Shelter

by Gilley, Lauren

  Her hand dove into her apron and he knew she was going for her phone.

  “It’s not what you think,” he stepped away from the door and toward her, which brought her head and hand snapping up. Her cell was indeed clenched between her fingers, thumb hovering over the screen. He sighed, forced himself to relax his now-threatening posture. “Carlos doesn’t know the whole story. Sam did and he was helping me.” She didn’t move. “Can I at least explain myself ‘fore you have me arrested?”

  She didn’t look happy about it, but she didn’t look scared either. Sam, he now scolded himself for not having come to this conclusion before, would never have wasted his time on some chickenshit bitch. You had to have some fight in you to put up with him. She tilted her head in silent concession. “You can try.”

  No way was Alma going to be at all approving of the lie: that Sam had decided to turn drug pusher for kicks and extra cash. And while he didn’t give a shit if she liked him, he needed to find Carlos. And he felt so guilty about what he’d done to this family; Sam’s death was all on him, and he owed the poor girl something. Even if the way she stood with her arms folded beneath her breasts annoyed the piss out of him.

  “Gimme your order pad?”

  “What?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Give it over.”

  She did, still scowling, a pen too, and Sean wrote a quick note that he presented to her. Alma’s eyes ran over the words I’m a cop and then flashed up to his, still narrow and cynical.

  “How?”

  “Sam said I was in Florida after high school, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Well…” he let it hang, let the implication sink in. He didn’t think for a second that the Silver Plate café was bugged, but in his line of work, saying things out loud was as good as broadcasting them over the radio.

  She looked skeptical, but some of the crinkles smoothed between her brows, her eyes widened, she nibbled at her lip. “Can you prove that?”

  Sean had anticipated that. He toed off his right shoe and bent to retrieve what he’d stowed there that morning: his official APD identification card. Alma took it and stared at it a long moment, turning it over and over, held it up to the light as if she were trying to discern whether or not it was a fake.

  “Okay,” she sighed, returning the plastic card. “So you are.”

  Sean replaced the ID and stepped back into his shiny loafer.

  “Sam knew?”

  When he glanced up, he saw that her expression had softened further. There was an anxiety sparkling in her eyes; she wanted so badly to believe the best of her dead husband.

  “Yeah,” he kept his voice soft. “He did. He was helping an old friend on the gig of a lifetime.”

  “God, Sam…” she glanced away and blinked hard a few times. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  It was meant to be rhetorical, and Sean knew it. “I need to find Carlos,” he prodded.

  “I haven’t seen him.” When her gaze came back to his, she’d dried up whatever tears had threatened. “Is he in danger?”

  He shrugged.

  “Shit. He’s such a dumbass.”

  Maybe being around sad, widowed pregnant chicks made him soft, but Sean felt like throwing the girl a bone. He scratched out another note on her order pad. He wanted out for you.

  Alma rolled her eyes, but he saw the pain tweak her features. “Okay, so we’re both dumbasses.” She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “Is that all you wanted?”

  What, had he expected her to hug him after he’d just dumped this much information on her? “What I told you is completely - ”

  “Confidential. I get it.”

  Sean crumpled up the top sheet of her order pad and wrote his cell number on the second, folded it and passed it to her. “Call me if he shows up. Please. It’s important.”

  “Sure.”

  He waited until she’d pocketed his number and had made firm eye contact, affirmed her words with a sharp nod. He wanted to think her stupid as he watched her smooth her hands along the crown of her head, tucking in stray pieces of ponytail, but he couldn’t. She just didn’t seem clueless enough to have been blindly led by Sam; no, she’d known what he was capable of. Nothing he’d told her that night had come as too much of a shock. Like mob wives and prisoners’ old ladies, you always had to wonder about a woman who willingly loved a man she shouldn’t have. And in Alma’s case, who’d done it twice. Crazy, or maybe too bold for her own good. He wasn’t sure.

  “Thanks, Alma.”

  She shrugged.

  “Congrats on the baby.”

