7

I made my excuses to the mission staff, who were none too thrilled that I could not join them for breakfast after all. I told them the truth. “I’m being interviewed by investigators about the bus bombing. It could take a while.”

It turned into three hours of interview that by comparison made reporter Ruby Webster’s questions seem appealing.

Agent Wu/Phu. “Are you certain you’d never before seen Patty Newfeldt, the girl with the backpack? Think, Carter. Maybe she knew you from the mission or one of the other places you volunteer?”

Agent Barnes. “What made you go after her backpack? You say you didn’t know it contained a bomb, yet you sensed you had to get rid of it or people would die? How’s that work?”

Agent Wu/Phu. “How about her parents? Maybe you ran into the mother at the county courthouse while applying for a license or a permit for something? Think, Carter. Maybe a food handler’s license or vaccinations for an overseas trip?”

Agent Barnes. “Maybe you used the father’s CPA services at tax time? They say they’ve never met you before but why would you single out their daughter? Why without uttering a single word to her would you attack a stranger and wrestle away her property, and then without even looking inside throw that property away?”

And that line of questioning always brought us full circle back to the central question, “How did you know there was a bomb in the backpack?”

For what seemed the thousandth time, I answered, “I can’t explain it. It was simply a hunch so strong that I had to act. If I was wrong, I could apologize and face whatever charges might come from my actions. If I was right and didn’t act, well, you and I would not be having this conversation right now.”

That was as honest as I could be without getting into my argument with God. Go there and at worst, they would think I was certifiable. “Fundamentalist Whack Job Says Voices Made Him Do It.” At best, I would be casting pearls before swine. My apologies to all hardworking law-enforcement officers everywhere, but the law and the supernatural had a hard time mixing. It was bad enough being an ordinary retired warehouseman trying his best to fly under the Almighty’s radar. Couldn’t get the police involved.

Ruth Anne, you’re being awfully quiet. Are you doing what you called your “thoughtful observations”?

“Jim, please, take a breather,” I could almost hear her say. “Stop trying to force things. Let nature takes its course.” By nature, she meant the natural law of God. He who set the planets in motion could certainly resolve our earthly concerns.

I was ever the scrappy bulldog, she the graceful Dane. Observe. Pray. Weigh. Act in concert with the forces of heaven. That was her way. I was never any good at it. Ah, Ruthie, I am so clumsy without you.

Patty had prayed for a miracle. Were you that miracle, Mr. Carter? I felt as capable of performing miracles as a baked potato. Why wouldn’t the world leave me alone?

Out of the ether I swore I heard a voice say, “Because I won’t.”

~*~

Bill met me at Crusty Jake’s on the waterfront. Best cinnamon rolls north or south of the equator. Big around as a good-sized lily pad. Icing thick as your thumb. Taste so fine everyone who ordered one was compelled to stop for thirty seconds of silence before eating, out of sheer respect. This was not a baked good. This was a religious experience.

Jake’s cinnamon rolls were to store-bought pastry what the Sistine Chapel was to velvet painting, kind of how the fine wine Jesus made stacked up against the cheap stuff.

Ruthie always wanted to split a roll with me. I’d said yes, but that I would then need one and a half rolls to satisfy my need.

She said to call it a need was to dignify the fact that the number of calories in a single Jake’s exceeded the population of half the towns around Seattle.

I said it was this close to being a health food.

She said I was not a fit judge of what was and was not healthy.

I said that if we ask for them heated, it was inevitable that some calories would ooze out and remain stuck to the plate. Couldn’t count those calories.

Ruthie huffed and said the fraction of time I allowed excess icing to remain on the plate could be measured in nanoseconds. “Besides, the only thing oozing around here is your growing list of lame excuses for porking out on Jake’s rolls.”

I said, “Guilty as charged. Can we save the remainder of this conversation for the ride home? I’m kind of busy.”

