by Bob Bickford
She took off her gloves and rummaged in her handbag. She came up with a single cigarette and put it in her mouth. She snapped the purse closed and set it on the seat beside her. Realizing she had forgotten about her lighter, she looked at me and got embarrassed by the awkwardness of it. She started for the purse again.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have offered you one. I'm not thinking very clearly.”
I snapped my lighter. She leaned into it, and sucked her cheeks in. She didn't look as though she had gotten much practice smoking. Her lipstick was pink, and when she took the cigarette from her mouth it looked as though it had been kissed.
“I don't do this, usually. I mean . . . I wouldn't sit with someone I didn't know. I knew you were safe, though.”
“You did?”
“Your voice didn't get higher when you spoke to me,” she said. “That's how I knew it was safe to sit down with you. You're completely taken. I can tell. I hope it doesn't offend you, my saying so.”
“That's all right,” I said. “I didn't mind. Higher than what?”
“When a strange man speaks to a woman, and he's interested in her or has intentions, his voice gets higher. Yours didn't when you spoke to me.”
“I see,” I said, and didn't.
“Also, you're sad.” She was definite. “You're missing someone who doesn't know that you are, and your heart feels broken. I can tell.”
This was some funny kind of woman. I tried not to think about Annie Kahlo. I didn't think I had much heart to break. I had gotten drunk by myself in a lot of strange places, so this didn't mean anything.
“You have a lot of theories.” I smiled. “Do you use a crystal ball?”
“I don't need one,” she said. “I feel that way sometimes, too.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, a little clumsily, and a tendril of smoke curled from the ashtray. She looked at the front door again.
“I'd better go,” she said.
She slid out of the booth. She started to put her gloves on, changed her mind and stuck them in her purse. Then she changed it back again, and put them on.
“It was nice meeting you,” she said, and turned away. “Good luck.”
I felt a stab of loneliness, or something. It wasn't a familiar feeling, whatever it was.
“Just a minute,” I said.
She looked back, in her careful hat and gloves, her hair and makeup. She was an awful lot more than she thought she was, but I couldn't think of a way to tell her that. She was none of my business, anyway.
“Whoever was supposed to meet you here is a damn fool,” I said. “No loss.”
Just for a moment, her eyes went raw, but just as quickly she collected herself.
“Do you think so?”
“I know so,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “You should tell her how you feel, whoever she is. Maybe she doesn't know.”
I watched her all the way to the door, and then a waiter passed and I indicated my empty glass. When I looked back at the doorway, she was gone.
“You don't know the first thing about love,” I muttered to myself.
-Twenty Eight-
I found a spot at the curb, halfway up the small hill to my house. This late at night, the street tended to fill up. One of these days. I needed to clean out my garage so I could start using it. I got out and started walking.
I reached a spot where the sidewalk buckled and heaved over the roots of a huge fig tree. There was no streetlight there, and I had to be careful in the dark—catch a toe and I’d go face-first into the cement. I was feeling the couple of bourbons in me, so I took my time. I kept an eye out for Lopez' men in the shadows, but they stayed out of sight.
Annie Kahlo was still on my mind. The woman in the bar had suggested that I tell her how I felt, that maybe she didn't know. I wasn't sure if I knew how I felt. I knew Annie seldom left my thoughts anymore. I knew I had never felt quite like this about anyone, ever before.
From behind me, headlights flooded the road. I moved sideways and blended myself into the shadows. I had no particular reason to hide, but I had stayed in one piece because I followed my instincts. A dark-colored Hudson rolled by slowly. The exhaust burbled softly and the tires crunched pebbles. When the big car reached the top, the brake lights flashed and it pulled to the curb.
I started to walk again, a little bit faster than before. A man got out of the car and stood beside it, looking up at the houses. His long coat and fedora were silhouetted in the low light. He tossed his cigarette away and it made a tiny spark when it hit the street. I kept my steps quiet and tried to stay in the shadows as I came closer.
One of Lopez' men stepped out of the dark, quiet as a ghost. One minute he wasn't there, the next he was right beside me. I felt glad that I wasn't going up against these boys.
“Lady say okay,” he said, voice low. “Ella está esperando un amigo. Su novio.”
“She told you she's expecting someone?” I whispered. “Did you say. . .her boyfriend?”
A yellow bulb came on next door, and the man started moving. Annie’s front door opened and she came outside, slender and unmistakable. He went up the steps. She came into his arms and they kissed for a long time. For me, it was the forever kind of long time.
I stood there in the dark and looked at the two of them there in the yellow light. My eyes burned, and my chest hurt like my heart had fallen out. I hoped it had.
About the time I couldn’t stand any more of it, they turned and went inside. The porch light went off. I waited for lights to come on inside, but the house stayed dark. I supposed they didn’t need any lights for what went on in there. I knew I should go into my own house. Annie Kahlo was none of my business, not now, not anymore, but I couldn’t tear myself away.
Suddenly, the small dark glass over the front door went bright, once, like a photographer’s flash. I heard the popping noise that went with the light.
“Annie,” I said, in a voice that wasn't mine.
I ran toward the darkened house, hauling the pistol off my hip as I went.
