Unmanned

by Lois Greiman

  “Will Swanson,” he said, and gave me an embarrassed grin. “From the gas station?”

  “Oh. Yes,” I said, witty under pressure.

  Strong as a bulldozer, Harlequin squeezed past my leg to slam his nose into Windshield Guy’s groin.

  “Holy crap!” he said, backed against the stucco. “What is that?”

  “Sorry. Harlequin, come!” I ordered. I might just as well have told him to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. He paid me no attention whatsoever. But after a couple more snuffles, he sneezed twice, then galloped loose-limbed down the steps and made a mad circle around my abbreviated yard, past my lone cactus and the two rocks that keep it company.

  Windshield Guy watched, eyes wide behind the wire-rims. “Is it…a dog?”

  Harley’s ears were flapping like wind socks and his tongue stretched nearly to his piebald shoulder. “Maybe,” I said. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh.” He looked surprised. “I’m sorry. Weren’t you expecting me?”

  I may have blinked. Sometimes it’s the most intelligent expression I can muster on short notice.

  “I called your office,” he added.

  I waited.

  “Asked if it would be okay to stop by. Your secretary gave me your address,” he added quickly.

  I wished like hell I could believe he was lying, but I’d known Mandy for a couple of weeks now. The girl made Gatorade look like Einstein.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, and blushed a little, backing away. “She didn’t tell you I called. You probably have company. I can…” He glanced uncomfortably down the street. “I’ll come back later.”

  “No, it’s all right.” No company. No Asian ambrosia. Harlequin galumphed back up the steps, nearly falling on his face before plopping his bony rump atop my foot and gazing adoringly into my eyes. If a guy looked at me like that even once I’d have five fat babies and a gas-guzzling minivan by Thursday. Reaching down, I fondled one droopy ear and reminded myself I knew very little about this guy except for the nice forearms. “How’d you get my phone number?”

  “Yellow pages. L.A. Counseling. Christina McMullen, Ph.D.” He was blushing again. Kind of sweet, but when I glanced toward the street, my suspicions fired up. Maybe they’re innate. Or maybe the attempts on my life have had an adverse effect on my naturally trusting nature. “Where’s your car?”

  He laughed, sounding nervous as he backed down my walkway. “Hank needed the truck. I took a cab over. Cost me an arm and an ear.”

  Suspicions. Maybe that was why I was sans five fat babies and the ubiquitous minivan. “Did you want to take a look at the garage?” I led him down the steps. Harlequin followed me, over the ragged walkway and through my front gate.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve made you nervous. I was sure your secretary would have told you to expect me,” he said.

  “Not your fault,” I said. “The Magnificent Mandy doesn’t like to be conventional.” I was starting to feel a little guilty. I mean, yeah, I did need a garage update, but I was far more interested in how his forearms flexed when he cleaned windshields. “Listen, Will, I don’t know if I can afford—”

  “Shit. I’m sorry,” he said. We’d reached the corner of my garage. It canted toward the south as if fighting a stout northwesterly. He glanced down Opus Street. There was no traffic this time of night. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I didn’t mean to make you feel like you owe me a job. Man, I’m terrible with hot…” He paused, flustered.

  My ears perked up, along with my flagging self-confidence. “What were you saying?”

  We made eye contact. The sun was setting, casting a rosy glow over the garage…and my mood. He shuffled his feet. “Hank can charm the socks off hot girls. But I…” Another shrug.

  I remembered our conversation at the gas station. It had actually been kind of witty. “I think you do okay.”

  “You kidding? I’m sweating like a greased pig,” he said. “Of course, in Oshkosh they think that’s sexy.”

  I laughed. He exhaled sharply, stared at me for a moment, then turned away. “So this is the alleged garage.”

  I gave it a jaundiced glance. I’d once parked Solberg’s Porsche in it. He had subsequently threatened litigation. “Can it be saved?”

  He made a face. “Are you religious?”

  “When I have to be.”

  He tapped a rotted board with his foot. “Now’s the time.”

  “I’ll dig out my rosary.”

  He glanced at me. “You’re kidding. You’re Catholic and beautiful.”

