Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  He stood and glared down at Garrett.

  "For the record, there's something else you should know." He shut his mouth and jammed his fingers into the front pockets of his jeans and it took him another several seconds to get to the place where he could say what he had to say.

  "I would rather rip out my heart with my bare hands than walk out on you."

  when she woke, Kirsten showered briefly, dressed in jeans and the simple but extravagantly expensive barely pink mohair sweater she considered comfort clothing and went down to the kitchen, heading for a cup of freshly brewed coffee. From the bottom of the stairs she could see Garrett and Matt through the screen door, sitting together, their dark heads close, deep in conversation.

  She had no idea whether Garrett would tell Matt why she had the photo in the first place. He must. Matt had to have been the one who'd found Garrett's photo print in her study.

  J. D. was sitting at the dining-room table reading the newspaper, looking surprisingly fresh for a night spent without sleep. He looked up as she paused by the foot of the stairs.

  She angled her head toward the porch.

  "What's going on?"

  He pointed to his ear and across the street to remind her to watch what she said. He shook his head, indicating that he didn't know what was happening with Garrett and Matt, then struck a nasty tone for the benefit of the boys in the band.

  "Doesn't concern you."

  "Everything concerns me," she returned.

  "Isn't that the point?"

  "No. What concerns you is keeping your trap shut till you have something useful to say." He made a face at her.

  "Think you can remember that?"

  Her eyes wouldn't stop flitting back to the backs of the men on the porch.

  "I'll keep it in mind."

  "There's a good idea."

  Passing the table, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. Through the side window, she saw Guiliani get up, stand over Garrett for a couple of seconds, then turn and bang through the screen door. He headed straight for the kitchen, nearly colliding with her, taken aback to find her standing there.

  Shorter than Garrett by a couple of inches, Matt still loomed over her.

  "You want to get out of the way, or hand me a mug."

  She turned on her heel, put her own coffee down, then brought out two mugs from the cabinet. He took one from her and poured his own coffee, set down the pot as Garrett walked in behind him. He looked straight at her as she handed the remaining mug to Garrett.

  He poured coffee as well, then turned around in the unnaturally silent kitchen and leaned against the counter, sucking down the coffee. Matt turned and walked out, leaving her alone with Garrett.

  She didn't know what to say or how to escape or whether she should, not only because of the bugs. Garrett wouldn't look at her, only stood staring at the floor. She knew he must have told Guiliani about the Mercury.

  Her heart pounded. Despite the years that had elapsed and all her fears, all her doubts, she knew her attraction to Garrett Weisz that night in the Mercury had been not only a physical one that remained even now, even in this moment, but one that drew her for the right reasons as well.

  Garrett Weisz was a man bound by a certain honor, a man who had stepped in with no thought of some sordid sexual payoff, but of protecting her from the drunken lout in the Mercury.

  He'd loved his wife.

  He'd worked all these years toward extinguishing the power of men like Chet Loehman.

  And he'd warned her in the park against mistaking him for a soft touch. He wasn't soft. He couldn't afford to be soft, not when it came to doing what had to be done, but he was easy. He was a man who would do the honorable thing every time--and that was what she thought she saw coming.

  And the last thing she wanted.

  Her throat tightened. Tears wavered in her eyes. Not unaware of her distress, he reached back to put down his coffee mug. His hand, surely unwitting, went to his chest, over his heart, and he looked at her with a kindness that should have eased her distress, but magnified it instead.

  "I want you to go upstairs and write down the name of every person you know who ever associated with Burton Raw- lings."

  "All right." She moved to refill her mug. He moved to accommodate her.

  She took the mug and fled up the stairs to her study.

  He followed her out of the kitchen, but no farther, letting her go because Matt was sitting on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table, his arms crossed over his chest, waiting. Watching.

  He leaned against the door frame. He didn't know what to do. He knew that with the wrong move in this moment. Matt would walk out the door in the next.

  The prospect shook him to his core.

  He needed to talk to Kirsten, needed somehow to put to rights a situation that had been turned on its head from the start, and somehow, that superseded even making peace with Matt. But then he realized that's why Matt was still sitting there anyway. His friend would cut him that hour of slack, before he delivered on his promise to quit.

  J. D. fell back in his chair and pulled the earphones off his head, tossing them onto Kirsten's scarred dining-room table.

  "Mind letting me in on what's going down here?" he asked, unconcerned that the question would raise any suspicion across the street, visibly suspicious of the evidence he saw of an impending break in their ranks.

  "Strategy," Garrett barked.

  "You thinking of pulling outta here?"

  "No."

  J. D. exhaled sharply, although knowing no more than he knew before, looking somewhat reassured.

  "Let me guess. You'll let me know if anything changes."

