CRY UNCLE

by Judith Arnold

  The heat tranquilized Pamela. Above her, the caws and mews of the sea gulls sounded like a lullaby. The words of her book blurred; she closed her eyes and felt the tension drain out of her. Giddy shrieks amid the thudding surf nibbled at the frayed edges of her consciousness.

  A long moment passed, and she opened her eyes and searched the shoreline. A shot of pink sprang from the foaming waves, then vanished, then sprang up again, arms wheeling, hair dripping.

  Pamela frowned. Hadn’t Lizard been wearing a lime-green swim suit?

  There it was, lying on the sand. The pink creature bounded out of the waves, darted along the water’s edge, and plunged in with another cheerful shout.

  Pamela sprang to her feet and sprinted to the water’s edge in time to see Lizard soar out of the water again, stark naked.

  She snatched the swimsuit off the sand and charged into the water, ignoring the shock of its coldness. “Lizard! Elizabeth! Get over here now!” she roared, fear and fury battling inside her. The chilly water lapped her knees as she forged deeper and grabbed hold of Lizard’s slippery arm. “Put this on!” she commanded, then cast a quick look around to see how many people might have seen the nude little girl.

  Lizard stared up at Pamela and blinked with phony innocence. “How come?”

  “Because I said so!” Pamela retorted.

  “So what? Birdie says—”

  “I don’t care what Birdie says!” Pamela reached down and grabbed Lizard’s foot, determined to shove it through the leg hole in her swimsuit. Lizard tumbled backward with a shivery splash that sprayed water all over Pamela.

  Lizard obviously found Pamela’s outraged sputtering hilarious. She leaped back up, giggling and dancing out of Pamela’s reach.

  “Get over here!” Pamela chased her through the water and out onto the beach, scrambling across the sand after the naked child, who continued to flap her arms and shriek with laughter. If onlookers hadn’t noticed Lizard before, they certainly noticed her now.

  Pamela’s long legs compensated for her lack of speed. After a minute she caught up to Lizard, snagged her around her wet belly, hauled her off the sand and lugged her back to the blanket, where she wrapped her in a towel. “Don’t you ever, ever do that again!” she chided.

  “How come?”

  “Because.” Pamela dried her in brisk, frantic strokes, then yanked the swimsuit onto her. Because I said so wasn’t going to work a second time. “Because you’re not supposed to be undressed in public,” she explained.

  “Birds don’t wear clothes,” Lizard pointed out.

  “Birds wear feathers.” Anticipating Lizard’s argument, she continued, “And no, you can’t wear feathers. Birds are different than people.”

  “But Birdie said if you strip to your essence you can be as free as the birds. You can fly in your spirit...or something like that.”

  Scowling, Pamela smoothed the straps across Lizard’s shoulders. “Do you know what essence means?”

  Lizard shrugged, the motion jarring one of the straps out of place. Pamela nudged it back. “I think it means, kinda like your skin or something.”

  “Listen to me.” Pamela kept her hands on Lizard’s shoulders, holding the girl in place. “It’s a sad fact of life, Lizard, but you can’t go running around naked in public. There are a lot of sick people in this world.”

  “What do you mean, sick? Like, they have chicken pox?”

  “No. It’s more like they’re sick in the head.” Pamela took a slow breath and sorted her thoughts. In her wildest dreams, she would never have imagined she would have to have this discussion with a little girl—someone else’s little girl, at that. It was the sort of task a childless professional woman shouldn’t have to face. Pamela had never studied the subject; she hadn’t read instructional articles or pamphlets on it.

  Someone else should have told Lizard these things. Birdie, or Joe, or Joe’s mother, or someone. No child should reach the age of five without knowing about perverts.

  Apparently, the other adults in Lizard’s life had failed to warn her. Pamela was just going to have to muddle through on her own. “Some sick-in-the-head people might want to touch your private parts,” she said carefully. “You know what your private parts are, don’t you?”

  “What I keep under my bed?”

  “No. The private parts of your body. The parts that are supposed to be covered by your bathing suit.”

  “You mean, like my butt?”

