by Lois Greiman
“I suppose,” I said.
I think it took us both a minute to realize what I’d just said. Another minute to assimilate the words. But I didn’t try to retract them. Perhaps that makes me masochistic as well as neurotic. But there it was.
“Get some sleep,” he said, and there was extra warmth in his voice now. Something that made me tingly and warm and hopeful. “I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
I slept like the dead that night … until two a.m., when something disturbed me. I awoke, heart pounding, utterly alert. Not like me at all. I glanced sideways, breath tight in my throat, but the doorway was blessedly empty. One stifled glance around the room assured me that all was well. But something had awakened me.
Stiff with fear, I pulled the blankets back and reached over Harlequin for my Mace. It felt cool and solid in my hand. I rose to my feet. Flipping on the light was harder than hell, because truth to tell, I didn’t want to see what was inside my house. But the glare of the overhead bulb showed nothing out of the ordinary. Still, something was wrong. I felt it in the arch of my left foot.
It wasn’t until that moment that I remembered Laney. Even though she had told Solberg that the letter-writer had been apprehended, he’d refused to return to his house in La Canada. Instead, he had bedded down on the carpet upstairs, just outside Elaine’s bedroom door.
I found him there, undisturbed, but he awoke when I approached.
“Laney?” he croaked.
I glanced through the open doorway and saw her lying there, eyes closed, face serene in the diffused moonlight.
“She’s fine,” I said, and doing a rudimentary check of the other rooms on that level, ventured downstairs.
I had just reached the bottom when something lunged at me.
I squawked and stumbled backward, struggling with the Mace. But in that instant, my attacker turned tail and ran. Literally. It took me several heart-racing seconds to realize I’d just scared Harlequin out of his wits. And myself out of mine.
“Harley,” I called. He turned, looking sheepish and tired, muzzle still wet from its sojourn in the toilet. “I’m sorry. Come here, handsome.” He ambled over, head bowed. I scratched his ears and realized my mistake; he’d been fast asleep beside me when I’d awakened, which meant there was no intruder. Harley had been as jumpy as a crack addict since the breakin, and he had ears like parasails. He wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to worry about some nocturnal noise.
Kissing his snout, I straightened and headed toward the bathroom. It was then that I saw a light flicker in the Al-Sadrs’ yard.
30
The Irish don’t really like anything they can’t punch or drink.
—Pete McMullen, Irishman
For a second I was sure I was imagining things, but then I saw two bodies moving around the corner of the house. Their clothes were dark except for the man’s white turban.
Ahmad had come back for Aalia!
Anger fumed through me. I was out the door without a second’s thought and yelled something inarticulate. The bodies jerked. I heard a muffled grunt, and then Aalia fell. I saw her hit the ground. Saw Ahmad straighten and glance toward me, and in that instant a thousand emotions exploded inside me. But the first and foremost was rage. He turned and jogged toward the alley, and it was then that I entirely lost my mind, because in a fraction of a second I deduced that I could beat him to his car. I was sprinting before my brain sent an impulse to my good sense, and now he was running, too. But I was fueled by rage and insanity.
My legs were pumping like sparking pistons. All I could think of were the scores of men in my past. The ones who had lied and bullied and belittled me.
I hit Ahmad five feet before he reached his car. Bowled over, he rolled toward his back tire, then scrambled to his feet. But I wasn’t about to let him get away. Not this time. From my knees, I raised my right hand and sprayed him directly in the face, but he kept coming. I shrieked and skittered away, but there was nowhere to go. Somehow I had gotten turned around. His car was behind me. I jerked upright as he lunged toward me. With a squeal of terror, I reached behind me, yanked his car door open, and tumbled inside.
He made a grab for the handle. It was nothing short of a miracle that his vehicle was unoccupied and I was able to hit the LOCK button.
From the interior I saw him stagger to a halt. He stumbled, then fell to his knees. He’d just started retching when I hit the horn. It blared in the dark silence like an air raid alarm.