  Her smile was thin as he showed himself out of the break room, but her footsteps didn’t falter as she followed him back into the café.

  Sean was glad for the notepad when he saw the ring of curious employees who’d gathered around the soda fountain. They all leapt as he and Alma reappeared, trying to look busy, bumping into one another in their haste to depart. It gave Sean a small amount of pleasure to know that he was capable of making people jump like that, but didn’t like being so conspicuous.

  The scent of fresh-roasted coffee was almost enough to pull him down into a chair. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten in hours, but he couldn’t stay. He’d run through a McDonald’s on his way back downtown. Home right now was the pullout sofa in the office space up above his faux real estate headquarters. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was functional.

  And, he remembered with an internal smile, Aisha hadn’t been complaining when she’d passed out on it beside him two nights before. From under heavy-lidded eyes, she’d glared at him, threatening castration if he ever breathed a word of it to their respective supervisors.

  It was setting up to be a cold night. As he pushed through the café’s door, the drastic change in temperature was shocking. The air smelled of ice and snow, and the wind was picking up, tumbling leaves and paper trash across the parking lot.

  He paused on the sidewalk to dig his leather gloves out of his coat pocket, doing a visual sweep as he did so. Traffic was heavier down on the other end of the lot where a Belk department store was flanked by a Christian bookseller and home décor boutique. Here, in front of the café, the lanes between the cars were far less congested. A black sedan with halogen headlamps that cut through the dark like blue lasers came gliding up an aisle a few rows over, able to move faster in this less-crowded section of the shopping center.

  Sean tugged on his second glove and nodded in appreciation for the car’s – it was a Mercedes, he could see the hood ornament now – quiet purr as it slowed and then whipped around the corner, accelerating along behind the vehicles parked in front of the café.

  Wait…

  The back of his neck prickled as he recognized both the black Benz and telltale way it was advancing in front of the restaurant.

  As a cop, he’d learned that paranoia was often the correct line of thought. He heard the Mercedes’ engine growl as the accelerator was stomped. He saw the dark, yawning mouth of the car’s open passenger window.

  His hand went for his gun and he dove to the sidewalk as the night exploded with the sound of automatic gunfire. The windows in the front of the café shattered with a deafening crash of glass, the shards raining down on the pavement around him.

  And then all he heard was the staccato beat of the AK-47 and the terrified screams coming from inside the building.

  26

  Her father and Sam had both taken her shooting a number of times. She was dead-on balls accurate with her .38 and .22 revolvers, not too shabby with the semi-auto .45, and could even hold her own against the shotgun’s recoil. But Alma was always surprised by just how loud gunshots were.

  Her palms and knees and stomach were against the floor, her nose hovered above the tile, its grainy pattern of flecks and whorls the only thing she could see. The hammering of her heart was almost as loud as the rapid fire crack-crack-crack-crackcrackcrack of what had undoubtedly been a fully automatic weapon. T
he shooter was already gone. The time that had lapsed between the first window shattering and now had been all of a few seconds.

  But now there was a symphony of screams ringing all around her. Plates, glasses and mugs had crashed to the floor. Tables had overturned. Men shouted, women shrieked, children and babies wailed.

  Lub-dub, lub-dub. None of it was as loud as her pulse. Alma felt like her ears had been stuffed with cotton, like she’d been drugged and was tilting her head up with infantile slowness.

  As her neck lifted inch by inch, the café and all its sounds became a visual picture too. The place was a warzone.

  Tables and chairs had been bowled over by tides of frantic bodies and their legs thrust skyward. Food and china shrapnel littered the floor. A woman had her back pressed against a table, her toddler son in her arms, tears leaving mascara streaks down her face as she cried into the top of his little blonde head.

  The windows were gaping holes in the front of the café and sharp, cold air was rushing in. The glass bits looked like confetti where it had showered over everything, like a sharp, prickly blizzard had doused all of them. She saw it in people’s hair, in jean cuffs and on top of sneakers. Patrons were on their feet and moving around now, some of them bloody. A few of them moaning and grabbing for arms or legs that could have just been bruised, or could have been sporting gunshot wounds.

