by Tami Hoag
She started the engine and put the car in gear. She would drive down to street level and call for a radio car from the well-lit area near the attendant’s booth.
A red dash light caught her eye, telling her to service the engine soon.
“Yeah. How about you service my engine soon?” she grumbled, easing the car out of the slot.
Her headlights hit the column. Nothing. No one. She tried to let go of the suspicion as she exhaled, but the tension wouldn’t dissipate.
She looked to the rearview mirror as she passed the column and caught a glimpse of something. Half the figure of a man standing near a sedan three cars away, back toward where she had been parked.
Nothing strange about a person in a parking garage. Every car had one sooner or later. Usually they opened doors and turned on lights. This one didn’t. He stepped out of sight. Liska abandoned the mirror and looked over her left shoulder. Her right hand rested on her gun on the seat beside her: a neat little Sig Sauer, sized to fit her small hand and still knock the shit out of a charging bull.
Where had he come from? She’d been watching and listening for another person to the point of straining her eyes and ears. No one had walked that far into the ramp after her without her knowing.
“Hey!”
The voice struck like a bullet. Liska snapped her head around to the right to see a man lunging toward the car, his head and upper body thrusting through the window frame.
“Hey!” he shouted again. His face was like something carved out of a stump with a penknife. Craggy, dirty. Yellow teeth. Filthy beard. Wild, dark eyes. “Gimme five dollars!”
Liska gunned the engine. The tires shrieked against the concrete. The man screamed in rage, rough hands grabbing hold of the front passenger’s seat by the stems of the headrest. Liska brought the Sig up and swung it toward his face.
“Get outta my car! I’m a cop!”
The man’s mouth tore open and a sound of rage roared up out of him on a foul breath.
Liska stabbed the Sig at him, half an inch from his mouth. “Let go, asshole!”
With one hand, she cranked the wheel left and hit the brakes, sending the Saturn into a skid. One of the back panels hit a minivan, and the drunk lost his grip on the headrest and was flung out the window.
Liska jammed the car into park, jumped out the door, and ran around the hood, leading with the Sig in a stiff-arm grip. The drunk lay crumpled near the back door of a filthy seventies Cadillac, still as death, eyes closed. Shit, that was all she needed—to have killed somebody. The parking ramp booth attendant ran up the ramp from the level below: a fat guy in a bad uniform with a too-small parka open to let his beer gut lead the way.
“Jeez, lady!” he exclaimed between gulps of air. It was twenty degrees and he was sweating like a racehorse, limp brown hair matted to his big head. His eyes bugged as he caught sight of the gun, and he raised his arms.
“I’m a cop,” Liska said. “He’s under arrest. Is there any security on duty?”
“Uh . . . he’s on a break.”
“Great. At the strip joint down the block, right?”
The attendant opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. Liska checked the drunk for signs of life. His breathing was regular and he had a good pulse. There was no blood she could see. She pulled a pair of handcuffs out of her coat pocket and snagged one of his wrists.
“You got a cell phone on you?” she asked, glancing at the attendant.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call nine-one-one. We need police and an ambulance.”
He looked ready to dive for cover. “Yes, ma’am. I thought you said you’re a cop.”
“Just do it.”
The drunk cracked open a bloodshot eye and tried to focus on her. “You’re a boy,” he declared. “Gimme five dollars.”
Liska glared at him. “You have the right to remain silent. Use it.”
She snapped the other cuff to the back door handle of the Caddie. Then she went back to the Saturn and dug a huge Maglite patrolman’s flashlight out of the glove compartment. The thing weighed three pounds and doubled as a club. The attendant was still standing with his hands up as she came out of the car.
Liska glared at him. “Why aren’t you calling?”
“I didn’t want to make any sudden moves.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
She snapped on the Maglite with her left hand, dug the Sig back out of her pocket, and started back up the ramp.
“Where are you going?” the attendant called.
“To look for the boogie man. Go make that call, Slick.”
IT WAS NEARLY ten o’clock by the time Liska pulled into her own driveway, exhausted and disgusted. More so when she saw Speed’s car blocking her way into the garage. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t actually get her car in the garage because of the accumulation of junk. It was a matter of principle.
She sat in the Saturn, freezing, the heater not able to compete against the cold rushing in the busted window. She’d found no trace of her phantom in the ramp. The uniforms had taken custody of the drunk—Edward Gedes—and followed the ambulance to HCMC, where they would kill time drinking coffee and flirting with the nurses in the ER as they waited for Edward to get checked out. There wasn’t much to charge him with unless they could prove he was the one who broke the window, and Liska didn’t see that happening. Her gut told her it hadn’t happened. Maybe Gedes had busted the window, then waited for her to come so he could try to jump through it like a trick pony, but she didn’t think so.
Nothing had been missing from the car, not that she kept anything of real value in it. No one had broken in to steal R.J.’s Jesse Ventura action figure. The glove compartment had not been ransacked. The stereo hadn’t been touched. She almost wished it had been. The theft of something would have made the broken window make sense. The only thing in the car that had been disturbed had been her junk mail. Someone willing to break into a car in a public garage now had her home address.
