Victim

by Gayle Wilson

  Today, however, she couldn't get any of what had happened the last two days out of her mind. Her fury with the cops hadn't lessened during the nearly sleepless night she'd spent after her visit to the police station.

  She kept thinking that if Tate could get her unlisted number within hours after his release, he probably wouldn't have any trouble finding out where she lived. And despite the nature of the decaying neighborhood that surrounded it, security at her building was a joke.

  Like Detective Cochran thought that message had been.

  "Your ex is out on the patio," Paul Reagan told her as she came back through the swinging door into the restaurant's kitchen. "Wants to know if you've got a minute to talk."

  All I need, Sarah thought.

  Considering what she felt if she ever allowed herself to think about Danny's last few hours of life, as she had been since she'd listened to the message on her machine, Dan was the last person she wanted to see right now.

  Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was after two. The lunch crowd had begun to thin, and most of her orders were up. Apparently Dan had figured out enough about her shift on his infrequent visits here to choose a time when it would be pretty hard to plead she was too busy to see him.

  Besides, she would have to deal with him sooner or later. Like going to talk to the cops last night, this, too, was something she should just get over and be done with.

  "Can you get 12 for me when it comes up?" she asked Paul. "I need to take care of this."

  "Got it covered." Reagan agreed. "Go on, He giving you a hard time?"

  No one at work had hassled her. They hadn't mentioned the media coverage, although the knowledge that she'd tried to kill the man who'd murdered her son had been in the eyes of some of her coworkers. They had met hers and then shifted uneasily away.

  "Probably wants to float a loan," Sarah said as she headed toward the door leading to the patio.

  Actually, that was the one thing she was sure Dan wouldn't try to do. He was making a hell of a lot more money than she was right now.

  Located on the fringes of the Garden District, the restaurant where she worked had fewer drunks and lower tips than the ones in the Quarter. That had seemed a more than reasonable trade-off when she'd taken the job.

  She hadn't even objected when she'd been assigned the day shift. She would have made more working after dark, but unlike a lot of the wait staff, she had no family to support. No one other than Toby, she amended.

  Dan's company, on the other hand, was flourishing. He'd taken over his dad's contracting business when his father died fifteen years ago.

  The company had specialized in repairs rather than home construction, and Dan had done well enough at it. After the hurricane, however, like most contractors in the region, Dan had more work than he could handle and at any price he wanted to name.

  When they'd first married, Sarah had worked right along beside him. She'd handled whatever needed to be done, from bookkeeping and fielding calls to setting up appointments and wielding a hammer or nail gun during those times when Dan couldn't get enough help to complete a project by deadline.

  As soon as Danny was old enough, he'd pitched in during the summers and when he had breaks from school. It had been, of necessity, a family business. Back when they had been a family.

  Dan's way of coping with Danny's death had been to throw himself into his work. It must have helped, she admitted, because he had gotten over it a lot better than she had. And she still resented the hell out of that.

  She fought a familiar sense of failure as she stepped through the outer door. After the interior warmth of the restaurant and the demands of the lunch hour rush, the bite of the cold air felt good.

  The patio, which was nothing more than row of small wrought-iron tables and chairs set on bricks laid in sand between the restaurant and the sidewalk, was popular in the spring and fall. The area wasn't open to customers this time of year, which was why Dan had chosen it.

  He was sitting at one of the tables, watching the traffic move up and down St. Charles. He was smoking, the cigarette held between his thumb and index finger.

  His hands were large, perpetually callused, and deeply tanned from the hours he worked outdoors. To her, they had always been one of his most attractive features. Even now, despite everything that lay between them, the accusations and the bitter arguments, at the sight of them there was a brush of desire, hot and aching, in the bottom of her stomach.

  Need, she amended. Not desire. Pure, unadulterated physical need. And considering how long it had been since those needs had been satisfied, this was nothing she wouldn't have felt for any attractive man. Especially one with whom she had a long and satisfying sexual history. Out of all the things that had gone wrong in their marriage—and at the last almost everything had—sex hadn't been one of them.

  As he stubbed out the cigarette with a characteristic impatience. Dan turned his head and caught her watching him. She moved forward, pulling out the chair across the table.

  Before she completed the motion of sitting clown in it, he asked, "What the hell did you think you were doing?"

  I did what you should have done.

  Exactly the kind of thinking that had led to their divorce. The kind the counselor had repeatedly warned her against. She had finally succeeded in preventing herself from voicing those thoughts, but she had never been able to deny them a place in her consciousness.

  "I would think that would be obvious. Dan. Even to you."

  "If you'd killed him, they'd have fried you."

  He must have gotten that from the news. Dan wasn't exactly into cause and effect.

  "They can't manage to fry him. At the time, however, I wasn't real worried about what the cops were going to do to me."

  "If you're going to try something like that, you don't do it in public. On the steps of the fucking courthouse, for God's sake."

  "Is that what you came here for? To tell me what I did wrong?"

  Shoot, bitch. And don't talk.

  "Ma's worried about you. I came because she asked me to."

