Come Morning - Joe Gores

by Gores

  "The zipper on your windbreaker."

  He removed the jacket and passed the detector. To his amazement, she suddenly grinned at him.

  "Right down to the gate. And good luck."

  He thanked her. He and his escort went down the sidewalk toward the final gate a football field away. Outside the open motor-pool building, a radio blared as a couple of prisoners hosed down a truck. To the right, beyond the fenced visitors' parking lot, raucous seagulls dipped and turned over the sparkling water of Richardson Bay.

  At the gate building was a door marked THIS WAY OUT, FOLKS, but the guard blocked Runyan's passage.

  "Prisoners use the gate."

  It was of six-foot-high, black-iron pickets, one side opened inward. A taut, well-conditioned, hard-faced guard brought a clipboard out of the guardroom beside it.

  "Name."

  "Runyan."

  "Check-out order and LD."

  Runyan handed over the precious warden's release order and, for the last time, his prison I.D. The guard made a checkmark on a mimeo'd sheet on his clipboard.

  "You're clear, mister."

  Feeling light-headed, Runyan walked through the gate with his escort. No sirens sounded, no alarms rang. The guard stopped a dozen feet beyond the gate and handed him an envelope.

  "Count it, then sign the receipt."

  He did. One hundred dollars.

  "You'll get another hundred from your parole officer when you report. The date, time and place are on your release papers." He hesitated, then added in a different voice, "If you need transport to town, that little yellow house beyond the post office--with the sun painted on the front--that's Catholic Social Services. They can help you there."

  "Thanks," said Runyan, but the guard had already turned away, as if somebody else had been using his voice.

  Runyan didn't want transport to town. He wanted to walk forever down the narrow uneven blacktop, stuffing his lungs with free air as sharp as ammonia. He heard a car engine start up behind him in the lot outside the prison gate, but he didn't turn. Through his mind was running the old Pete Chatman blues number, Gone to Memphis.

  I'm a bitter weed, I'm a bad seed,

  Come morning I'll be gone.

  Only it was this morning, and Runyan was gone away from here. To his left the hillside slanted up sharply, crowded with old frame houses in peeling, weather-beaten pastels. To his right, below road level, was a quarter-circle of new condos made out of grey-painted wood and with the plantings not yet in except for a couple of FOR SALE signs.

  Who the hell would want to buy a place within eyeshot of this sprawling miserable dragon with over 3,000 dead men living in its distended gut? Apparently somebody did; a new Continental was parked in the turn-around and a burly man with black curly hair had his hands cupped against a groundfloor window.

  Runyan, swinging his gym bag like a kid let out of school early, moved off to the shoulder as the car from the prison lot came up behind him. Then his neck went rigid and sweat popped out under his arms. The car was pacing him. He'd known it: It was all a macabre joke, at the last second they were going to take it all away from him.

  "Runyan?"

  A woman's voice. He didn't turn, but relief washed over him. They wouldn't send a woman to take him back.

  "I'm Louise Graham? I wrote to you?"

  He shot a quick look. Blue car, Lynx, wasn't that a Mercury?

  Her window down and her face peering out from behind huge round sunglasses. Mid, maybe late twenties. Hair pulled back severely. He kept walking.

  "I'm a journalist? Researching a book?"

  Every phrase a question. She sounded like a writer, looked like a writer--or what he thought a writer looked like.

  "You didn't answer my letter? Didn't see me on visiting day?"

  Three minutes out, he was suddenly being forced to do things he hadn't needed to do in seven years. Think. Weigh. Judge. Make decisions. Act.

  He kept walking.

  The car shot forward and slammed to a stop in front of him, blocking his way. He glanced back involuntarily; thank God, they were out of sight of the prison gates. She stuck an angry head out the window.

  "Damn you, all I'm doing is offering you a ride."

  He was proud of the way his voice reflected nothing at all. "Sure you are," he said.

  ***

  "Shit," said Angelo Tenconi aloud when Runyan got into the Mercury Lynx.

