Shelter

by Gilley, Lauren

  “Sean,” he said, and wasn’t providing any more info than that.

  It didn’t sound like he needed to. “What can I do for you?”

  He glanced around the dark interior of the SUV to double check that all the windows were rolled up and that Jerome was still standing in front of the hood, having a smoke. “My guy – Carlos Morales – says you’re stalking him.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Who?”

  Sean was too pissed for games. “Cut the shit, you know who. I gave you a goddamn list of all my pushers.”

  “Right, right.” Another pause. “Carlos is the one who lives in Marietta, right?”

  “The one who’s cousin got shot,” he growled. “And now he’s sayin’ you – and I mean you, not one of your goddamn associates – has been hangin’ around the café where his girl works.”

  “Oh,” the guy put on a fake voice of epiphany. “The little brunette. The pregnant one? Very cute. But, no, not stalking.” He made the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “I like the coffee there.”

  “You can go to Starbucks for coffee. I agreed to this shit with your boss. Get off my guy’s ass.”

  Diego – why didn’t he know this fucker’s name?! – clucked his tongue. “Don’t go getting self-righteous,” his pompous act slipped a moment, that hood rat in him peeking through again. “Your cooperation was appreciated, and won’t go without reward. I’m not stalking your guy.” Another pause. “Girl’s a sweet piece, though. Even knocked up. Not too many pregnant chicks I’d be willing to hit, but that one…”

  Sean felt a fist close around his heart that squeezed his pulse into a fast clip. Shit. He’d wanted to think Carlos was overreacting, wanted to believe that Sam’s death was a freak incident, a casualty of the street war. But Alma Morales was about as innocent as they came. He recalled the pretty slip of a girl he’d met at Sam’s place, the soft brown eyes, the graceful, eye-catching way she’d moved. The girl had classy DNA, but had been dressed down in jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot. She was exactly the kind of girl a guy wanted to go home to at night, and the kind you didn’t want to get killed. While she was carrying her dead husband’s child.

  “That girl’s got nothing to do with any of this,” he sounded more desperate than he wanted to. “Leave her outta this.”

  “She’s not in any danger.” And then the dial tone buzzed in his ear.

  “Shit,” Sean tossed his BlackBerry into the seat beside him, the phone bouncing off the leather.

  The stakes had been raised. His promotion wasn’t the only thing on the line anymore.

  **

  “Was work okay?”

  Carlos had just come into the bedroom – Alma’s bedroom – and was shedding his clothes and depositing them in the hamper by the door. It was a decorative, wicker hamper, unlike his own plastic garbage can type thing at the apartment. She was in the bathroom, the door open, and he could hear water running. Her voice sounded muffled by toothpaste.

  “Yeah,” he responded. He still felt the grip of the cold sweat that had plagued him all the way home. A glance at the clock proved it was almost eleven – and, if she were paying attention, wouldn’t she know that was a stupid time for him to get let off work from the bar? “Slow night,” he called in her direction, guilt niggling at his gut.

  “Maybe you shoulda thought about that before you started fuckin’ your dead cousin’s bitch.”

  The words, like everything vile and wrong in the world, had left their imprints on his brain. As if he could actually see the letters, the harshness of them. He couldn’t shake them off and it was infuriating.

  By the time he heard the water cut off, he had stripped down to his boxers. Alma’s small, pale feet came softly to the doorway and she stood in front of him in her pajamas: the silk shorts and camisole, her baby bump a taut little swell where hem met waistband. She’d brushed her long hair out and her cheeks were a shiny, freshly-scrubbed pink. Her grin was sleepy.

  “Guess who stopped by tonight?”

  He passed a hand across her belly in a quick gesture of greeting, and moved past her into the bathroom, too distracted to give a damn who’d stopped by so long as it wasn’t “Diego.” “Who?”

  She followed him, stood in the threshold while he cranked on the shower and waited for the temperature to get hot. “Caroline.”

