The Abels went out to their garage, where one space was empty, a reminder that the BMW was in the dealer’s shop having its windshield replaced. They got into the black Volvo that was left and drove out of the gate at the end of their driveway. They had bought this house in Van Nuys while they were still police officers.
Ronnie had noticed the house while she was patrolling the old, quiet neighborhood. She had driven past it many times, until one night shift she saw a newly posted sign that the house was for sale. She had always been curious about the house because it had a bit more than a triple lot. There was nothing else special about the house or the neighborhood. The house itself was a white ranch-style bungalow that sprawled on its plot without apparent planning because rooms seemed to have been added whenever the place grew too small for its occupants. The trees on the block were old, but they were mostly the low, bumpy magnolias that infested this part of the Valley. They provided little shade and dropped their thick, leathery half-brown leaves twelve months a year and their oversized white flowers for one week, leaving cone-like seed carriers the size and shape of grenades. Ronnie had simply been ready for her own house, and she liked this one.
On the first break of her shift she had called Sid, who was working homicide from the Metro Division at the time, and told him there was a house he had to see. They had not been able to meet at the address until after 8:00 a.m., when they were both off the clock.
They had walked the perimeter, gone off to breakfast together, then called the realtor and returned with him to look at the inside. Sid had been largely silent, because he knew by then that Ronnie was already determined, and the walk-through was a formality, a concession to his need to persuade himself that he wasn’t participating in a purely emotional decision. Ronnie did not believe that emotion was a bad basis for a decision about where and how a person lived—certainly better than numbers—but she let him look and pretended to listen when he spoke.
Over the years, the house had changed little. It still looked like thousands of other houses in the center of the San Fernando Valley—a small and undistinguished old house that had a two-story addition in the back. The house had a bit more land around it than some. Most of the first ones on their street had been orange groves or apricot orchards two generations ago. This had been out in the country then.
After many years and raising two children here, they had needed to replace the cracked and uneven asphalt driveway, and so Ronnie had picked out a style made of artificial paving stones, and Sid had decided they may as well add a new gate that didn’t require him to get out of the car to shut it. As they drove out of their driveway in the Volvo, they could hear the automatic gate roll along its track and then give a satisfying clank.
“You know,” said Sid, “I sometimes forget how much I like this car. I get used to driving that BMW, but this thing is like an old friend.”
“It ought to get us up to Osborne Street if you can keep from chasing down any more shooters.”
They were on their way north to the Foothill station to meet with Detective Hebert, the officer in charge of the investigation of the shooting. When they arrived, Hebert came out to the lobby to meet them. “Come on in,” he said. “Let’s go into an interview room so we can talk.”
Sid and Ronnie exchanged a glance so furtive that he didn’t see it. Ronnie said, “All right.”
“Here,” he said, and opened the door of an interrogation room. “You can wait in there while I get us some coffee.”
Sid and Ronnie entered and sat down in the two seats normally reserved for the two officers conducting the interview. The video cameras were aimed downward from above and behind them at the empty chair. They shared an understanding that Detective Hebert had gone to turn on the cameras and microphones to record what they said to each other, so they did not speak.
Hebert returned with a uniformed cop who carried two paper coffee cups. Hebert carried his own and opened the door. “Thanks,” he said, and the cop set down the two cups and went away. “I brought you cream and sugar.” He reached into his coat pocket and then placed some thimble-sized creamers and small envelopes in front of them on the table.
“Thank you,” said Ronnie.
Hebert hesitated for a few seconds, then sat down in the only empty chair and pulled it closer to the table. “Well, let’s talk about this shooting incident last night,” he said. “I’d like to go over some of the impressions I got last night, to be sure we’ve got all the information we need. What were you doing up there on Clovermeadow Lane last night after nightfall?”
Sid said, “The reason we were up there was that we had visited the Department of Public Works office, where we got a list of the construction sites where there might have been an open storm drain on March fifth of last year. That site was number three, the last one of the day.”
“And that was part of the investigation you’re on?”