  Our gazes locked again. “Am I going to have to pay extra for the flattery?”

  He grinned a little, looking boyish again. “We don’t see a lot of girls like you in Oshkosh,” he said, and took a step toward me.

  I knew right then that I should step back, but it wasn’t as if Prince Charming were waiting in the wings. Hell, Rivera wasn’t even waiting in the wings. Still, my nerves were jumping. Nice girls don’t make out on the first date. Of course, it had been about a decade and a half since I’d considered myself a girl. And the rules are somewhat less stringent for aging women who have been inadvertently celibate for twenty-one months, two weeks, and six days.

  “Thought my heart was going to stop when I saw you across the parking lot,” he said, and stepped a little closer, blocking Opus Street from view. He smelled kind of woodsy, like fresh-cut timber.

  Harlequin galloped around the corner of the garage, ecstatically chasing nothing.

  “Would have sold my kidneys just to see you smile.”

  Things were heating up rapidly, like the initial pages of one of those erotic novels. I shook my head, waiting to wake up…or for him to rip off his tear-away pants.

  “Listen, Will—” I began, but then he leaned in and kissed me with mouthwatering sweetness.

  “I’ll leave if you want me to,” he murmured. “Or—”

  He stopped, scowled, and glanced over his shoulder toward the street.

  “Or what?” I whispered, but suddenly there was a loud pop.

  “Fuck it!” he swore, and lurched behind me.

  Another pop. I spun toward him, numb, disoriented, and sure, absolutely certain someone wasn’t shooting at me. Not again. Wood sprayed into the air. I screamed. He shoved me forward. I crashed onto my knees. A bullet whizzed over my head. I dropped onto my belly, chanting Jesus’ name.

  And it must have worked, because the shooting ceased. My heart was beating like bongos against the dirt. I lifted my head a quarter of an inch. No pinging.

  Behind me, something whined and fell silent, and I suddenly felt sick. Sick and shaky.

  “No,” I rasped, turning on scathed hands and bloody knees.

  Harlequin was nowhere to be seen, but Will Swanson was there, sprawled on the ground in front of me. Eyes staring, hands lax, and blood oozing from his head into the parched earth beneath me.

  2

  Death and taxes—the one don’t look so bad when you compare it to the other.

  —Elmer Brady, Chrissy’s maternal grandfather, who had refused to pay taxes on more than one occasion

  “SIT DOWN.” RIVERA’S TONE was dark and hard-edged. My own sounded kind of squiggly.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” I was standing in the middle of my kitchen, dazed and queasy and not entirely certain how I had gotten there. Rivera had arrived before I’d reached the body, had pulled me to my feet. A few minutes later, a cruiser had squealed to a halt next to my garage, lights wheeling crazily.

  “Yes,” he said.

  My hands were shaking, my legs noodley, but I turned toward the door, wondering if I could manage the knob.

  “Sit down,” he repeated, but I had to see for myself, to do what I could, to try to make sense of a world gone mad…again. The floor felt uneven beneath my feet.

  “Sit down!” he ordered, and, yanking a chair from nowhere, pushed me into it. The room tilted. I teetered with it. “Put your head between your legs.”

  “I’m fine.” I can usual
ly lie with more panache, but guys don’t generally drop dead in my front yard. Though it’s happened in my office. My stomach crunched at the memory.

  From outside, I heard the static of a two-way radio. Words followed, but I couldn’t make them out—just the tone, solemn and succinct and matter-of-fact.

  Rivera kept his hand on my shoulder, holding me down or holding me up. Hard to say for sure.

  “What’s his name?” he asked, but I was lost in my own morass of self-pity and disorientation.

  “He never hurt anyone,” I said, and felt a warm droplet drift down my cheek.

  “How well did you know him?”

  I blinked, glanced up at him, smearing away the tear with the back of my hand. “Harlequin?”

  His scowl sharpened for an instant. A tic danced in his dark-stubbled jaw. “Jesus.” The scar beside his mouth twitched. “I’m talking about the dead g—the deceased.”

