CRY UNCLE

by Judith Arnold

  “She’s not going to go away,” Joe declared, hoping Pamela wouldn’t make a liar out of him. “So you’d best make peace with her.”

  Cocking her head, Lizard scrutinized him dubiously. “Why won’t she go away? Cuz she’s in love with you?”

  If only, he thought, then scowled. He didn’t want her love. He only wanted her help, right? Her help, her support, and her sleek body wrapped around him at night. “Yeah,” he muttered, unable to disguise the bitter disappointment shading his voice. “Pam and I are a real love match. So get used to it, Lizzie. This is the way it’s going to be.”

  Deflated, Lizard slouched toward the kitchen. “Well, if I gotta go do errands with her, the least she could do is let me eat a cookie first.”

  “I don’t think she’ll kick up too much of a fuss about that.” He watched his niece trudge away, then gazed up the stairs in time to see Pamela begin her descent. She carried her purse and wore sunglasses.

  At the bottom of the stairs she faced him. Her lips shaped a grim line; her skin smelled faintly of a sun-screen lotion. “You mentioned something about having a key I could use,” she said hesitantly.

  Unfolding his hand made him aware of how tight his fist had been. The key was warm from his grip, and his palm bore its outline. “Here,” he said, dropping it into her hand so he wouldn’t have to touch her.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry about Lizard.”

  “She’s going through a lot. I guess she’s entitled to have a snit.”

  “Sometimes I think she was born with PMS.”

  Pamela gave him a faint smile. “All females are born with PMS, Jonas.” She stashed the key in the pocket of her shorts, drawing his attention to her long legs. They were too pale, but a few more days of Florida sunshine would rectify that. Her calves, while slender, had muscle to them, and her knees shaped perfect ovals. Her thighs—

  “I’ve got to go to the bar,” he said abruptly.

  She looked at her watch. “It’s ten in the morning.”

  “People in these parts tend to start drinking early.” Especially when they’re in a state of intense sexual frustration, he added silently. “I’ll be home late. The Shipwreck closes around two a.m., depending on how many customers are in a take-his-keys-and-call-a-cab state.”

  Pamela nodded.

  “So I won’t be home till very late. No need to wait up.”

  She nodded again. Evidently she understood what he was really saying: that he didn’t want to have to see her when he rolled home. “Well,” she said, then mulled over her thoughts for a minute. “Have fun.”

  “You have fun, too.”

  “I’m sure the Department of Motor Vehicles will be a barrel of laughs,” she said dryly. “The next time you see me, all my documents will say I’m Pamela Brenner.”

  His wife. His partner. His legal mate.

  The woman living on the other end of the house.

  He strode out of the house without bothering to shout a farewell to Lizard. Let the two females with their PMS forge a truce. Let them find a way to coexist. Joe had already found his way to coexist with Pamela: stay as far away from her as he could.

  ***

  AS IT TURNED OUT, arriving at the Shipwreck early had been a wise move. Lois was the only one there, and she was having a time of it dragging the heavy tables from the main room’s periphery back to their usual places. She’d already swept and mopped the floor, but the rafters were still draped with white ribbons, and empty plastic champagne cups kept turning up in odd places—on a window sill, under the juke box, lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery along the ceramic edge of the urinal in the men’s room.

  “So,” Lois said, holding a plastic trash bag open for him to toss in his collection of used cups. “How’s holy matrimony treating you?”

  “I’m not sure it’s holy,” he grumbled, refusing to meet her dark-eyed gaze. “Pam and I were married by a judge, not a minister.” He climbed onto one of the tables and started uncoiling the white streamers from the rafters.

  “Okay, so how’s legal matrimony treating you?” Lois chattered up at him. Fortunately, she didn’t give him a chance to answer, but instead launched into a monologue about how lovely the wedding had been. “I wept through the entire ceremony, Joe—and for many hours afterward. It was so beautiful. The judge’s words, the ring, the music.... By the way, who the hell is this Pamela person, anyway? Where did you meet her? I mean, really, Joe, how long did you even know her before you went and got yourself shackled? Not that it wasn’t one of the most beautiful shacklings I ever saw, and the cake was incredible if I must say so myself. But honestly, Joe, what the hell was it? Love at first sight?”