“Right,” said Ronnie. “The body of a man named James Ballantine was found stuck in a storm sewer under a street in North Hollywood around then. There was no easy way for him to have gotten there, because the drains along the streets are designed not to let anything big, like a body, get into the system. So it had to be an open drain somewhere upstream.”
“And of course, you’re both former LAPD officers.” He paused. “I assume you both left the department without any issues?”
“You didn’t check?” said Sid.
Ronnie said, “No issues. I left after ten years and Sid left after twelve because we wanted to work together on our own.”
“Is that working out pretty well?” asked Hebert. “I think I’ve heard your names a few times.”
“It’s okay,” said Sid.
“Good, good,” said Hebert. “And you just said you were looking into the death of James Ballantine last March.”
“A homicide. Who hired you to do that?”
“Mr. Ballantine’s employer, Intercelleron Corporation. The contact person is named David Hemphill.”
“Hemphill,” said Hebert, and wrote the name on his note pad. “And what does Mr. Hemphill say his company wants?”
“Two new pairs of eyes looking at the case. He says the directors of the company are concerned because one of their employees was murdered, and they’re willing to pay to keep someone working actively on the case. It seemed to us that reaching the anniversary of the crime was the trigger.”
“I’ve seen that before,” said Hebert.
“We see it often,” Ronnie said. “The survivors get a lot of information at first, but then the flow slows down and they tell themselves they’ll give the police until some particular time. If the case isn’t solved when that time comes, they’ll hire their own investigators.”
“You ever get any results on that kind of case?”
“Sometimes,” said Sid.
“Really? Ever apprehend any perpetrators and get them convicted in a court?”
“Some,” Sid said.
“How many?” Hebert said. “One?”
“Sid doesn’t like to keep score,” Ronnie said.
Hebert leaned back in his chair and his lips began to curl upward into a smile.
But Ronnie wasn’t finished. “But I do. Since we left the LAPD we’ve had twenty-one homicide convictions, about half of them murder one and the others bargained down to second degree or voluntary manslaughter. There were also four who were guilty but got themselves killed while officers were trying to make the arrests. I think a couple of those were suicide by cop.” She paused. “Of course, we don’t usually take on murder cases. When we do, we usually work for defense attorneys.”
Hebert was silent for several seconds. “Ever think of coming back to work?”
“No,” said Ronnie. “Not once.”
“Why not?”
“We still have a lot of friends on the force, but—”
“I’ll bet you do, with all those convictions.”
Ronnie ignored the interruption. “We like to work together. No department in the country would let us do that.”
“I see,” said Hebert. “But I guess it’s safe to assume we can count on you to cooperate with the official investigation of the shooting.”
“We always do,” Sid said. “At the moment we haven’t got much to share. We’ve just started to look at the Ballantine case.”
“That case belongs to somebody in North Hollywood homicide. I’d be satisfied to get the person who shot out your windshield. That’s my case. What’s your theory?”
Ronnie said, “We put out ads online and in print offering twenty-five thousand dollars for the Ballantine case. We were followed, so we decided maybe we should go after the other car and see who was following us. We got too close, and they fired.”
“You’re sure that it wasn’t because you found the place where they’d put the body?”
“We don’t think we’d found anything,” said Ronnie. “We were there because one of the streets was at the stage of construction when a storm drain might still have been open, not paved over, and we wanted to see what it looked like. When Ballantine was murdered, that street was probably still empty field. The street where it could have happened would be one or two streets west of there.”
“You’re pretty sure that your going out there was what caused the shooting?”
Ronnie said, “Has anybody else been shot at out there?”
“Not that we know of,” said Hebert. “We’ll have to look into it. Any other thoughts on what happened out there last night?”
“Not right now,” said Sid. “We hope to later.”
“Well, then, thanks for coming,” said Hebert. He stood and held out his hand. “It’s been interesting. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
“Thank you,” Sid said. He shook Hebert’s hand.