  Drive by. Alma sucked in a deep breath that burned and she wondered if she hadn’t been breathing this whole time.

  “Alma, are you okay?!” the shrill shout pulled the cotton from her ears. She cracked her neck around and saw that Emily was kneeling beside her, a series of scratches turning one whole half of her face bloody. Her eyes were huge, terrified saucers. “Are you hurt?!” she demanded in a panic.

  “Drive by,” Alma said stupidly, still trying to find a place in her mind that would accept such a possibility.

  “No shit!” Emily’s hand curled around her arm. “Can you get up?”

  “Yeah, I’m - ” she sucked in a breath as she tried to move her legs for the first time and was stabbed with pain. The backs of her calves and thighs felt on fire. “Fuck,” she hissed, twisting around as best she could to determine the cause.

  Bullets had penetrated the bakery display case behind her – bullets had come ripping all the way through the café – and it had exploded. She saw the glimmer of glass needles in her black pants and the pain told her that some of shards had sunk deep through the fabric and into her flesh.

  “Here, let me,” Emily made a move as if she intended to start plucking the glass from her body, but Alma waved her away.

  “I’m fine. Go see if anyone else needs help.” Or, she added silently, is hurt worse.

  **

  “Black Mercedes. S class,” Sean barked into the phone as he blew through yet another yellow light at an intersection. So far he’d been tossed around to three different people in the narcotics department and all of them had asked him the same damn questions. “No, I didn’t get the goddamn plate number! Patch me through to Gilbert.”

  “One moment, please,” the desk sergeant said, and once again his ear was flooded with the elevator music that signaled he’d been put on hold.

  Marietta wasn’t nearly so congested as Atlanta, but there was a steady flow of pre-Christmas traffic that kept jamming him up. He was hauling ass down Barrett Parkway in pursuit of the shooter – who by this time he was convinced was either Sal or a close associate – at least, he wished he was hauling ass. He was doing about forty-five, weaving in and out of the two clogged-up lanes of north bound cars, ignoring the honks of irate horns. In the dark, it was impossible to tell if one of the dozens of pairs of red taillights ahead of him belonged to the Benz, or if the shooter was long since gone.

  Abruptly, the music on the other end of the line clicked off. “Gilbert,” came the rough greeting.

  “Dude,” Sean didn’t care that he bypassed protocol. “Drive by at the Silver Plate Café in Marietta.”

  “I heard. What the fuck, Taylor? Was that your work?”

  “You gotta get narcotics guys over there,” he ignored the accusation, mostly because it was true. “If this points to our guy, it’ll blow our whole case. Goddamn Cobb County can’t fuck up this bust.”

  Gilbert muttered something that sounded like an agreement. “Alright, I’ll - ”

  Sean ditched the phone into the passenger seat and took the wheel in both hands. As the cars around, behind and beside him halted at a red light, he saw the sliver glint of a Mercedes emblem on the big black sedan directly in front of him.

  He romped on the gas and the Escalade’s tires screeched as it lurched forward the few feet that separated it from the Mercedes. Two loud crunches signaled both the collision with the Escalade’s grill and the rear hatch of the minivan in front of it, and the Benz was stuck firmly in place.

  Sean palmed his Glock where it rested on the center console and threw open his door.

  The driver of the next car over was already out of his vehicle. “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Back in your car,” he ordered, once again hating that he wasn’t in uniform.

  Others were getting out too, though: the woman who’d been driving the rear-ended minivan, the whole family in the Volvo up and over. Fuck.

  “Everybody stay back!” Sean yelled as he gripped his gun in both hands and glided across the asphalt toward the driver door of the Mercedes. The window was down and a hand was reaching out of the dark depths of the car’s interior to test the door handle from the outside. “Hands!” he shouted, training the barrel of his nine mil on the center of the open window. “Lemme see some goddamn hands!”

