Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  "The one with the waggly tail." That one? We'll sing it again later, okay? "

  '"Kay." He gave her a wink.

  She fled upstairs to his room. Taking out a duffel bag from his closet, she put in a stack of underpants and another of undershirts.

  Jeans, socks, shirts, sweatshirts. Mittens. His brand-new winter parka.

  Her head ached with unspent tears. She dragged a knuckle hard over her forehead, willing the headache away, and took the duffel bag to her own closet where Christo wouldn't see it.

  She went downstairs to mix up a thick warm dough so that when the shows he was allowed to watch were over she could coax him into the kitchen with her. Getting flour over everything, a good dusting on his tiny freckled nose and his hair, too, he stood over the counter on a kitchen chair, mashing the cookie cutter into the dough, cutting dumplings.

  She'd microwaved a quart of frozen chicken stock, and had the pot boiling and ready by the time it grew dark outside. She let Christo spoon all the dumplings into the pot--a big concession that earned her a kiss on the cheek.

  "How come you're being' so nice. Mom?"

  A shiver went through her like wind cutting through the channels.

  "What? The dumplings? Making you do all the work?" she scoffed.

  "In your dreams."

  "No, in yours!" he chortled.

  "Can we make pudding, too?"

  "We don't have any chocolate kind."

  "Wullll, butterscotch is okay."

  "You'll have to stir," she warned.

  "No quitting halfway through."

  "But you'll take a turn, won't you, Mom?" He rolled his eyes.

  "Just if my arm gets tired anyway."

  His voice was so indelibly expressive. So up and down, all around.

  "That's it for treats, then."

  Time flew by her so quickly that before she knew it, the chicken and dumplings were all gone, there was a serious dent in the pudding into which she'd put the dose of baby Benadryl, and Christo was volunteering for bed.

  She knew what was coming. He wanted the medallion back into his medicine bag, and there was no question that she'd let him have it, but she teased, "How come you're being so nice, Christo-man?"

  He gave her the flirty, sidelong look she loved most of all. Grabbing up his medicine bag, he darted ahead of her to her room, yanked open the drawer and only then waited for her to open her box to get his lucky charm. He'd painted that simple balsa- wood box at preschool, decorating it for her with a rainbow made of starfish, so it needed something very special to go inside it. Which was how she'd come to show him the antique charm in the first place.

  She thought for an instant of the vagaries in life, the off chances, the small, seemingly inconsequential acts that became life-changing events. If she'd gone to her room instead of the Mercury that night, or if Garrett Weisz had not been there, if he'd gone drinking with buddies from naval intelligence or family, or if she'd simply refused when he'd asked if she minded if he sat with her awhile. She wouldn't have this precious, challenging, maddening, incredibly active little boy. A boy who tried so hard to be satisfied with a relic that once belonged to a real daddy.

  An edgy voice issued warnings that if Garrett somehow happened to see that medallion, he would know. If despite the Benadryl, Christo woke up and went for the medallion, or if it somehow spilled out,

  or if Garrett indulged idle interest in what a small boy put in a medicine bag. then the problem of telling him would be solved, wouldn't it?

  She didn't believe it would happen, and Christo would need the scrap of security the medallion represented.

  He gave her an extra-long hug, and let her hold him for quite a while, sitting there on her bed. Her heart thumped painfully.

  Another hour. Sixty more minutes before she handed Christo over to his father.

  Tears congealed inside her.

  She wouldn't cry, wouldn't give in to emotions over a changing reality she had no power to control. Just one more hour. She thought she would never be able to do this, then made herself buck up and follow Christo back into his room.

  She dropped down beside him.

  "Brrr, it's going to be cold in your teepee tonight. What do you ssayum," God, she couldn't stand this, couldn't do it.

  "Say we break out your sleeping bag?"

  Clutching his medicine bag in one hand, he touched her cheek with the other. His chin began to tremble and his big dark, beautiful brown eyes grew teary.

  "Mommy, what's wrong?"

  She shook her head, too fast.

  "Not a thing. I was just... I just got tears thinking how much I love you to bits and pieces."

  "I love you, Mommy."

  "I cannot believe you are sending my dog to Wyoming. " "I can't believe you're still whining about it."

  Ganett polished off his fourth cheeseburger and a soda. He reached over to turn down the blast of the heater in Matt's car.

  Parked in the same overgrown driveway Matt had found a block and a half from Kirsten McCourt's house, they'd been listening in on the boys in the band for hours. Their bickering and ruminating made it clear they were nervous about Kirsten's foray into the downtown police station, but they were allowing themselves to get puffed up, flushed with the first signs of success.

