He felt dirty when he sat up in the ugly pink chair, and, as he adjusted his pants, he looked out the window on the landing, to the streetlights outside, expecting to see her in tears, rushing up the steps to her apartment. And then he understood her haste. “No, no,” he said, taking in the view of the driveway and carport below. “Don’t. Don’t do that!”
17
Alicia liked the sound of the polycarbonate as it splintered under the impact of the baseball bat, but she was a bit surprised there wasn’t an explosion of red and white confetti. She expected a shower of plastic. When that didn’t happen she walloped the tail light again. Nothing exploded. Instead, there was a nice cascade of color, tiny Valentine candies showering down to the dimly lit pavement.
When she moved on to the left front light, Alicia gripped the bat higher, choking up on it, knuckles in a line, like her dad taught her. There was a song he used to sing when she was little, something about John Henry and his hammer. A baseball bat wasn’t a hammer, but it was good enough. She squared up, elbows high, and swung like she was hitting a fastball. She missed the light and hit the side panel, making a deeper impression in the dent already there. Changing her stance slightly to compensate for the incline of the driveway, she raised the bat and had another swing.
The crunching, fragmenting sound was satisfying, as satisfying as the first guzzle of Coke.
“Ahhhh,” Alicia said, as if she’d had an actual slug of cola, and kicked her feet through the candy-like bits of orange and white. She took care of the right front light and then moved to the side mirror on the passenger door. She was going go all Babe Ruth and hit that mirror out of the stadium.
“Put the bat down, Alicia.”
Swearing, Alicia stumbled and missed the hitting zone. The Louisville Slugger swung around her, arcing back too far, knocking into the Toyota parked beside the Volkswagen, imprinting the side window with a spider’s web.
Witchy stood at the rear of the car, barefoot and clearly cold, but the air wasn’t as satanically frigid as the smile Alicia gave her.
Passive, expressionless, wooden, Witchy said, ever-so-quietly, “Give it to me, Alicia. Give me the bat.”
“Come get it.” The bat descended. The hard shell around the side mirror cracked, but remained intact. She hit it again and again until it finally dropped off and landed on the street. Sweat poured into her eyes. Ears ringing, heart pounding, she lurched towards Witchy, bat raised. “You … you … ruined … it!”
“And you’re doing a fantastic job of ruining what’s left.”
“What’s left? There’s nothing left. You killed him!”
“And now you want to kill his car?”
Alicia whacked the right side of the car, finding the one spot that hadn’t been dented before. “No,” she ground through her teeth, “I want to kill you.”
“Then you’ll really be alone, won’t you?”
Hot, Alicia felt perspiration streaming off her chin. “Why? Why didn’t you die?”
Witchy crossed her arms. “I used to ask myself the same question, and then one day the answer was obvious, and I wondered why the hell it took me so long to see it. When I tell you, you’ll probably think the same thing. Do you want to know why?”
“Yes,” Alicia hissed. “Tell me why.”
Arms apart, Witchy leaned forward and rested her elbows on the trunk, palms down just next to the boot marks. She spread her fingers apart, making a perfect target as she said, “Because he let go of my hand.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“He let go of my hand. And stepped into the street. Without looking both ways.”
“That’s not a reason.” Alicia stared at Witchy and gripped the bat tightly. “That’s not a reason.” She wished she’d brought a hammer because she wasn’t going to need a follow-through with this swing. She took a step towards Witchy, but something made her stop. She was startled. The bat sagged in her grasp. Her knees quivered.
It was there again, on fire, the shrapnel embedded in her heart. For such a long time it had burned so hot and obliterated sensation, but the anesthetized nonexistence, the suspension of being was gone. Superheated fragments pumped out into her bloodstream, fiery shards sparked her nerve endings, and it was agony.
With a cry, Alicia raised the bat high overhead, like a caveman’s club, yet something halted the stick before it began its downward swing. One moment she was upright, then the bat wasn’t there and her cheek was pressed against the trunk and the boot prints, right beside her father’s wife’s left hand; her arm was twisted behind her back, the little finger on her right hand bent backwards.
