Annie on the Lam: A Christmas Caper

by Jennifer Archer

  Annie didn’t argue. She saw the weariness in his face, and knew that telling his story had cost him. She watched him check the front door lock and the window latches, then followed him into the bedroom where he checked those window latches, too.

  “Do you mind if I borrow a T-shirt to sleep in?” she asked.

  He pulled one with NYPD in bold letters across the front from his top dresser drawer.

  “I won’t be far,” he said as he turned to leave. “Just in the next room.”

  She read the thought that flashed through his eyes; he’d been in the next room when Emma Billings was terrorized, too.

  “Would you mind staying in here?” she asked, hugging the T-shirt against her to stop a sudden reoccurrence of the tremors. “I’m still kind of freaked out by everything. I’d rather not be alone.” She wasn’t pretending. To say the events of the night had rattled her nerves would be the grossest of understatements. She needed Joe close by as much as he seemed to need to be there.

  “Sure,” he said. “The floor is probably more comfortable than my lumpy sofa, anyway.”

  AT EIGHT THE NEXT MORNING, Joe sat at the edge of the bed next to Annie. He’d already been up for a while and had showered, pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt.

  Despite the hour, the room remained dark because of the cloud cover outside. Annie lay on her stomach beneath the covers, her face toward him, her hands under the pillow. A few minutes ago, the ringing telephone had not even caused her to stir.

  The apartment’s old radiator didn’t generate much heat. Joe thought she must be cold wearing only his T-shirt with nothing but a sheet and a blanket covering her impossibly long legs. He knew they were long because he’d opened an eye and peeked when she walked from the bathroom to the bed after changing into his shirt last night.

  Joe pushed a pale strand of hair off her cheek. Why did she have to be so damn pretty? And nice. Surprisingly enough, she was that, too. Nice and funny, rash and brave, smart and sweet. He drew a deep breath. She smelled good, too. He had wanted to crawl under the couch last night when she’d called him nice. Yeah, he was nice all right. A nice fat liar. “Annie, wake up,” Joe said.

  Sighing long and deep, she rolled onto her back. “Hmmm?”

  “Wake up. We need to get you out of here.”

  Annie frowned and opened her eyes. She pushed up onto her elbows. “What time is it?”

  “Just past eight. Dino called a second ago. He’s my cousin. He owns the cab. He said a couple of cops just paid him a visit. They were looking for a woman who caught a ride last night in a cab with plates that matched his.”

  “The one you were driving?”

  “Afraid so. I figure it’s you they’re looking for. I guess Landau got the tag number and called it in.”

  Her eyes flashed distress. “They might be the cops who are working with him.”

  “Could be.”

  She scooted farther up in the bed and pulled the blanket to her chin. “You think they’re coming here?”

  “That’d be my guess. Dino didn’t realize what’s up, obviously. He gave them my name and address. If they’re on the up-and-up, I doubt they’ll search the place, but just in case they are in on this thing with Landau, you might want to go out the back way.”

  He stood and she threw off the covers, climbed from the bed and hurried into the bathroom.

  While she dressed, Joe returned to the living room for her coat, purse and Landau’s briefcase, then took them into the bedroom. A minute later, Annie exited the bathroom, fully dressed and carrying her boots. He gathered his makeshift pallet off the floor and threw the bedding into his closet.

  Annie sat on the bed and tugged a fancy boot on over a plain wool sock. The socks surprised him. He had expected silk stockings. Or hoped for them, anyway.

  “It doesn’t make sense that Harry would’ve called the police, does it?” she asked. “Wouldn’t he be jeopardizing himself considering what I think I have in this briefcase?”

  “Or he’s hoping you haven’t had time to go through it and find anything to implicate him, so he’s not worried. And then there’s always the chance that you don’t have what you think you do.” Joe closed the closet door and looked back at her. “Look, I’ll just be straight with you. As it stands right now, you might be the person in trouble with the law more than Landau. No matter what you suspect of him, the fact is you broke into his office and stole his property.”

