Chapter 2
-
Herb Baer glanced down at the small electronic device in the heavily scarred man’s hand. He
couldn’t see any manufacturer’s tag on it, but that didn’t mean it was another one of Matthew’s electronic
gadgets, the small silvered plaque with the company name and VIN number might be located discretely on one of the bottom corners
of the compact gray box.
“ Do you think we should move to an enclosed space, Al? “
“ It’s a little bit late to try and run und hide, even for the children’s sake,
Preacher. “ Al Hoag answered, sighing so deeply that all the unspoken words rushed out into the narrow
space between them.
Herb nodded. “ Yeah, her leaving that suddenly doesn’t
bode well. She knows us well enough to guess what precautions we’d take as soon as Mattie told you she was gone. Life
would sure be easier if I just listened to Betty and stayed away from you, man. “
“ The hell ye say? “
Herb looked
up, seeing the pain and the anger. Battling it with the knowledge he had warned him time and again about Harold Devlon’s
granddaughter while there was still time to be free of her lies and Al had chosen not to listen! ‘Why was he suddenly
listening now?’
The
burl Scot had to look away, pretending that he was looking intently out the small window now level with the swaying dock,
but it was simply to give them both time to get up the companionway to where there was more air for them to breath without
being in another another’s face with useless regrets.
“ Trey called,
Uncle Al. He’s going to be late. He said to start without him. “ Amanda’s pretty face was strained by the
white lie, she’d called her husband at the hospital, hoping he could get away early, but things weren’t working
in her behalf.
“ I called Harbor Patrol, Al. “ The former Vet said quietly, to keep
his older sister from hearing him. They said there wasn’t any unusual activity around the boat in the last couple of
days and the moon’s been bright enough to notice swimmers or snorkelers? “
The twenty-something street man couldn’t keep the questioning out of his voice. Stress like this wasn’t
suppose to ooze down on real life and time with family when an aura of normalcy had wrapped them in invulnerability until
the Scot’s mans worried frown.
“ Gud. Where’s Brother John? “
“ Over there, talking with those two System boys, Rafael and Stevie. He has a thing for lost
souls doesn’t he? “
“ How do
ye think he found mae, Todd? “
“ On the
streets like me? “
Matthew broke the sudden silence by happily shouting ‘GIN” and throwing his cards on the fold down table
despite the slight breeze whipped around the edges of the marina, and when the ex-Marine looked back, the Scots man’s
face was a mask again. Big Al was gone, and Detective Lieutenant Al Hoag had taken his place. It should have been comforting,
but with his older sister so near, it simply gave him someone else to worry about if they had to duck for cover from an ambush.
For several heartbeats he heard the whump of the HUEY guarding them overhead as they retreated, and the sea stenches became
the constant water smell of the fetid canals of Nam, but then a girl’s high pitched and happy voice broke through and
he could separate himself a little further from the man who’d pulled a knife on the heavily scarred cop and the tall
man in a monk’s suit. That was the best he could hope for right now. He began to regret his sister Nancy’s decision
to summer out here on his doorstep to make sure he went to Sea Oaks with the other vets like he’d promised Al and Brother
John!
After a quiet conference, which fourteen-year-old Matthew Lovich pretended not to see, the decision was made to finish
the dinner but to stay at one of the house onshore tonight rather than sailing out beyond the massive suspension bridge as
they had originally planned.
The steaks were already done on one side and browning
on the other when Skipper Hal Brooks and his first mate Billy Campbell came on board with his fifteen-year-old niece Vanessa.
Though Al clearly knew them and was known by them, Todd was too nervous not to check their professional IDs and driver’s
licenses at the first opportunity he could away from the Boy. When Al told them they had to call the weekend off, it was clear
that both of the younger teens were disappointed at postponing their time together, but accustomed to adult’s broken
promises because matters at the Precinct superceded their personal lives. Al felt he couldn’t ignore the ex-soldier’s
instinctive reactions lightly, given his own fears about the possible flashpoint of the unknown killer who’d been stacking
the Haight.
His grown niece came up on deck, a little annoyed because she’d taken great care in preparing the fresh green
salad for a demonstration of her domestic skills for her Uncle Al, whose opinion she valued so highly, combined with another
female presence taking control of a space Amanda had already claimed as her own, but the boy and girl liked each other so
much it was a little embarrassing for Vanessa to admit she was jealous of someone who was obviously light years older than
herself! When she discovered they wouldn’t leave until dusk, her gentle nature found it easy for her to forgive them.
“ Tae morrow morning, we’ll
get a fresh start und simply stay out a day longer than we originally planned, Sweetheart. “ Al suggested,
kissing her on the cheek in apology. He did his best to keep his life at the precinct separate
from his private life, but when the Preacher felt the same kind of tension he was feeling, it had to be dealt with, and with
a minimum of concern for the children and civilians.
“
Maybe Georgiana’s oldest boy can join us? If we’re going to be a day later, Uncle Al? I think it would
do Wee Mattie some good to have a boy near his own age onboard? “
“ No wid tae pretty girls on board. “ Al answered.
his cheeks a surprising hue of red given his experiences as a boy in the Bo camps of the Forties and then as a soldier and
cop.
“ One each? “ Amanda suggested in puzzlement.
“ No wid Lonnie Rowan und Wee Mattie. One wud hae tae have both of them. They’re like
young bucks a’ this age. “
“ Were you? “
As the smile slipped
away from the scarred man’s face she immediately regretted the impulsive question. But there was so much about Al Hoag
that he left unsaid. At that moment heavy footsteps and the slight rocking of the moored craft warned them that the seven-foot-two
minister had come back aboard. For all of his gentleness, Brother John Carbasian was as solidly built as the bunker the Nazi’s
built to test resistance to rocket impact. Amanda jumped nervously but it was only her father’s adopted brother kissing
her a second time on the cheek, this time in a apology as he lifted the heavy salad bowl from her hands and lead the way to
the upper deck, for fear it might be someone other than the gentle Lebanese monk.
