by Nevada Barr
“Where?” Tiny demanded.
The Mustang was less than ten feet away, the apron probably still behind the front seat where she’d tossed it nearly a week before. Nothing in that ten feet would save her, would even change the world enough so she could save herself. Once they had the apron they would kill her. If Scott had seen it, taken it inside, they’d shoot her because it wasn’t there.
“Scott and Jim’s,” Anna managed. Her throat had gone dry. Talking was difficult. She’d not meant to endanger anyone else. It was against law enforcement ethics and against her personal code of conduct. For a brief flicker of thought she was ashamed at how effortlessly she would sell others out when her life hung in the balance.
“Go.” Tiny twitched her head, first at Anna then at Trish. Anna led the way up the concrete walk to the cottage’s door, not a back door as she’d have expected from the ginger-breaded porch and tended garden on the meadowside, but a second “front” door complete with doorbell and miniature wooden porch.
Light showed around the edges of the blinds on one of the windows flanking the entrance. Jim and Scott had yet to turn in for the night.
As she weaved up the narrow walk, the last blow to the head having awakened the cumulative effects of the others, Anna wasted brain time with justifications: Tiny wouldn’t let Trish kill Jim or Scott—too much history between them, even some affection at one time. And Jim and Scott might not take Anna’s part. There was a very real possibility she was trading two problems for four and one of those as strong as nine years working out in Soledad’s weight room could make a man.
She hadn’t sold out, she told herself. She was just playing for time, fighting for one more roll of the dice in hopes her luck would change. Her life expectancy in Tiny’s car had been short, in the deserted campground even shorter. Maybe Wither’s living room would present new possibilities. Maybe an armed law enforcement ranger would drop by for a post-midnight snack. Maybe the phone would ring and cause a moment’s distraction.
Maybe Santa would come down the chimney two weeks early and bring Anna a nice stocking full of hand grenades.
The toe of her shoe hit a raised paving stone. The shock with its echo of pain in head and ankle woke her from the trance she’d fallen into.
“If she so much as breathes funny, kill her,” Tiny ordered.
“Will do.” Trish dug the barrel of the gun into the small of Anna’s back.
“Stop that, for Chrissake,” Anna snapped. What with one thing and another, fear for her life was turning into massive irritation. One more poke and bullets be damned, she was going to punch somebody. An old, old memory flared up; when Molly was in her twenties she’d had a little butterball cat named Sophie. Sophie was the sweetest of God’s creatures till she was crossed, then she turned into psycho cat, a buzz saw of teeth and claws animated by the unleashed power of steam-driven hissing. Though she weighed only seven pounds she could leave grown women cowering. Anna knew how Sophie felt.
Brain turned back on and wit sharpened by anger, she set about damage control in the exposure of Scott and Jim, presumably innocent bystanders.
“Scott and Jim are idiots,” she said derisively. “They don’t know they’ve got the apron and wouldn’t know to do anything but throw it in the washing machine if they did. A faggot and an ex-con; not exactly the cream of the intelligentsia.” Anna hadn’t much of a feel for what the relationship was between Tiny and Wither or Wooldrich, and none at all as to what Trish thought of the men. She was just spewing toxins in hope of making somebody sick enough to get stupid.
“They’re sure going to be surprised to see you, Trish,” she went on. “It’s almost going to be worth the price of admission to this farce to see their faces. Everybody thinks you’re dead, your body frozen into a corpsicle up on Lower Merced Pass Lake. Once word gets out you are alive and well, stalking around pointing guns at cooks, California will become way too hot for you.”
Trish stopped. Anna heard the whisk of her sneakered feet on the icy walk cease.
“Tiny,” Trish said.
“Stop,” Tiny ordered.
Anna did and stayed very still, not wishing to trigger any fingers.
“I’d rather stay dead,” Trish said. “What do we do? Shoot the three of them?”
“Now there’s a bright idea,” Anna answered before Tiny could. “Like the Manson Family. Jesus. There’d be an army of federal agents for a body count like that. Bet you didn’t know that. Murder goes to the FBI unless the superintendent says otherwise. Hair, prints, DNA, fiber—the whole Thursday-night lineup. How careful have you been tonight?”
