by Maureen Tan
I said nothing.
Tommy sighed, pursed his lips, and nodded his head ever so slightly.
“So I figure, sooner or later, you’ll leave again. That’s really why I came here at this hour of the morning. I know you’re an early riser, and I was hoping to catch you alone. Whether he wants it or not, Alex needs full-time protection. Even with his cooperation, that’d be difficult. But when Joey called you, you came back. So you must still care.”
I kept silent. I didn’t contradict him. But Tommy was wrong. I’d come back for my own sake, not Alex’s. And when I had what I wanted, I would leave again.
Tommy continued speaking.
“You must still care, at least a little. Maybe as much as you can. So I’m asking for your help on this, Jane. I’m asking for your word that you’ll stay with Alex until the stalker is history. After that . . .” He shrugged. “I guess after that, whether you stay or go is up to you.”
* * *
Not much later, Alex came down to the kitchen. Like Tommy, he was in uniform.
Tommy turned, waved casually.
“Hey, slug-a-bed. Grab yourself some coffee and join us. I brought donuts. Been sittin’ here, makin’ sure Jane doesn’t eat ’em all up.”
Then he continued the story he’d launched into only moments earlier, in response to the sound of Alex’s footsteps on the back staircase.
“So Buchannan— You remember him, don’t you, Jane? He’s a fat, balding white guy with sergeant’s stripes and a beer belly? Well, he tells me they clock this woman doin’ forty-five in a thirty and pull her over. The woman’s middle-aged, nicely dressed, with sacks of groceries in the backseat of her car. A routine traffic stop. So Buchannan stands back and lets the rookie write the ticket.
“Right away, the woman starts pleading with the kid.
“ ‘Cain’t we talk about this, Officer?’ she says. ‘Cain’t I make a donation or buy a few tickets to the policeman’s ball or something?’
“And Buchannan swears the rookie looked right at her and said, clear as can be, ‘Ah’m sorry, ma’am. The Savannah police don’t have balls.’ ”
* * *
Four donuts later, both men left for the station.
As Tommy walked to his truck, Alex lingered on the porch long enough to drop a kiss on my cheek.
“I need to finish up some paperwork, but I should be done by late afternoon. I’m off tomorrow, and I’ll use vacation days after that. That’ll give us a block of time to concentrate on your . . . um . . . problem. I have a couple of ideas.” He paused. “That is, if that’s still what you want.”
I nodded.
“It is. Thanks.”
“No problem. Hey, don’t go wandering, okay? And keep the doors locked.” He grinned. “I don’t want any snakes getting into the house.”
* * *
I lingered on the porch a little longer, enjoying 70 degrees and sunshine. Absentmindedly, I scratched at my right arm. Then I looked down at it. It had been ten days, I thought. Or close enough.
I dropped off my mug and the donuts at the kitchen counter on my way upstairs to Alex’s bathroom. His medicine cabinet was well stocked, and I found what I needed right away. I cut the dressing from my arm, then used tweezers and a bit of willpower to remove my stitches. One knot at a time, one piece of thread at a time, one quick tug at a time.
Then I washed down the entire area with alcohol.
I was left with several dozen pairs of tiny pink tracks bordering a thin, irregular scar. I made a fist, flexed my arm, and felt the weak muscles quiver.
18
The cashier and the bagger at Winn Dixie were friends.
I could tell. Anyone could.
One was white. One was black. Both were thin. They each wore a short knit skirt, a tight knit top, and lots of rings in lots of places. Fingers, nostrils, lips, ears. Their loose uniform smocks, worn unbuttoned, did nothing to improve their appearances.
It was like shopping in London.
Except these two were not in a hurry.
They examined each item I’d purchased, paused to read the ingredients on a few, asked me about the identity of one of the vegetables, and moved the items ever so slowly from conveyor to bag.
I had time. I was patient. And I only thought that they might be stoned. I didn’t say it out loud.
Stoned or not, when the explosion outside shattered the plate glass windows and sent cans toppling from the shelves, they were the first to drop to the floor.
They were also among the first to raise their heads.
The bagger stood, turned in a slow, full circle, tugged at one of her earrings.
“Fuck,” she said slowly, making it sound religious.
Shoulder to shoulder, she and her friend made their way to the front of the store, stepping over glass, gaping and pointing at the parking lot.
I was behind them. I gaped, too.
The white sedan I’d driven to the market was in flames.
“Whose car is that?” the cashier asked.
The bagger shook her head slowly.
“Dunno.”
“Mine,” I said.
They turned and gaped at me.
* * *
The fire department came roaring in, followed by the police.
The fire was extinguished.
A clutter of cops supervised the scene.
One recognized me. A younger cop with a red mustache, thinning red hair, and freckles in between.
“Hey, Jane! Glad to see you back. Your car?”
“Alex’s actually. But I drove it and parked it. I was inside the store when it exploded.”
He shook his head, turned slowly, looked over the devastation again. Then his green eyes returned to my face.
“Damn,” he said.
He thumbed the two-way radio on his shoulder.
