His mother was working the afternoon shift, and he’d lost his key to the house, so he sat on the front step under the shelter of the porch roof, looking out at the rain, and smoking. After a little while, half an hour or so, Kiddo joined him. Jumped up on his lap and snuggled in. It was a cosy situation. Ross stroked the cat behind its fuzzy ears. Kiddo made a sound like a six-cylinder diesel engine.
Ross considered the situation. This crossroads at which he found himself, at the end of a high-speed journey that had led him in a more-or-less flawless circle.
Kelly was dead, so that took care of him.
George Hoffman had left a wife and children behind, but the woman was young and attractive, in line to benefit greatly from her husband’s generous government-subsidized life-insurance policy. Plus, Hoffman had voluntarily stuck his iron in the fire. He was a full-grown man and should have known better. If the payment he’d made was considerably out of proportion to the offences he’d committed, well, that certainly wasn’t Ross’s fault.
Ross had given Shannon an awful lot of thought, when the cops weren’t spitting in his face. Grilling him. The fact that she’d put a knife in Kelly complicated the issue. But Ross was confident she’d stabbed Kelly for reasons that had nothing to do with him. Besides, she hadn’t saved his bacon, since the cops had arrived a few seconds later anyway. No, he’d searched his soul, and the way he saw it, his debt to Shannon amounted to a big fat zero.
Anyway, there was nothing he could do for the Hoffman family or Shannon or anybody else, even if he wanted to. He had his own life to worry about, and it was time he started living it.
Had Shannon’s love for Garret been a sun-moon-and-stars kind of thing? Maybe, in the days and nights that followed their first meeting, in the nightclub. But Ross believed that after Garret was incarcerated, Shannon’s love had faltered. His impression was that she had become a specialist in long-distance romance, but was a complete flop at hand-to-hand combat.
Had she grieved out loud for Garret’s soul? Not that he could remember. Though she’d danced him through a few of the steps she and Garret had taken, she hadn’t exactly been inconsolable.
He’d hoped that Shannon had the missing two hundred and twenty grand; that she had been holding it for Garret. He’d hoped she was afraid to tell Kelly about it because he’d take it away from her, hoped she wouldn’t dare spend it on herself for fear of retribution from Garret.
Ross chuckled at his stupidity. Cigarette smoke leaked from the gaps between his teeth. He’d hoped that Shannon had fallen for him after Garret had died, that she was the kind of woman who needed somebody, that the letters they’d written to each other had meant something to her. Fat chance. He’d dreamt of great wealth, but the financial highlight of his adventure was pinching fifty dollars from his mother’s sugar bowl.
He’d hoped for far too much.
He lit another cigarette. Kiddo stirred lazily in his sleep.
He was facing eighteen months of getting to know his new parole officer. Eighteen months of washing dishes, or cars, or slinging hamburgers. Assuming he kept his nose clean, he’d be a free man one year from next September. But free to do what? Anything. Somehow, the concept of limitless choice wasn’t as scary as it had been, only a few days ago. He sat there on the porch, Kiddo in his lap, smoking and looking out at the rain, feeling content with the world for the first time in years.
The cops, during the course of their interrogation, had repeatedly asked him to describe his relationship with Garret. It was the armoured-car loot they were chasing. He’d told them again about how he and Garret had first met, out in the prison yard. As he’d repeated his story, time after time, something had kept nagging at him; a half-formed thought had tugged his brain but never pulled free.
But now, at last, it all came racing back. A high-speed rush of memory that took the corner on two wheels and went straight at him, the collision head-on and inevitable.
*
The first time he’d met Garret. Two white boys of similar age sharing a light out in the yard. The wind carrying the smoke away. Garret sizing him up, grinning crookedly as he told his stupid little joke.
“How many thieves does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
Ross thought it over. Shrugged.
“What lightbulb?” said Garret from beyond the grave.
Ross sat there on the porch, the cat snuggled into his lap, sound asleep, trusting. He looked out at the rain, listened to the musical sound of it impacting on the skin of the world. Would it ever stop raining?
Much more important, how was he going to come up with the fifty bucks he owed his mother?
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Memory Lane Page 29
