by Carole Buck
“Wait a minute!” she exclaimed, swatting back an errant lock of hair. “You actually are a security guard?”
Dick looked offended. “I told you I was!”
“A person can get in really bad trouble, pretendin’ to be a security guard,” Tom pointed out.
Brown eyes met hazel ones once again. Almost before her gaze connected with his, Lucy knew that Chris had had exactly the same reaction to the previous comment as she. Namely, that the “really bad trouble” one could get into for impersonating a security guard was nothing compared to the penalties one might incur for committing crimes such as, oh, say, breaking and entering, felonious assault, kidnapping and grand theft.
I know it’s tempting, she could practically hear Chris saying inside her head. But maybe we should refrain from reminding them that this caper could land them in prison until the middle of the next century if they’re caught.
Lucy drew a shaky breath. She’d tried to forget what they were like, these moments of unspoken communion. She’d experienced them frequently with Chris during their courtship and the early months of their marriage. But near the end of their relationship—
She shoved the past away again, painfully conscious that this was getting harder and harder to do. Then she turned back to Dick and said, “So the things you told me about Ray Price—about your subbing for him—those were true, too?”
“Of course they were true.” Dick’s mouth twitched. His mustache wriggled. “What did you think, Lucy? That I tied him up and stashed him someplace?”
Butch nearly choked on the gulp of soda he’d just taken. “Now where would she get an idea like that, I wonder?”
Dick glared at him. “Just because I had to do it to her and Chris doesn’t mean I’m gonna plan to do it to somebody else! That’d be...uh...uh...uh...”
“Premeditation?” Chris offered.
“Yeah!” Dick nodded his head. “Premeditation! And that’s even worse than pretending to be a security guard!”
“But don’t you have to premeditate if you’re gonna do that, Dick?” Tom asked, crumpling a soda can like a piece of tissue paper. He seemed absolutely serious about his question. “I mean, you gotta premeditate to get the right uniform—”
“Of all the stupid—”
“Speaking of premeditation,” Chris said, cutting off both the Spiveys. “I imagine you must have done a considerable amount of advance planning for this, ah...job.”
“And I imagine you imagine maybe we should’ve done a little more?” Butch countered.
There was an odd edge to his voice. It took Lucy a moment to realize that the edge was embarrassment. She felt a prickle of uneasiness as she noted the rigidity of Percival Johnson’s posture. It was her experience that an embarrassed male was a potentially dangerous one. She glanced toward her ex-husband.
“I didn’t say that, Butch,” Chris replied, sustaining the balding convict’s gaze for several unwavering seconds. That he could have forced the other man to look away, Lucy didn’t doubt for a second. But he chose to disengage first.
It was not how a Falco male would have handled the situation, she reflected with a curious pang. Dollars to doughnuts, her male relatives would have provoked a fight.
Lucy liked Chris’s tactics better. Much better.
“You didn’t have to, Harvard,” Butch returned after a beat, the tension easing out of his back and shoulders. “It’s true.”
“We planned, Butch!” Tom protested. “We planned lots!” He shifted toward Chris and Lucy and explained, “Butch and me started casin’ places to hit right after Dick got his job with the guard company. We had a couple of choices. Then stuff kind of clicked for us. We started hearin’ about this Red Treasure. Dick found out he was gonna be guardin’ here over New Year’s. All that.”
Lucy looked at Dick. “So, you went to work for the security company, uh...” She searched for an alternative to the word planning. “... figuring you were going to pull some kind of uh...” She paused again, finally recalling the non-pejorative noun her ex-husband had used earlier. “...uh, job?”
“Oh, no.” Dick shook his head to make this crystal-clear. “I was looking forward to an exciting career in private-sector law enforcement.”
“Then Dora-Jean dumped him again because of all that sharing stuff, and he decided—”
“Dora-Jean did not—”
“Shut up!” Butch ordered sharply. “Both of you, just shut up!”
The Spiveys subsided into grumpy silence. Lucy traded looks with Chris.