I pushed her front door open with my shoulder. Inside, the familiar fragrance of flowers was overwhelmed by the red stink of burned gunpowder and blood. I felt for the light switch. Captain Earnswood lay on the floor, clutching his middle. He rocked back and forth and began to moan, a keening noise that rose and fell. It sounded like he was singing. Annie stood over him, legs spread and arms extended.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted at her.
She looked back over her shoulder at me. Her eyes were hot and dark and bright. I was paralyzed with shock.
“He killed my sister,” she said. “Remember?”
She extended a toe underneath Earnswood's head and forced his chin upward.
“Look at me,” she commanded. “Look.”
Earnswood's complexion had gone nearly white except for two feverish, livid spots on his cheeks. Tears leaked from the corners of both eyes. He shook his head back and forth, back and forth, without a break in the moaning. Annie stopped the movement with her foot, took careful aim and fired again. The bark of the .38 nearly deafened me in the small vestibule. The shot took him in the face and slammed his head back against the tiles.
“Annie!” I screamed.
I caught her by the wrist and pulled her to me, trying to keep the gun in her hand pointed away from us. We struggled; she was incredibly, improbably strong. I fought her for the pistol and murmured to her as if I were trying to calm a panicked animal. She finally relinquished it and subsided against me. I held her close and rocked her, smelling the perspiration in her hair and feeling her shoulders shake with sobbing.
“What the hell, Annie,” I murmured. “What the hell did you do that for?”
Her shaking increased, and I turned her face up to mine and saw with some kind of horror that she wasn't just crying. The sound bubbled up at me; she was laughing, too, long peals of lovely, silver screen laughter. Any actress in the country would have sold her
soul to own that delectable, sweet, Annie-laugh.
I let her go, and she stumbled backward against the wall and went down to the floor, a puddle of hilarity and weeping and blue-and-white cotton.
“He killed my sister, the son of a bitch. They all did . . . all of them.”
I saw her tears and her madness, and I knew that I had never loved anyone as much.
I went to one knee and checked Earnswood. He lay on his side with his knees drawn up, like a boy taking a nap. He didn’t look like he was asleep, though. Dead people always look dead. I didn’t need to take his pulse or even to see the spreading mess beneath his head. The bullet had caught him square in the chin, and he was a whole lot uglier than he had been when he was alive. His eyes looked at me and at nothing. I let him fall back, and I wiped my hand on the leg of my pants without realizing I did it.
Annie sat on the tiles, her back against the wall. She had her head on her knees. The pieces were falling into place for me.
“You killed them all, didn't you?” I asked. “The men in the Nash, Mary Raw. All of them.”
No answer.
“What's next? Are you planning to kill Cleveland, too?”
She lifted her face. Her eyes were swollen with tears, and she dragged them over to focus on me. Her smile was gorgeous. “Yes. If I’m really lucky.”
I helped her to her feet. My mind raced. “How did you set these people up, Annie?”
She began to laugh again. I put an arm around her shaking shoulders and led her to the porch. Lowered to the top step, she clutched herself and began to rock. I turned back inside. Earnswood was just as still and dead as he had been. Other than dragging his corpse out to the closest flower bed, I didn't have any good ideas. It looked pretty hopeless. Even if one of the neighbors hadn't already called it in, too many people knew.
Lopez had his men on the street, and they didn't miss anything. The fact that they were staying in the shadows meant they knew it was one of the enemy dead, and they weren’t needed. I didn't want to burden Danny with the weight of a cover up. None of this was technically his fight, and he had done enough. I was going to have to bring the cops in, and figure a plausible way to keep Annie out of it.
I eased the front door closed behind me without touching the knob. There were lights on in the several of the apartment windows across the street, and in a couple of the nearby houses. The street hadn't slept through it. I started down the front porch steps just as one of the Mexicans stepped out of the shadows.
“Get off the street,” I told him. “It's over, for now. We've killed a cop. The street is going to be swarming with them in just a few minutes.”
“Yo sé,” he said. “We saw the whole thing. It was Earnswood . . . escupo sobre su cuerpo. I spit on him.”
He did something strange. He turned to where Annie sat, leaned down and took her hand very gently. He spoke softly to her in rapid Spanish. I couldn't make out any of it, but she looked up at him and nodded. When he finished, he kissed her hand and settled it back in her lap.
“Ella es una santa,” he said to me. “A hero.” He nodded at me, and was gone.
“Maybe I need to spend time in a different place,” Annie said. “My car’s around the block, ready. I put some things in it this afternoon. It’s better if I’m invisible until I finish this.”
The engine on the Hudson still ticked once in a while as it cooled down. The guy on the floor inside the house was cooling down, too, but if he made any noises I didn’t hear them. I kept my voice as gentle as I could.
“Finish this? What do you mean, finish this?”
“This isn't done yet,” she said. “Not quite.”
“It isn’t too late, Annie. I'm going to deal with the cops. We’ll say he broke in. Let me do the talking.”
“He is a cop . . . was. They won't listen, and I don't want them to listen,” she said. “I want them to know that I did it. I want them to know why.”
