by Ellery Kane
“You should’ve talked to me first, Clare.” Robocop was suddenly right behind her. “When there’s an issue with my officers, you come to me—understand?” He lowered his shades in the glare of the sun, and she saw her surprise in her reflection.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Sampson, Martinez, and Bennett. They were walked off the job yesterday.”
Clare swallowed the lump that was growing in her throat. It barely went down. “Why?” She knew why.
“Please don’t give me that little-miss-innocent act. It doesn’t work anymore.”
“I had a legal obligation to report what Cullen told me. What was I supposed to do?”
Robocop’s laughter, shrill as the scream of a bird, frightened her more than his gruff voice. “I protected you that day Ramirez sucker punched Cutthroat. I tried to stop you from going on the yard Thursday. But you wouldn’t give me the time of day. And this is how you repay me—you get my officers fired. Now Bonner’s on my ass wondering what did I know and when did I know it.”
Halfway through his diatribe, Clare went numb. All she could see was the door to West Block. She would say whatever she had to, whatever was necessary to get there. “I didn’t know those were your men, J. D. Really.” She reached for his arm, and he let her touch him. “I should’ve come to you first. You’re absolutely right.” Beneath her hand, his bicep tightened. To Clare, it felt like a writhing snake. “Let me take you out tonight. Drinks on me.”
“Well, I appreciate the apology.” Clare couldn’t see his eyes, but she felt them undressing her. “As for those drinks, I knew you’d come around. I’ll meet you at 7 at that little dive bar off Third Street, where all the officers hang out. Now be safe out there.” After his back was all she could see of him, she pinched herself off and on all the way to West Block. At the door, she used her sleeve to wipe a runaway tear from her cheek and marveled at the irony of its wet, mascara-colored existence. She’d stopped herself from crying about being sixteen and knocked up by Rodney Taylor, so how the hell did J. D. Briggs rattle her?
Dumas wasn’t alone. “Meet my cellie. Eddie Bailey.”
A lanky arm waved to Clare from the top bunk. “Call me Snip. Everybody does.”
“Snap?” Her imagination took her to the darkest place it could find. Eddie Bailey snapped necks. Pale, delicate necks, not unlike her own.
“No. Snip.”
“Oh.” Job hazard, she thought. Always assuming the worst. Still, she put an absent-minded hand to her collarbone.
“He’s a barber. A damn good one. I finally let him give me a little trim.” Clare grinned and nodded her approval. Dumas appeared clean-shaven and bright-eyed. Better than he’d looked since she met him.
“You seem good today.”
“Yep. I’m glad to see you. Your replacement, Doctor Fitzawhozit, was a real downer. One more meeting with him, and I would’ve been forced to do the dutch, as they say.”
Fitzawhozit. She had to remember that one. “I don’t think I can take all the credit for that smile. Did you see your family?”
“Sure did. Had a real long talk with the missus. She said that even if they take away our conjugal visits, she and the kids will be up here every week for regular visiting. And they just assigned me to the kitchen. Me. A cook? We had a good laugh about that one, seeing as how I can hardly boil water.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Snip said, snickering. “Good thing there’s no chance of the food getting any worse.” Dumas smacked the bunk above him, casting a conspiratorial side eye at Clare.
“The best part . . . I’m gonna see an attorney about appealing my case.”
“Sounds like you found a little bit of hope. Do you think you’re ready to start meeting in my office again?” Clare opened her pocket calendar before he could refuse. “How about Monday, 10:30 a.m.?”
“I’ll be there.”
The lilt in Dumas’ voice was magic, like one of his coin illusions. If only for a moment, Robocop disappeared. “Nice to meet you, Snip. Take care of Mr. Dumas for me.”
“Will do, Doc.”
Clare left them chuckling behind her.
“Sorry, I’m late. I—uh—spilled something on my blouse. I had to change.” C’mon, Clare. You can do better than that. But Robocop seemed to buy it. In truth, she’d sat in her car—parked a safe distance from his empty Jeep—until 7:15 p.m., watching the neon OPEN sign flicker off and on and off again. At 7:20 p.m., he’d pushed through the bar door, scanning the lot. His face told her what she would’ve guessed. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to wait. As penance, she offered the sweetest smile she could muster.