Taabish Al-Sadr was the first to pop out of his door. He stared in my direction. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see Aalia’s prone form and wondered desperately if she was all right. I tried to open the window to tell her brother-in-law to save her, but the window wouldn’t budge without a key. With one more terrified glance at the hacking Yemeni, I scrambled over the parking brake and pushed open the passenger door.
“Call 911!” I shrieked.
Al-Sadr stared at me, frozen in place.
I could no longer see Ahmad and prayed he was still coughing up his liver instead of scrambling around the bumper to yank me out of his car by my hair.
“Aalia’s hurt!” I screamed. “She may be dy—” I began, but in that instant I saw two women huddled in the light of the doorway behind Taabish. Adrenaline was flowing at a pretty good clip and blood was pounding in my ears like a tidal wave gone mad, but I was lucid enough to recognize that one of the women was Aalia.
“Ms. McMullen?” Taabish called, advancing toward me across the lawn.
I slammed the door shut, hit the locks, then shimmied back across the brake to stare through the driver’s window. Ahmad was still on all fours. Still retching. But his head didn’t really look as if it was covered with a turban anymore. It almost looked like he was blond.
I glanced at what I had thought was Aalia’s body. It didn’t appear as human as it had earlier. In fact, it looked a little like a felled tree, heavy on the top and skinny in the middle with one big lump of something at the end nearest me.
“Christina, what happens here?” Aalia called from the door. She took a few steps toward me.
“Go inside,” Taabish warned, waving her back. “The police will soon arrive.”
So he’d called 911. Good, I thought, but just then Ahmad lifted his head above his shoulders and for the first time I noticed that his face was as pale as mine.
Gathering his strength, he stumbled to his feet, raised his hands shoulder height, and wobbled sideways a little, still coughing. “I’m sorry.” His words were as slurred as a sailor’s on shore leave. “I just …” He took a moment to shake his head and lean against his bumper. “I was worried about Aalia.”
Taabish took a step closer. “Who is this man?”
“Skip …” He paused, steadied himself, bent double and coughed some more. “Stephen,” he corrected. “Stephen Vance, sir.” His trachea rattled on an inhalation. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I met Aalia at Starbucks last weekend.”
“Skip?” Aalia asked, and disengaged from the doorway.
“What do you do here in the dark of the night?” Taabish’s voice hadn’t softened any. And I saw now that he held a baseball bat in both hands.
“Aalia said …” Skip staggered again, wiped his eyes, and ricocheted off his left headlight. Mace is hell on eyesight. “She said she missed Al Mahwit so I brought her a coffee tree.” A garbled rasp rattled up his throat. “So she would feel more at home.”
Oh crap. I felt a little sick to my stomach as we all glanced at the tree that apparently was not bleeding to death on the lawn.
Taabish was the first to turn back toward Skip. “My sister by law, she is yet married in the eyes of Allah,” he said.
“I know that. I realize that, sir.” Skip coughed, wiped his mouth, and generally looked as if he were going to die. “I just thought she could use a friend. I wanted to surprise her.”
Aalia had advanced a few feet, and because I had a front-row seat, I saw that the look he shot in her
general direction had very little to do with friendship and a hell of a lot to do with adoration.
I couldn’t decide if I should feel hopeful or jealous. I had always kind of wanted my own stalker, but Taabish didn’t seem to see the beauty of the situation.
“My sister by law does not need a friend in the dark hours of the night,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir. I just … I know she’s been scared and I couldn’t sleep, so I …” He glanced through the window at me as though he kind of wished he was inside the car and maybe driving peacefully through some remote area of Nebraska. “I just thought I’d come by to make sure she was okay.”
“She was okay until you invaded our privacy in the small of the night.”
“I didn’t mean to—” he began, but then he started hacking again. It took him a while to straighten enough to stare through the window at me. “Holy cow,” he rasped. “What was that stuff?”