  That was probably the truth, Sarah decided. After all her years of experience, Dan's motives were pretty much an open book.

  "Tell her I'm fine. Tell her..." She couldn't think of a single comforting thing to tell Dan's mother.

  Danny's death had devastated her mother-in-law almost as much as it had the two of them. Of course, Louise had looked after Danny a lot when he was little and they'd been trying to get the business back on its feet after her father-in-law's long illness.

  Their divorce had been another blow, especially since Dan's mother had understood the reasons for it. She had known Sarah blamed Dan for Danny's death and that she couldn't find it in her heart to forgive him.

  As a result, her mother-in-law seemed to have aged ten years during the last three. Maybe they all had, but it showed more on Louise. For the first time since Sarah had known her, she seemed old.

  "Tell her I'm okay," she said finally. "And that I said not to worry."

  "She sees you all over the TV, with them saying you're trying to shoot somebody, dredging up the dirty details of our divorce, she's going to worry. You know that, Sarah. I don't know what the hell you were trying to prove."

  "I wasn't trying to prove anything. I heard they were going to let him go. I didn't think that was right."

  "You can't take the law into your own hands. That's why they got courts. You've got to let them handle it."

  That was the same thing the cops had said. It made even less sense to her coming from her ex-husband.

  "He called me last night." She hadn't intended to tell Dan about the message, but somehow the words were in her brain and then out of her mouth.

  Dan's forehead furrowed, his brows coming together over the bridge of his nose. "Who?"

  "Tate. The cops said it was somebody playing a joke, but it wasn't. It was him. I know it was him."

  "You talked to him?"

  She shook her head, wonde
ring for the first time if he would have talked to her if she'd been at home. And then wondering if he had somehow known she wasn't.

  "He left a message on my answering machine."

  There was a small silence, but Dan had to ask the inevitable question. "What kind of message?"

  She hadn't had any trouble saying the words to the detective she'd talked to last night. She had repeated them with the same sense of disassociation she'd straggled to maintain when she read through the speculation about Tate's background and his personality after his arrest.

  They were just words, she'd told herself. With only the power she gave them. But for some reason, she couldn't say them now.

  It was harder for men to protect themselves against the impact of something like that message. They weren't allowed to cry. Instead, they put guns in their mouths or they drank too much and drove head-on into a bridge abutment.

  "Just taunting me," she lied, protecting Dan out of habit and instinct.

  "Because of what you tried to do?"

  She nodded.

  "He threaten you?"

  "It wasn't like that. It was...gloating."

  He didn't ask again what Tate had said. She could tell from his eyes he didn't want to know. And because she had once loved him, a long time ago, she didn't repeat those terrible words to him.

  "He scare you?"

  She shrugged. Then, just as she had while she'd waited outside on the courthouse steps that morning, she crossed her arms over her chest, running her hands up and down them. She was beginning to feel the damp cold through the thin white cotton dress shirt that, with a black vest and red bow tie, comprised her work uniform.

  "It was... I don't know. Hearing his voice, it was like he'd been there. Inside my apartment. You know?"

  He nodded, his eyes concerned. "You want to come stay with me and Ma for a few days?"

  She shook her head. "You know I can't do that. It isn't good for any of us. but...especially not good for her."

  "What are the cops going to do about it?"

  "I told you. They said it wasn't him. I went ahead and filed a complaint. That way. if they catch him killing somebody else, they'll let me press charges for harassment."

  "They can't pick him up for leaving the message?"

  "Maybe. If they knew where the hell he is."

  "They didn't follow him when he was released? Stake out his house or something? Shit, what were they thinking?"

  "The impression I got is that they don't have a clue where he is. Comforting, isn't it?"

  "Assholes. This has been nothing but a fuck-up from the start. They don't even know what he's doing until the bodies start piling up. They mess up the arrest and have to release him. Then they can't even keep up with the guy."

  As much as she agreed with Dan's assessment of the police work, she couldn't afford to get into assigning blame for Tate's success. That kind of thinking triggered the endless round of anger and bitterness she needed to avoid in order to stay sane.

  Besides, the two of them had said these same words, or ones like them, a thousand times in the first year after their son's murder. Nothing had ever changed. When she woke up in the morning, Danny was still dead.

  "I've got to go," Sarah said, interrupting the pattern they'd fallen into in the only way she'd ever figured out to interrupt it. By running away. "Tell Louise I really am okay. And that what she saw on TV... Tell her... Tell her I won't do that again."

  She wasn't sure that was the truth, but she thought her mother-in-law would like to hear it. Maybe Dan would, too. Maybe it would reassure him.

  She was sorry now she'd told him about Tate's call, but she had needed to tell someone. Someone who would be as outraged as she was. Someone who would buy into her conviction that it had been Tate.

  "I could put you in a security system."

  She had already risen and started toward the door that led inside when Dan's offer registered in her tired brain. She turned back, her expression questioning.

  "Motion sensors. An alarm," he added.

  "You know how to do that?"

