by April Smith
“Let’s not get off on Margaret.”
“She said you were applying for a job in Fresno.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Don’t you ever think of getting out?”
“Are you?”
“How the hell do I know?” Then, viciously, “The Black Widow. Drove the Hat to death. I’m telling you, she’s death.”
“Like at this point I care.”
He stood up so resolutely that tears sprang to my eyes and I cried out, “Don’t go,” like a child.
“Pride is important to me,” he said sternly. “You keep beating me up.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“In front of my supervisor, my friends—I don’t know, is this a thing you have for men?”
“I love men. Is this a thing you have about women?”
He shook his head and laughed bitterly. Another impasse.
“Pride is important to me, too.” I took a step forward. “I’m sorry about the thing in the bar, I was just so hurt—”
“You’ve got to leave me alone,” he said almost desperately.
“I want safe passage, too.”
I was pleading.
“Go ahead.”
Then I didn’t know how to say it. “You’ve changed since we started going out, but especially the past few weeks. Something’s different, something’s weighing on you and it’s not just work. I never know what you’re really thinking. You’re always holding back.”
“That’s what my second ex-wife used to say.”
“Why?” I replied stupidly. “Is this a pattern?”
I wanted to prolong it, know more, have another chance—I did not want to be discarded like the others—but he was picking up his keys.
“Do me a favor. Whatever you think of her, don’t blame Sylvia Oberbeck.”
“Sylvia?”
“Sylvia’s going through a bad time.”
He should not have said her name. He should not have defended her, out loud, in my house, at that moment, to me. Like some rajah he seemed to believe all the wives and girlfriends should know the score and be grateful to be poked by him.
“What do you see in that dumb blonde jock?”
“What is it with blonde? They all want to be blonde. Can’t decide which half?” He gripped the hair at the side of my head and for a moment we were face-to-face. “Dark is good, baby. Mamacita.”
Then he let go. I was beyond furious.
“My grandfather was right.”
“The racist was right?”
“Yeah, he was right when he said, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re mixed race. You can pass for white, so pass. Because when you get into a fight, the first thing your husband’s going to say is, he’ll call you a filthy little spic.’”
Andrew looked hurt. “I’m not calling you a spic,” he protested. “I never use that word. That’s not what I said—”
“You’re right. You should leave.”
“I’m leaving.” He was gentle now, and soothing, as he had been with the distraught bank tellers. I had seen more sides of him than a carousel. “Just so we’re straight.”
“Straight on what?”
“What we have … is a working relationship.”
“Right,” I snorted. “I wish. Unfortunately, the Santa Monica kidnapping is not the only thing we’re working on.”
He gestured, confused. What was I talking about?
“Mission Impossible,” I replied with contempt, as if he were the dumbest fuck on earth.
“That will go away. Barry already forgot about it.”
“Not on our end. I officially reopened the case and got creamed for it, by the way.”
He had stepped toward me and we were facing each other again, only a few feet away. His hips were square, his hands hung down, deceptively relaxed.
“Why did you reopen the case?”
“To help you out, you stupid shit! You say you’re in trouble with your boss, the chief of police made it a priority, so here is me, going out of my way to go back to a case that I’m not even on anymore, in order to do something nice, because you were so upset—”
“I was pissed.” His fingers flexed.
“Well, maybe we’ll know something. Close it out and be done.” I crossed my arms. “The lab is doing the DNA.”
“On what?”
“The ski mask they found.” God, when would he get it? “Maybe there’s dried saliva on the mask. Hello?”
He grabbed my collar and held it, tight enough to choke, and fairly lifted me off the ground and put his rock hard knee against my pubic bone and pummeled up and down.
“What are you doing to me?” he said.
I gasped. It was like his knee was penetrating to my bladder.
“Get out of my life. Get out of my business. Stay away from my pussy.”
He let me go, and I kicked him.
“You bitch!”
He backed up, clutching his groin.
“Get out of here!” I roared, but instead he sprang forward and grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the deep rose coffee table. The edge went into my back and my head snapped. I kept on kicking, and he backed off and was groping himself and spinning around and saying, “You bitch! You bitch!”
I rolled off the coffee table. I could feel warm blood down my leg as if he had ruptured something inside. My intestines hurt and I retched. I was hunched over holding my stomach.
I had instinctively moved in front of the couch, keeping the coffee table between us.
“Stay over there,” I warned.
Andrew veered forward.
Inside the drawer of the deep rose coffee table was the Colt .32. I pulled it out and aimed the gun at Andrew.
“If you don’t leave right now I’ll shoot you.”
He looked at me with reddened eyes, leaning over, cupping his groin. The only light in the room was from the TV. He came at me. He kept coming. I fired once, wounding him in the torso.
A small-caliber round, especially with old hard-ball copper-jacketed bullets sitting in there from the time my grandfather had given me the gun, does not produce big holes. Still, I found it hard to believe he was coming at me again, but he was. I fired and he tackled me, and the shot went into the wall. We flew backwards over the coffee table and halfway onto the couch. The gun went off for the third time, hitting him in the thigh. We wrestled for control of the barrel, slippery with blood and meat. His big heavy body was on top of mine, and I saw his leg dripping blood. Then he just stood up and got off me. He walked out the front door and left it wide open.
