“Protective or not, I’d like to grab him by the scruff of his neck and shake him up one side of the barn and down the other until he gives us names. Information. Damn, Tyree, this afternoon was one hair away from ugly.”
“It was.” Tyree shrugged, twirled the car keys. “You want me to go then? Because I can stay as long as you want.”
“Nah, go on. Be with your kids and Yvonna for a while. I’ll get a ride. Call a taxi.”
“If you’re sure?” Tyree was clearly ready to bolt.
Judah didn’t blame him. A gunfight did that to you. Made you antsy, ready to be with your woman. Messed big time with your head.
By now Sophie was in Chicago. He’d checked the weather report while he was waiting for the nurse. Snow predicted all week for Chicago. Doctor Sugar was going to have herself a Currier and Ives kind of Christmas. She’d said she was coming back, but he wouldn’t bet gas money on it.
People changed. He’d be pure-grade stupid to make anything of her blithe assurance that she had responsibilities here in Poinciana. Sophie was a creature of impulse, of the moment, and once she was in Chicago, with everything all postcard-beautiful and her right in the middle of it, she’d have second thoughts.
She’d be out shopping or skiing. In a red cap, he’d bet. Her hair would shine with snow flakes. Sophie in snowflakes would be a treat to see. Her cheeks would be cherry-red from the cold.
She’d be laughing. Sophie laughed a lot. Giggled, too. That had surprised him the first time the musical ripple of laughter had erupted. Doctors didn’t giggle. But Sophie did.
He couldn’t recall when her laughter and sunniness had become necessary to him.
Now they were.
He didn’t know what he was going to do about it.
He couldn’t stop wondering what she was doing. Whatever it was, she’d be enjoying herself, full steam ahead, throwing all her energy and enthusiasm into whatever she was doing.
He missed her with a longing that made him stop and catch his breath, easing the tightness in his chest.
Only hours without her, and in spite of the bright Florida-blue sky, his world was darker, colder. This past year had left him feeling beat up. Lonelier. Older and tired.
He didn’t like feeling like an old man.
On an impulse, he took the elevator up to the Peds ward. Showing his badge to the nurse on duty, he headed toward the baby Sophie called Angel.
From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the guy who’d been hanging around it seemed every time Judah was at the hospital. Billy something.
He looked down at the baby he’d found in the rainy night and wondered what Sophie had found so irresistible. Babies were…an encumbrance.
Hostages to fate, they were hopelessly dependent on the adults in their lives.
Flawed, selfish adults. Impatient, driven, tormented adults. Hell, a person had to have a license to operate a vehicle. Nothing required to operate a baby or to make one. So where did Sophie find the grit to dive head-first into the idea of parenting this baby she knew nothing about? How could Sophie think she could raise this child? There was no way Sophie could make such an impulse work. You played the cards you were dealt. This abandoned child had a crummy hand. Bad luck for the kid, but that was life.
The baby’s brown eyes met his.
Her quiet, still gaze was adult in its wariness. She wasn’t a gurgly kind of kid. Observant, but not cuddly, as if she were holding herself safe, simply waiting for him to make the first move, like she knew exactly how her world had been destroyed in a moment of violence.
Her unwavering gaze made him profoundly uneasy.
The longer he watched, the more he had the strangest sense that Sophie’s Angel was studying him and trying to make up her mind about him.
He couldn’t speak, couldn’t take his eyes from her.
No help from heaven, none from earth.
The ever-familiar rage stirred in him.
This kid’s bad luck was one more tick in the column of Calvin Finnegan’s all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect-in-judgment God’s mistakes.
Judah knew he damned well didn’t want to be on speaking terms with a God who couldn’t do any better than this.
The awareness of the world’s cruelty that he carried always with him seemed more burdensome than ever as he watched Sophie’s Angel in the quiet Peds ward.
Confused and not sure why he’d sought out the baby, he turned to go.
