Beyond the Rules

by Doranna Durgin

  Owen raised his hands in surrender. “All right, then. For the record,” he pointed at Dave, “this is not the end of the conversation. For the record,” he shot a dark look at Kimmer, “this is not okay. But for now we’ll move forward.”

  “Good,” Kimmer said, moving right along into brusqueness.

  Dave held up a hand, excusing himself. “I’ve got an appointment in Virginia,” he said. “And since we’ve already established how this conversation will end, I think I’ll just go keep it.” He raised his chin fractionally, another acknowledgment of sorts to Owen. “I’ll stop by next time I’m in the area.”

  “You’d better,” Owen responded, and watched with a gaze that turned worried as soon as Dave’s back was turned.

  “What’s the deal?” Kimmer said. “He likes what he’s doing.”

  “Not up for discussion.” Owen, too, could be brusque.

  “So it’s only my personal life we talk about?”

  He looked back at her, his gaze even and unrelenting. “That’s right.”

  She made a disgusted noise and slid down into the chair, one leg over the arm and her body protesting as hard as it had the last time she’d been here. She’d had about enough of being kicked around for Hank.

  Except she thought she was probably only getting started.

  Owen raised an eyebrow. Kimmer said bluntly, “Wolchoski is dead. Hammy Hands is dead, too. Officer Conners will be okay.”

  “And of those things, for which are you responsible?” Only Owen could maintain that dry tone in the face of such startling news.

  Kimmer pretended to give it some thought. “Well, technically…two-thirds of them. Hammy Hands shot Wolchoski. I killed Hammy Hands. And since Hammy Hands was going back for seconds before I stopped him, I’ll take Conners, too.”

  Owen gave himself a moment to rub his hands over his face. Then he said, “From the top?”

  “Ambush on the way to Montour Falls. Pigeon Man got away—he was in a maroon Malibu, but I don’t know how long he’ll stay in it. I didn’t get the plate—it was Pennsylvania, though. They must have expected to handle this and go.” Which didn’t quite make sense, because Kimmer had been a loose end, too. She spoke over her own reservations. “I took care of Hammy Hands and exchanged a few words with Wolchoski and left before backup got there. I wanted to get to you first.”

  “Considering that current modern convenience called the cell phone—”

  “Batteries,” Kimmer said vaguely. It was convincing enough. She had somewhat of a reputation.

  Owen’s brow raised slightly higher. “You wanted to be here when the chief calls.”

  “Could be the sheriff,” Kimmer said helpfully. “It was county turf.”

  “You left the scene of a crime.”

  “Only so I could come make a full report before making myself available to the police.” But Kimmer quickly grew more serious. “I can’t afford to get tangled up in this, Owen. I didn’t cause it, and if I hadn’t been there things would’ve been a lot worse.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Yes. And Conners knows I was behind him, even if he doesn’t remember the seat belt thing.”

  “You’re going to have to make a statement.”

  “And I will. But listen.” She took a breath, hunting for thoughtfulness, finding mostly resentment and anger. “I thought this thing was over. I thought I could leave Hank out of it. Just a few hours ago I spoke to his wife, and she told me to get lost. But things have changed. Wolchoski had enough air left to let me know it’s not over. Whatever double dumb-ass thing Hank’s done, it’s still following him around. It’s still following me.”

  “It’s not doing a lot for our quiet presence in Schuyler County, either,” Owen said, back to being dry again. “You’ve got to make a statement. I’ll have a lawyer meet you there. She’ll keep it as quick and painless as possible.”

  Through a sudden swell of impatience, Kimmer said, “Pigeon Man is still out there. I’m tired of being the hunted. It’s time to do something about him.”

  “Without an ID? Without any other plan besides waiting at the state line and hoping he’ll drive by on the way to home?” Owen shook his head. “We underestimated these men. Now two of them are dead and the other is at large. We’ll go after him, all right, but with a plan. That means knowing more. And that means talking to your brother.”

  Kimmer gave a soundless snarl. “I’d rather wait at the highway for a week.”