The thin, taunt soldier was standing beside the luminous glow of the ship’s navigation system, discussing what
emergency gear was already on board and what the Skipper thought they might need to bring back with them if the voyage should
be longer than the three days originally designated when the dark skinned giant approached. The two boys he’d invited
to stay for the evening remain on deck with the older teens, but Rafael had already taken charge of them, as he did over his
younger companion Stevie.
“ Starting a day late won’t interfere with your other charters will it?
“
Hal Brooks looked up from his squatted position rummaging through the box of emergency flares, checking their expiration
dates. His teen-aged niece was supposed to have done that when they left on Monday but she’d been truthful enough to
admit she’d forgotten.
“ Thanks for asking Brother John, no. I’m not use to that kind of courtesy around the
Black Bastards. I book for the summer when William Devlon in the country. If Al isn’t using it, he is. I think they’re
both the spawn of a mermaid, if the truth were told. “
They shared a laugh, making sure
they weren’t being overhead.
“ Well, Neptune might be Mr. Devlon’s father, but I think Satan himself sired that burly
Scot! “
“ Don’t let their effeminizing lies fool you, Mr. Spears. They work best by misdirecting
the people they hope to deceive. Al Hoag? That damn Scot is a man I’d have at my back if it was Satan
himself I had to face! He’s fire to their ice, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s the only hope that little
boy has of making it in this world! “
Captain
Brooks winced at the harsh word for gay, used in polite conversations, but the nervous man was watching the edges of the shadows
moving on the water, not at him and he forced back the automatic gay-bashing ‘fag’ joke he hid behind, even among
his own kind.
“ How long till you come back, Al? “
“ If it’s another hour, you and Billy enjoy the stakes. Heaven knows ye’ve earned
it as good-natured as yer being about this. “
Hal Brooks smiled though his façade and almost said the words aloud in contempt, but at the last moment he simply
tightened his grin and waved goodbye to the two men protecting the retreat of the chattering women and the grim faced boy.
“ What’s up, Cappy? “ Billy Campbell asked
nervously, reading his life partner’s face as easily as a finger painting done by an over-active child.
“ I’ll tell you as soon as I’m sure there aren’t any bugs. “
“ Why would they bug their own boat? “ Billy demanded flippantly,
suddenly filled with an arrogant anger he couldn’t risk allowing himself to explore.
“ That Devlon bitch just left the country –in a hurry- on a private jet, not a scheduled
flight. She’s getting out before something happens. YOU want to bet your life that she isn’t after that damn Scots
man again? “
“ No! “ The younger man agreed, looking over his
shoulder. The solid ship with its heavily vanished sides and solid floors suddenly seemed no more than a coffin slipping up
and down restless on the incoming tide. They wouldn’t leave anything out in plain sight yet he forced his way to the
center of the small craft and looked down thought he pilot’s companionway, as sweat began to prickle on the sunburn
from where they’d fallen asleep nude. If Al Hoag was worried enough to move his loved ones away from this site, what
the hell were they still doing on it? But when he tried to object, his older companion laughed at
him scornfully, claiming the danger left as soon as the burly Scot did. Vanessa watched, uneasy with them when they were having
one of their lover’s quarrels though she hardly paid any attention to their relationship otherwise, but the smell of
thee grilled steaks was too much to ignore and she hastened past the thinly sweating man with the ceramic plates they kept
locked below where none of the regulars on the boat could find them and use them, It made the small wind craft more like their
own boat again and the breeze coming off the Bay was as sweet to the touch as the freshly squeezed orange juice chilling in
the miniature fridge.
*
The decision had been made by the Mayor’s
office last week that any further killings were to be kept suppressed until a Blue Smiler Task Force could be assembled. At
that point, they [meaning the Mayor and his best chum John Martins] would be responsible for how much was fed out to
the killer’s listening ears, or not. Al started to object, been reamed a new one by Chief of Detectives Ernie Buckhannon,
whereupon he’d signed one of the resignation forms he kept in his desk [since he figured he’d be too emotional
to write a good one at the time he was ready to use it] and stormed out, hoping to catch Herb or Betty at their desks. They’d
been talking about forming a private detective agency between the three of them anyhow, but no one expected to find another
victim two days later. It was always six weeks and a day. Never six weeks and two days, but six weeks and a day. The murderer
even went so far as to cal ‘his; reporter on the televised News show to make sure the discovery remained within his
predetermined time schedule, so both the husband and wife had turned him down and he’d left in a sulk. On the way home
he’d gotten a flat tire and almost didn’t make it to the tiny garage behind the main house, and he’d taken
that as ‘sign’. Only to get the call this morning to the commune on Pearl Avenue!
Vannie watched them leave over the bow of the ship with a pang. The tide was in far enough to hold the ship steady,
as if it had suddenly been seized by land, but that was deceptive and her odd gait would in time be rewarded by the rocking
of the great beast as the tide swept out under her ribbed belly. She’d half-hoped she’d be invited along as company
for his son when it was clear his ex-lover wasn’t coming on board the way they’d provisioned. But on the other
hand, it meant she didn’t have to deal with her creepy twin Orin the way he ogled her Uncle Hal and Billy Campbell [whom
she wasn’t supposed to know were ‘gay’.] But as she settled herself at the narrow table
in the galley and pulled out her last bit of homework she hadn’t done waiting for them to pick her up from the summer
secession, the over her head rang and she answered it instinctively. Because it was her new boyfriend Ethan, whom she was
trying to woo away from his old girlfriend her resolve to get the odious algebra homework done and out of the way was quickly
forgotten. After all, they had all weekend and Monday to get it done!