Sid walked out of the small room. As they moved down the hallway toward the foyer, they heard the door open and close again. When they reached the front of the building and were out in the open air again, Ronnie said quietly, “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to share anything.”
“I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to have anything.”
Sid Abel walked up the sidewalk toward the Figueroa Club at eleven o’clock that evening. There were the usual three men watching the door from outside the club. One looked like a valet parking attendant standing behind a black podium of the sort that contained a pegboard with car keys on it. Sid knew that this pegboard held a lot of car keys that didn’t go to any car, and that the board was on hinges, just the door to a hidden cabinet containing a steel plate to make the podium bulletproof and a short-barreled semiautomatic shotgun. The attendant switched off about once an hour with one or the other of the two men sitting in a car along the curb. They were there to pull ahead at high speed and make any unfriendly intruders unhappy in proportion to their sins.
The setup had not changed in at least three decades, since about the time when the club had moved here from Figueroa Street. This was a bad neighborhood, and the club was one of the principal things that made it that way.
“Hi,” Sid said to the attendant. “Is Jimmy Pascal around tonight?”
“I can ask,” said the attendant. “Who can I say wants him?”
“Sid Abel.”
“You look like a cop.”
“I’m not. You look like a parking attendant.”
“I’m not.”
Sid took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to the attendant.
The attendant pocketed it. “This isn’t much money.”
“Jimmy’s not much of a guy.” He stepped past the attendant. “Sit tight. I’ll go find him myself.”
The Figueroa was a private club, founded many years ago by a group of people who had shared a belief in after-hours drinking, and free enterprise that often included the exchange of goods and services that were not supposed to be for sale. It had retained that character long after many of those activities had gone out of style and been replaced by something worse, or become legal.
He walked in and could see the club had not changed since his last visit years ago. There was a long polished bar with stools and shelves of bottles backed by a big mirror. The rest of the front room was filled with round tables, where men and a few women played cards or just drank and talked. Beyond a broad arch was a room with three pool tables and long benches along the walls.
Sid spotted Jimmy near the end of the bar talking with two men. Jimmy Pascal was a short black man who weighed about three hundred pounds. He habitually wore a voluminous pair of khaki shorts, a billowing Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of size nine and a half quadruple-E sneakers. He was in his sixties, and made his living now in indirect ways—brokering agreements, selling items of mysterious provenance, introducing people—but when Sid met him twenty-five years ago, he had been a killer.
Sid went to the bar and sat on a stool where he could use the big mirror as a way to watch his back. The bartender, a young, strong-looking man with a beard, said, “Are you a member, sir?”
Sid took out his wallet and produced a tattered card.
The bartender was shocked. “That’s really an old one. I haven’t seen you before.”
Sid shrugged. “I haven’t come much since you were born. Can you get me a beer?”
“Yes, sir.” He turned toward the draft beer taps. “On tap we have—”
“Miller’s fine.”
The bartender turned away and picked up a glass, and Sid felt the heat of a large body close to his shoulder.
“Hey, Sidward.”
He raised his eyes to the mirror and saw Jimmy. “Hi, Jimmy. How have you been?”
“So-so. You like getting old? Me neither.”
“I’ll take it,” said Sid. “You got a couple of minutes?” His glass of beer appeared in front of him and he put a ten on the bar.
“Bring your beer. There are always people in here who will put stuff in it.”
“I know,” said Sid. “I didn’t plan to drink it.”
They walked to the back of the room past the pool tables where men who seemed to be waiting for something played listlessly. They went past the open door of the kitchen, and then out to a small parking lot in the rear of the building where Jimmy leaned against the hood of a car. “So?”
“We were out working on a case last night up in the northern part of the Valley. I noticed that a car had been behind us for way too long. They were waiting for us while we made our last stop, so I drove toward them to see who they were. The car took off, and I chased it. I started to gain on them, but I was still at least three hundred yards back. And then a passenger stuck a .308 rifle out the window and put a bullet through my windshield just above my head.”
“From a moving car?”
