by Susan Dunlap
Liza tapped out disbelief on her arm. She couldn’t find the flaw in Ellen’s thesis. Still…“It can’t be that simple.”
“It can. It is. It just seems impossible because of all we’ve been through.” Ellen flipped the wheel to the right and back again, a little dance on asphalt.
Liza grinned. “And all we have to do is call Harry. Okay, Ellen, dial the man up. There, ahead. Turn in there to that restaurant.”
“That’ll probably be the one Gwen mentioned. She could have called the cops. Still, we have to trust someone.”
“It’s not a matter of trust. If the cops are watching that place they’ve already seen us. No matter. You’ll use your one call for Harry. And mine for the gold or diamond merchants. Maybe they’ll even give us a necklace.”
“A reward? Why not?”
“We’ll have to go to the opera.”
“The opera?”
“To wear our diamonds. Anywhere else a tiara would be tacky.”
Twenty-Seven
DEVON MALLOY DID NOT feel the cold. He had trained himself to ignore physical feelings as he did emotions. Certainly the chill of a parking lot in Kansas City was not going to get to him.
He checked his watch. Four minutes to go. Give Cooper enough time to get settled inside, to open files, make phone calls that could be redialed. Malloy felt no anxiety; he had trained that out of himself too.
Or almost. And that would be alleviated as soon as he knew the shipment’s expected time of arrival at the Richland grade. The whole deal had been dicey from the moment he met Silvestri at the trial in Coeur, then at the gun show, slick Silvestri and his beautiful little blonde wife. He had been worried that Silvestri did not maintain sensible reserve around the wife, as if he did not know women talked. Then he had realized how to turn the tables. He had been specific about the train—a freight with one passenger car and no passengers but Silvestri and his wife. That had surprised Silvestri, his including the wife. Silvestri’s condescending smile said, “You want her, don’t you? She’s mine. But it will amuse me to dangle her in front of you.” Maybe in the end Silvestri would have lost his nerve and left her on the beach in L.A.; there was nothing Malloy could have done about that. But if she had been on the train he would have shot Silvestri, taken her and she would have become the perfect poster picture outside the Hanford when the tanks exploded. The yuppie dream girl screaming in terror as she waited to the while the world watched helplessly—it was perfect. Every day he felt the pain of his baby brother’s death, but Malloy was not so naive as to think the world would share his grief. They might shove Brian aside. But Liza Silvestri would grab sympathy from coast to coast.
Liza Silvestri made everything perfect. And then Silvestri died and ruined it. If there was just some way to still get her…
But there wasn’t. He had to be realistic about that.
Malloy shifted in the car seat. The windshield was fogging but he chose not to wipe it. It would shield him from view if any witness was up in Kansas City at this hour. Squinting through it would help to keep him focused.
Obsessed, that was what Caryl had called him before she walked out of their marriage. Obsessed about Hanford, and about Green Run, the day the government chose to open the smoke stacks and kill its own people. She had argued that Green Run was a Cold War phenomenon, that Hanford’s thirteen years of spewing radionuclides was over, that the political climate had changed. Like Caryl said, he was a bright guy, a genius, she had called him; any door would open to him. He had lain back, his head in the softness of her lap, and felt the lure of owning two hundred acres of aspen-covered hills, with a house he designed, a boat he built for fishing on the river, with children of his own. “Look,” Caryl had said, “the DOE shut down Hanford. They’re cleaning up the waste. You say you want change; that’s change!”
And then the bastards decided to restart the Fast Flux Test Facility reactor. Their own documents admitted that the reactor posed catastrophic safety risks, that the reactor could melt down or explode. Safety measures? They could notify officials downwind in two hours, they said. In two hours it would be two hours too late.
The windshield was fogged opaque. He was not angry; he did not allow himself anger, not now of all times. He unzipped his jacket and let the cold November air strike his damp neck.
Nothing had changed at Hanford. There was no Cold War now to blame. Only the government and its greedy contractors. And vermin like them would go on forever at Hanford, at other nuclear plants, spewing out deadly radionuclides. He would show them what can happen once and for all.