  His reflection looked like shit: dark circles under his eyes, scruff on his jaw, hair starting to grow out from its usual buzz – which was a bad idea, because his hair was curly as shit and he no longer had the patience to gel it into submission. He rooted around in the bag he had on the counter for his clippers, the water raining against the glass door of the shower beside him. “Really?” he asked because he needed to keep up some semblance of normal for Alma’s sake at least.

  “Yeah. We had a nice talk.”

  “Good.”

  “It really was. All this trouble I’ve had with Mom has got me to thinking.” She propped a shoulder against the doorjamb and looked like she intended to stay there for a while. She continued to talk, though he tuned her out, as he did a quick, messy trim of his head and sideburns. “…and I’m hoping,” Alma said as he slid open the shower door and stepped out of his boxers. He just couldn’t shake her. Was she going to stand on the other side of the glass and shout the rest of her story to him? She talked too much! Sam had said as much once.

  “Do ya mind?” he asked in a tight, terse voice he hadn’t intended, but had been unable to prevent. It was bad enough he was feeling guilty again; her presence was annoying the shit out of him.

  She didn’t react with shock, like he’d expected. “Sure,” she said, and slipped out, face now closed-off and expressionless.

  Maybe in a day or two, he’d regret treating her the way Sam had. But for now, he took advantage of the peace and stepped under the pounding jets. The hot water bled the tension from his body, turned his muscles to jelly. But no amount of her lavender-scented soap and pore-cleansing steam could relieve the mental knots beneath his skull.

  He toweled off and pulled on fresh boxers, brushed his teeth and found her in bed. She’d turned out the lamp on her nightstand, but had left his – Sam’s – on. Her side of the room seemed dark and uninviting. He hadn’t had too many long-term relationships – okay, so he hadn’t even had one. This thing with Alma was intimate on a level to which he’d never gone before with any other girl. But he was pretty sure coldness and distance were worse than yelling and screaming.

  Carlos climbed into bed with a sigh, stretched out beside “his girl” as everyone was calling her, and laid a hand on her arm. She showed no response to his touch. “That’s great about Caroline, babe. Really.”

  She shifted and the sheets rustled, her eyes stayed on the ceiling as she rolled over onto her back. “It is,” she agreed. “I’m trying to right some of my wrongs, even if it’s one tiny step at a time.”

  “Alma.” Her head rolled toward his. “You don’t have any wrongs, sweetheart.”

  She blinked. “Sometimes it feels that way.”

  “Come here.”

  She burrowed through the sheets and molded herself against his side, an arm slung across his chest. Carlos encircled her narrow shoulders with his own arm, breathed in the smell of her shampoo and enjoyed the feel of her breasts along his rib cage. She needed those emotional reassurances. Even before, when she’d been the tough little girl he’d always known, she’d probably needed them then too, she’d just been better at putting up a front before her husband had been ripped away from her.

  She fell asleep quickly, the tell-tale even, deep pattern of her breathing signaling the fact. He managed to turn off the lamp without waking her and it wasn’t until the room was bathed in darkness that he realized what had been bothering him all day.

  The buyer in the café had top of the line dress shoes, same as he had behind the liquor store the day of the buy too.

  Just like whoever had been in the building where Sam was killed.

  18

&nbs
p; Alma threw the tail end of her scarf over her shoulder and zipped up her black North Face fleece against the chill of the December afternoon. Her cheeks and ears stung, the tip of her nose felt numb, but nothing was going to rival the warmth that radiated inside her. As she walked toward her truck in the parking lot of her doctor’s office, she couldn’t stop smiling, even though her frozen cheeks made it difficult.

  She was having a boy. Up on the screen, for all the world to see, the unmistakable evidence had been present. The baby she carried – her baby with Sam – her own Sam, was a boy.

  To say her pregnancy hadn’t felt real up till now would have been sinful. She’d been sick, had watched and felt her body change, but assigning him a gender, making him a him and not an it added another layer of reality. One that was terrifying and electric all at once.

  After she’d shut herself in her Chevy and had cranked the motor, cringing at the blast of not-yet-heated air that came pouring out of the vents, she pulled out her cell and dialed as best she could with cold fingers.

