by R. E. Donald
She woke with a start to the sound of a slamming door. Her neck was stiff and her feet were cold and her bladder was uncomfortably full. Then she heard the whine of the Blazer's engine coming to life, and ducked down behind the dashboard just as its lights came on. She pushed the button on her watch to illuminate the dial and saw that it was almost two o'clock. "Shit!" she swore, knowing that she couldn't start up and follow the Blazer at this time of night without them knowing where she'd come from. When she looked up, she saw a taillight disappear around the end of the second warehouse, heading for Still Creek. "Shit!" she said again, then looked up at the studio windows. They were dark.
She started her pickup, then thought better of it and turned off the ignition. She had to pee. While she was at it, she thought, since her eyes were accustomed to the dark, why not poke around a little? She stepped out of the truck and slammed the door, loud as a rifle shot. The silence as she walked across the parking lot - or was it the anticipation of a pee? - made her shiver. A few security lights from the offices at the other end of the warehouse illuminated the area in front of the doors, but what was out there in the dark, in the tangle of grass and skinny green alders beyond the back of the building? She tried the door to the studio, but it was locked. The small window in the door showed nothing but blackness behind a brief veil of condensation from her breath. Was there a fire escape? Some means of getting to the second floor from the outside?
Her footsteps crunching on gravel, she walked around the corner into deep shadow, running her hand along the building's corrugated siding until she was half way down its rear length. Leaning against the wall for support, she yanked her sweatpants down to her knees and squatted to pee. The exquisite relief was spoiled by the annoying fact that droplets splashed back on her thighs and buttocks. She tugged her sweatpants back up and stepped away from the building to look up at it. Slashes of reflected light indicated the location of windows on the upper floor, but she couldn't make out any means of access at the rear. She saw no point in continuing, and had already turned back when she thought she heard a car and stopped, holding her breath to listen. She could identify no sounds beyond the white noise of an industrial yard: the faint hum of lights, the distant swish of traffic. She walked on, the crunch of her footfalls all she could hear, rounded the corner, heading toward her pickup, and found herself caught in a sudden blaze of headlights. She ducked back around the corner, and heard a man's voice yell, "Hey, you! Stop right there!"
"Shit!" she said to herself, started to run with the sinking feeling that she couldn't run as fast or as far as the body behind that voice. Her mind raced to the consequences. A trip, a fall, a physical tussle on the gravel? Who was it? One of the musicians coming back? A security guard?
"Police!" the voice continued.
"Shit!" she said aloud, and stopped dead.
Russell left the captain's office with the first smile he'd had on his face in the past eighteen hours. So, maybe Feldman had upstaged him last night, and maybe he hadn't been able to see Jennifer, but at least now he could move forward with the Iceman investigation. Russell grabbed the empty coffee mug off his desk and looked inside. Whew! It could use a rinse. He headed for the men's room, whistling. The captain had just okayed a trip to Vancouver. The D.A. wanted more to tie the Nillsons to the victim. Since they were short a man with Merv on vacation, Russell had to volunteer to go on his own time on the weekend, but that didn't bother him at all. Because in Vancouver, he could not only spend his days interviewing witnesses first hand and visiting sites relevant to the Iceman case, he could also spend some time with Jennifer. And it was about time.
She'd been less than understanding last night when he'd called to let her know he was going to be indefinitely delayed. "Don't come after midnight," she'd said. "I have an early breakfast meeting and then have to rush straight to the airport."
"What's that got to do with me spending the night?"
"I've had a rough week, Russell. I'm bagged. I need my sleep."
"I've got my key. You won't even have to get up."
"Getting up isn't the point. It's waking up."
"Don't forget, Jen, it's been a while. It'll be over so fast, you won't know what hit you."
"I can hardly wait," she said, without enthusiasm. "No, Russell. Let's save it for next time."
"And when is next time?" Russell didn't try to hide the frustration in his voice. "I'd like to see you once in a while, Jen. Is that too much to ask?"
There were a few seconds of silence, then Jennifer said, "This isn't working for us anymore, is it?"
At that point, Russell had been entering the parking lot at the crime scene. "I gotta go," he said. "So can I come by?"
"No," she said. "I'll call you on the weekend."
Russell examined his face in the mirror above the sink as he ran hot water into the dirty mug. By the time he'd finished dealing with Ashton and his father last night, Feldman hovering in the background like a bad smell, then taken a run back to the crime scene, it had been close to two a.m. When he got home, feeling bad about the kid and imagining Jennifer lying in her bed alone, hot and juicy under the covers and smelling of sweat and Chanel, he'd been too wired to get much sleep. It showed. There were puffy pouches under his eyes, and tiny red webs in the whites. He wiped the crud out of the bottom of the mug with a paper towel, then rinsed his face with cold water, patted it dry with paper towels, and slapped his cheeks a few times. What the hell. By the time he got to Vancouver on Saturday, he'd be irresistible. He'd look like a million bucks.
The foxy chick was at the coffee machine again. She was wearing a purple leather skirt and matching shoes with three-inch heels. Man! Those legs.
