He noticed the drink on the coffee table. It wasn’t even noon. “What happened?”
She shook her head and tried to stave off a fresh wave of tears. “It’s silly.”
“I doubt that.” He gestured for her to sit down and she did, but she wouldn’t look at him and instead fussed with the piping on one of the throw pillows.
He gave her a moment to gather herself, then sat down next to her and waited some more.
Finally, she looked at him sadly. “I thought I could do this.”
“Tell me.”
She shook her head. “All of this. Being married to Tony, knowing … But I don’t think I can.”
“Did he hurt you?”
She shook her head vehemently. “It’s not that. It’s not him, it’s me.”
“I don’t understand.”
She brought a crumpled Kleenex she held in her hand to her nose. “I know.”
After another pause, she turned to face him. “I don’t know if you can understand what it’s like.”
“What what’s like?”
“To be someone else,” she said and looked at him almost pleadingly. “Someone you never thought you’d be. I’d forgotten who I was. Until yesterday.”
She looked at him shyly and his heart broke for her. He nodded encouragingly. “I think I can.”
“I didn’t realize how …” Her forehead furrowed as she searched for the word, “small I’d become. Do you know what I mean? I let little bits of myself go.”
She looked at the wall, seeing a memory. “I let him take them.” She rubbed two fingers together. “Like little cuts.”
She came out of her mind and back to him. “And they’re so small at first, you don’t notice them. But they keep coming and coming,” she said, “and before you know it, you’re bleeding to death.”
Jack sat quietly, humbled by her honesty and worried at the rawness of her pain.
She looked at him shyly, embarrassed. “Until you have a day like yesterday, and you remember who you used to be.”
She shook her head. “I told you it was stupid.”
He reached for her hand and took hold of it. “It’s not. It’s not stupid at all.”
She looked down at their joined hands and he wondered if he’d gone too far. Slowly, she looked up at him and he saw that look in her eyes again. Her eyes moved to his mouth.
He had a decision to make. She was beautiful and he would love to comfort her, but he didn’t dare influence her. If she was gaining the strength to leave her husband, to give the FBI what they wanted, he would nurture it, but it had to come from her.
She leaned toward him almost imperceptibly when the phone rang. They both jumped at the sound. She pushed out a shaky breath and immediately the unsure, nervous woman was back.
She walked over to the phone and picked it up on the third ring. She even fake-smiled for the benefit of the person on the other end of the line. “Santo residence.”
Jack let out a breath of his own. He was on dangerous ground now.
“What?” Susan said, her voice rising in alarm. “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll be right there.”
Jack walked over to her as she hung up the phone.
“What is it?”
Her face was pale. “Ronnie’s been shot.”
Chapter Eighteen
WHITMORE WAS ALREADY THERE looming over Ronnie’s hospital bed by the time Jack and Susan arrived. A tall man stood in the corner picking at his teeth with a toothpick. He started when they came in and jabbed himself in the gums.
Susan gave an audible sigh of relief when the saw that Ronnie was okay. He was sitting up in bed, his arm bandaged and in a sling, but obviously not seriously hurt.
“Are you all right?” she asked as she hurried to her brother’s side.
“They tried to kill me,” he said.
Susan leaned down and kissed his cheek.
“They didn’t do a very good job,” Whitmore said.
“Daddy!”
“Lucky for us,” Whitmore added, although Jack wasn’t sure he meant it.
“First you, now me, sis.”
“Open season on Whitmores, huh?” the tall man said with a laugh.
“That’s not funny, Richard,” Susan said, and the man shrugged and went back to his toothpick.
Susan straightened her brother’s hair. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“All right?” he said. “I got a hole in my arm the size of a Buick.”
Jack looked to Whitmore who clarified. “It was a twenty-two. Barely a scratch.”
“Only ’cause I’m lucky,” Ronnie said. “A couple inches left and I’d be dead.”
Susan took his hand. “Oh, Ronnie.”
Richard pushed himself off the wall. His head bobbed up and down. “Yeah, just missed him.”
The man was in perpetual motion, a hand jangling or a shoulder twitching.
“What happened exactly?” Jack asked, returning his focus to Ronnie.
Ronnie shrugged as best he could with only one healthy arm. “I don’t know. We were over on the west side—”
Whitmore frowned in surprise and disappointment. “What were you doing there?”
Jack looked to Susan for clarification. “It’s the colored side of town.”
Jack nodded and let it go. “You said, ‘we?’”
“Yeah, Rich wanted to talk to a guy about a band he’d heard about.”
Richard bounced off the wall again. “Harlem Knights, they’re gonna be big.”
Whitmore scowled at him and shook his head. Obviously this wasn’t the first of Richard and Ronnie’s escapades.
“So anyway,” Ronnie said. “I went with him. And we don’t get more than a few blocks in when somebody pulls up beside us in this big old Lincoln.”
“Negroes?” Whitmore asked.
Ronnie shook his head. “Naw. White.”
“Italian,” Richard added.
“How can you be so sure of that?” Whitmore asked.
Richard shrugged, his bony shoulders jumping and dropping several times. He looked quickly at Ronnie. “Just looked like it, ’s all.”