“At least ninety miles an hour on that stretch. And from the passenger side, it’s a left-handed shot.” He paused. “I’m wondering if you’ve heard anything that might give me some insight into my future.”
“You’re probably right that it’s a pro,” said Jimmy. “But I don’t know who. Nobody has been shopping a hit on you that I know of. Of course, LA is a big place, and the only times I’ve been in the North Valley I was on the freeway driving past it to somewhere else. A lot of people hated you in the old days, but they don’t usually wait ten years to let you know. Are you working on something now that would worry that kind of people?”
“A week or two ago we helped get a guy named Alex Rinosa arrested for murder.”
“The music guy? That was you? I’ll ask around and see if he’s been trying to hire anybody, but I don’t think so. He’s got to have too much attention on him to try that, and nobody I know would even talk to him now. What else you been up to?”
“We’re trying to find out who killed a man a year ago and put his body in a storm sewer up there,” said Sid. “We’re not close to finding out.”
“I haven’t heard anything about that either. What was the guy’s name?”
“James Ballantine. He was a chemist working for Intercelleron in Woodland Hills. A black guy.”
“A chemist, huh?”
“Not that kind.”
“They’re all that kind if they want to be.”
“No sign that he wanted to, though.”
“I’ll listen for you. I’m always listening. If I hear anything about you or him, I’ll tell you.”
Sid said, “I know you don’t owe me a favor.”
“No, but if I get you something, you will.”
“Thanks, Jimmy.” He stepped to the alley beside the lot and poured the beer out on the ground. “Good night.” Then he walked off down the alley, and turned toward the street where his car was parked. He had other people to see.
* * *
Ronnie watched the back door of the halfway house swing open to let a young Hispanic woman with a scrollwork tattoo on her neck step outside. Ronnie lunged forward, caught the door before it closed, and went inside.
Coming up the hallway was a stern-looking middle-aged woman with no makeup and her hair pulled back tight. Her eyes narrowed when she saw Ronnie, but during the five steps before they reached each other, their eyes met and stayed locked, and a change took place in the woman. “I’m sorry. I have to ask,” she said.
Ronnie said, “I’m Tiffany’s mom.” As she flashed a driver’s license, her shoulder holster with the Glock in it was just visible under her tailored jacket.
“There hasn’t been a Tiffany in two months.”
“Then I’m Maria’s mom.”
The woman passed by, on her way somewhere. Ronnie kept going. Whenever she passed one of the small residential rooms, she glanced inside. She went up one corridor and then turned to walk along the next.
“Ronnie?”
She turned. There was a small bedroom, outfitted to look something like a cell and something like a room in a bad motel. A small, too-thin woman with dyed red hair, a pointed jaw, and protruding cheekbones came to the doorway.
“Hi, hon,” said Ronnie. “I thought you might be getting out just about now, so I made a couple of phone calls.”
“You came to see me?”
“No big deal,” said Ronnie. “I was working on something and it happened to bring me by here. So I thought, ‘I think I’ll stop in and see how Elaine is doing.’”
Elaine shrugged. “You can come in if you’d like.”
There it was, Ronnie thought. After a stint in prison, having a room you could invite people into or throw them out of seemed to be a great luxury. “Well, just for a minute.” Ronnie entered the small room. She looked around at the sparse furnishings, and then lifted a chair that was in front of a small, plain table. She spun it around and sat down. “So tell me, honey. Is everything all right?”
Elaine shrugged again, and Ronnie could see her collarbones protruding. “While I was gone my boyfriend sold all my stuff and went off with a woman who wasn’t nearly as good-looking as me.”
Ronnie nodded. “They can be like that,” she said. “They don’t say no a lot to the one who’s right there in front of them.”
Elaine gave a little laugh. “Like I needed another reason to stay out of jail.”
“Any reason will do. Have you got any money?”
“When he took off, I lost my apartment, of course. That was where I’d stashed my money. But they give us food and clothes, and this time they’re going to get me a job.”
