Come Morning - Joe Gores

by Gores

  Louise suddenly sobered. "What are we going to do, baby? You're as bad off as you were before. Taps has the bonds and you still have to find the cash somewhere to-"

  "We have the bonds," Runyan corrected her. He pulled up his sweater and took out the wad of securities. "I figured Taps for a double cross, so I kept them just in case." He laughed. "I've learned something in the last eight years."

  ***

  It was well after dark when Louise drove across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. They had left Grace's plane at the little country airfield, returned the Park Service jeep to the chain link fence behind the maintenance shed, and slept into the early afternoon before breaking camp and packing up their gear. On the way up, Runyan was delighted to catch a glimpse of Moyers's car behind them on the freeway.

  "This is the next tricky part," he told her as they took the first skyway off-ramp after the bridge.

  "We have to stash the bonds without Moyers knowing anything about them. I think it'll work because he's relying on that beeper he planted on our car. Turn here."

  Louise swung the Toyota into First Street from Mission. It was an area of sandwich shops, a coin arcade, wholesale office furniture dealers. To their left crouched the dark mass of the Trans-Bay Terminal; it also housed the Trailways Bus Depot.

  "Slow around the block twice," said Runyan. "The second time, use the alley."

  He jumped out of the moving car, cut behind it ducking other vehicles, took a long running leap to the sidewalk. Before the startled Louise even lost sight of him in her rearview mirror, he was into the terminal.

  Hidden from the street but able to see cars after they had passed, he waited just inside the door. Thirty seconds later, Moyers drove by. Runyan grinned to himself and turned away.

  He crossed the nearly empty, echoing, low-roofed waiting room, past the lighted ticket windows to the bank of coin lockers flanking the Fremont Street entrance, chose one in which to stuff the thick sheaf of securities from under his sweater. Key in hand, he walked over to one of the phone booths and entered it.

  Louise had gone out First Street to Folsom, turned left, at Fremont had turned left again. She kept checking the rearview mirror, but she saw no sign of Moyers. Was he back there? Or had he guessed Runyan's strategy and stopped by the terminal to check out the waiting room?

  She waited for a rattling almost-empty electric trolley to leave the terminal, then turned into Mission, at First turned again to start her second round. A motorcyclist paced her for half a block, ogling her and darting his tongue in and out between bearded lips.

  What if Runyan wasn't ...

  He would be there, dammit.

  She turned into Howard instead of going down to Mission again. Buses used this street for picking up and dropping off passengers. As she slowed beside the bright wedge of light from the side door of the terminal, Runyan came flying out and dove head-first into the door she had reached across to fling open. As she goosed it away, Runyan looked back over his shoulder. Moyers had just turned into the far end of Howard.

  Runyan turned back with a huge grin on his face. "Baby, we made it," he said.

  CHAPTER 28

  Louise and Runyan burst into her hotel room together, trying to beat one another to the king-size bed. They landed crosswise on it side-by-side in a dead heat and kicked off their shoes. Runyan chuckled into the bedspread, while Louise tried to snap her fingers. They seemed unable to make a sound. "So much for Moyers," she said, trying again. Still no snap. They laughed as if this were inordinately funny.

  Runyan, still chuckling, rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling, his hands interlocked beneath his head.

  She said, "We bent him to our nefarious purposes-except I don't know what they are." She looked at him from the corners of her eyes. "What's our move--being reasonably young, devilishly attractive, and ridiculously wealthy?"

  "We cash in the bearer bonds and give the money to Cardwell and his creep partners--thus becoming ridiculously unwealthy."

  Louise swung around at right angles, also onto her back, so she could rest her head on Runyan's belly and stare at the ceiling as he was. "Two out of three ain't bad." She remembered a vivid fragment of childhood: slumber parties, lying like this with her head on the stomach of her best girlfriend as they exchanged their innermost secrets. "I think I almost like it."

  "Being unwealthy?"

  "Not caring." She rolled her head to look up past the heavy rounded muscles of his chest to the strong line of his throat and thrust of his chin. "I came into this thinking you were just as rotten a bastard as ... as the guy I was doing it for. And feeling that I was no better than either of you."

