First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  “Are you going to let some gorilla of a bodyguard talk to you like that?” Deanna demanded of her husband. She wobbled, almost falling off her high heels, as she smeared on another thick coat of lipstick. “You can’t talk to your employer like that,” she informed me when Leopold didn’t answer. “We pay your salary. We tell you what to do, not the other way around.”

  Leopold now ignored both of us. “Listen, come down Saturday night and we’ll go out,” he was saying to his friend Bernie in a voice that probably wasn’t meant to carry so far. Deanna looked at him like she wanted him dead. Saturday night plans meant that her husband would be partying with Bernie and his mistress, not her, his wife. She started yelling at him, pretty much at the top of her voice, saying that he was dickless, that he was a moron, that she hated him, that he was a bad dad, that his kids hated him, too. Her red lipstick rubbed around her mouth as she berated him, making it look like she had clown makeup on. Damn, she was some kind of mean clown.

  “Can you quiet down?” I asked her, in a way that was meant to be polite. She was distracting me from what I was supposed to be doing, i.e., protecting her dickless moron of a husband, but no one cared what I was saying over Deanna’s insults. It was hard to hear anything other than her screeching. On top of that, the ice maiden wife kept up her rubbing against me, breasts squashed into my ribs. I tried to disengage from her claws around my arm so I could physically move Leopold out of harm’s way (harm from his wife or from any other source). In the background, somewhere in a corner of my mind, I heard an engine rev.

  Instead of thinking about doing my job, my mind went right to Isobel. I remembered how I had knocked her down onto the sidewalk when I heard the car roaring in front of my apartment building, how she had turned dead-white afterwards and pitched forward into my arms. I still wanted to get her in with a new doctor, a better one. A specialist who could give a second opinion about why her heart wasn’t keeping the right rhythm. I was sure the pain pills she had taken after Kash’s beating hadn’t done her heart much good, either.

  Those thoughts were what distracted me, what slowed me down when the car came up the block toward us in the dark with its headlights off. I was about a second late when I threw Judith away from me and ran for Leopold, but I got him down just as the shots rang out from the window of the SUV. Its engine roared as it sped off into the night. For about five seconds it was completely quiet, then someone started screaming.

  “You all right?” I lifted myself off Leopold. “Hey! Are you hit?”

  “No.” He winced. “You landed on me.”

  Yeah, I hadn’t managed to put myself under him to take the brunt of the fall like I’d done for Isobel. “You all right, though?” As he nodded, I got myself carefully up. “We need to get out of here, now.”

  “What’s that noise?” he asked, gingerly lifting himself from the pavement.

  The noise was his wife, sitting in a dirty puddle and screaming her head off. I managed to assure myself that she was ok, too, before handing her over to Leopold. His friend Bernard had sobered up and was standing near, but not too close, to his own wife. She was holding her fingers to her cheek and she grabbed my shirt with her other hand as I went by.

  “You pushed me down. Look at me!” She removed her palm from her face and I saw a long, bloody graze across her cheekbone. There were cuts on her hands, too, but she was worried about something else. “Look at my manicure!” she said angrily as she waved her fingers at me. “Look!”

  “There was a drive-by,” I pointed out, and left it at that. And damned if Ronnie didn’t decide to finally show his ass up.

  “Where the fuck were you, Ronnie?” I growled as he ran around to open the doors.

  “Getting gas. You guys were done early.” He stared at us, at me pulling Leopold and Leopold pulling Deanna. “What happened here?”

  I shook my head. “Leopold, get in,” I ordered, now pushing him and his screaming wife into the seat. Neither of them looked back at their two friends standing on the sidewalk, but I watched as Judith got her husband moving and away from the restaurant. She was practically dragging him along behind her. “Go!” I told Ronnie, and we were out before I even heard a hint of sirens.

  “They shot at me!” Leopold kept saying as the car raced through the dark streets. “They shot at me!”

  I turned around to look at him. “Who? Who do you think did it?”