To
soothe her conscience she asked him a tentative question about The New Math, which he gratefully knocked away to ask her about
more important matters, like the color of the panties she was wearing, and she was oblivious to the world till Billy Campbell
came as far down the companionway as he could, to bend and glare at her for occupying the line too long, without having to
go all the way down the stairs. She regretfully severed the connection then held her breath for a few seconds but no demanding
and thwarted mess age came from the Black Bastards themselves, as her Uncle called them for their cruelty in business matters,
like the papers that came due on Skipper Ron’s boat when they came and took it away from him when it was all he had
left in the world!
It’d been sold for scrap because no one was willing to put that kind of money into making the dreadful little
heap seaworthy again, but he’d thought to die there, and she separated the Devlon’s innate cruelty from the boy
she liked, telling herself that with a different father and a different way of Life, he would grow up a worthy husband and
love the sea just as much as did! Maybe he’d buy a boat and let her be her own captain while he worked in one of those
huge rise buildings bearing his grandfather’s name?
At a quarter to eleven, that late Thursday night just as Al Hoag was using his key to unlock the gated entrance to
the private marina, a loud explosion ripped away the silence from the lighted boats and unlit ships at moor with equal intensity,
up and over. Sparking a fire on the waterproof tarps of both sides, one of either side of the Mary Maiden. Then a second,
even greater explosion demolished all three as the gas tanks erupted with three days worth of fuel stowed below. The second
blast knocked all four of them off their feet, and a fireball raced toward them, setting off the car alarm behind them as
the ship so recently moored beside the well-lit wind ship
Only
with the third explosion, the ship to the starboard of the flaming hulks giving vent to the heat and the compressed gases
of the enclosed inferno, did any sense of what just happened start to sink in. Matthew was hidden under his body guard’s
motionless body, Amada sat upright, dazed, her hand full of blood from the shallow but profusely bleeding cut on her forehead.
“ I want my daddy! “ She sobbed, reaching
out to cling to the protection offered by her Uncle’s arms.
Todd Spears groaned, dazed and still
unconscious. Amanda pulled on his arm with unthinking violence to find and protect the burly youth trapped under him. Grass
clung to the boy’s whitened face, a plastic holder for a six pack of beer abandoned in the general direction of the
trash can which had knocked him and Todd to the ground hung limply from his left ear but she found nothing in her that could
laugh at his look of fear.
Lights from the hotel rooms behind them came on,
casting an eerie yellow glow on the flattened grass and splintered windshields of the cars parked facing the Marina. It looked
like war zone! In what seemed an instantaneous response because of their delayed reaction times, they ear drums began to function
sufficiently to allow them to hear the piercing wails of fire engines and police vehicles converging on the scene.
A Red Cross station was set up under a canopy and a picnic table; as survivors of the blast were given a hurried triage.
There weren’t enough ambulances for everyone, so the most severely burned were air lifted to nearby hospitals to receive
fluids and routing to more established burn centers within a hundred mile radius, the less serious traumatized were bandaged
and a person assigned to them to hear the inevitable spew of emotions and fears that follows so random and terrible an act
of violence and the worst case scenarios were taken to the near-by hospitals as they were found. The VA Hospital on the hill
sent down an emergency team of surgeons and doctors until transportation could be assured to everyone who needed it.
Amada and Matthew ere assigned to swabbing cuts and wrapping bandages, similar to their own when the doctor in charge
saw how they were in shock by the trauma they took on as their own responsibility, although it had yet to be discovered which
boat caught on fire first, or whether they were as much the targets as the sad victims of the rampant hatred of homosexuals,
or worse, simply the random targets of some nut-ball case like the groups demanding anarchy and arson on the campus every
day in the name of student ‘freedom of speech’!
As long as they stayed busy helping others, it helped to keep their feelings of helplessness at bay. Al envied them
as he stood beside the blonde, aggressively interviewing anyone who would be willing to be seen on camera, while he waited
his turn at debriefing from the Harbor Master and the precinct who covered North Beach.
It was Carole Lindsey who told him that Todd Spears was stable, with a concussion and three cracked ribs, but alive.
He didn’t even care that she filmed his reaction for the ‘documentary’ she blathered on about filming from
this footage. It was enough to know that another good man hadn’t died because of him! No matter
what the official results of tonight’s inquiry there was no longer any doubt left in mind, or love for her left in his
heart. She had every reason to believe he and her young son would be on The Mary Maiden when it exploded! She couldn’t
fight her father Weak William or her grandfather Harold Devlon, whose guts and blood went into starting and maintaining the
international empire. But she could kill its next heir, to kept the old bastard from by-passing her, as he had by-passed his
own son in her favor! With a male heir born from her anguish, Harold no longer had need of her! A cold hatred
filled the space where his love for her had lain. Blood called to blood! Hatred to hate. If she failed the first time, she’d
only do it again!
Had the singular murders in the Haight Ashbury simply
been a ruse to keep him preoccupied and suggest an anonymous killer who’d never be found? There was only one way to
find out, and to extract a revenge that wouldn’t scar the boy for life! Relinquishing the sobbing boy to his grandfather
William Devlon’s care. Al sought his brother’s side, unsure of what to expect after nearly killing the light of
his life.