The phantom in the shadows.
Why her car, of all the cars in the ramp?
She gathered her stuff and trudged to the house. No one noticed her entrance. A battle was being waged in her living room. In one corner a tent had been fashioned from a blanket. Dining room chairs had been dragged in and overturned to make a fort near the Christmas tree. Their faces streaked with camo paint, the boys were running around in their pajamas, waving plastic light sabers, making enough noise to wake the dead. Her ex-husband was crouched behind the recliner, wearing a bathrobe over his clothes, a black rag tied around his head, a glow-in-the-dark samurai sword in hand.
“Welcome home, Mom,” Liska said, slinging her purse onto the dining room table. “Did you have a good day? Not really,” she answered herself. “But thank you for asking. I’m just glad to be home where everything is peaceful and orderly, and I feel loved by all.”
Kyle reacted first, stopping in his tracks, the grin dropping off his face as he looked from his mother to his father and back. Two years older than R.J., he remembered the hostilities at the end of the marriage, and was sensitive to the tension that remained between his parents.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, glancing down at the toy in his hand and setting it aside, as if he were embarrassed to be caught having fun. He had his father’s heartbreaker looks, but a seriousness lacking in Speed’s genes.
“Hi, Big Guy.” Liska went to him, brushed his hair back, and kissed his forehead. Kyle looked at the floor.
R.J. squealed like a wild pig and ran around in circles, swinging his saber with reckless abandon, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge his mother’s presence. Anger burned a familiar path through her as she turned her gaze on her ex.
“Hey, Speed, fancy meeting you here. Again. You’re almost acting like you’re a father or something. Where’s Heather?”
“I sent her home,” he said, straightening out of his crouch. “Why should you pay a sitter if you don’t have to? I had some time tonight.”
/> “That’s very considerate of you to think of my financial situation,” she said, wanting badly to add, especially considering you never bother to contribute to the cause. But she bit her tongue for the boys’ sake.
“It’s way past bedtime, boys,” she said, playing the bad guy again and resenting Speed for it. “Go wash your faces and brush your teeth, please.”
Kyle started from the room. R.J. stared at her with big eyes, then gave a bloodcurdling shout and leapt in the air, twisting and flailing his arms and legs in his best Ninja impersonation.
Kyle went and grabbed his arm. “Knock it off, Rockhead,” he said in his sternest voice. Liska didn’t reprimand him.
“I realize you made a career of truancy,” she told Speed after the boys had left the room, “but your sons actually attend school. They need a certain amount of sleep for that.”
“One late night won’t kill them, Nikki.”
“No.”
But why did you have to pick tonight? she wanted to say, except she was afraid she might burst into tears if she did. She was too worn out for Speed tonight, and Kovac’s burger was a long time past. She rubbed her face with her hands and walked away from him, back through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she began rummaging through one of the lower cupboards.
She could see Speed strike a pose in the doorway. He had shed the bathrobe, revealing a black Aerosmith T-shirt stretched taut across his chest and clinging to his flat belly. The short sleeves strained around upper arms thick with well-cut muscle. He looked as if he’d been pumping iron in a serious way. He pulled the rag off his head and ruffled his short hair, making it stand up in tufts.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
“Since when do we talk about anything?”
He shrugged. “So we start tonight.”
“I don’t want to start anything tonight.”
She pulled a box of translucent blue trash bags from the cupboard and scrutinized one for size and durability. “It’ll do for now.”
“Do for what?”
“Someone busted the side window out of my car tonight. Makes for a drafty ride doing sixty on the freeway.”
“Goddamn junkies,” he muttered. “They steal anything?”
“Nope.”
“They just broke the window?”
“And rummaged through the junk mail on the front seat.”
“You’re sure it was junk? No credit card statements? No cell phone bill? Nothing like that?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Didn’t touch the stereo.”
“What’s to touch? I drive a Saturn. It’s got a radio. Who would want it?”
Speed frowned. “I don’t like that they didn’t take anything.”
“Me neither.” She pulled the junk drawer open and dug around for a roll of duct tape. “I wish they had taken the car. The engine light is coming on. With my luck, it has some terminal illness.”
“You working anything that someone might want to find you?” he asked, coming to the counter where she stood compulsively folding the trash bag into the smallest square possible.
Liska thought of Neon Man, and Cal Springer, and IA, and the uniform Ogden and two dead cops. She shook her head, looking down at the bag. “Nothing special.”
He’s standing too close, she thought. I don’t want him that close. Not tonight.
“I hear the ME ruled on your IA guy,” he said. “Accident, huh?”
Liska shrugged a little and fingered a frayed piece of tape. “The insurance pays out that way.”
“You think something else?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. Leonard says it’s closed.”
“It matters if you’re going to keep digging on it. What are you thinking? That he bought it because of an investigation? You think some rotten cop lynched him? That’s pretty fucking out there, Nikki. What could be going on in the Minneapolis PD that would push someone that far off the ledge?”