  He stopped talking briefly, but his flabby lips hung open, gaping. Leopold had no idea. He wanted to look like a tough guy and get the respect he thought he deserved, but in reality, he was a scared child. What he said next, words that I could hardly catch with Deanna’s continued hysteria, proved it: “I need to talk to my father. He’ll know what to do.”

  I faced forward in disgust. He needed to grow a pair. “Did you see anything?” I asked Ronnie, loud enough that he could hear me over Deanna.

  The driver shook his head, his features still bruised and swollen from my fists. “Nothing. I was around the corner, at the gas station. I heard the shots, that was all, and I came as fast as I could.” Both of us watched carefully but the roads were quiet on the way back to the compound. Whoever had shot at us had gone back under.

  Thank God, Deanna finally went hoarse, so the noise from the back seat stopped. Leopold hadn’t said one word or raised one finger to comfort her, the loving husband that he was. My ears rang a little in the silence as we sped north. I only broke it to ask Ronnie a few more questions about what he might have seen before the drive-by.

  “I was looking at my phone a lot tonight,” he said quietly. “Issues with my girlfriend.” He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror as he said that. So, nobody had seen anything, including me, because I had been caught up in thoughts of Isobel. I’d been so caught up in her that I nearly let my boss get killed, or myself, or all of us.

  We dropped Deanna off at their house, but drove further down the long drive to where Leopold’s parents lived so he could give his dad the rundown on what had happened. That guy was the real brains of the operation, as far as I could tell, even though he was so frail now that the only times I had seen him were when he was pushed in a wheelchair with an IV pole and two attendants.

  “My dad will know what to do,” Leopold said confidently to no one in particular as Ronnie opened the door for him. “He always does.” Then he suddenly turned to me, his face still pasty white under the dome light. “Good job tonight.”

  It hadn’t been, but Leopold was just glad to be alive. I nodded at him.

  “This will mean a bonus for you,” he called over his shoulder as he went up his father’s front steps. We watched until he let himself in and disappeared.

  Ronnie looked disgusted. “A bonus. You’re the hero, right?” he asked me as he got back in the car.

  “No. He was lucky. I was slow.”

  “Not slow enough,” Ronnie said, but when I turned to look at him, he chuckled. “I’m just kidding. Even though he had you beat my ass into the ground, I still like this job. Pays great and until tonight, Leopold hasn’t had any problems at all.”

  Exactly. Leopold was low-level. The crime he was involved in was mostly construction bribes to run his dad’s company, a little trafficking of stolen goods with their fleet of trucks. Maybe some drugs on the side, but nothing that I could think of that would get him shot. It didn’t make any sense to me.

  Unless they hadn’t been after Leopold, and there had actually been another target. My fists clenched. Damn that Memphis. I had been spending every moment I could looking for him in clubs, bars, restaurants, parties, every place he might be out. I had been driving up and down streets and checking abandoned houses. Maybe I was getting close, and this was his response. I had to find him.

  Ronnie dropped me at my car and I headed straight back to Detroit. It was late enough now that I didn’t think she’d be awake, but I sent her a message anyway. “See any stars tonight?”

  And Isobel wrote back right away. “It’s too cloudy. I’m looking fo
r Polaris.”

  I went another few miles before she wrote again. “Are you done with your other job? I have some ice cream.”

  I smiled at the phone and then I adjusted my route, and I drove to her building. I watched behind me as I did but it was clear.

  Isobel must have been standing at the apartment door when I walked up, waiting there for me. I had barely touched the old metal with a knock when the door jerked open, revealing her bruises and also her big blue eyes. She smiled but then touched where her lip was split.

  “That didn’t take you too long,” she said, waving with her hand for me to come inside.

  No, it hadn’t taken too long, because I had passed every other car on the freeway to make it here in half the time it should have. “Not bad,” I agreed. I realized that I was walking too close to her, close enough to touch, and I slowed my steps.

  Isobel went to the window and looked up. “I don’t see Polaris.”

  “You were right. It’s a little cloudy.” But I wasn’t looking at the sky, just watching her.