  Tenconi was a big black-haired man with an angry jaw-blurred now by easy living--that would always need a shave. He whispered the Connie around the little turn-around and up onto the narrow blacktop. The freaking FOR SALE condos had been a good place to watch the two-million bucks leave Q, but who was the freaking broad had just picked up Runyan?

  Looked like a U-Drive, maybe, but anyone coming into this would be local, was he not right? Unless, of course, they'd imported some hotshot out-of-town broad to work on him. Or maybe she was some quiff Runyan had been banging before he went away?

  He drifted the Connie along three cars behind as she took the underpass up onto Cal 17 westbound. He adjusted the strap constricting his chest like an auto safety belt. It was the shoulder holster for Tenconi's Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum, built on the .44 Magnum frame with the four-inch barrel.

  It could shoot through a freaking engine block, it could sure as hell shoot through Runyan if it had to.

  CHAPTER 4

  As she drove down Waldo Grade toward the tunnel on US 101, Louise wondered how you got through to a clod like Runyan: He was handsome enough, with air from the open window ruffling his shiny black prison-chopped hair, and his eyes a piercing blue under dark even brows. But he was reacting to her as to a rock lying alongside the highway. None of her research on him ranging back to childhood had prepared her for this zombie. Could seven years in prison have turned him into a homosexual? Well, how about vulnerability? Expose her throat, like a she-wolf showing submission to the pack's dominant male?

  "Um ... in my letter, I mentioned I was a journalist researching a book? I was working for a newspaper in Minneapolis, but I felt the need for an in-depth study of the ex-convict reentering society after a long hiatus ..." No reaction. Didn't know the big words? "What I mean is, what happens when you hit the street after being away for a long time?"

  No answer. Beyond Waldo Tunnel, San Francisco sprang up like an enchanted city in a pop-up book of her childhood. They swept down and out onto the Golden Gate past the stunning rocky Marin headlands flanking the span.

  "What I'm concerned with here are the difficulties the emerging mainline prisoner encounters in adjusting to this ... um ... new and bewildering complex of inputs..."

  Nothing. Maybe he had a dead battery or something. Her voice had an edge, she couldn't help it.

  "Instead of complex of inputs, how does everything coming at you at once grab you?"

  Runyan finally looked over at her, making his eyes go dull. "They put saltpeter in our soup to keep our sex drive low," he said. "It makes you all mushy in the head." In the same tone, he added, "I have to report to my parole officer, if you could drop me at a bus stop on Van Ness. .."

  "I'll drive you," she said quickly.

  Dammit, girl, keep the asperity out of your voice. Asperity is not what this man needs right now. Maybe she should have worn a Playboy bunny outfit instead of doing her skun rat impression. Maybe she should just ask him what he was thinking. Maybe she should just tell him what she was thinking.

  I think you're a lout and a boor and a wise-ass and probably a fag, and I want you to tell me all about yourself. Sure.

  ***

  The San Francisco Parole Office was supposed to have been relocated to a nondescript two-story stucco office building between a parking lot and an old Queen Anne Victorian on South Van Ness. But the doorway was half-blocked by a pile of sand wearing a highway warning flasher with ROADWORK-DRIVE CAREFULLY stencilled on it. The signs on the ground floor government-funded mental health clinic and counselling service for the elderly were i
n Spanish only.

  Runyan was checking his release papers, obviously confused.

  "Could it be on the second floor?" Louise asked almost timidly; she didn't want to come on all assertive, in case he was macho man after all.

  "Sure, you're right, that's it. Thanks." He opened the door and started to get out, gym bag in hand.

  "You don't lose me that easily," she said. "I'll wait."

  He shrugged and tossed the gym bag back in the car, as if it didn't matter much. Short brown people with broad Peruvian faces and excitable Latin discourse crowded the street. A pair of lovers passed, hand-in-hand, heads together, giggling; to Louise it was a rough-looking neighborhood, but to them it was safe territory.

  Runyan pulled open the door on the curb side and began, "Look, Miss Graham, I can make it on my own from-"

  "Ms. And I'm trying to interview you, remember?"

  He shrugged again and got in. She drove in on South Van Ness to the broad arterial slash of Market Street; beyond rose pompous, self-important grey government buildings. As they passed the glittering Marion Davies Concert Hall, Runyan craned around in his seat, then settled back shaking his head.

