Fast Friends

by Susan Dunlap

  “Gun show?”

  But Liza wasn’t about to go into that, not weird as that was. “Gun show.”

  “Harry doesn’t know anything about guns. Your husband wouldn’t have been huddled with Harry about guns.”

  “Ellen, I can’t deal with peripheral things like that now. Look, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’ve come, and that you’ll lend me your room. But go now.”

  “I’m not going any—”

  “Ellen, you’re just in the way now.”

  “You need someone to help you, Liza.”

  Ellen’s hand was shaking; the tissue she was holding looked like a white flag. There was something so awkward and sweet and so very innocent about her.

  Liza took a breath and steeled herself to put on the toughest act she’d ever attempted. “Ellen, if you were able to handle things, you would have kept that slimy cafeteria boss, Sleem, off your mother’s butt. You wouldn’t have had to wait for me to do it.” She had to swallow before she could add the coup de grâce. “You never could handle men. And my problem, Ellen, is all about men. Now go and let me get some sleep.”

  Liza didn’t turn around as Ellen left. She couldn’t bear to see her face, that face she would never see again. She stood in the empty room, alone.

  Thirteen

  DEVON MALLOY THREW THE remote full force into the davenport. The soft thump of plastic into quilting was only mildly satisfying, but he did not want to break the remote. He could not afford the time to go out and buy a new one.

  His whole adult life had been devoted to Hot Standby—his one nod to melodrama coining the code name that never escaped his lips. No children, wife an ex, mother he no longer spoke to, a career he chose only for the access it gave him to federal records. If the goddamned government vermin knew about him they would have to admit he was the all-around expert on the Hanford Nuclear Site, the most contaminated acreage in the nation. Getting inside Hanford, opening the stacks and throwing the government’s lies in its face was his life. It was just a matter of time. As in Free Cell on the computer, and its 32,000 layouts; every player was defeated by some layouts, everyone but himself…because he was intelligent, disciplined and he restrained the urge to make a move before he was certain his plan was foolproof.

  He had his plan for Hanford; there was no way the government vermin would keep him out. Not with Silvestri’s weapons…He never dreamed he would attain firepower of that magnitude. Uzis, hand-held missile launchers, and up. Weapons that would be the red carpet into Hanford.

  And now the asshole Silvestri got himself killed.

  Malloy retrieved the remote. He perched on the davenport facing the blank screen and pressed the ON button to the point just before it caught, released it, pressed again. The exercise had become too easy; even so it served to distance him from emotion about the slime—about Silvestri. He had once killed a man without experiencing anything but the small concern over the added complication the corpse created. Hours later he had driven to a million dollar “ranch house” in Montana and sweet-talked six rich dilettantes into ponying up a million each for the cause. Without hesitation or backward look, he had reeled out an elaborate story of money needed to support major civil unrest with the possibility of violence, something he could not rule out. The dilettantes liked that possibility of minor violence. It made them feel like they were in a militia, the living-room militia. He had gotten his six million in cash, in suitcases so heavy he could barely lift them. Silvestri had run him through hoops—no bearer’s bonds, no gold, no wire transfers, only cash.

  People called him cold, but he was not emotionless. He was a laser focused on Hanford. Tomorrow he would be laughing and crying, his body overflowing with the warmth of victory when he turned off the mixing pump inside the High Level Waste Storage tanks, let the gases build up, quickly, quickly, and watched them explode.

  The rush he always got picturing the tanks splitting apart and the radioactive waste—uranium, iodine-131, strontium-90—spewing into the air uncontrolled, died before it warmed him. He had one shot at Hot Standby, tomorrow, and if he did not find out which train the shipment was on, the weapons would roll on to Pocatello or to Eastport and Canada.

  One chance.