  I blanched, remembering Will Swanson’s eyes, wide and sightless above a growing pool of blood. It had been surprisingly dark, black almost, forming a paisley shape before being soaked into my starved lawn like milk on dry toast. My stomach heaved.

  “Head between your legs,” Rivera ordered again, and this time I complied, scrunching my fingers in my skirt and breathing deep. “Christ!” He sounded impatient and angry. Shuffled his feet. His shoes were brown leather, scuffed at the toes, just visible beneath his blue jeans, and somehow the sight of them started my tears up in earnest. Harlequin had loved shoes.

  I drew in a shaky breath, let my tears drip onto the floor, cleared my throat, and straightened carefully. “Where is he?”

  Rivera was silent for a moment as if trying to follow my line of thought, then, “Stay here,” he said, and turned away.

  “I want to come—” I said, and tried to rise, but he turned back toward me.

  “Stay!” he said, and jabbed a finger at me with more venom than he’d ever used on Harley. “Or I swear to God I’ll let them haul you downtown.”

  “He was my dog,” I said. Maybe I was trying for defiance, but my voice warbled and my chin felt strangely disconnected.

  He swore again, but softer this time. “Please…” The word sounded funny coming from him. Like he’d never said it before and was trying to figure out how to formulate the sounds. “…just stay put for once in your goddamn life.”

  I considered arguing, but there was something funky going on in his eyes. It almost looked like worry, so I kept silent, trying to work that out. And apparently he took that as agreement, because he was gone in a moment.

  Near the cupboards, Harlequin’s dishes sat on a plastic mat. Three nuggets of food were scattered across it. I felt my eyes well over again. My throat felt tight. It was stupid. I knew it was. A man was dead, and all I could think about was that lop-eared—

  The door opened. Rivera stepped inside, face chiseled into a frown, brows low over deadly dark eyes. I hiccuped between my chattering teeth, and then he thrust the door open and Harlequin stood on the threshold, eyelids drooping, skinny tail clamped between trembling, knock-kneed legs.

  “Harley,” I whimpered. His head came up and then he was slinking across the floor toward me and I was crying and hiccuping while a dog the size of a buffalo licked my face and tried desperately to climb onto my lap.

  When I’d run out of tears and snot I found that Rivera had leaned his hips against my counter and was watching me with thundercloud eyes.

  “I didn’t even think you liked that damned dog,” he said.

  I wiped the back of my hand across my nose and tugged at a floppy ear. “I don’t. He’s just so…” I cleared my throat, unable to come up with a socially acceptable superlative. “Where’d you find him?”

  “Under the Porsche.” There was a pause. “I’m assuming it’s Solberg’s?”

  I nodded, sniffled, pressed my face to the dog’s for a minute. He smelled bad.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, and cleared my throat again. “What about…” I steadied myself. My knees hurt where they’d been scraped raw. “What about Will?”

  Watching Rivera, it was as if a light switch clicked in his personality, and suddenly a little notebook appeared in his hand. He scribbled rapidly. “What’s his last name?”

  “Is he dead?”

  His eyes narrowed. “How well did you know him?”

  My lips jerked spasmodically. “He was from Oshkosh.”

  He gave me a look that suggested I might be a few smokes short of a full pack.

  “He has a brother,” I said.

  He nodded. Crazy or not, he still seemed happy to have me talk. “Where’d you meet him?”

  “I was getting gas.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “I didn’t see his car,” I said, trying not to think too hard, to remember too much. “But he liked the Porsche.”

  Rivera snapped his gaze to me. “You were driving Solberg’s car?”

  “Mine’s in the—”

  “Tell me—” He stopped himself. The muscle danced in his jaw. “Tell me you didn’t just meet this guy today.”

  I fiddled with Harlequin’s collar. Rivera has an ungodly gift for making me look stupid. Of course, sometimes I give him a hand, just to be neighborly. “He was a carpenter.”

  This news didn’t seem to make him any happier.

  “Said he’d fix my garage for cheap.”