“ Thank gawd, mun! Yer both safe! “ James Patrick
said heatedly, afraid to embrace the shorter man in the bear hug his emotions demanded of him. “
Dunt’! “ He said sharply. “ Dun’t
blame yerself even if it turns out that wicked Witch is a’ the back o’ this! She had us both fooled, Lad! For
long, long years! “
“ How can I not blame myself? Like our Mary’s death? “
Before the massive man could think of an answer, the bearded Scots man was called away to make his statement, since
it was felt he needed to be isolated from others even though it would be daylight before they would get around to taking his
statement. As things stood he was one of the primary suspects, giving the burning death of his wife and best friend in Los
Angeles in ‘Fifty seven!
A car on fire? A boat? How much difference was there in that?
*
It was a dark and stormy on the night fourteen years ago when he met Loraine Devlon the dreamy-eyed, idealistic teenager;
out to change the world in apology for her family’s extreme wealth. The wind pushed the sea waves up the narrow channel
into ‘The Pond’, passing by the low cement barrier in front of the former rental unit with the same dark and pulsing
vibrancy of his thoughts, knowing how soon all brain activity would cease. He was sure he’d hear the roar of his Police
Special .38 going off that close to his ear and he knew he’d feel the pain that Mary MacKendrie felt when her loving
husband’s bullet mercifully ended the intolerable pain of the rabbis. There were times when he wondered why the people
who loved him hadn’t been as merciful when they saw how much pain he was in? It was only in
this moment he realized that he’d born the fear that his love for wild animals had drawn the sick dog near, near enough
to kill Mary and then take Egan MacKendrie’s life because he couldn’t live with the terrible knowledge of what
he’d done, however good its intentions.
It was almost a relief. An
acknowledgement that this was one less pain he would have to bear, but it wasn’t forgiveness enough to help him stop
contemplating suicide. As a cop he knew what would be found; the gristly sight of missing skull and dried
blood and brain matter, the cruel stench and yet he felt no responsibility for that, oddly. Though profoundly drunk, he was
strangely sober, as if he was watching another man’s life, some dark Russian novel of revenge and pain and he agreed
with the mystic and noble cession which had to come. If it didn’t, Life would continue, and he couldn’t bear more
of that!
A portion of the thrift and frugality inbred in him in the hobo camps after his foster parent’s death in the
isolated Saskatchewan cabin made him rebuke himself for the cost of the property and the expense of remolding it after so
many years of casual disinterest and hard use as a summer rental. But he and Nora Sue had been happy here
all three summers when Capitola meant getting out of LA as far as their budget and their youthful imaginations would allow.
He got up and walked to the open French doors to the patio. It was dark now and rainy, but when the daylight and warm returned,
the flies would come in. He didn’t want that final indignity!
The breeze stroked his face, its
salt and odors of things left too long in the sun a curious mixture of emotion and evocative memory; a portion of the boy
Allen struggling to survive the terrible weight of losses the man, Al Hoag, engendered. But then the inner
sight of Nora Sue’s plain but shining face came back to haunt him with the same accusation he’d heard Norris Cheel
whisper to every new wave of blue suit recruits to the Stanyon Street cop house: ‘ Where was the
gold of her wedding ring if she was wearing it? Even in that heat, it should only have melted around the charred bones of
his wife and best friend! ‘
He searched for the answer with the
sudden desperation of a man who wants to live, but he couldn’t it. Both bodies had been in the back seat of Buck Frazier’s
car, and they were seen by two reputable witnesses as ‘necking hotly’ just prior to the car being spotted on fire.
His teeth bared in a vicious grin at the sudden analogy, but there wasn’t room left for any additional pain!
Buck was their best friend as well as their Rookie Sergeant. They had all been so thrilled at his attention, him and
Zee and the Professor, even the young rookie Norris Cheel, assigned to their unit because his particular manners were ‘suspicious’
in their macho world of cops; but that when he was still a flesh and blood human not San Francisco’s self-defined “Super
Cop”. None of them had to stopped to question why he wasn’t hanging out with the veteran cops, at least, not in
time to save Nora Sue’s life!
He raised his fist in anger as he challenged his own grim accuser and saw only the shadowed image of his own reflection
in the freshly polished glass. A sea gull had spotted the next pain and it was so close to where he could see his chest and
rib cage that it almost became a symbol for his shriveled heart. He’d been unfair to Georgiana once she picked Zee to
marry. He realized that too late. He tried not to picture how Nora Sue must have felt, realizing he was hopelessly in love
with the copper skinned, veracious First Nation woman, but it haunted him now with the addition of a further guilt.
Nora Sue had given him her virginity, he had given her a wedding ring made from the melted gold of his birth mother’s
crucifix, and neither could be regained! He wept. For the first time in six months he gasped for breath between harsh, convulsing
sobs and he withered inside at this further evidence of weakness and lost masculinity. If it hadn’t
been for the woman’s scream at that moment he would simply have turned and launched himself toward the bed to sleep
it off. But whenever he looked back he credited Loraine with saving his life that dark and storm night by the sea.
He was just emerging from the bathroom, his shirt as wet as his hair from the icy sting of the cold water in the narrow
shower stall when he was her. Her eyes were glazed, her cheeks coated with black streaks of mascara and she had to hold unto
the freshly painted French door to stay upright. His first fear was that she’d vomit on the hard wood floor, then he
glimpsed the pain her drunkenness couldn’t disguise and he was moved by a compassion that war and the demands of survival
in a Bo camp in his extreme youth had pushed so far down he’d thought it gone forever. Then the intrusion of her anger
and youthful arrogance severed the potential link between them.