“Wow, that’s great,” said Ronnie. She patted Elaine’s thin arm with her left hand, reached into her jeans pocket with her right, and pulled out a pair of hundred-dollar bills. She held on to Elaine’s arm and put the bills in her hand. “Here’s a little bit to hold you over until you get your first paycheck.” She looked at her watch, stood, and put the chair back by the table.
Elaine looked confused. “What do you want for this? I haven’t told you anything. I just got out.”
“It’s okay,” said Ronnie. She took a business card out of her purse and handed it to her. “In case you’ve forgotten my phone number. If anything comes up that you think I’d like to know, you won’t forget me.”
“I won’t forget you,” she said. “You said you’re working on something tonight. What is it?”
“A man got shot and shoved in a storm sewer almost exactly a year ago. Nobody knows why. He was a scientist, a black guy named Ballantine. Well, got to go, hon.”
Ronnie made six more stops in different parts of the city during the night, talking to women she had met before. They were business contacts made in the course of a long career. Two were escorts who went on outcalls together because it was safer than working alone. They had stopped in a coffee shop for a late dinner, and when Ronnie called, they invited her to meet them. Another was a woman bartender in a restaurant where men had been known to be offered jobs that could be done quickly but paid very well. Ronnie drove up Sepulveda Boulevard very late and spotted two women on the street in spots they had worked when Ronnie was still a cop in the Valley. At each stop, Ronnie gave someone a business card and a hundred-dollar bill as a present, and asked for nothing specific except that the recipient call her if anything that might interest her came up.
She got home at three thirty, in time to see Sid arrive in the rental car he’d gotten to replace the BMW. He had made ten stops, making the rounds of his own informants.
“Anybody know anything?” she asked.
“Nothing so far. They’re all going to listen.”
“Maybe we don’t know the right offenders.”
“I guess that’s not entirely bad. Let’s go get some sleep.”
The next day they were up and out of their driveway in their black Volvo by noon. After an hour, a white van with magnetic signs and seals on the doors that said LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER pulled up in front of the gate and a man in hard hat and coveralls got out and unloaded a few tools. The van pulled ahead a few feet and parked.
Nicole Hoyt sat in the van and watched Ed in the rearview mirror until he had gotten the electric gate at the Abels’ house open and gone in to work on their driveway. She had studied the place on aerial photographic maps she found online. Ed had been happy when he found that the driveway was made of paving stones all fitted together like puzzle pieces. Now he was prying up pavers and digging.
Nicole had set out orange traffic cones in front of the van and behind it. Anybody willing to buy a few cones could get away with just about any nonsense he wanted. The van was a good place to be while she served as Ed’s lookout. She watched for cars and for dog walkers and delivery people, but there were very few on this quiet block today. As she sat there she thought about Ed, and pictured him working. He was prying up the stones as quickly as he could, then digging a trench in the dirt, putting the dirt into buckets, and dumping it in the flower beds. Next he would place a thin layer of plywood over the trench and cover that with pavers so it looked the same as the rest of the driveway.
Ed was strong and had machinelike stamina, but he was racing against an unknown deadline. The people who lived in that house might come home at any time, and Nicole was the only one who could warn him. If they arrived too soon, Nicole was determined to start the van and back it into their car. If she and Ed had to finish this contract the simple, direct way in daylight, then they would, and just hope they could get away without leaving too many eyewitnesses.
Nicole looked down at the digital clock on the dashboard. As each second passed, she hoped Ed was getting closer to finishing. She tried not to look at the clock again to see if it had changed to the next minute yet. At times like this she was always worried that she would lose him, and the clock watching made her anxiety worse.
Meeting Ed had solved a lot of problems. She had been alone for a long time, and had never liked it. She had grown up in a small, hot town in southern Arizona, the sort of place illegal immigrants hurried through because it was neither big enough to hide them nor nice enough to make them want to stay. When she was younger she went through men like a woman trying on shoes at a sale, hoping each one would fit, but never finding one that did. The right man never appeared, and nothing seemed to take her mind off her loneliness.
