The Step Between

by Penny Mickelbury

  “What!” she yelled at the third knock—which now, in her mind, translated as pounding—at the door. “Either come in or go away but stop that damn pounding!”

  The door opened and Warren Forchette strolled in, wearing his trademark Xavier University T-shirt and jeans, which fit him like sculpture, and, in deference to the climate, a navy blue wool blazer and a pair of well-worn Doc Martens instead of Converse All Stars on his feet. She eyed him in speechless amazement while still attempting to do in a matter of moments what evolution had required centuries to accomplish: to walk upright. She placed both hands at the small of her back and pushed.

  “Well, hi, Warren, how nice to see you,” he trilled in a false falsetto. “Hello, C.A. It’s nice to see you, too,” he replied to himself in an exaggeration of his normally purring bass.

  She grinned and shook her head and opened her arms to him. He wrapped her in a warm, tight embrace, which she reveled in until the pain in her back became too uncomfortable and she emitted a slight groan. He released her immediately, holding her at arm’s length.

  “Are you injured?”

  She shook her head. “No, Warren, my back hurts because I slept on the sofa last night.”

  He looked over at the love seat. “You slept on that?” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “You deserve to have a backache. Get down on the floor.”

  “What?”

  “Lay down on the floor on your stomach, C.A.,” he said as if speaking to a slow two-year-old, removing his jacket and extending an exaggeratedly polite “thank you” as she complied. He knelt down, straddling her, his knees at her hips, and began massaging her lower back. He was a powerfully built man and all the strength of his hands and arms went into relieving the tension in the muscles of her lower back and spinal column, not all of it caused by her sleepless night on the too-short sofa.

  She lay there, unable to speak and instinctively unwilling to release the sounds of relief his ministrations were producing. The opening of the door proved her decision to be a wise one. “What the hell!” said a startled Jake, as he took in the sight before him. Then, recognizing it for what it was rather than what it could have been, exclaimed, “Forchette! What the hell are you doing here?”

  Warren repeated his greeting routine: “Hello, Warren, how nice to see you,” he said, imitating Jake’s growl. “Hey, Jake, it’s good to see you, too.” And he continued his massage, to Carole Ann’s delight. But finally he stopped and sat back on his haunches and looked up at Jake. “I called the both of you until two o’clock this morning. C.A. wasn’t home, you weren’t home, Grace wasn’t home at your house, I got worried, went to the airport, got on a plane, and here I am. You both look like warmed-over death on a rusty plate. Why would that be?”

  There was silence while both Carole Ann and Jake pondered how to tell the story without taking too long and having it sound as bizarre to an outsider as it felt to them. They were saved from having to fashion an immediate response by a rapid knocking on the door, which swung open to admit Paolo Petrocelli.

  “Good morning, all,” he chirped with the brightness of one struggling to remain alert, offering a nod of greeting all around with a slight hesitation at Warren, and heading to the coffeepot. “If you think you can stand the suspense, coffee will be ready and breakfast will be served in a Philadelphia minute.” He raised and dangled a bulging brown bag.

  Both Carole Ann and Warren knew it was time for her to get up. Though both had ignored it, neither had failed to take in Paolo’s startled glance at the scene on the floor. Warren got to his feet and Carole Ann rolled over onto her back, then sat up. Warren extended his hands to her and pulled her to her feet, holding her close for a moment to steady her. She introduced Paolo and Warren to each other and they exchanged a brisk, brief handshake before Warren resumed his position at Carole Ann’s side—and his massaging of her neck—and Paolo resumed his duties at the coffee table.

  “I know you believe in the early bird and all that, Paolo, but this is pushing it even for you,” she said in a joking tone, her voice still containing enough of the pain she felt to not be totally convincing.

  “You really did get hurt yesterday,” he said accusingly.

  “What happened yesterday?” Warren asked quickly.

  “Can we tell you later, Warren, please?” she pleaded. “It has to do with why Jake and I both slept here last night and why Paolo’s here with breakfast and it’s a long story and you need to hear the whole thing.”