“
I told him I was going to kill myself because of what he did, and he said to use this to do it! “
She waved a heavy gun by its handle, motioning threateningly in his general vicinity, the weight of the oversized pistol
pulling it downward mercifully but he flew to her side to disarm her with such haste he frightened her more than the boy next
door that she’d wrongly thought Harold Devlon’s money would control.
Rational
thought forced the drunken Scot to clear his mind of everything but the pressing and immediate details. He slipped open the
cylinder and found it was indeed fully loaded. Pretending to be instructing her on how to point and fire it, he slipped the
bullets into his side pocket and yelled ‘bang’ loudly in her ear when she pulled the trigger. She jumped to one
side and urinated down her leg in shock and horror.
“ You
scared me! “ She demanded with a child’s need for apology and reassurance.
Within another twenty minutes he had her sitting in the kitchen chair Nora Sue had painted bright red two summers ago
and decorated with tiny Alpine flowers of yellow and white; not sober, but no longer ready to do herself personal harm any
longer. The thought of his own self-directed demise as far removed as the threat of dawn from their fevered conversation.
When she left, staggering with a charming imitation of a drunk person pretending to be sober, he put the thought out,
and the beautiful young rich girl out of his mind. The water in the shower was barely tepid but he washed in its irregular
flow until it ran icy cold. Then he dressed and followed his stomach toward the shadowed kitchenette with its expected gas
leak pungency, hearing shouts just outside the doors he’d deliberately closed and locked this time.
A youth in pale colored underwear and a wet t-shirt raced from the narrow alleyway between the two former rental units,
his face a whitened mask of horror as the girl chased after him unsteadily, still waving the gun he presumed to be loaded.
The youth’s eyes bored into his, starkly asking protection, but the heavily scarred Scotsman had none to give. With
deliberate insult he half turned and reached for the threaded cord that allowed the heavy drapes to float back into place
across the newly polished doors of wood and glass. ‘ A woman’s
intimate secret belonged only to her husband to uncover ‘, he thought angrily, in an old fashioned sense of anger
toward the callow pain.
Though his stomach resisted the solid food at first, he closed his eyes as he lay across the Murphy bed pulled
down in the living room and tried to pretend the damp odors of mold and paint were the same as he and Nora Sue shared when
they were still both young enough to dream, young enough to be alive. They hadn’t waited, but they had married!
There was broad, hot sunlight infusing the room despite the lined curtains at the far end of the room when he was awakened
by angry pounding on the narrow door facing the internal walkway of the summer houses. He grumbled to himself as he slid upright
from across the disheveled bed, and wiped the thin trickle of salvia from the side of his mouth. He wasn’t sure who
he was expecting, the girl’s guardians, or the boys, but it was Cory Shepherd, the local cop.
“ You look like hell, Al. “ Cory
said good naturedly, but he didn’t wait to be invited in. Whatever the apparent pleasantries he was here on official
business, and the soiled cop knew it.
“ Heat the coffee while I change. “
“ You should shower first. “
“ I did shower. I j’ust put on the same clothes. I’ve been having night
visitors, und I didn’t think they wanted to see how much they hae to be envious of by my sleeping in the nude.
“
The younger man grimaced, unsure how to answer. Since the heavily scared Scot immediately walked toward the back of
the central room, clearing now waiting for an answer anyway. Nervously, he dumped out the small portion of brown liquid in
the old fashioned coffee pot and laded in enough grounds for the kind of coffee they both liked.
“ No egg shells! “
He challenged as the Scot kept his back turned as he zipped up his trousers. After so many years in the Service together
the modesty was a little touching, and a trifle insulting at the same time.
“
I’d hae to eat the eggs. Just don’t swish it around before you pour, like you always do! I
assume you’re here a’ boot my night visitors? “
“ It sounds disgusting! I don’t even want to know, you pervert! I’m here
about Harold Devlon’s granddaughter. “
The Scot
used the words as an excuse to lift the unmade bed upright against the swinging door, pretending to be looking underneath
it for the missing heiress. It took more of an effort to push the heavy bed up into its daytime frame than he could ever remember.
Either it was getting rusted from being so near the sea year round, or the dread of old age was creeping up on him!
Cory stepped to one side as Al Hoag swung the heavy bed and door shut, locking it out of sight until tonight. Unless
he were to spending it in a country jail cell!
“ Which
one is that? “
“ I never
knew you to be a funny man, Al. Perhaps this isn’t the time to start! “
The Scot fought back a sense of being wounded over something he could have just as easily said to the younger man.
He was sober, but that intersecting period of emotionalism and easily wounded feelings betrayed how much of the alcohol was
still in his blood stream. He knew the younger man respected him and he felt like asked in feigned casualness, ‘Oh,
by the way. I almost committed suicide last night. Now how much do ye look up to mae? ‘
He felt like asking, needing to punish himself without being able to seized on any particular reason for an explanation.
“ She was supposed to have come home with Jeffrey but he says she got angry and flounced
off as soon as they arrived. Did she come over here? “
“
For a few minutes. But the last time I saw her she was walking back to his house. . “
Telling the truth was easier than a lie, he just left out the parts he didn’t want to say.
Then talked about sports and a possible job opening in September after that, downing all but a thick layer of grounds
and chocolate dark liquid that stained a fresh sheen of brown over the rust and food marks left in the corner of the slow
moving drain.
Just before Cory left, Al asked him about coming over this afternoon to borrow a crescent wrench. If he was going to
live, and live here, he might as well make himself more comfortable while living here, at least until he could decide what
to do with it. The City was home now, LA was just a freeway on-ramp as far as he was concerned, but frankly, he’d never
given a thought to how he’d have to make a living now that he’d quit the SFPD so precipitously. It was come up
here, clean the house, and end it. No problem. Now what he was he going to do with the rest of the afternoon, much less the
rest of his life?