  Runyan strained to look down at her, giving himself a momentary double chin. "But now you feel that you and I are better than that?" She nodded.

  He said, "Yeah, I like that, too."

  Louise shifted around again, so she was lying beside him with her head cushioned on his shoulder. They stared solemnly at the ceiling, neither speaking for a long time.

  "Just OUT isn't enough, is it?" Louise finally said.

  "Not for me, not any more." After a long moment, he said, "There should be a ceiling fan up there, and this should be Singapore, or Tahiti, or Hong Kong. I keep feeling I want to do something--go mountain climbing around the world like that guy at Yosemite-"

  "Giovanni."

  "Yeah, him. Maybe a wilderness guide, or try to get a fishing boat ... something that's ... my own...."

  Louise nodded. Both of them were relaxed, unpressured, the tension finally gone.

  "I want to keep on writing," she said. "Keep at it until I learn how to make the words say on paper what I'm feeling inside. I keep catching myself thinking that the last five or six years never happened ... or happened to someone else. .."

  "Seven or eight years," said Runyan in a sleepy voice. He gave a long sigh. "Down in L.A., when I charged Brother Blood's car, I realized you always have two ways to run. Away from..."

  "Or toward?" murmured Louise.

  They fell asleep that way, side-by-side on the big bed in the dim room.

  ***

  It was a little before ten a.m. when Louise pulled the Tercel up in front of the regional parole office. They had already returned their rented camping gear to the mountain shop.

  "I'll check in with Sharples," said Runyan, opening his door, "make sure he doesn't have any excuse to call out the troops. Then we'll settle up with those guys and be home free."

  "I'm still worried about Moyers--he's convinced you're going to turn the diamonds over to him eventually."

  He squeezed her hand in reassurance and got out and closed his door. Louise drove down the block to an open space in front of a stucco-fronted meeting hall which once had been a church. She turned on the radio for company while waiting.

  ***

  Runyan crossed the shabby waiting room to the desk where the angry-faced secretary was opening mail. The straightbacked, government-issue chairs that lined the walls were empty except for two bulky men at opposite corners of the room, as alike as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, each reading one of the stale magazines from the dog-eared pile on the coffee table.

  "Runyan. For Sharples."

  The secretary looked up at him with almost frightened eyes. The bulky men, minus their magazines, converged on him from their opposing corners in a classic pincers movement. The closest one flashed an SFPD badge at Runyan.

  "Inspectors Waterhouse and-

  "-Prince," finished the other, then added unnecessarily, "San Francisco Pee-Dee."

  "We want to ask you a few questions," said Waterhouse.

  "Downtown," said Prince.

  "What about my rights?" asked Runyan. He fought down his panic reaction, kept his voice flat and his face unrevealing. "We're not charging you with anything," said Waterhouse. "Yet."

  "Just asking questions."

  "About Jim Cardwell's murder."

  Runyan, shaken, demanded, "Jamie? Dead? How? When?"

 
For years in San Quentin he had dreamed, schemed, wished for this moment; now that it had arrived, all he felt was shock, disorientation, and, strangely, a sense of loss.

  "He does that good, don't he?" said Waterhouse.

  "I think it's the way he moves his eyebrows." He added, to Runyan, "So since you ain't being charged with anything-"

  "-Yet," said Waterhouse.

  "You ain't got any rights."

  "Yet," finished Waterhouse.

  ***

  Louise was behind the wheel with her window rolled down, listening to the irrepressible Bruce Springsteen's gravelly voice explore his Jersey roots, when Moyers's hand came through the window to turn off the radio.

  "Do I see diamonds in your eyes, my dear?" he said.

  Louise, without even looking over at him, switched on Springsteen again. Moyers spoke over the sound of his voice.

  "I ran a trace on you, lady."

  Louise just managed to keep her eyes straight front. He couldn't have gotten past Vegas, could he? The trail had to dead-end there. Moyers reached in and shut off the radio again.

