by Brenda Novak
“Well…” Kimberly gazed distractedly after Brandon. “Don’t do anything till I get back.”
“SO WHAT’S THE PLAN?” Kimberly asked as soon as she returned from taking Brandon to school.
Lauren sat at the kitchen table next to her friend, drinking the iced cappuccino Kimberly had brought her. The sun streamed in through the French doors that lined the back of the house, and the fresh flowers that normally graced the table were pushed off to the side. “I don’t really have one yet,” she said, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the vacuum. The maid service had arrived only minutes earlier, and a tall, lean woman was cleaning the bedrooms. “I went through my checkbook and savings account statements while you were gone, trying to figure out how much money I can lay my hands on right away.”
“And?” The diamond tennis bracelet on Kimberly’s wrist slid partway up her arm as she took a sip of her own cappuccino. “What’s the grand total?”
“Fifteen thousand seven hundred eighty-nine dollars.” Lauren circled the figure beneath the column of numbers she’d added together on the pad she normally kept by the phone. “That is, if I don’t break the Certificate of Deposit Nana gave me when I graduated from college.”
“Fifteen thousand, huh?” Kimberly twirled her bracelet with two perfectly sculpted nails. “That doesn’t sound like much, kiddo. You could get a lot more if you called your father. I’m sure he’s got plenty stashed away.”
“I doubt much of it’s liquid. He keeps his money pretty tied up in investments. Besides, Harley’s never had much. I think fifteen thousand will sound like a fortune to him.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to call your father about this?”
Lauren frowned as she pictured speaking with Quentin. Couldn’t she wait until she’d cleaned up this mess she’d made? It would be so much more pleasant to tell him with a smile in her voice that he didn’t need to worry any longer: Brandon was safe, they were all safe, she’d taken care of everything.
“What more can my father do than I’m already doing?” she asked.
Kimberly adjusted her visor. “It just seems like he’d want to be involved. What if your plan backfires?”
“It can’t backfire,” Lauren argued. “We offer Harley money, he rejects the offer, we sweeten the pot. It’s that simple. Pretty soon, we’ll reach a number he can’t refuse.”
“I don’t think I’d accept any amount of money, not if it meant giving up my child.”
“He’s not you. He’s always been dirt poor. And he’s not ‘giving up’ Brandon. He did that a long time ago. This is just—” she shrugged “—insurance that he’ll stay out of the way until Brandon grows to adulthood.”
“Okay,” Kimberly said, but she didn’t sound very convinced.
“The problem is how to approach him,” Lauren went on. “Should I call him and arrange a meeting? Or show up at Tank’s apartment and hope to catch him off guard?”
Leaning back, Kimberly crossed her feet at the ankles and toyed with the white pleats on her skirt. “It would help if we knew him better,” she mused. “Do you think Damien could tell you more about what he’s like?”
Lauren propped her elbows on the table. “Damien doesn’t really know him. He was out of high school by the time Harley was a freshman.”
“Jeez, I didn’t realize Damien’s so old.”
“He’s eight years older than we are.”
“Okay, so what about Tank? Do you think we can enlist his help?”
“Are you kidding? Harley’s his friend.”
“Wait, I got it.” Clapping her hands, Kimberly shot out of her chair and did a palms up “ta-da.” “We spy on him!”
“What?” Lauren cried. “No way!”
“Don’t say no yet. I’ve seen it done in lots of TV shows. We simply get a pair of binoculars and stake out Tank’s place. We watch what Harley does, get a feel for what he’s like, and let that help us with our decisions. If he’s drinking heavily or doing drugs or entertaining one woman after another, we can feel justified in buying him off, fighting him to the death, whatever. Because then we’ll know his true nature, right?”
Lauren definitely saw the benefit of obtaining more information about Harley, but spying? “And if he’s not doing any of those things? I’ve got to fight him anyway.”
“Who says?” she demanded.
