Denial lf-4 Page 7

“For dropping in just to see Adele and the baby and, if I can flatter my old ass, to see me. You didn’t really need what you got from Adele. Lots of better ways you could have got it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do need an excuse.”

  She put a firm hand on my right arm and said, “Fooling God?” she said. “If he sees you getting too close to someone, he may play another one of his tricks on you?”

  That wasn’t quite it, but it was close enough.

  “Here,” she said, handing me something in a small white tube. “Rub it on your knee and shoulder. Hell, rub it on your ass if you’ve a mind to.”

  “Thanks,” I said, putting the tube in my pocket.

  “Happy trails,” she said and closed the door after me.

  I made some turns, a right onto Webber, a left at Beneva, a U-turn and up to Bee Ridge to be sure no one was following me.

  Maybe the guy who had tried to run me down had a life outside the one related to trying to kill me. Maybe he had a job, a family, places he was expected. Maybe he just went after me on his lunch hour. Then again, maybe not.

  I drove back down Beneva, stopped at Shaner’s and picked up a pair of large pizzas, one with double onions and one with mushrooms and double sausage.

  It was past seven. I drove to Sally’s apartment in the Alhambra. I took off my Cubs cap, tucked it into my back pocket and pushed the button. Susan opened the door.

  Sally’s daughter was eleven, wore glasses, was dark like her mother, and spoke her mind, which at this moment told her to call over her shoulder, “Mr. Smiley Face is here.”

  Michael appeared, tall, gangly, a head of curly hair and blue eyes, which he definitely got from his father.

  “I thought we were going out,” Susan said.

  “Something came up.”

  “At least he comes bearing gifts,” Michael said.

  “Mushroom and double sausage,” I said, holding out the pizzas.

  Michael took both pizza boxes and with a hand on his sister’s shoulder, stepped back to let me in.

  Sally came out of the tiny kitchen just off the dining room area. She had changed into a loose-fitting green dress. Michael and Susan had both boxes open on the dining room table and were reaching for pizza slices.

  “You’re late,” Sally said quietly.

  “Someone tried to kill me,” I said, low enough so the kids couldn’t hear me.

  “Well,” she said. “I just got here a few minutes ago myself and I don’t have as good an excuse as you.”

  “I’m not making a joke,” I said.

  “I know,” said Sally with a sigh. “What’s it about?”

  “Kyle McClory,” I said.

  “Tell me about it later,” she said, touching my cheek. “I’ll get drinks out of the fridge. You grab some plates and napkins.”

  I had plenty of time. I had almost seven hours before I had to pick up Ames to break into the Seaside Assisted Living Facility.

  There was no point in asking Michael if he knew Kyle McClory. They were the same age, but a culture and school apart. Michael went to Riverview. Kyle had gone to Sarasota High. The schools were ten minutes, endless space and a meaningless rivalry apart.

  After the pizza was gone and crumbs cleared away, Susan said she wanted to play a card game called B.S. Sally said she was tired. I said I didn’t want to learn anything new. Michael said he would play if Susan did the after-dinner cleaning up by herself. She agreed.

  “Please,” Susan said, looking first at Sally and then at me. “I’ll teach you. It’s real easy.”

  Sally said, “Well…”

  “I beseech, supplicate, implore and plead,” Susan said.

  I couldn’t resist the display of vocabulary.

  We played three games. I won two of them. Susan finally said, “I can’t tell when you’re lying. You always look the same.”

  “I’ll try to be more obvious when I lie,” I said. “Look for twitches, eye movement, finger movements, scratches.”

  “You have those?” Michael asked.

  “No,” I said. “Tone of voice helps.”

  “You always talk the same,” Susan said.

  She put her cards down and stepped in front of me. There was determination in her eyes.

  “Susan,” Sally said with what may have been a gentle warning.

  “I said I’d do it,” Susan said, meeting my eyes.

  “Do it,” said Michael.

  Susan reached over with both hands and began to tickle me under my arms. I forced a smile; at least I thought it was a smile.

  “You’re not ticklish,” Susan said after about fifteen seconds of trying.

  “No,” I said.

  Susan stepped back.

  “You are strange,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  Michael collected the cards and put them away and went to the bedroom to watch the end of an Orlando Magic game. Susan hung around a few minutes longer and then followed her brother.

  When they were gone, Sally got up from the table, saying, “Who tried to kill you?”

  I told her about the threatening telephone call and the car that almost hit me in the parking lot at the mall.

  “I’m not going to say it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That you have to do a better job of taking care of yourself,” she said, moving into the kitchen.

  “You just said it.”

  “Let’s call it a night. I’ve got a report to write,” she said. “In addition to which, I’m tired and cranky.”

  “I’ve got something to do too,” I said, rising.

  “Besides going to your room and watching an old movie?”

  “Yes. I’m going to a friend’s house and we’re going to bake a pineapple upside-down cake,” I said.

  “No.”

  “I was lying.”

  “I could tell,” she said.

  “How?”

  “You looked me in the eye and said it without blinking or smiling. Besides, I can’t come up with an image of you in a kitchen at night mixing batter.”