“I don’t think anything,” she said impatiently. “And I’m not in on what goes on in IA. It doesn’t matter anyway. The lieutenant signed off on it.”
“So it’s closed,” he said. “You’re out of it. That’s gotta be a relief.”
“Sure,” she said without conviction. She could feel him watching her, waiting for what she wasn’t saying.
“Nikki . . .”
There was frustration in his voice, and maybe a little longing. Maybe more than a little. Or maybe she just wanted to think it. He touched her chin and she looked up at him, holding her breath. Many things about their relationship had turned sour in the last few years, but never the physical aspect. He had always—and to her eternal despair, probably would always—excited her physically. Chemistry didn’t care about jealousies or rivalries or infidelities.
“Are you guys gonna kiss?”
“R.J.,” Liska said as Speed exhaled heavily. “You don’t ask people questions like that. It’s rude.”
“So?”
He hadn’t quite rubbed all the camo paint off his face. She bent down and kissed a smudge on his forehead.
“So I love you,” she said. “Time for bed.”
“But Dad—”
“Was just leaving,” she said, giving Speed a pointed look.
R.J. scowled. “You always make him leave.”
“Come on, Rocket,” Speed said, scooping R.J. up and over his shoulder. “I’ll tuck you in and tell you about the time I busted Big Ass Baxter.”
Liska watched them leave the kitchen, part of her wanting to follow. Not because she wanted to give any impression they had a normal family life. She wanted to follow because she was jealous of the rapport Speed had with the boys. That didn’t seem a healthy thing to indulge. No more than her need for her ex-husband’s touch.
She picked up the duct tape and garbage bag and went out the kitchen door, glad for the slap of cold night air.
“How stylish,” she muttered as she taped the bag over the broken-out window. Nothing like a little duct tape to class up a car.
The neighborhood was quiet. The night was clear and crisp with a sky full of more stars than she could see from this spot in the city. Her neighbor on this side of her house worked for United Way. On the other side was a couple who’d been with 3M for a collective thirty-some years. None of them had ever seen a dead guy hanging from a rafter. Standing in the middle of the neighborhood, Liska felt suddenly alone, set apart from normal humans by the experiences she had had and would have. Set apart tonight by violence that had been directed at her.
Someone she didn’t know and couldn’t identify had her address.
She looked down the driveway to the street. Any car going by . . . Any pair of eyes watching from the dark . . . Any strange sound outside her bedroom window . . .
Vulnerability was not a familiar or welcome feeling. It went through her and over her like the chill of an illness. The anticipation of fear. A kind of weakness. A sense of powerlessness. A sense of isolation.
She wanted to kick someone.
“Alone at last.”
Liska startled and spun around, voice recognition coming a split second before she came face-to-face with the source. “Dammit, Speed! How have you lived this long?”
“I don’t know. I expected you to kill me a long time ago.” His grin lit up the dark.
“You’re lucky I wasn’t holding a gun,” she said.
“I’m probably still lucky you’re not holding a gun.”
He stuffed his hands in the pockets of the old jacket he was wearing and dug out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. He fired one up.
“I wouldn’t shoot you now,” she said. “I want this night to be over. If I shot you, I’d have to be up till dawn with the arrest and the booking and all of that. It’s not worth it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m tired, Speed. Can you say goodnight now?”
He took a long pull on the cigarette and exhaled, looking down the driveway to the street as a dark no
ndescript sedan crept past and kept going. Liska watched it out of the corner of her eye and pulled her coat tighter around her.
“You’ll call someone and get that window fixed tomorrow?” Speed said, flaking ash off his cigarette as he gestured toward her car.
“I’m on the phone mentally, even as we speak.”
“’Cause that garbage bag just screams white trash.”
“Thanks for your concern over my safety.”
“You’re the mother of my children.”
“That speaks volumes about my judgment, doesn’t it?”
“Hey.” He looked straight at her and flicked the cigarette on the snow. “Don’t say you regret the boys.”
Liska met his gaze. “I don’t regret the boys. Not for half a heartbeat.”
“But you regret us.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked wearily. “It seems a little late for remorse and bargaining, Speed. Our marriage has been dead a very long time.”
Speed pulled his keys out of his pocket and sorted out the one he needed. “Regret’s a waste of time. Live for the moment. You never know which one will be your last.”
“And on that cheery note . . .” Liska turned toward the house.
He caught her by the arm as she went past. He was thinking he might try to kiss her. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in the tension of his body. But she didn’t want it, and she supposed he could see and feel that too.
“Take care, Nikki,” he said softly. “You’re too brave for your own good.”
“I’m what I need to be,” she said.
He found a sad smile for that and let go of her. “Yeah. Too bad I was never what you needed.”
“I wouldn’t say never,” she said, but she didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on the ground.
She didn’t watch him walk away, but she watched him back out the driveway and turn onto the street. She stood there until the red glow of his taillights was a faded memory. And then she was alone again, she thought as she stared at her patchwork car window. Or so she hoped.