“Not me,” she complained hoarsely, trying to sit up, but failing. The nurse eased her back down. “Cowboy . . . no drugs. He can’t have drugs. He . ..” She couldn’t get another word out, her tongue an uncooperative slug. A deep purple light fanned in at the edges of her eyes, stealing away the nurse and finally the overly bright light above the bed. Just before the goo dragged her down for good, she thought she heard the nurse say something, but it blended into a dream, and she lost all track of it.
69 Winning the Yes
“I owe you,” LaMoia called out from behind the roar of his kitchen blender and a batch of LaMoia’s original-recipe margaritas. Blue patrolled the kitchen floor licking up spills. LaMoia drizzled tequila through an open hole in the lid. A plate of raw salt awaited to his left.
“Damn right you do.” She wore a sling on her left arm, some bandages he couldn’t see. She sat on a padded stool at his kitchen counter. Even her bottom was sore.
He wore a series of serious bruises on his face and arms like medals of honor. He caught her looking. “You could kiss them to make them better.”
“Are we flirting?” she asked. Not wanting to be in the houseboat where Walker had watched her so closely, she’d been living as LaMoia’s houseguest for the past week. As friends. But on this night romance simmered beneath the surface, and both felt it.
He delivered the drinks. “Get over it.”
“Delicious,” she said, sampling the concoction.
“More where that came from.”
“Indeed.”
He raised his glass. “To forgetting.”
She knew he meant well by such a toast, but it only served to remind her of all the forgetting she had yet to do. Ferrell Walker wouldn’t be forgotten—at least not by a legal system hungry to prosecute him. The man had months, years, of waiting to do—first in the hospital, then a prison in the eastern part of the state. His rescue from the debris of the cave-in had come nearly twenty minutes after LaMoia’s. His oxygen-starved brain had failed to recover following resuscitation. The guards called him “a drooler.” LaMoia called him pitiful. Matthews called him a casualty. She wouldn’t soon forget Margaret either, or the little baby girl the doctors had saved postmortem. Inquiries had been made: Margaret’s mother and stepfather, her only living family, had refused the child.
An honors memorial service had been held that same afternoon for Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair. Neither Matthews nor LaMoia had attended.
She sloshed the tangy ice around her mouth, taking a big gulp. “I could have about five of these.”
“Now that’s more like it,” LaMoia said.
“You want to get me drunk, John?”
“It was your idea, not mine. Besides, you’re not exactly drinking alone here, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He considered this. “Have I ever seen you drunk, Matthews? I don’t think so. You see? That’s another thing about you: You’re always in such total control—of you, and everyone around you.”
She drank too fast and froze her throat. LaMoia brought the mixer’s pitcher over and refilled her glass halfway. He fully topped off his own.
“More, please.” When he failed to accommodate her, she reached for the pitcher with her good hand, but LaMoia caught her gently by her wrist.
LaMoia said, “No more for you. You don’t get any excuses.”
“Excuses for what?” she asked, bewildered by his refusal. For a moment, the room held perfectly still—the ferries out on the bay stopped moving; the rivulets of margarita froze on the side of the mixer—the only sound in the room the steady thumping of Blue’s tail against one of the stools and the high octane drumming in her ears.
He reached over, took hold of her shirt, and carefully drew her to him. She reached out for balance with her good hand as he planted his lips onto hers and drew the wind out of her, drew her eyelids down, her head spinning, her toes dancing in her shoes. She felt everything inside tense like she’d grabbed hold of a live wire, and then her muscles melted into a steadily increasing warmth that rose into her chest and flooded her thighs. Her free hand laced into his curly hair and she kissed him back.
His bar stool nearly went over.
She wanted to get naked. She wanted him inside her, right here on the kitchen counter.
He whispered, “No excuses for that.”
“You make a mean margarita.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“In all sorts of things.” Where had that come from? She added, “I may be a little rusty.”
“You don’t feel rusty.” His hand was inside the back of her shirt. Her head tingled.
“No excuses,” she said.
“None.”
She whispered, “Listen, John, either we stop right now, or . . . we don’t.” It sounded stupid, once she heard it replay in her head.
“Whatever happens, happens,” he said, still kissing her. “And we give it the best chance it has. No excuses, no fear.”
She said, “Who’da thought?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Matthews.”
“I imagine so.” She added, “What are the chances you might call me by my first name, Romeo?”
“None.” He opened his arms and embraced her. Peace and excitement washed through her.
“Take me to bed,” she whispered into his ear.
“Mind reader.”
She sputtered a nervous laugh.
He grabbed her hand.
Easing off the stool and into his arms, she said softly, “What are we doing?”
“Living. What’s so wrong with that?”
70 Old Friends
The Great Lady inhabited the same wicker throne, a twinkle to her dark eyes that nearly hid behind the mass of flesh as she smiled at Boldt. Dumpling soup. Crispy beef with pea pods. Egg-fried rice with gulf shrimp.
“You like, Mr. Both?”
“Tasty. Better than ever,” he said.
“Why eyes so sad? You clear up Billy Chen. He make no mistake on job. Prove again what great friend you are to an old lady.”