  "I put a man in Vegas on you--it wasn't too tough." Though she still wasn't looking at him, she could almost feel him shrug. "It's always in the computers once you find a way in. So now I know who you really are. Where you went when you left Vegas. Why you're here."

  Louise blurted out, "There aren't any ..." but caught herself before the word "diamonds."

  She sat motionless until she was in control again, then turned and looked at him. He was dressed in a brown suit with a blue shirt, a color combination she despised, one elbow on the frame of the open window.

  "There aren't any reasons for you to tell him what you found out."

  Her voice was even. "I'm not in your way."

  "Sheer enjoyment?" He said it as if he really was wondering; then he smiled unpleasantly. "You have to disappear, right now, totally. Right out of Runyan's life. I need him with nobody to lean on except me."

  Louise thought she finally understood. Runyan had wanted Moyers in Yosemite so he would have to back up their contention that they'd actually been there the whole time. Moyers was just turning it around. Get her out of the picture, and only his word stood between Runyan and a return to prison.

  "No," she said flatly. "I can't do that."

  "I talk to him, you're not even a memory," said Moyers in an almost reasonable voice. "Whatever you want--him, the diamonds, peace in the world--you aren't going to get it anyway. Forget that. But go now, you walk away clean." He leaned closer; his face and voice were suddenly ugly. "Make me take him down, and I'll take you down with him. Accessory after the fact of murder for a start, then-"

  "But he didn't kill anyone and I didn't-"

  "Doesn't matter. It's what I can make the cops and the courts believe. And I can make them believe damned near anything I want. I've had a lot of practice, over the years."

  She said quickly, desperately, "We could work together. I wouldn't keep you from recovering the diamonds. He'll ... do anything I say ... "

  "Right now. Permanently."

  She turned the full force of her emerald eyes on him, making sure that none of her meaning was obscure.

  "I'd do anything you wanted, Moyers." She paused. "Anything."

  He sighed; his obsessed eyes passed up and down her body, deliberately stripping her. With genuine regret he said, "God, I'd love to!" He shrugged. "But I can't take the chance. You're too dangerous. There's no way I could ever trust you, and I don't want to end up stupid about you like Runyan."

  He stepped back and jerked a thumb. She wanted to fight; she wanted to keep on trying. But her will seemed numbed, paralyzed. If she could only talk with Runyan, he'd know how to...

  But she couldn't talk with Runyan about her real past, not ever. She'd lost Runyan, as of this instant, and if Moyers told him everything, even the memory of her would be destroyed for him. After Yosemite, after Los Angeles, they both deserved more of the relationship than that; but Moyers's obsession with the diamonds went far beyond his lust for her, so she could never get to him the way she had to. She twisted the key, the engine roared, she fishtailed the car away with a shriek of rubber.

  ***

  Runyan had been in a lot of interrogation rooms during his detention and arraignment and trial. They were all pretty much the same. Institutional pastel walls, wooden table with three or four straight-backed chairs with the varnish coming off them, a mirror which was, of course, one-way glass for those in the adjacent observation room. Built-in pickups going to a voice-activated tape recorder somewhere. Ashtrays on the table for those who smoked.

  Runyan sat with his hands clasped in front of him, his elbows resting on the table edge. He had quit smoking his first week in Q, cold turkey, realizing that when you were inside, any addiction was a handle someone had on you. The overhead light brushed Waterhouse's pale elongated shadow back and forth across the table as he strode around.

  He stopped and thrust his face down to within a few inches of Runyan's. "You drove back and shot him."

  "I was half a mile up a mountain," said Runyan, not for just the first time. "With a witness."

  "The same witness you say is your alibi for the Tenconi hit." He straightened up and sneered, "The same gun in both cases. And the maid puts you in Tenconi's penthouse just-"

  "Leaving. Four hours before he got his ticket punched."

  Waterhouse started pacing again, talking as if to himself.

  "Eight years ago, Cardwell owes Tenconi a bundle. He's also night guard in a building where you just happen to pull a two-million-plus jewel heist. He shoots you. He's king for a day. They name margarines after him."

  Runyan was silent. Waterhouse kept pacing.

