“No, listen to me. Life is what’s important. It’s everything. It’s a gift most of us only get once, but I was lucky. Every day I wake up grateful for the rain in my face, the hot cement under my feet, the idiot dawdling in the passing lane. Grateful because I got a second chance to make my life mean something. I was that close—” she snapped her fingers “—to nothing. And you’re a fool to treat life like a cheap present you can exchange at the mall if you don’t like the way it comes wrapped.”
She dropped his shirt and one slender fingertip caught inside his waistband, a point of unforgiving heat. Her words ran together, the drawl slurring them into one long rush of sound. “And if you don’t give a damn about the gift of your own life, think about these kids.” She brushed two furious tears from her eyes. “Think about them. Someone’s out there trying to kill you. You may not care if he succeeds, but Alicia and these kids care.”
Catching Maggie’s flailing hands, Sullivan tried to stop the torrent. “But I—”
The words continued to pour forth. “And if that doesn’t matter to you either, then think about what could have happened if Alicia and the kids were walking to the corner—” she freed her hand and pointed to the ice-cream shop at the corner not far from where his car had been parked that day “—and the bomb had gone off then? Or what if he keeps trying and one day you’re in the playground with Katie and, oops, too bad, poor Katie was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“All right.” He flung her hands from him. “I didn’t think about endangering anyone else. It never occurred to me. I should have realized…” His words trailed into silence. He was sick with a different kind of fear now. “But I didn’t.”
“Someone’s going to keep taking shots at you until he—or she—succeeds.”
“I’ll be more careful.” Acid boiled into his mouth. He’d never once thought about the kids.
Maggie ran her raw palms down the side of her jeans. A fleck of blood touched the seam. “If you don’t help me figure out who hates you enough to kill you, you’re responsible if one of these kids—or Alicia—gets caught in the cross fire.”
“I won’t come here again.”
“You won’t come here? Won’t go to work? Won’t go to the corner for a newspaper? You’re a walking time bomb, Mr. Barnett. You’d better start caring whether you live or die because if you don’t, you’re going to get some innocent bystander killed. And maybe he—or she—unlike you, will care. About living.
“Help me, Sullivan,” she pleaded, her eyes huge and shining with unshed tears. “Help me. Life is everything. It’s all we’ve got, the one sure thing. Make it count. There’s nothing else,” she whispered, her breath a sweetness on the air, filling his lungs until he tasted the very essence of her. It still wasn’t enough.
*
Chapter 7
« ^ »
Not until Sullivan slid into the cramped space of her compact car, glared at her and then hid behind his sunglasses, saying only, “Drive,” had Maggie dared hope she’d penetrated his who-gives-a-damn attitude. “Head north on Route 41 to the Palma River,” he’d continued, his thin mouth a slash in his gaunt face. “I’ll tell you what to do when we get there.” Staring out the window at the flatland ranches passing in front of him, he hadn’t spoken since.
She’d struck out, appalled at what might have happened, furious at the waste of Sullivan’s life, slashing at the cynicism that let him believe his life was worthless, that it didn’t affect the wiggle of the earth one iota if he lived or died.
He was wrong. Short-sighted. Plain ignorant, that’s what. She might not have said anything if she hadn’t realized how close the bombing had occurred to the daycare center. She’d never forgotten a poem she’d read in school about the toiling bell and each person’s death diminishing everyone else. She knew about that toiling bell, and that’s what she’d tried to make Sullivan see—that life truly was a rare gift.
Checking her mirror, she accelerated, passing a semi loaded with shiny new cars angled into the steel structure rising off the flatbed. A long buh-wuh, buh-wuh saluted her. She waved and shot forward, the speedometer needle edging toward the top of the circle. She saw Sullivan eye the needle over the rim of his glasses, lift an eyebrow at her and fold his arms across his chest, sliding down into the seat on his tailbone as if to say, “What the hell.”