  Even above the shouts of concerned citizens and the beeping of car horns, he heard a startled shout of “okay, okay!” from inside the Mercedes. A second hand was thrust out into the night. A white hand, he noticed.

  His stomach sank, but he continued to approach, leaning down to glance into the car when he was close enough. A middle-aged Caucasian male in a wrinkled grey suit stared back at him through thick glasses. His eyes were big around as blue half dollars, and in the red glow of surrounding taillights, Sean could see the sheen of sweat on the guy’s upper lip.

  It was not Sal. Not even the shooter. A different black Mercedes entirely.

  “Goddamn it.”

  **

  Alma wasn’t sure she could be more mortified than she was now: stripped below the waist with only a sheet for privacy, on her stomach – awkward as that was – while a surgical intern used tweezers and a flashlight to find and remove all the tiny glass shards from the backs of her legs. It didn’t help that the intern was male. Or that they were in the middle of a bustling room lined wall-to-wall with beds where the other café patrons and staff were being inspected.

  There were no fatalities and only one man had been actually grazed by a bullet. The rest was stitches and contusions, possible concussions thanks to the mad scramble to duck down out of harm’s way. The most chilling part was, Alma knew the shooter could have killed all of them if he’d wanted to: it had been meant as a warning. He’d intended to miss.

  The post-shooting chaos had lasted only minutes before sirens and flashing lights had descended upon them. As she’d been draped with a paramedic’s blanket and ushered out into the night, she’d searched for Sean, but hadn’t seen him. If he was truly a cop – and the ID had looked real enough – then he was undercover and didn’t want to blow that cover. As much as she wanted to blame him for this night, for everything, really, she knew it was her own fault: she’d chosen first to love Sam, and then Carlos, and now she was paying for that reckless heart her parents had always chastised.

  Speaking of parents…

  Diane was standing in front of her, purse clasped in both hands, dark, perfectly-plucked brows knitted together as she supervised the proceedings. Thankfully, when it had come time to doff her pants, Tom had decided he needed to investigate the cafeteria, for which she was grateful, and, surprisingly, she was gra
teful for her mother’s presence too. Her nerves were still raw and frazzled – every dropped instrument or clang of medical equipment sent her jerking up on her arms.

  “I just don’t understand,” Diane said for the fifth or sixth time. “How could this happen? Right here?”

  “The world’s full of awful, random violence,” Alma said and hated that she sounded like some wizened old matron who had little sayings for all the world’s problems. With her head rested on her folded hands, she stared at her mother’s khaki-clad knees and wished she wasn’t now a secret keeper. She also wished she was angrier with Carlos than she was; her fury had fizzled into pity and sympathy.

  “You’re not working at that place again,” Diane said. “No way.”

  “We’ll be closed for repairs for at least a week, Mom.”

  “Not we, because you’re quitting. Where’s your manager? I’ll go quit for you right now.”

  “Mom!” Diane’s face was not as thunderous as her voice had suggested. She looked pale and lost, completely helpless. She wasn’t used to thinking of her mother as helpless, but it somehow strengthened her resolve. Alma knew she couldn’t go back to the café – she’d never risk her baby like that again – but it wasn’t a rash decision. “I’ve been looking for something else, okay?” she said more softly. “It’ll be alright.”

  Because it was going to have to be. Nothing else in her life was, so she was going to have to start making things alright all by herself.

  **

  “There was a shooting at the café where your girl works.”

  When Carlos finally sobered up enough to check his voicemail, that was what Sean’s voice told him. And the time stamp told him it had happened only a few hours ago.

  It was one a.m., but he rubbed the grit out of his eyes and tugged the sweatshirt he’d been using as a pillow over his head.

  The building, the dank, dusty, empty and rotting building where Sam had died, was frigid and whistling with the sound of the wind that crept in through cracks and holes. He hated this place, and somehow, with yet more blood on his hands, it felt like the only place that would hold him. Like he didn’t deserve better than these crumbling walls and the blood-stained floors where he’d left his cousin to die. After all, he was really quite good at leaving people to die.