Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  Somehow she didn’t want him going out on that roof without knowing that internal bruising, a hurt to the heart could heal as well. The one he’d dealt her, the devastating one she’d aimed at him.

  But she didn’t know how to form the words to bridge the gap between them. How did she go about applying a curative to blows to the heart? Was such a thing even possible?

  He reached through the window, cupping her face in his large hand. “It’s all right,” he said softly. “You stay here.”

  “No,” she said, shaking free of his hand and stepping over the windowsill. She felt a pang of embarrassment at seeing their handprints in the thick layer of West Texas dust.

  “I really do clean once in a while,” she said.

  Pete glanced down at the handprints. “Is this some of that soil that Taylor said is on its way to Arkansas?”

  Carolyn nodded. “Good thing they think we’re gone,” she said. “If they saw those handprints, they’d know exactly where we are.”

  “I don’t think there’s much worry about that.”

  Pete led the way down the overhang to the point it disappeared beneath the sharply pitched roof. Grunting, he hitched his body up and over onto the old wood shingles before holding down his hands to help her up. Then they wriggled up the shingles on the upward slant of the back side of her house. From that position they could lie against the sun-warmed and worn shingles and peek over the sagging center point of her roof.

  Carolyn’s heart was racing, not so much from fear of a drug deal going down soon, but of the old roof and the sheer, dizzying height. It was a long, long way down to the utterly ungiving ground.

  “I don’t think we’ll miss much from up here,” he said, looking through a large pair of binoculars Adams had given him earlier.

  Carolyn wanted to tell him she was missing too much already.

  He touched her arm and a frisson of reaction coursed through her. His merest touch could transport her, she thought, creating a chain reaction within her. Like the domino effect of hurts causing more hurts, his single touch sparked a series of fires inside her.

  Despite their amazing position on the roof of her house, the ancient wood shingles digging into her, Carolyn closed her eyes and absorbed the strange peace. She could hear Pete’s slow, steady breathing, the whisper of the tall grasses moving to the rhythm of the late afternoon breeze, a homed lark calling a warning to his mate. In the sharp quiet, she could even hear Ralphette’s kittens mewling way off in the barn.

  The homed lark called again, then was quiet. Ralphette’s kittens fell silent as their mother apparently rejoined them. Pete’s breathing hitched.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, feeling her heart jolt at the sudden tension in his voice. Her eyes flew open. “What’s wrong?”

  “Somebody’s coming.”

  “Who?”

  Pete didn’t answer for several seconds. “Red-and-white half-ton pickup.”

  “Wannamachers,” she breathed, ducking down and rolling to her side, nearer to Pete, her heart pounding so loudly she was sure he could hear it, that they would hear it when they arrived.

  “Don’t move at all,” he whispered, inching down beside her. “They’re getting out of the truck.”

  “Why would they come here?”

  “The drop site must be closer to your house than we guessed. Or else they’re coming to make sure you really got out.”

  “They’ll see everything in the house is still there.”

  “They’ll see a chaotic mess. And the doors are locked.”

  “What if Craig gave them the keys?”

  “Sh-h-h,” he said, pressing a finger against her lips. It was warm and callused and, for some odd reason, feeling it made tears spring to her eyes.

  “We’re safe here,” he said, and brushed his finger along her cheek. “Perfectly safe.”

  She smiled tremulously. That’s what she’d been missing since the night before, that sense of safety, that security she’d felt around him before.

  The cellular phone gave a bleat and Pete nearly threw it from the rooftop as he grabbed it up. He listened for a few seconds. “We know,” he whispered. “We’re literally right on top of them.”

  He depressed the switch and set the phone to “ringer off.” “Damn,” he said. “I about had a heart attack.”

  Carolyn rolled from her side to her back, hysteria welling up in her. She pressed her hands over her mouth to keep from giggling aloud. There was nothing funny at all about the situation but the expression on his face and the way he’d juggled the phone tickled her in too many ways.