He checked his watch again. In one minute he would be headed inside. In a few more he would be driving out of the parking lot, with the final bit of data on the shipment. He would be ready to notify all twenty men near Hanford which train to meet and when.
But the sudden blossoming and more sudden plucking away of the perfect accouterment—Liza Silvestri—gnawed at him. After all these years to see the perfect hostage, the symbol of a nation of hostages, and have to do without. There had to be a way.
There was something, a flicker in his thoughts. What? Women talk, that was it. In bad times they talk a lot. Bad times, like a husband being shot. For the first time since Malloy left Coeur d’Alene he felt a smile teasing his face. Who would Liza Silvestri call at this very bad time but her best friend who was Cooper’s, the freight forwarder’s, girlfriend? All he had to do was get the woman’s name and whereabouts from Cooper.
Harry Cooper was in front of his office computer, standing. He couldn’t stay in his chair. Silvestri’s bill of lading for his container was on the screen. He didn’t need to check it. He’d written it up, taken Silvestri’s word on the weight, and—his throat tightened at the thought—created the Western Inspectors Bureau number that allowed the cargo to go through without being weighed. How could he have—
But he’d meant that fiction to facilitate the passage of the container, not conceal some kind of contraband.
Union Pacific, the form said at the top. UP a reliable major. He checked the web page for location—an hour over the Oregon border. He scanned the blocks with the weight in tons—gross, tare, net; the length of car, the marked capacity of car, the stenciled weight of car, the freight bill date, the freight bill number, the waybill date and number. He’d listed the origin road code and the station of origin, Long Beach, CA. Bill of lading date…could it be just a week ago? The invoice number was there and the customer number. Consigned to: D. Malloy and Associates. Destination: Richland, WA.
He checked again at the top, where the form offered the option of “STOP this car at”; the goose egg sat in place. No one should have stopped the car; no one should have checked it.
Route Long Beach-Oakland-Roseville-Portland-Richland. If the shipment had been pulled off in the hole, on the siding at one of the interchange points, there’d be a notice on the web page. According to the website, Silvestri’s shipment had passed over the Oregon line headed to Portland, just as it should be. Nothing was amiss here. There was no reason for anyone to worry. Certainly no reason for the lunatic receiver to be calling in the middle of the night and threatening him. That frightened Harry Cooper all the more. The only sensible reason for the threats was that the receiver was truly a lunatic, out of control, a madman waiting for a shipment of contraband or drugs or, God forbid, guns.
In the distance metal clanked, cars shifting in the night. Further away, the lowing of a whistle cut the thick winter air and seemed to echo off the empty corridor outside his office. The music of night sorrows. During the day there was ten times the noise, passenger trains whistling through intersections, grinding to stops, phones ringing, computers beeping, young forwarders running in for his advice. Noise thick as tracks around K.C., and he never noticed any of it. But now it was as if he was the only man for a hundred miles, standing on the lone rail in the snows of North Dakota, ears cocked for the howls of wolves.
If he hadn’t taken on—no, falsified the bill of lading for Silve
stri’s shipment, he’d be home in bed right now, with luck with Ellen, and his biggest decision would be how she’d react to being awakened by a kiss. He’d have the weekend off. They’d have gone to Gelia’s for dinner and then to the opera. She’d never have thought of jumping on a plane west to…oh, God, to Silvestri’s wife and who knew what?
If Silvestri’s murder was not the sharp corner of a love triangle, if it was somehow connected to this shipment…His gut clenched. If Silvestri’s wife was involved, then the hitmen would be tracking her down. Her and Ellen.
Things like this didn’t happen to people like him, like Ellen. The lunatic wouldn’t be threatening Ellen if it weren’t for him. If only he knew where she was; he’d fly there in a minute.
Outside in the corridor, shoe leather slapped on the bare wooden floor, shoes rushing, slowing, like an old engine puffing uphill. Cooper’s stomach eased up; it comforted him to realize that someone else had reason to be here at this time Sunday morning.