“This is Merle—”
Behind him, the sun reflected off the glittering glass that had once been Winn Dixie’s display window. My gaze continued upward, drawn to the building’s low roof by another glint.
Scope!
“—and we have a—”
I hit the young cop with my left shoulder, knocking him to the ground.
“Gun!” I yelled. And pointed.
The bullet hit the pavement beside us, sent cement chips flying.
Around us, cops flattened themselves on the ground and scrambled to the shelter of the nearest car. They cried out to the civilians to get down, to take cover now! They aimed their weapons at a shooter who was no longer there.
“Tried to kill a cop!” someone muttered. “Torched the car and waited.”
Maybe, I thought. Maybe.
As long as selecting my car was coincidence.
* * *
Reports were filed, headlines made, and glass swept up.
The car was towed to the police impound lot. A few hours after that, Alex and I sat down to a dinner of pork chops and peas and mashed potatoes. It was good food for poking at when no one is much interested in eating.
“Does Sir William know you’re here?”
I shook my head.
“In theory, no.”
“Could someone have followed you? Maybe someone he hired?”
“I was careful, Alex. And a professional assassin would have done a better job, don’t you think?”
“Even professionals screw up.”
I pondered that possibility as I squashed my potatoes with the back of my fork and watched the gravy run out onto the plate. Then I said: “Perhaps your fellow is escalating.”
Alex stiffened, but I ignored his body language and finished my thought.
“He may have recognized your car in the parking lot, assumed you were in the store, and taken the opportunity.”
“And mistaken Merle for me? I don’t think so.”
“Then we’re back to coincidence. Which neither of us believes in.”
Alex looked down at his plate and rolled his peas around with his fork.
“I’ll ge
t some extra cops out here to protect you.”
“And your stalker?”
He stabbed a piece of pork chop, then put his fork down on his plate. He lifted his eyes to mine.
“He takes his chances. I can’t protect him forever.”
“What’s going on, Alex?”
“Keep out of it.”
He added a curt “please” as an afterthought.
His tone brought to mind poisonous snakes and old colonial flags.
Don’t tread on me, I thought. The attitude was typical Alex.
“Okay. Your house. Your rules.”
He looked horrified.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
I brushed the apology aside with a casual sweep of my hand and a twist of my lips.
“I’ll try not to interfere, Alex. But what you’re doing— the risk you’re taking—scares me. And Tommy. And Joey.”
“Believe me, I know. But I can’t think of any other way to handle it.”
“Very well. I suppose all we can do at this point is watch our backs carefully. In the meantime—until one of us decides otherwise—the car was randomly selected. A trap baited for a cop. Any cop. The guy waited, took his shot, and ran away.”
He nodded. Lifted his fork again.
“Thanks. Better eat up. Tommy told me to make sure you didn’t miss a meal.”
* * *
After dinner, we baked cookies.
At first, I objected. As Alex pulled mixing bowls, measuring cups and spoons, and cookie sheets from cupboards and drawers, I said: “The identity of a killer is buried in my memory. Someone is delivering reptiles to your doorstep. And there’s a sniper after one of us. Perhaps our time could be better spent?”
He paused, regarded me seriously, then shook his head.
“Nope. I can’t think of anything better to do, right at the moment.”
He moved around the kitchen gathering ingredients and didn’t speak again until he was cracking eggs into a large bowl.
“There’s nothing threatening about being here in the kitchen with me and making cookies.”
He paused, and his statement seemed to require an answer.
“No. There isn’t.”
“So maybe this’d be a good time to let down your guard. When you concentrate on mixing and measuring, the rest of your mind gets a chance to wander. ’Least, that’s been my experience. If you think of something significant, great. If not, we’ll have cookies to munch on. Okay?”
I nodded, then took several deep breaths and released them slowly as I made a conscious effort to relax the tension in my jaw, neck, and shoulders.
Alex used a large wooden spatula and began beating together eggs, butter, and brown sugar in a large orange crockery bowl. The bowl clashed terribly with the red tabletop.
“Is your arm strong enough to handle sifting the dry ingredients?”
“I think so.”
Following Alex’s instructions, I measured and sifted, then added the flour mixture to his bowl.
He stirred some more.
I added vanilla and rum extract.
“My mom used to make these cookies with her mother. She told me that one day when I was helping her bake,” he said. “So when Joey was little, I made sure she and I made cookies together. Now she has the recipe memorized, too. Someday, when she has kids, she’ll probably bake cookies with them.”
Alex opened a plastic container, filled a scoop with pecans, and let them slide into the bowl. He repeated the procedure with semi-sweet chocolate chips and again with walnuts.
More stirring.
“The dough’s always the same, but the other stuff varies according to what you have in the pantry.”
Unexpectedly, I recalled a very different recipe.
The instructor tipped the pipe bomb on end, lifted the battered scoop, and drove it into a barrel of nails. He poured the nails into the pipe. Then he shoved the scoop into a bucket of ball bearings. The third scoop was filled with broken glass.
“The basic components are always the same. But the load varies according to availability and personal prefer ence.”
