First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  “Rory,” she sighed, her eyes fluttering closed, and I almost lost it right there. But I managed to hold myself back and I got to watch her come again, and after I got the condom situation settled, I did, too, deep inside her body. Then we stayed there, all tangled together, her little feet resting on my calf, her hands smoothing my hair, her lips brushing over my skin. It felt like I could stay on the couch forever, holding Isobel.

  In between kissing, we talked about the other furniture we’d need, besides the chair. Mostly, she did the talking about that and I listened and remembered so I could try to make it all happen.

  “Is that your phone?” she asked, breaking off her discussion about house plants. I had no idea what she was saying but the words “Boston fern” came up a lot and I had made a mental note already. “Maybe it’s Jade.”

  I reached for it and saw the screen. “You take it. It’s Rella’s number.”

  “Hi, it’s Isobel —what?” She sat up straight, her breasts moving tantalizingly close to my mouth, her pink nipple almost brushing my lips. But the look on her face told me that this wasn’t the time. It was all right, because we had the rest of our lives.

  She wasn’t on the call for long. “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure.” Isobel scrambled off the couch and threw the blanket over her naked body. “Rella told me that she and Jade are ok but they need both of us to come right away. I heard my mom in the background like she’s in Rella’s living room. They aren’t killing each other yet, but…” We both hurried to get dressed and get Jory the cat and I told Isobel I’d drive us. I wanted her near to me. And I was having the feeling that there were eyes on us, either Kash or one of Memphis’s associates, and I couldn’t let anything happen to her.

  “We’re fine,” Rella said calmly, as Isobel opened her apartment door and let us in.

  “Hi, Izzie,” Jade sang out. She reached for the cat, cuddling Jory under her chin. “Don’t worry, we didn’t kill him.”

  Isobel stopped cold. “Who’s dead? What did you do, Jade?”

  “Now, now,” Rella tsked. “How are you this morning, honey? And you, Rory?” She raised her eyebrows at both of us. “Late night?”

  “Rella!” Isobel exclaimed, and blushed. “What happened here?”

  “He came to the door, and I hit him,” Jade said. “First I lured him into the apartment, and then I hit him. Then I got Rella, and she helped me get rid of the body.”

  “I don’t know this movie,” Isobel said, shaking her head.

  “It’s not a movie, but he isn’t dead,” Rella announced. “Would anyone care for coffee?”

  I thought that Isobel looked a little faint. “Sit down,” I said, and directed her to the hard couch. “Tell us what happened. Please,” I added, when Rella gave me a look.

  “Jade came down to let me know that she needed some assistance,” she explained. “And fortunately, the elevator was working, so I went upstairs. And there was Mr. Kash on the floor of your living room—”

  “What?” Isobel exploded again.

  “She had hit him with a frying pan,” Rella said calmly. “He had come and pounded on the door, and she opened it and told him to come in to see you. Then she bashed him a good one.”

  Jade smirked. “I got him for you,” she told her daughter, and all of a sudden, Isobel’s eyes filled up with tears.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said, and Jade nodded.

  “Between the two of us, we were able to roll him into the elevator,” Rella went on, with no more emotion than when she had read out her grocery list to me over the phone.

  “He was heavy,” Jade said, and shot Rella a dirty look.

  “With my bad hip, Jade did most of the rolling. I was more in a supervisory role,” she explained.

  “A supervisory role to move the body,” I said.

  “Oh, no, he was alive. We got him into the lobby, and we left him there. Breathing,” she pointed out, and Isobel’s mouth fell open. “Mr. Mazariegos from the second floor came upon him a few minutes later so Jade and I were quite fortunate to have vacated the area. We watched through my peephole. Kash was coming to by that point and started yelling, so Mr. Mazariegos called the police. They came and found him with that gun stuck down his pants, and it was not a registered firearm,” she said primly. “He also had quite a stash of illegal narcotics in his back pocket.”

  “And more in his car. A lot,” Jade threw in. “The police took it,” she added, pretty sadly.

