by Mary McBride
"There you are." Mike Kaczinski came up beside him. He set the candle he was carrying down on the counter next to the sink. "You feeling okay, Son?"
"Oh, sure."
"How's the rib?"
"Fine." Sonny shrugged. "It only hurts when I breathe."
"And the head?"
"That's fine, too. It only hurts when I think."
Mike chuckled softly. "Well, that shouldn't be a problem, then."
The candle flame barely cut the darkness around the two friends as they stood there side by side. They'd met in grade school, gotten in all the obligatory trouble together in high school, shared a room at college, and then finally cheered each other through the police academy. Mike had been Sonny's best man, not just at his wedding, but in every sense of the word.
Like Sonny, he wore his dark brown hair on the long side, the better to blend in on the street. Unlike Sonny, he'd gone home every night to a solid, happy marriage for the past ten years.
Now the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out the window at the rectangle of yellow light on the second floor next door.
"She's planning to get pregnant next week from a freaking sperm bank." Sonny's voice barely rose above a rough whisper.
"Yeah. I heard."
"I'm not going to let that happen, Mikey."
"Yeah. I figured."
* * *
When the last reveler drove off into the wee small hours of the morning, Melanie slipped back into bed, beat her pillow to a pulp, and pulled the covers up over her head. Okay. So she wasn't going to wake up in the morning to find it was all a bad dream. It was a living nightmare, and she was going to have to deal with it one way or another.
She'd be damned if she'd stay barricaded behind locked doors. Sonny was just going to have to move. Seattle would be nice. Hong Kong would be even better. A bit closer, there was a house around the corner on Garland Boulevard
that Dieter Weist and his partner had almost completed so Sonny wouldn't have to be bothered with all the drudgery that went along with rehabing. He didn't know the first thing about rehabing anyway. Good grief. When she'd lived with him in his loft, he hadn't even owned a screwdriver or a hammer to put a picture up on a wall, much less known how to use either one.
What was he planning to do? Live in that hovel next door while plaster rained down on his head and garbage squished under his feet?
He didn't even have electricity yet, for heaven's sake. No plumbing, either, judging from the Day-Glo-colored Porta Potty that she had spied tucked behind the dilapidated back porch.
Why was he doing this? She wanted to rip open the shutters and wrench up the window and scream, "It's over. It didn't work, Sonny. Just—for God's sake—let it go."
If she did that, though, he'd only yell back, "You love me, Mel. You know it."
Dammit. She punched the pillow again and dug herself deeper into the mattress. That was the problem. She did love him. She just couldn't live with him.
If only she'd known that when he'd handed her those two glasses of champagne and then shucked his disguise like some gorgeous butterfly emerging from a hairy cocoon. If only his voice with its too-much-whiskey and too-many-smokes timbre hadn't sent a cascade of tingles down her spine when he'd called her darlin' the first time, as in "Let's get out of here, darlin'."
Melanie was far too practical, way too levelheaded to be swept off her feet, so she'd finally come to the conclusion that Sonny must have drugged her those few weeks before they'd gotten married. That first night, after they'd left the awards ceremony and after he'd showered and changed at the precinct, they'd sat in the back booth of a little jazz club, the sparks between them nearly setting the place on fire.
No one had ever made her feel like the molten center of the universe before. No one had ever made her forget what time it was, what day it was, what century. No one had ever gotten her into bed on the very first date and then gotten her to stay there for an entire weekend.
He had to have drugged her.
It wasn't just the sex. During those early weeks Sonny had made her feel like a new person, somebody completely recreated. She'd never once made a list of any kind. She'd barely even opened her planner except to make certain there was no official function that would prevent her from being with her man.
Sonny had been with her constantly—24/7 as they said in the department—because, like now, he'd been on vacation following a shooting. He'd been sexy and funny and charming and attentive and sweet and…
…And in her drugged, delirious condition she'd married him one afternoon at city hall in Judge Beckmann's chambers with Sam Venneman as her maid of honor and Mike Kaczinski as his best man.