He was nervous, and Jack was pretty sure, lying. If he had to place bets, he’d put money on the idea that Ronnie was lying, too. But why and about what, he didn’t know. He could be lying to protect someone, but to be honest, that seemed far too heroic. If he was lying, it was to protect himself. But from Whitmore or someone else?
His father grunted at Richard, who melted back into the wall. Whitmore turned back to his son. “And then what happened?”
“They shot me!”
Susan squeezed her brother’s hand.
“Yes, that much is clear,” Whitmore said.
Poor Susan. She was worried for her brother and probably worried for herself again. If the mob was behind this, then they’d moved up from kidnapping to attempted murder pretty quickly. But it just didn’t sit right with Jack. None of it did.
“I’m glad you’re all right, son,” Whitmore finally said and squeezed his son’s good shoulder.
“They’re tryin’ to get at ya, Dad,” Ronnie said. “First Susie, now me. You gotta sign it. They’ll kill one of us if you don’t.”
Whitmore’s frowned deepened.
~~~
“We’re looking for Danny Doyle.”
The mechanic’s legs moved, one knee rising as he shifted to get better leverage on his dolly. Simon leaned over and repeated his request.
“I heard ya.”
The mechanic slid out from beneath the car and wiped his greasy hands on the stained pants legs of his blue coveralls.
He looked at Simon with annoyance and then his eyes crinkled with worry. “He take stuff from your car, too?”
His eyes shifted from Simon to Elizabeth and back again. He wiped his forehead with his forearm and stood. He walked over to his tool cart and picked up a rag to get the rest of the grease from his hands. It was a losing proposition. “Like I told the cops, I can’t watch ‘em al
l day. Fired him. You got stuff missing?”
He tossed the rag back onto the cart. “Talk to your insurance.”
It was hardly surprising that Danny was a thief as well. “Be that as it may,” Simon said. “I’d like to talk to him.”
The man shrugged. “Well, you ain’t gonna find him here. Chick fired him. I think he got a bum rap. Probably the Hispanic kid.”
Lovely.
Elizabeth batted her eyes and tried her best smile. “Do you have any idea where we might find him? Where he lives? We just want to talk. We’d really appreciate your help.”
Vince, as his name patch read, put a hand on his hip. “Look lady, we’re short-handed now and I got five cars to fix today. And those foreign jobs, nothing’s where it should be. No offense,” he said to Simon, “but you English make crap cars. I don’t know where Danny is and this ain’t none of my business.”
He picked up a wrench from his tool cart, got onto his dolly and slid back under the car.
Simon looked at Elizabeth in frustration, but she wasn’t deterred by Vince’s brick wall. She turned heel and walked over to a door marked office. Without hesitating, she tried it.
“Locked.”
“What are you doing?”
“If he worked here, his address is in there.”
She pushed herself up onto tiptoes to peer through the small window in the door.
“I don’t think Vince is going to help us on that front,” Simon said.
She smiled a smile he knew meant trouble. “Then we’ll just have to help ourselves.”
Elizabeth’s aptitude for breaking and entering was disturbing. Not only was she good at it, but she loved doing it. The skill was acquired during her childhood. While she painted a picture Damon Runyon would have loved, Simon knew the reality was probably far less colorful. Although she’d never wanted for love, she had wanted for nearly everything else.
For an otherwise law-abiding and very justice-minded citizen who would rather break her own arm than harm someone, she took a great deal of glee in picking locks and sliding over transoms. But that was his Elizabeth, a wonderful set of contradictions.
This particular set was currently breaking into the office of Chick’s Auto Body while he stood watch. She’d assured him it was only trespassing, not even burglary. Somehow, he didn’t find the distinction comforting.
They’d waited until the shop had closed and night had come. And now, his wife was on her knees in front of the door to the outside, trying to coax it open.
“Oh, this one’s a little different,” she said. ‘The tumbler—”
“Perhaps you could tell me about that later.”
Elizabeth nodded and went back to work. Thankfully, it didn’t take long and then they were inside the shabby little office. Simon turned on the small flashlight he’d bought and they rifled through the records.
Elizabeth pulled a folder from a filing cabinet. “Over here,” she said.
Simon shined the light onto it. Doyle’s address was on East Carey Street. They committed it to memory and put the file back. They were in and out of the office unseen and on their way to Doyle’s.
The cab pulled up in front of a dilapidated house in what Simon hoped was the poorest part of town. If there were something worse, he didn’t want to see it. He paid the driver to wait and they made their way up the dark path to the even darker house.
No lights were on inside. Only a few lights were on in any of the houses on the street. The faint sound of music came from a house a few doors down, and a coyote’s baleful cry echoed over it from somewhere in the distance.
Simon’s long strides put him at the front door before Elizabeth. The house was small and shabby, the door smudged with dirt. He started to knock, but turned back to Elizabeth. “At least stand behind me.”
“So you can protect me?”
“That would be novel,” he said, “but in this case, so he doesn’t see you. One of the women he kidnapped? It might tip our hand prematurely.”
“Good point.”
