Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  The tension between the two women was suddenly as thick as butter. I interjected, "But we would like to talk a little bit about how the boy's mother died, Ella. Could we do that?"

  Ella burped a tiny burp and covered her mouth. She looked away and closed her eyes, holding them tightly shut.

  "Ella?" I said.

  "Hell's another," she muttered. "Hell's another."

  CHAPTER 30

  I never used to curse before she died. Not even in anger. Certainly not just for the hell of it like I do now. The man who killed her stuck one knife in her chest and he stuck another one in my soul."

  Hell's another.

  I was still unsure what relation Ramp's mother was to Ella. I asked, "His mother was your daughter-in-law, Ella?"

  "No, no, no. Denise was our daughter. Herbert and me had one daughter, one son. Our son-that's Brian-he died in a Humvee accident in Somalia. He was a medic in the Marines at the time. It was on the news."

  Ella sighed quickly-almost a gasp-before she continued. "Then Denise was murdered in Denver. Bang, bang. Strike one, strike two."

  "I didn't know. I'm so sorry."

  "Brian-that's our son-he was trying to do good when he died. Humanitarian assistance in Somalia. That's in Africa. He was a peacekeeper. A Marine peacekeeper. Herbert always thought it was an oxy-whaddyacallit?"

  "Oxymoron."

  "Yeah. Oxymoron. Doesn't matter. Fact is, Brian was a peacekeeper at heart. His death was just one of those things that preachers can't explain no matter how hard they try or how long they talk on Sunday mornings about God's mysterious ways. Herbert was philosophical about it, said it could just as easily have been a pickup truck accident on I-70 that killed Brian. If I'd had a bet to place, I would've rather bet my son's life on the pickup and the interstate, you know what I mean?"

  I said I did.

  Ella required no further prompting. She said, "But Denise?" She shook her head as though trying to cleanse an image of something she'd rather not recall. "It was four years, five months ago. Two weeks before Christmas. She was living with her husband, Patrick, in Denver, in the neighborhood they call Uptown. You know it?"

  "Vaguely," I said. Years before during my first marriage, when I'd spent more time in Denver, the neighborhood was called North Capitol Hill. Now dubbed Uptown on the Hill, the compact urban neighborhood just northeast of downtown was an interesting multiethnic place with a range of residents who varied widely in financial wherewithal. Despite its new name, though, the neighborhood wasn't on much of a hill. Recently refurbished late-nineteenth-century homes sat adjacent to massive redevelopment projects, vacant lots, and old apartment houses gone to seed.

  "Denise was a nurse at one of the hospitals nearby. Presbyterian? She liked the neighborhood because she could walk to work and because there were all kinds of people living there. That was her way of telling us that life there was nothing like being out here in Agate. The whole time she and Pat were there, they didn't even know it but three doors down from their old Denver square was a rooming house that was actually a halfway house, you know, a place for released criminals. The ones who've been, whaddyacallit, paroled?"

  "Yes," Lucy said, "paroled."

  Ella had already shared enough details that I thought I knew the rest of the story. A Denver woman had been stabbed to death by a guy on parole for a previous murder conviction. I remembered the story from news reports and I recalled discussing it in some detail with Sam over a couple of beers one night.

  Sam had been especially irate about the crime. The practice of releasing dangerous felons on early parole was an issue that bugged cops more than it bugged anybody else. Except, maybe, the families of the paroled felon's last victims, or the families of his next victims.

  "He'd been in the halfway house for a few months," Ella told us. "Luther Smith is his name. He'd served four years, five months, three days for a manslaughter conviction in Commerce City before he was released into a halfway house in Denver. Why there? Why right down the street from my girl? Who knows? But he was living in that halfway house when he began following my Denise to work and deciding that since she worked at a hospital she might be keeping drugs at her house. That's what he told the police anyway; that's the way he explained breaking into her place and ransacking it and waiting for her to come home from work that day.

  "Pat-her husband-worked as a pressman at the Denver Post. He was gone evenings. Denise thought she was coming home to an empty house. But she wasn't. Luther Smith was there waiting for her and he was mad as hell because he hadn't found any drugs anywhere in the house."