  Owen pushed the phone across the desk. “Call Hank.”

  “He’ll lie.”

  “Probably. But his lies might tell us something.”

  This was Owen the Boss. Owen giving her the bottom line.

  Kimmer picked up the phone and punched out the numbers vigorously enough that Owen should have winced. He didn’t. He waited, apparently unaffected by Kimmer’s seething resentment. The phone rang several times and then a machine picked up, and Hank’s voice, awkward and stilted, told her to leave a message.

  She hung up.

  Owen didn’t need to be told what had happened. “Then go make your statement. And then get back here. I’ve made some preliminary contacts with the Pittsburgh police, and by the time you get back I should have access to some mug shots. You can try to reach Hank again then.”

  She wanted to protest. She’d given him a photo. Surely the Pittsburgh cops could work from that. Surely anyone in the agency office could work from that. But she was the one who’d seen Pigeon Man in person. No photograph could replace that advantage, only augment it. And Owen had a bottom-line look on his face that she’d never seen before. For all the years she’d pushed and prodded and lobbied to do things her own way, he’d never responded like this. Implacable. Unmoveable. As taciturn as ever…only more so. Things going unsaid.

  Because this time the Hunter Agency was on its home turf—and this time Kimmer had spent the past several weeks giving the local law reason to regret instead of appreciate the agency’s usually discreet presence.

  In the past, she’d threatened to walk away once or twice. Now Owen was drawing that line. This is what you’ll do if you want to stay with us.

  She heard him. She knew it wasn’t a bluff. And she wasn’t ready to let it happen—not when this job was suddenly the only stable thing in her life.

  And so she spent the afternoon at the modest Watkins Glen police station on North Franklin, describing the ambush, turning over her SIG Sauer for ballistics testing and carefully omitting her conversation with Wolchoski. She squelched her constant impulse to go out and find Pigeon Man, as if she could simply sniff him out. If Chief Harrison had any information about Pigeon Man’s location—or if Hammy Hands had been in possession of a convenient hotel key or a nice PalmPilot full of contact info—he wasn’t letting on. The only bright point of the afternoon came when Officer Conners made his way back into the station house, his eyes still red, his voice hoarse and his handshake full of gratitude.

  Maybe it wasn’t coincidence that Harrison let her go shortly afterward.

  Back to Hunter, as required. But first…she reeked of sweat and the lingering stink of the tear gas, and she had a whole bottle of eye drops waiting for her at home. Not to mention she ached to talk to—

  Rio.

  Who wasn’t there.

  Who might not come back.

  Get used to it. Rules were rules, and she knew better than to forget the most important. The only one who’ll take care of you is you.

  Chapter 9

  Rio picked his mother right up off her feet just as he’d always done since that year he’d grown four inches. And as always, she hugged him back just as hard even as she remonstrated him. She used to say, “Have some respect!” Now she said, “You’ll hurt your back, Ryobe!” And of course he only held her more tightly for an instant before gently touching her to the ground.

  Kimmer didn’t do that, he suddenly realized. She understood his injury; she adjusted to it in many unspoken ways. But she trusted that he knew what he could
and couldn’t do, and left him to make those decisions without second-guessing or fuss.

  Meiko Carlsen took a step back to inspect him, her black eyes sharp. Next to Rio, or his brother Ari or his father Lars, she barely cast a shadow. But she still ruled the household, and Rio warmed to her smile. “See?” he said. “I didn’t starve to death. I haven’t even been existing entirely on fast food.”

  His mother gently poked his side. “You could use some padding.”

  “I’m fine,” Rio told her, just as gently. “I’m here because I’m concerned about you, so don’t try to distract me.”

  Now she said it. “Have some respect.”

  Rio gave her the slightest of bows. “Always.” He picked up his bags and stepped into the familiar living room, leaving his sneakers behind in the mudroom. He’d come prepared; he pulled a pair of thong sandals from the weekender bag and dropped them to the floor, forcing his socks to stretch around the thong itself. From the other bag, a fancy mall bag, he pulled a beautifully wrapped box of his mother’s favorite English toffee, and presented it to her with a small bow.