For lack of anything else to do, he walked out to the public access patio at the front of his unit. It was early enough
in the season that most of the sand dumped there by the municipal fathers was still in place. Held down by the forms of sleeping
ducks and ever watched Herring Gulls. Four children from the motel played on the other side of the estuary while a grim faced
matron watched him with such foul suspicion, he turned and walked down the low staircase to the grainy, yellowed sand. A chill
wind blew up from the pilings under the empty restaurant bringing an odor of mud, barnacles and stale urine. A small both
familiar and comforting while vaguely repugnant because it reminded him of the people who would soon crowd these heated sidewalks
as an overflow from the main beach in Santa Cruz.
He walked a little further out, angling
to keep his feet from pushing the wary ducks into movement on the chilled, firm sand. He kept drifting down the edge of the
narrow strip of beach, feeling as if he were being eyed suspiciously by the empty business and rental apartments, even when
he was sober enough to understand they merely reflected back his somber internal mood. He stopped at the hard edge of the
rock cliffs were the exposed face of the mountain shone, lighted and red in the newly risen sun, not being quite as hot or
bright as his closed eyes had first perceived.
The smell of Eucalyptus was overpowering
from the century old trees leaning over the abysses where once several more feet of earth and rock had stood. Houses built
when women still wore bustles to make their rear end prominent and they scolded and bossed the young servant girls they brought
with them from their expensive mansions up in San Francisco. The railroad had been all then, now it was a sleepy blip at the
water’s edge where people pushed off the main beach in Santa Cruz could still find surf and innocent fun at the bowling
alley and specialty side shops with their beads and their sea shell souvenirs for the out-of-state tourists. .
The drone of the machine lodged within the discrete municipal sewage plant drew him because it provided a mask of ‘white
noise’ to still the voices clamoring inside his head, He knew what his life had been as a rookie cop in L.A., as a plain
clothes cop on Stanton Street, a quiet residential house where the veterans hung out till retirement policing the Golden Gate
Park, and what it had felt like to endure Chief of Detective’s Ernie Bohannon’s shock and Herb and Betty’s
ire at his decision to simply quit without talking it over with any of them. They were the closest thing to family in his
life, even though he wasn’t seeing Ernie’s sister Ursula any longer. The only person he’d even said ‘good
bye’ to was James Patrick MacKendrie, the other foster boy Egan and Mary raised. He had sensed something was wrong,
but he’d lived with Al’s moodiness so many years and he was the only other person to understand how guilty the
boy Allen felt for the shocking death of their parents, so he’d borne with the moods and the angers with a stoic love
that refused to give up hope that ‘some day’ he’d have a ’break through’ and ‘allow himself
to be happy’.
He had to admit he’d never given the possibility any time, until last night. He didn’t even realize, until
he saw the girl, her hair plastered to her face by the rain and the look buried deep beneath the smeared make-up, that we
chose our emotions. He’d always thought of them as a weight we were duty bound to simply bear to the best of our ability.
His youth in the Hobo camps of northern America and southern Canada had impressed that on him until he’d drifted to
the Prescott farm, meaning to stay only long enough to earn enough cash to see him through the winter. Nora Sue’s father
had seen he was strong and committed to a work ethic despite his small size and extreme youth, and four years later he’d
allowed them to marry. Never guessing that Allen MacKendrie Hoag had ‘dreams’ and that he would steal away his
only daughter from the farm, and ultimately kill her in the back seat of his Rookie Sergeant’s car because he became
so obsessed with that dream!
For just a moment Al struggled with his own sense of guilt and doubt, as if a physical opponent had leaped on his back
from the shadows of the gnarled tree growing at the side of the sedate brick building, stabbing him repeatedly with an icy
knife of incrimination and futility. He ducked his right shoulder in a move he’d learned in the Bo camps where the knives
were real and as quick as an implied insult to a soul weary man with nothing left to lose but the remainder of his swollen
pride. Then he walked away from the edge of exposed rock and stone filled casement that marked the end of the foundation for
the quietly efficient and oversized outhouse feeling a weight fall off as he chose not to allow the familiar thief.
A warmth swept through him that he struggled to understand. It couldn’t be the Deity he’d cursed and ignored
for so many decades since Mary’s death, and yet it was a visceral reminder that he was something more than mere flesh
and blood, more than the wastes that were being mixed with chlorine and being pumped out into the depths just beyond the Continental
shelf just under his feet. But he rejected both consciously, even while his inner being renewed its belief on the deepest
level beyond the reach of mere thought. Something, Someone had reached out to him last night, something that had a reason
for his continued existence, even though he didn’t know what it was, a part of him that was nurtured so tenderly at
Mary MacKendrie’s began to push up from the barren soil in his soul. And he began to look for it, like the scent of
smoke on a still Saskatchewan winter’s day when he and James Patrick had lost their way in the excite-ment of the hunt
and they needed to find their way home to the ex-Mounty and his white haired wife.
Usually
the only times he glimpsed this tender side of himself was when he was caught up in one of his paintings, the sum of many
winter and spring days in the wilds where he’d hide in the midst of the wild animal’s lives until the craving
for sugar and grease drove him home to the sound of Mary’s sweet, high voice. He signed them Egan’s son, because
that’s how he felt of himself in his deepest parts. He knew his teen aged mother had been pregnant ‘by the Hoag
boy’ and cast out of the house by her rigid and angry father, giving birth in the sheltered cabin with the old couple
and promising to return. But she never did, and something in him had never allowed him to look for ‘the Hoag boy’
who’s spawned him in a messy promise of broken affection. Yet as he drew in a ragged breath of machine oil, dust and
Eucalyptus oil, he sensed he’d been willing to give that long denied part of him a fresh start, in his own crude and
effective manner of murdering the cynical cop who’d shielded him so well and so long, even against Nora Sue’s
attempts to love him back to the farm boy she’d married at such cost.