  Fourteen

  ELLEN LEANED AGAINST THE elevator wall. She felt as if the car were tumbling, swirling, as if reality had lost its moorings. She felt as she had in high school, in college, in Portland—the lumpy girl who couldn’t handle men. The make-do, the last-minute date. Twenty-four hours ago she had been safe and settled in her apartment overlooking the Plaza, her biggest problem an unused opera ticket. Now she was in a strange city, about to wander out of a strange hotel, away from her friend who decided she wasn’t good enough. She shouldn’t have left Liza in that condition. But what choice did she have? Yeah Liza was upset; yeah things were awful; but still…

  Liza was out of her life for good. She pushed the button for Lobby and the elderly car mumbled in its supports and began descending. What to do now? Fly home? Had Liza booked a return flight she’d have to change? Jeez, she was too tired to think straight. Tired and starved. The responsible thing to do was go to the police.

  The elevator door opened at Lobby Level. Loud, male voices pierced the brocade decorum of the lobby. “Big,” one of them insisted. “We have standards in this hotel. We do not have bigs.”

  Bigs?

  Pigs?

  Why were they carrying on about pigs? The hotel didn’t even have a restaurant. Reality really had spun off its moorings.

  “He can’t stay in the lobby, rooting around for truffles.”

  San Francisco, indeed.

  “Fine!” The man wasn’t shouting. He had one of those whiny voices that cuts through noise. “Fine, Larry, just take him up to Ms. Baines’s room and tell her we have some standards here.”

  Ms. Baines’s room! The doors started to close. Ellen jammed her shoulder in the opening. The doors stuttered. She marched forward, dragging her suitcases.

  The lobby was decorated for effect, not comfort—a mauve and gray room, with brocade sofas by an electric fire, carved mahogany chairs on either side of round writing tables lit by lamps with fringed shades. Marble-topped coffee tables with floral arrangements heavy on the weird and pointy. Intricate, and threadbare Oriental carpet. The check-in desk, a decorous marble and mahogany counter, was hidden away in the corner. No guests were present, only the uniformed bell captain and a lanky wavy-haired man with a lanky face, dressed in the San Francisco de rigueur of black turtleneck, tweed jacket, and jeans. There was a bulge under his arm and Ellen wondered if he was wearing a gun. Planted in front of the check-in counter the two men glared mightily at each other.

  Ellen thrust her shoulders back, strode up, and poked her suitcases between the two. “I am Ellen Baines, and I’m traveling alone. And I don’t appreciate you taking anyone to my room.”

  All motion stopped, then the two men turned to her, puzzlement nearly transforming them into twins. Behind them, from inside the concierge’s office came a squeak.

  It was the bell captain who said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Baines, but we cannot allow livestock.”

  “Livestock?”

  “It is a pig.”

  “What is a pig?”

  The wavy-hair—Larry—was laughing now. He stepped forward. “Yeah, Daniel, what is a pig? You’re working on a doctor of philosophy—just what is a pig?”

  Daniel groaned.

  “Now, Daniel, ‘sounds like’ won’t do. This is a fine hotel and our guests expect their questions to be answered in words.” Larry flashed her a grin. It was a conspiratorial grin produced by a mobile mouth. He leaned a forearm on the check-in counter. Daniel jerked back instinctively and his jaw tightened. In a battle of wits with Larry, the desk clerk was doomed.

  She sensed the small wave of nausea before she realized its cause. Daniel. She could have stepped inside the poor little man’s skin, his poor inadequate skin that covered his inadequate self. She knew the fee
ling only too well. Larry was a first-string kind of guy and if the elevator door opened and Liza Silvestri strolled out, he’d be striding over to her as naturally as vermouth to gin. They’d be heading out the etched-glass doors. Daniel would be left organizing his cards as if they were chapters in War and Peace. And she? She’d be relegated to the spot beside him, her flush of humiliation and fury cooled by the breeze from the closing etched-glass doors. Because she “never could handle men.” Because she’d never be first choice; always make-do.

  She turned her back on the tall, so-sure man with his Lizalike irresponsible banter. “I’m checking out—”

  But the clerk was already reaching for the concierge door. He pulled it open. A black and white piglet trotted but, squeaking with each step.

  Ellen stared. Reality really had lost its moorings.

  The pig wrinkled his snout and headed purposefully for the brocade sofa.