“Bullshit,” Trish breathed, but she believed. Anna could tell by the lack of conviction in her obscenity.
“Relax,” Tiny ordered.
“Park rangers caught Manson,” Anna said. “Nailed him in Death Valley. Who knows, maybe you’ll get a cell near one of the gang, maybe Squeaky Fromme.”
“Tiny—”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe we should—”
“Shut up.”
Trish said no more. Anna waited, an unpleasant tingling sensation on the back of her head as if her mind’s eye watched the deadly red dot of a laser sight playing across her hair.
“Give me the gun,” Tiny said at last. “Soon as we’re in, I’ll open the shade. You stay by the door and watch. If I holler, you come in.”
“What about Scott and Jim?” Trish asked, belatedly showing concern for her partner in crime.
“A faggot and a bean counter. Not a spine between ’em,” Tiny answered acidly. “I’ve been running the two of them for years. I can do it one more night.”
One woman, one gun; Anna felt marginally more optimistic. Trish came across as a tad psycho with a cup of sadism thrown in for flavor. Still, Anna wished it had been Trish going in and Tiny waiting. Tiny was a businesswoman and the family business was drug dealing. She’d be almost impossible to rattle or bluff.
Gun concealed in pocket or sleeve, Tiny edged past Anna, walking on the frozen grass so she would not be within lunging distance. As she drew level with Anna, her hand slid up to protect the bloodied cheek. The body as well as the mind remembering from whence bad things flowed.
Noticing this sign of weakness the moment Anna did, Tiny used the offending hand to grab Anna’s upper arm in a grip that would have done a snapping turtle proud. Years of schlepping loaded plates had given the woman fingers of titanium. The gun, the barrel of which Anna had become all too familiar with, prodded through the down of her jacket.
“We’re a coupla girlfriends come to fetch an apron,” Tiny said evenly. Out of the corner of her eye Anna saw Trish slip from moonlight to shadow, her shoes crunching faintly as frozen blades of grass broke beneath them.
“I have no reason to kill these fools. They’ve been useful and both can cook. You want them gunned down, all you have to do is wink or grimace or even just look at me funny and I’ll kill the three of you. My brother will have me out of the country before the bodies are found. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes ma’am,” Anna said.
“Good girl. Now ring the bell and let’s get this over with.”
The doorbell was from an old door, the kind with a butterfly knob that clattered a metal clapper when turned. Anna gave it a vicious twist. Brassy clanging shimmered and shattered in the frozen air.
“This better be it,” Tiny growled. “My patience with you ran out a minute after you broke your second plate.”
The knob turned, the door opened, light poured from around Scott’s substantial frame.
He’s an accountant,Anna reminded herself. Accountants didn’t customarily kill people.
“Hey, Anna,” he said, and she was relieved to hear both pleasure and concern in his voice. “And Tiny. The honors just keep piling up. Come in. Come in. It’s freezing out here.”
“Hi, Scott,” Tiny said and walked Anna through the doorway. “We won’t keep you long. Anna here lost part of her uniform and needed to get
it back before her next shift.”
The excuse, though true, sounded impossibly lame, but Scott never blinked. Maybe he was used to acceding to absurd demands from the headwaitress.
“Come on into the kitchen,” Scott said. “Jim’s fixing us a bite to eat and there’s coffee on. You look like you could use something hot.”
Tiny knew the house. She led Anna down a short hall to a doorway on the left. Beyond it was a surprisingly large kitchen, the size of the old house’s living room, and filled with the gleaming accoutrements of a gourmet cook. Jim was standing behind a central island, chopping scallions with practiced ferocity. Five eggs, white and perfect, waited in a bowl at his elbow. Cooking had warmed the kitchen and he’d left off his bathrobe. The gray-striped flannel pajamas hung from his gaunt frame, the flowing fabric accentuating the wasting flesh and pale skin. Anna was surprised she’d never noticed before how sick he was.
