Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

He turned back and watched himself drinking tequila in the mirror. “You’re a cheap drunk, lady. One gulp and you’re gone. That how Macklin got you in bed the first time?”

  She unhooked one of her heels from the rung of the stool and put it on the floor. He grasped her wrist, shutting off her circulation.

  “I need to use the ladies’ room.”

  “I’ll walk you over. The place is full of sleazebags.”

  Tiny, crowded tables took up most of the space on the way to the little corridor leading to the restrooms. He steered her expertly between them with his hand on her upper arm. He wasn’t gripping it as hard as he could, but she knew his fingers would leave bruises.

  There was no line, a lucky break. There was no window in the ladies’ room either, which was not so lucky. She passed a pair of women freshening their makeup at the mirror—one wore a full-length evening gown and bolero jacket in black velvet, the other a purple leather miniskirt and red brassiere—and entered a vacant stall, where she sat on the toilet seat and thought.

  She’d dressed for comfort, not for glamor: short-sleeved rayon shirt, loose, pleated slacks, flats with waffled soles, her walking shoes, packed with the Walk of Fame in mind. She’d left her purse in the room, clipped a hundred dollars in twenties, her driver’s license, and American Express card together and put them in a pocket. No makeup case or even sunglasses, nothing to carry. It was as light as she’d traveled since she’d passed out of her tomboy phase. She felt like a spy, or some kind of fugitive from the law. Which, in a way, she was—a fugitive from the law, anyway—because Abilene had so clearly demonstrated that the police were not her salvation. It was as if she were the criminal. These were the thoughts that trampled through her head as she sat fully clothed on the toilet seat in one of the stalls.

  Five minutes seemed to be the far frontier of Abilene’s patience. The air stirred as the door opened from the corridor, followed by a sharp gasp from one of the women at the mirror. Cowboy heels clomped on tile.

  “Pull up your panties, ladies. I’m a Texas Ranger. There’s a woman in here kidnapped a little boy in Dallas for immoral purposes.”

  More intakes of breath, feet shuffling toward the exit. The door drifted shut on silence.

  Abilene grunted. He was crouching to peer under the first in the line of stalls. Laurie was in the third, standing on the seat now, hunched over to keep her head from sticking above the partition. She reached out and carefully slid back the latch, holding the door shut with a thumb as she did so. She could hear her heart hammering.

  She saw a glint off a silver-capped toe, heard again the grunt as he lowered himself to push-up position on the floor outside her stall. Now. She pounced, pushing off with her feet and throwing all her weight against the door.

  He was just getting up. She pushed through the resistance when the door struck him, in the shoulder or head, tipping him off his hands and the balls of his feet. She hurdled him as he fell sprawling, lost her balance when she touched down, but caught herself on the edge of a sink and kept going, not looking back, tore open the door to the corridor and ran down it and across the lounge, bumping tables and knocking over glasses and caroming off a man who was putting on his coat. She used her shoulder as a battering ram to clear a way through a gaggle of customers in the entrance. Shoving open the door she tripped on the threshold and fell to one knee on the front step, skinning it and tearing her pants. A parking attendant in a red blazer threw away his cigarette and stepped in to help her, but she was on her feet before he could bend down, bounding down the steps to the sidewalk.

  There was a line of cabs in front of the building, but the closest was the one at the end, where the driver was holding the door for a woman who was getting out of the back. Laurie shoved her out of the way and scrambled into the seat. For an instant their faces were two inches apart, but it would be minutes before she realized the angry expression belonged to Kathleen Turner.

  “Go!” she shouted to the driver, but he was already behind the wheel, pushing down the accelerator. Later she would wonder how many agitated females he had been called upon to sweep away from popular places in a hurry. She looked back through the rear window and saw what looked like the crown of a cream-colored Stetson bobbing above the heads of the crowd on the sidewalk, making its way toward the first cab in line.

  “Please go faster.”