  “There were also several warrants out for his arrest. They carried him away in an ambulance, but handcuffed. He wasn’t sure what had hit him,” Rella concluded, and Jade raised her hand.

  “I did.”

  Isobel just stared. I was sorry I hadn’t been able to take care of Kash myself, but I was glad that Jade had finally stepped up, in her own way, for her daughter. I had a few things to do to make sure that, if the police did come around asking more questions, nothing was going to get traced back to any of these women. It was unlikely that they had time to mess any longer with a criminal getting hit on the head, but I wasn’t going to risk Isobel. I did my thing with the blood and the weapon, Isobel’s frying pan, and then I packed up more of the stuff in her apartment. Jade had already managed to make it a mess.

  When I came back down to Rella’s, Isobel still seemed to be in a state of shock, and Rella was telling her not to worry, that she and Jade had formed an understanding and would be together for the day. It wasn’t a situation that had any longevity, but it would work for now.

  “And we’ll keep the cat,” Jade said, cuddling Jory.

  “Don’t you need to be at work?” Rella mentioned, and I got Isobel out to my car, still feeling the itch like there were eyes on me somewhere.

  “Where to?”

  She gave me an address out in the suburbs but she was still staring at her building, even turning around as we drove up the block. Fast, because I wanted to put some distance there.

  “My mom hit Kash,” she finally said. “She knocked him out?”

  “Yep.”

  “Do you think she really did it for me? Like, she was trying to protect me from him?”

  Her voice had so much hope in it. “Yeah, I think so. I think she wanted to protect her daughter,” I agreed, and when I looked over, despite everything that had gone on that morning, Isobel had a smile on her face.

  Chapter 14

  Isobel

  “Sorry I’m late,” I apologized to Ameyo, but as I said it, I smiled. I just kept smiling today, even though my mom and Rella had almost killed someone.

  Ameyo smiled back at me and absently rubbed her rounding tummy. “That’s ok. You seem…different. You seem happy today, Izzie.”

  That was different for me, I supposed. “I am,” I admitted.

  “Does it have something to do with that big guy waiting in the car for you?” She looked over my shoulder to where Rory was sitting in the driveway, reading a book. He was worried about me, so he had taken the day off from the woodshop to tag along. It was just like when one time I’d had to give a speech at school, and Rella had come to listen, sitting in the auditorium with the other parents so I could see her. I had never had that before, and Rory staring seriously down at his book about Native American cultures in the driveway gave me that same safe, comfortable feeling.

  “That’s my new boyfriend,” I told Ameyo, and my smile got so big that I probably looked like a clown.

  “He’s…um, he’s…he’s kind of…” She looked more at Rory. “Is he, um, safe?”

  I got what she meant. He didn’t look safe—he looked a little uncontrolled and dangerous, too. Ameyo had seen the bruises on my face and arms, sometimes, and maybe she hadn’t believed my stories about all the accidents I was having. “He is with me,” I told her.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  But I kept talking, like she was my friend instead of my employer. “I met him a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I liked him, even back then.”

/>   “Your first crush?” Her eyes sparkled. “Well, maybe he’ll be your last, too. Patrick was my first boyfriend in second grade. He kissed me on the cheek next to the tire swing.” Ameyo laughed. “So he was my first and now he’s my last, and we don’t bother about the in-between.”

  Your husband isn’t what you think, I wanted to tell her, remembering his weekend of cheating. I opened my mouth, unsure of how to say it, but Ameyo kept talking.

  “I was worried for a while when I found out I was pregnant because he was so focused on the baby. We had wanted it for so long, and with Patrick as a doctor, he knows all the things that can go wrong. I felt like maybe I was turning into an incubator in his mind,” she said, making a face. “It was good to get away for the weekend to talk about it.”

  “Away for the weekend?” I echoed, and she nodded.

  “He told me that he was going golfing, but he surprised me by borrowing his friend Charlie’s cabin so we could be together with no interruptions. We went and got pretty busy in some lovely flannel sheets!” She smiled, remembering.