  Larry laughed. “This is one all-business pig.”

  Befuddled as she was, Ellen couldn’t help laughing, too. “I’m no barnyard expert, but I know what pigs like to do—root. You may not want him rooting in your lobby.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth before Daniel was across the room and in the process of shooing ineffectually. She scooped up the pig. “Hey, easy, he’s not going to contaminate you. He’s only a little pig. And, I might add, not my pig.”

  Larry scratched the pig’s snout, but it was her he was eyeing, and for a moment she knew how Liza must have felt all the time. Automatically, she shifted to avoid blocking his line of vision, even though there was no Liza-quality woman behind her. But he was definitely smiling at her.

  Daniel’s whine brought her back to herself. “Your guest—”

  “Oh, Liza. Of course.” Why was she not surprised that Liza Silvestri was avoiding the police and doing it with a pig? And that she was in danger of being left holding Liza’s bacon?

  The pig wrinkled his black and white snout. The end was pink, the white a skunk-like stripe up the middle, the black on the rest of its face and ears. It was a cutie and the poor frightened piglet did need her. The pig wrinkled its nose at her, as if the little guy understood that she was the one to count on.

  Just like Liza understood. Well, she wasn’t taking care of Liza or Liza’s pig. She thrust the animal in Daniel’s arms. “My friend will be down in a minute. She’ll take her pig and leave. I’m checking out.”

  The clerk jerked back and would have dropped the pig if Ellen hadn’t kept her hands on him. He turned as pink as the pig, and as if noting the familial color, the pig tried to nuzzle his neck. Daniel thrust him away like a vial of virus.

  She hesitated and took him back, poor scared little fellow. She stood, knowing she should do something but unable to summon up the energy. She should check out. Find another hotel. Or arrange for a van to the airport and just sit there till the next flight to Kansas City. But if she went back now…

  Or should she find out where the police station was and make a report? But suppose Liza was right about the police…Juvenile records were supposed to be sealed. Would the police really remember her this long? Of course, Liza…Well, men did remember. Maybe she was in danger from them.

  She must have looked as overwhelmed as she felt; still it surprised her when Larry, the sexy one, put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re too tired to make a decision about this pig. What you need is to sit down, eat something and get some time to pull yourself together. There’s a quiet bar next door; they make a good roast beef sandwich. Come on, I’ll take you over. Daniel can keep the pig till your friend comes for him.”

  Daniel stepped behind the counter. “Hey, no way am I—”

  The piglet squealed.

  Ellen looked down at his round squirming body. She felt so bad for him, and suddenly again for Liza, for herself, for this whole miserable mess.

  “Food?” Larry’s hand slid down to her arm. She thought of Harry and blushed, and felt stupid. If the man who directed her to food was a sexy guy, what difference did that make? Food and quiet were exactly what she needed before she could decide what to do about Liza and the police and a new hotel and calling Harry and…“You never could handle men,” Liza had said. Well, she could damn well handle lunch with this one.

  The pig wriggled again. She took a deep breath and corralled her concentration on the problem at hand. Giving the pig a little squeeze she plopped him against Daniel’s chest.

  “Hey, lady, you can’t just walk out!”

  She opened her wallet and pulled out a twenty. “Keep him till my friend leaves. And don’t rush her; her husband just died and she needs time to rest and get herself together too.”

  The clerk made a show of avoiding looking at the twenty. He pulled himself up straighter and said, “Very well, as a kindness. But inasmuch as you are leaving I will need her name.”

  “Liza Silvestri.”

  Fifteen

  LIZA STARED FIRST AT the phone then at the television, her eyes blurring. She should do something, but she was so tired. She didn’t know what to do.

  But she knew what not to do. Calling Bentec headed the list of Not To Do.

  She yanked the bedspread loose and pulled the fabric around her. It was stiff, made of some fake fiber that neither wrinkled nor warmed.