  The car lunged. The automobiles in Los Angeles, basted together as the place was by multiple lanes of concrete and asphalt, all seemed to be powered by engines not normally available to passenger vehicles. A pair of kind-looking eyes in a dark face looked at something in the rearview mirror, then met her gaze. They looked like Morgan Freeman’s, tragic and tolerant.

  “I can tie this guy up in knots,” the driver said.

  “Please.”

  The cab swung right into a side street from the inside lane, forcing the driver of a haulaway carrying yet more cars into the city to whoosh his air brakes to avoid collision, picked up speed in a narrow aisle between parked cars, spun left into a broad boulevard, then right again through a parking lot and out into a kind of alley that looked as if it hadn’t been paved since before color television. Laurie had a good sense of direction, but lost her bearings quickly in the tangle of one-way streets, commercial drives, and palm-lined avenues that followed. After what must have been a hundred blocks, they slowed down, and she stopped looking through the rear window.

  She leaned forward, gripping the back of the front seat. “My husband—”

  She stopped. Nothing beyond those two words was safe to say.

  They were stopped at a light. The driver twisted in his seat and rested a forearm with an anchor tattooed on it across the top. It made her think of Popeye, but there was nothing cartoonish about the expression that went with the sad eyes.

  “I’m an old fart, I give advice,” he said. “You can tell me to shut up and drive and it won’t hurt my feelings none. Any husband worth running from is worth getting rid of.”

  “It’s not what you think. But thanks.”

  The light changed. As if he could see it through the back of his head he turned back around and crossed the intersection.

  Laurie sat back. She looked at the driver’s face on his chauffeur’s license attached to the back of the seat. He was younger in the photo, and wore a beard that he’d shaved off since, but the eyes were the same. She thought again of Morgan Freeman, and that made her think of something else.

  “Your name’s Martin?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I was named after Dr. King. Not Junior, his daddy. My mama used to sing in his choir in Atlanta, so she said. I never heard her sing a note.”

  “My name’s Laurie. I was named after Lauren Bacall.”

  “I don’t guess Miz Bacall would mind if she ever saw you.”

  “Do you like movies, Martin?”

  “I always say yes to that question. In this town you got to, even if you don’t. I don’t know as you noticed, but that was Miz Kathleen Turner you almost knocked over getting in.”

  “I noticed. I wasn’t that far gone. What about Jim Carrey?”

  “I never drove him.”

  “I meant do you like his movies?”

  “They’re okay. I’m a Wayans man myself. But, yeah, he’s all right. I guess I like him.”

  “What about James Caan?”

  “I drove him once. He was with some people, so we didn’t talk. He’s made some good ones. The Godfather, that was terrific. My wife liked For the Boys.”

  “How does he compare to Jim Carrey?”

  The brows in the mirror drew together. “I don’t guess I can answer that. Who could? I mean, Carrey couldn’t beat up a punk in an alley so’s you’d believe it, but Caan couldn’t twist his face around and make funny noises without you thinking he’s having some kind of seizure. How you going to pick one over the other? Sometimes you feel like a banana split and sometimes you want pastrami. It don’t mean one’s any better than the other. They’re just different.
”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where to? Courthouse, airport, or home?”

  She looked down. She was twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger. She stopped. “Airport.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “On the way, if we pass someplace where they filmed something famous, or where the stars hang out, or a fireplug Rin-Tin-Tin once peed on, I’d consider it a favor if you kept it to yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And please don’t call me ma’am.”

  “Yes, Miz Bacall.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Macklin spotted the surveillance vehicle right away.

  San Antonio had experienced one of its brief, fierce autumn rains that turned its sandy soil to gritty mud, which adhered to tires and fenders like salt on flypaper. The panel truck bearing a logo identifying it as the property of a maids-for-hire firm was the only vehicle in Johns Davis’s block that had been washed since the downpour. That spit-and-polish paramilitary training never went away.