I staggered into the kitchen. I walked around in a circle, dazed, then I thought, Where is he going? and ran down the hallway after him.
Andrew was already outside at the carport. He had one hand pressed against his rib cage and with the other he was awkwardly trying to open the door.
“What are you doing, Andy? Please stop, Andy. Andy, wait. Please let me call the paramedics—”
He never spoke. Somehow he had gotten the gun. I didn’t realize it, but I had known, disoriented in the kitchen, something was wrong because I was no longer holding the gun. Now he tossed it into the passenger seat. I was gripping the top of the driver’s door. We had a little tug-of-war, I tried to pull it open, but he was stronger and jerked it out of my hands and slammed it and drove away. The glass was streaked with blood. We must have been out there less than a minute. Nobody saw us and nobody heard the low-velocity shots over the sounds of the TV.
I went inside and locked the door to my apartment and stood there. My insides were burning. I went into the bathroom and urinated blood.
My ankle hurt. My head hurt from where it concussed against the coffee table. I came back into the living room. There was glass all over my floor. I picked up three bullet casings. I put a pad in my underwear to absorb the blood and lay down on the couch. I needed to call somebody. I lay there in a stream of blood and tears, thinking someone would come and take care of this, but nobody came.
I swept u
p the glass. The sun had come up by then. I crouched in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and then crawled out, clutching my gut like some primitive thing. Then I got dressed and went to work.
Part Two
SAFE PASSAGE
Fifteen.
I went up in the elevator and got off and used my card to access the revolving entry. I passed through a smudged white door that led to the Corridor of Winds and out to the matrix. Setting the briefcase down, I took off the blazer and hung it on a wooden hanger that went on a peg beneath a brass plaque that said Special Agent Ana Grey on a square column of dark wood—a masculine touch, like the posts on a booth in a bar and grill, that marked our territories.
My personal territory that day was a region of numb, disbelieving shock. The ritualized motions of entry and claim did nothing to make it familiar. This was not a place I could have imagined, nothing I had been trained for, a scenario so extraordinary the conscious mind could not hold it all at once, but like a poor clay pot in a fiery kiln, cracked in two. I always thought of working for the FBI as a privilege to serve my community—yet here I was, sitting in my senior-rank ergonomic chair (the chair was a cheap knockoff), scheming like a criminal: You cannot appear upset. You cannot appear to have prior knowledge of what happened to Andrew.
Although I may have seemed to be scrolling through e-mail, I was frantic. My head turned. The chair swiveled. It was early, but I could not stop watching for the arrival of Rick and the troops. Would they provide safe passage—or the opposite? If they knew, they would have no choice. It would be moi kneeling down on the carpeted box in the office in the garage, hands cuffed behind my back, while Hugh Akron hovered lasciviously with the ink pad. Suddenly it seemed a spectacularly bad idea to be there. Leave.
I got as far as the bathroom.
“Put cold water on your face,” my grandfather would command, after he had made me cry. I would weep for an hour during his violent verbal tirades. I hardly remember what they were about—boys, virginity—but I would cower on the narrow bed while he stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes and ranting. If my hands weren’t clean before dinner, he would spoon dirt from a potted plant onto my plate. He was not crazy, nor a drunk. He was, as far as I can figure it, a rage-aholic, addicted to the power of his own anger. Once, when I was late coming home from a date, he surprised me at the front door with a crack across the head.
“Go. Put water on your face.”
Dismissed, I would slink off with mongrel gratitude.
Years later, I had authority and carried a gun; I had long surpassed the status my grandfather held as lieutenant in the Long Beach Police Department, but in the mirror now saw only turbulent red-faced chaos, a guilt-ridden mess for which Poppy would have only had contempt. “You messed up, stupid.” I willed the tears to stop and when they would not, smacked my own temple with the heel of my hand. I did it again, alone in the tidy rest room.
When I emerged, Barbara Sullivan was coming right at me with bright alert eyes. She had just arrived at work, loaded with shopping bags and cartons to be mailed.
“Do you believe it? Deirdre’s already outgrown her six-month stuff. I have to return all these gifts!” she sang, and swept into her office as if I had replied; as if I were not paralyzed with fear of what she might have seen in my face, macabre and chalky-looking from the powder I had hurriedly pressed over swollen eyelids and hot cheeks.
I don’t know what impression I gave. But then I had truly become my shadow self, and shadows are tricksters with canny ways of deception. So maybe Ana Grey was standing there beaming, and maybe when Ana settled back at her workstation, others registered a generous sigh of pleasure in sharing her friend’s joy.
It seemed a good idea to be looking at something. Files. I counted twelve that needed cleaning up for the ninety-day review, including extortion, an inmate who was stabbed at the Veterans Administration hospital (crime on a government reservation), threatening letters to a software company and three cases of movie stars being harassed by stalkers. The inspectors would pull a document at random and expect it to have met the standards. They would not pay attention to content, only form. The Bureau is all about standards. Standards of behavior. Standards of protocol and language and law.