  Nodding, Garrett pulled off his sweatshirt and tossed it over the back of the chair opposite J. D. where his parka already lay.

  "You'll be the first."

  He grabbed fresh clothes and his straight-edge razor from his duffel bag and went upstairs to shower. At some deeply personal level, he felt he could not go to Kirsten unclean in any sense.

  He closed himself off in the bathroom they all used, where Christo's bath toys lined the tub, only to realize there was no shower. He felt foiled, deeply thwarted in his desire to come clean, to be clean with Kirsten. She deserved that much from him. What he felt for her-- whether reverberations of a night he only vaguely recalled or of the night before, or even of the moment he stood watching Christo peacefully sucking his thumb in his sleep--demanded that much.

  But all he could do was strip his T-shirt off over his head, run the hot tap and duck his head under the water. He soaped himself, his face and chest and armpits, scraped the razor over his beard, wiped his torso dry and donned the clean shirt, then combed his hair. But looking himself in the eye in a shabby little mirror made charming by a painted-on frame and the words I am a star, he knew the stain on his honor remained.

  Kirsten sat in the chair at her computer, bent over the list of names she'd obviously begun to write out by hand, with pen and paper. He moved into the study and picked up the ladder-back chair from the corner in one hand. Setting it down beside her, a few feet away, he sat with her, face-to-face, much as he had in Vorees's interrogation room less than twenty-four hours before.

  "Kirsten." She set aside the pen and paper. Her usual grace of movement seemed to have vanished. She looked at him with such foreboding, such brittle grit that he lost whatever it was he had been about to say.

  She fed him the line and then forbade him to use it.

  "If you say you're sorry for what happened between us that night, I won't ever forgive you." She left him staring, uncomprehending. "And if you say to me that you want to do the honorable thing" -- "Kirsten, cut it out." He shoved a hand through his still-damp hair.

  Nothing could have prepared him for her forbidding the slightest apology.

  "What am I supposed to do? Tell you I'm not sorry that I didn't remember you? You think I shouldn't be sorry that I didn't even know your name? Am I supposed to believe you fee
l nothing at all about that?"

  Her head shook slowly back and forth in denial, then dipped low so he couldn't see her eyes anymore.

  "I would never say what happened between us that night meant nothing to me."

  "Then what" -- "It meant everything."

  Chapter Eight

  "Everything." His breath locked in his chest. The fleeting thought rose in him that she intended not only that the knife be plunged into his heart, but buried as well, twisted without mercy. His jaw clenched.

  "So the night meant nothing to me, everything to you."

  She shrugged artlessly.

  "Everything I wanted. I never" -- "What did you want?"

  Her chin went up.

  "I wanted what Margo had."

  "My wife?" A chill arose in him he couldn't begin to halt, for if she thought she had gotten from him anything Margo had ever known, she was dead wrong.

  "Your wife. Yes. I wanted what your wife had. I wanted to be her. I wanted to know what it was like to make love with a man who was desperately in love with me. I thought I would never find it for myself, and I... I haven't."

  "Kirsten, come on" -- "No--let me finish. That night at the Mercury, I chose to let myself believe that if I could be her for you, for one last night together, then I could have what I wanted with all my heart as well.

  "I swear to you, I never, ever expected to see you again, or dreamed that if I did, you would remember me. If anyone should apologize, it should be me. But I'm not going to say I'm sorry, because if it had never happened, I wouldn't have" -- A rough knock sounded on the open door. Garrett snapped, "Beat it," without even looking in that direction, but outside the white-noise barrier his warning went unheard and unheeded.

  Matt stepped inside the study.

  "You're wanted downtown."

  "Wanted where?"

  "Grenallo just called. He wants to be brought up to speed. Now."

  Unused to being dragged off--even by a U. S. attorney--to explain himself in the midst of any operation ever, Garrett got up.

  "How in the Sam Hill does he know there is anything to be brought up to speed about?"

  Matt blinked.

  "One of two possibilities. Rawlings gave up all other avenues and went straight to the top, or else the pilot you conscripted might have mentioned an overnight trip to Wyoming."

  Hands on his hips, Garrett jerked his head, signaling an exit to Matt.

  "Get out, would you please?"

  His friend left.

  Garrett turned away from Kirsten as well, and went to the window.

  Holding himself stiff-armed out from the window frame, watching for a seaplane he could hear in the distance, he fought to understand what fatally flawed perception he had of the night, and that Kirsten had harbored all these years about Margo.

  He had to go. He dropped his arm and turned back to her. He didn't have time to explain much of anything, even if he could, even if he understood it himself, but he had one thing he had to say now.