  He’d purchased a pair of cheap folding 4x binoculars at the local Walgreen’s, which he moved from the truck to the handful of cars parked against the curb and in driveways within reasonable striking distance of the bookie’s cedar-and-stone-faced house with the requisite clump of decorative mescal planted in the front yard. Depending upon the importance the local authorities placed on the Davis affair, the sparkling panel truck might have been a decoy. A late-model Plymouth with a recent wax job under a diffident sprinkling of mud seemed a likelihood, but he eliminated it when a tall man with his hair in a ponytail and a red bandanna tied around his head came out of one of the houses and got in behind the wheel and drove away. He’d been carrying two or three videotapes in plastic cases with the blue-and-yellow Blockbuster logo on the labels.

  It was an upscale neighborhood, as Edison, the spotter, had said. The residents took good care of their homes and drove new cars and pickups with all the options and some custom features. Macklin slid the binoculars along the street until he came to an automobile he liked the look of: a bottle-green 1960 Corvette Stingray with white inserts and chrome-reverse wheels, receiving a bath from a middle-aged man in an undershirt in the driveway of a brick split-level house six doors down from Davis’s. The man was taking advantage of the last ray of daylight to serub and hose off the destructive sand before covering the car with the tan tarpaulin he had rolled up on his front porch. Macklin focused in on a sticker that ran the length of the rear bumper, reading: PROUD TO SAY I’M N.R.A. He grinned.

  He laid the binoculars on the passenger’s seat of the rented Camaro, reached into the K-Mart sack on the floor, and retrieved an aluminum slingshot with a forearm brace and an industrial-strength rubber band. Although he’d seen the identical item in Walgreen’s, and there formed the idea of using it, he’d gone to another store for that purchase, to avoid calling attention to himself at any one establishment. The police would put it all together in time, but there was no sense in making their job easier. Without opening his window, he fitted the brace to his forearm and sighted between the prongs, fixing the Corvette’s sloping rear window a third of the way up from the bottom of his window, two inches right of center. In a few minutes it would be dark, and he couldn’t be sure he’d be able to find the mark in whatever light remained.

  Laying aside the slingshot, he scooped the .38 from under his seat and threaded the barrel inside the waistband of his slacks. He’d dressed loosely for freedom of movement, in shades of gray, which blended into the shadows better than black and wouldn’t get him arrested as a suspicious person if he were spotted skulking about got up as a cat burglar, and high-topped black sneakers he’d bought at K-Mart and would discard later, along with everything else he was wearing. He’d known killers who were conscientious about discarding incriminating weapons and not leaving DNA behind, but who were waiting their turn on Death Row because microscopic amounts of blood had shown up in their closets. And then there were footprints, which had been convicting people since Sherlock Holmes. Preparation was important, but it only counted for half. The rest was in the follow-through. If you paid proper attention to those two things, the act itself was automatic.

  The Texas dusk slid in on its belly, gila-fashion, striped with yellow from the lighted windows and then the streetlamps as they winked on all of a piece. The Corvette owner wound his hose around a reel and covered the car, then went inside the house. For five minutes nothing stirred, Macklin included. Then he opened his window. He picked up the slingshot and fitted a steel ball-bearing the size of a marble into the pocket of the rubber band, rolling the ball first between thumb and forefinger to smear the prints. Again he fitted the brace to his forearm, took aim using the coordinates he’d noted, rested his arm on the window ledge, and drew back the band to the corner of his jaw. He took a deep breath, let out half of it, and released his grip on the band. The projectile whistled away into the darkness. After an improbably long silence, the shivery tinkle of collapsing glass drifted back toward him. There was another pause after that, a kind of gulp, and then the shrill pulsating wail of an electronic alarm, accompanied by the frenzied beep of the Corvette’s horn and its headlights flashing.

  The porchlight of the split-level house came on and the man in the undershirt charged outside. Light bounced in flat sheets off the mirrorlike surface of a huge revolver in his right hand. The bigger the bumper sticker, the bigger the gun, and Macklin had expected nothing less than a .44 magnum the size of a pump handle. He wasn’t disappointed.