  “Not just the part about her being shot at,” Paolo injected and Carole Ann threw him a truly mean look as she felt Warren stiffen beside her.

  She changed the subject, and the tone. “What’s for breakfast? And how dare you be so chipper.”

  “Pears and bananas and Nova lox and cream cheese and bagels and fresh grapefruit juice. And I can afford to be chipper. I spent the night with Bob.”

  “Oooohhh!” she said lasciviously. “I was just thinking to myself yesterday what a fine-looking specimen Bob is, and here you snatch him right from under my nose.”

  It was pure high camp, not a side of herself she often displayed and which most acquainted with her would have doubted her capable of producing. The three men laughed out loud, all of them releasing the tension they’d been holding. “You should sleep on the couch more often. Pain does wonderful things for your disposition,” Paolo said.

  “You only wish my disposition had improved,” she said ominously with a Jake-like growl. Then she shifted her tone and her attention back to Warren. “How did you get here from the airport?” she asked, her voice muffled because her chin was pressed into her chest. She was standing with her back to Warren and her head bent and he was massaging her neck and shoulders.

  “I hope you didn’t take a taxi all the way out here,” Jake said, wrinkling his brow. “One of those guys with larceny in his heart could charge you a small fortune!”

  Warren laughed. Having attended Howard University’s law school, he was familiar with D.C.’s notoriously primitive taxi system. Instituted to benefit members of Congress who traversed the Capitol Hill-downtown areas, taxis did not have meters, but charged by zones. Naturally, the cheapest zones were those between Capitol Hill and downtown, and the meter, which didn’t exist, obviously couldn’t run while the taxi was stuck in traffic, which was the norm on a trip from Capitol Hill to downtown. “I took the airport bus to the Convention Center, then a taxi out here. After we agreed on the fare.”

  Carole Ann chose that moment to fully straighten herself and released a loud groan at the effort of accomplishment.

  “You don’t look much better,” Paolo said to Jake. “You don’t even have a tiny couch in your office and you look like you slept on one.”

  “I slept on the one downstairs in the lounge, and it ain’t tiny but it sure as hell is hard!”

  Carole Ann managed a real laugh as they grouped themselves around the coffee table and actually experienced a few moments of relaxation as they enjoyed the fresh-brewed coffee and fresh fruit and the paper-thin salmon, which Paolo said he got at the Jefferson Hotel.

  “I thought I recognized this lox. You have to go to New York to get better. What in the world were you doing all the way downtown at this time of the morning?” Carole Ann queried, talking with a full mouth and without apology.

  “Will you tell me first what you meant when you said your disposition really hadn’t changed?” He’d asked the question casually and quietly but it was loaded nonetheless.

  She nodded. “Sure. I spent the night reaching the conclusion that John D. MacDonald and Jimmy Sanderson can’t possibly be the same person. Try this on for size: Our man John is Richard Islington’s Jack . . . personal associate and server of coffee on occasion. Recall the descriptions we’ve had of an approximately forty-year-old white male, tall, thin, driving a white Range Rover? Fits ‘Jack,’ and that’s a common derivative of John. The only description of Jimmy Sanderson we have comes from Jake and Beth Childress: shorter and younger than MacDonald.
Ergo they can’t be the same person. But I think they know each other.”

  Paolo nodded, his eyes locked on hers. “Not the same person, but as close as brothers. To be precise, stepbrothers. John David MacDonald and James Daniel Sanderson. Both born in Toronto, Canada, John in 1965, James in 1975.” And he explained that he and Bob had spent the night at the FBI lab in the J. Edgar Hoover Building downtown running the prints gathered by Jocelyn in Sanderson’s apartment.

  Jake frowned. “I thought you were getting them run at the D.C. lab.”