Maggie loved driving fast. She was still a good driver. Unlike the business with the Smith and Wesson, she was her old self—whatever that was—behind the wheel of her car. She’d been driving a lot since she’d been released from the hospital.
Even with her world turned inside out since the shooting, she’d learned that each day was precious, each minute a coin to be spent wisely. Not squandered, but not hoarded, either.
Bent like a pretzel into the passenger space, Sullivan looked miserable. His knees bumped the dashboard even with his legs slanted toward her. Self-condemnation and overwhelming guilt had blazed into his eyes earlier.
Hidden behind the mask of his sunglasses, that tormented blue haunted her.
Fighting an errant wave of sympathy, Maggie tried to ignore his morose presence. She would have felt guilty if she hadn’t been sure she was right. Sullivan needed to see the ripple effect of his actions. She didn’t feel sorry for him, not one little bit. Not her. No way.
But she turned to ask him if he wanted the air conditioner on when he shifted uncomfortably. His brooding glance kept her mouth clamped shut. She pressed the accelerator. The needle swung to the right, past the seventy mark.
He could suffer. She preferred fresh air, herself. Air rich and redolent with the pungent aroma of cow dung. Drawing a deep breath, she tried not to cough. A good, healthy stink.
Sullivan sat up, peering through her bug-spattered windshield. “Turn right at the next crossroad.”
The next crossroad streaked into view as he spoke. Checking her mirrors even as she turned, Maggie deftly spun the car east, farther inland and away from the gulf.
“Thank you, Mr. Barnett.” She wanted to tell him to give her a little warning next time, but instead she nodded her head regally, graciously accepting his direction. She knew it would annoy the bejeebers out of him.
If glowers could burn, she would have been a heap of ashes.
Casting a rapid look sideways, Maggie permitted herself a very private, very smug smile. Sullivan was better off getting ticked with her. Much better for his health than brooding.
Braced against the door, Sullivan watched Maggie’s square, competent hands control the car through its slide after the turn. She was an exceptional driver, but he should have given her advance warning. He’d been lost in his thoughts, back at the center—images of Katie laughing, her sneakered toes pointed to the sky; Skipper with ice cream melting and dripping down his shirt.
The boom of an explosion and metal spearing the sky.
They would have been waiting on the curb for their ride home if the explosion had happened an hour or two earlier.
“So, Mr. Barnett, where are we going? Or are we playing What’s My Destination and I have three guesses?” Maggie flashed him another one of her teasing grins, the tucked corners of her bottom lip quivering.
She’d stripped off a piece of his hide like a platoon leader after a botched parachute drop during his SEAL training, all her detached professionalism peeled away by the strength of her worry about the kids at the center. Passionate in her attack, every inch of her trembling with alarm. Passion, hot and searing, heating her skin, branding him with her touch, her accusations.
“I won’t report you if you break down and call me Sullivan,” he said finally, fidgeting into a different position, equally cramped.
“Really?” She swerved smoothly around a large chunk of rubber retread. “Okay. I’ll call you Sullivan. You can call me Detective.” Again that quiver at the corners of her mouth. The defining V of her upper lip was barely there, the bottom lip a long, full swoop of rosy softness. “But you haven’t told me where we’re
going. Not that I mind chauffeuring you around the county, but I’d hate to run out of gas back here in the boonies.”
Was there any harm in revealing where they were headed? Sullivan lifted his glasses and held them between his hands, thinking.
“You’re going to have to trust me sometime, you know.” Her voice was quiet.
“Why?” Trusting was dangerous. He’d learned that during a nighttime live-fire exercise. Expecting the guy behind him to cover, he’d leapfrogged to the next belly-down point. In the dark, under the frightening and real gunfire, the man had panicked. Sullivan had spent some down time in the base hospital. He shifted position again, his knee brushing her denimed thigh. And being a reporter had only intensified his basic belief that people were seldom what they presented themselves to be. “Trusting people can get you killed. Why should I trust you?” he said to Maggie.
Lizzie hadn’t trusted him, hadn’t believed in the strength of his love.