And then Sophie’s Angel waved one closed fist and grabbed her toe, pulling it to her small mouth. She smiled in his direction, a quick rearrangement of minute features. The smile killed, no question.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Look, let’s get this straight, right up front. I don’t like babies. I don’t like kids. And I sure as hell don’t like teenagers. I’m not a sucker, kid, so don’t flirt with me. I’m not one of those wusses who go all goo-goo over kids. You’re wasting your time. Got it?”
It might have been the sound of his male voice in the silence of the ward, a difference in her environment that startled her.
Because she whimpered once, the small sound of one tiny human being reaching out for comfort, for connection with another human being, her loneliness mirroring his. Only that one, forlorn whimper.
Silence.
Judah picked her up before he realized he’d even reached into her crib. “This doesn’t mean anything, you know. Don’t think it does.”
Her baby palm swatted his face, offering him the very comfort she had sought from him.
He took a deep breath, and it was hard to suck in air. “Kid, I can’t help you. There’s damn all I can do. Don’t look to me for help. I’m nobody’s hero.” He jiggled her gently, helplessly, while she kept her gaze fixed on him.
He couldn’t change anything for her. He knew he couldn’t make the past go away. There would be no happy ever after for this baby, no matter what Sophie believed. Nothing Sophie could do. Nothing he could fix. Life was hard, ugly, and this poor munchkin had been caught in the maw of evil.
All he could do was find her mother’s killer. That much he could do.
Would do.
Chapter 14
Outside the Peds ward, a shadow moved. A flicker, nothing more. Furtive in this very public arena.
Judah went still. In his arms, Angel folded in on herself, a tiny, blanket-wrapped silent mouse. Looking down at her, he mouthed, “Shh,” as if she could understand and heed his warning.
The on-duty nurse was attending to another infant in the far corner of the room. Something in Judah’s posture must have caught her attention because she glanced at him, her eyebrows drawn together in a question.
Before she could speak out loud, he gave a minute shrug, all cool here, nothing wrong, and she resumed changing the IV tubing snaking from the baby in the crib.
In a remote corner of Judah’s brain, he understood that he was behaving irrationally. There was no reason to be on guard, not here. No threat in a room full of babies.
But the animal brain whispered its warning, and he listened, all senses quivering.
Nothing happened.
No more movement.
Yet still there was that disturbance in the air.
Carefully he eased Angel back into her crib. Moving noiselessly to the wall separating him and that sense of wrongness coming from the hall, Judah stopped, muscles tensed, at the doorjamb next to the privacy panel for the ward.
And waited once more as he’d done for so many years, waiting for evil to step out and show itself.
As silent and as unmoving as a stalking lion, he could have waited forever. Within seconds, though, a muffled clank came from the hall.
The stringy-haired head that poked around the edge of the door was familiar.
“Hey, there, Billy Ray.” Judah stepped out from the concealing panel. “Looking for something?”
Billy Ray’s face went a pastier shade of pale. “No. Yes! I mean—”
Judah closed in on him, walking Billy Ray
backwards into the hall, the sun-bleached blue of Billy Ray’s eyes dilating into darkness as he stuttered and stumbled and never loosened his death grip on the mop he held in one shaking hand.
“Yes? No? What’s it going to be, Billy Ray? What’s that?” Judah asked softly, punctuating each word with a hard thump of his flat hand against the other man’s sunken chest. The thump sent the man reeling backwards, Judah right in his face, murmuring, “Speak up, guy. I can’t hear you. You really, really want to make sure I hear you, Billy Ray.”
“I know!” Sliding the mop back and forth, Billy Ray backed into the wall. “I didn’t do nothing, I didn’t! I didn’t hurt that baby!”
Once in a while you got lucky. Judah felt lucky. “Baby? What baby is that?”
“You know!” Billy Ray gestured wildly. “That baby!”
“Going to have to be more specific.” Judah patted him hard on the chest. “There’s a room full of babies in back of me. What did you plan to do with one of those babies, huh, Billy Ray?” With two fingers, Judah tapped him softly on the neck. “Going to steal one? Sneak it out of the hospital? Maybe you were thinking of doing that. Yeah, makes sense to me. Sneak some baby out and sell it. Make a bundle.”