  Things were heating up. The spooks believed their surveillance was finally beginning to pay off. That any minute, Rawlings and their target, the- Court, were going to make the crucial error. Sitting so long there in Guiliani's car, Garrett had willed them to make the call to Loehman himself, but so far, nothing.

  Matt was drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel.

  "Something wrong, Guili?"

  "The prospect of drugging my dog, for one thing."

  "If you don't, Wag'll wake up the kid before we get out of the driveway." Garrett yawned.

  "It's just a sleeping pill. Besides, if you hadn't suggested I take Wag along to the park, Christo wouldn't even know he existed."

  "Yeah, well, I'm a sucker for a kid without a dad. What can I say?"

  "Not a lot," Garrett wisecracked, because there was a lot of history, a lot of poignant crap bound up in Matt's being a sucker for a kid without a dad.

  All of it old news. Just stuff you learned when you spent your life undercover and spent precious few hours connected to your own life.

  Times like those, you desperately needed something real to cling to, even if it was painful, even if it was history, especially if it wasn't your own familiar screwed-up terrain.

  Everybody had one of those, an inner landscape that, no matter how beautiful, became littered over a lifetime with disappointments, losses, land mines. It was appalling how easy it came to be shared, harder to recall how you came to be the one spilling your guts.

  He wadded up the cheeseburger wrap and shoved it into the paper bag.

  His own past was on the rampage, nagging.

  He couldn't remember ever before encountering Kirsten McCourt, but every instinct inside him lobbied against his faulty recall. When he boiled it down, all his impressions, his questions, her answers, his actions, her reactions, and not least, his attraction to her, he realized that everything about the woman clashed with his expectations and his experience, and he didn't like the disparity at all.

  She looked fragile but he knew better. Vulnerable, yes, because of Christo. But fragile?

  No.

  No shrinking violet could have done the things she'd had to do to make the case against Chet Loch- man come together five years ago. She had an iron will when push came to shove, yet she'd done a one hundred-and-eighty-degree turn on the position she'd staked in room five this afternoon.

  She was smart. She knew how these things happened. She could have gotten herself and her son into protective custody and been long gone by now. She'd have had to live with the possibility that Loehman would never stop coming after her, but if all this came to a dead end despite its promise, there was a better than even chance that threat would never materialize.
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  Which meant either that Kirsten McCourt believed they would only half succeed with her there to bait Rawlings, and she'd pay with her life. or that without her they could not succeed at all.

  Either way, he admitted to Guiliani, sucking down the last of the melted ice in his cup, she paid.

  Wag began to whine and scratch at the back door window to be let out.

  Glaring at Garrett, because after this pit stop Wag was going to dreamland. Matt switched off the overhead-light toggle and reached behind his seat to open the door and let Wag scramble out unattended.

  "So what's your problem?"

  "She's hiding something."

  Matt moved the toothpick in his mouth to one side with his tongue. He didn't answer, which blackened Garrett's mood even more. Guiliani's IQ was in the stratosphere. He thought at about the speed of light, and one-on-one like this, his voluble mouth was never far behind.

  "Gee. What do you think it is?" Garrett supplied in a cranky voice, then went silent.

  "See," Matt said softly, "if I thought you could answer the question, I'd have asked."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  "It's no vote at all, just the truth." Wag wormed his way back in and Guiliani reached behind to close the door. He took a sleeping pill out of his shirt pocket, broke open the capsule and began mashing the granules into a couple of French fries.

  "But since you mention it, maybe we need to look at the possibility that she's afraid of you. Maybe she has something to hide."

  "Like what?"

  Matt tossed Wag the fries, which the poor unsuspecting mutt gobbled without tasting.

  "Maybe Loehman got to her already. Maybe he's getting tired of us dogging his case, harassing his people. Suppose his real agenda is to sucker us into some trap where we can be... dealt with" -- "Killed off?"

  "--in one fell swoop. Yeah." Matt paused to guzzle down high-caffeine- content soda, then went on.

  "Maybe Burton Rawlings isn't quite the disaffected victim he portrays himself as being. Don't forget, Kirsten McCourt was married to Lane Montgomery, who was already in Loehman's pocket. Maybe Rawlings was, too."

  Garrett thought Matt was spinning one doozy of a conspiracy theory.

  "So then, according to your theory, out of fear for her kid's life, Kirsten is cooperating with Loehman for the purpose of sucking us into some kind of ambush."

  "It'd work, Garrett. They set up a phony stakeout across the street designed to make us lick our chops at the potential for striking at the heart of Loehman's operations. We get sucked into their sting operation instead of them getting sucked into ours."

  Garrett sent him a look.

  "You have gone right over the edge, do you know that?"

  "One of us has."

  "So you're shining me on, here, is that it? Because I think she's hiding something?"

  "Not for a minute." Matt clapped his trap shut and stared a few moments out at the surrounding darkness.