  Diane answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “It’s a boy,” Alma gushed without preamble. She was too excited for pleasantries. “I just left doctor Laramie’s and he said I’m having a boy.”

  There was a beat of silence and Alma had a moment of regret, thinking she should have called Carlos first. But he was at work and she hadn’t wanted to bother him, plus he’d been acting oddly again and –

  “That’s great, baby,” Diane recovered with a deep breath. She released a shaky little laugh. “Wow.”

  “I know.” She held the phone between her cheek and shoulder so she could fasten her seatbelt. “Except I think I said ‘holy shit’.”

  Alma expected to be chastised for her language, but instead, she nearly dropped her phone at her mother’s next words.

  “Why don’t you kids come by for dinner tonight?”

  Was it a trap? Or had their heart-to-heart and carefully polite phone conversations since taken hold and warmed her mother’s feelings? “And by kids you mean…”

  “You and Carlos, of course.”

  An image of the four them together – her parents and her man – sprang to life in her mind: a happy, cheerful dinner table scene, everyone talking and laughing. She’d never anticipated having that: a united family. Common ground between her blood relatives and the ones she’d chosen for herself. And maybe, she scolded herself, that’s why you’ve never even tried to help it along.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “What time?”

  **

  “And you’re telling me this now?” Carlos puffed at his cigarette and then relinquished the butt to the gutter, the burning end hissing out when it hit the puddle there. His brain was having trouble fitting together the pieces of what Sean had just said. They were standing in the parking lot of a busy shopping center, people bustling by on the sidewalk, the smell of pizza wafting over from the Johnny’s where his co-workers were choking down a fast lunch. They were shielded from the other Good & Green guys by a row of cars, but fear of being spotted in a strange conversation wasn’t what was turning the half a slice of pepperoni in his gut to lead.

  Sean gave an apologetic shrug without pulling his hands out of the pockets of his long wool trench coat. “Didn’t think it was your business.”

  “But it is now?”

  “I looked into what you said the other night - ”

  “Oh, fuck.” Carlos paced away before he’d heard the rest: he didn’t need to. He scrubbed a hand back over his scalp, his skin feeling tight and prickly, his heart rate kicking up another notch. If he kept smoking like he was, with this amount of stress, he might be looking at a heart attack before thirty. “How is this happening?” he flung out his arms and pivoted around, fixing Sean with a look. “How?”

  The dealer sighed. “I’m sorry, Carlos. Really, man.”

  “Sorry doesn’t keep Alma safe!”

  “Don’t yell.”

  “Yeah…sorry.” He exhaled in a rush.

  Sean’s expression was, he swore, one of true regret. “I never meant for Alma to get dragged into this.”

  “Why? You’re one of the ‘good’ ones?”

  He twitched a non-smile. “’Cause Sam was a friend.” As much as Carlos hated the man’s ass right now, he had to acknowledge the very uncharacteristic behavior he’d shown coming to warn him about the new business structure and Diego’s reason for visiting Alma. It wasn’t what he thought of as typical dealer behavior. “And gettin’ people shot’s bad for business.” And there came the Sean he knew.

  Carlos’s legs – already shaky – finally made standing too difficult, so he sat down on the curb of the sidewalk, elbows resting on his knees. The information Sean had dumped on him was just too much to comprehend. To know that Sam hadn’t been the victim of random drug violence, but the planned assassination of a bigger, more organized, deadly drug machine was so disturbing, he thought he might puke. Maybe it should have been better, but it wasn’t. He could live with chance, with fate – but not with the direct knowledge that by signing them onto this gig with Sean, Sam had signed his own death warrant. There was no way to go back and reevaluate their actions; the only thing that could have saved him was saying no to Sean that night on the back deck.

  And Alma…Jesus. Now she was a potential target? Leverage or some shit? He would rather have just been paranoid than right. Because now that he was right, it meant Sam’s girl, his girl, could wind up…

  He told himself not to think about it, but he saw her crumpled, lifeless body lying in a pool of blood anyway. He fought the urge to gag.