  “Charlie? Your husband has a friend named Charlie?” That was what the texts had been, setting up a secret weekend with Ameyo? “You guys went away together that weekend when you thought he was going off with his friends?”

  She nodded, and picked up her briefcase. “I’m late, too. You know how you think you’ll get just one more thing done…” She walked briskly toward the door, asking me to put a load of laundry in the dryer if I had time.

  I went to stop the washer so the clothes didn’t get ruined, because Ameyo didn’t ever seem to understand how to deal with her machine. As I did, I thought that I was very, very glad to have been wrong about her husband, and that he hadn’t been cheating on her. Maybe they weren’t perfect, as I had once thought. Ameyo wasn’t, I decided, as I pulled a shrunken sweater out of the washer. But they could be good together, anyway. I still thought that her baby was very, very lucky.

  Rory got out to walk to me and take my bucket of supplies from my hand when I was done with Ameyo and Patrick’s house. “Where to next?” he asked as he started the car.

  I gave him the address, and added, “I won’t be going to the Tollmans, so this will be the last job today.” I smoothed my ponytail and thought of Mrs. Tollman’s perfect hair. “I wonder why they left like that.”

  He turned out onto Woodward. “Bernard Tollman was cheating with my boss’s girlfriend. Leopold found out,” he mentioned. “I thought I told you that.”

  No, he hadn’t. My mouth dropped open. “That’s why they had to leave?”

  “They had to leave because Leopold got mad, and he knows too much. Bernie talked a lot when he drank and he told his old friend about all the bad shit he was doing at work, and he and Leopold are up to some things, too.”

  “Mr. Tollman was doing bad stuff? Seriously?”

  “White collar,” Rory confirmed. “But still, it was probably better to go, lay low for a while, until Leopold calms down. If he does. Leopold wants to find him, to make sure that Bernie doesn’t talk either. They’re both scared shitless of each other now that they’re not friends anymore.”

  I sat back, stunned. Everybody had something to hide. Mr. Tollman hid his crimes behind his expensive silver ties. But Ameyo’s husband had hidden a good thing, a sweet thing. Rory hid that he was ashamed, but he had told me. I reached and patted his leg, and then undid my seatbelt to kiss his cheek, and he looked over and smiled as I clicked it back on.

  “Are you taking the day off tomorrow?” he asked me.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Your birthday,” he reminded me, and I checked the date on the phone that I had taken back from Jade. He was right about that, if my birth certificate could be trusted. Since it had been filled out at the hospital and not by my mom herself, I figured it was probably accurate. “Rella told me,” he said.

  I wondered a little what else Rella had told him, what she might have guessed about how Jade and I had been living when I was a kid. About the guys my mom had over and what she had done with them, those guys who would sometimes find me wherever I tried to hide. And Rory already knew some of what had happened since, with Kash and me taking from those houses and—it was all right. It was like Ameyo said, that she didn’t worry about the in-between. My in-between had been pretty terrible, but things were looking a lot better now.

  “So? What should we do? How are we going to celebrate?”

  “You already gave me my present,” I reminded him, but he shook his head.

  “I gave you one present. There may be another.”

  But the best present was just being with him. I opened my mouth to tell him that, but then something crashed into the car and my words turned into a scream as we careened toward the sidewalk.

  ∞

  Rory

  My body slammed forward as the seatbelt stopped me but in the next second, I was trying to get us out of there. It didn’t work—we were boxed in. I gunned the engine but there was a telephone pole in front of us and two cars bigger than the SUV to the left and behind. We were trapped.

  “Get down. Isobel, get down!”

  “What?” Her eyes were huge and she wasn’t moving. I grabbed her head to push her onto the floor of the car but the seatbelt locked and it took precious seconds to unfasten her, and by then, they were already shooting.

  And then the other cars squealed away, and it was totally silent. I was still, too, mentally checking myself, but I was fine. They had been just as useless as the kid that Memphis had sent on a scooter to kill me. In the next second, I realized that it was too silent, because Isobel wasn’t even crying or screaming.