I tried not to wince. “Mace,” I said, raising my voice to make myself heard through the window. “It’s the first time I’ve tried it.”
“Pretty effective,” he said, and made a strange gargling noise. It almost sounded like a painful chuckle. “I’ll have to get Aalia some in case—”
“You will get my sister nothing,” Ramla said, and hustling to Aalia, pulled her toward the house. Taabish had drawn the bat back behind his body, and though I didn’t think they had a plethora of budding softball leagues in Yemen, he looked as if he had the general idea of how to hit a ball into the outfield. “She is a good follower of Allah.”
“I’m sorry—” Skip began again, but his apology was interrupted by the sound of sirens.
The police arrived moments later yelling for everyone to remain where we were.
We did. Me, still huddled inside the car; Al-Sadr with his bat still drawn back; the sisters frozen on the front lawn. And Skip, looking lost and ridiculously young, gazing at Aalia blindly, with his hands raised well above his head.
In the end, the officer first on the scene handcuffed Skip and eased him toward his squad car.
Once there, they stood for an instant as pertinent information was jotted down. I had a few minutes to speak to him before they hauled him off.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”
“No.” He shook his head, glanced longingly toward the Al-Sadrs’ house, even though Aalia had long since been shooed inside, and turned bravely back to me. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just glad to know she has a friend like you to look after her.”
“He really said that?” Laney had awakened at the first sound of the siren and hustled the police toward the backyard. We were sitting on the couch, pondering the intricacies of life. Well, she was pondering. I was eating the remainder of the Crazy Chrissy’s Caramel straight out of the jar. I have a strong conviction that calories consumed after a major trauma are not accounted for in the metabolic process. This theory has yet to be proven by the scientific community, research groups being what they are.
“Yup,” I said.
“While he was handcuffed?”
I peeled off another spoonful of midnight delight.
“Yup.”
She glanced at Solberg. He was sitting close enough to be a pimple on her ass. If a pimple would dare grow on her ass.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She smiled and touched his hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
I glanced from one to the other and licked the spoon. “Sorry for what?” For being a cowardly dweeb who wasn’t good enough to spit shine Laney’s Manolos?
“Jeen didn’t want me to leave the house,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said again, and managed to tear his gaze from her face long enough to give me a guilty glance. “I didn’t know you were out there.”
“You didn’t hear the commotion?”
“Well …” He swallowed. “I didn’t know you were involved. And I thought … you know, someone was after Laney.”
“The letters have made us all jumpy,” she said.
“I’m usually more stoic in a crisis,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “he hardly ever cries like a baby just because you’re trying to leave the house.”
They both shifted their gazes to me, making me almost choke on my next spoonful. “You didn’t!” I said.
“I wasn’t crying!” he said. “I was just … faking it. Trying to convince Laney to remain inside … where she’s safe.”
“You cried?” I couldn’t believe it. I could hardly wait to tell Rivera, I realized, and wondered with a grin when that had started. “Like … real tears?”
“I was faking it!” he insisted, but his face was red.
I considered needling him some more, but the truth is, if Laney insisted on putting herself in harm’s way, I’d probably tear up a little myself.
“Well …” I ate more ice cream. “I’m happy you kept her inside.”
“I didn’t know who was out there,” he repeated.
I shook my head, amazed at the whimsical ways of the world. “Turns out it was just some lovesick boy mooning over Aalia.”
“How can you be sure he wasn’t sent by her husband?” Solberg asked.
“He was bearing a coffee tree.”
“Maybe it’s a ploy,” he said.
Leave it to Solberg to see boogeymen in gift trees. “The police searched his car, all he had was a college textbook and a Snickers bar, and that’s only dangerous to his glycogen level.”
We talked a little longer. Finally Solberg nodded off, slumped against the corner of the couch. He looked a little like an overgrown Yoda propped up against the cushions as he was. If I didn’t hate him so much I would have admitted he was almost cute in that so-ugly kind of way that lizards and newborns share.