  "Tenconi is shot to death a few days after you get out of Q. Cardwell is shot to death a few days after that. And now our shiny new police computer discovers that you and Cardwell were old Army buddies-something nobody ever bothered to find out at the time of your trial. Suggestive, ain't it?"

  Runyan said nothing. It was suggestive. If he'd been on their side of the table, he'd have been trying to make it fit into a pattern too.

  Prince came in. He shut the door and leaned against the wall beside it with his arms folded. There was a sardonic look on his face. He gave a grunt of laughter.

  "This Louise Graham must be the invisible woman."

  Runyan, shaken, strove to hide it. He yawned and shrugged and wished he still smoked cigarettes.

  "Try her motel," he said. "She probably got tired of waiting in the car out there at-"

  "Checked out," said Prince. "No forwarding."

  Runyan felt all the animation leave his spirit. He felt the switches close, he felt the emotions drain away, he felt his face clench like a fist. When he turned toward them, he wore the mask he had brought out of San Quentin with him.

  "Shame on me," he said softly in his flat prison voice.

  CHAPTER 29

  Runyan crossed the echoing lobby of the Hall of justice from the elevator bank, pushed open the front door, and went out into the cool bright San Francisco day. On the steps he passed detainees' relatives coming from the bail brokers' offices across Bryant Street, chattering attorneys bright-voiced as magpies, plainclothes cops whose veiled arrogance made them unmistakable. Waterhouse said behind him, "You got lucky, Runyan." He turned, face cold and set. They must have been waiting since getting the news that Moyers had backed Runyan's statement concerning Cardwell's murder.

  "For the moment," added Prince.

  "Since the same gun was used, you're clean on both hits."

  "For the moment," said Prince. "It's bullshit, of course, but . . ."

  Waterhouse shrugged. Runyan went down the steps without speaking. Louise had abandoned him again, obviously for good, which meant he was back to being an ex-con out on the street with a lot of people after him for one thing or another.

  But he had one more job before resigning from the human race. Jamie was dead, and to his own amazement
he couldn't just let it go. Maybe what the Chinese said was right: When you saved someone's life he was your responsibility forever. Delarty and/or Gatian, working singly or in tandem. Either way, he was going to take them down. He knew just how to do it.

  At the East Bay Terminal, after making sure nobody was on his tail, he entered the same phone booth he had used after putting the bonds in the coin locker the night before.

  ***

  When the phone rang Art was brooding out the window at the fine drizzle which was obliterating Portland's measly skyline. Win, lose, or draw, the fucking auditors were gone, anyway.

  Gladyce stuck her head in the door. She'd had it in his lap every night for a week; pretty soon, he wasn't careful, she'd be going down on him under the desk. He'd taken to calling her Glad-Ass in their private moments.

  "It's your brother on line three, Art."

  He swung his swivel chair back to the desk, staring at her box and making kissing sounds with his lips as he punched line three. Gladyce giggled and pulled the door shut.

  "Yeah, you in town, kid?" demanded Art into the phone.

  Runyan's voice answered, "San Francisco. I just called to thank you for the loan, Art, and to tell you I'll be putting it into the mail to you this afternoon or tomorrow."

  "Hey, bring it with you," said Art. Aggrieved, he added, "You aren't going to crap out on me, are you?"

  "I'm sorry, Art, I won't be able to make it for a while. I'll be cleaning up some loose ends around here, then. .."

  ***

  Runyan had stuffed two sticks of gum into his mouth and started chewing them while talking with Art. When he hung up, the hand he'd rested casually on the moulding at the top of the phone booth brought down the coin locker key he'd stashed there.

  He divided the bonds into two even packets: one he tossed back in the locker, feeding in a coin and removing the key again; the other packet he split to cram into the inside pockets of his jacket like a chipmunk stuffing nuts into its facial pouches.

  Then he got a shoeshine at the stand beside the door to the men's room. As the black man daubed on polish and popped the cloth, head down and concentrating on the shoes, Runyan took the wad of gum from his mouth, wrapped the locker key in it, and stuck it against the inner edge of the front of the chair on which he was sitting.