  Lois’s words reminded him how very few people knew the truth about his marriage. Kitty knew, and his lawyer, and the happy couple themselves. “Yeah,” he fibbed, trying not to sound too gruff. “It was love at first sight.”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about love at first sight. It’s supposed to be very romantic, but it doesn’t seem all that practical.”

  “It can be damned practical,” he argued. If any word described his marriage to Pam, it was practical. He carefully unsnagged a thread which had gotten caught on a splinter in the wood, then let the long white ribbon drop, deciding it looked like nothing so much as toilet paper as it drifted to the floor.

  Lois scooped it up and shoved it into the trash bag. “Well, I would never have guessed her to be your type, Joe.”

  Neither would I, he thought uneasily.

  “I mean, you always used to go for big bazooms. This Pam person, whoever the hell she is—if I may speak frankly, Joe, she has more class than your usual squeezes.”

  “Maybe that’s why I married her,” he snapped, wishing Lois would shut up. He leaped down from the table and took the trash bag from her. “I’ll go stick this in the Dumpster.” He would do anything—even volunteer for a garbage run—to get away from Lois and her unintentionally annoying banter.

  Outside in the alley, he unwound. What the heck—he couldn’t be having a worse time with Lois than Pamela was having with Lizard. The notion of Pam standing in one of those interminable lines at the Motor Vehicle Department, with Lizard screeching and moaning and making an all-around nuisance of herself, brought a smile to his lips. It wasn’t that he wished Pamela ill. It was just that if he was going to be miserable, he wanted his wife to be miserable, too.

  It turned out that the remainder of his day was more or less unremittingly miserable. The early crowd started dribbling in shortly after noon. They tended to be mostly dissolute would-be writers, many of them sporting Hemingway beards and running at the mouth about the Great American Novels they were going to write if only they had a free half-hour. Yet instead of rambling self-indulgently about their great oeuvres and their chronic writer’s blocks as they usually did, they all spent the afternoon slapping Joe on the back, congratulating him and dishing out advice on how to keep the little lady in line, or on her back, or whatever. Joe had to grin good-naturedly and pretend he appreciated all their suggestions.

  “Never bring her flowers when you’ve done something that would upset her,” one of them admonished him. “Iif you fool around on the side, don’t bring her flowers. It’s like hanging a neon sign around your neck saying, Guilty.”

  “You’re the boss,” another chimed in. “Don’t ever let her forget that.”

  “If things get stale, go the vibrator route,” yet another recommended. “Works every time—as long as you’ve got fresh batteries on hand.”

  Joe barely had time to recover from the afternoon crowd when the evening crowd arrived. They were worse, because they were his friends. The fishermen and Navy guys couldn’t stop riding him about his impetuous marriage. The ladies seemed to think Joe was twice as irresistible, now that he was officially out of reach. Men shook their heads and offered their condolences; women whispered that if he had any problems with his wife, he could unburden himself to them. A few romantically inclined w
omen played Stand By Me on the juke box so many times Joe almost stopped liking the song.

  No, he still liked the song. It was just that whenever he heard it, he wanted Pamela in his arms, dancing with him, smiling, looking slightly dazed, slightly amazed, and utterly beautiful in her simple white dress. The song made him remember how easily he and Pamela had moved together on the dance floor, how well their bodies had matched, how natural it had felt to have her in his arms. It made him remember how much he’d wanted to take her home, and carry her into his house, and make her his wife.

  He stayed until closing time, ignoring Brick when he grunted that Joe should go home to the missus. Joe stayed past when Kitty sashayed out the back door, swearing she was bushed. He stayed until the last bleary-eyed beer-drinker shuffled out the door.