  "You don't like it?" she asked quickly.

  "I love it," he said, hitting love with a hammer. "If you could turn right at Golden Gate. .."

  They went by the hulking stone Federal Building and Federal Courthouse, a grey monstrosity taking up an entire block behind a plaza that looked too sterile even to attract pigeons.

  "Is this where your trial was held?"

  "This is federal, I was state," said Runyan tonelessly.

  How adroitly you elicit his views on things, Louise thought. First Davies Hall, then this. Maybe you ought to try to sell him magazine subscriptions. But it wasn't just her; there was some tension in him that was beyond the moment. Something having nothing to do with her, or having to do with her in a way she didn't yet understand.

  The neighborhood had changed again. They were in the Tenderloin, low life in a high crime area. Even the women looked like muggers. At the corner of Larkin the light held them as two mounted policemen clopped by, one with a huge pink carnation stuck through the mane of his sleek, wiselooking horse.

  "When do you start asking me about the diamonds?" Runyan demanded abruptly.

  "I don't know anything about any diamonds--other than you allegedly took a bunch of them." She strove to keep shrewishness out of her voice. "I still would have been in college when you did that, anyway."

  The red light had stopped them in front of the old, genteelly seedy YMCA, with its chipping paint and earnest sign, MEN AND WOMEN-ROOMS-FITNESS CENTER.

  "We don't talk about the diamonds, we don't talk," said Runyan.

  Louise made an elaborately courteous gesture. "Then by all means, let us talk about the diamonds."

  The light was changing; Runyan opened his door and stepped out with his gym bag.

  "I don't talk about the diamonds," he said.

  He walked around the corner and was gone. Louise whipped off her dark glasses to glare after him, then belatedly shot the Lynx around the corner too as the cars behind her started to honk. Runyan was half-a-block ahead, walking rapidly. On the corner two bearded men in their early thirties were kissing, hands on one another's hips.

  The anger abruptly left her face. Seeing them, she knew that Runyan hadn't gone that route in prison. Which meant he was accessible to a woman in ways that Louise knew all about.

  ***

  The blue sign at 531 Leavenworth still read WESTWARD HOTEL in white letters with broken bits of neon tube dangling from them. He had roomed there once, years before, it was the logical place to list as his address with the parole authority.

  Plastered beside the brown double doors at the head of the terrazzo steps were various stern warnings on pastel sheets of stiff art paper: NO SITTING ON STEPS (blue); PLEASE KEEP DOORWAY CLEAN (pink); NO VISITORS (yellow); and NO TRESPASSING (red and black). Posted off to one side was one of much heavier caliber, a dated DEMOLITION ORDER APPEAL HEARING.

  He paid the pallid rat-faced clerk a week in advance on a room that was second floor back, at the far end of the cross hall next to the fire escape window. It was what you could expect in the Tenderloin for $50 a week: shabby chest of drawers, a sink in the corner with a thin napless towel on the rack, no soap or washcloth, a small hand mirror tacked above the sink partially to mask the brown water stains of an old overflow from the sink upstairs. The single bed had a humanshaped depression in the middle of it.

  On the other hand, with the brown roller shade up, sunlight came through the frayed imitation lace curtains to give it a certain spurious golden charm. And it was a room, not a cell; no electrically controlled bar would slide across the door at night to keep him in.

  Runyan tossed his gym bag on the dresser and stripped off his shirt. He started to run cold water into the sink to wash away the stink of Q, a need more psychological than physical.

  Would she show up again? He'd detected real beauty behind those dark glasses and severe hair, but he couldn't afford the luxury of believing that she was just a writer after material.

  As the sink filled, he thought, On the other hand, who would she belong to? Moyers didn't need a plant, he knew Runyan probably would turn the diamonds back to him, eventually, for the recovery fee. Unless he had become more rather than less of a man during the past seven years, Cardwell wouldn't have the guts. There weren't any other players--unless, and this was his real fear, Jamie'd had partners in the betrayal ...