“You move and your finger breaks,” a man said as the bat thunked on the ground. “You fight me and your finger breaks. Do you understand?” Alicia saw a bare chest that disappeared into pajama pants and a pair of hiking boots. “Are you all right, Queenie?” The guy looked over his shoulder.
Using his foot, the man nudged her legs apart, like cops did on TV, and Alicia felt panic rise. She tried to squirm away. The pressure on her finger increased. Swearing, Alicia felt her eyes burn, blurring Willa, who had a hand to her forehead, pushing back hair that wasn’t white. Alicia thought she’d find it funny, had expected to laugh, to feel triumph over the crown of snow white that had been sullied, but she began to sob. “Mommy?”
“Detective,” the only mother Alicia had ever known said, “please let my daughter go.”
The front door opened before Willa hit the first step. It was early, nearly six, but he was up, dressed in jeans and a University of New Mexico Lobos sweatshirt. She got the impression he’d been expecting her.
“She okay?” John asked.
“For now. She’s asleep back at the little apartment she’s been staying in over by Smith’s. I’m meeting her tomorrow for coffee before she drives home. She’s been here all week. The tire the other night, the one Dominic fixed; that was her. My hair … that was her too.”
“Did you get any sleep?”
“No. Did you?”
“A little. Do you want to come in?”
With an almighty yawn, Willa stepped inside and followed him down the short staircase to the kitchen. He took a seat at the table and gestured for her to do the same. The tabletop was still covered with crime scene photos, which, judging by the neat pile to one side, the plate with toast crumbs, and a glass of chocolate milk to the other, John had been examining.
Willa pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. She held on to the back, setting the carved knobs at the top into the palms of her hands. The long sleeves of the rugby jersey—his rugby jersey, the one she still wore—slipped down over her knuckles. Yawning, finding it impossible to meet his steady gaze, she looked down at pictures of a dead man on the table. A tattoo scrolled along beneath the victim’s clavicle in an amateurish, sloppy, science-fiction-ish script that wasn’t Elvish or Klingon, and it left her brain with colorful afterimages of nonsensical shapes and blood.
John’s hand reached for the milk, shifting her attention from the phantom forms. When he set the empty glass back and gathered up the pictures, she said, “I’m not sure how to apologize, or what to apologize for first. I’m not even sure if you’re angry. But I’m going to assume you are.”
“Bad assumption.”
“You’re not angry?” Willa said, meeting his eyes. He had a chocolate milk moustache.
He licked the beige milkiness from his upper lip, put the photos into a folder and tapped it against the edge of the table. “No. I’m confused and a little disappointed, I guess. I can choose to be irrational, to be angry, or something else—which, in this case, is confused and disappointed. In my line of work, I’ve found it’s better to have all the facts before letting anger take over. I know there are things you can’t tell me about, things you can’t discuss, things you have to keep secret. I knew there was something else you were keeping from me, and it was significant, but I never thought a daughter would be one of those things.”
Willa moved the chair and
sat. She rubbed her tired eyes for a moment then leaned on her elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands, the jersey bunched up under her fingers. “Alicia is actually my stepdaughter. She’s all that’s left of Miles, and for the last eighteen months, I thought I’d lost her too. She’s hated me for all that time, wanted nothing to do with me, and she was out of my life—except to pop up from time to time, to torment me in small ways, to beat the crap out of the car, to steal money from me, to switch my shampoo. I had sort of made my peace with that. I became the evil stepmother she needed me to be. She wanted me to fuck off. So I did.”
“The same way you told Dominic and your sister to.”
For a moment, Willa found it hard to swallow, the breath in her lungs refused to move while her brain grappled with a fact she’d failed to notice. She coughed. “Exactly.”
“And why couldn’t you tell me that?” John placed the folder on the chair next to him. He hunched forward, setting his elbows on the tabletop, chin in his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me that story when I asked about the dents in the car?”