  A loud bang from down on the ground drove all humor from her. She was glad she’d already covered her mouth, for at the thunderous crash, she would have cried out. She looked a question at Pete. He shrugged slightly, frowning.

  Then she recognized the sound. Someone below had thrown open the cellar door. It rested at a slant to the ground, stairs leading down into a dirt-floored root cellar or tornado safety zone. And the fold-out door had a tin faceplate that sounded like Thor striking the sky whenever it was pitched over onto its cement rests.

  “Cellar,” she breathed. “They’re in the cellar.”

  “Can they get into the house from there?”

  “Yes. But I think the door’s locked.”

  “Must stash something there. Maybe their own private cache.”

  Sure enough, a few minutes later, the pickup started again and they could both see the packages jouncing in the back as Bubba or Jimmy drove the half-ton out of the driveway and onto the road leading toward town.

  Pete switched on the telephone and called Adams. “Coming your way with something in the back of the pickup. They took it from the cellar... no, can’t see the entrance from here...we’re fine. We’ll just sit tight.”

  In his unusual fashion, Pete depressed the Off button without a farewell. Was that an Eastern thing? Carolyn wondered. A prison thing...an FBI trait? She didn’t know, but she did know it seemed suddenly very important to find out. There were a whole host of things she had a burning desire to know about him. His favorite foods, drink, all the little habits that made up a person.

  She closed her eyes again, feeling a wave of serenity sweeping through her. When this was all over, when they were off the roof and the Wannamachers and their Canadian friend safely locked up, she would tell him how she felt about him. Let him know that she was past the place of hurt. She’d been able to stomach the idea of his being a killer but had flown into total despair when she discovered he was respectable? What possible sense did that make?

  What had hurt her so deeply was that he’d withheld the truth from her. Lied to her. Made her feel foolish and betrayed.

  She’d only been hurt...not completely destroyed. To walk away from Pete would do that to her.

  She listened to the renewed calling of the horned lark and heard the countermelody of a nighthawk. And the telephone ringing inside her house. She stiffened, knowing instinctively who was calling.

  “Oh, my God, it’s Taylor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Taylor. Remember? She said she’d try us morning and night and if we didn’t answer either time, she was sending out the troopers. She’ll do it, too. She couldn’t get through this morning. And now...tonight the phone’s just ringing. She’ll keep calling until I answer—or she’ll call Doug’s friends.

  It’ll ruin everything.”

  “Damn,” Pete said, inching down the shingles. He would have to roll over her to get there.

  “No, I’ll go,” she said. “You stay here and be watchdog.”

  He looked as if he would argue, but apparently saw the logic in her argument, and since she was closer to the window and because she was already halfway there, he nodded and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. “Just tell her we’re fine and get back up here ASAP.”

  She felt like giggling again as she crossed the window ledge and ran for the stairs. Her realization that she did
n’t want to live without Pete, that a hurt could be mended by simply accepting it and letting it go, that her troubles were all likely to be over that night, forever, filled her veins with effervescence, made her step light and easy. She grabbed up the phone.

  “Taylor?”

  There was a pause, then, “Wrong,” a male voice drawled. “Guess again, Miz Leary.”

  Numb as she felt at that second, a different voice speaking directly behind her made her jump and pitch the phone’s receiver to the floor.

  “You! How’d you get back here? We watched you leave. Damn. Dubois’s gonna pitch a hissy.”

  “Bubba,” Carolyn breathed.

  “You should have listened to us,” he said, shaking his head and drawing a .45 from his belt. “You just can’t tell some folks nothing.”

  He strolled toward her, leveling the gun at her chest.

  Pete counted the seconds Carolyn had been gone. When he’d reached a full minute and a half’s worth, he laid the binoculars aside and wrestled with the need to go check on her.

  She could have felt the call of nature, he told himself. Taylor might have told her that something had happened to one of the girls—his stomach knotted at the thought—or she might have tripped going down the stairs.

  Or, he thought, suddenly realizing that there had only been a single crash of the cellar door. The Wannamachers hadn’t closed it. Maybe one of them had stayed behind.