  “Ryobe!” she said. “You’re family, not a guest.” But she took the package, pleasure and anticipation lighting her face—a face with angles more severe than his, slightly flattened Asian features barely affected by her paternal Danish heritage. “Such a beautiful wrapping.”

  “It’s not much,” he said. “I hope it pleases you.”

  “Domo,” she murmured, and set the package aside on the small, gleaming wood table in the corner of the room that always seemed to hold some special object—a careful flower arrangement, a casual pile of perfectly arranged rocks and a feather or, as today, a small blown-glass decorative vase. She’d open it later, so as not to seem too eager. “I have a room ready for you.”

  He let her lead him through the living room with its sparse, precisely chosen furniture—most of it in clean, organic Danish lines—and to the guest room, a place he’d never again thought he’d stay. He’d had his own house here not so long ago. A rental, to be sure, but near enough to being his.

  Rio dropped his bags on the bed and sat down, putting his mother closer to eye level. “Tell me,” he said. “How is she? How are you?”

  The direct questioning caught his mother by surprise. She twisted her hands together, realized she’d done it and stopped. Always poised, that was Meiko Carlsen. Always well dressed—as she was today in a flowing tunic and pant combination. Always well coiffed. Her drop earrings matched her outfit and her minimal makeup brought out her beautifully almond eyes and her small rosebud mouth.

  Except today he caught a hint of tremble in those earrings. And her black hair held more gray than he thought he’d remembered from even half a year earlier. The strain of Sobo’s illness showed in her face…and in the way she once more twisted her hands. “I’m well,” she said, and he supposed that to be the truth. Well—under the circumstances. “Your sobo…” She hesitated, shaking her head. “She is a most determined person, as she ever was. The doctors believe she should be in assisted living.”

  Rio offered up a skeptical expression. She laughed, a light sound. “Exactly so. Your father and I have been investigating those places, but I don’t think anything will come of it. I think—” and she stopped, suddenly, biting her lip and continuing only with the same determination she’d attributed to her mother, “I think she would rather be here when she goes, even if it means she goes sooner.”

  Quick panic flashed through him. “Is that a worry? Now?”

  His mother waved away the question with a graceful hand. “No. Not like that. But perhaps…soon.”

  “I would have come,” Rio said. “I’ve wanted to come.”

  Meiko straightened slightly at that. “We’ve handled things in the way we thought best,” she said. “We have a social worker from the hospital also working on Sobo’s behalf.”

  “I wasn’t questioning your decisions,” Rio said, his voice quiet with understanding. But he also shook his head, knowing this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have right now, not the first thing he did upon arriving home. “Anyway, I’m here. And I can pick up some of the extras for a while.”

  “That would be helpful,” his mother allowed, and that alone was enough to tell Rio how strained they’d been. “Perhaps you’d like to see her? She’s usually awake at this hour and she knows we’re expecting you.”

  “Of course I want to see her. And after we’ve visited a while—” he glanced at his watch “—I’ll fix her some tea. Unless she’s no longer into her late afternoon tea, but if that were the case I’m pretty sure the shock waves would have reached me even down at the Finger Lakes.”

  “Come, then.” His mother held out a hand to him in invitation. “But Rio…be prepared for some changes.”

  Changes. No kidding. Rio’s fingers tightened on the gift he’d brought his grandmother—her very favorite See’s chocolates, elaborately wrapped. Sobo had called for them to enter her little domain instead of coming to the half-open door on which his mother had knocked. Now she regarded him from her small recliner, a tiny old woman with her eyes almost hidden in their wrinkled folds but her face lit from within nonetheless. “Ryobe!”

