While She Was Sleeping

by Diane Pershing

  Nodding with satisfaction, Nick whistled as he pulled on his jeans. He’d brought his clothes into the bathroom with him so as not to embarrass Carly by parading nude in front of her. He found himself chuckling at the thought. Modesty after the fact. Great, no-holds-barred sex, then behaving with politeness, as though it hadn’t happened. But it was something he was glad to do for her. He liked her, believed her, too.

  And that strong chemistry between them was still there. He knew it and she knew it. Even with her freshly scrubbed face and the rest of her covered up totally by that robe of his, she’d turned him on. A couple of times this morning their eyes had locked; he was pretty sure he could have taken her right back to bed.

  Lots of time, he told himself. They’d get this memory-loss thing behind them, then he’d convince her to take a week’s vacation so the two of them could play. Good plan, he told the mirror. One of his better ones.

  After pulling his polo shirt over his hear. Nick opened the bathroom door. “Carly?” he called out, then looked around. She wasn’t in the bedroom, so he strode into the living room. “Carly? Where are you?”

  Probably out on the balcony, he thought. It was a great day—lots of sun, no smog. After he took her down to the station and they filed a report, maybe they’d go for a drive. He could show her the coastline with its harbors and sailboats and water-skiers. The dolphins might be playing close to shore today; she’d like that. Maybe they’d stop off somewhere later for a drink and dinner. He had the day off from the bar, and Kyle, the owner, was due back tomorrow, so his temp job was over. Nick was free for a while. Free to be with Carly.

  Whistling, he walked out onto the balcony.

  She wasn’t there. He frowned. Not on the balcony, not in the kitchen or the living room or the bedroom. Was she lying somewhere, behind the couch or on the other side of the bed where he couldn’t see her? Had she fainted? She’d been under a lot of strain.

  Worried, he tore through his small condo, but no Carly, anywhere. Something was wrong. He glanced at his wrist to check the time, but didn’t have his watch on. He grabbed it from the bedside table. As he was buckling the leather strap, his eye fell on the note. He picked it up then read it.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Carly had taken off, with his money and wearing his clothes. She was sorry. She would return everything.

  Right.

  And pigs flew.

  The first thing she did was to find a drugstore and get a pair of cheap rubber thongs—$5.99, plus tax. She glanced around nervously as she paid the cashier. It would be nice if she could see clearly; since leaving Nick’s place, she’d had this creepy feeling, like someone was watching her. But, with her poor eyesight, how would she know?

  She considered trying to find one of those one-hour eyeglass places, but she didn’t have her prescription, and they would have to get it from her eye doctor in Hull and it was Sunday. Besides, she didn’t have enough money, and Nick’s credit card was for a true emergency only. So, she’d just have to make do with squinting. She could see far enough in front of her to avoid tripping or running into anyone, she assured herself, and with all the other things in her life to worry about at that moment, not seeing clearly was something she’d just have to live with.

  When she came out of the drugstore, she looked up and down the street, but no one who resembled Nick was anywhere in sight. Still, she couldn’t shake an inner voice warning her to be on guard. Maybe some of this was the aftereffects of whatever drug she’d been given, but when a man brushed past her, she almost jumped out of her skin as he muttered, “Sorry.” Leaning against a display window, her hand over her racing heart, she told herself she simply had to stop this panicked reaction to every sudden movement. She had to.

  She started walking. She always thought better on the move; it was as if her brain got more oxygen. Think, she ordered her mind, as it seemed she’d been ordering it to do all morning. What should her next move be?

  Instead of an, answer, all she got were more questions about the night before. How had she wound up on the yacht? And had she run away from the bloody scene? If so, the bar must have been nearby, because without shoes she wouldn’t have gone far. And Nick’s condo was a short distance from there. Should she go back to the bar? Try to jog her memory by finding out where Demeter’s yacht was?

  Not a smart move, for heaven’s sake. She had to avoid being anywhere near the murder scene. What she needed to do was get as far away from Marina del Rey as possible, so Nick wouldn’t find her.