She had tried drugs in most of their common forms while she was still a teenager, and accomplished a lot of throwing up, a heart that raced enough to make her think her blood was about to burst out of her ears, and some very ugly scabs where she had clumsily injected drugs into her veins. She had liked drugs. They seemed to combine her two favorite feelings, being uncontrollable and then being unconscious, but they had begun to weaken her in preparation for killing her, like a friend who was really a sly and patient enemy. There were only two ways for a girl like her to afford drugs, and her parents caught her at one of them—stealing cash and credit cards from their wallets—and threw her out. Fortunately, she had already stolen enough to get to Phoenix.
Once there, she decided she needed to recover her health. While she was working to repair herself, her narcissism emerged and made her obsessed with the way she looked. She wanted desperately to be pretty. She enrolled in cosmetology school so she would be an expert. The instructors taught her to cut, style, and color hair, gave her enough of a basic understanding of aesthetics to take care of her skin, and taught her to do nails. She became a model of her own skills and a showcase for the beauty supplies she pilfered from the school. When she graduated, her appearance got her a job, mostly dying hair and doing makeup for proms and weddings. She lasted three months. The constant exposure to formaldehyde, dibutyl phthalate, ammonia, and other chemicals had already made her sick.
She had never lost her interest in men, only lost men’s interest in her during the final phases of her drug period when she got too skinny and lizard-like for most of them. Once she looked better she’d resumed her effort to try to sort out the available men and end up with a good one. All she got was a growing memory of men she didn’t like very much, and a familiarity with disappointment.
Men were astoundingly simple. They were motivated by sex and greed. The greedy ones were always trying to manipulate her into paying for things that they should have bought—dinners, tickets, airline reservations, hotels. They were always calculating and straining for advantage over everybody, and she was nearest and easiest.
The ones who were primarily motivated by sex were better, because she could withhold or grant it to manipulate them, and be in charge most of the time. The one drawback was that they liked sex, but they weren’t always particular about whom they had it with. Ed was one of those men, but she had so far been able to keep him where she could see him and make sure he was happy she was around.
She met Ed only after she had come down to her last idea. She had not found a man she could tolerate who would be willing or able to support her, so she needed a career. She had tried many different jobs and failed at each of them. She had enrolled in four schools of various kinds, joined three churches, gone online in a hundred guises. All that was left was military service. That would not only provide her with necessities and a little spending money, but would surround her with men.
She didn’t want to simply commit herself to a branch of the military before she had some idea of what she would be doing. The solution was to skip out on her lease and use the savings to attend a camp in Tennessee called Training Command. They claimed to have marine veterans as instructors in combat techniques, survival, martial arts, and use of the M4 rifle, Beretta M9 pistol, and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. After giving it more thought she sold her car and signed up for the eight-week course.
Nicole was put into a class with twenty-six men and three women. She was terribly intimidated at first, but since her drug days she had taken great care of her body. She ran pretty well, and could do a few push-ups. When the physical training began, her confidence collapsed. She strained and suffered to stay ahead of the two old men who were in their sixties and the three women. As she ran she would feel the air searing her lungs and her legs giving out, and watch the main group of men disappearing far ahead up the road between tall pines. When the class did pull-ups the men did them endlessly. She could do three, but only because by then she had lost a lot of weight.
Then one day she discovered she had a talent. She could shoot. There had been no reason whatever to expect this. She was not athletic. The only indications of good command over her muscles had been pretty penmanship and the ability to dance, and her style of dancing relied more on an ability to move her hips than her feet.
Nicole was good. She instinctively did the things a person had to do to line up the sights of a weapon on the bull’s-eye. In spite of her small size, the grips and forestocks seemed to have been made to rest in her hands and the rifle butts to nestle into her right shoulder. She had perfect vision, but it had never seemed to her to be a big advantage before. She often wore contact lenses anyway, to make her eyes the color she wanted that day. But she could put a hole in a bull’s-eye just about any time she wanted to.