  Ella thrust her chin forward. I could see the effort she was using in her attempt to control the quivering that had erupted.

  "He began to try to rape my little girl and she fought him like a banshee. That's what the cops said. She fought him as hard as any woman has ever fought off any man. That's what they told me and Herbert.

  "So Luther Smith stabbed her. He did it just once. Sliced right through some big artery at the top of her stomach. And my Denise bled to death right there in her own bedroom. It was Jason who found her when he got home from a football game at his high school that night."

  Jason, I said to myself. He has a name. The bomber has a name. It's Jason, but not Jason Ramp. Ramp's his mother's name. It's Jason what?

  To Ella, I said, "I'm so sorry. You've had so much loss."

  Lucy added, "I'm so sorry, too. What happened to your daughter is awful. Inexcusable."

  Ella frosted her voice with defeat. "He didn't rape her. Coroner said he didn't rape her. I sometimes find myself wishing that he had. Wishing she hadn't fought him so hard so she might be alive."

  Her words covered the contours of the irony of rape like upholstery covers an old sofa. "I'm so sorry, Ella," I said again. There should have been better words, but if there were, I didn't know them.

  "I still go to church every Sunday, you know. Despite what God allowed to be done to my children. I made a pledge to keep giving Him a chance to explain Himself until the day that I die."

  Lucy said, "It's my understanding that your grandson calls himself Ramp, still. That's in honor of his mother?"

  "No, our name-his mother's maiden name-is his middle name. The boy's name is Jason Ramp Bass. His friends started calling him Ramp sometime in high school. Something about skateboarding I never understood. There's a lot about skateboarding I never understood." Ella sighed. "You get to be my age, you realize the list of things you never understood is a hell of a long one."

  L ucy and I sat at the kitchen table with Ella for quite a while early that afternoon, learning about Denise and Pat, and the boy his grandmother called Jase.

  "Pat couldn't manage Jase after Denise died. Boy gave him no end of trouble. So he came out here to live with me and Herbert. Jase didn't like it out here in the country but he adjusted okay. I give Herbert most of the credit for that. When Herbert was in town between demo jobs, the boy and him were inseparable. Always doing things together. Mostly cutting steel with explosives. Herbert said that the boy had a knack with explosives."

  From the corner of my eye, I could see the screen on the television set on the counter. A teaser for the evening news was running. I wasn't sure if Lucy saw it, too, but assuming that Lucy's story was about to be featured, I knew that I didn't want Ella to be reminded of Lucy's recent notoriety.

  I stood, carrying dishes toward the sink.

  "Don't do that," Ella said. "I'll clean up."

  "It's not a bother-it's the way I was brought up," I said. I switched the TV off before I stacked the dishes. "I hope you don't mind that I turned it off. It's distracting me."

  "Oh, I don't mind. It's only there for company. And I've already got company, today."

  "Where's Jase now? In Denver?" Lucy asked.

  "Mmm-hmm. Denver. He works for a welding company. It's something else that Herbert taught him. Herbert was always cutting metal and welding metal for his experiments."

  "Shaped charges," Lucy said.r />
  "That's right." One side of Ella's mouth elevated in a smile. "You don't know what they are, do you?"

  "No," she admitted. "I don't. I don't have a clue what a shaped charge is."

  Ella laughed so hard she started to cough from a place deep in the recesses of her lungs. When she finally controlled the spasm, she said, "You two are going to go talk to him now, aren't you? Once you leave here."

  Lucy and I both nodded.

  "Figured. Well, I'll save you some time and tell you where to find him, but I want to talk to him first. I should also talk to Pat, his father, let him know what you told me. Once I do those two things, I'll tell you where to find Jase. If he really did what you say, well… But I want you to remember something, too. I want you to remember that the boy was hurt by his mother's death. You'll remember that? We've all been hurt by what happened."

  I said, "Of course."

  Lucy wrote her phone numbers on a sheet of paper and gave it to Ella. She said, "That's fair, Ella. You give me a call after you talk to Jason and his father, okay?"

