by Ann B. Ross
Turning off the ignition—what use was it now?—I leaned my head against the steering wheel. Then, with a resigned sigh, I straightened up, gathered my pocketbook and umbrella, and stepped out of the car into the drizzle. There was nothing for it but to walk to the soup kitchen and throw myself on the mercy of Brother Vernon Puckett.
Chapter 44
But first I locked my car, although what good it would’ve done a thief in its present condition I didn’t know. Then going around the car to the sidewalk, I opened my umbrella and prepared to walk the two blocks to Brother Vern’s soup kitchen. It was a daunting prospect, considering what was between me and it, but I gained courage by recalling Mildred’s advice about walking in a big city. Hold your purse tightly under your arm, she’d said, walk with purpose, and don’t look anyone in the eye. If it worked in New York, it ought to work in Abbotsville.
As I started walking, although not quite as purposefully as Mildred had suggested, I could hear rain dripping from the bare branches of the trees that overhung the sidewalk. As I peered ahead toward the end of the block, I saw a dark figure slowly separate itself from a telephone pole and begin strolling toward me. I clamped down on my pocketbook and tightened my grip on the umbrella, keeping my eyes peeled on the ambling figure. He—and I was sure it was a he—didn’t seem to be in a hurry, just purposeful.
Stepping on a rise in the sidewalk, I almost tripped, then, while regaining my footing, I caught a glimpse of another dark figure ambling up behind me. Oh, Lord, two of them! My first impulse was to run back to the car and lock myself in, but the one behind me was too close.
My heart pounding, I thought about screaming. I thought about running. I thought about dashing between the parked cars and running to Miguel’s. I thought about dropping my pocketbook and running. I thought about throwing my pocketbook and running.
Scanning the street and the possibilities, my eyes happened to light on a familiar, low-slung car up ahead, snugged in among the few others parked along the street. Relief flooded my soul at the sight of the vague outline of a head and shoulders on the driver’s side—Mr. Pickens, parked, but not in a lot! It had to be him—he wouldn’t let anyone else drive his car.
Too scared to scream and barely able to breathe for fear I’d be grabbed before reaching his car, I kept walking, never breaking stride, even though I was almost petrified. Not wanting to give away my intentions, I stared straight ahead, letting them think that I hadn’t noticed the trap I was in. If I could just get to Mr. Pickens’s car before the two men met—with me in the middle—I would be safe.
It took only three of my most purposeful strides to get to the passenger door and, as I reached for the handle—almost dropping my pocketbook as I did—I heard running feet closing in on me from both directions.
Expecting an interior light to come on, which didn’t, I slung open the door, jammed the open umbrella into the car, and followed it in headfirst, creating a bellow that almost broke my eardrums and a stream of ugly words like I’d never heard before. A plastic-foam coffee cup flew through the air as I crammed myself in behind the umbrella. I slammed the door and locked it, while Mr. Pickens, cursing and swearing, fought off my umbrella. Finally crushing it against the steering wheel, he swung open his door and scrambled out.
“Get back in, Mr. Pickens!” I screamed. “They’re after me. Hurry. Let’s go! Let’s go!”
He stood in the open door, staring with unbelieving eyes at me, his shirt and pants dripping wet. “What in the . . .”
“Don’t ask. I’ll explain later. Now, come on—those men are after us.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Mr. Pickens said as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. Then he said something across the roof of the car to the two men and they began to slink away.
“Now,” Mr. Pickens said through gritted teeth as he leaned in, “what are you doing here? Just tell me so I can understand. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!”
“Well, it’s like this,” I began. “My car ran out of gas and . . . get in the car, Mr. Pickens. We can’t have a decent conversation with you standing out there in the rain.”
I think he took a deep breath, then another one—probably to calm himself after the fright I’d given him. Then he snatched my crumpled-up umbrella—now with a few broken ribs—jerked it out of the car, and slung it across the street. After that little display of peevishness, he took out his handkerchief and mopped up the coffee puddled on the driver’s seat. He threw the sopping handkerchief onto the street, completely unmindful of a possible littering charge.