“You’re forgiven. In fact, I’d like to personally thank whatever it is you spilled, because you look incredible in that dress.” Jesus. He didn’t waste any time.
“Thank you,” she said as he ushered her inside, his hand barely resting on the small of her back. “It’s nice to have an occasion to dress up. I can’t exactly wear this to work.”
His mouth opened wide—so wide—when he laughed that Clare turned away. That thick, salmon-pink tongue lolling in the center of perfect white teeth revolted her. She knew its intentions. The things it wanted from her. “If you wore that dress to work . . . ” Mercifully, he left the rest unspoken, shaking his head in amusement instead.
“I see you started without me,” she said, motioning to the half-downed beer in front of him. “Drinks on me, remember?” She hated herself for offering almost as much as she hated the inflection in her voice. It was necessary though. There were things she wanted too.
“Don’t worry. I started a tab.” He ran his hand through his honey-colored hair, mussing it. “Honestly, I was nervous.”
“Why?”
He gestured to her with an open hand. “Isn’t it obvious? I didn’t think I’d ever score a date with Clare Keely.”
“Oh, is this a date?” She watched his teasing eyes twinkle at her. He leaned in. She backed away. This sport, the push and pull, felt effortless. And Clare didn’t let herself feel guilty. Robocop brought this on himself.
Three-and-a-half beers later—three for Robocop, a half for Clare—Cullen’s name came up. “So tell me about this nut-job client of yours.” Finally. But she feigned ignorance. “The ratfink. You know, Cutthroat the canary.”
“J. D., I can’t talk about my patients. Especially not here.”
“Oh, c’mon. Gimme a little somethin’ I can rub in his face. That guy is the luckiest SOB in Quentin. I’d like to take him down a notch.”
She produced a laugh. “Hey,” she said. “Did you know . . . ”
Robocop’s loose expression sobered with her question, and she cursed herself for being too eager. “Know what?”
“I shouldn’t ask. I know you don’t trust me anymore.” Her lower lip pouted a little. Just enough.
“Of course I trust you. Are you kidding?” His hand found her knee and rested there, waiting for permission. She scooted closer, granting. “Ask me anything,” he said.
“Did you know Cullen was greenlighted?” She’d learned that word from Dumas too. “That Rivas was going to stab him that day on the yard?”
Robocop polished off beer number four with one long swig and slid his hand a little further up her leg. “Whaddya say we finish this conversation in my Jeep? Maybe take a little drive?”
His touch made Clare tingle, and she felt dizzy. Sick. “Okay, but—” Before she could set the rules of the game, he hopped off his stool and swaggered to the exit. She tossed a wad of cash on the bar and followed him.
Across the parking lot, the black Jeep loomed like a hearse. Clare grabbed his hand before he reached it. “On second thought, I have to get up early tomorrow. I think I’d better go.”
He stopped cold, and Clare saw how it would go. He would drag her, rubbing her arm raw with the effort. Call her every vile name in the book. Then toss her in the backseat like a rag doll and take what he’d always wanted from her—from the first
day she walked onto the yard. “Alright, party pooper. But let me walk you to your car.”
Clare fumbled with her keys, anxious to make a clean getaway, disappointed in herself. “So this means we’re friends, right?” he asked, helping her with the door.
“Friends.” She repeated it back to him, uncertain. It felt like a promise she didn’t want to make.
“I tell all my officers you can be my friend or my enemy. There’s no middle ground. Once you pick a side, there’s no going back.”
She twittered. “Friends it is, then.”
“With possibilities, I hope.” The kiss felt inevitable. His lips pushed themselves onto hers. And the tongue she reviled, now pickled with alcohol, thrust itself into her mouth. But it was the smell—the heavy musk of Aqua Velva—that nearly buckled her knees. That smell didn’t belong to him. That smell was Rodney Taylor’s.