  “I don’t think you want to know what I’m going to do,” I said.

  “Help somebody,” she said. “That’s what you do.”

  “It’s what you do too,” I said.

  We were moving toward the front door in the living room.

  “We’re a match made in heaven,” she said and kissed me. “Put your arms around me and mean it,” she added, her face inches from mine.

  I could feel her breath, smell her hair. Her eyes were large and brown and moist and maybe a little tired. I kissed her back. She opened her mouth, arms around my neck. I felt her breasts warm against me. I told myself not to think of my dead wife. I failed but it didn’t stop me from holding Sally and letting the kiss stay warm.

  She gently removed her arms, patted my cheek and stepped back, smiling at me.

  I opened my mouth to speak but she cut me off with, “Nothing to say, Lewis. Nothing to explain or talk about. It’s okay.”

  She opened the door and I stepped out into the cool darkness. Standing on the landing, I told her more about my day, the person who tried to run me down, about Dorothy Cgnozic. Sally listened, nodded a few times while I talked. I kept it short, very short, and I didn’t mention that Ames and I were going to break into the Seaside Assisted Living Facility in a few hours.

  “Forty-six eleven Tenth,” she said, starting to close the door.

  “Forty-six eleven Tenth,” I repeated.

  “That’s where Yolanda Root is staying.”

  She closed the door.

  I watched the parking lot as I moved down the stairs. Nothing moved but the leaves on the bushes from a gentle breeze.

  I drove back to the DQ parking lot, checking my rearview mirror for anyone who might be following me.

  The DQ was a few minutes from closing. I got to the window in time to order a large black coffee. The thin black girl behind the counter, Teresa, was working two jobs. Teresa was nineteen. She had two
children under six years old. During the day she worked in the bakery section of the Publix on Fruitville and in the evening she was behind the counter at the DQ. Her mother watched the kids.

  “Want a Blizzard?” she asked, wiping her hands on a white towel. “On me. You’re my last customer as a night counter girl. Dave promoted me to day manager.”

  “Publix?”

  “They’ll have to get along without me,” she said with a smile, showing white, slightly large teeth. “Raise makes up for it and I can see my kids at night, have dinner with them.”

  “I need the coffee to stay awake,” I said.

  “Okay, the coffee’s on me,” she said.

  “I accept,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Two sugars and cream?” she said. “Right?”

  I always took three sugars, but I said, “Right.” She got the coffee and handed it to me. I toasted her with it.

  “Did he find you?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Man who was looking for you,” she said. “Looked like he was coming down from a bad high, you know? Shaky, nervous-like.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Bigger than you, older than you, one of those little beards, real white.”

  “The man or the beard?” I asked.

  “Both,” she said.

  “When did he come by?”

  “Few hours ago, maybe.”

  “Did you see his car?”

  “Didn’t notice,” she said. “Got to finish cleaning up.” I went to the steps of the two-story office building at the back of the parking lot. I held the coffee cup in my left hand and fished for my keys with my right hand.

  I looked back as I went up the concrete steps. There were two cars in the DQ parking lot, Teresa’s 1986 Toyota and mine. No cars were parked across Washington. Traffic moved by. It never stopped, but around eleven each night it slowed down to a rumble of trucks and a swish of cars going over the speed limit.

  The phone began to ring before I could turn on the lights. I hit the switch, kicked the door closed, pocketed my keys and took my coffee to the desk.

  “Yes,” I said, picking up the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It was the same man who had threatened to kill me and I was reasonably sure he was the one who had talked to Teresa. He sounded about five levels above nervous.

  “For what?”

  “Trying to run you down,” he said. “I’ve been telling myself that I just wanted to frighten you, but if you hadn’t jumped out of the way, I might have killed you. Are you all right?”

  “Nothing broken. Nothing bleeding. Come on up and we’ll talk about it,” I said, moving to the window and taking a sip of coffee. He couldn’t be far.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry but I really do have to stop you. Please just stop, let me punish myself. Seneca was right when he said, ‘Every guilty person is his own hangman.’”

  “You going to try again to kill me?”

  “You’re not going to stop trying to find me, are you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then… I’m really sorry. I’ve got to get home now.”

  He hung up. I turned off the office light after I hit the switch in the back room where I lived, kicked off my shoes, turned on the television and the VCR and inserted a tape before sitting on the bed, where I hit the button on the remote.

  Stagecoach came on. It was dubbed in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. Julio at the video store down the street had sold it to me for three dollars. I hadn’t known it was in Spanish until a few seconds ago. I’m sure Julio hadn’t either.

  I watched Andy Devine and George Bancroft jabbering at each other in voices that weren’t theirs. The guy who dubbed John Wayne tried to mimic the Duke, but didn’t come close. I turned off the sound and kept watching. I knew almost every word of the movie.

  As I watched, I followed the instructions on the tube I had taken out of my pocket and rubbed the white cream on my knee and shoulder. It went from cold to warm, tingly electric. It seemed to be working.

  When the Plummer brothers were dead and John Wayne and Claire Trevor had ridden off in the buckboard, I put in a tape of The Woman on the Beach. Joan Bennett spoke English. I finished my now room-temperature coffee.