  Rio bowed, more deeply than he offered anyone else, more deliberate than the quick acknowledgments he sprinkled through his life without even thinking about it. He glanced at his mother; Meiko nodded, and, with her own little bow, wordlessly retreated. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner.” He crossed the room in a few long strides, finding it pretty much as he’d last seen it—sparsely furnished with lacquered furniture once brought from her homeland with great care, along with several hand-painted watercolors. The recliner he knelt by…pure Furniture City. The quilt over her lap made by a cousin, and the pillow behind her head a truly childish concoction, definitely not square. Carolyne had made it in her Brownie days. Rio presented her with the chocolates, and smiled at Sobo’s only partially concealed delight. She knew as well as he did what lay beneath that silvered wrapping paper and the many-tiered bow.

  She was, of course, much too proper to open the gift immediately. She murmured Domo and set it aside for later, then gathered his hands up in her gnarled fingers. “There was no need to disrupt your new life.”

  “I had a need to disrupt my new life,” Rio said. “Only out of respect for your wishes did I stay away.” Then he cocked his head and admitted, “Well…until I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “And your Kimmer Reed…does she understand?”

  Damn. Sobo had always been able to do that. And Rio wanted to be able to say yes, of course she does—but he wasn’t sure. All he knew for sure was what he’d told Sobo. “She tries.” He sat back on his heels, leaving his hands under her warm, papery touch. “Kimmer…her life has been so different from ours.”

  “Her family.” Sobo nodded. Rio had told her of Kimmer, of what he’d known before he left. Now he knew more.

  “I met her brother,” he said, and shook his head. “I think I understand a lot better now. And at the same time, I’m not sure I can ever truly understand at all.”

  And when Sobo nodded again, Rio thought he caught a glimmer of wistfulness on her face. What an idiot I am. Of course Sobo would grasp Kimmer’s situation, perhaps much better than anyone else in the family, even without knowing what Rio knew. Without ever having seen that look on Kimmer’s face when the past caught up to her, sometimes struck out through her. His grandmother, too, had once been caught between two worlds.

  “Do you think,” Rio asked, hesitating on the border of becoming more personal than would be polite, “it will ever be easier for her?”

  Sobo was silent a long moment, long enough that Rio took a breath, ready to apologize for the question. But he closed his mouth quickly enough when she spoke. And he wasn’t expecting her to say, “That depends on you, Rio-san.” She smiled at the look on his face, a quiet smile, and she nodded ever so slightly in his direction. The faintest hint of a bow. “Your grandfather is
the one who made my life possible, in so many ways. Certainly I could not have made the transition between our worlds without him. I loved my own too dearly, and would have returned to it at the first opportunity.”

  “I wouldn’t say Kimmer loves her past.” Rio’s words came out more dryly than he meant them to.

  “But she is tied to it nonetheless. She needs a strong present if she is to pull away from what she knows.” Sobo patted his hands. “She will never be as you’re used to, Rio-san. But look around this room. Do you think I was without these things when your grandfather was still alive?”

  Rio didn’t have to look. “I think you’ve always had them.”

  She nodded. “And he loved me for what I was.” Then she pulled her hands back and rested them in her lap.

  Rio was quite certain she had more to say than that, and just as certain she’d leave him to think about it himself. “Thank you, Sobo.”

  “You’re a good boy, Rio. You’ll be fine. Now come back later, and I might have a chocolate to share with you.”

  Rio grinned. “It’s a deal.” He leaned over to kiss her wrinkled cheek as he rose to his feet, and left the room with a vivid image of Sobo unwrapping the chocolates so carefully, so precisely. He was still smiling when he reached the living room, where his mother put him to work setting the table.

  Home again, all right.

  Returning home felt different. Hollow. It didn’t matter how many times Kimmer reminded herself that she’d very happily lived this way for quite a long time, or that she’d always known better than to count on someone else. It was what it was. And it didn’t matter that she expected to spend only a few moments at home—a quick shower, a quick sandwich—before heading back to Hunter and to the Pittsburgh mug shots.

  She turned down her street at early dusk, her mind on that sandwich and most determinedly not on the empty house. So, okay, there was a cat there. Rio’s cat, if anyone could be said to own a cat. Kimmer was doing litterbox duty and if she neglected it she’d sure enough know the house wasn’t empty.