“No, no, no,” he moaned.
“No?” Judah flicked the back of his hand against the man’s cheek. “You on drugs, Billy Ray? You thinking of making a quick buck by stealing a baby to pay for some fine white powder to ease you through the day?”
“No! I work. My job is here. I do a good job! Every day, Billy Ray does a good job! I didn’t hurt that baby!” His retreat cut off by the wall, the man crumpled into a heap at Judah’s feet. One of his long, thin hands continued to twitch the mop back and forth off to Judah’s left. Billy Ray’s other hand picked at his upper lip, worrying the skin until a drop of bright red dotted it.
Billy Ray’s fear rose like a cloud of mosquito spray off the man, toxic and suffocating. Underneath the fear, though, was confusion.
And distress. A distress that intensified with each shift of Billy Ray’s glance to the door of the Peds ward.
Oh, hell. Judah finally got it, finally saw what he should have recognized the first time he’d seen the man. Judah felt his blood pressure drop as his icy rage drained away.
He’d been blinded by his fury that someone could threaten those babies. Holding Angel, he’d seen nothing else except one more threat to her.
He’d been stupid.
That’s what happened when emotions sneaked in.
He still needed answers. Billy Ray would give some, lead him to the rest.
Eventually.
Then they’d know who’d killed Le Duc Nhu. Know, too, why her baby had been found in the manger.
Lowering his voice to a confiding tone, Judah squatted beside Billy Ray, hunkering down in a guy-to-guy posture. He let the tension ease from his muscles, let Billy Ray pick up on the change. He thought about taking Billy Ray down to the cafeteria, but decided it was better to stay casual, keep talking in the hall. That way he wouldn’t spook Billy Ray any more than he had already. Eventually, as if he had all the time in the world, Judah pointed to the mop. “Hey, man. My bad. Sorry I came on so strong. You surprised me, that’s all. Listen, I can see you’re a hard worker. By the way,” Judah stretched out his hand, “that’s a mighty fine mop you’re using.”
Billy Ray drew the mop closer. “My mop. Nobody uses it but Billy Ray. I keep the floors real clean. That’s my job.”
“You do a swell job,” Judah said.
“You the cop what brought in the baby. I seen you that day.”
Judah let a beat of silence rest between them, let Billy Ray take a deep breath before Judah added conversationally, “And every time I’ve been at the hospital, I’ve seen you. You’re a really busy guy.”
The man jerked his head several times. But his glance once more went to the magnet of the Peds ward, and beads of sweat popped out along his hairline.
“I’ve seen how you keep to a schedule, stick to your routine—”
Billy Ray’s bobbing nods increased frantically.
“But there’s some other reason why you show up whenever I’m around, isn’t there?”
The head bobs slowed, the smell of fear rose even stronger, and Billy Ray’s hand on the mop resumed its twitching.
“You need to tell my why that happens, Billy Ray. Why you showed up in the cafeteria, for instance, when I was there.”
“I keep busy. I go everywhere.”
“And that’s why I think you can help me.” Judah placed one hand on the mop handle. He could feel the vibration of the man’s twitches through the handle. He could feel the vibration of the man’s twitches through the handle. “You want to help me, don’t you, Billy Ray?” Judah saw the last name embroidered on the man’s shirt. “Or you want me to call you Mr. Watley? You like that better?”
The man inhaled. “Everybody calls me Billy Ray.”
“Okay.” Judah nodded. “That’s real friendly of you, Billy Ray. But that’s why you’ve been following me around, right? To help the baby?”
Billy Ray’s other hand finally ceased picking at his lip. “I help a lot.”
Through the windows of the Peds ward, Judah watched puffy clouds move across the late-afternoon brilliant blue and rose-tinged sky. Stretching northward, blanketing Sophie, the sky there would be gray and snowfilled. If she’d been here, she could have explained Billy Ray. He wouldn’t have been so stupid as to bully Billy Ray and scare him mindless. Sophie would have understood what Judah hadn’t.