“
I needs tae give ye permission to go, Lassie. “ He whispered,
with tears in his eyes as he leaned against the waist high metal rail outside the pump house. He didn’t want too, but
she had already been taken from him in Los Angeles nearly a decade ago; all he was doing was acknowledging her loss. Like
it or not, it was time to ‘go on’, just like Georgiana had begged him to do for the first two years after the
funeral. He straightened rigidly, both at the shocking insight that he’d driven Georgiana to Zee Rowan’s
arms by his refusal to let go of the anger and the past as by the sound of a childlike sob from the hollow inner core of the
ancient tree wedged against the side of the building.
When he turned and saw it was the
missing girl from last night, rare compassion swept over him, and as he merely watched her try to vainly thrust more of herself
into the burnt out core to avoid detection, he saw her as though he were Mary MacKendrie, his only example of what such emotion
and concern for others felt, and he walked toward her, holding out his hand in a promise of shelter and friendship as real
as the flesh and bone that offered it. Her eyes were wide and staring, from exhaustion as much as fear, but she took the extended
hand in her own, without speaking, and a bond formed between them despite the disfiguring scars and the proof of his rage,
It was a moment that profoundly altered the course of both their lives.
Loraine Devlon began to tremble violently as she clung to him. Instinctively Al Hoag took off his jacket and put it
around the bared shoulders of her ruined gown. She clutched at it instinctively, pulling it across her slender bosom, Her
face and smile radiant with gratitude. It was the way he would forever remember her, like the portrait of Dorian Grey,
no matter how the years changed her. He took her around the corner to a coffee shop for locals where no one would look at
her twice, or be obvious in their interpretation of her sodden Prom dress. As they ate it shocked him to find so naïve
and sheltered an eighteen year old could still exist in the rarified stratosphere of her father and grand-father’s social
tier. Though she could no longer claim to it in the flesh, she was still as naïve and virginal as any ten year running
through the rows of corn stalks of her father’s farm, his barometer of youth and innocence.
At the time he naively thought the arrival of Samuel ‘The Snake” Lovich was a providential co-incidence
allowing him to be shed of the tear stained and over-talkative teen, but as she introduced him as “Mr. Egansson”,
a common mistake from the way in which he signed his paintings in the Vivian Lang Gallery so the upper crust people who purchased
‘the new artists’ sight unseen because Vivian recommended them as ‘hot new comers’ wouldn’t
suspect they were busy buying massive, glacial landscapes from a rumpled cop living in the precinct house more than his shabby
little apartment on Army Street, the suave man’s eyes narrowed, as if he suspected a trick.
She’d been so busy gushing over the painting he’d consigned to a local shot, where a doomed hawk with a
broken wing was defending itself against the hunter’s dogs, totally unaware of the danger from the man with a rifle
approaching from the deepest shadows at the back of the painting that he’d been caught up in the memory of the real
event, that his usual ‘Perp Radar’ hadn’t been able to get through to him in time. She was genuinely sad
because her grandfather, who raised her in her father William’s absence to the East, saw the lonely intent of the painting
as she showed it to him in the window and he’d refused to pay the $1500 price tag attached to the back of the small
but deeply detailed original. Later that day, he’d been called by the excited owner of the shop to pick up his seventy
percent of the asking price.
As she stood to leave with the smiling older man the
lonely Scot had felt the prick of the golden chain linking them together, flesh to flesh and heart to heart, but he dismissed
it, as he did all attempts at human contact that threatened his self-protective isolation. Oddly, it was looking at her empty
plate as it rested on the sunlight, red checkered table cloth before the harried waitress had time to clean up half of the
table that helped him back across a threshold he was only vaguely aware he’d set as the price of continued existence.
But he crossed it, feeling another gentle link waft into place as he noted the empty space on the gallery wall where his Egansson
had rested in clear view of the passing tourists. A third took its place on the chain of events linking
them, ever so gently, when he found himself agreeing to drive all the way back to the City to pick up two canvases that Vivian
Lang had rejected as ‘too bland and too commercial’ because they were merely renderings from memory of the view
from Egan and Mary MacKendrie’s cabin overlooking Foster Lake.
James Patrick
had tears in his eyes the Christmas he accepted the only painting Al ever did of the cabin itself, and the elderly pair who’d
found it in their hearts to take in two cast off boys and give them a loving home and old fashioned values of right or wrong.
Who would have thought they would leave that tiny unmarked lake and huge forest at the edge of the savanna and make their
way in a world more vicious than any wolf and elk shared? But they had, and once they found each other after so many years
apart, thinking one another dead, the disparate brothers clung to one another in wordless connection.
There was another note threatening a petition against the expected condemnation of the boarding houses and apartments
in the way of the proposed Army Street on-ramp slipped under his apartment door, and his answering machine registered twelve
hang-ups, Ursula’s trademark sign of ire, even though she and Norris Cheel had been ‘an item’ for almost
eighteen months. He crumbled the petition request angrily, the city would have its way no matter how many signatures they
gathered, he thought savagely, then he simply unplugged his answering machine and plugged it back in, relieved to see the
light no longer blinked. A fresh canvas for the magnificent Nordic goddess to scratch her scarlet painted nails in possessive
ire. A part of him dreaded the day when he no longer mattered enough to draw even this negative attention. He suspected Cheel
was secretly ‘gay’, he mistrusted anyone as astringently clean and anal as the dark haired cop, but he had to
admit they made a good looking couple. She would never put up with any ‘funny stuff’, so if he visited discrete
homosexual bathhouses, he was good at keeping his secrets.