  "I can figure it out. Get the stuff at cost with my license. You'd have to pay if you want monitoring, but I could rig it to where the alarm goes off if somebody tries to come into the apartment. They wouldn't know if it was connected to a protection service or directly to the cops."

  "I don't think that's necessary," she said, but the more she thought about it, the more tempting it was.

  "I can do it for almost nothing. It'll make me feel better about you being there by yourself. It'd make Ma feel better, too."

  "The cops said Tate wouldn't do something like that. Call me, I mean." After his generosity, she felt she should be honest with Dan about what she'd been told. "They said it didn't fit his pattern. But...I don't like the idea of somebody having my phone number."

  "Let me come over and take a look. See what I can rig up. You got nothing to lose."

  The phrase she'd avoided yesterday. Nothing to lose.

  So many mornings since Danny had been killed, she'd opened her eyes and wished she was dead. Then last night, because of the message on her machine, she had taken Dan's gun out of the drawer and put it on top of her bedside table. And that hadn't been so she could use it on herself.

  "You sure?" She was a little surprised by her willingness to think about what Dan was proposing, considering the possible emotional pitfalls involved.

  "You got a spare key, I'll go by there now. We're pretty much caught up."

  "I don't have it with me," she said.

  "What time you get off?"

  "Four-thirty."'

  "I could meet you. Take a look at your place. See what I need to pick up. You give me the key then, and

  I can probably get something rigged up tomorrow. I'm not talking anything fancy. Just something so that if somebody opens a door or a window and doesn't punch in the code, you got plenty of noise"

  She couldn't see how that wouldn't be a good thing. Other than the fact that it would put Dan in her apartment. That had been the whole purpose in moving someplace new. To leave the ghosts behind.

  "Okay," she said.

  "So... five?"

  "I'll have to walk Toby. He needs to go out after being shut up all day. If you're not there when I get home, I'll leave the spare key on top of the door."

  They had always kept an extra on top of the molding over the back door, in case either of them got locked out. Or in case they needed one of the neighbors or Louise to go into the house for some reason.

  "I'll be there," he promised. "It'll make Ma feel better. I'll get points," he said, smiling at her as if they were coconspirators.

  Seeing that familiar tilt of his lips, the unwanted flutter of sexual awareness moved through her lower body again. This was not a good idea. Surely Dan wasn't thinking—

  "Five," he said.

  Despite her misgivings about having him in the apartment, she nodded. Cochran might be convinced that wasn't Tate on her machine, but she wasn't.

  After all, she was the one who had been trying to put a bullet between his eyes that morning. Maybe he was the kind who carried grudges.

  Six

  Dwight Ingersoll was sitting cross-legged beside the door to her apartment when Sarah topped the stairs. As soon as he saw her, he scrambled to his feet, holding out a ball, the eagerness on his face painfully blatant.

  "I got Toby a ball."

  It was pink, somewhere between a tennis ball and a soccer ball in size. There was a picture of something that might possibly be a kitten on the side facing her. Because most of the paint had worn away, the animal was difficult to identify.

  Like everything else about this child, there was something off-kilter about the toy. Judging by its size and what she could see of the artwork, the ball had originally been designed as a plaything for a baby or a toddler—probably a feminine one. It was certainly not the normal property of a nine-year-old boy. Not even this one.

  And he was wearing that same too-
small jacket he'd had on last night. Despite the heat, which had risen throughout the day to gather thickly along the third-floor hallway, the coat was zipped all the way to the collar, making it obvious the boy was planning to accompany her and Toby to the park.

  The same feeling of dread washed over her as when she'd been told Dan was waiting on the patio. She didn't want to come home to find Dwight Ingersoll on her doorstep every afternoon. She especially hadn't wanted to find him here today.

  "My mama said I could go all the way to the park as long as I was with you."

  Sarah wondered if she could fob him off by telling him she wasn't going to take the dog for a walk today. Of course, as soon as she opened the door, Toby would plow through it, proving her a liar.

  If she didn't put a stop to this right now, the child would be here every day, ready to play ball with her dog. All she wanted to do in the afternoon was give poor Toby some relief and then get back inside as quickly as she could. She didn't want to be recreational director for the neighborhood misfit.

  Although the term was cruelly accurate, she felt terrible for thinking it. Terrible for feeling that way about this poor, neglected, and obviously lonely boy.

  "Could I hold his leash on the way?" Eyes shining, Dwight was looking up at her as if she and Toby represented everything he'd ever hoped for in this life.

  "Actually, today might not be the best day..." Sarah began and watched the anticipation literally evaporate from his features.

  Killjoy. No one used the word anymore, but that's what she had done. She had killed his delight in yesterday's unspoken promise.

  She should have told him last night that they weren't going to play ball in the park. She should have put a stop to this before it got started. She had known that would be the smart thing to do, and instead of doing it—

  She eased a breath, calming her building anxiety. She could handle this. It wasn't like she was making a lifelong commitment. One afternoon.

  She even had a legitimate reason to cut it short. He could throw the ball for Toby a couple of times, and then she'd figure out some way to tell him this wasn't going to become a habit.