Lauren’s father said. And she had to listen to him. It was her place in life to be the good daughter, the one who always tried to maintain peace in the family. She’d heard it as a constant litany the whole time she and Audra were growing up: That lazy Audra, if only she was more like you, Lauren…If only she had her head on straight like you…Lauren knows what life’s all about, don’t you, my girl?…Lauren would never be so stupid…
“I say,” she lied. “We have to fight him because it’s best for Brandon.”
Kimberly frowned. “Then go to court if that’s what you believe is best. But I think you’re crazy to go into anything blind. You’ve got to know what you’re dealing with, and if you see Harley in action again you might actually feel good about what you have to do.”
There was nothing to lose. Harley was far from being a saint. Lauren knew he wouldn’t be a good influence on Brandon, and confirming that could only help. “A man dressed in leather and riding a Harley is seldom a paragon of virtue,” she said to battle the voice inside that whispered Anyone can change…
“Exactly! So come on.” Kimberly scooped her keys off the counter and charged for the door. “We’ve got to buy a pair of binoculars and a plain-looking sedan and get set up before he starts moving around for the day.”
“We’re going to buy a plain-looking sedan?” Lauren echoed.
“No? Okay, you’re right,” Kimberly said. “That’ll only eat into our bribe money. We’ll borrow my cousin Georgia’s car. It’s a Chevy something or other, pretty nondescript, and she lives close by. Only you’ll have to drive. I think it’s a standard transmission and I don’t know how to drive a stick.”
Lauren shoved back her chair. As crazy as Kimberly’s plan sounded, she thought that catching Harley in some transgression—doing something completely unacceptable—might be the perfect solution. At least it would eradicate the doubts in her mind. Plus, if she was keeping an eye on Harley, she’d know Brandon was safe at school. “We don’t have any idea where Tank lives,” she said.
“I’ve got my cell,” Kimberly told her. “If he’s not listed with information, we can always call Damien.”
“Okay,” Lauren said. Then she smiled. Harley had accused her of doing nothing more productive with her time than playing tennis. But she and Kimberly were going to be doing more than visiting the club this morning. A lot more.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’M HAVING A BLAST,” Kimberly whispered, training her binoculars on Tank’s apartment. “I’ve always wanted to do something like this.”
“You don’t have to whisper,” Lauren told her, growing exasperated. “There’s no way he can hear us.”
“Our windows are down.”
“Only because we can’t run the air conditioning in this hunk of junk without burning up the engine. His windows are closed tight.” May was hardly ever this hot in Portland. It felt like summer already.
“So, someone else could hear us,” Kimberly said.
Lauren gazed around the deserted parking lot. “Who? There’s no one around. The last sign of life we saw was that woman who carted her three children and several baskets of clothing to the laundry, and that was over an hour ago.”
“Surveillance usually takes a while,” Kimberly said. “Didn’t you ever watch Stakeout?”
“I did, but Richard Dreyfus isn’t here, and I’m getting bored, okay? This is a waste of time.”
“Boy, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed,” Kimberly grumbled.
“Probably because I never made it to bed.” Lauren sighed and tried to be patient. But after spending the next half hour tapping her fingers on the st
eering wheel, reclining her seat as far as the clothes and garbage behind it would allow, and leaning out the window to stare at Harley’s bike, which was parked in the shade of an old oak tree at the corner of the lot, she’d had it. “Aren’t those binoculars hurting your eyes yet?” she asked when she couldn’t take the boredom another minute.
“No.”
“How long do you think we should stay here?” She depressed the cigarette lighter just to watch it pop out. “I mean, I admit this was kind of titillating at first. But I’m starting to feel silly.”
“Consider it a background search,” Kimberly said. “The do-it-yourself kind.”
“Maybe if it was night, we’d see something. Probably Tuesday mornings aren’t big drug-dealing hours.”
“Tuesday mornings are as good a time as any.”
“But we’ve been here for over two hours and we haven’t caught sight of Harley once. He probably left the house with Tank this morning before we arrived.”
“How do you know Tank’s gone?”
“I’m guessing he works. Besides, there’s only six cars in the lot and over fifty apartments in the complex. Someone has to be gone.”
