by Jane Graves
The driver behind him hit his horn in several more long, droning honks. John acted as if he didn’t even hear them.
He looked to his right, down Wilmont Street, then shifted his gaze to Renee, his dark eyes boring right into her. She blinked. A tear coursed down her cheek, and she reached her fingertip up to brush it away before it could fall.
The driver behind them laid on his horn again. John spat out a sudden curse. He stepped on the gas, cut the wheel hard to the right, and swung his Explorer south onto Wilmont Street. Renee grabbed the door beside her as he stomped the accelerator. In seconds he’d blasted past the thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit, pushing the car to forty and beyond. Away from the police station.
“John?”
“Don’t say a word.”
“But—”
“Do you want to go to jail?”
“Of course not, but—”
“Then don’t say a word.”
Okay. No problem. She’d have her lips sewn shut and her vocal cords surgically removed if it meant not going to jail.
Not going to jail?
Renee couldn’t believe it. Had he actually reconsidered taking her in? If so, where were they going now?
John drove several miles down Wilmont Street before finally turning onto Porter Avenue and entering Tolosa Heights, an older part of town with aging but tidy storefronts, interspersed with an occasional fast-food restaurant or an office building.
Then he turned onto James Street, a residential area of brick houses that had been built in the 1950s. Even though night had fallen, streetlamps illuminated the calm, idyllic neighborhood. Trees in that flux state between autumn and winter held on to their few remaining leaves for dear life. An elderly couple, bundled against the cool night air, scuffed down the sidewalk, a Boston terrier trotting along beside them. It was a regular Norman Rockwell kind of place. Unfortunately, it was hard for Renee to appreciate it when her insides felt more like Pablo Picasso.
Where in the world was he taking her?
John slowed his car, then reached up to the visor over his head and pulled down an automatic garage-door opener. He swung his car into the driveway at 1530 James Street, a neat little redbrick house with white trim, black shutters, and a row of crape myrtles lining the sidewalk in front of the house.
He hit the button on the remote, and the garage door came up. He drove the Explorer into the garage, lowered the door again, and killed the engine. The silence was overwhelming.
“Where are we?” Renee asked.
“Home.”
“Whose home?”
“Mine.”
Renee couldn’t believe this. John had brought her to his house?
“Why are we here?”
He didn’t reply. He escorted her out of the car, unlocked the back door, and led her into the kitchen. The house was in a time warp, with the original cabinets and countertops from the 1950s, both in a screamy shade of yellow. He instructed her to kick off her muddy shoes, and he did the same. She’d barely gotten her feet out of them before he grabbed her arm and led her through the living room. She caught sight of a little bit of updating—refinished hardwood floors, mini-blinds, and an area rug or two—before he pulled her down the hall and straight into a bedroom. From the looks of it, it was his bedroom, sparsely furnished with a dresser and a bed topped by a solid navy blue spread.
He grabbed something off the dresser. Renee’s heart skipped when she saw what it was.
Handcuffs.
Before she knew what was happening, he’d snapped one of them onto her left wrist. The metal felt like ice.
“John. Please. No handcuffs. I promise I won’t try to get away.”
“Yes, you will. The first chance you get.”
He led her over to the bed. He pushed her down to a sitting position, then snapped the other handcuff onto one of the spindles of the headboard.
“Please, John. Not again. Not after being tied to that bed last night!”
“Fine. I’ll take you to jail. They have a very nice cot there with your name on it. You won’t even have to wear handcuffs.”
“Never mind. I don’t know what I was thinking. The handcuffs are lovely.”
“I knew you’d see it my way.” He started out of the room.
“Wait a minute! Where are you going? You can’t just leave me here!”
He left the room and closed the door behind him with a solid thunk.
“John!”
His footsteps faded down the hall. Then...silence.
Renee looked down at her cuffed wrist, then back at the door again.
What the hell had just happened here?
Chapter 9
John went straight to his kitchen, fished through the cabinet next to the refrigerator, and finally located his mega-size bottle of aspirin. He spilled four into his hand and downed them with a glass of water, trying to get rid of the headache that had been pounding his skull ever since he had pulled out of Winslow.
He collapsed on the sofa in his living room, trying to remember exactly what the penalty was for harboring a fugitive. Whatever it was, it undoubtedly took a quantum leap if the person doing the harboring was a cop. As he sat there, he tried really hard to convince himself that it wasn’t a damn fool thing he’d just done, but that was one hell of a hard sell.
His descent into bad judgment had started when he hadn’t restrained Renee at Harley’s when he’d had the chance. He’d sunk lower when he had called her by her phony name. Then he’d hit rock bottom when he made that right turn onto Wilmont Avenue instead of heading to the station.
He had no idea what he was going to do now. If anyone—anyone—found out he was keeping her here instead of turning her in, his career was toast. But right now, when he needed to be thinking about taking her to jail, all he could think about was what had happened between them out in the woods only a few hours ago. It had been an experience so hot, so intense, so downright unforgettable that senile dementia would have to set in before the memory would ever dim.