  It had been fluke that she met Bentec at all, and bad luck he’d seen her that particular night a month ago. She and Jay were sitting at a red light on Venice Boulevard when Bentec’s unmarked car pulled up next them. Jay’d been so smug about scoring a dinner reservation at Cleo when the normal wait was a year that he was noticing nothing around him. She couldn’t help but smile remembering him going on and on about the underappreciated novelty of driving only city streets—as if she didn’t realize how hard he was trying to cover up his déclassé glee. He’d been sitting in the convertible, his arm around her shoulder, his fingers tracing the deep neckline of the dress he’d just given her. The V-neck was two inches lower than anything in her closet, so low it revealed the snake tattoo that had seemed racy and daring when she got it at fourteen. Then the asp’s open mouth arched lasciviously around her left breast made her feel sophisticated. It hadn’t been long before she realized it was all too memorable. By the time she met Jay almost a decade later, she was keeping it covered to shield herself from remembering. In a city where showing cleavage was the norm, people assumed she had opted for provocative modesty.

  But Jay had given her the dress and that one special night she’d worn it. After all, she’d reasoned, their waiter at Cleo was hardly going to endanger his tip by looking down his nose at her. There’d be no one else to see it. And the black clingy fabric had looked every bit as terrific as Jay had predicted.

  Jay’d had the top down on the Mustang, a CD of Betty Carter doing “Close Your Eyes” oozing from all four speakers. A horn yowled from the next car and the driver had motioned him to follow. Irritation had sparked Jay’s face. “Five minutes, max, Babe,” he’d said and cut across two lanes to the curb. He was on the sidewalk next to Bentec before the engine stopped.

  Now she wished she could recall what Bentec had said to Jay. But all she remembered was his glance down at the tattoo, the leer he didn’t bother to hide. It all happened in two seconds. Bentec made no comment to her, but she saw the truth. She had let herself believe the lawyers and social workers and the judge who insisted that juvenile records were sealed. The truth? Nothing is secret. A juvenile record like hers certainly wasn’t secret. Frank Bentec had not been a cop on that case. But he had seen the surveillance photo, camera looking down on her naked fourteen-year-old breasts and the tattoo. He had seen it because that photo in the supposedly sealed case had been copied and recopied till it garnered leers in station-house locker rooms all over Los Angeles.

  When she became Liza Silvestri she’d thought she was safe from Elizabeth Cummings’s past.

  Jay had seen her go pale. He’d cut Bentec short, drove to a boutique, bought her a lace turtleneck to wear to dinner, and nev
er asked a question. The tattoo was gone now, gone too late, way too late.

  If she had told Jay the whole story, would he have been prepared? Would he be alive now?

  Frank Bentec could answer that question, but she knew better than to get anywhere near him. She pulled the bedspread tighter around her, but it did no good.

  The dark TV screen stared accusingly. But Jay’s death wasn’t going to make it onto CNN. It would only be mentioned on a local channel—

  But wait. Local would be L.A., and Ellen saw it here. Why was it such big news it made San Francisco television? She shivered; the bedspread fell off and she didn’t bother picking up its useless fibers.

  The room had a mini bar. She could have one of those little bottles of gin or vodka or brandy. She could drink one after another till they drowned this day.

  Or she could close her eyes for a few minutes. She’d be able to think if she weren’t in such a fog of exhaustion.

  She nudged off her shoes, pulled the blanket loose and slipped under it. She’d just rest for a few minutes. Then she’d decide what to do.

  The door burst open. A man was back-lit by the hall light. God, he’s going to shoot Jay! Liza’s scream tore at her throat.

  The man was running at her. She screamed louder. She tried to push Jay out of danger. She couldn’t see Jay. There were blankets in her way. She wasn’t in their loft but in a strange bedroom. In bed.

  “Lady, lady, please! Please stop screaming. You’re going to get me fired!”

  She recognized him, the clerk she’d left watching Felton. The poor man was more terrified than she was. But the sound of the gun shots in the loft still resounded inside her flesh. She was too frozen to speak. It was all she could do to stop the momentum of her screams.

  She could hear creaking—doors—outside in the hallway; mutterings she couldn’t translate into words; feet pounding. The room was dark. How did it get dark? It was afternoon, a minute ago.