  Carolyn might be taking so long because there might have been someone waiting for her in the house. Just because the Wannamachers employed poor grammar and spoke in West Texas drawls didn’t mean they were at all stupid.

  He was already inching toward Jenny and Shawna’s window when he heard the voice.

  “Now where could he be?”

  Bubba Wannamacher, Pete thought, somehow knowing which brother was inside Carolyn’s house. Funny, he couldn’t tell Jenny or Shawna’s voices apart, but he could a Wannamacher.

  Bubba called loudly, in a singsong voice, “Come out, come out wherever you are...or the little lady gets it.”

  He heard Carolyn give a bitten cry and his jaw clenched. He’d let her walk right into them.

  “He’s not here!” Carolyn said. Her voice was loud and strong. And Pete knew they were in Jenny and Shawna’s bedroom.

  And he remembered the clearly defined handprints on the windowsill. His and hers matching prints.

  “He left!” Carolyn said. Her voice was so clear, she sounded as if she were right beside the window. There was no way Pete could scramble off the roof without making noise and no way that noise wouldn’t alert Bubba.

  He knew Carolyn was trying to buy time, talking loudly so that Pete would be alerted to Bubba’s presence.

  His fists clenched as he heard Bubba threaten Carolyn again. “I really will do something to the little lady. And you know I can do it, too,” Bubba called out.

  Because the window stood open and the house was so poorly insulated, Pete could hear Bubba dragging Carolyn across the hall to her bedroom. He slithered down the shingles, tensing himself, preparing to swing down to the overhang.

  He paused as he heard Bubba’s voice, louder now, apparently still in the hallway, not all the way into Carolyn’s bedroom.

  “Well, well, what have we here? Two apple cores. Two suitcases. Why, Miz Leary, sleeping with the hired hand? When you coulda had fun with me all along.”

  It was all Pete could do not to swing down from the roof when he heard Carolyn’s disgusted protest.

  “Now where is he?” Bubba asked, his voice getting louder again as he moved back into Jenny and Shawna’s bedroom.

  “He left!” Carolyn called. “He...he was afraid.”

  “You know something, Miz Leary...or since we’re getting to be such good friends, can I call you Carolyn?...I don’t think that hired hand of youm is all that skittish. Fact is, if we hadn’t held a gun on him the other night, I think he’d a took us all three on.”

  “I tell you, Bubba, he left. He took the Ranger. You don’t see it anywhere, do you?” she demanded.

  Nearly overriding his fear for her—and his anger at whichever Wannamacher was holding her—was admiration for Carolyn. She must be terrified and yet she was still trying to cover for him, give him time to help or get it there.

  “Now, why do you suppose that window’s open?” Wannamacher asked.

  “Airing out the room from your smell!” Carolyn snapped, then gave a sharp cry.

  Pete inched down the roofline, trying not to make a sound. He wouldn’t be able to help her if Wannamacher met him at the windowsill with a gun. And he sure couldn’t help her if he fell off the damned roof by moving too fast.

  But when Bubba said, “You know what? Let’s just see what you look like under all these clothes,” Pete felt Carolyn’s cry to his soul. He couldn’t hold back a second longer. He didn’t inch down onto the overhang, he flung himself down, catching the rotting trim in one hand and grabbing for the window ledge with the other.

  The trim gave way with a sick groan and the screech of pulled nails.

  For a moment he hung in midair some thirty feet above the ground, swinging in front of the window, seeing Bubba Wannamacher digging at Carolyn’s clothing, bending her back against Shawna’s desk.

  The stark horror of what he saw saved him, spurring him into a swinging kick that jettisoned him through the window with an avenging force and an appalling clatter of broken glass and shattered wood. He was on Bubba before the man had even turned to see what the noise was.

  “What the—?” Bubba cried out as he went down.

  “Pete!” Carolyn called as she was also flung to the floor. She skidded wildly for a moment and came up against Jenny’s bed.