  But anybody smart enough to preserve his safety through eight long years of silence was too smart to put himself into the hands of a hired woman. So maybe she was what she said she was.

  As he came up whooshing from the cold water, the mirror showed him Louise just coming through the door. He said immediately, without turning, "The insurance company is waiting for me to be a good little doggie and dig up their bone for them." Blinking, he groped for the towel. "They figure I have the diamonds stashed somewhere."

  She had shut the door and was turning in a complete circle, taking in the room.

  "It's you," she said.

  Using the towel was like drying off with a cardboard shirt backing. She was pulling down the window shade, making the room a dim cavern where anything might happen. She tossed her sunglasses on the dresser and started shaking out her hair: Her eyes were the most beautiful Runyan had ever seen, wide-set emerald chips glowing with an inner light. He felt an involuntary thickening in the groin, a tightness in the chest, a growing wildness in his mind.

  "At that college, didn't they teach you about leaving the door open when you're alone in a room with a man?"

  "We had coed dorms."

  She pulled out her blouse and started unbuttoning it. Oh Jesus, eight years. He almost ran to open the door, but she stepped right into him, so her face was only inches from his. Through the gauzy bra her already hardening nipples were like tiny hot coals against his naked chest. His arms came up to encircle her. Her hips were shifting against him, bringing him completely erect.

  "This ... is as far as we can take it and still quit easy," he said in a harsh voice.

  "I didn't come here to quit," she said.

  Her tongue, tasting very faintly of cinnamon, was hot between his lips. Her buttocks were taut beneath his clutching hands as he lifted her toward the bed with a cresting, almost frenzied urgency.

  CHAPTER 5

  The three-sided air shaft held trash cans and opened out into the alley. Runyan dropped the edge of the shade and turned back into the dimness of the room, naked. He had a gymnast's finely muscled body. Louise was pulling the wisp of bra up against her ripe, beautifully shaped breasts. "Uh ... I'm sorry I... uh ... started out so rough," he said. "At first I was afraid that after all this time I might be impotent. Then I just. . ."

  She straightened, buckling the bra, then pulled on her blouse. She winked bawdily at him. "After eight years, you're entitled to poke a little fun."

  Ru
nyan felt an unexpected surge of sad anger. This had been the fulfillment of every sexual fantasy through seven years of endless nights, and she was acting as if ...

  "What was this for you? Kicks? Tease the animals?"

  There was a hint of wicked laughter in her voice. "I did more than tease the animal. And-"

  "What are you after?" He had grabbed her shoulders and was shaking her, all his doubts rushing back. "What do you want?"

  She didn't try to break free; she seemed used to coping with men to whom violence came easily.

  "What do you want?"

  Runyan's hands dropped away. He said in a low, angry voice, "I don't want to go back inside. I don't want you yelling rape unless I talk to you about the diamonds. I don't want-"

  "But want do you want?"

  He responded with silence; he had no more answer for her than he had for himself. She turned away with an abrupt briskness that made the last hours just another prison-born fantasy, picked up her purse and sunglasses and walked right out of the room without a backward glance.

  "Hey!" yelped Runyan, stunned.

  He started to follow her, then realized that he was naked. He turned back to snatch up his pants.

  ***

  The door at the foot of the stairs swept away her reflected image as she went through it: cool, self-contained, sure of herself, almost haughty. Only she had to lean against the front of the building for a moment, she felt so shaky inside.

  She started walking, buffeted by inner gales. A Chinese youth wearing a white gauze mask against pollution was unloading canned goods for the grocery store next door. A heavy-faced white man's eyes gleamed greedily at her from between the stems of a split-leaf philodendron in the window of the Chinese restaurant on the corner. In the parking lot the attendant stripped her with his eyes as he took her money and got the Lynx.

  She was shaking so hard she could hardly get the key into the ignition. Her arms ached where Runyan had gripped them. She'd meant to control the situation, control him, control herself; instead, she had seduced herself with his vulnerability. She'd remembered him walking away from the prison like a jaunty, scared little kid, and all of a sudden she'd been out of control, hung out on the cruel edge of passion where she couldn't get down and it had just kept happening until it almost hurt ...