  “Do you want some ice cream?”

  I sat down slowly on her couch. Now that the adrenaline had stopped coursing through my body, I was as tired as I’d ever been in my life. “No. No, thanks.”

  She sat down too, near enough that I could have brushed against her if I’d shifted my leg. “How was work? Did anything interesting happen?”

  I thought for a minute. “No, not too much.”

  She seemed to relax. “Good. I’m glad.”

  “How about you? How’s Rella?”

  Isobel told me a long story about how Rella’s grand-niece had called after dinner to talk about her moving, going south to Georgia so they could have her closer to the rest of the family. “Rella won’t go,” she said confidently. “She loves Detroit. She won’t want to leave.”

  “It must be hard for her here in the winter. Walking everywhere, I mean.”

  She bit her busted lip. “Yeah, I guess it is. Three years ago, she slipped on a sidewalk and really hurt her hip. That’s one of the reasons she goes so slowly now. That was what her niece said, too, that the weather would be better for her there. But Rella just said how she can’t leave Detroit.”

  I nodded. I was glad she’d be here for Isobel.

  “But then afterwards, she started talking to me about Barry again, and I thought…” I watched the mix of feelings on her face. “Her niece wants Rella to be in a home,” Isobel explained. “Like an assisted living place, where she could have someone watching her more. Making sure she eats meals and things. And they have all kinds of activities, that’s what her niece said.” Isobel’s teeth ran over her lower lip again. “But she wouldn’t want to leave her church. And also, she has so many memories here.”

  And you, I thought. She had Isobel here. “It sounds like it would be good for her, either way,” I said, and she nodded, unconvinced. I patted my shirt pocket, looking for my pack, then reminded myself of why it wasn’t there.

  “You can smoke, if you want,” she told me. “I really don’t mind.”

  “I quit.”

  “Really?” she asked skeptically. “You seriously quit, just like that?”

  “Just like that,” I agreed. I let myself touch her, hovering my palm over her knee, hardly any contact at all. Her whole leg jumped, but she looked at me steadily. “I quit for you.”

  She moved then, scooting closer to me on her crappy couch. Very, very slowly, I put my arm around her shoulders, and she rested against my chest. “Am I going to hurt you?” I asked, but Isobel didn’t answer that. Instead, she shivered in my arms.

  Chapter 9

  Isobel

  Nothing. I couldn’t find anything in Ameyo and Patrick’s house, nothing to indicate that he was fooling around on her. But the proof had to be there somewhere.

  I peeked through the drawers in his nightstand one last time, through the papers in his desk, even in the safe, and I couldn’t find it. There hadn’t been anything obviously interesting in the trash that I’d taken out, either, or in his dirty clothes that I’d washed. So where was the evidence? This coming weekend was when he planned to meet up with his girlfriend, because I’d seen her text and his hotel and restaurant reservations when he’d left his phone in his pants in the laundry. I wished he had left it again so I could go through it a second time to get more information.

  Ameyo had freaked out about the bruises on my face when I’d first come in. But she’d believed my story that I’d been in an accident in a friend’s car. She’d wanted me to go to the hospital to see her husband, the cheating doctor, but of course I refused. There was no way that he would have fallen for the “car accident” excuse when he examined my injuries, and I didn’t want to see his lying ass, anyway.

  “If you won’t go see Patrick, then go home and rest, Izzie!” she’d tried to insist, but I’d said I was staying. Eventually, she gave in, but told me not to do anything too hard or lift anything heavy. Instead, she went over some more special requests and all of them revolved around their baby, like already starting to child-proof their house. She was so excited about every single part of it.

  “What are you doing this weekend?” I’d asked casually after she’d talked animatedly about the agony of paint color choices before Patrick had picked light green, perfect for a boy or a girl. They weren’t going to find out the sex; they wanted to be surprised and she said they would be so happy either way.