  The bar’s silence was eerie. In the shadows, in the whisper of the air conditioning, he could almost hear the echoing strains of Stand By Me. He contemplated removing that disk from the juke box, but decided to leave it in for now. By tomorrow night, the novelty of his marital status would have worn off; people would leave him—and the song—alone.

  He gave the bar one final wipe, then locked the cash register. Glancing up, he noticed that the steering wheel clock on the wall read ten past two.

  She had to be safely in bed by now. He would be able to go home and get to his own room without running the risk of seeing her and yielding to temptation. And he’d sleep late tomorrow, and maybe, if luck stayed with him, she would go out early and he wouldn’t have to see her in the morning, either.

  He drove down Duval Street, which was still lively with traffic and noisy pedestrians at that late hour, and south into his own slumbering neighborhood. The front porch light of his house glowed. Pamela must have left it on for him.

  Damn her for doing something so thoughtful. The plan was that he’d dive into bed without thinking about her, without being touched by anything she did or was or meant to him.

  Okay. So she was considerate. As long as he didn’t see her, he could stand a bit of consideration on her part.

  He climbed up the porch steps and let himself into the house. The hall light was on, too, but the upstairs was dark and silent. Everybody was asleep.

  He tiptoed down the hall to make sure the back door was locked—and spotted her on the screened porch, sprawled out on the cushions of the wrought-iron sofa in the corner. She was sound asleep, a book open across her chest.

  She must have tried to wait up for him. Like a good wife, a real wife, she’d sat up and read, waiting for her man to come home from the late shift at work.

  Damn her all over again. If she was going to do stuff like this, leaving lights on for him, struggling to stay awake so she could greet him when he finally got home...if she was going to act like a wife, he was going to have one hell of a time trying not to act like a husband.

  Sighing, he went out to the porch, located a book mark on the table, and tucked it into her book. Then he gathered her into his arms. She seemed heavier tonight than she had last night, because she was asleep. But he’d gladly take the extra weight. If she woke up, if she opened her eyes and smiled and whispered his name, he would turn left at the top of the stairs, not right, and refuse to release her until he’d reached his own room, his own bed.

  Thinking about it made him hard. Feeling her silky hair brush against his arm, her cheek nestle against his shoulder and her knees bend around his other arm as he carried her up the stairs made him more than hard. It made him feel protective and bewildered and—damn her to high heaven—affectionate.

  He blew out a long, weary breath. Affectionate he could handle. Protective wasn’t like him—at least when it came to anyone other than Lizard—but it was part of the deal he’d agreed to when Pamela told him about her situation back in Seattle with the hit man. And affectionate and protective were enough to make him feel bewildered.

  But he felt something more, too, something restless, something troublesome, something as hot and steamy as Key West in July. It made him walk faster, as fast as he could without waking her, and practically hurl her onto her bed. Without even stopping to pull off her sandals, he high-tailed out of her room, sweating and aching and wondering how he was going to survive this stupid marriage without losing his mind.

  Chapter Eight

  “WHEN YOU SAY BINGO,” Mick asked, “exactly what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, I got a line on her driver’s license.”

  Mick pressed the mute button on the remote control and leaned back in the overstuffed chair. The silent drama being played out on the television screen across the room from him—some gonzo was throttling some lady—was a scene Mick would ordinarily have found engrossing. But Tony’s news was even more engrossing, even if he didn’t trust the chump from here till tomorrow. Sometimes he wondered whether the only good thing about having Tony on his payroll was that Tony’s fellow police officers believed him when he said Miss Hayes wasn’t in any danger from Mick.

  But other than keeping the Seattle Police Department out of Mick’s hair while he tried to put the bitch out of commission, Tony hadn’t delivered. Or more precisely, he hadn’t delivered enough. Mick had been able to trace her credit-card charges as far east as St. Louis, but from that point on she’d disappeared into the black hole of cash purchases, leaving no records, no trail. Where the hell had she gone? North to New York? South to Atlanta? Back to the West Coast? He knew she wasn’t likely to have flown out of the country; none of her bills was to an airline. And besides, if she’d wanted to go continent-hopping, she would have booked a flight out of Seattle, not St. Louis.