Tiny steered till the both of them were standing with their backs to the wall beside the hall doorway. Scott followed them in.
“Have we got enough coffee for a couple of half-frozen strays?” he was asking cheerfully.
Jim stopped chopping to stare at the two of them. Seeing his roommate’s shocked countenance, Scott ceased bustling and looked at them as well, the first time he’d seen them in the light.
“My God, what happened to you two?”
What with one thing and another Anna’d not bothered to think about the visuals. Her clothes were streaked and dirty from playing tag with the truck. The murdered doe had left blood and saliva on the front of her jacket and pants. It was pretty much guaranteed her short thick hair was proclaiming its independence. She didn’t even want to know what her face looked like. Trish had hit her so many times with the pistol even her hair was sore. The left side of her face was bound to be swollen and discolored.
Tiny’d suffered only one indignity, a swift kick in the pants delivered by Anna as she was getting out of the car, but for a solitary event the fall had done considerable damage. Cheek and temple were raw and bloody. Her trousers were wet. One knee was ripped and beneath the jacket her sweater was dark with water and speckled with gravel.
They looked as if they’d spent the evening brawling. In Anna’s case that was true. Unfortunately, she’d been on a losing streak.
By the look on Tiny’s face, Anna guessed she’d not given any thought to appearances either. Battered and bloodied as they were, the tale of seeking a mislaid apron was made even more laughable. In less time than it took to draw breath, the untenable nature of their position registered on the headwaitress’s face, dissolved, and was replaced by a look as hard and black as obsidian.
The hand clamped on Anna’s upper arm loosed. The gun with its silencer came out from under her coat.
“Do as I say and nobody has to get hurt,” Tiny said in her dull flat voice. Not one of the three of them thought to laugh at the cliché or at the sight of the little old lady with the great big gun. Just so might Ma Barker have looked when the G-men came.
Anna had once seen a photograph of Ma Barker in a museum or maybe on the History Channel. The headwaitress shared the same small bones and grim expression, the same hard, lifeless eyes, eyes that had seen it all and really didn’t give a damn.
“We’ve just come to get something Anna shouldn’t ever have had in the first place. Where’s her apron?”
If Anna’s earlier protestations hadn’t convinced Tiny of the men’s ignorance of what was becoming a thick plot, the looks of vacuous incomprehension on their faces should have done the trick.
“How the hell should we know?” Scott demanded. He’d recovered first. The muscles in his neck and shoulders bunched for a fight.
“Don’t get lippy with me,” Tiny said. Again the Sunday school teacher, but without the taint of heaven.
“They don’t know,” Anna said. “They don’t know they have it.”
“Fine,” Tiny said. She leveled the gun at Jim’s head. “You tell me where it is or I’ll add his brains to the omelet.”
“It’s in Scott’s car. We went out a week or so ago. I threw it in the backseat and forgot it. Unless Scott brought it in, it’s still there.”
“I never saw it,” Scott said.
A tense waiting silence as cold as the frosty night outside settled over the kitchen. Tiny was thinking. Anna wondered if the woman weighed the truth of her words. If they sounded hollow, would a bullet drop Jim?
Tiny believed her. She had just been reworking the criminal version of the fourth-grade story problem, how to get the fox, the hen and the bag of grain across the river in a rowboat built for two without anybody devouring anybody. Tiny couldn’t leave, couldn’t send Anna or either of the men and couldn’t reveal that Trish Spencer was still of this world.
“Open the window,” she said finally, addressing Scott.
“It’s below freezing out there.”
“Open the doggone window.”Doggone. Lippy. Smarty-pants. None of these gentle expletives softened the orders they accompanied. Tiny’s voice was an edged weapon.
Scott stepped to the window, one of two flanking the door they’d entered through, and banged the sash up about six inches. “That’s as far as it goes,” he said. “The wood’s swollen with the damp.”
“That’s enough. Now you put your rosy little lips down there and say: ‘It’s in the backseat.’ That’s all you say and you say it, not yell it.”