"Hey," she said. "I was hoping I'd bump into you again." She sidled up next to him and bumped him with her hip, then eyed him from beneath heavy lashes. "How ya been?"
"Cute trick," he said, jerking his hip in her direction. "But I can't do it back to you, 'cause that would be harassment." He filled up his coffee mug, adding, "... and that's against department policy, know what I mean?"
"I like a little sex-u-al harassment now and then," she drawled, taking his coffee mug and setting it down beside the machine. She grabbed his hand, clicked her ballpoint pen, and wrote a telephone number across his palm. "Call me, okay?" she said, smiling over her shoulder at him as she walked away, swinging that purple skirtful of young hips.
"Not on your life, baby," Russell said under his breath. "It ain't gonna happen." Even if things were falling apart with Jennifer, he wasn't desperate enough to have casual sex with a woman who worked in the same building, let alone the same office. When you say goodbye, you've got to be able to cut the cord. Not that he wasn't tempted, maybe a little too tempted after last night. He licked his palm, stood on one foot, and rubbed his palm against his other sock.
By the time he reached his desk, the foxy chick's phone number was too smudged to read.
Sharon had no desire to talk to Alora Magee, but she was happy to get out of her cell and away from that disgusting troll and her irritating voice. Outside of the cell and away from Angie, she felt the relief of moving from a nightmare to a plain old bad dream. When the guards ushered her into the interview room, Alora was already there with her briefcase open on the table. The lawyer sat square to the table, leaning on her elbows with her chin propped up in one hand, as if she were tired. She looked up and smiled, perhaps with a hint of apology, as if she felt bad about the unpleasantness of their last meeting. She indicated a chair with a wave of her hand, but Sharon didn't feel like sitting down.
"I'd like to walk around a bit, if you don't mind," she said, trying not to sound hostile. The lawyer wasn't so bad, after all, and the longer she could stay here, away from Angie, the better.
"You like these?" the lawyer asked, throwing a small paperback onto the table.
Sharon picked it up, turned it over. A romance novel. "I've never read one," she said with a shrug and set it back down.
"Your friend sent a bun
ch of them."
"What friend?"
"Shit. I don't know what's the matter with my brain. I've forgotten her name. Oh, here," she said, pulling an envelope out of her briefcase and sliding something out of it. "El. Her name's El."
She passed a sheet of paper across the table, and Sharon saw there was a note scrawled on it. The note said:
Sharon -
Thought this might keep you company.
She's being well taken care of, and
expecting to be home with her Mom soon.
Good luck.
El.
Sharon turned it over, and her heart did a sudden lurch. There was Peaches, smiling up at the camera with her aren't-I-a-clever-girl look. Sharon felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her, and groped for a chair.
It hit home, hard. It hit home that her reality had become this ugly building full of unhappy people, full of resentment and bitterness and perversion. Her sole pleasures had become the blessed oblivion of sleep, and getting out of sight and hearing of that horrid and nauseating cellmate of hers. Ray and their life together had become a dream, an internal movie of memories that she could sometimes escape to when it was quiet enough for her to shut out her surroundings, but it wasn't her reality any more. Imprisonment was her reality, and something as simple and precious as this little dog was beyond her reach. If she'd ever in her life thought that jail wouldn't be such a bad deal, now she knew how sadly she was mistaken. She was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of self-pity, a surge as strong as floodwaters knocking her off her feet. She lay her arms and head on the table and began to sob, loose racking sobs, till she was bawling, tasting salty tears like a heartbroken child, letting herself really cry for the first time since this whole thing had started.
She didn't know how long she'd been crying, but she gradually became aware of a hand stroking hers. She drew her hand away, took several deep breaths and sat up, keeping her eyes down. She didn't need sympathy from anybody, least of all some skinny California lawyer with nice skin who had it made. She hurriedly wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, took more deep breaths until she felt in control. When she finally looked across the table at Alora Magee, the lawyer had her hands clasped on the table in front of her, as if in prayer. She had a wan smile on her face.
"You're the second person in twelve hours to pull away from me as if I had the plague," she said, then shook her head. "I'm sorry. My problems are pretty inconsequential compared to yours." The lawyer pulled a pack of tissues out of her briefcase and slid it across the table.
Sharon nodded her thanks as she pulled one out, then turned away to blow her nose. She felt a surprising sense of relief. The crying helped. There was a faint scent of leather on the tissue. "You don't have to apologize," she said. "It would be nice to think about somebody else's problems for a change."
Alora shrugged. "Just the usual baby boomer's angst, I guess. One day I woke up and discovered that I was in my late thirties and had no man in my life. Look at me." She stretched her arms out from her sides, palms up. "I'm not so bad looking. Nice hair. Good teeth." She bared her teeth and Sharon couldn't help but laugh, although it sounded more like a hiccup. "Yet sometimes it feels as if I'm as far away from finding a man to grow old with as I am from walking to the moon." She let out a sigh, began to stroke the top of her briefcase with an index finger.