“Because sometimes you have to have to take a leap of faith.”
Jerking bolt upright, Sullivan slammed his head against the ceiling. “What the hell did you say?”
She frowned, flicking her short fingernails against the steering wheel. “Every now and then you have to reach out.” She grinned. “You know—reach out and touch someone.” Her voice trailed off and she frowned again. “You might as well take a chance, Sullivan Barnett, and trust me. You may resent me, but at the moment you need me.”
“I don’t need anyone.” He never had. Not until he’d met Lizzie. And then she’d taken half of him with her and left him with this never-ending soul sickness.
“Look, at some point, you’re going to make up your mind to trust me, regardless of your suspicions about the department. I won’t have a chance of discovering who’s threatening you if you can’t give me a little trust. And that’s the bottom line, tough guy.” She pulled off the road and shut off the engine, half turning in her seat and facing him, her movements crisp and decisive.
A Rubicon. He could cross it or not. She was leaving it up to him. “You’re asking for a hell of a lot, Maggie Webster.”
“I know.” In the heat, tendrils of hair frizzed, framing her earnest face. Next to the delicate lobe of her right ear, the green-and-purple scarf ends hung limp in the humidity.
They weren’t being tailed. He’d watched. She hadn’t made any phone calls after they’d left the Sunshine Center, and they were in her personal car, not a department-equipped vehicle, so she didn’t have a radio or cellular phone. He’d noticed that before he crawled into the car. Reaching a decision, he nodded once. “Yeah. I reckon I’m going to have to trust you. Sure as hell I can’t get rid of you.” He’d planned to, but she’d sand-bagged him.
She frowned.
Tapping her cheek, Sullivan said, “It was a joke, Maggie. A joke.”
“You don’t make jokes.”
Her cheek was peach soft. He flicked the scarf tail against her earlobe, where a gold ball shone against her skin. “Well, I just made one.”
“Now what?”
He wondered if she realized she’d turned her ear to his touch. The gold earring was satiny and cool. It moved once under his light touch, and he dropped his hand. “Now you keep driving until the first gas station. Fill up. We’ll need it for the round trip. I don’t want to be stranded where we’re going, either.”
“Which is?”
He wiggled the steering wheel.
“Aw, c’mon, big guy. It’s not that hard,” she encouraged, a sassy tip to her chin.
“Yeah, actually it is that hard. For me.” He meant trusting her wasn’t easy, but in the silence of the open country, her cheek tilted toward him, his hand still warm from touching her, the words hovered between them, taking on an old meaning, and he stumbled over his words.
She blushed, her glance sliding away from his.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I didn’t think you—” She played with the ends of the scarf, grew pink again, and turned loose the fabric as if it had burned her.
She pinched her mouth and didn’t say anything else.
Sullivan hadn’t felt this embarrassed with a woman since he’d been thirteen and the janitor had caught him necking with Carly Thibideau in the girls’ washroom after school.
Back then, he’d said things like that and thought he was being a stud. Wouldn’t have been okay then, either, but it was understandable. Or if he and Maggie were casual friends, they could have joked about the way they’d both responded to the unintended double entendre. And if they were lovers…
Therein lay the problem. They weren’t lovers. Weren’t going to be, and yet this constant, insistent awareness sang between them like a note struck on a tuning fork.
Somehow, being forty-one made his blunder more embarrassing.
Like a rude noise in a public place, the incident was best forgotten. He took a deep breath and doggedly ignored the charged moment, getting back to business, where they would both be less ill at ease. “We’re going fifty miles upriver to Seth’s Landing. I’m meeting a source there.” It was hard to teach an old dog new tricks. The cliché, like most, held a nugget of truth. He didn’t intend to tell Maggie the name of his source.
Pink still shading her cheeks, Maggie fiddled with the keys, avoiding looking at him as her thumb stroked one serrated edge. “And?”