“Tank might be gone, but I don’t think Harley is,” Kimberly said. “He’s probably sleeping. Drug dealers always sleep late. We just need to wake him up.”
Lauren raised her brows. “We don’t know he’s a drug dealer. And how do you propose we wake him up? Knock?”
Kimberly handed over her cell phone. “Call him.”
“What?”
“It’s my cell phone, so even if Tank has Caller ID, Harley won’t recognize the number.”
“And if he doesn’t answer?”
Kimberly hesitated.
“We leave, okay?” Lauren insisted. “If he doesn’t answer, he’s probably not home. And I don’t want to be sitting here when he gets back.”
Kimberly rolled her eyes. “Okay, don’t get uptight.”
Lauren figured she had good reason to be uptight. She’d never spied on anyone before, and she didn’t feel like a particularly upstanding citizen doing it now. To appease Kimberly, she dialed Tank’s number, which she knew by heart, and pushed the talk button.
Don’t answer. Don’t answer. Don’t answer, she chanted to herself as it rang. She was starting to have a bad feeling about this. She was starting to think her time would be better spent playing tennis all day. At least she couldn’t get into any trouble doing something so—
“Hello?”
Shit! It was him! Lauren nearly dropped the phone in her haste to punch the end button.
“He’s home?” Kimberly asked, her eyes wide with excitement.
Heart racing, Lauren nodded.
“I told you,” she said triumphantly. “He was sleeping, right?”
“I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to tell from hello.”
“Yippee!” Kimberly clapped her hands. “Here we go.” Using the binoculars, she watched the apartment while Lauren waited for any kind of reaction, but nothing happened. The minutes dragged on. A neighbor took out her trash. An old Corvette turned into the lot, idled while a young boy ran up to one of the apartments, then peeled off, but there was no sign of Harley.
“He must’ve gone back to sleep,” Kimberly said, obviously disappointed. “Call him again.”
“Why?”
“We need to stir him up, get him moving so we can see what he’s up to.”
Lauren looked at the phone she’d propped next to the gearshift. She didn’t want to call him again. She wanted to go home. “No, we’re leaving.”
“Why? This is just getting good.”
“Have you forgotten? We have a bribe to scrape together so I can get Harley out of my life. And I need to work on the fund-raiser for the women’s shelter, and go to the grocery store, and—”
“Wait,” Kimberly interrupted, her hand reaching out to catch Lauren just as she was about to turn the key in the ignition. “I think I see something.”
Lauren saw it, too, even without binoculars. Someone was raising the blind a little higher on Tank’s apartment window, but because of the brightness of the sun, she couldn’t make out who it was.
“Is that him?” she breathed, her nerves jumping to attention.
“It has to be,” Kimberly said. “Tank sure as heck never looked so good. And he wasn’t the type to improve with age.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Nothing yet. He just looked outside, then walked away.”
Lauren smacked the steering wheel. “Darn, that’s it? Two hours out here in this heat and that’s all we get? A glimpse?”
“I’m not complaining,” Kimberly said. “He wasn’t wearing a shirt.”
“Give me those binoculars.”
Kimberly reluctantly relinquished her new toy. At first everything was blurry and dark, but once Lauren had adjusted the focus, she saw a Coors poster plastered on the wall, a pinup of a woman with giant breasts wearing a string bikini, and an old lamp, obviously next to a couch or chair. “Which way did he go?” she asked.
“To the left.”
Lauren scanned the area left of the window without seeing anything, then caught her breath when Harley loomed, larger than life, before her eyes. “Oh, my gosh. He’s back. And he’s wearing nothing but a pair of jeans.” At least, that was what Lauren guessed he had on. She couldn’t see anything except a broad expanse of golden-brown chest and rippling muscle. “He must’ve just gotten out of the shower because his hair is wet.”
“See? We probably woke him when we called. Party animals are always late risers.”
Lauren didn’t say anything. She was too busy staring at Harley as he paced in front of the window while using the telephone. He looked good enough to make her mouth go dry.
“He’s a bum for sure,” Kimberly went on, growing more committed as she spoke. “Who else would sleep until nearly eleven o’clock?”