I was feeling nauseous. Barbara had been, just, too carefree. She had not stopped for conversation. Not asked about the Santa Monica kidnapping, nor what was up with Andrew, not invited me for morning tea. This was not her pattern. Andrew must have told them and she knew. Everybody in the Bureau knew. They were getting ready for the takedown and they would do it here, where I was containable. Should I sit it out, or escape through the Corridor of Winds?
Another blackout was coming, and I couldn’t fight it. Instead of escape, I dozed in the chair, wondering if offenders shut down in the midst of crimes; if the Mission Impossible Bandit, at the peak of excitement, having made it through the roof and on his way, had not also been overwhelmed by a contradictory torpor; if he had not lain down and slept a while on the warm, waxed linoleum floor of the employee lounge, while the ticking minutes unlocked the vault.
The phone on my desk jerked me awake. It was Dr. Arnie from the forensic lab.
“You told me to put the pedal to the metal on the rape so we cross-referenced the chemicals in the paint flake with particles of soil found on Juliana Meyer-Murphy’s clothing. Might have something for you.”
I reached for a pad.
“She was probably taken to a post–World War Two house in a loamy area of the coast.”
“What do you mean, loamy area?”
“Well, loam is soil that’s generally a mix of sand, clay, silt and organic matter.”
“I know what loam is, it’s the area I would like more clearly defined.”
“You mean, where the house was that he took her?”
“Yes. Where the house was that he took her!”
“That would be an older residential section, not too far inland, most likely on the Pacific coast, judging from the plant material, which is mainly—”
“Arnie.” Struggling. “The Pacific coast of the United States is almost a thousand miles long.”
“You might like this better. About the shoe print on her back. Turns out to be an outsole lug pattern on a combat-style boot manufactured in New Hampshire, sometime in the past two years, sold under the name Climbers. Total order seventy-five thousand pairs. I know what you’re gonna say: Hold it, Dr. Arnie! This is what you give me? One boot in seventy-five thousand pairs that walked in an area approximately one thousand miles long, sometime in the last two years? This is what I say to you: I can reduce the possible number of boots that could have made that particular impression to six-point-two-five pairs!”
Hearing nothing in reply, Dr. Arnie continued talking to himself:
“Out of seventy-five thousand pairs, they made ten thousand in size ten, for which four hand-engraved molds were needed. That would be twenty-five hundred left and twenty-five hundred right outsoles from each size-ten mold. The possible left or right outsoles sharing class characteristics of the molded outsole would therefore be twenty-five hundred …”
The numbers came at me like enemy fire. They drilled holes in my head.
Where was Andrew? Had he made it to a hospital? Had he told them? Was he dead? Was that possible? Him, inert? I know what dead is. Could I have done that? What a colossal mistake, pulling that gun. What a horrible, tragic, unbearable bungle. Stupid. I messed up, all right. What did I think? He was Ray Brennan coming at me? What was I aiming for? Ray Brennan’s face on the bathroom door?
“The same pair of left and right outsoles, bearing the same crime scene impressions, will occur six hundred and twenty-five times out of ten thousand …”
I wanted to stand up and scream. An unseen hand reached around from behind and clamped itself over my mouth.
By evening of that day in hell, I had still heard nothing. No grave message from the Santa Monica Police Department. No burly pair of homicide detectives showed up for a p
rivate talk.
As an investigator, I’d had to learn patience. It was a skill I worked hard to achieve, since I have the metabolism of a hummingbird—dart here, dart there, get the gist and be gone. Now I forced myself to slow down and ask, What do I really know?
Andrew had been wounded but had gotten into his car and driven away. Our trainers tell us if you are seriously injured and you know it within fifteen seconds, you are likely to survive. It takes a lot to bleed out. Even a critical trauma can be survived if you get to an emergency room within that first golden hour, and the hospital was fifteen minutes from my apartment.
He would seek medical treatment. He would be identified.
The police would know.
It would be easy to find out: call Margaret Forrester on a ruse about the kidnapping and she would spill it, whatever it was.
Like a bad scene from a bad movie, I picked up the phone and let it drop.
Okay, call someone else over there.
Picked it up and let it drop.
I couldn’t do it. I was too afraid of knowing, although one fact was unavoidable: Andrew had driven off with my gun.
I left the office at six-thirty-five and drove home, aware of nothing until I was suddenly unlocking the front door. Nobody had been inside, which was good luck, as any rookie would have known she was walking into a crime scene.
There were glinting pieces of glass I had missed with the vacuum cleaner. Furniture was still slightly askew, and come to think of it, there were bloodstained clothes in the laundry hamper. If you missed all that, there would be a bullet hole in the white swinging door between the kitchen and the pantry, which might as well have had a huge black arrow pointing to it.
It was hopeless. All the forensics guys had to do was come in here with Luminol and the details of the struggle would fluoresce in the dark like the answer in the window of a magic eight ball. In a fit of despair I moved to the phone to turn myself in and get it over with. All I wanted was for the headache, like screws in an iron mask tightening over the facial bones, to stop.