Then Sonny's time off work had ended and she'd hardly seen him anymore. It seemed her then-new husband's view of the ideal marriage was one where he worked long hours, sometimes two and three days at a time, undercover on the street, then came home expecting the honeymoon to continue under the covers with his irritated bride.
No sooner had she tidied up his messy loft than he stumbled in to fling newspapers everywhere, to put T-shirts in his sock drawer, to rip out the neatly tucked covers from the foot of the mattress to accommodate his long legs, to claim he couldn't make plans for the future because he didn't even know what he'd be doing next week.
She'd made lists and Sonny had made excuses.
After six months, during four of which she'd had a headache that felt like a cannonball inside her skull, Melanie had walked out and filed for divorce.
For his part, Sonny went through an approximation of the Five Stages of Grief. Denial: "There's nothing wrong with our marriage, babe." Anger: "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Bargaining: "I can change, Mel." Depression: "Aw, hell, darlin'. Why don't you just stick a knife in my heart and get it over with?"
Finally, or so she'd thought when he'd stopped calling her constantly and dropping by city hall every other day, he'd reached the last stage. Acceptance.
Obviously she'd been wrong about that. Sonny hadn't changed a bit. He never would. He'd always be his spur - of - the - moment, let - the - devil - take - tomorrow, what-me-worry, haphazard self. And she'd always be the worrier, the list maker, the Queen of Post-It notes and the planner.
The twain would never meet.
And one of the twain, dammit, would have to go.
Melanie squeezed her eyes closed, determined to wrench at least a few hours sleep from the chaos that suddenly surrounded her.
* * *
Next door, at that precise moment, Sonny took a swig from his bottle of beer and a long drag on his cigarette, then leaned back his head and closed his eyes. He'd kept a couple candles burning to ward off any lowlife who might be looking for an unoccupied place to crash for the night. If that warning didn't prove successful, he was still wearing his shoulder holster with his service pistol snug under his arm.
He was almost hoping some coked-up derelict did stumble in, thus offering him a legitimate excuse to shove somebody up against a wall and work off some of the foul mood he was in.
Cop on the Block at your service, ma'am. What was that? You say you want a baby?
Every time he thought about what Melanie planned to do, his gut churned, tying itself into a thousand tight little knots, and his heart surged with a sort of primitive rage. It made him nuts to think of his wife getting pregnant by another man, artificially or otherwise. If otherwise, at least he'd have the pleasure of killing the guy. What could he do about the artificial deal—stomp a little vial and grind it into the floor?
He'd found out about her cockamamie plan last week, the same afternoon he'd gone through the plate-glass window. That revelation, coupled with the one he'd had from the .44 Magnum, had finally propelled him into action. Waiting for Mel to change her mind obviously wasn't working, and merely telling her that he'd changed wasn't good enough or fast enough in light of this baby deal.
The Cop on the Block notion had seemed inspired at the time. He filled out the paperwork,
sat on his captain's desk until he signed it, then personally walked it through the approval process at the Third Street Bank. If the nerdy little vice president in charge of loans filed a complaint, Sonny was fully prepared to say that he'd simply drawn his gun to make certain the safety was on.
So far, so good. The house was his. He was sitting here, a mere twenty feet from Melanie's place. Of course, he was sitting in the dark and his toilet was outside and Mel was barricaded behind locked doors, but—by God—he was here. Now he just had to convince her that he was capable of change.
As for Mel, she didn't have to change even so much as a hair for him. He'd probably fallen for her the first time he'd seen her up on the stage at that awards ceremony exerting nearly superhuman effort to keep her knees together in that tiny little gray skirt while two hundred pairs of eyes were zeroing in on them and two hundred good but lecherous souls were silently pleading for just one little peek.