A man to grow old with. "God! I'd give anything right now not to love that man! That's what hurts so goddamn much." Sharon covered her eyes with one hand and took a few deep breaths through her mouth. Her nose was plugged and her eyes stung from the crying. "You know? Last year at this time, being in jail like this would have been a piece of cake compared to what I'm feeling now. I could've just waltzed through this like it was summer camp. But you know what? With Ray I had a taste of heaven out there..." She raised her arm, gesturing toward the high windows. "... and now it hurts like hell to lose it."
"You can't lose what you ain't never had. That's what the song says." Alora smiled sadly, but this time Sharon didn't find her sympathy offensive.
Sharon leaned back in her chair, put her palms to her cheeks, and thought about it. Would she have given up the pleasure she'd found with Ray in order to avoid this pain? It was a tough question, coming at her in the middle of the pain. Suddenly she was dying for a cigarette. "Have you got a smoke?"
"Sure. Special for you." Alora slid a pack of cigarettes and matches across the table, and watched while Sharon took one out and lit up. It had been so long, the first drag made her dizzy, but she sucked in another lungful and held it for the hit.
"Ray changed my life." She took another deep drag and blew it out slowly. "God! He changed me. I never knew I could feel so good about myself. Self respect. He gave me my self respect." She smiled wistfully and added, "I guess sometimes it's better to have somebody like that and lose them than to never have them at all."
The lawyer looked so sorrowful, Sharon almost started to cry again. Instead, she picked up the photograph of Peaches and found herself laughing and crying at the same time. "This little punkin' head... this picture... it's kind of like a picture of what me and Ray had together. See? See how she's got that light in her eyes? A little mischief, a little fun, a lot of love, like she knows she's absolutely adorable. A symbol." She held the photo up, shook it a little. "This is a symbol of how much love we had and how good it was." She took a last drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out. "God! It hurts like hell, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world."
"Sharon," said Alora, leaning forward with a bemused expression on her face, "why are you speaking in the past tense?"
Sharon bit her lower lip. "It's over, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
"They think we're guilty. We've got no way to prove that we're not."
"And are you?"
"Shit," Sharon said, getting to her feet. "I almost forgot that you're one of 'them'."
The big Freightliner swallowed the gray tape of highway at sixty miles an hour, hour after solitary hour. Hunter's thoughts kept drifting back to his evening with Alora Magee. She was attractive, pleasant to be with, but when she'd shown her interest in him, he'd backed off. What's wrong with me? he thought. What kind of magic was he waiting for? He thought about Chris settling for Lance the Lawyer. Settling? Who was he to judge? Maybe the companionship of Lance the Lawyer was better than none at all. No. There was a good reason for his own behavior.
In spite of the yearning he felt for intimacy in his life, he was on the road at least twenty days a month, never spending enough time in one place, including home, to get to know anyone well. In spite of the undeniable attraction he felt for Alora, there couldn't be a future with her, and he wasn't interested in a relationship without a future. Old fashioned was right. Old fashioned, and too old to change.
A J.B. Hunt rig passed him, the driver giving him a comradely salute. Hunter smiled and nodded, took a few seconds to pick up the thread of his thought. Why couldn't there be a future with someone like Alora Magee? He hated analyzing things to death like this, but he had been wrestling with his solitude for too long to ignore it anymore. Was it just because she lived in California, in one place, and his home was in Vancouver, although he spent precious little time there, as his daughters would attest. No. It was more than that. He hadn't let himself explore his feelings, nor acknowledge them even to himself, but he felt a strong connection with Ken's widow, uncomfortably strong. He had tried to interpret it as something less than it was. He felt responsible for Helen, he was prepared to admit that. He could tell himself over and over again that he wasn't responsible for Ken's death, but the guilt remained like an indelible stain. Shouldn't he have known that Ken was close to the edge? Shouldn't he have been there for him?
Hunter felt the familiar churning in his brain, the restlessness that made him want to bust out and run, run until his lungs burst and his legs collapsed like rubber hose. He had often wondered, reluctantly and with distaste, if that was what had attracted him to life on the r
oad. Running and running and always getting ready to run again. If he just kept moving, maybe he could leave the guilt behind. He couldn't argue it away, because it wasn't a rational thing. It bedeviled him and tormented him and wouldn't let him rest. After Ken's death, because of Ken's death, Hunter had sullied everything he held sacred. He destroyed evidence, he betrayed Ken's last wishes, he failed to show the integrity he'd always prided himself on, the courage to be honest and open. Was it compassion, or was it cowardice and shame? Or was it, plainly and simply, for her? For Helen.
Hunter felt a need to talk to someone, take his mind off the subject, so when he stopped for fuel in Santa Nella, he called El from an outdoor payphone.
"It's about time," she said.
"I called when I left L.A., and you weren't there." Wally said he'd pass the message on, but Hunter didn't want El to give Wally a bad time, so he didn't elaborate. Wally was a good, steady worker, with the patience and good nature to put up with El's occasional bellowing.
"Yeah, yeah. I know. Listen, though. Something interesting happened at Greg Williams' house yesterday." He could hear the familiar squeak of her captain's chair as she rocked back and forth.