Scott did as he was told.
A rustling of feet across the grass let them know Trish had heard.
“Don’t look out,” Tiny snapped.
Scott dropped the curtain. “What now?” he asked.
“Now we wait. If Anna is telling the truth, we leave. No harm done. You ever mention we were here and Jim goes to jail for a long time. Men who smuggle narcotics into prisons are not dealt with kindly. Especially pathetic old faggots who do it so they can screw a little whore everybody else does for cigarettes and spare change.”
Jim, who till this point had rendered himself relatively invisible by remaining immobile with his eyes cast down as if mesmerized by the pattern of scallions on his cutting board, looked up.
“You’ve no right to talk about Lonnie like that. Lonnie was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Hah!” Tiny sneered and for the first time Anna saw her taking enjoyment in her work. “Your precious Lonnie killed you. The boy was a walking mattress. He was one of Soledad’s ‘girls.’ Every hairy, tattooed, sweating pig in there had a piece of old Lonnie. You go prancing after him like Julia Child in boxers and think you gave the little virgin choirboy AIDS.”
What color there was in Jim’s face drained away. For a second Anna thought he was going to faint and readied herself to move should his collapse present her with an opportunity.
Wither managed to keep his feet by pressing his hands flat on the kitchen island. “That’s not true,” he said when he could speak. “Lonnie loved me.”
“Lonnie ‘loved’ anything that moved. Do you know why Lonnie wrote you from the clink? Not because he wanted to recapture that long-lost love. My nephew, Luther, told him to. They wanted drugs. My lad to peddle, yours to take. God, they must’ve gotten a laugh out of you simpering around in your apron—”
“That’s enough,” Scott said.
“Making cow eyes and measuring out salt.”
Jim’s hands clenched into fists on the countertop. When he raised them, one clutched the heavy chopping knife. Training and experience told Anna not to watch eyes but hands. Jim’s, one still holding the knife, disappeared behind the cooking island.
“Not true,” he said again. He was shaking now but whether from sickness, shock or rage, Anna couldn’t tell.
“Ask Scott,” Tiny taunted him. “Ask Scott if Lonnie wasn’t a two-bit whore. He was there. Watching you beat yourself up these last years would have been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.”
Jim looked at his roommate. A fraction too late, Scott said, “It’s not true,
” but the truth had been in his face.
Jim looked back to his torturer. Now Anna was sure; it was rage.
“Don’t do it,” Anna said.
“Knife,” Tiny barked. “Put it back where I can see it.”
Jim’s arm came up. He set the knife carefully down by the cutting board. His face never changed. The knife hand, empty now, vanished again behind the counter.
“Hands where I can see them,” Tiny ordered.
The hands came up again pressed tightly together, palm to palm in an attitude of prayer. Jim moved from behind the counter, oddly dignified in his rumpled pajamas, fingers steepled like a penitent approaching the altar for absolution.
“You praying for my soul?” Tiny laughed.
“Yes.”
Still watching the hands, Anna saw the blood seeping from between Jim’s palms to run down his thin wrist.
“Well, cut it out,” Tiny said.
Jim kept coming. One more step and he spread his hands as if to take Tiny’s injured face in them. His palms were scarlet, blood pulsing from a deep gash on his left palm.
Time, which had slowed for Anna, delineating each moment in the drama, speeded up with a vengeance. Tiny’s face froze in horror. Scott began to move.
“No,” Tiny screamed.
“Don’t do it,” Anna yelled.
“Jim,” Scott cried.
Pounding came on the window glass.
Jim lunged.
The shushedwhump of a silenced gun sounded twice, maybe three times. Anna threw herself at Tiny. Jim kept coming. The gun sounded again. Then the three of them were on the floor, Jim still, Tiny thrashing with the strength and violence of a furious bobcat. Anna was indifferent to shrieks and blows; every ounce of her attention was on getting control of the gun. Her body across Tiny’s writhing form, she grabbed the scrawny arm in both hands and smashed it down on the tile floor till the fingers let go of the weapon.