November 18, 1996
Clare plucked a single, dying chrysanthemum from the vase on her desk—he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me—discarding each butterscotch petal into the trash at her feet. After that kiss, Clare expected Briggs to give chase—she let the answering machine take his call the next day—but she never figured him for the flower type. The vase had been waiting on her desk since last Thursday morning. No note.
“He loves me,” she said aloud, snickering to herself.
“Lucky fellow.”
“Clive, you’re early.” Clare hid behind her hair, letting it fall like a golden curtain around her face as she glanced at her watch. “I was just about to toss these flowers.”
“Yellow chrysanthemums.” He waited for her attention. “Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer.” Baiting her, as usual.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when she wasn’t tagging behind some deadbeat like a stray puppy, Mommie Dearest worked in a flower shop. Yellow mums mean somebody likes you.” He settled into the chair opposite her, stretching his legs under the desk dangerously close to hers.
“Good to know.” She dumped the contents of the vase, feeling a little guilty as the yellow petals met an unceremonious end in her trash can. “You know, you can’t keep showing up here early and unannounced.”
He flinched. “I didn’t think you’d mind. Not after last week. You stood up for me with your boss.”
I lied for you, he might as well have said. She wasn’t ready for this. Not on a Monday morning sans coffee. “Is this about your feelings for me? Should we revisit that subject?”
“Yes, let’s.” He leaned forward, his stare so intense, Clare had to look away. “Mine haven’t changed.” There was a question there, implied. A gaping hole of a question, a hole with no bottom, a hole Clare feared falling into.
“Maybe I’ve given you the wrong idea by letting you stay last week . . . agreeing to your plan with Ramirez . . . ”
“Holding my hand?” he whispered.
She teetered on the edge, the soil slipping beneath her feet. “I didn’t hold your hand, Clive. I was comforting you. That’s what therapists do.”
“You’re right. Of course. Wishful thinking, perhaps?”
“I’d call it projection. Or Freud would anyway. You were projecting your own desires on me. Thinking I felt the same as you.” She sounded like an actress playing a therapist on TV—a bad actress.
“So you don’t? You’re not attracted to me?” His eyes played with hers, daring her.
“We were talking about you, remember?”
“And this is me asking you. Just between us. Not as a therapist. As a woman.” And there he was again. Rodney Taylor. He was never far away. You’re more woman than my wife ever was. Look at your tight little body. Clare had looked at it. Her barely-there breasts tucked away inside a white Hanes bra. Her flat stomach, tan from laying poolside with Lizzie. Even two years later, when it was swollen so that she had to cover it with sweatshirts a size too big, his baby floating inside, her body seemed—to her, anyway—light years away from womanhood.
“Why is my answer so important to you?”
“Because I’ve never wanted someone who didn’t want me back.”
“What would that be like for you—if I didn’t?” Do I? That same bottomless pit of a question, Cullen’s laugh beckoning to her from its depths.
“Different.”
“Different good or different bad?”
“Just different.”
“And if I was attracted to you? What then?” Clare skin’s prickled at her own audacity. But she didn’t take it back. Cullen returned her challenge with a slippery smile. Smug. She remembered that fevered dream weeks ago, how she wanted his lips pressed to hers. He smiled like he knew.
“You’ve been hurt, Clare. Some bastard hurt you.” Her throat made the noise of a small animal, a whimper. “I don’t know how I know, but I do. I’ve always known things like that. Like with Emily. And Gina.”
She didn’t deny it. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“If you wanted me, I’d take care of you. I’d never . . . ” Clare filled in the rest of that sentence with the autopsy report she read in the file on her desk. “I’m different now. Like I shed my skin, you know?”
“It’s essential to you that I believe you’ve changed.” She kept a tight grip on Doctor Keely so Clare couldn’t slip through.
“Well, do you?”
“Sometimes. Then you say things to make me wonder. Like the other day in the infirmary, you told me you have remorse for what happened to Emily. What happened to her. You minimized your responsibility. And you still haven’t told me exactly what you did to her.”