“Did he really cry?” I asked.
Laney sighed. “He hasn’t been getting enough sleep.”
“Some people don’t burst into tears when they’re tired,” I said. “They just get grouchy.”
“You would know,” she said.
I had finished off the ice cream a while ago and wished I hadn’t. After all, I was still holding the spoon and it seemed like a terrible waste of energy.
“Even after I realized the kid had come bearing gifts, I still thought he might be trouble,” I admitted. “But now I think he’s just a nice guy. Worried about little Aalia. It’s kind of cute in a creepy, stalkerish sort of way.”
“I’m afraid they’ve got a lot against them.”
“How do you mean?”
“Aalia and Stephen. Religion can be as divisive as it can be enlightening. Could be Mr. Al-Sadr would be more comfortable with an abusive Muslim husband than a doting American boyfriend. The fact that Aalia is wearing blue jeans and spending her Saturdays at Starbucks is probably driving him crazy.”
I shrugged, willing to let them work that out for themselves as I glanced at Yoda once again. “What’d he do? Block the door with his meager body when you tried to leave?” I asked.
“He ordered me to remain inside.”
I felt my eyebrows make a dash for my hairline. “He ordered you?”
“It was kind of sweet.”
I glanced toward him. Turns out little Yoda had more balls than I’d given him credit for. Laney had been practicing yoga and kickboxing for more than a decade. She could have tied him in knots without turning a hair.
“What’d you do?”
“I think I may have sworn at him.”
“Seriously?”
“I kind of like you, Mac. Even when you’re grouchy.”
“You swore at him?”
“Maybe.”
“Is that when he started to cry?”
“Right about then.”
“Said he’d die if anything happened to you?”
“Something like that.”
I nodded, ruminating and licking the dry spoon. “You know what bothers me the most?”
“That you kind of want a stalker of your very own.”
“Yeah,” I said, and sighed.
31
I truly believe it is emotionally damaging to be amicable for long periods of time.
—Christina McMullen, Ph.D.
I slept like a chilled reptile for the rest of the night. But by morning my mind still felt nubby. Sometimes running acts like a brain defuzzer, so I trundled up Chestnut Hill with Harley at my side in an attempt to wake up my cerebellum, but when I reached home I felt sweaty and nubby.
I reached the office at 7:50. At 8:10 Shirley buzzed to tell me Rivera was on the line. I took a fortifying breath and picked up the receiver.
“I swear to God I’m not trying to get myself killed,” I said. “I just … I was really tired, and I saw someone in the Al-Sadrs’ yard and I thought—”
“They picked up Ahmad Orsorio last night.”
My mouth was still open, trying to yammer out a defense. “What?”
“He’d checked himself into Glendale Memorial. Guess the bullet in his leg was giving him some trouble.”
“They got him?”
“The bastard’s femur was broken.”
“So what happens now?”
“Now he has an armed guard at his bedside till he goes to trial or gets shipped back to Yemen in disgrace.”
I sighed. “I love happy endings.”
Rivera chuckled. “So your bad-ass friend that shot him … what’s his name? I’d like to thank him.”
“I’ll make sure to relay your gratitude.”
“I’d rather do it in person.”
“I bet you would,” I said, and hung up a few seconds later.
One would think with all these ugly loose ends being tied up, I would have been as cheery as a picnic basket that weekend, but something was gnawing at me and I wasn’t sure what it was.
By Friday I had eye bags the size of feed sacks, which made Laney’s chipper countenance that much more irritating.
“Good morning.”
“Really?” I said, and gave her a malevolent stare through one sandbagged eye. I was just pouring myself a bowlful of Cap’n Crunch. Diabetes in a bowl.
“I’ve made a decision about the wedding,” Laney said.
“You’re calling it off?” I asked, and added milk to the Crunch.