Exhausted, she shrugged half-heartedly and shoved up the jersey’s sleeves. “I tried to be honest with you. I had a hard time being honest and telling you I wanted to date you without having time to date you, and an even harder time asking you to screw me, so I thought mentioning—”
“You had a stepdaughter with issues would have been the deal-breaker for me?”
“I didn’t need to drag you into that madness.”
John nodded. “Okay. Fair enough but, for the record, I wouldn’t have cared. I like kids. I figured you knew that after seeing me with my niece, Sofia. A bad assumption on my part.”
“I’m truly sorry,” she said, kneading her eyes once more. “I’m sorry for presuming you wouldn’t understand. I’m sorry for my contradictory, yes-no behavior, and I’m especially sorry how I left so … abruptly.”
“Yeah. About that.” Sniff-sniff-sniff. “I’m wondering where you might stand on the second coming.” He reached for her hand and let his fingers trail down her forearm.
Willa wanted to laugh, but she was too tired, and it was time to be naked in another way. “I’d like very much to sleep with you, but I’m sure doing that will depend on what you think about the other thing I have to tell you. And you’re right. It’s significant.”
“What, you have an incurable disease or a…” John grimaced and cleared his throat as he sat back in his chair, “…sexually transmitted one?”
“I wish.”
“You wish?”
“Yes.” Queenie looked at him dead in the eye and sighed heavily, brushing a lock of pale lavender hair out of her face. “Because it’s a hell of a lot easier to explain than telling you I’m not really here on a fellowship grant and that I work for the FBI.”
“What?” John cocked his head, as if doing so would turn her statement into English instead of the gibberish he thought he heard.
“You heard me correctly. I work for the FBI. Undercover. I have for years. And no one, no one, knows.” Queenie stood up and took his empty Star Wars glass to the sink. She rinsed out Princess Leia and filled her with water.
As she drank, John frowned. And squinted. And opened his mouth to say something, but she didn’t give him the chance. She came back to the table and shoved the glass of water into his hand.
“Look,” Queenie said gesturing like his Aunt Eilish’s Sicilian husband, “you’re law enforcement, so I’m telling you. I’m disclosing this. I’m trusting you. Your captain knows, as do several other officers in the department. But that’s it. It’s a clandestine, joint operation investigating the theft of classified material from the Lab. Local members of the community may be involved. People you know may be involved, but I can’t tell you any more than that. I really, really can’t. And I need you to keep this to yourself.”
He nodded and kept on nodding, processing the information, connecting dots. “Hoo boy,” he finally muttered. “Well, now this all makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“I knew from the start there was something you were being careful about. And it wasn’t a stepdaughter. I saw you at the station the other morning with that guy, Tom, the DoD ‘consultant’. I didn’t think much of it at the time, chalked it up to the usual police check for the Lab staff. He’s working with you, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“FBI?”
“Mm-hm. Can I trust you with this, John?”
“Can you trust me?”
“I know I wasn’t very forthcoming about a few things, we’ve only known each other a few days, but can I trust you?”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
”Yeah,” John shrugged, “Okay. You can trust me. I’m okay with it.”
“How can you not be angry about this?”
“I get the impression you think I should be ranting and hollering. I’m not like that. That’s not how I do angry.”
Skepticism wrinkled her brow. “Do you… You … you don’t want to know anything else?”
“Sure, but you can’t tell me anything else, and I understand how these things work.”
“I don’t,” she said, returning to the seat she had vacated two minutes earlier. She reached for the glass of water in his hand and drank it down.
Then she burst into tears.
“Hey. Hey!” John rose and stood beside her, watching tears cascade down her scrunched-up face. Her nose had turned bright red. “Queenie, what are you doing?”
“What the hell does it look like?” she sniffled.
“Yeah, but why?”
“I’m … tired.”
“Okay. I’m tired too, but you don’t see me bawling, do you?”
“No, but I have so much work to do. So much damned work…”
“I have work to do too. When it comes to you, I’ve been a pretty shitty detective, but when it comes to my job, I have an unidentified dead man—a potential murder with no suspects and no clues beyond peanut butter and a tattoo.”