  “Fuck. Fuck!” I ran around the side of the car and yanked open the door, and then I caught her body as she slumped out. “Isobel!” I laid her there, right on the dirty sidewalk, but she didn’t have any marks on her body, no blood, no wounds. It was a faint. She had fainted.

  “Isobel? Baby? Wake up!” I could hear my own voice shaking, and then I heard sirens. Nope, we had to go. I gathered her up and put her in the back seat. I could only think of one place to take her where I knew she’d be safe. “I’m going to fix it,” I told her, gunning the engine and reaching back to hold her limp hand. “This is going to be over soon.”

  “What the hell happened, man? Someone shot at you?” Ronnie asked after I screeched to a halt inside Leopold’s gated compound and got out of the driver’s seat. He walked toward my car, shaking his head as he stared at the bullet holes. “Shit, this was bad.”

  “Someone shot at me and my girl. Come here and watch her for me.” I considered the obvious damage to the SUV. “I’m going to need to borrow your car, too.”

  Isobel had woken up as we drove and crawled into the front seat but she was a mess, crying and trembling, thinking that at any moment, we were going to get killed. “Rory, no!” she said, and lurched across the car to put her arms around my neck as I started to get out. “Don’t go!”

  I held her for a moment, rubbing her back. Damned if I wanted to leave her, either. “Stay here and you’ll be fine.”

  She was used to people leaving her, I realized, because she let go of me right away and nodded, sliding back into her seat and looking straight ahead.

  “Isobel.”

  She turned her face toward me. Her eyes were still so big, the pupils like black holes almost swallowing up all the blue.

  “I will be back. I’m going to fix this so we’ll be safe, always.”

  She didn’t speak or give me any sign that she’d heard me, and finally, I had to walk away. I went straight to the door of Leopold’s father’s house and I asked the person in uniform who answered my ring if I could speak to the old man. He was in the front room with his machines helping him, the oxygen and God knew what else to keep him alive. But his eyes were just as sharp as they’d always been.

  “Have a seat,” he told me in his reedy voice. “You’re too tall to look at.”

  I did, carefully, on a chair that
looked too old to be sturdy. Then I explained to him that I needed to go take care of a problem, something in my life that had the potential to interfere with his family, too.

  He got angry when he heard that. “Leopold doesn’t give me enough grief?” he asked me. “More complications? Why don’t I just fire you right now and you can march your big self out through the gate? Problem solved.”

  I shook my head. “I’m just asking if I can leave my girlfriend here for a couple of hours so I can take care of this, and then you won’t have to worry about me and my issues anymore. When I come back, I’ll tell you where Bernie Tollman went, if you’re interested.”

  “The lawyer?” He looked hard at me with his hidden, hooded gaze. “Why do you think I care about him? Leopold told me he went on vacation.”

  “Maybe, but maybe he’s running. Your son has a big mouth,” I commented, and the old man looked disgusted. “I know what he and Tollman have been up to on the side, and I bet you do, too. I bet that Leopold can’t wipe his, uh,” I stopped myself from swearing. “He can’t wipe his nose without you knowing.”

  I didn’t need to worry about swearing. I couldn’t understand what the old man answered in another language, but I was willing to bet from his expression that all of it was filthy. He ended by saying, “Leopold! I should have drowned him at birth, but he looks just like his mother. Yes, Mr. Morin, I need to find Bernie Tollman, and just like I did with the stupid mistress, I’m going to make him be quiet.”

  My face must have showed what I was afraid he would do, because he laughed like a creaky door. “I’ll pay him off, I mean! We’re not that kind of family.” He closed his eyes and sat quietly, reminding me of Rella before her mind started to wander. But then he looked at me and nodded slightly. “Go solve your problem and keep your hands clean. Nothing comes back to us.”

  I nodded and went back to Isobel. She was out of the SUV, sitting on a low wall with her face turned away from the bullet scars decorating the car doors. Now she wore my jacket from the back seat, even in the warm spring sunshine, and it was so big on her that she looked like she’d draped herself in a tent. I could see the fabric of it waver as she shivered. Ronnie was watching her warily but she was looking at the ground.