  A kid on in-line skates passed her and called out, “Great shirt!”

  “Thanks,” Carly said automatically, then stopped and stood in place for a moment. There it was again, that feeling of being followed. She whipped around suddenly, but the skater was already down the block, and all she could see was a blur of faces, many of them, strolling, hurrying, jogging. If someone was following her, and was keeping more than ten feet back from her, she had no way of knowing.

  She had no way of knowing a lot of things; she had blacked out several important hours in her life. What she felt was helplessness. Utter helplessness. And alone, so alone.

  Stay on the main streets, she told herself. Keep moving. If someone was after her—and who knew, she might be so paranoid at the moment, she could be imagining the whole thing—she was safe in crowds. Wasn’t she?

  A bus drove by and pulled up half a block away. She ran toward it. She would ride it to wherever it led, until she felt safe. From Nick, anyway. She wouldn’t actually feel safe, she was sure, for a long, long time.

  The only other person to get on the bus with her was a blowsy-looking woman wearing an L.A. Dodgers cap. Carly breathed a sigh of relief and settled herself into a seat by the window.

  The bus route took her through winding streets and onto a main thoroughfare. Carly tried to concentrate on the blurred view from the window, past shops and palm trees, people in shorts and summer clothes strolling and laughing. Back home it was autumn and an early frost had hit It had been snowing for the past week, the skies gray, the daylight dim. Here, it was all bright sun; here, it seemed to be perpetual summer.

  Half his face shot off. Pool of blood.

  The image kept coming back to her, like some kind of visual tune you couldn’t get out of your head. But nothing else, no associated memories. Just the picture, as if she’d taken a snapshot and kept bringing it out from some photo album in her mind. She tried to shut it out, tried to focus as best she could on the scenery. After a while, the bus pulled up to a stop right next to a sign that read, in giant letters, “TELEVISIONS!!!!” and another underneath, “HUGE SALE!!!”

  That’s right, she’d been about to turn on the TV at Nick’s place, to get more information about Pete Demeter’s murder. A murder like this would be on all the local stations, she was sure. They always latched on to anything sensational in their own backyards. She hopped off the bus and went into the store.

  It was a small space, with twenty or so television sets in the whole place, all of them tuned to football games. The store was poorly lit, and it seemed to Carly the whole thing could use vacuuming and dusting.

  The only other person there was a portly man in a white short-sleeved shirt who stood in front of one of the sets, intent on the game.

  Carly approached him. “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah?” he said without looking at her. “Offside, you jerk!” he yelled at the picture tube. “The ref’s blind!”

  “Um, pardon me—”

  The man wheeled around with such a look of angry impatience, she leaped backward automatically. “What?” he said sharply.

  “Are you the salesman?” She hated how timid she sounded, but she had never done well with being yelled at.

  “No, he’s on a break. I’m just watching the store.” He returned to his game. “Come back in ten minutes.”

  “Well, then, do you mind if I switch the channel on one of the sets?”

  “Lady, I don’t care what you do.”

&n
bsp; She walked to the TV farthest from the man and punched both the up and down buttons, trying to find some news. All she got was football, ice hockey, figure skating, a program about fish hatcheries, but no news.

  “Excuse me?” she called out.

  “What?”

  “Where is the news? CNN? Anything like that?”

  He dragged his attention away from the game and came over to her. “Listen, you want cable you gotta pay for it. You buying a set or planning on living here?”

  “No, I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I just want to see the news.”

  “Go buy a paper then. Got it?”

  Weren’t the people in California supposed to be nicer than this? she wondered, walking toward the front of the store. Then she stopped. If she was being followed, she needed to take precautions. Edging around the perimeter of the store, hoping the rude man was wrapped up in his game, she headed toward the back, through a storeroom, and out into an alleyway.

  A deserted alleyway, from what she could tell, filled with garbage cans and empty cartons. And the smell of rotting food. She glanced both ways, trying to decide her direction, then arbitrarily chose right. Not pleased to be alone in an alley, even in broad daylight, she picked up speed as she walked, then broke into a full run.