Today I was glad to see Bill looked his old self. I heard that some of the passengers on the bus had been bloodied by the shattered windows from the blast. Physically, Bill looked unscathed. While we waited for our sweet rolls to be served, I apologized for vanishing without a word.

Bill laughed heartily, shaking an ample belly barely contained by a green knit polo shirt. It was the first time I had seen him out of uniform.

“What, you kiddin’ me? I see you all over the news, though I have to admit I’m a little tired of the same old pictures. Seattle’s hero being loaded onto a gurney, Seattle’s hero being prepared for transport to Harborview. Seattle’s hero as a geeky high-school senior. Can’t you give ’em something new to work with?”

I wondered if Jake’s cinnamon-roll icing could be declared the state frosting. “Cool it with the hero talk. I’ll be forced to get a facelift and dye my hair a different color.”

Bill smiled and with a little moan of pleasure took another bite of roll, but did not let it keep him from talking. “Ain’t no amount of lift can help that face of yours. No kidding, Jim, I’m so glad you’re OK. When I saw you rip the backpack off that girl, I thought you’d gone ape on me. Then when you tore out of the bus and hurled that thing into orbit and it blew, oh, man, I couldn’t believe it. I’m still in shock.” Tears dripped down the sides of Bill’s nose, but it didn’t stop him from eating. “You saved us all, man. You rabid, crazy fool saved us all. I thought you was gonna die.” Bill’s shoulders shook and the tears rolled down. He set down his fork and gulped in air. His face reddened and I thought he was going to have a stroke.

“Bill—”

“No! You let me say this. You may not feel like no hero, but you put your life at risk for me and Cigar Man and a whole lot of people you will never know. There isn’t one man in a million who would put his life on the line for his friends, let alone perfect strangers. You’re my hero, Jim. You’re Roxanne’s hero. She said she’d marry you in a heartbeat if I wasn’t in the picture. I said if it hadn’t been for you, I might not be in the picture, and she burst out crying and kissed me seven ways from Sunday.” He winked. “You’ve even improved my love life.”

“Drink your coffee, Bill. When do I get to meet this sweet queen of yours?”

He napkined his face dry and took a long sip of the brew. His eyes squeezed shut in what I took for ecstasy. I needed to get the man a new coffee maker. Then I remembered Roxie special-ordered a Colombian blend she said was good to the taste buds and to the digestion. “She stays put long enough, we can have you over for her sweet-potato pie. Roxie puts things in there I don’t even know what they are. She should have a show on the Food Network. Sweet Roxie’s Sweet Pies.”

We talked Mariners baseball. Sounders soccer. The prospects for Seahawks football. I learned Bill had taken two days off to get his head back together and that he was getting used to a new 17.

“It’s like a good woman, Jimmy. If you truly care about her, you learn all her little quirks and idiosyncrasies, and you anticipate her needs and make allowances for her shortcomings. For love, Jimmy, for love. I loved the old 17 and now I got to learn to love the new 17. But I’ll never have another bus beautiful as Roxie.” A look of anxiety settled on his bulldog features. “You won’t tell her, will you? I don’t want Roxanne to think that a bus is a mistress I love more than I love her. I can’t explain it and no one but another driver can fully understand.”

I shook my head, a little uncomfortable with Bill’s soft side. I liked him better as the gruff-voiced jokester. We weren’t chummy enough to be veering off into territory I mostly reserved for Ruthie. A few times, my real emotions came out with troubled kids who “shopped” at the Safari, but those were the hard cases.

The more the sun set, the noisier Crusty J’s became. The loudest was Jake himself, who made the rounds in white paper ice-cream hat and soiled white apron, laughing with the locals, tickling the babies, and complimenting the ladies on their hair, their nail polish, their choice of “food establishments.” Thin as a pogo stick and twice as bouncy, his warmth spilled out the constantly opening front door and splashed over the passersby on the sidewalk out front. A good many detoured inside for the beef-chunk chili or the chicken pot pie. It was easy for an hour to think you were part of a family spread out over a handful of booths and a dozen tables.