  Ella looked back up at me before she spoke to Lucy. "Right now, you're acting like you're going to wait to talk to Jase until I call you. But you won't wait. You're going to go try to find him as soon as you leave here. You're going to go out to your fancy car and get on your cell phone and call your cop friends or you're going to use some computer whizbang and do some magic thing that the police do on TV and you're going to try and find him. Clear as dew, you'd lie to an old woman."

  Lucy said, "To track down whoever has been setting those bombs, Ella, I'd lie to every old woman I could find."

  Ella opened a drawer that was recessed into the side of the kitchen table. She reached in and slid out a huge revolver. I thought it might be a.45. It was clean and gleamed with fresh oil. Ella rested the weapon on the table, the barrel pointed only slightly away from Lucy.

  My heart galloped.

  "I like you both," Ella said. "I do."

  I thought, Hell's another.

  CHAPTER 31

  L ucy dropped me off back at my car. I would've loved to have had some time to reflect with her over what we'd just learned-or, at the very least, to hear what she thought about Ella's revolver-but I had to rush to Boulder to have a prayer of getting back for my appointment with Naomi.

  I held up my watch and said, "If I make it to my office on time, I'm meeting with her this afternoon." I was still reluctant to use my patient's name in conversation.

  Lucy wasn't. She said, "You're seeing Naomi?"

  "She said she had some news for me, something important. But what we just learned from Ella can't wait for that-Sam needs to know everything we heard right now. So do the Denver Police."

  "I'll do that, don't worry," she said. "I know who to talk to. And maybe the fact that it comes from me will earn me some redemption."

  I spent the long drive back to Boulder watching my mirrors for a State Patrol cruiser and trying to prepare myself for what I expected would be a difficult session with Naomi.

  When I got to my office and entered through the rear doors, it was only four-twenty but the red light on the far wall was already beaming. Naomi Bigg wasn't only on time for her extra appointment, she was early. And, given what Lucy and I had discovered about Ramp earlier that afternoon, I was more than ready for the meeting. I took a deep breath and made long strides down the hall to greet her.

  But the woman I found standing in the middle of the waiting room wasn't Naomi Bigg.

  She heard me open the door and barely threw a glance my way before she demanded, "Where is she? Is she back there? Where is she?"

  The voice was frantic and distinctly young. The speaker was, too. When I didn't reply right away, she immediately turned back to scan the street, spying at something through the window.

  I guessed that she was in her late teens, early twenties. She was blond and overweight. How overweight was hard to tell; her clothes hung on her like curtains. One eyebrow was pierced and adorned with a thin gold ring. Her hair was cut, well, badly, and dyed even worse, though I suspected that the aesthetic impact of the coiffure was intentional. I thought that there was something unusual about her makeup as well but couldn't decide exactly what. Maybe it was the color around her eyes.

  "May I help you?" I asked.

  "You're her doctor? My mother's doctor? Is she back there? God, this is important! Is she fucking back there yet? I need to talk to her!"

  She'd begun screaming at me.

  "No, she's not here yet. You're Marin, aren't you?"

  She nodded and returned her attention to the window. I could see her shoulders rise and fall with each rapid breath.

  I said, "I expect her any minute. You can talk to her then. In the meantime, is there anything that I can do to help you while-"

  She raised her arms up above her head and then dropped them quickly past her waist, as though she were signaling the start of a race. "Oh my God, where is she? I can't believe he'd do this. I never thought he'd do this. It's not what she thinks. It isn't what she thinks."

  "Who'd do what?" Her terror was infectious. Naomi's message was still echoing in my ears. I was beginning to become aware of pressure building in my chest, my pulse pounding at the veins in my neck.

  There's another bomb. That lawyer.

  Marin shook her head, exasperated. "Does she park here? In front? Or do you have a parking lot?"

  I stared at her, stammering in an effort to start a sentence.

  "When she comes to visit you, goddamn it, where the hell does she park her damn car?"