  “Jesus!” Rivera said, and suddenly he was pacing. “You just met the guy this morning and invited him out to…to what?” He stopped to glare at me. Harlequin clambered from my lap and clicked across the cheap flooring to gaze up at him. “Don’t you think at all?”

  “Yeah, I thought.” I jerked to my feet. The adrenaline that had gotten me through those first ugly moments was firing up again, leaving the weak-assed nausea behind. “I thought you probably weren’t going to show again.”

  He gave me a puzzled look from the corner of his eye. I’ve been familiar with that expression since I was four and Dad found me scrunched up on the top shelf in the kitchen cupboard eating Oreos. “So you invite some…” He waved in the general direction of my front lawn. “…some dead guy over?”

  I raised my chin. “He wasn’t dead at the time.”

  “Well…” He chuckled, paced. “…his chances weren’t very good, were they? Not with you in his life.”

  I gritted my teeth at him. “You’re still alive.”

  “Probably just a damned oversight on your part.”

  “Probably,” I said, and traipsed into the bathroom. Rivera followed me. But I ignored him as I yanked open the door beneath the sink and snagged a package of Virginia Slims from behind the box of tampons. I had a little trouble opening the pack, but the cigarette felt good between my fingers. Having it snatched out of my hand didn’t feel quite so lovely.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “You quit.” He tossed it in the garbage. “Remember?”

  “Well, I started again,” I said, and tried to pull another from the neat rows, but I fumbled the pack and it toppled to the floor, spilling cigarettes atop my bathroom rug. And then I started to cry.

  But even over the sobs I could hear Rivera cursing. “Come here,” he said finally, and tugged me into his arms. I resisted for a moment out of principle, but when I let myself go, his chest felt firm, his V-neck soft against my cheek. I tried to stop crying. Some women look cute when they cry. I look like a horror-flick chick. The one you know is doomed from the moment she steps onto the screen.

  “Blow your nose,” he said, handing me a roll of toilet paper.

  I was beyond arguing. I blew my nose. Then he led me to the couch and pulled me down beside him. Harlequin climbed up and with a heavy sigh plopped his head onto my lap.

  “You okay now?” Rivera’s voice sounded low and dusky.

  “Sure.” As lies went, it was shaky, but at least I didn’t blubber like a colicky infant.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  My lips twitched h
opelessly. “You going to yell at me again?”

  “I didn’t yell.”

  I gave him a look from drippy eyes.

  “Much,” he added, and pushed the hair back from my face. At one point it had been coiled up in a stylish ’do. Now it probably looked as if I’d had an unfortunate run-in with an industrial fan. He grinned a little, touched my cheek. “I can’t keep the boys at bay much longer, honey. They’re going to want a statement.”

  Honey. The word sounded strange from his lips. Unfamiliar but oddly right. I refrained from crawling into his lap and curling up like a love-starved kitten. I would have had to take the dog with me.

  “His name was Will Swanson. He helped me clean my windshield.” I told him the name and location of the gas station.

  “Why?”

  I thought about that for a second. “To be nice?”

  He scowled but didn’t comment, maybe because he thought I’d start sniveling again. “Where’d he come from?”

  “Oshkosh.”

  “I mean, was he inside the store? Filling his car?”

  “Oh. He was just there when I glanced up.”

  “He introduce himself?”

  “Not right away. We talked.” I remembered back, swallowed. Will had been charming. Now he was dead. A trend seemed to be forming. “He had a movie script, I think.”

  “Do you know where he was pitching it?”

  I shuddered in a breath. “I was late for work.” I cleared my throat. “Didn’t have much time.”

  “Did you see any identification?”

  “Iden—”

  “Credit card.” He made an impatient gesture. “Driver’s license. Birth certificate?”

  I blinked, lashes fat and heavy from the latest deluge. “Birth certificate?”

  His scar jumped. “What made you think he was who he said he was?”

  I frowned at the untidy wad of toilet paper still in my hand. “What would make me think he wasn’t?”

  “Jesus, McMullen, everyone and his brother seems to be trying to kill you. It’s time you woke up and—”

  I must have been tearing up again, because he stopped himself, drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

  The tears froze in my eyes. “What?”