  Suddenly, she stumbled over something and slammed into a garbage pail, managing to right herself before falling. Looking around for what had caused her to trip, she let out a scream. A filthy man in tattered clothes, obviously napping between the garbage cans, sat up. He gave off a powerful unwashed odor. The man smiled at her; his teeth were cracked and rotten. She’d tripped on his feet.

  “Sorry,” Carly said, backing away in the opposite direction. “So sorry,” she said again. Then she started running, and she kept on running for as long as she could.

  Nick drained the last of his beer and set the bottle on the bar. “Eileen? Same way.”

  The day bartender, a happily married mother of five who could have passed for twenty-six, grinned at him as she brought out another cold one and pushed it down the length of the counter toward him. “Feeling the heat, are you, Nick?”

  “You could say that. Damn,” he cursed, his eyes glued on the overhead TV in the corner. “Shoulda gone for the field goal. Damn rookies, always hotdogging it.”

  “I don’t know,” came a voice from the bar stool next to him. “Looked like a judgment call to me.”

  Nick wheeled around, ready to give the guy a lesson in strategy, but grinned instead. “Dominic!” He clapped his friend on the back. “Hey. Where you been?”

  “Glad I found you here. I took a chance.”

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Same as you. And—” Dom indicated the young man on the stool behind him “—another one for Miguel here.”

  “Eileen, two more,” Nick called out, then pivoted his stool to face Dominic D’Annunzio.

  Dom, who was a little shorter and stockier than Nick, with the black hair and brown eyes of his southern Italian ancestry, worked for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. He and Nick had struck up a friendship a few years back, when the Manhattan Beach P.D. had called in L.A.S.D. for help on a homicide. The two men had found they had a lot in common, including the fact that they were the same age, shared a passion for beach volleyball and being cops, and were annoyed by strict adherence to proper police procedures.

  “Nick, meet Miguel,” Dom said, his Brooklyn roots strong in his accent. He leaned back so the two men could shake hands. “I’ve told you about Miguel, Nick. I’m the kid’s Big Brother, you know, for like ten years.”

  “Oh, yeah. Hi, Miguel.” The young man was twenty or so, slender and olive-skinned, but his grip was strong.

  “And,” Dom went on, “he has this dumb idea of being a cop. I keep telling him it’s hero worship and he’ll get over it. But he tells me I’m wrong. So, I need you to talk him out of it. You’re better with explaining things than I am.” He angled his head to grin wickedly at Miguel. “Nick’s my hero. Strange dude, but okay. And he knows how things work.”

  “Stuff it,” Nick said good-naturedly.

  “Yeah, ol’ Nick’s like a teacher, makes you want to listen. So, tell Miguel, Nick, about being a cop.”

  “You mean about how most of us have a death wish, and about the alcohol stats and the divorce rate?”

  Dom grinned. “Yeah. And how it ain’t for anyone who goes to museums, like Miguel here likes to do.”

  “Hey, Dom, knock it off,” Miguel said with a sheepish face.

  Nick joined in Dom’s laughter. But what Nick had said about police work was true, and the two older men knew it. Men and women who were too “sensitive” rarely made the cut at the academy. If things got under your skin too easily, you couldn’t tolerate the violence and cruelty that went with a cop’s life. Violence and cruelty were ninety percent of what they saw on the job.

  Nick was glad to sit here at Morgan R’s, glad to shoot the breeze with Dom and Miguel, answer a couple of questions for the kid, give him some pointers. Back when he was on the job, he’d always liked working with rookies. It was probably his rescue thing again—the new ones were so cocky, but so damned innocent—but he was often assigned to help them along.

  Yeah, Nick was glad to sit here and drink beer and watch the games. Glad to talk about the Demeter murder, which was all over the news. It had probably been a mob hit, and Dom and he tossed around some names of possible wise-guy shooters.