  Pausing to look up at him, her boot in her hand, Annie said, “I had probable cause.”

  “That only comes into play if you’re an officer of the law.”

  “Do you mean to tell me I committed a crime by taking evidence that will prove my boss is a criminal?”

  “That depends on a lot of variables. For instance, did Landau routinely allow you to look at business documents? Were you given free access to his office?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “The fact that Landau chased you to get them back indicates ‘no’. Did anyone else see you go in there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then at least it’s your word against his.”

  Her expression said what she didn’t admit: Before rushing into her boss’s office, she didn’t stop to consider the consequences. She acted on impulse, driven by the need to avenge her mother, Joe guessed.

  “That was nice of your cousin to call and warn me. Does he always go out of his way to help customers he doesn’t even know escape the law?”

  “It’s me he’s worried about, not you. He was afraid I might’ve gotten myself in some kind of bind.”

  “You do that often, do you?” She sent him a nervous smile.

  “Only for good-lookin’ women on the lam,” he teased. Crossing to the dresser, he slid open the bottom drawer, took out his .38 snub-nosed, slipped it into his jeans’ waistband. Then he shoved a strip clip carrying extra rounds into his pocket.

  “Good gawd. You don’t really think you’ll need that, do you?” Annie’s voice quivered.

  “Just a precaution.” He winked at her, hoping to ease her mind some. “Sorry there’s no back door. You’ll have to go out the window. I’ve already opened it.”

  She turned to the billowing curtain as if only then noticing it. “No wonder it’s freezing in here.” Shivering, Annie stood and slipped on Landau’s long fur coat as the knock Joe had anticipated sounded at the front door.

  He strode over to the open window, looked down and scanned the alley below for signs of anyone watching his place from the back. “Looks clear but stay low and keep your eyes open until you get to my car.” He turned to her and started toward the bedroom door. “At least I live on the first floor. You won’t have to jump this time.”

  “I guess that’s one consolation.”

  “Hang on!” he yelled toward the living room, when another louder knock sounded. He looked back at Annie and whispered, “Close the window behind you. Quietly.”

  “Wait a minute!” She blinked wide eyes at him. “What car are we talking about?”

  “It’s the Goat parked on the side street just off the alley.” Reaching into his jean pocket he pulled out a set of keys and tossed them at her.

  Annie caught them. “Goat?”

  “GTO. You can’t miss her. She’s old, midnight-blue and gorgeous.”

  Annie looked down at the keys then up at him. “I’m scared.”

  “You can do this.” He grinned at her, nodded, then passed through the door, closing it behind him. He walked barefoot across his living room.

  The fact that he recognized one of the officers waiting on the other side of his apartment door didn’t surprise him. You got to know a lot of cops after seventeen years on the force. “Hey, Willis.” Joe yawned and frowned. “This better be good. You woke me from the best damn sleep I’ve had in weeks.”

  “You look like you could use it. Been a long time, Brady.”

  “Yeah, it has.”

  Randy Willis shook Joe’s hand, then introduced his partner, Mike Prine.
Joe sensed tension radiating from Willis. That didn’t surprise him. They had worked together in the past; Willis was a part of the task force put together to take down Frank Reno. Though they had never been crossways with one another, Joe sensed from the start that Willis had no use for him. He had found out why soon enough. Joe had once targeted a fellow officer and friend of Willis’s suspected of dealing. Willis and the guy had gone through the academy together.

  “Strange time for a social call,” Joe said, then stepped back and motioned them in.

  “Wish I could say I was here for a beer,” Willis said. He and Prine moved past him and into the living room.

  “How’s it hangin’, pal?” Mac shrieked, and everyone laughed.

  Then Willis turned and stared at Joe with bland eyes. “Dino Corelli says you drive a cab for him.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. What about it?”