  When the clock said it was time, I turned off the VCR and the lights and dropped the empty coffee cup in the garbage. After a quick stop in the washroom halfway down the walkway outside my office, I went to my car and drove to the Texas Bar amp; Grille to pick up Ames and commit a felony.

  7

  Ames wore his well-worn jeans and a plaid shirt and denim jacket. No slicker. No shotgun. No Stetson on his head. This was a simple break-in.

  “Mornin’,” he said, getting into the car and handing me a cardboard cup of coffee. He had a cup too.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Flashlight?”

  Ames reached into his pocket and came up with a black penlight not very different from the one I had in my pocket.

  Ames didn’t put on his seat belt. He never did. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe they worked. He just didn’t like the government, any government, telling him what he had to do to protect himself.

  Ames didn’t really like anyone telling him what to do for any reason. Even Ed was careful when telling Ames that there was something he wanted done in the Texas Bar amp; Grille. “Would you do the windows today?” or “Mind getting the garbage out early tomorrow?” were the ways Ed respected Ames’s self-respect.

  There wasn’t much traffic at one-thirty in the morning, but there was some. I sipped coffee, drove and didn’t turn on the radio.

  “Saw Flo, Adele and the baby,” I said. “They’re fine.”

  I glanced at Ames, who nodded to indicate that he had heard, registered and approved of what I had said. That was all we said for the twelve-minute ride. I drove at about ten miles an hour after I turned down the narrow road that led to the Seaside from Beneva.

  The front-canopied entrance to the Seaside was dark behind the glass doors. There were cars, seven of them, at the end of the lot. Some of them must have belonged to the night staff. A few of the cars might even belong to residents still able to drive. I didn’t park near the other cars. Ames indicated that I should pull into a corner space under a tree where the parking lot lights didn’t hit

  “We go in over there.”

  He pointed to the side of the one-story brick building. We put our coffee cups in the holders by the dashboard, got out and closed the doors quietly. I didn’t lock them. We might want to or have to get out of here quickly.

  I followed Ames into the darkness at the side of the building. The sky was clear but there wasn’t much of a moon, not enough light to keep me from tripping over a bush and pitching forward, losing my hat.

  Ames helped me up.

  “Lost my cap,” I whispered, squinting around my feet.

  “Here,” whispered Ames, handing it to me.

  A light came on in the window three feet from us. We pressed our backs against the wall and inched away. We stopped when we heard the window begin to open.

  A tiny woman, white bushy hair, glasses on the end of her nose, leaned out, pulled her robe around her and said, “Jerry Lee?”

  She didn’t look in our direction, just squinted toward the trees straight ahead of her.

  “Is that you, Jerry Lee?”

  Something shuffled in the grass by the trees. Whoever or whatever it was came slowly toward the window. When the light from the window hit the gator, which was a good or bad seven feet long, it turned its head up toward the woman, mouth open. Its eyes were a glassy white.

  Ames moved slightly at my side. I turned my eyes but not my head and made out a gun in his hand. The gator grunted and turned its head toward us.

  “Jerry Lee, be quiet,” the old woman whispered.

  She threw something out the window into the gator’s open mouth. The gator made a gulping sound, took a few steps forward and opened its
mouth even wider. The old woman threw something else out the window. Jerry Lee the gator snatched it from the air.

  “Jerry Lee,” she whispered. “You’ve got to be quiet. You know I’m not supposed to… Someone’s in the hall.”

  She closed the window and a few seconds later the light went out. I could only make out the vague shape of Jerry Lee and hoped his appetite had been satisfied.

  There was a click from the gun in Ames’s hand as the gator turned its head in our direction and took a short step toward us.

  Ames moved past me, took four steps and stood in front of the gator, gun in hand.

  “Get out of here,” Ames whispered, aiming his gun directly down at Jerry Lee’s left eye.

  The gator grunted. Ames brought his booted right foot down on Jerry Lee’s snout and took a step back, gun steady in his hand.

  “Your move,” Ames said calmly to the gator.

  The gator shook its head back and forth, trying to decide what to do. Then it turned right and scuttled across the long grass into the darkness between the trees. There was a splash in the darkness.

  Ames walked back to me, tucking the gun into his belt under his denim jacket.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  I followed him without tripping to the fourth window, where he stopped and reached up. He pushed the window up and whispered, “It’s empty. Least it was this afternoon, when I unlocked the window.”

  Ames boosted himself up and went through the window headfirst. He made almost no noise. When he was in, he reached back to help me up. I was reasonably quiet.

  Ames turned on his flashlight. There was nothing in the room but a bed with a rolled-up mattress, a wooden night table and a wooden chest of drawers with nothing on top of it. There were no pictures on the walls.

  Ames motioned to me and turned off his flashlight. We went to the door. He listened, ear to the door, for a few seconds and then turned the knob. He opened the door slowly. The lights in the hall were night dim. He stepped out and motioned for me to follow him.

  In the hall, Ames moved to his right with me behind him. There was a turn in front of us with a long hallway. From far down that long hallway came a man’s voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but could tell that the person was probably talking on the phone because of the silent pauses.