Okay. Maybe at first it was just the challenge of those lovely, super-glued knees. But after an hour of being with her that night, Sonny had quickly forgotten about the knees in order to focus on her quick, bright, and almost comically organized mind. And though he might have teased her about the lists and date books she produced from her handbag like a succession of clowns from a midget car, a part of him—an important, bone-deep part—truly envied the order and apparent certainty in her life.
Until Mel, the women he'd been with had lives as erratic as his own. Sheila, the flight attendant. Tammy, the traveling sales rep. Barb and Cathy and the other Cathy, all cops, all the time. Maybe the haphazard attitude was a habit with him, acquired from too many moves as a kid from one foster home to another. Maybe it was a defense. If he didn't make plans, they couldn't go wrong. Who knew?
But Sonny knew that from the minute he'd met Melanie Sears, he'd felt as if he'd found a permanent home. Then, because he continued to be an erratic, undependable, insensitive jerk, he'd promptly lost her.
He would've cut off his right arm for a second chance. Or quit smoking. Really quit this time. Whatever Mel wanted. Anything.
All she had to do was ask.
Assuming she ever spoke to him again.
In the meantime, he'd made his own list. After "Get Melanie Back" came "Fix up this freaking dump." He drained the last of his beer, dropped his cigarette into the wet remnants in the bottle, then prayed he could slide into a few hours of dreamless sleep.
* * *
Chapter 3
« ^ »
There was no wake-up call in the world quite like the squeal of the hydraulic lift on a big flatbed as it prepared to slide a boxcar-size Dumpster onto a concrete pad.
Melanie groaned her way out of bed, snarled through her shower, and then got dressed and stomped downstairs to fix breakfast. She was starving after eating just a skimpy howl of cereal the night before.
Sometime during the course of the night—sometime between the raucous hooting and door slamming of the party and the ground-shaking thud of the Dumpster bin shortly after dawn—she had decided to not let Sonny Randle ruin her life. Twice. If he couldn't accept the fact that their marriage was over, that was his problem. Not hers. If he wanted to waste his time trying to convince her otherwise, it wasn't going to work.
She had plans, and she was going to follow through with them no matter who moved in next door. Anyway, dammit, she was here first.
Muttering to herself, she pulled a box of eggs and a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. She wasn't going to quit eating right just because Sonny was here. Of all the times in her life that good nutrition was important, it was now, prior to her pregnancy. She wasn't going to alter a lifetime's worth of good habits just because the King of Chaos had moved into the neighborhood.
As if to emphasize her steely resolve, she cracked an egg so hard against the edge of the bowl that it splattered across the shiny white tile counter and dribbled down the front of the oak cabinet. She didn't feel the least bit guilty blaming that on Sonny, too, as she grabbed a paper towel to clean it up. In fact, whatever went wrong from here on out would clearly be his fault if for no other reason than sheer proximity.
While she ate her scrambled egg with neat little bites of whole wheat toast, Melanie did what she did best. She made a list. Even if she decided to postpone Monday's appointment until next month, there were a million things that needed to be done. These weren't tasks she'd overlooked, but ones she'd saved for this special time. It was how she'd planned to spend her pregnancy, indulging herself in getting ready for the birth.
The nursery, on the second floor adjacent to her room, needed everything. She couldn't wait to shop for the crib and the dresser and the sweet little night-light that would adorn it, but those would only come after she painted the walls the perfect shade of yellow that she had yet to find. Not daffodil. And it wasn't quite pale lemon sherbet, either. The best way she could describe the color in her head was baby-duck yellow. Melanie wrote that at the top of her list. Surely someone at the paint store would know exactly what she meant and be able to mix up a batch with ease.
She wrote down brushes, rollers, and paint tray, then decided that was probably enough for one day's To Do list. After all, she didn't want to finish everything in the first month and then have nothing to do for the next eight.