  Pamela sighed. Why bother with discretion? “Yes, Lizard. Like your butt.”

  “Why would anyone want to touch my butt?”

  “Because they’re sick.”

  “Do they think touching my butt’ll make them better?”

  Pamela sighed again. “It doesn’t really matter what they think, because they’re sick in the head. In any case, Lizard, I want you to promise me you won’t go running around nude anymore.”

  “Even in the bath?”

  “In public, Lizard. That’s what we’re talking about. No nudity in public.”

  Lizard looked peeved. Her eyes narrowed and frown lines pleated her brow. “What if Uncle Joe says I can?” she tested.

  “If he says you can...” I’ll kill him, Pamela concluded silently. He didn’t have the right to say anything on this subject. He’d relinquished his rights when he’d decided to meet with his distributor at the Shipwreck instead of coming to the beach with his family. “If he says you can, you can,” she said. “But I’m sure he’ll say you can’t.”

  Lizard stuck out her lower lip in a plump little pout. “I bet he says I can. I’m gonna go build a castle. And you can’t help.” She stomped off in a snit.

  Pamela permitted herself one final sigh that ended in a shudder. She would rather have Lizard angry at her than running around in her birthday suit. Her gaze glued to Lizard, she felt some of her tension fade, but not all. One part of her remained tight with rage—rage that Joe hadn’t taught Lizard how to protect herself.

  Damn it. This had nothing to do with Mona Whitley and the courts. It had nothing to do with persuading the authorities that Lizard belonged in Key West. This wasn’t a game, a staged performance. This was real life. When Pamela thought about all the weirdoes in the world, and all the terrible things that could have happened to Lizard, she wanted to weep.

  She wasn’t going to weep. What she was going to do was give that husband of hers a piece of her mind about his responsibilities as a family man.

  ***

  IT HAD ALL SEEMED so simple when Mary DiNardi first raised the idea. You get married, you make a pretty family picture for the judge, you keep Lizard. No emotions, no involvement, just a straightforward deal, as neat and fair as the contracts he drew up with his distributor.

  He’d even picked a woman who didn’t turn him on—except that she did. He’d picked a woman who had as good a reason to stick with him as he had to stick with her—unless she was simply a crazy lady. Was it any wonder that he wanted to keep as far from her as possible?

  “Go home,” Kitty scolded him. “You look like hell.”

  How she could see what he looked like in the murky light of the bar was beyond him. “You used to think I was cute,” he shot back.

  “You used to look like you got a few hours of sleep every night. Go home.”

  He glanced toward the steering wheel on the wall. Nearly midnight—the busiest time at the Shipwreck. “The bar’s too crowded.”

  “Nothing the rest of us can’t handle. Go home, Joe—and do us all a favor this time: don’t stay up all night making whoopee with Pamela. Get some sleep.”

  Making whoopee. Real funny. “I’ll leave in an hour.”

  “You’ll leave right now, or Brick’ll escort you out. Right, Brick?”

  Brick grunted. Joe eyed his fellow bartender with resignation. Besides making the best tequila sunrises on the island, another reason Joe had hired Brick was because he was built like a linebacker on the Dolphins, which enabled him to double as a bouncer when things got to
o rowdy. Joe didn’t doubt that Brick could “escort” him from the premises—either by tossing him over one brawny shoulder or by dragging him out by his feet.

  “All right,” he relented. “I’m outta here.”

  Driving home, he admitted to himself that he really was exhausted. His fatigue wasn’t just a result of the nocturnal restlessness caused by knowing a woman—an available woman with snow-blond hair and the sexiest shoulders this side of the Continental Divide—was lying alone in a bed at the opposite end of the hall from him. It was also an outgrowth of living with doubt.

  He’d trusted Pamela once. He wanted to trust her again. But he wasn’t sure how, short of investigating her mental health records. And what would he do if he found out she was clinically paranoid? If he gave her the boot after less than a month of marriage, the courts sure wouldn’t consider Lizard’s home life stable.

  He’d gotten himself into jams before. Jams with women, on occasion. Given all the women he knew, he’d have had to be God Himself not to have screwed up at least a few times. But he’d never gotten mixed up with marriage. And he’d never had so much at stake.