  Pete took all this in with one part of his mind while the other focused on making certain Bubba Wannamacher would never touch Carolyn again. Over and over again his splinter-laden hand pummeled Bubba’s face.

  “Pete,” he heard Carolyn calling as if from miles away. “Pete, stop! Pete, it’s okay, Pete.” But she was too far away and he was too violently snared by the tremendous anger that held sway in him.

  “Don’t, Pete...we don’t need this between us.” He felt her digging at his shoulders. Trying to hold him back. “Pete!”

  His fist slowed and his hand at Bubba’s throat loosened its grip a notch, then another.

  “Pete, I was wrong to shut you out like that. I was hurt, I was angry. But that didn’t change my feelings for you. Nothing could change that.”

  “What—?” he panted, afraid to look at her, afraid he was delirious, dreaming this somehow. He stared into Bubba Wannamacher’s bloodied face, took in the fact that the man was nearly unconscious. He dropped his own bleeding hand to his thigh.

  “I love you, Pete,” she said. Softly. Steadily.

  And then he felt her hand gentle on his shoulder, stroking him now, soothing him. No longer afraid for him, possibly of him.

  “I love you, Pete.”

  He closed his eyes, surprised to be feeling pain instead of joy at her words. Then he realized it was the pain of intense, staggeringly profound relief.

  “I thought...” he murmured. “Oh, God, I thought I’d blown it all.” He was still gasping for air. “Everything that mattered to me...I thought I killed it because I lied...to you.”

  Her hand squeezed his shoulder and he felt her kneel behind him. “For a minute, I thought so, too,” she admitted, laying her head against his back. “We’re too new. We don’t have the stuff between us yet that could glue us back together.”

  “Do we now?” he asked, feeling like a little kid alone in the dark, seeing a flashlight coming his way: scared to death and hopeful at the same time. “Do we, Carolyn?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “Because we want to love each other. We want each other. Yes. I really think we’ll be okay.”

  Pete blinked his eyes against the tears that threatened to fall free. He looked at Bubba Wannamacher’s battered face and up at Jenny and Shawna’s p
oster-studded ceiling.

  “Let’s call in the troops,” he said. “I’m about ready to call it a day.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, not moving. “And we better hurry. I think Jimmy’s on his way back. It was him on the phone, not Taylor.”

  “And I’d rather be holding you than Bubba,” he said, and felt his first true grin in almost twenty-four hours as she chuckled against him.

  “That makes two of us,” she said.

  She rose first, holding out a hand to help him up. He unstraddled the heavyset and thoroughly subdued thug and stiffly pushed to his feet, one of his hands wrapped around hers, the other grasping Bubba’s .45 automatic. He swayed for a moment as he stood and found he was more than half-afraid to meet her eyes, afraid of seeing she hadn’t really meant her words.

  He thought of her courage, her strength, the way she’d been pawed by Bubba, and shifted his gaze to find her waiting for him. And the love she felt for him blazed in her blue eyes, a luminescent, liquid fire, quenching a thirst that had raged in him all his life.

  He dragged her to his chest and held her close against him, breathing in the scent of her hair, the feel of her supple body pressed to his.

  “I love you, Carolyn. God only knows how much.” He struggled against a new wave of raw emotion. He closed his eyes, fighting it, glorying in it. He didn’t feel the tear snaking down his face, only her soft, trembling hand wiping it away.

  “I love you, too, Pete.”

  He kissed her fingers and tasted mingled salt, blood and the sweet love of Carolyn.

  “But we’d better make a couple of phone calls,” she said.

  “Right,” he answered, drawing her upward for a long, deep kiss.

  “I think I broke the phone downstairs,” she said, finally, gently cradling his bruised face with both her hands.

  He kept his arm around her waist, his hand at the small of her back, holding her to him. “And I left the cell phone on the roof.”

  “Well...I’ve wanted to sit in the moonlight with you for a long time now,” she said, pressing a soft, delicate kiss to his lips.