“Friendships are complicated. You helped me out, too.”
“You got woman problem.” Mama Lu made it a statement with no room for argument.
“I’ve got a wonderful wife I love and terrific kids, Great Lady.”
“You still got woman problem,” she said.
He laughed aloud. He thought it might have been the first time he’d ever laughed in her company, and he wondered if it was bad form. He apologized, excusing himself, just in case.
“You apologizing for laughing? You got it bad. Who is she?”
“It’s a he and she,” he admitted.
Again she clucked her tongue. “Only a fool suffers another man’s pleasure.”
He considered this, nodded, and said, “And sometimes a fool has to hear things from a friend to get it right.”
She smacked her lips and picked at her teeth, and for a moment he feared she might take out her teeth. This monster of flesh trained her dark, beady eyes onto him and he withered beneath her gaze. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but he had a relationship with this woman.
“People change, Mr. Both. Maybe laws don’t change, but people do. Not good confuse the two.”
He heard himself admit to her, “I love them both separately, it’s together I’m having a hard time.”
“There you go again, face like a dog,” she said, studying him from the far side of a loaded pair of chopsticks. She waited a long time before speaking. Not a grain of rice fell from her grip. She said, “Hearts of gold never break. Bend, sure. Gold soft. But never break.” She ate the rice and spoke through the food. “You have good heart, Mr. Both. Heart of gold.”
When he left, a half hour later, Boldt kissed her hand. It was the first time he’d touched the woman, and she clearly appreciated the gesture.
Back in the Crown Vic, he put on a Chieftains tape and cranked the volume. A plaintive Irish ballad sung by Van Morrison. “Have I told you lately that I lov
e you?” Van the Man crooned, and Boldt hummed along, swept up by his emotions. He had memories of Liz in his head, not Daphne, and this felt absolutely right to him.
He burped and thought Mama Lu would have appreciated that more than a kiss on the hand.
He drove home, his thumb keeping the song’s slow rhythm on the steering wheel. The melody rose from his throat to his lips as he formed the lyrics and began singing loudly. He couldn’t wait to get home.
71 Life’s No Picnic
The houseboat stood empty, its hardwood floor gleaming clean because Daphne Matthews was not the kind of person to sell a house and leave it dirty. John had known this moment would hurt, and he’d offered to join her, but she’d made this pilgrimage alone.
She couldn’t leave without tears, and she’d wanted to be alone to suffer them in private. So much of her adult life had passed through these doors, even if limited in terms of years. She’d both found herself here and lost herself here—several times, if she were being honest—and parting came hard. The lump in her throat practically stopped her from breathing. It had been more than a house, a home—this place had been a friend that had suffered her complaints, her joys, and two failed engagements. They knew each other. Yet she didn’t want to live the next chapter here.
Her cell phone rang—a new number—and she fished it from her purse, checking the caller-ID before she answered it. Seeing the number on the screen filled her with purpose and joy. She felt especially glad that it wasn’t John calling. He’d kept his word about giving her this time here. She hardly recognized the guy anymore. What on earth was she getting herself into?
She answered, the caller-ID having alerted her that it was her attorney. Quick hellos, a brief amount of small talk. Bursting with curiosity, Matthews asked, “Did you speak with the judge?”
“I did.”
“Has he made a determination?”
“There are waiting periods.”
“But the relatives declined custody.” They’d been through this so many times. It seemed so simple to Matthews. Why did the courts get involved and make it so complicated? She had butterflies. She wanted an answer. She knew she might lose John if this came to pass, and that worried her. A part of her questioned the wisdom in losing the one thing currently working in her life. She was happy for the first time in a long, long time.
“Yes, but a further search for blood relations must be made. We’ll have to petition the court again on your behalf, and I’d be remiss if I encouraged you about the outcome.”
“And in the meantime?”
“State custody.”
“Which means exactly what, after the hospital stay, the incubators?”
“An institution for the waiting period. A foster home if she’s lucky after that while the paperwork makes her available.”
“Can I visit her?”
“In all likelihood.”
“And if I’m first in line for adoption?” She felt like reminding her attorney she’d handled an illegal adoption case a few years back. She knew a lot more about providing a good home than anybody would ever know.
“The watchword right now is patience, Daphne.”
“Patience,” Matthews repeated into the phone. She pulled the front door of the houseboat shut angrily, and it locked her out.
“None of this is bad news,” the attorney said. “But you have to stop thinking about this in terms of being first in line. The court looks at qualifications.”
“And I’m a single mother,” she said. “You’re saying that hurts us.”
“Not at all. Plenty of single mothers adopt. I’m saying you need patience. That’s all.”
“I can handle that,” she said, knowing it was the truth. She told herself repeatedly that she could handle it. She felt a wreck. “But I don’t think it’s best for her.”
The attorney chuckled on the other end of the call. “I’ll call you as her situation changes. And you call me if you change your mind.”
“I’m not changing my mind on this,” Matthews said.
“No,” the attorney said, “I don’t believe you are.”
Matthews said good-bye and tripped the call to disconnect, returned the phone to her purse, and started down the dock. She stopped and grinned as she saw him.