“Come back!” Bill blurted, making me jump. His eyes again welled with emotion. For a minute there, I thought he might take my hand in his beefy paws. He moved his coffee mug and empty plate to one side and leaned forward, all earnestness and eye contact like the female grief counselor I had fired after I lost Ruthie. “Virgil thinks you suffered brain damage in the explosion, and Stella and Doomie—I mean, Greg—are fit to bust for you to be the first to know whatever it is they’re busting to tell. The way they’re holding hands and sucking face, you don’t have to be Mr. Wizard to know what those two are cooking up. And, uh, and—”

“What, Bill?” Part of me said I shouldn’t have eaten the entire cinnamon roll, part of me wanted a second one, extra icing. Bill was not helping. I saw Ruthie come out of the kitchen of my mind with that look of “if you put another thousand calories into your mouth, I will pump your stomach with a turkey baster.” I waved Jake away—he was in his “can I get you another” mode—and signaled the new waitress to refill my cup.

And waited.

Bill stared at the red-and-white-checked oilcloth covering our table and absentmindedly smoothed it with the palms of his hands. It didn’t need smoothing. “I know you have every right to take a cab or catch a ride with a coworker, and if I was you, I might do the same thing. But things on the 17 aren’t the same without you. I can’t explain it. It sounds different. The riders are different. The air’s different. Sheesh, I sound like a loon.” Rheumy dark eyes implored me to make the Twilight Zone go away.

I reached across and gave Bill a friendly slap on the arm. “You sound like a man who’s been given a new bus. The chassis creaks in different places. The tranny growls at thirty instead of twenty. Spooky Doomie has morphed into Grinning Greg, and Jimmy the Jinx is taking a few days to soak the rash from his hind end. Hardly signs of the apocalypse.”

Bill studied me carefully. Too carefully. The man drove transit. When had he become my analyst?

Why did I have the sudden crazy urge to tell him about the McCutcheons and Bea’s brush with suicide? And the warning scribbled into the back of one of the seats on his bus, the warning that saved Bea’s life?

“Greta asks about you.”

Greta.

“She’s concerned for you. Pardon my asking, but have you two seen each other outside the bus?”

“I’m old enough to be her old man.” I said it too fast. Too defensively. Idiot.

Bill grinned slyly. “I didn’t ask if you’d spent a week in Monte Carlo together. ’Sides, age doesn’t mean what it used to. She seems like a sweet girl. Great figure. Artsy. You could do worse.”

“My Ruthie’s only been gone four years, Bill.”

“Forty-eight months.”

“You’re looking at a one-woman man, my friend.”

“Roxie thinks you’re hiding.”

“Does she?”

“Yup, and that Ruthie would want you to live, not lock yourself away like Howard Hughes.”

“Roxie’s pretty talkative.”

“Yup, and she wants to know if you’ll go bowl with me tomorrow night, grab a couple beers, act like normal people.”

I looked at my knuckles. They were bone white. “Shouldn’t we keep a little professional separation here?” My voice carried too much menace; Bill was one of the good guys. “You know what I mean. People don’t socialize with their barber, their minister, their bus driver.”

Bill reared back from the table, shoulders slumped under the hurt I’d inflicted. “In that case, Mr. Carter, I’ll tell Greta to mind her own business. And I’ll mind mine. Roxie too. Glad to see you looking well.” He stood up with a screech of chair legs and fumbled for a wallet.

I put out a hand to stop him. “My treat. Bill, listen, I didn’t mean—”

But he threw down a twenty and was gone.

I sat a long time, staring at the little silver bell positioned above the entrance to Crusty J’s. It went on ringing in my head. The waitress came by with the coffeepot a couple of times. I waved her off. Once, Jake silently squeezed my shoulder on his way by. The only thing that registered at the time, though, was the realization that a message could reach me beyond the confines of the 17 after all. This one said, “You, James Carter, are a colossal jerk.”