“Butch,” she said after a moment or two.
“Yeah?”
“If it isn’t too personal...what did you do to get sent to prison?”
Tom snickered. Butch gave him a glare that could have peeled paint at fifty paces. Tom suddenly got very busy stuffing his mouth with cold, greasy pizza. Butch turned back to Lucy, his expression turning sheepish.
“I got sent to prison because I made a dumb-cluck move during a burglary,” he said. “I got into the house fine, or so I thought. Nobody was home. There was a ton of stuff to steal, including this video-game hookup. Really expensive deal. Top-of-the-line. I go for that sort of thing, you know? Anyway, I turned it on and all of a sudden the television lit up like World War III.” He gestured with great animation, sketching an impression of what had appeared on the screen. For one weird moment, Lucy found herself thinking of Wayne Dweck. “I mean, there was bullets flyin’, bombs burstin’ and body parts all over the place. Best damned effects I’d ever seen. So, I grabbed the control and started to play.”
“And he was still playin’ when the cops showed up because of the silent alarm he didn’t know he tripped,” Tom concluded in a rush. “He didn’t even know they were there until one of the cops kind of tapped him on the shoulder.”
There was a volatile silence. Lucy edged toward Chris, fearing Tom had finally gone too far. She felt her ex-husband stiffen, and knew that he was contemplating the same possibility.
“Tom?” The question was soft. Almost gentle.
“Yeah, Butch?” The response was wary.
“Do you remember earlier, when Chris and Lucy were talking about short-term memory loss?”
“Uh...no.”
“Well, I’m of the opinion that you have a serious case of it.”
“Think he remembers what he did to get put in prison?” Dick asked snidely.
“Oh, God,” Lucy heard Chris mutter. “Here we go again.”
“It wasn’t somethin’ wrong!” Tom cried, thumping his hands against the floor.
“He stole a police car,” Butch informed Chris and Lucy.
Tom was almost beside himself. “Yeah, but, that’s not why I got put in prison!”
Lucy darted a glance at Chris. He lifted his eyebrows, clearly inquiring whether she was absolutely sure she wanted to get in the middle of this. She felt the corners of her mouth curl in an admission that yes, she was. He smiled knowingly and nodded his head, prompting her to get on with it.
“Why did you get put in prison, Tom?” she asked.
“I don’t have to tell. I’m takin’ that amendment thing against self-discrimination,”
“You have to be under oath to do that, Tom,” Chris advised him mildly.
“Really?”
“Really. Sorry.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“No, that’s the Constitution.”
“Come on, just spit it out,” Butch prodded. “You’re in court, sitting next to your lawyer. The cop whose car you stole...”
“Borrowed.”
“...stole and crashed into a telephone pole...”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen! I get the brake and the gas mixed up sometimes!”
“Well, maybe if you got your license—”
“Shut up, Dick,” Butch snapped. “Let Tom finish his story. Okay, Tom. The cop’s on the stand, and the D.A. asks him if the guy who took his vehicle is in the courtroom. And you—” he made a prompting gesture “
—what?”
Tom looked down and muttered something into his beard.
“I don’t think Chris and Lucy heard that.”
“It’s all right, Tom,” Lucy said quickly, assailed by a pang of pity. “We don’t really need to know.”
Tom heaved a great sigh and looked up. “No. That’s okay. I’ll tell you. When the lawyer asked was the man who took the police car in the court, I raised my hand and said, ‘Yeah, I’m sittin’ right here.’”
Chris and Lucy were returned to storage room captivity a few minutes later. Before they were, Lucy checked her watch. She gasped when she saw the time, then looked up at her ex-husband.
“Happy New Year,” he said ironically.
Butch reached into his filthy jumpsuit and pulled out a pocket watch. “I’ve got one-oh-eight,” he announced.
“One-oh-eight... and twelve seconds,” Dick concurred, consulting his wristwatch.