  Paolo shook his head. “When we got there, they were butt-deep in something to do with a phony ballistics report that was about to surface in the newspaper and all the techs were working triple overtime to clean up the mess so the chief wouldn’t look like a complete idiot. Again. So, I took a chance that I could call in a favor from a friend at the Bureau. That and the promise of goodies down the road let us bring home the bacon. Bob’s downstairs with the grocery list. Seems look like every set of prints that Jocelyn picked up scored a hit. Talk about a den of thieves!”

  Jake slapped the table. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “I’ll settle for the condensed version,” Warren said with exaggerated politeness, and sat back to listen as he was given anything but. And at the end of the recitation, he agreed that the mess they were in was as murky as one of the bayous and swamps he called home. He expressed a willingness to “stick around, stick my nose in, get in the way. And tonight, C.A., I can take you to your shooting lesson.”

  10

  CHILDREN WHO GROW UP ON the bayou, warren explained to her, learned how to fish and shoot in the same day. He compared it to native Angelenos learning to walk and drive and surf in the same week; and when offered that explanation, she understood how and why he didn’t share her revulsion for firearms. But she was not ready or willing to embrace a gun as her new best friend.

  Sergeant Betty Carpenter was Jocelyn Anderson’s exact opposite. Where Jocelyn was quiet and reserved, Betty was the essence of effervescence. Where Jocelyn, nicknamed Chameleon, could blend in, Betty was a standout in every way. She reminded Carole Ann of the singer/actress Queen Latifah: Betty was a big, gorgeous woman with enough personality for half a dozen people. And she could shoot a gun like she was born with it in her hand. But she not only did not belittle Carole Ann for her reticence, the gun expert actually shared the belief that America would have been better off without the bearing of arms as a Constitutional right. Her only objective, she made clear, was to teach Carole Ann how to use the weapon efficiently and effectively and safely. And, she stressed, she could accomplish that task only if Carole Ann was prepared to learn.

  Jake had provided her with three of his weapons: two revolvers and a semiautomatic. She could decide which was more comfortable. She immediately rejected the Smith & Wesson .357 as too large for her hand and spent the next hour alternating between the other two, a Smith & Wesson Ladysmith .38 and a Beretta. After another hour, she could fire both weapons without first closing her eyes, and it was agreed that for the next two days Warren would work with her at the private firing range in Waldorf and, when he returned home, she would return to the academy range and work with Betty.

  “I wish you’d called me,” Warren said to her later that evening, after they’d eaten dinner and washed the dishes and were enjoying one of their favorite snacks: ice-cold beer—her favorite, brought by Warren from New Orleans—and popcorn. “I wish you felt you could have told me all this was going on.”

  “Actually, I did call you once,” she said quietly. “You weren’t home.”

  He sat with that thought for a long moment. “Then I wish you’d left a message. ‘Warren, call me as soon as you get home.’ I would have . . .” He stopped himself, aware that he sounded recriminating. “How are you getting through all this?”

  She looked at him, looked into his eyes and held them, seeking to know if he was asking what she needed him to ask, deciding that he was. “They don’t know I’m not like them, Warren. That I don’t think like them, don’t react like they do, don’t feel about these events the way they feel them and feel about them. They forget I’m not a cop, Warren, and I never forget that.”

  “Couldn’t you tell them how you feel?”

  She nodded and smiled a little. “Oh, sure. And they’d listen and try to understand. Jake would, I know. And I think Paolo would. And Patty would. But I don’t think they’d ever really understand. I’m frightened almost all of the time now, Warren. I’m ready to quit. I don’t ever want to think and feel like a cop. I don’t ever want to grow accustomed to living with fear. I don’t want to know how to kill someone with a gun. I’m a lawyer, Warren. I’m not a cop.”

  They were seated at opposite ends of the couch in the den, facing each other. The couch where Warren had slept during the Christmas holidays and which he had pronounced every bit as comfortable as a bed. She and Al had had it specially made; it was deep and long, with high arms and a high back and designed to accommodate the special body needs of long people. There was a table at each end of the couch, providing ready and arm’s-length access to beer and popcorn. The wide-screen television was across the room, tuned to CNN with no volume. Their focus was each other.