At the beginning of her second week on the range, her name started going around the camp. After two more days, students from other classes started to appear behind the firing line to watch her shoot. Soon there were instructors among them.
Eventually Ed Hoyt turned up. He was tall and muscular but not freakishly big. He had dark brown hair, and at that time he had a mustache. Nicole had always thought of a mustache as a declaration that a man was celibate, or at least not interested in women, because so many gay men and cops had them, but that turned out not to be accurate in Ed’s case, and within a week she had gotten him to shave it off.
She was, by the end of the eight-week course, well prepared to become a marine. She could perform all of the rudimentary martial arts moves they would teach her in boot camp. She could break down and reassemble all of the standard-issue firearms blindfolded, and she was the best sharpshooter in the school. She was good, but not quite as spectacular, on the combat pistol course. Still, her small size and guile made her unbeatable at the hide-and-seek, run-and-gun kinds of games the school set up in the forest.
Then the camp ended. Instead of taking the bus to the nearest recruiting office, she carried her backpack out of the cramped women’s cabin and got into the passenger seat of Ed Hoyt’s Dodge Bighorn pickup and waited while Ed loaded her gear into the cargo box in the bed with his and locked it. He drove her south to his apartment in Tampa.
When they reached his place, they unloaded their packs into his spare room, then locked the door, turned on the air conditioner, and stayed indoors for six days. It was less like a honeymoon than a contest. They broke each other the way trainers broke wild horses. They exhausted each other and then came together again, wrestled and fought, overcoming every sense of reserve or separateness. If one of them was awake and wanted, the other had no right to refuse or to hold back. Because he was the man he always began as the aggressor, but her knowledge that she could wait him out and demand more would arouse her to ask. And hearing her ask would tease him into the next encounter. The only time she wore anything, it was an old camouflage army shirt that had HOYT embroidered over the left pocket and had a black scroll that said 75 RANGER RGT. It went down nearly to her knees, and protected her skin from being spattered with grease when she cooked.
At the end of the week they were through. Nicole had lost more weight, and she could see he had too. The bed linen desperately needed washing, and the recycling bin was filled with empty liquor bottles. The trash was overflowing with cans, because after they’d used up the fresh food, they had opened most of the canned food in the apartment, heated it hurriedly, and eaten it together from the pot.
They went out for breakfast at a restaurant on Tampa Bay. When they had ordered their food he leaned forward with his elbows on the table. He said, “Are you tired of me yet?”
She said, “No. Are you tired of me?”
“No. I never met a woman like you. I think we should get married.”
“Why? Do you think I’ve been holding something back for my future husband?”
“All this week I kept wondering what next week would be like. I want to find out.”
“I don’t want to marry somebody who will cheat on me.”
“You ruined me. Another woman would have a hard time holding my attention. And if I cheat, you’re welcome to cut off my ring finger to take the ring back.”
She remembered him looking straight into her eyes across the table when he said that, and she remembered reminding herself that all liars stared into a person’s eyes, but still being swayed by his disgusting offer.
The buzz of Nicole’s cell phone startled her, and she reached into her pocket, pulled it out, and pressed it to her ear as she stared into the rearview mirror. “I’m still here,” she said.
“I’m done,” Ed said. “Bring the van to pick me up.”
Nicole jumped down from the van, put the orange cones into a stack and tossed them into the back, then got in and swung the van around to pull up beside the driveway of the Abels’ house.
Ed was standing by the entrance in his orange and yellow DPW vest with his pickaxe, chisel, hammer, and spade. He opened the back door, set everything on the floor and went around to the driver’s seat while Nicole crawled to the passenger seat. He drove off.
After a couple of turns he glanced at her. “Have you got something to tell me?”
She shrugged and said, “I was just thinking that I like to see you all sweaty like that.”
“How long can you hold that thought?”
“Why? Where are we going now?”
“We still have to get rid of the van and get ready for the Abels.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “You might want to park the van in some isolated place for a little while first. We can put the sun shade over the windshield so nobody can see in.”