There was no escaping the turbulence she created in him. Shifting, Sullivan rearranged himself once more, his blood pooling thick and heavy as her thumb slid along the key.
“He says there’s an illegal toxic waste-dumping operation going on up here. He says he can hand over papers and names that will document the connection between this operation and a supposedly legit real-estate group.”
“What?” The keys clanked against the steering column.
“Hanky-panky, Detective. Add greed and money and, abracadabra, you have hanky-panky.”
“But this dumping situation isn’t the story you were originally working on?” She hauled out her handy dandy notepad.
“No, the toxic dumping came up after I’d already gotten several letters.”
“Why did you first get interested?”
“Four companies getting excessively favorable city contracts. It seemed simple enough. Usual quid pro quo. Payoffs, you know. But one thing led to another. I kept running into several names over and over—in the corporate records of those companies, on the records of large land buys that later became megamalls or exclusive housing developments.”
“I don’t see how it ties into the dumping. Anyway, the real-estate stuff doesn’t seem illegal.”
“It’s not. Unless someone paid a city council member or a county commissioner under the table for zoning changes, for instance.” Taking her hand and holding it palm up, Sullivan handed her a nickel from her jumble of coins in the car console. Carefully lining it up on her life line, he continued.
“Unless that someone is also involved in illegal low-bidding deals for city contracts. Unless that someone—or several someones—has a long-range plan for condemning certain privately owned land and rezoning protected acreage for commercial development.” He dropped a dime and a quarter into her palm with a clink.
“Unless someone pays off the police to turn their heads when stuff is going on, like destruction of supplies at rival building sites.” Opening his hand, he let a rain of coins fall into her palm. He rattled the remaining coins in the console. “Then it’s real illegal. Money, as they say, talks, Maggie. And I’m always curious when I hear that little green voice chattering away in my ear.”
Looking out the open window at the empty landscape, Maggie closed her fist tightly around the coins. “All of this is happening?”
“That’s only half of it. I’ve been digging for months. I’ve checked corporate records to see who owns what companies. I’ve gone back and forth between tract indexes and abstract books to see who owns the land or buildings these companies use. I’ve checked divorce records to see if Jack and Ji
ll are reporting the same assets. Sometimes they aren’t, and I have another paper trail to follow.” He tapped her fist holding the change. “All kinds of greed, Maggie.”
She dropped the coins back into the console. “All kinds of reasons to kill you, Sullivan.”
There was nothing timid about Maggie Webster.
Her mouth was tight. She slapped his arm. “To send you threatening letters. To blow up your car. How could you have ignored these threats?”
He held her small hand flat against his leg as he reminded her, “Because I was doing my job the same way you were! Because I like the rush it gives me to nail these schmucks. Because, by the time the bombing happened, I plain didn’t give a damn anymore.”
“So the payoffs led you to the toxic dumping?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I had a phone call from this guy who insisted on staying anonymous, so I couldn’t use him in my pieces. But he told me details about some of the land deals that I was able to check out and verify through other means. And then he started handing me little teasers about a company that’s supposedly passing itself off as an approved toxic-waste-disposal outfit, but in fact isn’t. Instead, it’s busily cooking up a poisonous chemical stew somewhere out here where no one knows what’s happening. There’s an unbelievable amount of money involved in this. Eventually millions.”
“For someone.” Maggie’s pen skittered across the page. “Your source is in danger, isn’t he?”
“God. I hope not.” Sullivan thought for a minute about the county clerk who’d begun calling him late at night to pass on information, the man’s voice shaky at first but determined. The clerk had had enough of crooks and corruption, he insisted. “I don’t think so. He’s cautious, and I haven’t written about the dumping yet. As far as I know, he’s the only one who knows I’ve hooked on to it. The letters might have something to do with this new development, but I think they’re related to the payoffs and bribery.” He raised his shoulders. “Maybe not.”
The quiet was oppressive, and Maggie glanced back down the road they’d traveled. Nothing but heat-silvered concrete running east and west.
SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE Page 12