  Prine quoted a number. “Those your plates?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You pick up a woman last night sometime after midnight at the corner of 32nd and Park?”

  Joe shrugged. “I pick up lots of women. Can’t say I remember each and every one or where they get in.”

  “I think you’d remember this one.” Willis handed him a snapshot.

  Joe took it and pretended to study the photo of Annie. He guessed it had been shot at the Christmas party last night since she wore the same clothes she had on now.

  “Yeah, I do remember her.” He handed the picture back.

  “You remember where you took her?” Willis asked.

  “Let me think.” Joe walked into the kitchen, turned on the tap at the sink, splashed his face. Turning, he recited an address close by Annie’s apartment. “I’m pretty sure I dropped her off somewhere in that vicinity. She in some kind of trouble?”

  “You could say that.” Prine made his way over to the kitchen counter, pulled out a stool.

  Joe met him there on the opposite side. Too late, he spotted the beer bottles sitting between them on the countertop.

  Willis saw them, too. He came over, picked one up, met Joe’s gaze and set the bottle down again. “Have company last night?”

  “Matter of fact, I entertained a lady when I got off work.”

  Prine nodded toward the bedroom door. “She still here?”

  “Nah. I avoid morning-afters whenever possible.” Joe chuckled.

  “She give you that shiner?”

  He’d forgotten about his eye. Touching the tender spot above his left cheek, Joe winced and said sheepishly, “She was a bit of a wildcat.”

  Willis took another look at Annie’s photograph. “Wouldn’t be this little wildcat, would it?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Joe scoffed. “You think a class act like that would mess with me?”

  Willis held his gaze. “A neighbor close by that address you just gave me said she saw a woman drive away from the apartment building in a cab around one-thirty…maybe 2:00 a.m. Said she seemed to be in a hurry.”

  “Must’ve been a different cab. That woman in the picture was my last ride of the night. I dropped her off shortly before one and headed home.”

  “Then you won’t mind us taking a look around the place.” Willis started toward the bedroom door with his partner close behind.

  “What are you thinking?” Joe followed, huffing a laugh. “I got her tucked away in my bed?”

  “Never know.”

  “I’m flattered.” He held his breath as Willis opened the door. Relief sifted through him when he didn’t feel a cold draft, and he exhaled when he saw that the window was shut. “Excuse the mess,” he said. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tidied up.”

  RECLINED IN THE BACK SEAT of Joe’s GTO, Annie huddled beneath Harry’s coat with the briefcase and her purse on the floorboard beside her. She wished she and Joe had looked at the files last night. Until he had mentioned the possibility that she could’ve committed a crime, the thought had never crossed her mind. Now her urgency to find evidence against Harry increased tenfold, even if it didn’t lead to Reno.

  Joe’s apartment was off-limits now, as was her own. She had recognized the voice of one of the officers at his front door—the one Joe had called Willis—as that of one of the two men who had been in Harry’s office the day she hid in his closet. If the guy suspected Joe had helped her, they would be watching his place from now on.

  A car engine rumbled to life somewhere nearby. Annie resisted the temptation to look. She hoped the cops were leaving. She was fast turning into an icicle, and Harry’s coat offered little comfort. At least a foot of snow covered the ground, and frigid wind hissed through every crevice of Joe’s car.

  After at least ten more minutes of waiting, Annie’s teeth were chattering nonstop. She thought she might cry with relief when the front driver’s door opened and the overhead light blinked on briefly before the door closed again. Instead, she sneezed.

  “Holy shit,” Joe said. “If Willis and his partner didn’t hear that a mile away, they’re deaf.”

  “I couldn’t help it. I probably have pneumonia from waiting out here.” She started to sit up.

  “Stay down,” Joe snapped, without turning to look at her. “If they’re watching my place, they probably expect I’ll leave in the cab, but I still don’t want to take any chances.”