“Sleeping late hardly makes him an unfit father,” Lauren replied, watching Harley pinch the bridge of his nose, talk some more on the phone, then hang up. “We need something more, something that tells me Brandon’s better off without him.”
“We’re going to have to get closer. You realize that, don’t you?” Kimberly made a grab for the binoculars, but Lauren held them out of reach, so she leaned out the window, presumably to see what she could with the naked eye.
Harley disappeared, then returned carrying a cup. “Get closer? Why?” Lauren asked, still entranced by what she was seeing.
“Because you can’t see if there’s any drug paraphernalia on the coffee table from down here,” Kimberly said. “You can’t see whether there’re any hard liquor bottles on the counter or whether there’s a slew of adult videos stacked under the TV.”
“All that stuff could belong to Tank. It’s his apartment.” Harley set his cup down, rubbed his face with one hand and picked up the phone again.
“If there’re drugs up there, chances are Tank’s not doing them alone,” Kimberly said, and Lauren had to admit she was probably right. Still, sitting in the parking lot with a pair of binoculars, watching Harley through the living-room window, was one thing. Creeping up and peeking into other, more private rooms was something else.
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she said.
“Oh, come on. If you want to know what Harley’s really like, you’ll have to take a few risks, Lauren.”
“Risks?” Lauren lowered the binoculars long enough to narrow her eyes at Kimberly. “You’re going to get me arrested, aren’t you?”
TANK’S CALL-WAITING BEEPED for the fourth time in an hour. Harley was still on the telephone with his dealership in Burlingame. He’d just spoken to his top salesman, helped him work out a deal for a customer who wanted a new hog but owed too much on his trade-in, and now he was talking to Joe, his manager, on another problem. But he was almost too tired to think straight. He’d worked most of the night, slept less than four hours, but there were things he needed to do that
could only be handled during the day.
“It’s a factory problem,” he said after hearing about the many complaints they’d been receiving on the ignition modulator for the Softtail Deuce. “Call them and see what they’re going to do to make it right.”
“I’ve already talked to them,” Joe said. “They’ll guarantee the parts, but they won’t cover labor. Which is a bitch because someone’s got to change out the injectors, and people are getting royally pissed when we try to charge them for it.”
“I don’t blame them. They shouldn’t have to pay for it. But I’m not going to eat the loss, either. It’s not our fault the parts were bad. I’ll call the factory myself and get back to you—”
Tank’s call-waiting beeped again. “Gotta run,” Harley said. “Someone’s calling through and this isn’t my phone. I’ll talk to you in a few minutes.” He hit the flash button. “Hello?”
“Harley?” It was Tank.
“Hey, man. What’s going on?”
“Reva, the neighbor who sometimes watches Lucy for me, just called me on my cell. I can’t imagine there’s anything to this, but she claims there’s two women in a brown Chevy Corsica at the far end of the parking lot who are training a pair of binoculars on my apartment or someone else’s close by. I can’t imagine anyone would actually case my place, least of all two women, but whatever they’re doing is making Reva pretty nervous. I was hoping you’d run down there and see what’s going on.”
Two women with binoculars? What was that all about? There certainly wasn’t any good bird-watching around here, not in this cement jungle. “Sure thing,” he said. “Call you back in a few.”
Harley hung up and moved to one side of the front window, careful to stay in the shadows so he could gaze out over the lot without being easily observed. His bike was fine. He could see it parked under the oak tree where he’d left it yesterday. And the car he’d rented was still in its proper place, too, in a space marked Visitor. There was a brown Chevy Corsica parked on the street, tucked halfway behind the Springfield Apartments sign, but it appeared to be empty. He couldn’t see anyone at all—until he spotted a slim woman in a tennis skirt slipping through the trees near the curb. A pair of binoculars hung around her neck, and she was casting furtive glances to either side while pulling someone behind her. But the pair didn’t seem threatening. They just seemed out of place. He couldn’t picture either one of them driving the rusted Chevy Corsica with the smashed front fender. Neither could he imagine them living in this mostly blue-collar neighborhood.