Twenty-Eight
ELLEN LEANED BACK, LETTING her gaze follow Liza and her pig around the Max Café parking lot. She was too wired to sleep. She could sleep on the plane back to Kansas City. Or in her own apartment, as late and luxuriously as she wanted. In her tiara.
“Sorry. It took him forever.” Liza plunked the pig in the Camaro. “Long as he was in the car, you’d think he’d have been happy as the first in line for the Opera House ladies’ room at intermission.”
“Even if he doesn’t have a tiara?”
“We’ll get you a diamond collar, huh Felton?” She gave him a final scratch behind the ears. “It’s like so much time passed he forgot about that part of his life. They say constipation is a problem for pigs. Who’d figure, huh? But, anyway, he is one empty pig now. Or he would be if he hadn’t found the dog’s dish over there. Going to be one unhappy hound. C’est la vie, or le chien, eh? Let’s go call Harry.”
Ellen laughed. “What were you doing while your pig was chowing down? Were you sniffing helium?”
The café was clearly a local hangout. In the minutes it had taken the pig to defecate, the three trucks in front had been joined by a pick-up and a tan-and-rust Desoto, all pulled so close to the fogged picture windows of the diner-sized room Ellen pictured patrons opening those windows and putting their bread baskets on their engines to keep them warm. Two plaid-jacketed men sat at the counter, two in down vests at one table and an elderly couple at another. “Sit wherever you want, ladies,” the waitress called from behind the counter.
Liza bounced across the room to the far table by the window and Ellen’s own feet felt pretty light. It wasn’t over, she reminded herself. But she did feel like a short-timer. She took the seat facing the phone and tried not to glare at the man talking on it.
“Coffee, ladies?”
Ellen nodded.
Liza hesitated. “Do you have herbal—Hell, make it coffee. Not decaf; make it the hard stuff.”
The waitress poured and left. Glancing at her ample derriere, Liza muttered, “Food must be okay here.”
“Shhh.”
“What do you think, she’s going to go into a rage and sit on me?”
“Eat some crackers.”
Liza laughed. “Keep my mouth busy, huh? And don’t comment on that bloodhound in the truck wagging his jowls or the guy at the counter who could be his brother.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet.”
She opened her hands in diva mode and sang, “Over the river and through the woods…”
“Stop! You’ll get yourself arrested for disturbing the peace. And no lawyer’d be able to talk you free on that.”
Liza grabbed her hands. “You know what? A tiara isn’t enough! For what we’ve been through? I don’t think so.”
“So what’re you saying, Liza, two tiaras? With a bracelet tossed in? Of course, then we’d have to do the opera in New York, so we weren’t overdressed.”
“Two tiaras apiece would stand out even in Manhattan.” The waitress brought the coffee and Liza ordered bacon and eggs for both of them. “Maybe we should take the whole shipment and skip the diamond merchants. Then we’d be really overdressed.”
“And we wouldn’t be looking at the end of the tunnel, we’d—Oh, rats, look the guy’s redialling. Couldn’t he have called from home?”
“Why don’t you go and poke him with your tiara? Hey, you want onions scrambled in your eggs? I’m going to see if I can catch the waitress in time.” Liza was up and out of the chair before Ellen could nod. But it didn’t matter, onions or not. She sat relishing the buoyancy even as it seeped away in Liza’s absence. Fingering the tines of the fork, she looked out the window at the stand of redwoods across the street. Odd to think that she might never see redwoods again. Redwoods that had been such a part of her life in Portland. She hadn’t thought she’d missed the great trees in Kansas City—they had their own great trees there, giant elms with branches swaying in the winds off the prairie, ghost trees in lightning. But not redwoods, taller than one glance could frame, unyielding in flood or storm—until it was too late.
“What’re you thinking?”
She started. She hadn’t even noticed Liza’s return. “Thinking? The redwoods. I haven’t seen them since I left Portland.”
Liza smiled. “And?”
“And what?”