  Annie stared up at the back of his head. “Does your heater work?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not starting the engine for a while yet. Like I said, they could be hiding out somewhere close by watching for me to take off. Sorry I had to leave you out here. I didn’t think it would be smart to leave the apartment right after they did.” He paused, then added, “Looks like this snow’s not letting up.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Still shivering uncontrollably, Annie listened to the tap, tap, tap of Joe’s fingers against the steering wheel. “That man you called Willis? He’s one of the policemen I heard talking to Harry when I was hiding in his closet. I recognized his voice.”

  The tapping ceased. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “We need a safe place to stay until we can get you on a plane out of here. Any ideas?”

  “A plane?” Annie lifted her head from the seat. “Where am I going?”

  “Home.”

  “You mean Savannah?”

  “If Savannah’s home.”

  “I’m not going home.”

  “Why not? You’ll be safe there with your family.”

  “But if Harry finds out where I am and follows me there, then I’ll put my family in danger, too.”

  A horrible thought struck her. What if Harry talked to Reno about this? About her? Would he remember the name Macy? Or had he completely erased her mother’s death from his memory? At that moment, she prayed that he had. The thought that he might remember, that he might threaten her family in order to get to her, made Annie sick with apprehension.

  “Joe, there’s something I haven’t told you.” She sat up.

  “Annie, I told you to stay down!”

  She slumped in the seat again. As she explained her mother’s connection to Frank Reno, she expected him to express surprise. Or in light of his own ongoing investigation of the man, irritation that she hadn’t shared this bit of her family history last night. But Joe listened without comment.

  When she finished, he released a long breath. “This is your father’s problem, too. From way back. He should be in on this. Let him help you. Help each other.”

  “I know I have to tell him. I have to warn him. And I will. I’ll call him.”

  “My phone is dead. I didn’t think to charge it when we got in last night.”

  “Then we’ll find another one. But I don’t want to go to Georgia.” She remembered Aunt Tawney telling Tess that she couldn’t be counted on to follow through with anything. “I’m not turning this over to you and running away, Joe. I started it and I’m going to finish it.”

  “I�
�m not asking you to turn it over to me. We can stay in touch. You don’t have to be here to—”

  “I’m forty years old and I only found out recently the details surrounding my mother’s death. My father hid it from me. He built her up in my mind as this humming little June Cleaver wife and mother and I bought into it even though I think I knew deep down it wasn’t true…that she was unhappy. I’ve spent twenty-four years trying to live up to that image of her he created. To stay close to him and make up for what he lost by doing what I thought were all the right things that would make him proud.” She thought of the long hours she’d put in at the bank. “Turns out, what I was doing wasn’t what he wanted at all. So now I’m doing what I want to do. Sometimes I think he’s been afraid all these years I’d follow in her footsteps if I knew the truth.”

  After a long pause, Joe said, “Maybe he was right to worry about that.”

  “Don’t you start with me, too. I am not just like my mother, damn it.”

  Her own words startled her. Until now, she had not admitted to herself how much it bothered her for people to make that comparison. Before, she’d always thought they meant she was a nice, well-bred lady who did what was best for her family, who made them proud. Now she knew otherwise. They meant she was never satisfied, impetuous, flighty. Annie wasn’t sure which image bothered her more.

  “I didn’t get mixed up with Harry or Reno out of desperation or naïveté,” she told Joe. “I sought them out with a purpose in mind, knowing exactly what kind of men I might be dealing with.”

  “You don’t think your mother knew that, too?”

  Annie didn’t want to believe it. If her mother had known, that meant she’d willingly tried to go into business with a crook. “No,” Annie insisted. “I don’t. I think she needed help, she wanted out of her life with my father, and Reno came off as a friend to take advantage of that.”

  She told Joe about her conversation with Karla Wilshire, the woman who’d last seen her mother alive, about Reno taking Lydia’s money, their fight on the night of her death.

  “This isn’t the way to prove something to your dad, Annie.”