  "Patients usually park on the street. But I've never watched where your mother parks her car."

  She looked up. "Is that a siren? Oh my God, oh my God. Do you hear that? In the distance. Is that a siren?"

  I listened. I didn't hear a siren. I said so.

  "What time is it?" she demanded. She seemed to have totally forgotten about the phantom siren.

  I looked at my watch. Employing a voice that tried to reflect a pretense that I wasn't talking to a histrionic stranger, I said, "Four twenty-five. A little after."

  "Is she late?"

  "No. She's not due here for a few more minutes." I had no right to share that information, but I didn't even consider the possibility of not answering Marin Bigg's question.

  Marin pointed outside and screamed, "There she is! There's her car. See it? That's it!"

  I looked through the glass and saw the BMW that Naomi had been driving when she'd pulled up next to Lauren and me at the stoplight the day before. She was right out front of my building, backing expertly into a parking space that was only a few feet longer than her car. A cigarette dangled from her lips. Even from this distance I could tell that the ash was precariously long.

  Marin ran out the door, waving her arms as though she were intent on bringing a runaway train to a halt. She started yelling, "Mom! Mom! Don't stop the car! Don't stop the car! Get out and leave it running. Mom! Mom!"

  I was totally perplexed. I followed her outside.

  Marin leapt off the little porch, still waving her arms. "Mom! Mom! Here! Don't stop the car! Mom! Don't-"

  Naomi stopped the car. The reassuring BMW purr clicked off.

  Marin covered her ears.

  I exhaled.

  Marin had stopped screaming as suddenly as if someone had pulled the plug on her power source.

  Her voice now hollow, she said, "It didn't… He didn't… Mom, Mom. You're okay, Mom."

  She may have actually finished those first two sentences, but I was still on the porch, fifteen or twenty feet behind her, and I couldn't hear her well.

  Naomi climbed out of the BMW and stood on the street right beside the still-open door of her car. She took a moment to straighten her clothes, tugging down the bottom of a short-sleeved jacket. Her shoulders were stiff. I thought that she wasn't happy to see her daughter. Shaking her head emphatically, she said, "Not now, Marin. We'll talk later. Go on back home-wait for me there. I'm serious about this-wait
there."

  Marin held her hands out, palms to the sky. "Mom, I… I came to warn you…" Her tone grew plaintive.

  "About what? About him?" Naomi's tone was derisive, cutting. I recognized it instantly; she'd certainly used the same tone often enough with me. "It's a little late for that, isn't it? I just talked to him. He came by the office to plead with me, called upstairs and waited outside by my car. I just left him in the parking lot five minutes ago. So I already know what's going on. All of it. The party the two of you have planned is over as of right now, do you understand? I'll do what I can to help you both, I promise. Now go on home. I can't believe you did this. I just can't believe it."

  Marin was frozen in place, standing on the sidewalk ten feet from her mother's car. I couldn't see Marin's face, though I could tell from her posture that the tension wasn't quite gone. She said nothing; she didn't seem to have a response for her mother's words.

  Naomi leaned back down and reached into the car, grabbed the big Vuitton bag she always carried with her, and slung it over her shoulder. She slammed the car door. The noise it made was a solid, Bavarian thud. "Go home," she told her daughter. "I'll be there in an hour. We'll decide what to do then."

  Either Naomi had not seen me eavesdropping on the porch or she was ignoring me. Either way, I was grateful not to have much of a role in this new act of the Bigg family drama.

  For a moment, neither woman took a step. When Naomi finally walked with determined strides toward the sidewalk, I decided that the time had come for me to go back into my office and let this scenario between mother and daughter develop however it was going to develop.

  I think I turned my head first.

  But I'm not sure.

  Maybe I'd even completed turning all the way around so that I was facing the door. But the ragged piece of metal that I caught on the outside of my right thigh argued against that.

  Regardless, I remember seeing the flash in the periphery of my vision, and I think I heard the boom. Maybe it was the other way around. I know I felt the concussion. The evidence of that was irrefutable. It threw me against the front door of the old brick house with enough force to crack oak.