He’d called Sophie a fool for believing in people. Yet he’d been the fool for going off half-cocked when he’d seen Billy Ray sneaking around. He’d been pure cop in those moments, sure, reacting fast and aggressively, but he’d been a cop who wasn’t seeing what was in front of him.
Sophie might have kept him from making such a fool of himself—
But she’d cheerfully turned her back on Poinciana and flown into the cold and snow, abandoning them. She should have been here, he thought.
He recognized his own pigheadedness.
Sophie had a right to be wherever she wanted to be.
Clearly, she didn’t want to be here.
He slammed shut the door on those thoughts. Sophie was gone. She didn’t get to live in his head.
Settling back against the wall, giving the man beside him all the space and time he needed, Judah said, finally, gently, “Tell me about the baby, Billy Ray. How did you help her? Because you did, didn’t you?”
Billy Ray told him.
It was a long telling with many starts and stops, many side trips.
At the end, Judah rested his head against the wall and shut his eyes.
Mankind.
Man-unkind.
Stupid, all of it. Stupid. And a dead woman and a homeless child at the end of it all.
Outside the window of Sophie’s grandmother’s apartment, flurries of snow whipped in the dark against the sides of the yellow Chicago brick buildings. The gangways between them were so narrow that Sophie could have reached from her Bushka’s steamy kitchen into the rooms of the building across the way with a short pole.
Living practically in the neighbors’ pockets had once felt cozy. Now, though, missing the endless pulse of the Gulf outside her Florida house, she felt confined, as though she couldn’t get a deep breath. She wanted to breathe in the tang of salt and sea, the smell of pale dirt and oranges. Since the moment she’d deplaned into O’Hare Airport’s briskness, she’d yearned for that damp, rich smell of the tropics, the sensuous heat that loosened her muscles and made her yawn.
Unexpected, this longing for the sandy soil of a place she’d expected to be temporary, nothing more than a way station, a stopping place on the road to— Where?
She’d never planned for what would come after the job at Poinciana Hospital, never considered it as a permanent…home.
Her hands smoothed over the floured surface of the kitchen table. Her Bushka had already laid out th
e dough for the walnut rolls on the old kitchen table. The old table was square and heavy, the enameled paint that Sophie remembered from her childhood worn away by years of use. On the stubby legs of the table, remaining bits of brilliant red caught the light from the overhead fixture, their glitter a reminder of times past.
Letting her thoughts drift with her movements, Sophie rolled the dough thinner and thinner until it almost covered the table top entirely.
Cracking walnuts at the kitchen counter, her grandmother hummed along with the Christmas music from the CD player, Sophie’s gift to her the previous Christmas. It had replaced an ancient record player from the fifties that her grandmother had nursed along when everyone else had moved on to eight-track tapes, cassettes and then CDs.
At the time, Sophie had wondered if Irina Romanov would ever use the player.
Because, like the kitchen table, some things didn’t change.
But, clearly, given enough time and inclination, some things did.
“There.” Brushing the hulls aside, Irina tossed the ancient nutcracker onto the counter. “Finished with that job.” She dusted her hands together, picked up the chopping knife.
“When are you going to tell me, Sophie mine? About whatever has put those shadows under your eyes and the trouble in them?” Her elegant, husky voice held only a trace of the Russia of her childhood. A professor of Russian literature at Northwestern, she’d made her speech patterns mold to American life. “I would guess a man if it were anyone but my Sophie.”
Sophie couldn’t hold her Bushka’s steady gaze.
“I see. Tsk.” Irina Romanov moved the knife briskly over the nuts, chopping them finer and finer. “You have made a wonderful life for yourself, and now a man is playing topsy-turvy with your plans for the first time, yes?”
“It’s not the man who’s turning everything crazy. Not exactly.” Sophie swooped the rolling pin diagonally over the dough, smoothing it into a glistening sheet of pastry rich with butter. “Anyway, I’ve never been much of a one for long-range plans, Bushka. You know that.”
Dead Calm Page 20