  A light was glowing in the living room window when he pulled into the driveway. Pamela usually left the hallway light on for him, as well as the light above the front door. It wasn’t like her to forget to turn off the other lights.

  Fatigue weighed him down as he climbed out of his car, trudged up the front walk and let himself into the house. His neck was stiff, his back aching. Tonight he was going to put his distrust and desire on hold and get some serious, uninterrupted shut-eye. Whatever lay ahead, he needed his strength to confront it.

  What lay ahead, it turned out, was Pamela. He had barely closed the door behind himself when she charged at him from the living room. She was wide awake, so full of energy he recoiled a step as she advanced toward him. “We’ve got to talk, Jonas. This is really important. And so help me, if you try to avoid me—”

  “Hey, hey.” He held up his hands to stop her. He’d just come home. He wasn’t expecting to see her; he wasn’t used to seeing her. He was tired, he was sore...and she was a vision of beauty.

  She must have been out in the sun all day. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were pink, her arms and legs—exposed by her shorts and tank top—more of a golden hue. Her hair seemed a few shades lighter than it had been that morning, her lashes and eyebrows bleached to platinum above her silver-bright eyes.

  “This is important, Jonas,” she said.

  “Fine. It’s important.” He sidled past her, heading for the kitchen. If it was all that important, he might need a beer to get him through it.

  “It’s about Lizard.”

  Thank God it wasn’t about him and Pamela. He paused and turned. “What about her?”

  “Did you know she likes to run naked on the beach?”

  Actually, he hadn’t known that. But what the hell? She was a kid. A remarkably uninhibited one. “Naked, huh.”

  “From her head to her toes.”

  “Well.” He continued down the hall to the kitchen, Pamela hot on his trail. Without turning, he pulled a couple of beers from the fridge, extended one to her, and then set it on the table when she didn’t take it. He twisted the cap off the other bottle and took a swig.

  She crowded him against the counter, her hands fisted and her eyes ablaze. “Damn it, Joe! Don’t you realize what a terrible thing this is?”

  “Terrible thing?” He’d suspected Pamela of having a prudish streak—after all, she’d passed up the opportunity to make love with him. But hell, a little kid running around bare-ass on the beach was no big deal. “Come on, Pam. She’s five years old.”

  “Old enough to keep her body covered.”

  “For God’s sake. So she ran around naked. It’s no big deal. You know how kids are.”

  “I know how adults are.”

  He knew some of them were prigs. Pamela, for instance. “What happened? Did some blue-nose come over and tell you to cover her up?”

  “Blue-nose? Do you think I’m talking about morality? You think that’s what this is about?” Pamela’s knuckles turned a bloodless white. The tendons in her neck stood out. Slowly it dawned on him that she was really in a state about this.

  He lowered his bottle and regarded her cautiously. “I’ll admit Lizard can be wild, but come on. She isn’t even in school yet. Kids are always losing their swimsuits at the beach. They love skinny-dipping.”

  “This isn’t about Lizard’s wildness, or skinny-dipping, or losing her swimsuit. This is about the real world, Joe. It’s about creeps who get their jollies with little girls.”

  “Jesus Christ.” His heart lurched in his chest. Had some creep touched Lizard? Had someone approached her? He’d strangle the guy with his bare hands, so help him. He’d tear off his head—and other parts of his body, too. He’d—

  “Maybe you don’t see the danger. Maybe you think I’m being hysterical—”

  “Who touched her?” His voice emerged low, raw, the rage barely suppressed. “Did someone touch her?”

  “No. But you let her run around naked, and you’re asking for trouble.” Pamela began to pace the kitchen, not so much burning off steam as charging herself up. “I’m not talking about fun and games, Joe. I’m not talking about skinny-dipping. We were on a public beach, and Lizard removed her bathing suit because Birdie told her it would free her essence. Well, let me tell you something, Joe. I’m not going to let that precious little girl free her essence on a public beach. The world is full of creeps. And Lizard thinks she’s perfectly safe exposing herself when who the hell knows what kind of perverted beast might be on that beach with her, watching her and getting ideas. I don’t know what you allow, what you think is just children being children, what you consider acceptable Key West behavior. And frankly, I don’t give a damn what you allow and what you consider acceptable. As long as I’m here, as long as I’m Lizard’s aunt by marriage, that child is not going to go naked on a public beach. I absolutely refuse to let her expose herself to that kind of danger—and if you disagree with me, well, tough luck.”