She moved behind him and he knocked. There was no answer and he tried again. Nothing.
He tried the door handle and was surprised to find it unlocked. Slowly, he pushed the door open. He turned on his flashlight and they stepped inside.
“Damn.”
The house was abandoned. There were holes in the floor and the walls. Dust covered everything. There were no signs of life, no signs anyone had been there in months, maybe even longer. If Doyle had lived there at all, it had been a long time ago. Their one solid lead had just come to a dead end.
Chapter Nineteen
“AND DO YOU KNOW what he said to me?”
Jack shook his head and watched as Susan poured herself another drink.
“That I wouldn’t understand,” she continued, her eyes already glassy from the last gin and tonic. She laughed, but it was sad and a little manic. “Do you know what I studied in school? Economics. But I’m too stupid to understand his business.”
Poor Susan. She’d been on the verge of this since this morning when they’d visited Ronnie in the hospital. She’d held it together for most of the day, but when evening came, she crawled into a bottle.
She brought the glass to her lips with a flourish and spilled some of the drink down the front of her dress.
“Oh, damn.”
She put the glass down, barely making it onto the edge of the bookshelf and looked for something to clean up with.
Jack stood and handed her his handkerchief. She looked at him with a sloppy smile. “You don’t think I’m stupid, do you?”
“No. Hardly.”
She smiled and dabbed at her dress. “I see all sorts of things. He thinks I don’t, but I do.” She looked up at Jack and tapped his chest with her finger. “And I know what they mean, too.”
No wonder the Feds wanted her. If her husband and his associates conducted business in front of her, she could be a critical witness. If she didn’t get killed first.
Susan smiled at him and took a stumbling step toward him, putting a finger to her lips. “But don’t tell anyone. Shhh.”
He caught her as she tripped over her own feet and fell against his chest. She put her finger against his lips and said in hushed tones, “It’s a secret.”
Her eyes searched his and then dipped down to his lips. Her finger ran gently across them then down his chin. For a moment, he thought she was going to kiss him, but she shoved his handkerchief against his chest and pushed off and turned away. She grabbed her drink and walked the few steps over to the sofa. She gathered herself and sat down with what she clearly hoped was exceptional grace. She held her glass out, her knees together and leaned back into the cushion.
She smiled in triumph.
“You see? I’m very capable of doing things myself. I can sit. I can smile.” She gave him a sampling. “I can look good at parties. I’m quite accomplished, don’t you think?”
Jack sat down next to her. “You are, but not because of those things.”
When she looked at him, her eyes were wet with emotion, but she blinked it away and forced a smile. She started to take another drink, but Jack put his hand over hers to stop her.
“Why don’t I make us some coffee?”
She let him take the glass from her hand and put it on the table. She turned and looked at him for a long moment. “You’re always looking out for me, aren’t you?”
He started to stand, but her hand cupped his cheek.
“You see me, don’t you? Me?”
He covered her hand with his and gently started to pull it away from his face. “Susan …”
She leaned in to kiss him.
And before Jack could stop her, they both started at the sound of the front door closing.
“Susie?” Tony’s voice boomed from the entry hall.
Susan’s eyes went wide with alarm and she moved away from Jack just as her husband came into the room.
To say he was unhappy about the scene he found was an epic
understatement. If steam could have shot out from his ears, like it did in cartoons, Jack was sure it would have.
He looked at the glass on the table and Susan’s breathlessness. His eyes narrowed. “What’s going on here?”
Jack stood. If he was going to get punched in the face, he’d rather do it on his own two feet.
“We were just talking.”
Tony didn’t look convinced.
“Susan’s upset about Ronnie.”
Tony’s eyes shifted to his wife and he seemed to ease back off the throttle a little. “I heard about that. He’s all right, isn’t he?”
Susan sniffled and nodded. “He’ll be fine. It’s just …”
“Yeah,” Tony said, but his eyes were back on Jack. “It’s a dangerous world out there.”
The threat was clumsy but received. Jack turned to Susan. “Will you be all right?”
He saw in her eyes all of the things she couldn’t say. None of them were what she finally did say. “I’ll be fine.”
Tony held out his arm gesturing toward the door in summary dismissal.
Jack hesitated. He didn’t want to leave Susan in the state she was in with Tony in his, but if he tried to stay, it would probably just make things worse.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” Jack asked.
She nodded and forced another smile to her face. “The big day.”
He nodded. Tomorrow was the big day, but not because of the anniversary party. Tomorrow night was the night she was murdered. And still would be unless he did his job, which, by looking at her husband, had just gotten a little bit harder.
Jack excused himself and wandered back into the casino. He called up to the Crosses’ suite, but there was no answer. He parked himself at the bank of slots on the far side of the room and decided to wait for them. If they managed to track down one of the kidnappers, Jack’s luck just might be changing for the better.
He tossed a few nickels into the machine and earned enough to play again. By the time the machine ate his winnings he was feeling restless.
“Hello, stranger.”
He turned around to see Charlene’s smiling face.
“Hello, yourself.”
Jacks Are Wild: An Out of Time Novel (Saving Time, Book 1) Page 18
