Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  "I mean that literally, about the money." He took one and passed the rest.

  "Keep a sharp eye out for this miserable excuse for a human being. Name's Rawlings, and there's a nice little price on his head."

  Bile stung her throat. She knew then what Garrett had been doing, why he was doing it and why he'd chosen the moment he had to touch her.

  He'd suspected all along that the urgency of this meeting arose from Loehman's need to neutralize Rawlings, but Garrett had grown weary of the swaggering and arrogant talk, and forced Feder to cut to the chase.

  He should have warned her.

  Chapter Nine

  She shot up and ran, tripping over her own feet in her flight to the bathroom. Hurling herself into the small half bath, she shoved the door shut behind her.

  Her insides heaved violently. She knew at some level that she'd blown it for Garrett and Matt, and she hated herself for coming so unglued over a bounty, a death sentence on Burton Rawlings. She was a professional, a veteran of vile, gruesome crime scenes, but that didn't stop the useless retching.

  Garrett shoved into the bathroom, closed the door and sank onto the floor with her, pulling her roughly into his arms.

  "Kirsten, pull yourself together. Do you want these cretins to figure out that" -- "Don't," she uttered harshly, jerking away from him.

  "They're talking about murder, Garrett! They're-" He shook her. She felt herself sinking fast, losing it all over again.

  "What did you think this was about? You know what this is. You've known it since you heard what you heard on Christo's monitor. Rawlings was always the worm."

  She wanted to shriek at him. Could he really believe that knowing a thing at some guesswork level two or three times removed and seeing Burton's picture being passed around so every Tom, Dick and Harry Vigilante in greater Seattle would be gunning for him weren't two appallingly different things?

  But Feder banged on the door at just that moment.

  "Everything copacetic in there?" He sounded far, far more suspicious than concerned, and she knew it was her fault.

  Her eyes flew to Garrett's.

  "Fine," he called, looking at her, urging her, imploring her silently to pull it together.

  "C'mon, Kirsten. You can do this," he murmured, suddenly gentle, tender. He stood, lifting her to her feet.

  "Just follow my lead, okay? You can do this. I know you can. Do it for Christo."

  Gritting her teeth, she nodded, willing herself to do what she had to do to save the situation. If it could be saved at all.

  "Okay."

  "That's my girl." For a brief instant, stroking her back, he cupped her head to his chest, then reached for the door, a slaphappy grin plastered on his face.

  Feder stood outside the door, his ruddy complexion a mask of angry suspicion.

  "What the devil is going on here?"

  Garrett shrugged.

  "No big deal. She's got some bug, is all."

  Feder's mistrust transformed into something only slightly less malicious.

  "That right?" Still with his hand high on the frame blocking the door, he leaned back, craning his neck around and called out to the others.

  "You hear that, guys? She's got some bug is all. I know. Maybe we got a new little Truth Sayer on the way." He looked hard at Kirsten.

  "That it? Another little baby for God and country?"

  Garrett stiffened, still in character, ready to take the creep on over bullying his wife. Kirsten laid a hand on his biceps and conjured from God only knew where a look of confused innocence.

  "Mr. Feder," she asked, her voice childlike, "I... isn't that okay? Isn't that a good thing? A new... a new baby?"

  He stared her down. Her eyes flooded. Her chin trembled, and though none of it came upon her for any reason Feder could have fathomed, by some grace, he bought into it.

  "Aw, hell. Don't cry. Here, you come sit down." He exchanged looks with Garrett and backed off.

  "Sorry. You just gotta question something like that comin' out spur of the minute like this."

  Garrett shoved the advantage hard.

  "I don't hold with anybody bullying my wife." He shouldered his way past the man, his arm around Kirsten as he guided her to his place on the sofa. Feder followed.

  "Don't get yourself in a twist now. Come on."

  "Don't tell me what to do, Feder," Garrett snapped.

  Kirsten sat on the couch where Garrett had been. She sent an apologetic look around the room and saw Matt at the patio window, deep in conversation with one of the others.

  Distracted from her now, Feder noticed the same thing immediately. "You two got something to say, say it to the group. There's no room for cowboys here."

  Matt's partner in the side conversation, a spectacled nerdy little guy of five-four on a tall day, returned to his seat looking a little defiant. Matt stuck his hand in his breast pocket, pulled out a toothpick, peeled the paper wrap and stuck the splinter-shaped bit of cedar into his mouth.

  "Doesn't seem like that."

  Feder glared.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, offering a bounty is... unlikely to encourage togetherness."

  "The point, wiseacre, is to share whatever information any one of us has."

  Matt traded looks with Garrett.

  "You seen this guy Rawlings? Anybody seen this guy?"

  Amidst a lot of negative head-shaking, Feder fumed.