  It was safe to assume she was still in the U.S., and sooner or later she was going to run out of cash. But where would she be when she had to go back to living on plastic? When was she going to stick one of those gold cards of hers into an automatic teller machine for a cash advance, and send Mick another clue as to her whereabouts?

  He tried to keep his temper with Tony. The guy was risking a lot to dig up whatever information he could for Mick. Of course, he could always stop, say no, tell Mick where to shove his annual donation to the Tony Fund. But if he did that, Mick could finger Tony for everything he’d done in years past, which would expose Tony for the bad cop he was. So Tony had damned well better keep trying to find Pamela Hayes.

  “Her driver’s license,” Mick said impassively. After tasting success with the lady’s credit report, and then winding up empty-handed, Mick wasn’t going to let himself get excited about anything Tony had to tell him. Not until it panned out.

  “More than that, Mick. Her name.”

  “I know her name.”

  “Not anymore, you don’t. She changed it.”

  Mick squelched the optimism that threatened him. Until he had everything—which meant, until he had her—he refused to get his hopes up. “What did she change it to?”

  “This wasn’t easy to find out,” Tony hedged.

  Squeezing me for more money, Mick thought angrily. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how hard it was to find out,” he snapped. “Tell me her name.”

  “Brenner.”

  “Brenner what?”

  “Pamela Brenner. And she’s traded in her Washington State license for a Florida one.”

  Mick’s pulse sped up. She was in Florida, apparently planning to stay long enough to have changed her license. Evidently she was really afraid of Mick, if she’d changed her name, too.

  Well, he’d never taken her for a fool. She had enough brains to recognize that Mick was somebody she ought to be really afraid of.

  “Florida’s a big state,” he remarked. “Give me an address.”

  “I couldn’t get the address. My contact in Florida got the heebie-jeebies and hung up before I could wring anything more out of him. He wouldn’t even say for sure that Pamela Brenner is the same person as Pamela Hayes. According to Florida’s central computer system, someone whose license number matched Hayes’s Washington state license changed her papers to Flor
ida. Maybe it’s her, maybe it’s not.”

  “Don’t yank my chain, Tony. If I’ve got to travel all the way to Florida, I need to know where to go. Miami, Tampa, Orlando... You’ve got to get me her address.”

  “You aren’t allowed to leave the state while you’re out on bail, Mick.”

  “That’s not your problem. Your problem is, I need to know if this Pamela Brenner is the same broad as my good friend Miss Hayes. And I need to know where she lives. And frankly, her plate numbers would be more useful to me than her driver’s license, which she no doubt will be carrying in her wallet where I can’t see it. Like, I’m supposed to pick the pocket of every skinny blond bitch in Florida to see if she’s got the right license? Get me tags, pal. Get me an address. Florida’s a big state.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Tony promised.

  “Just get me what I need, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  “Yeah,” Tony promised again. “That sounds about right to me.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

  Mick lowered the receiver and grinned. He might have been heavy-handed with Tony, but the guy was a wimp, and he responded well to being scolded. Mick didn’t even have to spell out a threat. He just had to give a little nudge, and Tony would go back to risking his neck to get Mick what he was after.

  Florida. Pamela Brenner, nee Hayes, lived in Florida. Once again Mick could taste success.

  Still smiling, he lifted the remote control and turned the sound back on. The lady on the screen was lying dead, the man looming above her, looking mighty satisfied with what he’d accomplished.

  Jury selection for Mick’s new trial wasn’t supposed to begin for months. If necessary, his lawyer could drag things out even longer. But it probably wouldn’t be necessary. Mick would soon be feeling the same smug satisfaction as the guy on the TV show, taking pride in a job well done—and walking free when the state’s star witness was unable to testify against him.

  Oh, yes, he thought, gazing at the female corpse on the screen. Things were definitely looking up.