After she rinsed her breakfast dishes, she peeked out the window to see if the coast was clear enough to sneak out and get the morning paper. The big red sandstone house next door looked just as deserted as it ever had. The Cop on the Block, she supposed, was somewhere in the debris, sleeping off the effects of his orgy last night.
Melanie opened her front door and stood on her front steps a moment, stretching her arms toward the cloudless azure sky, then gazing at the pink-and-white blossoms of the dogwood trees in Channing Park. Next April on a lovely morning just like this one, she couldn't help but think, she'd be bundling the baby in a stroller and heading off for a lovely turn around the park. One more reason, she thought, to not cancel Monday's procedure.
There were always joggers and power walkers and just plain amblers moving at their individual paces around the park. Right now Melanie could see the Wrenn sisters coming down Kassing at a pretty good clip. She waved, hoping if they paused to chat, she didn't mix up their names the way she usually did. One was Susan and the other Sandy, but she was never quite sure which. There was only a year between them but they looked like identical twenty-something twins, both tall and terribly blond, and tended to dress that way, no doubt thoroughly enjoying the confusion they created. This morning they were wearing jiggly little T-shirts and a thin coating of hot-pink Spandex on their long legs.
She didn't have to worry about their names, though. As they passed on the sidewalk in front of her yard, both sisters waved and called in chirpy unison, "Hi, Melody," getting her name wrong as they always did. Then, without slowing, they continued on to 1224 where they quite suddenly put on the brakes.
"Hi, there," Susan or Sandy purred.
"Hi, there," Sandy or Susan echoed.
"Morning, ladies."
That voice! That sandpapery baritone with its top notes of booze and tobacco nearly brought Melanie to her knees. One quick glance revealed her ex-husband, a vision in a faded denim shirt and jeans, lolling on the little front porch next door as if he actually belonged there.
While he was chatting up the Wrenns, Melanie stalked down the walk for her paper. It wasn't on the walk, or under her little boxwood hedge, or anywhere to be seen. It was when she turned back toward her house and cast another furtive glance in Sonny's direction that she realized he was sitting there with the sports section draped over his knee. The son of a bitch stole her newspaper!
The minute Susan and Sandy cooed "Nice meeting you" and got under way again, Melanie yelled, "Is that my paper?"
"I borrowed it to look at the Classifieds," he called back.
She chewed on a few prime curses before she shouted, "Well, are you done?"
"Almost." He picked up
the paper and disappeared behind it, apparently without the slightest intention of returning it to her in the near future.
God! Nobody on the planet could set her hair on fire the way Sonny did. She knew she should've shrugged with monumental indifference and sauntered back inside her house, but instead she clenched her fists and went charging across her yard toward his.
"Give me my damn paper," she shrieked as she pounded up the little flight of stairs to his porch. But just as she reached to grab it from his hands, Sonny stood and held the paper high over his head.
"Just a minute, Mel. I want to see if my ad is in here."
She glared at him. Not that she cared one bit or was even mildly curious, but she still heard herself asking, "What ad?"
Sonny was looking up now, squinting in order to read the paper high over his head and well out of her reach. "This ad," he said. "Good. They got it in."
Melanie was gearing up for a leap worthy of a W.N.B.A. superstar when he suddenly snapped the paper closed and handed it to her. "What ad?" she asked again.
"I'm selling my car."
He lowered himself onto the thick sandstone blocks that formed the sidewall of the small porch while Melanie continued to stand. She wasn't at all sure that she'd heard him right. He'd had that gas-swilling, evil, black vehicle forever. It wasn't just transportation. It was his alter ego, as much a part of him as his sea-colored eyes and his devastating smile.
"You're selling the Corvette?"
"Yep." He leaned back against the house and slung a jeans-clad leg up onto the porch wall. "You were right. It's not a family car."
She blinked. "You don't have a family, Sonny."
"Not yet." He cocked his head, squinting against the morning sun at Melanie's back, but nevertheless pinning her with eyes that had turned a deep and warm Bahamian blue. "But I'm working on it."