Kerrin. He'd pay in the renewed ravages of loneliness and useless aching, but right now he was going to enjoy what he could. "And Freedom," he heard himself asking, as though he had any business interesting himself in the outside world. "How's everything back in town?"

  "Oh, fine, I guess. You were right about Matt and Elaine, by the way. He shuts her up in his bedroom and claims they're working on some hush-hush project." Kerrin rolled her eyes in a fair imitation of her brother. "Right."

  The mention of hush-hush projects reminded Gary briefly of his own secret project in Freedom. But he took his qualms about the town's safety and put them to the side. He'd done what he could, passing the ball to Marty. Marty, like Kerrin, knew the red tape dance. He also knew everything that Gary did about the Holiday Bomber and the tunnel. He'd take care of the matter.

  "How's Elaine doing?" Gary asked instead.

  "Fine. She's moved into your house, thanks to all that money you left her. Oh, which reminds me." Kerrin stopped to dig around in her purse. "I brought something for you."

  Before Gary had a chance to stop her, she'd shoved a single sheet document across the counter at him. He just had time to catch a glimpse of STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION written in fancy script at the top before one of the screws swept down to snatch it away.

  "No signing or exchange of papers," he growled.

  "What ‑‑?" Kerrin's astonished gaze turned toward Gary. "What's the harm in a piece of paper?"

  Gary leaned back in the institutional metal chair, all the balm of Kerrin's presence dissolving into a more familiar helplessness. "They just like to control things." He glanced idly after the retreating guard. "What was it?"

  He turned back to find Kerrin regarding him with a peculiar expression. "It was an award," she said.

  "Oh." He supposed he ought to be excited about that, but suddenly nothing excited him any more. He didn't have anything to do with this woman's world, not really. He was inside. She was out. The two couldn't meet. What was he doing here, leading her on, trying to keep up the connection? It was futile, and it wasn't right.

  "Gary." She leaned over the table, reaching for him. He drew his arm back, away from her touch. "Gary," she repeated urgently. "We have to get you out of here. This place is killing you."

  A cool wind breezed over Gary's grave. Kerrin was repeating Eldridge's claim, almost to a tee. But Gary shook off his second death prediction in half an hour.

  "Kindly don't discuss 'getting me out,'" he advised her. "The screws aren't likely to take it well. And don't think you're going to be able to dance your way through this red tape. They have very good reason to keep me in here."

  "I'll call Marty today," Kerrin went on, blithely ignoring his request. Her eyes went vague and dreamy.

  "Oh, I'm sure Marty will be just brimming over with helpful suggestions," Gary snickered. He didn't bother telling Kerrin that Marty had yet to take care of officially reducing his prison sentence. There were still twenty years on his record.

  "And in the meantime," Kerrin continued, her gaze narrowing back on him, "we have to do something so that we can be together. I think we ought to get married."

  The words dropped like acid onto an already festering wound. "Get married," Gary repeated in disbelief.

  "It's the only viable alternative," Kerrin told him, "under the circumstances."

  "That is NO alternative."

  "I can move down here to Chino," she went on, ignoring him. "I'm sure I can find some kind of job."

  "No!" Gary slammed a palm on the counter and leaned over it. He wanted to snarl and bare his teeth at her, anything to make her admit what he really was, to make her see the truth. "No, Ms. Horton, we are not getting married."

  Her amber-jade eyes just looked at him in her uniqu
e way, the way that got her anything she wanted out of him. But not this, he wasn't going to stoop this low.

  "Gary, I don't need to point out the obvious, surely," she said. "We need to be together, physically."

  His voice came out as a harsh rasp. "The hell we do."

  "For one thing," Kerrin announced, "how else are we going to have children?"

  That did it. Children? He'd had as much of this nonsense as he could take. Children ‑‑ him? Children, with a con for a father? He pushed back from the chair and stood up, letting his eyes fall on her with all of the old, well-developed con implacability. "This conversation is over. This visit is over. And furthermore ‑‑ " He hardened his voice yet more. "You aren't coming back here again."

  "Gary ‑‑ "

  "If you do," he promised, "I won't agree to see you, so it'll just be a waste of time. Now get out."

  He'd finally gotten through. Gary could see that in her expression of shock and pain. Closing his eyes, he turned and headed for the guard at the door. He felt suddenly nauseous, and hoped he could make it through the door before he lost what little lunch he'd eaten. Married?! Where had his brain been when he'd taken on this woman? Somewhere below the region of his belt, no doubt. Married with children!

  Finally the screw managed to get the security door open and Gary made it through, never glancing back at Kerrin. The door closed after him with a final clang and he knew right then that both Kerrin and Eldridge had been right, but only half right. He wasn't going to die. He was already dead.

  ~~~

  Matt hated doctors. He hated the calm, sedate manner in which they talked. He hated the way information that could set a guy flat on his back in horror came out of their mouths with supreme ease.

  Dr. Flanigan was no more likable now than he'd been when Matt had first met him three years ago. He still kept an eerie silence as he studied your records, still rubbed his chin with quiet reserve as he stood scanning your latest X-ray. Matt sat in his wheelchair across the doctor's wide desk, silently steaming, quietly dying. Why couldn't the guy come out and say something, for Christ's sake?