  Things moved quickly after that. Light spilled out of the panel truck as three men in plainclothes boiled out, two of them drawing guns from belt holsters. The third carried a shotgun. They spread out in front of the split-level, shouting for the Corvette owner to drop his weapon.

  Macklin got out and trotted across to Johns Davis’s house.

  A narrow strip of grass separated it from the house next door. He followed it around to the back, where three concrete steps led up to a screened-in back porch.

  Edison’s information had been thorough and, based upon the early evidence, accurate. The clapboard screen door was secured with a hook and eye. Macklin released the hook by drawing a jackknife blade up between the door and the frame and let himself inside, easing the door shut behind him against the tension of the spring. The back door was more of a challenge, but that, too, had been foreseen. Edison, or an experienced thief in his employ, had taken an impression of the deadbolt lock and had a key made. However, no one had had the opportunity to test the key. Keys used frequently tended to wear into patterns identical with the wear and tear on the locks, and new keys struck from fresh blanks often had to go back once or twice for additional grinding. This one was a tight fit. For a moment, Macklin thought this visit would have to be scrubbed and a different scenario planned for another time, as Davis would be more on his guard after the incident down the block. There was no room for play in the keyhole, so Macklin drew the key out and reinserted it. This time the tumblers gave. The bolt slid back.

  Not much noise had been made, but there had been some. He hoped the commotion out front had drawn Davis away from the back. He pocketed the key, drew the .38, and crept inside, swiveling right and left to avoid ambush. When none occurred he inspected the darkness for the pinpoint glow of a keypad or the flicker of a motion detector. There was neither. Edison was worth whatever he was paid. Someone would miss him when the time came for Macklin to sweep up his tracks.

  He was in a kitchen. Light leaking from the next room gleamed off countertops and appliances, a refrigerator cut in with a click and a hum. He tested the linoleum for creaks, then wasted no time getting across it and into a six-foot hallway paneled in blonde wood and carpeted with silent shag, the intruder’s friend. There were pictures on the walls, coppertoned photographs of old-time Texas Rangers and a print made from a steelpoint engraving of a Civil War naval battle in the Gulf of Mexico. The spotter had said Davis was as proud of Southwestern history as only a tr
ansplanted Texan could be.

  The hallway opened into a large living room with more shag on the floor and overstuffed furniture covered in brown saddle leather with antiqued brass studs, emphatically a bachelor’s room. Four torchiere lamps with distressed-iron shafts bounced light off a white ceiling, illuminating every corner. Football players skirmished in silence on a twenty-seven-inch TV screen in an Early American cupboard with shelves of books and videotapes in clear plastic cases.

  The man standing at the picture window with his back to Macklin matched the description and the photographs he’d been given. Davis was thickset but not fat, with the square shoulders of a onetime athlete and a head of thick sandy hair, tinted from its natural gray. Underneath his light sweater and khaki slacks, Macklin knew, was an appendix scar, necessarily long for the year in which the surgery had taken place, and a pin in his right ankle where he’d shattered it in his only game with the junior varsity at Loyola University. He had six hundred fifty-eight thousand dollars distributed among ten U.S. banks and nearly two million in numbered accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and the Principality of Andorra. He hated beets. At the moment he was holding the thick drapes away from the windowframe to watch what was going on in the street.

  Macklin pressed his elbow against his ribs to steady his arm and took aim between Davis’s shoulder blades. The drapes stirred, straightening themselves, and Davis turned around. He had something black in his right hand.

  Macklin nearly fired on sight. He would have, a year ago, when his reflexes were on point. In the synapse of delay, he identified the item as a cordless telephone. He held off, with his finger resting on the trigger.

  “I just bought it today,” Davis said. “I can’t use them in my work. Too many people have scanners, I might as well place bets over the P.A. system at the Astrodome. But the police won’t let me have a gun, and I can’t very well walk around stepping over a cord. I can’t even push a vacuum cleaner without tripping myself up.”