Up under the shadow of a tree, staying out of the heat, John LaMoia was smiling that shit-eating grin of his. John LaMoia— she still couldn’t get over it. He held a picnic basket in his right hand. An incongruous combination if ever there were one.
But then again, John LaMoia had proved himself, if anything, unpredictable.
Please visit Ridley Pearson’s website:
www.ridleypearson.com
If you enjoyed The Art of Deception, read on for an
excerpt from Ridley Pearson’s next exciting thriller,
The Body of Peter Hayes,
in bookstores April 2004.
Lou Boldt picked up bits and pieces of the assault over an uncooperative cell phone. Paramedics were still on the scene—a trailer park near Sea-Tac Airport—a promising report because it suggested the victim remained at the scene as well. If he reached the site in time, Boldt meant to ride to the hospital in the back of the ambulance. He owed Danny Foreman that much.
The Crown Vic bumped through a pothole that would have knocked dentures out. Boldt’s eyes shifted focus briefly to catch his reflection in the silver of the windshield. Boldt had crossed forty a few years back, tinges of gray gave a hint of it. He was in the best physical shape of his professional career thanks to Weight Watchers, a renewed interest in tennis, and a regimen of sit-ups and push-ups in front of CNN each morning. He scratched at his tie, seeing that he was wearing some of his dinner, a familiar habit, and hit a second pothole because of the distraction. His head came up to catch a glimpse of a closed gas station. Plywood tombstones where the pumps should have been, the signs torn down, the neon beer ads gone from the windows.
He turned down a muddy lane, dodging the first of many emergency vehicles. The air hung heavy with mist, Seattle working its way out of a lazy fall and into the steady, cold drizzle of winter. Three to five months of it depending on El Niño or El Niña—Boldt couldn’t keep straight which was which.
Beneath twin sliding glass windows on the butt end, the once white house trailer carried a broken, chrome script that Boldt reassembled in his head to read EVERHOME. It had come to rest in a patch of weedy lawn that needed cutting and was accessed by a poured cement path, broken and heaved like calving icebergs. The emergency vehicles included a crime scene unit van, a King County Sheriff patrol car, and an ambulance with its hood up. Technically the scene was the Seattle Police Department’s, and therefore Boldt’s, but Danny Foreman’s career had landed him first in the Sheriff’s Department, then SPD, and now BCI, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, what some states called the investigative arm of the state police. Boldt wasn’t going to start pawing the dirt in a turf war. Danny Foreman was well liked, both despite and because of his unorthodox approach to law enforcement. To his detriment and to his favor he played it solo whenever possible; it had won him accolades and gotten him into trouble. The job was as much politics as it was raw talent, and Foreman lacked political skills, which to Boldt explained their mutual respect.
Foreman lay on a stretcher inside a thicket of blackberry bushes that grabbed at Boldt’s pant legs. A balloon-like device had been inserted into Danny’s mouth. A woman squeezed the bag while monitoring her sports watch. Foreman looked wiry and older than the early fifties Boldt knew him to be. Tired and beaten down. His nap was graying now and cut short, and a pattern of black moles spread beneath both eyes, lending him the mask-like look of a raccoon. Could it possibly have been as long as all that?
Boldt was quickly caught up to date by a deputy sheriff and a paramedic, both interrupting each other to finish the other’s sentence. The deputy sheriff knew the name Boldt and acted like a teenager in front of a rock star, trying to impress while fawning at the same time. Boldt had enough head
lines to fill a scrapbook, but wasn’t inclined to keep one. He had the highest case clearance per average in the history of the Seattle Police Department. He had rumors to defeat and stories to live up to, and none of it mattered a damn to him, which only served to provoke more of the same.
Foreman had apparently been hit by a projectile stun gun and “subsequent to that”—these people all spoke the same way, and though Boldt was probably supposed to as well, he’d never taken up the language—“the subject was administered a dose of an unknown drug with behavioral characteristics not dissimilar to those of Rohypnol.” The date rape drug of choice, alternately known as roofies, ruffies, roche, R-2, rib, and rope, produced sedation, muscle relaxation, and amnesia in the victim, more commonly a coed found later with her panties down than a cop on a stakeout.
The ambulance on the scene was having engine trouble, and though a second ambulance had been dispatched, efforts were being made to get this one started. Boldt’s chest tightened with anticipation as he learned that the combination of the medication and the stun gun had resulted in “respiratory depression.” Foreman had nearly stopped breathing. He’d been unconscious for almost fifteen minutes.
“Look what the dog drug in,” a blinking Foreman said suddenly, his voice slurred behind the drug.
His coming conscious sent the paramedic into high gear, shouting out numbers like a sports announcer.
“You took a stun dart,” Boldt said. “Then they roped you.”
“Feel like Jell-O. No bones, discounting the one I got for Emma, my nurse here.”
“Keep it in your pants, Danny,” the woman said, grinning, “or I’ll search my bag for the hemostats.”
“Emma and I went to high school together.”
“We went to the same high school,” Emma corrected for Boldt’s sake. “Only Agent Foreman graduated twenty-eight years ahead of my class.”
“Always technicalities with you,” Foreman said.
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