Then he crawled back in, slammed the door hard enough to rock the car, and folded his arms across the steering wheel. Leaning his head on his arms, he whispered, “Just tell me why.”
“Oh, I will. But first, how did you get rid of those muggers? They were about to accost me, Mr. Pickens!”
He raised his head, stared out the windshield, and under his breath mumbled something about needing strength. Then, in a carefully controlled voice, he said, “They weren’t muggers. They were undercover.”
“Undercover! My goodness, why didn’t they say so? I thought I was going to get robbed and beaten and left for dead.”
He didn’t respond, though I gave him plenty of time to do so. He just continued to sit there in that damp seat and stare through the windshield. I wondered what was going through his mind, but thought it best not to inquire.
“Well, anyway,” I said, “like I said, I ran out of gas because I was looking for you. Mr. Pickens, I have been through every parking lot in this town looking for your car. You can’t imagine what a blessing it was to find it here, right when I needed it. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have expected it to be here—I mean, I wasn’t looking for it here because I was going to the soup kitchen to use the phone. You can understand that, can’t you?”
He glanced sideways at me, nodded, and said a little tightly, “Oh, yeah, perfectly clear. So far.”
“All right. So I guess you want to know why I was looking for you.”
“That would be nice.”
I stared at the side of his face for a few seconds, wondering at his calm demeanor—so unlike him, but quite welcome under the circumstances.
Tapping into some of the outrage that had driven me out of my home and onto the streets on a cold, wet Halloween night, I went on the attack. “Aren’t you concerned about your wife? Or your children? They could be sick and in fact they are. But as far as you know—because you’re out rambling around all over the place—everything is just fine. You are a married man, Mr. Pickens, a fact that you seem to forget, and you have responsibilities.”
Still in that deadly quiet voice, he said, “I just talked to Hazel Marie. Everything’s fine.”
“Well, from where I sit, everything is not fine.” I drew in a deep breath and let him have what had been building up in me ever since that day in the mall parking lot. “You may think, Mr. Pickens, that what you do is your business and yours alone. You may think that you can do as you please, and no one will know or care. You may think that you are safe from prying eyes in a parking lot—be it church or mall—but you’re in a small town now and, let me tell you, you have been seen. And not just you, but those women you’ve been driving around with and parking with have also been seen. What is the matter with you? Why are you jeopardizing what you have at home for some big-haired woman, or I should say women, because you’ve been seen with at least two and how many more there are, I’m sure I don’t know. The only saving grace is that so far Hazel Marie hasn’t seen you, so she doesn’t know what you’ve been up to. But, believe me, sooner or later, someone will tell her and then where will you be? I’ll tell you where you’ll be, you’ll be out on the street, that’s where.”
“She knows.”
“What?” I stared at him. “She knows? She knows you’re seeing other women? I don’t believe it. She’d never put up with it.”
“She k
nows I’m working.”
“Well, excuse me. I’ve just never heard it called working before.” I couldn’t help giving the word a sarcastic twist, but that beat all I’d ever heard. “Well, I guess you’ve pulled the wool over her eyes. Bless her heart, she’s so trusting she’d believe anything you told her. But what’re you going to tell Lillian? Or me?” I paused, a catch in my throat. “Or Lloyd? We’ve all seen you, and working is not going to cut it.”
“Lloyd?” That caught his attention, because he took his arms off the steering wheel and leaned back, staring at me.
“You shouldn’t have gone through town tonight when children were all up and down the street. He saw you pass by with a laughing woman and, Mr. Pickens, I will tell you straight out, he is devastated. He thinks you’re going to divorce his mother.”
Mr. Pickens wiped his hand down his face, glanced out the window as if he might find an answer out there, then he turned back to me. In a defeated tone, he murmured, “This was not supposed to happen.”