  "I agree. She is afraid of you."

  "But you're not seriously saying you believe all that. Not that Loehman wouldn't thrill to the possibility, but this is pretty far out."

  "I don't know what to believe, Garrett. Something's not right."

  Garrett expelled a frustrated breath.

  "What's on your mind, pais an

  He expelled one long frustrated breath and reached beneath the seat of his car. He handed Garrett an eight-by-eleven-and-a-half-inch sheet of paper. Garrett angled the sheet toward the street lamps shedding some decent light and saw his own image in near-perfect detail.

  "Where did this come from?"

  "I found it this afternoon on Kirsten's computer printer, Garrett.

  It's time-stamped about twelve hours before she took her act to Ann Calder. "

  Chapter Six

  Suddenly, Mart's conspiracy theory took on some credence for Garrett, but his mind was busy spinning excuses for Kirsten McCourt.

  Maybe she'd assisted in the destruction of her own evidence years ago.

  She must have been pregnant with Christo then, vulnerable to Loehman's threats and her own husband's treachery. If she had bowed to the pressure in fear of her own life, if she'd had any part in destroying the evidence, her greatest fear now would be of Garrett's team finally bringing Loehman down. If that happened, all hell would break loose.

  Loehman would finger her, giving up her complicity in destroying the evidence in a heartbeat. She'd go to prison and lose her son.

  Garrett didn't believe it, but he couldn't afford the luxury of dismissing the print of his own image in her possession, or Kirsten's fear of him. He could think of no other reason for it.

  He left Matt sitting in his car, hurdled the chain link fence and let himself into her back door with Matt's key. He spotted a duffel bag waiting on the landing, filled with what he assumed she'd packed for her son's sojourn. He thought he must know what this was like for her, then admitted to himself he didn't have the foggiest idea. If he had a clue, where would it have come from?

  He'd never even heard of a baby monitor.

  Once upon a time, he had figured he'd have a couple of babies by now, but then, he'd figured a lot of things that might have been but were never going to be now.

  Margo had been his ticket to that life. It alarmed him, that he couldn't even remember what Margo looked like.

  Blond, blue-eyed. That much.

  He couldn't remember any more, not the shape of her face or the curve of her smile or how he once thought she fit standing next to him. Or even how he'd believed he wouldn't be able to go on living. Not really.

  All he could think now as he came upon Kirsten in the study was how he had to stuff his hands into his pockets so he wouldn't give in to the insane urge to cross the room and take Christo's mother into his arms instead of confronting her with the picture of him off her printer.

  "Is this," he asked softly, flipping the switch that controlled the small library lamp beside her, "what you're looking for?"

  even in the inadequate light of the lamp, she could see that Garrett was holding the print of his own reconstructed Identicomp image.

  She'd only just remembered it herself, had only come looking for it a few moments ago.

  Dread congealed from an amorphous cloud to a solid block of fear in her chest. What was there to say? She'd printed out the image of a man whose name she hadn't even known twenty-four hours ago, but whose name she knew now.

  Her heart thudded painfully.

  He must know now that Christo was his son.

  Wouldn't he know?

  Maybe she'd meant to leave it there on her printer, subconsciously arranged it like that, to let the image speak for itself and for her.

  Maybe she'd wanted him to come upon his own likeness.

  She sank into her chair and looked back at his tightened, hardened profile, unable to believe she had come to this. Scared so bad that she would blame Garrett Weisz for her lies of omission and wish on him a discovery as heartless as that.

  She answered his question.

  "Yes."

  "Tell me a story, Kirsten. I'll try real hard to believe."

  Her chin went up. All she could think was how terribly handsome he was, how male, how compelling his nose was, how she had chosen to do what she had done.

  "There is no story."

  His head hung for a couple of seconds as if he had to keep a tight rein or shake the truth from her.

  "An explanation, then. Did Loehman get to you first?"

  Loehman?

  "I don't know what you mean."

  His voice low, deliberate, scarcely camouflaging a deep, if unwilling, distrust, he stared at her.

  "It means I want to know where you got this photo, Kirsten. I need to know where you got it, and when, and I need to know now. Who gave you this picture?"

  "No one gave it to me." What could he be thinking? She knew suddenly that this was not about Christo, not about the night they had met and made love and conceived together a beau
tiful little boy.

  "No one gave it to you."

  Disappointment spread like a stain seeping through her body.

  "That's right. No one gave it to me. Garrett" -- "Not Rawlings, not Loehman, not the spooks across the street?"

  "Garrett, I don't have any idea what you're saying! Do you think I'm somehow in league with them? Why? What" -- "Kirsten." He interrupted her, then for a moment, shut his mouth, seeming to consider very carefully what he said to her.