A moment, perhaps two passed before I realized that Alex was standing quietly beside me, waiting. I lifted my eyes to his face and saw sympathy, concern, and something more. I saw a cop’s perceptions. An interrogator’s perceptions. I tensed, anticipating questions I didn’t want to answer.
Alex’s lips tightened just a bit.
“Nothing threatening,” he said quietly.
He turned away, crossed the kitchen, dug through the refrigerator, and came back to the table with a small cardboard box. He held it up.
“Raisins?”
I managed an expression of mock horror.
“Ugh! No raisins. Please.”
He grinned and tried a little salesmanship.
“They’re a marvelous source of nutrition. Lots of iron.”
“I still abhor them. Always have. Always will.”
Alex sighed mournfully.
“Too bad.”
He returned the box to the refrigerator, then detoured to the silverware drawer and brought several mismatched spoons back to the table. They were held up for my inspection.
“Choose your weapon.”
“Choose your weapon,” Mac said as we stood at the end of the firing range. I looked at the handguns spread out before me, reached for the one I’d seen Mac use. He shook his head, grabbed my wrist, lifted my hand, and put his palm against mine. My hand was slim, my fingers long and tapered. His hands and fingers were thicker, wider, stronger. “What best suits me or any other man will not necessarily work for you.” He pointed at the Walther PPK Special. “Try this one.”
I took the smaller spoon and concentrated on dropping somewhat uniform glops of dough onto the cookie sheets.
The batches moved from raw to baked to cooled to cookie jar. Alex and I nibbled broken cookies, drank milk, and talked about nothing in particular. Eventually, the conversation turned to foods we liked and foods we’d tried. That turned into a game of one-upsmanship.
Impressing a woman like me was difficult.
Impressing a Marine who’d soldiered in Vietnam was equally challenging.
There was no reaction on either side to mushy grubs and crunchy bugs. No reaction, except another memory I didn’t share with Alex.
There were roaches on the plate, mixed in with the co agulated brown slime that passed as food. The roaches were dead, mostly. Which was a blessing. I dug them out with the tip of my finger and flicked them away, trying not to count. Then I began eating the only food I’d get that day, wondering at what point I’d be hungry enough to eat the bugs, too.
“Endure training,” Mac had said, “and you can endure anything.”
The roaches were the least of it.
Our game moved on to exotic blue plate specials.
“Kangaroo tail soup,” I offered.
“Alligator jerky,” Alex countered.
“Sheep’s eyeballs.”
“Monkey brains.”
I called for a new game.
“Why now?” Alex asked indignantly. “Are you quitting because I was winning?”
Mac’s voice: “Why now, Janie? You buried Brian seven years ago. You didn’t quit then, though I thought perhaps you would. Why now?”
“Maybe I felt I owed it to Brian—and to you—to carry on, to serve Her Majesty’s government without reservation. I’ve given as much as anyone should be asked to give. So now I’m asking, Mac. Please, let me go.”
I forced a smile and infused it with a little malice.
“Your last few suggestions were making me hungry.”
He laughed.
“Okay. Same game. New rules. You have to have tasted it and know how to cook it.”
He knew I didn’t usually cook and foolishly assumed he had an advantage.
I lifted my chin.
“Since you believe you were winning, you go first.”
“Roast ’possum. You wa
nt the recipe from the time you shoot it?”
Suddenly, I was recalling too many faces and too much death.
Suddenly, I was recalling only one face.
Brian lay sprawled at my feet, his eyes staring sight lessly at the ceiling. Beneath him, the scarred plank floor was filthy and littered with scraps of leather. A distrac tion, however brief, from the wound I didn’t want to see. The wound that was in the center of his chest. It was gap ing, dark, and terrible. Fatal. I knew that. But I fell to my knees beside him, anyway, and searched for some sign of life. I searched. And I prayed. No miracle occurred.
I tore my mind from the past. Deliberately avoiding Alex’s eyes, I pushed a spoon off the table with my elbow and bent over, out of his sight, to retrieve it. As I groped for the spoon, I forced away tears and reestablished emotional control.
I smiled crookedly at Alex as I sat back up.
I ignored his anxious expression.
“Oh, by all means,” I said. “Give me the entire recipe.”
It took him just a moment to retrieve that line of thought.
“Well, you shoot the ’possum and gut it and hang it in the shed for two days. Unrefrigerated, of course. Then you skin it and cut off the excess fat. After that, you stuff it with seasoned bread crumbs and roast it. Uncovered. For two, two and a half hours. Moderate oven.”
There was little surprise in the method of preparation. The rabbit and game birds that my grandfather, Mac, and I had hunted were cooked in much the same manner. Except that, rather than trim off fat, you often had to lard them.
“Sounds tasty.”
Alex looked disappointed.
“Haggis,” I said.
“I’ve heard of it. But can you cook it?”
“The servants used to make it for my grandfather as a special treat. I’d sit on a stool beside the stove and watch them.”
I closed my eyes, ticked off the steps on my fingers as I recalled the recipe.
“You take a sheep’s heart and liver. Mince it up with suet, onions, and oatmeal. Season it well. Stuff it into the sheep’s stomach. Then boil it into a nice pudding.”