  Her eyes flashed at him, shiny with tears. Joe realized that this wasn’t about Lizard’s lack of decorum, or the hang-loose atmosphere of the island, or Pamela’s arguable paranoia. She cared about Lizard, cared about his niece so much she was willing to wait up for Joe, and rant and rave, and wave her fists in the air. For Lizard’s sake. Because she cared.

  He still wasn’t sure he believed she was in any danger. But for the moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she loved his niece as much as he did, loved her enough to go to the mat with him about her, and fight for her, and worry about her.

  How could he not believe in a woman who cared so much about Lizard? How could he not want her?

  One long stride carried him across the room to her. He snagged her in mid-circuit around the room, wrapped his arms around her, and pressed his lips to hers in a hard, fierce, angry, loving kiss.

  Chapter Twelve

  KEY WEST. MICK supposed it made a certain sense that she would get herself as far from Seattle as her car would carry her. Although she could have crossed the border into Canada. More’s the pity she hadn’t. If she had, it would have been a hell of a lot easier for Tony to track her down, what with certain acquaintances of his who happened to be affiliated with the border patrol.

  Okay, so whatever. Key West might be far away, but it wasn’t inaccessible. All Mick had to do was fly to Miami, rent a car, scoot down Route One on the causeway that connected all those dinky little islands, find the lady currently going under the name of Pamela Brenner and pop her. Easy as pie.

  Mick inventoried the contents of his suitcase one more time. Underwear, toiletries, fake mustache, sunglasses, baseball cap. Traveler’s checks. Auto club directory of lodgings in Southern Florida. Unassembled plastic gun, the pieces neatly stashed inside the suitcase lining.

  He would buy the bullets once he got to Florida.

  He could
n’t believe how simple it had been, once some homicide detective had mentioned in passing to Tony that he’d heard from a friend of Pamela’s. “She’s still running scared, according to her friend,” the detective had told Tony, all innocence, all goo-goo helpfulness.

  Tony, bless his little heart, hadn’t given anything away. “A friend of hers, huh? Did you happen to catch her name?”

  “It was a he. Let’s see, we got it on the tape: Joe Brenner.”

  Bull’s-eye. Pamela Hayes had changed her name to Brenner, hadn’t she? Joe Brenner’s phone number could be traced easily enough, to a bar on Key West. From there, a quick Google search had produced Joe Brenner’s home address: Leon Street, same address that appeared on Pamela Hayes Brenner’s new Florida license.

  Thank you, God.

  Mick had considered contacting someone on the East Coast to do the dirty deed for him. Technically, he wasn’t allowed to leave the state while he was free on bail. But technicalities could be smoothed over with a little cash, and Mick wanted the Hayes woman for himself. No one had ever had the guts to stand up to him before. She was a prize, and he wanted her scalp on his belt.

  He zipped his bag shut, grabbed his car keys and left the apartment. A cool drizzle bathed the road and created haloes around the street lights. A sign, he thought, humming to himself. A sign that the angels were with him on this mission.

  Oh, he was going to get her, all right. He was going to plug her with so many holes she could do service as a colander. And he was going to enjoy it. Nobody testified against him in court and walked away.

  The clock on his dashboard read eight o’clock. He’d arranged to have a ticket waiting for him at the airport. The red-eye’s departure time was nine-fifty. When he woke up tomorrow, he’d be in the Sunshine State.

  He hummed a tune in time to the clicking of his windshield wipers. This was going to feel good, he thought. Pamela Hayes deserved to die, and not just because she’d fingered him. Women didn’t belong on construction sites. It was a man’s business: designing, building, raising capital and keeping the union in line. What the hell had they brought in a female architect for? Female architects ought to be designing doll houses.