“…and there aren’t any cartoons on now!” she sobbed.
John rubbed the whiskers on his jaw and crouched in front of her. “Do you know what you need?”
“Bugs Bunny,” she blubbered.
“I mean before that.”
“To get laid.”
“And before that too.”
Eyes wet and wide, she took a hiccupping breath. “You still...” hiccup, “you still want…” hiccup, “to take me to bed?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve never made love with an FBI agent.”
Her laughter was anxious, staccato, and after blinking a few times, she snuffled and wiped her runny nose on the sleeve of the rugby jersey. “So what else do I need?”
Rising, he pulled the empty glass from her hand. “More water to wash down all the guilt you feel.”
Willa watched him refill Princess Leia and return with the water. “How can you be so nice about all this? How can you be such a nice guy all the time?” She drank, watching him over the rim of the glass.
“Maybe I like finishing last.”
The liquid caught in her throat and she spit it back into the glass, coughing, gasping, and finally laughing. He made her laugh about everything. Always. Glass safely on the tabletop, she met his gaze. “I’m a mess,” she said. “You’re not a hulking, conceited wolf like Dominic. You’re not brash or loud like Miles was. You’re big and deliberate, level-headed and hilarious. You’re not like any man I’ve ever known. And I’m a mess.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you see what a disaster I am? I’m The Towering Inferno and Earthquake rolled into one woman.”
Casually, he lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “Think of me as the Red Cross.”
”There’s something else I have to tell you.”
“Go on.” He crossed his arms and waited.
She bit her top lip. “Um … I’ve … whatever it is, five, six days, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you. I don’t know what
you did, or how you did it, but I’m not an automaton going through the motions of living anymore. You make me laugh. You make me matter. You make me want to matter to Dominic, to Alicia. You make me want to matter to you.” A wispy, nervous laugh puffed from her mouth. “I love you, John.”
Arms still crossed, he exhaled. “And that’s supposed to what, send me shrieking from the room, tearing out my hair?”
“It’s a little preposterous, a little sudden, don’t you think?”
“No. My Aunt Martha married my Uncle Larry after one date. So, you see, that sort of fall-in-love-after-a-day-or-two thing runs in my family.”
“Are you saying—”
“Duhh. I love you. I think I have since I saw you standing in the snow behind your beat-up Volkswagen in the supermarket parking lot. Or maybe it was when you opened the door wearing that robe with peanut butter all over it. Does that make you want to run out of here screaming?” He dropped his arms.
Willa blinked a few times as if doing so helped to process the information. “How did this happen? How did this happen so fast? No, no, wait. This is not happening… Is it?”
His expression mixed Eastwood squint with Willis smirk. “It is.”
“Oh.”
“Come here, Queenie.”
John never saw her move. One second she was sitting there, gobsmacked. The next, in one motion, she’d stood and grabbed the neck of his shirt and yanked him down to kiss him fiercely. The electricity interrupted hours earlier surged back to life. His hands went to her ass. Her fingers were in his hair for a moment, then at his jeans. One cool, small hand burrowed beneath the loosened waistband and into his boxers to close around his—presto—erection, and suddenly weak-kneed, he stumbled sideways a little and snagged the foot of a chair. The chair scraped over the tiled floor and teetered. He heard the folder of photos he’d set there slide off and spill across the floor.
The action of her grip was simple, a squeeze-slide-squeeze from root to tip, and it was overwhelmingly effective, had him skittering towards the edge of a teenagerly swift climax. When the tip of her tongue darted in and out of his mouth, he groaned and staggered as he lifted her and tried to get himself out of adolescent peril. Her hand slipped from his pants and she wrapped an arm around his shoulder and her legs around his waist. One eye open, he carried her, walked over the scattered photographs. With a giggle, her mouth moved and she bit into his neck, fingers clutching at his arm and shoulders. They made it as far as the stairs near the powder room when he remembered a rather vital fact. “Son of a…” he muttered, breathless.
For Your Eyes Only Page 28