“Well, see, that’s what does happen when you first start to deceive. You don’t consider the consequences.” I was ready to light into him again, but he suddenly sat up, stared intently out the windshield, opened the car door, and said, “Lock the doors and stay here.”
And off he took, running up the street toward Miguel’s or Brother Vern’s soup kitchen, I didn’t know which, leaving me with my mouth open and a lot more I wanted to say.
Chapter 45
So stunned by his sudden exit, I just sat there watching his shadowy figure race up the block, dodge between parked cars, bypass the loiterers on the sidewalk, and head for the soup kitchen. He didn’t give Miguel’s a glance, just plowed on toward Brother Vern’s mission.
Except . . . I sat up straight to see over the parked cars, peering through the dark . . . he didn’t go to Brother Vern’s mission. I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to swerve off the sidewalk, then he was gone. I stared, not daring to blink, at the front door of the soup kitchen. There were lights on inside, as well as upstairs in the apartment, so I should’ve been able to see him go in. But I hadn’t. He’d disappeared beside the building.
I knew from my earlier inspection of the building that there was an alley along the side, and I knew there was a back door for access to the Dumpster. But why would he be going to the back door? That didn’t make sense. And, most important, what had he been doing, drinking coffee here in the dark, in the first place? Why would he do that, and what had he seen that was so urgent that he’d left me high and dry?
I vacillated between staying put and going to see what he was up to. My hand edged toward the door handle, then stopped. I’d get soaking wet, my poor bent and broken umbrella unusable and unavailable. And those muggers? Or rather, undercover agents—where were they? And what were they undercover for? I’d been so intent on venting my anger that I’d failed to get some basic answers.
There was only one way to get them, so I pulled on the door handle, unlatched the door, and had it snatched out of my hand. The door swung open and a sizable body crawled in on top of me. A rough, rasping voice said, “Get over! Get over and drive!”
The woman—for it was a woman and a hefty one at that—shoved and pushed as she squeezed herself in, ending up practically on my lap. I yelled, she yelled and kept on pushing. Not being able to sit on the console for long, I tumbled sideways into the driver’s seat, my feet snared by the gear shift. I clawed for the door handle.
“No, you don’t!” the woman screamed, pulling my shoulders around. “Crank this car and MOVE.”
“Who are you? What do you want?” Trying to fight her off, I pushed her away but her fingers clamped down on my neck in a pinch so sharp that I screamed. “Stop, stop, let me out. You can have the car!”
“You’re driving,” she hissed right in my face, her breath reeking of onions, as her fingers clamped down tighter. “They’re not looking for an old woman, so they won’t stop you. Get me out of town, somewhere away from here, I don’t care where.”
Barely able to move, those pinching fingers biting into my skin, my eyes watering, taking note of a head of straggly hair—another of Mr. Pickens’s girlfriends? She didn’t look his type, but what did I know?
“Uh, miss,” I said, “I think I’m a friend of a friend of yours. Mr. Pickens? J. D. Pickens? This is his car and . . .”
“I know whose car it is,” she growled, breathing hard. “The low-down, lying, two-faced, under-handed . . .”
“Miscreant?” I supplied, wanting to be helpful before she pulled a plug from my neck.
The car’s interior suddenly lit up, startling me and her, as four patrol cars with blue lights flickering swished swiftly and silently past like a ghostly convoy. Two of them slid to a stop in front of the soup kitchen, while the other two bounced into the alley beside it.
That did it. She gave my neck a vicious twist. I screamed and she shrieked, “Crank this car!”
I did, in wonderment that Mr. Pickens had left the key in the ignition. Of course he had expected it to be safe, locked in with me.
The car roared to life. I reached for the gear shift on the console and pulled at it, but it didn’t move. I tried again and heard a grinding noise. “I can’t find DRIVE,” I said. “I can’t find the lights, I can’t find anything.”