“Nine-fifteen,” Tom chipperly declared, glancing at his own timepiece.
“Nine-fifteen? We were supposed to synchronize our watches, you jerk!”
“I did. But I think Lucy hit mine when she was fightin’ us, and it stopped.”
Eight
Chris shifted, trying to find a comfortable position. Even a semicomfortable position. Heck, he’d settle for any position in which he didn’t feel in imminent danger of having his spinal cord punctured by a piece of metal.
In honor of their passage from the old year to the new, Butch and the Spivey boys had relented a bit on the tying-up situation. While they’d insisted that both he and Lucy had to be fettered, they’d agreed to deep-six the duct-tape restraints around the wrists and ankles. They’d also given in on the back-to-back issue. He and his es-wife were now securely attached to floor-to-ceiling shelf supports on opposite sides of the storage room.
Chris had expected that being face-to-face would make it easier for him and Lucy to talk. It hadn’t worked out that way. A curious kind of constraint had settled over both of them as soon as their captors exited. They’d exchanged a few desultory comments, then fallen silent. The longer this silence had gone on, the worse the tension in the small storage room had become. It had finally reached the point where Lucy had stopped looking at him!
He shifted again, noticing for the first time that there was a tear in one of his trouser legs. Oh, well, he thought with a mental shrug. It wasn’t as though this were the only navy blue suit he owned.
He glanced across at Lucy. She was sitting motionless, her shapely legs outstretched and crossed neatly at the ankles. Although the figure-skimming dress she had on appeared to be intact, the stockings that clung to her lower limbs had multiple runs.
Her head was slightly tilted back, and her eyes were closed. The rise and fall of her breasts was slow and steady.
She wasn’t sleeping. She obviously wanted him to think she was, but he knew she wasn’t. He could read tension in every line of her curvaceous body. Lucy, asleep, was as bonelessly relaxed as a rag doll.
Or so he very vividly remembered.
Chris shifted a third time, doing his best to ignore a sudden stirring in his groin. He cleared his throat. Lucy continued to play possum.
“I’d forgotten what a soft touch you are, Lucia Annette,” he finally ventured, although he’d done nothing of the kind.
He’d experienced a great many conflicting emotions about Lucy’s one-on-one approach to compassion during their marriage, including a bitter resentment of the fact that the time she expended on other people was time she didn’t have for him. But in an odd way, she’d set him on the professional course that had led to his being offered the foundation job that had brought him to Atlanta.
The memory of her willingness to reach out and help troubled people as best she could had prompted him to start doing pro bono work for a free legal clinic in one of New York’s poorer neighborhoods. While he wouldn’t deny that he relished the high-powered cut and thrust of corporate work—he liked winning, and he liked winning big—the cases he handled for the clinic nourished a part of his soul he hadn’t known was hungry.
Lucy didn’t rise to his verbal bait immediately. Indeed, he could sense her debating whether to ignore it altogether. Finally, she lifted her eyelids a fraction of an inch and peered down her nose at him. After a few moments of this, she opened her eyes completely and brought her head down to a normal angle.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, adjusting her position a bit. He wondered fleetingly whether she missed the feel of his back pressing against hers as he missed the feel of hers pressing against his. That their being roped together had been uncomfortable went without saying. Yet there’d been something...reassuring... about the contact.
“You. Just a little while ago. Telling Tom it really wasn’t necessary for him to say what he’d done to get himself thrown in the slammer. And you tried to let all three of our, ah, ‘hosts’ off the hook before that, too. Remember? You changed the subject right after Butch admitted they don’t know what this Red Treasure thing is. You didn’t want to rub their noses in how clueless they are.”
She cocked an eyebrow, a hint of pugnacity entering her expression. “And I suppose you do?”
“I think I have a little less compunction about it than you do. It didn’t bother me for a nanosecond when I tricked Dick into spilling part of the beans about this idiotic heist of theirs.”
“Maybe not. Then again, you had a perfect chance to humiliate Butch, and you let it slide.”