  "So you're leading the meeting now, is that it?"

  Matt shrugged.

  "I got no interest in running the meeting. Just seemed like the natural question. What is the bounty, by the way?"

  "A hundred G's."

  Kirsten looked at Garrett, hoping the longing in her to get away from this house would be seen as hope that her man could bring home a hundred thousand dollars.

  Garrett whistled softly.

  "That's a lot of money. What's this guy Rawlings up to?"

  "Not important," Feder said, reasserting control.

  "Loehman wants him."

  "So what went on in your little aside with the clerk," Garrett asked, pulling a U-turn away from the curb outside Feder's house.

  "Funny you should put it that way," Matt answered, "since the guy is in fact a clerk."

  "Let me guess. A fish vendor in the market."

  Matt plucked the toothpick out of his mouth and rolled down Christo's window just far enough to pitch it out. "You know, Weisz, you are a real killjoy sometimes. How did you know that?"

  Garrett tossed him a look.

  "That's why they pay me the big bucks. So what?"

  "No, wait a minute. I want to know how you knew that. What did I miss?"

  "The introductions, maybe?"

  Matt shook his head sadly.

  "Here I thought it was your brilliant powers of deduction. How'd I miss that? Anyway, he's tucked away in some outdoor fish market downtown. He goes across the street to the alley for a smoke once in a while. Says he ran right into Rawlings just in the last week, coming out of the InterBank Building."

  "You must be kidding!" Kirsten sat forward in the back seat.

  "Aren't you?"

  "No. He's sure of it."

  "We'll have to pay the bank a visit. See if Raw- lings has an account there, money stashed, whatever."

  "He may not even have been in the bank. There are several floors of private offices in that building."

  "This isn't even possible," Kirsten protested.

  "How can you take a dozen random people out of a population of millions and one of them be certain he's seen Burton?"

  Garrett pulled to a stop at a red light and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  "That's why Loehman's operation is so hairy, Kirsten. The membership cuts across all incomes, all classes. It's the whole six- degrees-of-separation thing. Somebody always knows somebody else, and all it takes is one Judas. What did the fishmonger want?"

  "He wanted to know--just in case he sees Raw- lings again and manag
es to tail him--if I'd take Burton down and split the bounty."

  "So you want to be the one to follow up?" Garrett asked, dismissing the rest.

  "With the fish-market guy? I suppose I'm the obvious choice." With a dejected flourish Matt whipped out another toothpick.

  "You're going to owe me big time."

  "Sure, well, I'll trade anytime. Chatting up a fishmonger for jack hammering my brains out."

  Matt smacked his lips around the toothpick.

  "Well, maybe you don't owe me that much."

  when they arrived back at her house on Queen Anne Hill, J. D. waved them upstairs into the sound- protected study and handed Kirsten a fax from her friend Ginny. Below the cover page was a drawing Christo had done, stick figures with a mom holding hands with a kid holding hands with a dad. and a dog labeled Wag.

  Kirsten took one look at Christo's drawing, handed it off to Guiliani, clamped her mouth shut and fled down the stairs, banging out the back door.

  Garrett frowned, staring after her.

  "I don't get it."

  Matt wouldn't spare a glance away.

  "Mom, Dad, boy, dog. Seems pretty straightforward to me."

  Garret! glared right back at him, feeling about as clueless as he'd been about the baby monitor. He looked down at the drawing. The taller one in a skirt wasn't recognizable as Kirsten. The stick figures could just as easily be Ginny and Sam Wilder. "Aunt, uncle, boy, dog. Even more straightforward. What's your point?"

  "The boy's in need of a dad, Weisz." Matt crossed his arms over his chest, speculating, "I'd bet a month's take-home this isn't the first time Kirsten's gotten that message."

  He had never heard Matt Guiliani bet so much as a ten-spot on a football game.

  "What makes you so sure?"

  His friend shrugged.

  "My dad was all I ever wanted." He paused.

  "You going to go after her or what?"

  He wanted to snap back that he wasn't cut out to play hero to her damsel in distress. Certainly not the answer to all Kirsten McCourt's problems. Or Christo's. But he turned on his heel and followed Kirsten outside, ticked off at Guiliani for no good reason he could even imagine.

  He found her huddled on the stone bench by the sundial in the backyard. She looked up at him, her eyes lingering, darting away.

  Moonlight bathed her face. His heart thumped awkwardly because he didn't know what to say to her. He should know.

  He expected more of himself.

  "I'm sorry. This must be hell for Christo, too."

  Her eyes darted away.

  "He's fine, Garrett. He'll be fine."

  "He's a great kid."

  "He is."

  "Guiliani thinks Christo's drawing means he's desperate for a dad."

  Her head dipped low.