“The clutch!” she screamed.
“The what?” Oh, Lord, it had a straight-shift gear stick. No wonder Mr. Pickens wouldn’t let anyone else drive it—no one could. But years before, I’d tried a straight-shift, so as my passenger reached for my neck again, I stomped on the clutch and rammed the shift stick into some kind of gear. The car shot forward and crashed into the back of the car in front. Glass tinkled onto the pavement.
The woman screamed in my face, calling me all kinds of outlandish and completely unearned—I was trying my best—names.
Stomping on the clutch again, I tried another gear, this time smashing into the car behind. A few more back-and-forth tries later, I was able to get the car out of the parking place.
We were out on the street, the car growling along in first gear because I couldn’t find the next one, headed toward the soup kitchen and the brace of squad cars out front.
That woman started screaming again. “Turn on the lights, you fool! Turn around! Don’t go past the cops! The other way, go the other way!”
I’d about had enough. “If you don’t stop yelling in my ear,” I said, “I’m going to run this car up a telephone pole. And if you pinch me again . . . well, you’ll be sorry.”
“Just get me out of here,” she said, but she kept her hands to herself. “And shift gears! Don’t you know anything?”
So I tried for the next gear but the car didn’t like that one bit. Find it or grind it, I remembered, and I was not finding it.
“The clutch!” the woman screamed again, giving me a back-handed slap on the arm, which made me slam on the brakes. The motor died right there in the middle of the street.
“Don’t you touch me,” I said, as I quickly cranked the car, found first gear again, and revved the engine. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Limping along in first gear, with the engine pulling hard and me searching for the light switch, I almost clipped a man running across the street from Miguel’s. Dodging him, I sideswiped a pickup, then heard a chorus of yells from the loitering men watching the action at the soup kitchen. I wished they would stop me. I wished they’d call 911 and report me. I did not want to go off somewhere with this woman—no telling what she’d do.
At the thought of actually driving off into the night with this lunatic when Mr. Pickens and a whole bunch of police officers were right there in front of me, I knew what I had to do. So I did it.
It would’ve worked so much better if I’d been able to find third, or even second, gear to give me some speed, but that big engine growling along in first had the power of a truck.
When I got abreast of the rear bumper of one of the parked cop cars, I turned the wheel, pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and sent Mr. Pickens’s beloved car full on into WE PROTECT AND SERVE—and kept pressing the gas pedal. Metal squeaked and screamed as the squad car crumpled, and I kept pressing. The woman screamed bloody murder, slapping at me and trying to wrest away the steering wheel. I wanted to smack her good, but I had my hands full as I kept my foot on the gas pedal, that big engine groaning and growling as it pushed the squad car up onto the sidewalk and scraped it against Brother Vern’s rented building. Flinching from the woman’s slapping hands, I turned the wheel so that her side of Mr. Pickens’s car scraped along the side of the squad car. She wouldn’t be getting out that way.
Men—in uniform and out—poured from the door of the soup kitchen, Mr. Pickens leading the pack. I didn’t wait for them. I was out of the car in a flash, tumbling out onto the pavement, unmindful of the drizzling rain and what it would do to my hair.
Screaming was all I heard—screaming and yelling and shrieking and some really bad words. The woman was crawling over the console, her mouth wide open and her face contorted, as she tried to follow me out.
Big hands helped me up as cops swarmed around the car and dragged out the woman, kicking and screaming and cursing. I think I was the object of her stream of profanity, but I just tuned her out. Mr. Pickens was there.
“Are you all right?” he yelled, his voice frantic with concern. “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?”
“Oh, Mr. Pickens, I’ve put a dent in your car, but I’ll have it fixed. I didn’t know what else to do—she made me do it. I wouldn’t have driven it for the world, but she pinched me so hard I had to do it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll get it fixed.” I looked over the scene of the accident. “And the police car, too.”