Then he thought of his father.
Without a doubt, Joseph DeMarco was watching him from the great beyond and regretting that the boundary between life and death kept him from collaring his wayward son and beating some good old-fashioned common sense into him. First he’d flipped out over that little scumbag’s not-guilty verdict, and now he was keeping an armed-robbery suspect handcuffed to his bed. In either case, the extenuating circumstances wouldn’t have swayed his father in the least.
I don’t want to hear your explanations, he’d heard his father say so many times while he was growing up. There are no explanations. There's only right and wrong.
He’d never bothered with an excessive number of words—he got right to the point, then right to the belt. John remembered the night when he was sixteen years old, when he’d violated his curfew because he’d helped a friend jump-start the dead battery in his car. Late was late, his father said, and John had caught hell for it.
His brothers, Alex and Dave, had found ways to cope with such a narrow definition of right and wrong—Dave by passive resistance and stoic tolerance of whatever punishment he received, and Alex by becoming just like his father so that he rarely got punished in the first place. John had never managed either of those things, spending his teenage years loving and hating his father all at the same time and wondering if the day would ever come when he could live up to his expectations.
So far, the answer was no.
A couple of times John almost decided to march back into his bedroom, grab Renee, and take her in. Then he’d think, What if she’s innocent? and immediately he’d counter with, That's not your decision to make.
No matter how many times he told himself to do his job and get it over with, he finally came to the conclusion that there was only one way he’d be able to take her to jail with a clear conscience. And that was if he was certain beyond a reasonable doubt that she was guilty.
She’d wanted to talk on the way out of that forest. To tell her s
tory. To plead her case.
Maybe it was time to let her do just that.
Renee took stock of her situation, tried to make some sense of it, then gave up. She had no idea what John was up to, but she did feel a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe he believed her, at least a little, or she would be sitting in the county jail right now.
She gazed around the room and saw a typical bachelor’s bedroom, with clothes scattered about, bed unmade, and furniture that looked like early flea market. The coating of dust on the dresser told her that housecleaning was at the bottom of his to-do list.
On his dresser she saw several framed photos. Three were studio shots, one of an older couple, one of an attractive, dark-headed woman of about thirty or thirty-five, and another a group picture that had to have been taken some time back because John was in it and he looked at least ten years younger. Surrounding him was a group of smiling people.
Family pictures.
Renee had the weirdest feeling as she looked at them, suddenly realizing that this man with whom she’d been at war for the past twenty-four hours had an actual life. A family. A history. She’d started to believe that maybe he’d just shown up on Earth one day a full-grown cop ready to save Tolosa, Texas, from the bad guys, but here was proof positive that he really was a human being.
She looked at the pictures for a long time, and she found herself wondering if he carried any in his wallet, too. Then she thought about what her own wallet contained, the one that undoubtedly had been confiscated by the manager of the Flamingo Motor Lodge. He might have found her eight hundred and fifty dollars there, but what he hadn’t found were photographs. There was that silly one of her and Paula they’d taken in a photo booth at the Texas State Fair a couple of years ago, but other than that, nothing. Wallet pictures were to remind you of your family when you couldn’t be with them, but did she want to be reminded of her family, which consisted only of her alcoholic mother? Not likely.
She leaned against a bed pillow, her arm uncomfortably restrained by the cuff, and sighed with exhaustion. That fifteen mile walk had really taken it out of her. Thoughts of escape filtered through her mind, but fatigue prevented her from forming them into a cohesive plan she could put into action. She’d caught John unaware last night. She wouldn’t be getting that kind of chance again.
Sleep. That was what she needed.
She’d almost drifted off when the bedroom door squeaked open. She sat up suddenly to see John’s broad-shouldered body filling the doorway.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She felt a grumble in her stomach and realized that the answer to that question was yes. “Yeah. A little.”
He unlocked her from the handcuff. “I heated up some soup. Come eat.”
Yes. Eating would be good. Unfortunately, it was all she could do to lift herself off the bed. She came to her feet, wobbling a little, every muscle screaming in agony.
“But first,” John said, “here are the ground rules. When you’re not locked up, you don’t leave my sight. If you do, I’m taking you in. If someone comes to my door, I’m locking you up in the bedroom. If you make any sound at all, I’m taking you in. If you pull any of the kind of crap you pulled while we were walking through those woods, I’m taking you in. Simply put, if someone finds out you’re here, I could lose my job, not to mention having charges brought against me for harboring a fugitive. I’ll do anything to make sure that doesn’t happen. Anything. Do you understand?”
Renee swallowed hard and nodded.
“And in the event that I do take you in and you mention any of this to anyone, I’ll deny every word of it, then do everything humanly possible to ensure that you’re convicted of that robbery. Do you understand that?”