  “To tell you the truth, C.A., given what you’ve been through in the last few weeks, I’m amazed that you’re still in one piece. And I think that means you’re in better shape than you think you are.”

  “Explain.”

  He sat up straight, turned around, and put his feet on the floor. Then he slid himself down the sofa toward her, and looked directly into her eyes. “You can’t undo what has happened to you. Nobody can, including your therapist. And you’d be a fool not to have been frightened going after Grace Graham like you did. And nobody but a psychopath enjoys killing people. So don’t think for one second, C.A., that there’s something wrong with you because you experience fear, or that you experience it in a way that the rest of us don’t. Because I’ll tell you something, kiddo: I’ll bet you that not a single one of your cop buddies has ever endured what you have, in the way you have. Oh, yeah, Jake got shot and he’ll never, as long as he lives, forget what that felt like. But he wasn’t shot by somebody he’d known and loved all his life, looking him square in the eye when the trigger was pulled. You were. Somebody you loved tried to kill you.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and coursed down her face, and she allowed them to fall. She sniffled but did not otherwise move or speak, and he took that as permission to continue.

  “And Paolo may have rescued dozens of hostages, but he’s never been one and therefore doesn’t know that terror firsthand, so Grace is the only one who can feel that feeling with you. But don’t underestimate what he knows about how you and Grace feel. And I doubt that any of them, cops though they are, has ever killed another human being. Good cops, C.A., work like hell to avoid taking a life, and they don’t take what you did lightly.”

  Her tears were falling steadily now, as was mucus from her nose, and he got up and strode quickly from the room, returning in seconds with a box of tissues. He offered it to her and she pulled out a handful. She wiped and blew until she’d regained some measure of control.

  “I’m almost finished. Can you stand to hear just a few sentences more?”

  “Oh, don’t stop now,” she said, lighthearted sarcasm only partially covered by a sob.

  “Because hiding their feelings is something cops do better than even you do,” he said, and noticed with a relieved grin that she almost succeeded in shooting him one of her famed evil eyes, “they don’t know how to tell you they understand why you’re afraid to learn how to shoot a gun. But I believe they do understand, C.A., and I wouldn’t bullshit you about something this serious. I also believe they want you to know how to use a gun as a means of protection, not as a tool for death. Jake would die if something happened to you. So would Tommy. They want you to be able to save yourself if ever again you need to. That’s all.”

  He resumed
his position of comfort on the end of the couch opposite her, back against the arm, legs stretched out before him, though not touching hers, which were pulled up into her chest. Her head was resting on her knees, but she still was watching him unflinchingly.

  She moved suddenly, swinging her legs around and down, and she stood up quickly, drained her beer, and put the bottle on the table. “I’m going to bed. What time do you want to go shoot those damn guns tomorrow?”

  “Not too early,” he said, releasing the yawn he’d been stifling for the past fifteen minutes. “It is Saturday, after all. And if I may make a tiny suggestion? If you plan to make sleeping at the office a habit, get a real couch.”

  She laughed and came to stand beside him, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Thank you, Warren,” she said in an almost whisper, and left the room, leaving the whispering silence in her wake.

  By the time she drove Warren to the airport on Sunday night, Carole Ann had talked through the entire OnShore/Seaboard/Islington mess with him, and had become proficient with both the revolver and the semiautomatic, having a slight preference for the latter. She had evolved to the point that all of her rounds actually pierced the target, though few of them would have resulted in a bullet through the heart. Which was fine with her. She was grateful for Warren’s presence and assistance, and she told him as much. She would not have been able to grow as comfortable with the gun or with using it had it not been for him. He disagreed; he told her that she could excel at whatever she tackled. She shrugged.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” she replied off-handedly; the gun business had taken a backseat in her consciousness to her belief that she knew who was responsible for the turmoil surrounding them, if not exactly why . . . and she thought she knew at least some of the why.