Chris blinked, caught off guard by this assertion. He hadn’t realized that Lucy was watching his exchange with Percival Johnson so closely. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have expected her to respond to it so...well, he was tempted to say so positively, but he didn’t want to press his luck.
“Guy-style psych-out.” He shrugged. “You’ve probably seen your brothers and cousins do it hundreds of times.”
“Your ‘guy-style’ isn’t the same as their ‘guy-style,’ Chris.”
Ten years ago, he would have assumed that the corollary to this wry statement was that his then-wife preferred her relatives’ brand of masculine behavior to his own. He wasn’t ready to assume anything now.
He sucked in a lungful of air, wrestling with some hard truths. He wanted Lucy’s approval. And her admiration. But above all, he wanted her forgiveness for what he’d done to her. To them. Because if she could find it in her generous heart to forgive, there might...just might...be a chance for them to begin again.
A slightly bizarre realization slid from the shadowy edges of his consciousness to the forefront of his brain. God Almighty, he thought. If he managed to achieve a reconciliation with his ex-wife, at least some of the credit for it would have to go to Butch and the Spivey brothers. And knowing Lucy, she’d want to find a way to repay the debt. She’d probably want to testify on their behalf when—definitely when, not if—the trio was captured and brought to trial. Heck. She’d probably lobby him to defend the idiots!
Chris felt his lips twist. What was it Dick had said? Something about regarding this situation as an opportunity?
The sound of Lucy sighing refocused his awareness.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Maybe I am a soft touch.” The concession was rueful. “They’re criminals, for heaven’s sake! Two of them have done jail time. One of them clobbered you over the head. They’ve also wrecked all the beautiful redecoration work Abby Davis did....”
“But?” he prompted, as her litany of charges trailed off into silence.
Her gaze met his. “What can I say? I feel sorry for them. I mean, they seem so...so...”
“Stupid?”
Lucy tried to look shocked. She sustained the illusion for about two and a half seconds, then broke up. “That sounds so...” She gave a gurgle of laughter. “...judgmental.”
“I was only quoting them on each other.”
“I don’t remember anyone calling Butch stupid.”
Chris feigned a frown, pretending
to think back. “You know,” he said after a few moments, “I think you’re right.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t a valid description, you understand. At least, not as far as poor Tom and Dick are concerned. Still, it’s not a very nice word.”
“Okay. How about...” He cocked his head, searching for an appropriate euphemism. “...mentally challenged?”
“Intellectually deprived,” she countered instantly, her brown eyes sparkling. The makeup she’d used to enhance them had smudged a bit, adding a sultry hint of heaviness to her lids.
“Half-armed in any war of wits?”
“Ooh... That’s really nasty.” A dimple-displaying smile. deprived the comment of any sting. Then Lucy grew reflective, worrying her lower lip with the edge of her upper front teeth. Whatever gloss or coloring she’d been wearing on her mouth had long since worn off. “I wonder if there’s some sort of course in remedial criminality they could take.”
“Forget nasty. Now you’re talking downright scary.”
“I suppose a little knowledge would be a dangerous thing in the case of the Spivey brothers....”
There was a pause. Chris adjusted his position anew. He had to be careful how he moved his head. If he tilted it back too far, something jabbed against the egg-size lump he’d received from Butch.
The lighthearted atmosphere engendered by their rapid-fire bantering about their captors leaked away. The pause consolidated into another uncomfortable silence.
Chris knew that it was his move. His...opportunity. He also understood that there were certain subjects that were taboo until Lucy chose to broach them. Chief among these was the night she’d walked into his office and found him kissing his onetime girlfriend, Irene Houghton.
Until Lucy clearly signaled that she wanted to talk about that episode...
That she was ready to talk about it...
He took a slow, steadying breath. There were other issues that were not off-limits, he told himself. Issues that it was up to him to raise and resolve.
“Lucy?”
“Mmm?”
“Was I really such a...snob...when we were together?”