  “What do I do?” he asked, helpless.

  Sean squatted down in front of him, somehow holding the tails of his coat off the dirty asphalt. “You just stick with me a little longer,” he said in a low, intense voice. “Just a little longer, and I swear, I’ll make it right.”

  Carlos wiped a hand down his face and tried to gauge the other man’s expression. He couldn’t. “Why are you doing this?”

  He glanced away, presenting his profile. “Maybe I feel bad,” he said quietly.

  **

  All through dinner, Alma kept looking for the traps: the tiger pits covered with leaves, the snares hidden amongst the underbrush. But she couldn’t find them. If her parents weren’t sincere in their warm welcome and polite dinner conversation, they had been taking acting classes in the past couple of weeks.

  Carlos, though, was getting on her nerves.

  Sullen throughout dinner, quiet, staring at his plate and answering in monosyllabic, clipped sentences, he’d been the picture of rudeness. It was if they’d traded brains; she was trying to be polite and upbeat and he was acting like, well…her. While it painted her usual behavior in an embarrassing light, it wasn’t helping his cause with Tom and Diane.

  “I’m sorry,” Alma told her mother as they were clearing the table. Carlos was out on the porch having a cigarette and Tom was in front of a football game on the sofa. “I don’t know what his problem is tonight.”

  Diane made an amused sound in the back of her throat as she stacked the last of the dishes up next to the sink. “That’d be us,” she said, clucking her tongue. “He always was uncomfortable around us.”

  “Can you blame him?” Alma asked, careful to keep her voice neutral.

  Her answer was a tip of the head and then Diane was walking past her, back toward the dining room. “Come with me.”

  She knew better than to ask – she wouldn’t get an answer and it might only lead to an argument. She followed her mother across the foyer and up the switchback staircase, into the guest bedroom and over behind the leather, wingback chair where the half-door led into the unfinished storage space. They had a proper attic with one of those creaky, unstable ladders that unfolded out of the ceiling, but they kept the good Christmas decorations and anything Diane needed easy access to down here behind the front dormer windows.

  The door came open with a little puff of dust and Diane led the wa
y, ducking down beneath the threshold. There was a soft click as Alma went in behind her and the bare bulb that served as overhead lighting came on.

  All the Rubbermaid tubs of ornaments and garland had been stacked up against the walls, up under the eaves, leaving a rectangle of clear space in the middle. The floor was clean, as if it had been swept or vacuumed. And sitting before her was her old baby furniture.

  “Oh,” was all she could say, stepping forward. She rested her hand on the rail of her old crib and swore she could remember viewing the world from behind its vertical slats. It, and the matching dresser and changing table, the rocker over to the side, were all lacquered a dark Havana color. Her yellow and blue patchwork quilt was folded up on top of the dresser.

  “I pulled it out of storage,” Diane explained. “After our shopping trip a while back…well, I didn’t figure you’d wanna shop anymore.”

  “Yeah. I mean no,” she patted the crib rail. “No, I didn’t want to shop anymore.” When she turned around, she saw that Diane’s eyes looked slick with unshed tears, one hand held loosely around her throat in the telltale show of emotion they both demonstrated. “What?”

  “I remember putting you down in that crib and now…” she sighed in a happy sort of way, smiled. “I’m just glad things are going better.”

  And by “things” Alma knew she meant their relationship. She smiled. “Me too, Mom.”

  She helped load the dishwasher, politely turned down an offer of cheesecake, promised to bring her truck by the next day after work to pick up the furniture, hugged her parents and donned her coat all without seeing Carlos again. He was on the front porch when she let herself out, head tilted skyward, a plume of smoke rising up from between his lips to join the stars. Four crushed out cigarette butts littered the brick stoop at his feet.

  Alma tucked her hands into the pockets of her leather motorcycle jacket. “You have a fun night?”

  His head swiveled toward her, whites of his eyes shining in the dark. “You done?”

  “Yeah.” She frowned. “What happened to you being Mr. Supportive? You just gonna hide out here every time we come over?”