“How did you set these people up?” I asked again. “These were all careful people, who had every reason to be wary of you. How did they even let you get close?”
Her face changed. She looked almost savage.
“They all wanted the same thing,” she said. “Everyone wants the same thing, even you.”
“That isn't true,” I said, stung. “I've never given you a reason to think that.”
“I have to go,” she said, and turned away.
I took a plunge. “I'm going to say that I saw him break in, and I went over to protect you...”
“Go to hell.”
“I can help you with this.”
“Go to hell. Get out of my business. Oh...and Nate? You failed. You had a chance to make things right, and you didn't. I had to do it myself.”
She spun away and headed across the grass. I watched her go.
You failed.
I faced the worst decision of my life. I had spent a decade as a cop in St, Louis. Earnswood was dirty, but he was still a cop. I didn't work for bad people if I could help it. Annie Kahlo was a murderer. She had killed more than once, and she wasn't done killing. If I let her go, I would be no better than Sal Cleveland.
I watched Annie disappear around the corner.
There was no way to take any of this back. There was no way to stop loving her, either, and I didn’t know what to do. The man in the moon peered over the rooftops across the street from me. He wasn’t offering anything. As I took a deep breath, I heard Charlene Cleveland's voice, as clearly as if she were standing right beside me.
You don't know the first thing about love.
I started to run.
The convertible sat at the curb, already idling. Annie didn't speak or look at me when I got in the passenger side. She put Mercury in gear and pulled away even before I could get the door closed. The engine sound wound up into a howl, and she pushed the car into a hard left turn and sped up Olive Street. A block away, a pair of headlights came toward us. I didn't need to see the red light on the roof to know it was a prowl car.
Annie raised her voice to be heard. “Why are you doing this?”
“I told you I would stay in for the whole nine,” I said. “That hasn't changed.”
Parked cars flashed by, inches from my window. The passing buildings were mostly dark. Only an occasional burst of colored neon interrupted the street lights.
“If you are, then give me back my gun,” she said.
I hesitated, and then took her pistol from my pocket and laid it on the seat between us. It was the last thing I wanted to do. It seemed like a point of no return, even if I had probably passed that the first time I met her. I smelled the burned gunpowder and in my imagination, the blood.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “I guess this is the ninth inning,”
Over the sound of the Mercury's engine, there came the faint warble of the approaching siren. It quickly grew louder, and then the radio car flew past. The driver's face was a white blur.
“No, it isn't,” she said. “Not yet.”
For just a moment, in the glare of headlights, I had seen her smile, like a sweet secret, dark and serene. It made me shiver a little inside, so I looked back at the road.
This late, there was almost no traffic. Annie drove the streets of Santa Teresa, apparently with no destination and no purpose except to keep us moving. I heard faint sirens from time to time, and once I saw a prowl car paralleling us a block away. I wondered if the police knew they were hunting for a green Mercury convertible.
The ride spun by like some kind of dream. She turned the car away from State Street, and the neon-soaked sidewalks went shadowy, all at once. We spun through block after darkened block. This was the city where I lived and made my living, and I recognized none of it.
On Mission Street, deep in the Mexican barrio, we had to slow down to a crawl because the narrow street was full of people. The crowd poured out of a stone church and overflowed into the road. Figures milled around in the dark and stepped out into our lights. Some of them were shaki
ng maracas or slapping at tambores, dancing to music I couldn't hear.
A flight of steps led up to the church, which was open and unlighted. The door was a black hole. I leaned out and looked up; the steeple disappeared into the night sky.
“In the middle of the night?” I asked. “Who goes to church in the middle of the night?”
“I thought almost everyone did,” Annie said. “They don't?”
“Not in my experience, they don't.”
She smiled again.
“That's a relief,” she said. “I thought I was the only one who didn't.”
A young girl in a wedding dress appeared next to the car, close to my door. The light caught at her veil and made her face radiant. A rabbit, wearing a string tie and beaded vest, had her by the hand. I saw that all of the people around her were wearing animal masks. A bird growled and held up two fists. It feathers bobbed as it moved aggressively toward us. Annie tapped the horn and moved the car forward. The crowd parted reluctantly, and then was gone. We were back into empty streets.
“This is my world,” Annie said. “I wander here constantly. I think it's because I'm so afraid of everything.”
The Mercury flew south on side streets, back out to Cabrillo Boulevard, and the beach. The hotel entrances burned brightly and their signs sparkled and flashed, but only an occasional pair of headlights lit the roadway. If we got caught here, we had nowhere to hide. On my right, there was a huge blackness. The ocean was dark and nearly infinite, and it seemed like a place to hide, a riddle that no one would ever solve.
A traffic light turned red, and Annie braked to a stop.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I don't know yet,” she said. “I'll drive until I do.”
A small, dark shape waddled in front of the car, following the crosswalk to the other side. I had to strain to see it in the dark, and I wondered if I was seeing things. It looked like a duck. An old woman hurried out of the darkness, caught up with the bird in front of our car and bent over it. After hoarse laughter and a lot of fuss, she straightened slowly and settled the duck on her shoulder.
“Sorry thing,” she said, still laughing.