“That sigh of yours wasn’t an agricultural statement. That was a guy-sigh.”
“So now you’re the all-knowing interpreter of body noises?”
“Nothing special about me. Felton could have nailed that one. If he had, he’d say you were thinking about an old lover in Portland.”
“Forget Portland.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
Liza grinned. “I will, if you tell me about it.”
“It’s none of your business?”
Liza made gimme motions with both hands.
“In a minute you’re going to be fingering through my brain.”
“So tell me about him. I’m right, there is a ‘him.’ So, tell. What’s the harm? We could use some happy memories. It’ll make me happy to know you had fun in Portland.”
The fork was still in Ellen’s hand. She pressed the tines into her fingertips. She’d been so faithful to the No Speak rule. How could she break it now when she’d be back in Kansas City so soon?
“Ellen, what’s the harm in talking about it? Of course I’ll never mention it after this, because let’s be honest here, it’s not like you’ll be saving your vacation days to go on another trip with me next year. If I called you again you’d slam the phone down so fast my ear would burn. Right? Huh?”
Ellen laughed softly. “Nah. I’d just have you committed.”
“So next to the stranger on the plane I’m the best person in the world. Actually, I’m better than the plane person. You never know how he might react. But me, well what do you think is going to shock me?”
There was a catch in Liza’s voice. A great rush of sorrow flowed through and Ellen had to press the tines harder to keep control. What kind of dreary life did Liza have if there was nothing left to shock her? And now she didn’t even have that life anymore. Was it so much to tell her about Portland? Slowly, she said, “I’ve never told this to anyone.”
Liza smiled, unconsciously Ellen was sure. The smile was just a slight shifting of cheeks, but it changed her face entirely. She looked like she’d gotten an unexpected gift. It almost made Ellen cry. “There’s no one else I would tell. I—”
“I guess that means we really are friends, huh?”
“It does in my book.”
Liza’s mouth quivered as if she was about to cry. She swallowed, and seemed to hoist a grin out of nowhere and paste it on her mouth. “Okay, friend, tell me your secrets.”
Ellen stared down at the table. Emotion wasn’t something she was good at and she was way over her head with these two currents washing over her. Even as she shifted back and put the fork down Ellen could feel the tickle of warmth at the b
ottom of her spine, the warmth she felt each time before the No Thought rule. Still staring at the table, she said, “It’s strange to say this out loud. I never thought I would. It never occurred to me I’d trust anyone enough to tell. Sometimes I can hardly believe something that lasted for so short a time wrenched me off my foundations. But I’m not like you. Men would step on my stomach to get closer to you. No man has ever made a beeline to get to me. I grew up gawky, chunky, all the ‘y’ words that make a girl ignorable. When you knew me in college I divided my time between being efficient and resenting life’s unfairness. I guess I could have gone on like that for the rest of my life, if it hadn’t been for—” she grinned—“the great gift of my car being totaled.”
“Totaled? You okay?”
“Nothing happened to me. I wasn’t in it. The car was parked and some drunk plowed into it. But that’s not the point.”
Liza nodded, a tiny movement that seemed less to signal agreement than to show she was stepping out of the way.
“What happened was I started to use my bicycle to get around. It was a dry year for Portland and the section of town I lived in was pretty flat and so it made sense. I’d never done anything remotely athletic before. I had to borrow my landlady’s old bike to begin with. But what I found out was it was fun. So I bought a bike, a new, good bike. I kept making my routes longer, looping around to include a hill, trying—Anyway the point is that I realized that this was something I loved and I, amazing for great-lump me, I was a good rider. When I plunked down six hundred dollars for a mountain bike and equipment I’d made my commitment. I started doing tours and races. My whole life had turned inside out.”
The food arrived. Ellen didn’t look down at it. The café windows were steamy, giving a misty quality to the redwoods beyond, as if she was leaning on handlebars looking through sunglasses fogged by her hot sweaty face. “My job, which used to be my focus, was just an inconvenience between weekends. I, who used to be an outsider, was a Plum among Plums.”