  “Me, over the weekend?” Ameyo had looked a little surprised. “Nothing, I guess. Patrick’s going away with some friends for a golf weekend in…I can’t remember if it’s North or South Carolina.” She had laughed a little. “I guess I’ll see my parents, get my nails done, catch up with friends. You’re right, I should get on with my planning!”

  Inwardly, I had seethed. There she was talking about getting a decaf latte instead of regular so she wouldn’t do anything to hurt the baby, and the baby’s father was going to be off with that slut “Charlie” who had texted, “Call me, babe.” Ameyo had no idea what was ahead of her.

  I needed to find proof of what her husband was up to, and then I planned to do something I had never done, not one time ever before, no matter how awful the secret I’d discovered: I was going to tell her. Not to her face, no, not exactly. But I wanted to leave the evidence out where she would find it and know. That way, I didn’t have to be involved in it but Ameyo would learn the truth, that her husband was fake, and he was just a liar and a cheater. She deserved to know.

  All of us women deserved to know what they were up to. Ameyo might have believed that Patrick was different, but my mom was right. As off as she usually was about almost everything else in life, she had told the truth when she’d said that they were all the same…

  Well, maybe not quite all of them, I allowed myself to think. Maybe there were a few guys who weren’t totally bad. I thought about resting on Rory’s chest and listened to his heart, to the steady rhythm, and I hadn’t ever felt so safe and comfortable in my whole life. Or maybe I had, once—when I had been thirteen, when I’d put on the flannel shirt and coat in his apartment, when I’d been full of his pasta and orange juice. I’d been clean and safe and warm.

  I reminded myself how that night had ended: Rory had gone to jail. It was going to be hard, since I felt so good when I was with him, but I couldn’t let my guard down. There was just no such thing as being too careful. And unfortunately, that must have been Patrick’s motto, too, because I didn’t find a single piece of evidence that I could leave out for his wife to show that he was a cheater. She was going to spend the weekend in stupid ignorance while he was off with another woman, and once again, there was nothing I could do about it, no way for me to do anything except take it.

  I was tired of taking it.

  I was already furious when I arrived at Mrs. Weller’s house, where I had to remove my shoes and wear the socks that she left out for me—no shoes, even though the floor was disgustingly grimy due to her pack of tiny, yappy dogs. They surr
ounded my ankles when I came in, almost tripping me because I was still moving stiffly, and one of them bit me a little. Mrs. Weller never believed that her dogs would bite, though, so there was no point in telling her.

  It wasn’t even my first bite of the day, because before I’d gone to Ameyo’s house that morning, I’d headed to my mom’s apartment on another rescue mission. I’d found a few more cats there that I’d dropped off at the animal shelter on my way to work. I had the bloody marks to show for it, and Jade had screamed at me for ruining her life by taking the pets she loved so much. She’d followed me out into the street and attracted a little crowd, telling them how awful I was, how mean.

  By the time I moved on to the Tollman house, I wasn’t furious anymore; I was just depressed. I let myself in quietly, noticing that (unfortunately) her car was in the garage, so she was in there somewhere, maybe working out in their giant gym or messing around with the volunteer stuff that she called work in her beautiful home office. Wherever she was, I was sure that she would notice that I was seven minutes late. On the way out of the Wellers’ house, I’d stepped in something that one of those dogs had left on the freshly mopped floor. It went through the ugly socks I’d had to wear and it had taken me a little time to clean up, my foot and the floor, again.

  I crept through the Tollmans’ white kitchen, angry at myself for acting like one of the feral cats I’d trapped at my mom’s place, just as sneaky and fearful. Still, I tried not to let the cleaning supplies in my bucket shift and make any noise as I moved through the rooms. I must have done a good job at creeping around, because Mrs. Tollman never appeared. She didn’t pop out to complain or correct me as she often liked to do if she was at home while I worked. Maybe she was out with a friend, although I hadn’t seen any evidence that she had one of those. I smiled meanly, and then remembered that I wasn’t one to talk. Except, Rory…no. That wasn’t a good line of thinking. I reminded myself to be careful, even with him.