  Nick was glad to do anything except think or talk about Carly. If Dom, or any of the other guys on the force knew he’d been two-elevened by a lady he’d spent the night with, he’d never live it down.

  So. he wasn’t going to think about Carly and last night and how, once again, a woman had turned his head inside out and told him pretty lies, then had ripped off his money and walked away. If he thought about that, he’d get really p.o.’d, and there was no telling what he’d do then. He gulped down half the bottle of beer. Nah. She wasn’t worth thinking about. He would consider the twenty or thirty bucks payment for services rendered and forget about her.

  “Come on,” he told Dom and Miguel. “Let’s get us a table and do some serious drinking.”

  Carly sat at the phone booth and gazed dispiritedly out the glass windows as people came and went at the hotel’s circular auto entrance. She’d been trying to reach both Margie and Richard all afternoon, without success. She’d found some news at a Sports Deli, but learned nothing more about the murder. She’d also bought a candy bar, had taken another bus and was now at a hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and she was so tired her brain wasn’t functioning—except to realize that she had seventeen dollars left and absolutely no idea what to do next.

  On an impulse, she picked up the phone and punched in Nick’s number, managing to remember it from this morning. His phone rang, but there was no answer. When his machine came on, she replaced the receiver. A feeling of emptiness washed over her.

  Nick. He’d been with her, on the edges of her mind, all day. She remembered everything about him—his hard exterior, that occasional glimpse of compassion in his eyes, the way he made her feel as a woman.

  He must be furious with her, might even have reported her to the police for stealing his money and credit card. What a fool she was.

  She glanced down at the change spread out on the phone table and at the cocktail napkin she’d grabbed from Nick’s bedside table. Morgan R’s, it said on one corner in bright red letters. Restaurant and Bar, Marina del Rey, California. Was that the bar she’d met Nick in last night? She picked up the napkin and stared at the name again. A phone number was printed there. Without giving herself time to think, she lifted the receiver, dropped two dimes in the slot and punched in the number of Morgan R’s.

  Nick, now at a table with Dom and Miguel, on which was littered several empty bottles of Sam Adams and vacant peanut shells, was explaining to the kid how his knee had gotten smashed to bits by a crook’s bull
et. “And the docs keep telling me it’ll never heal all the way. But they don’t know who they’re talking to. I’m going to prove the docs wrong. Hey, Dom,” Nick said with a grin, “you keep eating those peanuts, you’re going to turn into an elephant.”

  Dom broke open another shell. “Can’t help it. I really miss my cigarettes.”

  “Let that be another lesson to you, Miguel,” Nick said, aware he was slurring his words, but not giving a damn. “Don’t start, then you don’t have to stop.”

  “Screw yourself,” Dom said good-naturedly.

  “Hey, Nick,” Eileen called out. “Phone for you.”

  He glanced up at the bartender. “Who is it?”

  “One of your lady friends.”

  Nick sent the two men a smirk and rose unsteadily to his feet. His knee gave out and, wincing, he held on to the chair until he could regain his balance. Damn. After three operations, and with all the exercises and physical therapy, couldn’t the stupid thing work right yet? Cursing softly and weaving slightly—how many beers had he had? Five? Six? More?—he went around to the other side of the bar and grabbed the receiver.

  “Yeah?” he said, not in the mood to be nice to anyone at this moment. Damn knee. It was screwing up his life and he wasn’t happy about it.

  “Nick?”

  He knew her voice right away and he went still.

  “Nick? It’s Carly.”

  “Carly who?” he said deliberately.

  There was a long pause. “I...I know you must be angry at me,” she said finally.

  “Now, why would I be angry at you?”

  “Did you read the note? I said I’d pay you back. And I will, Nick, I promise. I’ll need to get your address, of course. I don’t know why I took the credit card—”

  “Credit card?” Frowning, Nick fished around in his pocket for his wallet. When he opened it, he saw the empty slot where his Visa usually was.

  “Oh, God,” she was saying. “You mean you didn’t know? I’m sorry. I won’t use it, but I just thought, you know, in case—”