By now Renee was so shaken by his no-nonsense tone that her heart was thudding like a bass drum. But it was okay. She could do rules. She could do captivity. She could eat worms and stand on her head in the comer if it meant staying out of jail.
“Yes. I understand.”
John gave her a curt nod, then led her to the kitchen. With his permission, she washed her hands at the sink, and then they sat down at the table, where he’d set out bowls of chicken noodle soup. It was absolutely surreal, the two of them sitting there and eating as if it were the most normal thing in the world, when Renee had never experienced anything more abnormal in her life. Nothing broke the silence except for spoons clinking against bowls. When they’d both finished, John took their bowls and deposited them in the sink. He returned to the table and sat down beside her again, one bare foot resting on a rung of the chair on the other side of him. This time he was carrying a pad of paper and a pen.
“Okay,” he said. “The night of the robbery. I want you to tell me your side of the story.”
Renee stared at him with surprise. “You...you actually want to hear what I have to say about it?”
He scowled at her. “I said I did, didn’t I?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“All the way out of the woods you wanted to talk, and now suddenly it’s a problem?”
“No! No problem. Absolutely no problem at all.” She took a deep breath and tried to look innocent, though she wasn’t really sure what innocent looked like to a cop.
She put her elbows on the table and tried to clear her weary brain to think, wishing she’d had some sleep before he decided it was interrogation time, since this might be her only chance to make him understand that she had no part in that robbery.
“Okay. That night I’d just found out that I’d gotten a promotion at the restaurant where I work. The owner made me the assistant manager. I’d wanted that job forever, and when I got it, I felt like celebrating. So I left a little early. I went home and called my friend Paula. But then I remembered that she’d gone to the Hilton for one of those weekend-for-two things with her no-good boyfriend, Tom. So I was stuck celebrating by myself.”
“What time did the robbery occur?”
“Apparently it was about ten-fifteen.”
“Which convenience store?”
“The Handi-Mart down on Griffin Street. It’s only a few blocks away from my apartment.”
John made a few notes. “And where were you when the robbery occurred?”
“Home.”
“Did you see anybody? Make a phone call? Anything?”
“No. I stayed in my apartment and watched some sappy old movie on TV”
“But then you left your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“What time did the cop pull you over?”
“A little after eleven.”
John wrote down the time. “What were you doing going out at eleven at night?”
Renee sighed. “Getting ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” He looked at her disbelievingly.
“Yes. Ice cream. I know it sounds dumb now, but that’s where I was going. Ben and Jerry were the only ones around I could celebrate with.”
“So you didn’t see anyone from the time you got home after work to the time you left again.”
“That’s right. Well, except for Steve Garroway.”
“Who’s he?”
“My ex-boyfriend. We broke up a couple of months ago.”
“Did he come to your apartment?”
“No. I saw him in the hall.”
“What time?”
“It was almost eleven.”
“Forty-five minutes after the robbery.”
“Yes. He was coming out of Tom’s apartment—”
“Tom?”
“Paula’s boyfriend. The one I told you about. Tom lives down the hall from me.”
“Does Steve live there, too?”
“No. He used to, but he moved out a couple of months ago. He still lives in the same apartment complex, though, but in a different building. Steve and Tom are cousins.”
“So what was he doing at Tom’s apartment?”
“Feeding his cat while Tom and Paula were gone. He does that sometimes.”
“Did yo
u speak to Steve when you saw him?”
“Yes.” Renee stared down at the table. “Or, rather, he spoke to me.”
“What about?”
“Do we really have to go into this?”
“No, Renee. We don’t have to go into anything. I can take you down to the police station and you can answer their questions instead.”
Renee’s stomach turned upside down at the mere mention of the police station. At that moment she’d have told John her entire life story if he had asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Steve is a very charming man. Smart, attractive, but he’s got a character flaw or two that I just can’t deal with.”
“Such as?”
“He’s got no ambition. He DJs at some of those clubs down on Colfax Street during the week when they don’t have live bands. He always told me that those jobs were just temporary until he could get a real job, only I figured out pretty soon that the DJ gig was his real job and he had no intention of ever doing anything else. And whatever money he gets hold of he gambles away, so there’s no way he’ll ever amount to anything.”
She hadn’t always felt that way about him. She and Steve and Paula and Tom used to get together on summer evenings at Paula’s apartment to watch the Rangers play, since Paula had a big-screen TV and made the best nachos on the planet. Renee wasn’t the biggest sports fan in the world, but those evenings had been a lot of fun. But then she’d realized that Tom was freeloading off Paula and cheating on her at the same time, and that Steve’s main goals in life were to play music and get laid. Things hadn’t been quite the same after that.
“Is that why you broke up?” John asked. “Because of what he did for a living?”
“Eventually it would have come to that.”
“But that wasn’t the reason?”
Renee paused, wondering why any of this was relevant. “No. The real reason we broke up was that after two months he thought I ought to sleep with him. I declined. Once he realized I was serious, he was gone.”