  "He fantasizes a lot."

  Garrett nodded, a smile coming slowly, fantasies of his own coming to mind. Current ones, in which she was there with Christo, the two of them with him visiting Snow Dancer, but old ones, too.

  "When I was a kid I wanted to be a freedom fighter like my father."

  "A freedom fighter?"

  "That's what they called the people who took part in the resistance in Hungary."

  Kirsten turned toward him.

  "Your father actually grew up there?"

  Garrett nodded.

  "He was sixteen when the Russian tanks invaded Budapest. In 1956 his family was all killed, his sisters raped and then killed. I don't remember a time that I didn't fully understand the horror of it. Or that he was never going to get over it. Freedom from tyranny was... everything.

  "But when I was Christo's age--and years older, I had stars in my eyes. My grandmother was an honest-to-God Gypsy, and Kryztov" -he said his father's name in that deeply respectful, guttural way " --was a real war hero, darting out in front of those tanks, lobbing Molotov cocktails.

  "What I didn't get," he went on after a moment, "until after my father died was how the reality of his experience shaped me. He had this saying that even if a Hungarian gets into a revolving door after you, he'll come out ahead."

  "Oh! Christo would love that!"

  "Me, too. Made me think of a superhero. But when the tanks rolled inland crushed the spirit right out of the whole country, no one felt like that anymore. He found the feeling again in America, but I always knew, like I knew the sun was coming up tomorrow, that freedom could never be taken for granted. That it was up to me to pick up where Kryztov left off."

  In a way, it felt to Garrett as if his whole life had been a preamble to this. To bringing Chet Loehman before a jury of his peers where he would be held accountable for his murders, defended by some dream- team battery of lawyers whose job it was to assure his right to a fair and complete hearing. Just one of the rights of free people that Loehman trampled.

  Now it had only grown more personal for Garrett. He wanted to eliminate the threat of Chet Loehman and all the Truth Sayers so he could give Kirsten back her son. It came as a bit of a shock to realize what he wanted was to have it all count for something. He may not be the answer to her problems, but he wanted to be.

  He wanted to be her hero.

  Her son's hero.

  The word lingered in his mind, a dimly recalled echo, a fragment of memory to do with that night in the Mercury Club when he had come to Kirsten's rescue.

  "Garrett, I need to tell you" -- "You don't owe me any explanations, Kirsten."

  "Then you know...?"

  "All I know, Kirsten, is that I'm falling in love with you."

  "Garrett" -His name rode the crest of a small cry.

  "Shh." He touched a finger to her lips, but it wasn't enough. His hand strayed to the silky spill of her hair and tears out of nowhere crept up on him for the staggering need to be a man with his woman, to touch her, to remember and rejoice and reenact the night five years ago when they made love and he knew beyond question that she was meant to be with him, and he with her.

  He brought his lips to hers, just touching, just sensing, and thought his heart would explode.

  He could feel her warm, halting breath, hear her excitement pulsing, smell the need as thick in her as it was in him. But when she took hold of his coat lapels and dragged herself up to him, to take that touch of their lips to a kiss where he knew no simple kiss had ever been, he felt such power as he'd never known before either.

  Her power over him.

  The hero in her.

  To say he was falling in love with her was a lie. She was his hero and he was so far beyond gone as to make the falling a distant memory.

  within a minute of the bank opening the next morning, a time Garrett chose to avoid the possibility of running into the fish-market Truth Sayer with a hand to Kirsten's elbow, Garrett walked directly to the reception desk of the InterBank.

  He flashed his badge.

  "We'd like to see the bank manager, Mr.

  Delahunt. "

  The young receptionist, who had not yet even put away her purse, picked up a phone and punched in a couple of numbers.

  "The police are here to see Mr. Delahunt. Is he there?" She listened a moment then hung up. She gave them directions to his office.

  "You can go up. It's the seventh floor."

  An extremely tall, gangly man with a light complexion, pale goatee and nearly bald head, Delahunt stood waiting for them in his office doorway.

  Garrett stuck out his hand.

  "I'm Garrett Weisz, Mr. Delahunt, and this is Kirsten McCourt. I appreciate your seeing us with no notice."

  "No problem. Come on in." He led them in, and directed them to the chairs opposite his desk.

  "What can I do to help?"

  "We're looking for this man." Garrett pulled out Kirsten's Identicomp likeness of Rawlings, unfolded it and slid it over the desk.

  "We don't know if he's a customer or an account holder, or if he holds a safe-deposit box here."

  Eyeing the sheet of paper, Delahunt's eyebrow quirked up.

  "Or none of t
he above?"

  "Or none of the above," Garrett conceded.

  "His name is Burton Rawlings," Kirsten said, leaning forward in her chair.