  "It's true I loved my wife. It's true I don't remember your face, but it's not true that I don't remember you. And if you thought, Kirsten, that I was making love to Margo that night, you were wrong."

  one of them was always with her, sometimes two, while the others came and went. If three of them were gone, one had taken her car, and the other two took off in vehicles they'd supposedly driven to Seattle from the Tri-Cities. All of their efforts concentrated on finding Burton Rawlings, a man who should not have been possessed of any special skills in pulling off a disappearing act.

  She didn't see Garrett again for the next two days, and when the morning of the third day came, Matt told her Garrett wouldn't be back until early evening.

  He'd rigged another white-noise barrier to the bugs that while still transmitting the kitchen background noise, the clatter of dishes and silver, the rush of running water, filtered out the range of voices.

  But as she stood at the griddle turning out piles of pancakes, Matt hovering nearby, the silence between them lengthened.

  "You feeding an army?"

  "It gives me something to do." She missed Christo every minute of the day. She hadn't been able to get through on the cell phone to Ginny and Sam to talk to her son since the first morning. And Lord knew, anything that took her mind for a few moments from ruminating over Garrett's last words to her was a blessing.

  Leaning against the refrigerator. Matt shifted, crossing one boot over the other.

  "Why didn't you tell him about Christo?"

  Preparing a couple of plates, doling out crisp bacon and pancakes, her hands went unnaturally still. Her throat made that clicking sound again. She forced herself to resume, to pour warmed syrup into a pitcher, but no clever answer offered itself up. She put down the Depression-glass pitcher before it slipped from her hands. Still turned away, she braced herself with both hands against the counter.

  "I don't know. I will. I" -He made some nearly sympathetic sound.

  "Save it, Kirsten. Till this is over. He doesn't need the distraction now."

  He took the plates she'd prepared and left the kitchen.

  She stayed, stricken by the deep irony that his best friend had gleaned what Garrett had not. She'd thought he was coming back to her to do the honorable thing, to marry his son's mother because it was the right thing to do. But it wasn't until hours after he'd departed to deal with John Grenallo that she realized he was only making the case that what had happened between them meant more to him than a one-night stand. She'd nearly gotten so far as to overcome the disappointment clogging her throat, to do the honorable thing herself and tell him.

  Now another forty-eight hours had passed since she'd seen him. Now she had it in her head that Garrett had not been oblivious to her in that hotel room. Now some gentle breeze of thought wended its way through her mind and body, stirring hope and other dangerous feelings.

  The hours dragged by between her calls to Christo, who was as close to seventh heaven as he could be while she wasn't around. He was enthralled with the snow, the tractor to move the snow out of the driveway. Wag the dog's constant antics, his Aunt Ginny's to spoil.

  She'd fashioned a "manly" unbreakable satin cord and colored it bronze and Christo was wearing his daddy's medallion now.

  Garrett kept Grenallo informed, not only supplying him with the cell- phone numbers they were each using, but play-by-play as well.

  Grenallo wanted results this time, because if he didn't get them, he was going to have to shut down the pursuit of Chet Loehman altogether.

  She listened in on J. D. "s earphones a while, enough to learn that the boys in the band were spread too thin to follow three different vehicles, which angered them no end.

  They figured they'd been trumped or even dealt out of a game they could not stop hanging around to watch. The ante was very high, and at the last, they figured to ambush the winner and be off with the goods--whatever they were, however they could be leveraged in the battle for control of the Truth Sayers organization.

  But Rawlings hadn't attempted to contact her again, just as she'd warned them. She spent the first few hours after Garrett left to go talk to John Grenallo with Matt working up Identicomp photos of the three men Matt had seen in the stakeout house. Ross Vorees dropped in, using the back door, to take away a diskette containing the photo files.

  He'd planned to try importing the photos into the city, state and national databases, searching for names, matches to rap sheets, connections to Lochman that could also be exploited. But he took one look at the photo prints themselves, handed them back to her and sat on Christo's step stool.

  "I know these guys. Two of them anyway."

  J. D. " this time, was in the study with Kirsten and Vorees.

  "Who are they?"

  "Cops. Tacoma cops."

  J. D. shook his head.

  "Why doesn't that surprise me?"

  Feeling slightly ill, Kirsten frowned.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Simple," Vorees
answered.

  "To be honest, it's really not all that cut-and-dried, Kirsten, but we're beginning to see cops over represented in vigilante organizations. When you have to watch your righteous collars put back on the streets day in and day out, the years of it begin to tell.

  "You harden up," he went on, "till you find you're Andy Sipowicz, only this is real life. You know if the perps go up for something they didn't do, nine times out of ten they should've been in the slammer before the crime they didn't commit. To be honest, it's just a matter of time before doling out your own justice begins to look like the only solution."