Clare let out a long breath. Maybe she’d been too harsh. But then, “I know what I did to her. So do you. You’ve read the file. But if you need me to say it, I will. I had sex with her. Poured her a glass of wine or three. I pretended everything was fine, business as usual. That I didn’t know she was screwing around on me. And she never saw it coming. She fell asleep like it was the best sex she’d ever had.” Clare suddenly wanted to stop him before he got to the end. “I waited until I couldn’t wait anymore, and then I slit her throat.” She nodded fast, so she wouldn’t gasp.
“Did you take her earring?”
“No one ever asked me that before. God, you’re good. But, no, I didn’t take it. I put one in her ear after. The cheapest hearts I could find. It was my gift to her.” Clare hadn’t expected that. “My goodbye gift.”
“Why?”
“One fake heart. That’s exactly what she deserved.”
“Remorse is a funny thing,” Cullen said. He had Clare pinned to her seat, laser-focused on his storm-cloud eyes, lost in the thick of their best session yet. “It’s there inside me—guilt, regret—but I put it in a box. A box I don’t open unless I have to. How else could I survive?” Clare had never heard anything more true. She’d buried more than the baby, the tiny thing, the intruder that came out of her. She entombed the guilt there too. How else could she survive?
A knock at her office door, and Clare was Doctor Keely again. Her stomach nose-dived when she found the clock. She’d lost track of time. Fifteen minutes over. Please don’t let it be Fitzawhozit. Anyone but him.
“Mr. Dumas, I’m so sorry.” Clare opened the door just wide enough to offer a contrite smile. “We went over time. It’ll just be a minute.”
“I’m not goin’ anywhere,” he told her, and they both chuckled. “Obviously.”
Cullen brushed past her—was he angry?—so that his shoulder barely grazed her chest. “It was my fault. I got here late.”
November 24, 1996
Ah, Sunday. Clare loved Sundays. A long run, then coffee with Lizzie. That was the plan. Since she’d mentioned her run-in with Mr. Taylor, Lizzie insisted on a new coffee shop. It’s time to try something different anyway, Lizzie assured her. C’mon, Clare-Bear. Men, coffee—variety is the spice of life.
Clare was grateful. Sort of. She didn’t tell Lizzie about the circuitous path she took to Joe’s Coffeehouse, the one that took her rig
ht by the parking lot of their old haunt. And she certainly didn’t mention scouring the cars for his silver Bimmer. Learn to say it right, Clarie, Rodney had corrected, the first time he’d picked her up in his red one. If you’re going to ride shotgun with me, then you have to talk the talk, okay? It’s Bimmer, not Beamer.
Her stalking was irrational, completely absurd, but she couldn’t stop. Every morning she told herself not today, and yet there she was again, idling past, slow and wide-eyed like a gawker at the scene of a head-on collision. She wanted to see him. The way he looked at her—like she was the sun—drew her back like a boomerang. Nobody else worshipped her that way. She hated that she loved it.
Fifteen mornings, she’d come up empty. Until today. She circled around the block to be sure. There were thousands of BMWs in Marin. But she’d committed his license plate to memory since it disappeared from her rearview weeks ago. Like so many things about him, that plate had been burned into her brain. And there it was, double-parked. She willed herself to drive past. A losing battle that ended with her surrender. A last-minute turn into the lot. She shut off the engine, cracked the window, and hunkered down in her seat.
Clare drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, while the anticipation curdled in her stomach. She’d been here before. Waiting for Rodney Taylor. The day she’d returned from her cousin’s house in L.A., three months pregnant, she saw that Bimmer parked at the brand-new Blockbuster. He’d had a red one then. Candy apple red. And she watched until he drove it away, following it on her bike. Riding behind him, just out of sight, she felt desperate. Her feverish pedaling straight out of the Wizard of Oz. The Wicked Witch of the West chasing Dorothy, smack-dab in the middle of a tornado. That made her the witch. The witch with a secret incubating inside her. But Mr. Taylor channeled Oz himself. Great and powerful—that’s how she saw him then. She would tell him everything, and he would make it go away. That much she knew.