On impulse he accepted James Patrick’s
offer of a free Scotch as he sat at the furthest end of the highly polished mahogany bar. Local legend said the wood was salvaged
from the discarded crates on the docks and made wedged into the space between two buildings that crumbled in the Ought Six
quake while it remained standing. To honor it they simply rebuilt the new buildings around it, and few men but the regulars
entered the dingy, smokeless interior. Cursing was a natural part of the stevedore’s life and though there was nothing
‘prissy’ about the former boxing champion who ran the bar, James Patrick didn’t allow anything to be said
or done that would have offended Egan or Mary, and he had enough regulars to pay for the lights and the supplies they consumed.
It gave him someplace to be beside an Old Folk’s Home, he’d say if anyone thought they knew him well enough to
ask. The ones who really knew him didn’t have to bother to question the obvious.
Al
soaked in the quiet masculine feel of the narrow room as much as his older brother’s obvious affection. A tiny quilt
stabbed at him between the shoulder blades as he considered that if he had gone through with his original plans one of their
friends would be sitting here telling him that his younger brother’s body had just been discovered with the top of his
head blown off by a ‘self-inflicted gun shot would’. For the first time the heavily scarred Scot found a reason
to be glad to be alive. It reached deep inside him and straightened his shoulders without him even noticing.
James Patrick noticed, and his smile deepened as the weight lifted from his heart. He had no idea what lightened the
load from the younger man’s shoulders, but he breathed a silent prayer of gratitude to heaven for both of them, knowing
that Al wouldn’t have thought to do it. He was used to being his brother’s voice in those higher realms where
he was sure Egan and Mary watched in the calm content of knowing love would win out.
“ So ye finally sold one? “ He
teased at the earnest smile when Al first walked in. They’d agreed to ‘do lunch’ as soon as his shift ended,
then they were going to drive out to the warehouse where the other canvases were stored in bins under carefully controlled
temperatures. Al would have left them strewn around his studio, getting dust and paint spatters on them, but James Patrick
felt they were a national treasure because they reflected a life that no longer existed, even though the cabin was still standing
last summer when he flew his plane up there. Though he’d only been in his late teens, he’d helped to bury his
parents and scrub down the barn wall when he and the rescue team arrived too late with the rabbis serum. He’d remained,
thinking the twelve year old might have just fled into the woods as he did when they were both alive, but after three weeks
he’d given up and closed up the cabin with hammer and nails, leaving a note on the side of the cabin that was still
there a year later although mice and birds had found a way into the empty shelter. He didn’t think Al Hoag had ever
gone back up there, but there wasn’t any way he could ask, even if the younger man had been able to answer. The paintings
were all of a primitive innocence, not unlike a boy would see the world he loved. That was answer enough to fit his needs.
They were just walking out when a startlingly beautiful woman called out Al’s name, as if afraid she’d
miss them in this ‘chance’ encounter. The man at her side scowled defensively, though he pretended to still be
his ex-partner’s friend, and James Patrick found his head swimming at the musky but totally feminine perfume the First
Nation woman exuded as she threw her arms around the scarred man’s neck happily. Zee Rowan and their friends Herb and
Betty Bauer caught up with them momentarily, but to his shock, Al chose to keep to their former plans, merely folding in the
two couples with their plans to eat at Luigiui’s, around the corner.
“
Are ye simply tae full tae son, Lad? “ He enquired casually, as
if the right to ownership in the car they were riding in gave him the edge.
“
Too full o’ something, I guess. “ Al answered apologetically, drawing
in his elbow from the edge of the opened passenger window and trying to straighten his posture instinctively. It was a mannerism
he usually showed only to Egan, so the older man thought he must have been more deeply in the past then their casual conversation
with the two cop couples had suggested. Of course no one spoke of Nora Sue, although he missed her dearly, nor of anything
but the latest gossip at the residential cop house. Such talk bored him to tears, but for the sake of his younger brother
he smiled and tried to pretend he was interested.
“ Father
of Wisdom “ had been the haunting title Al printed on the back of an early portrait
he’d done soon after they were reunited because of a live shaving cream commercial shot at one of the larger event halls
in LA. Although he felt all of his forty-six years as he sat beside the bearded cop on a San Francisco freeway, he didn’t
feel wise, only bloated!
He stopped in the office to use their
john, so Al already had four canvases selected and he was staring at them intently, weighing them more harshly than any art
critic would have dared.
“ Help me frame this one! “ He said curtly,
having made up his mind.
James Patrick smiled despite the curt, abusive tone. It flattered him that Al trusted his judgment more than he did
his own, knowing that he usually allowed Vivian Lang to select the frames she felt most appropriate. That night he opened
the last two beers from the twelve pack Al brought over on his last visit. It felt odd to give himself permission to be tipsy,
to allow control to slip away from him, but it fit the strangely evocative mood engendered when they turned off the television
set after the heavy-middleweight fight to talk about the man and woman who’d raised them so tenderly to be made of ‘sterner
stuff’. He didn’t even waken at dawn as his brother leaned over and kissed his cheek goodbye, slipping a hundred
dollar bill into one of the more heavily read books on the living room shelf so James Patrick would find it and assume it
was just one of his own that he’d forgotten placing there. He hated leaving his money in banks after living through
the Bank crashes of his youth.
Al took a cab to his own apartment, found another request under his front door, this one in the actual petition form,
and smiling sadly he signed it and hung it up on the loose nail by the mail boxes on his way out. It wouldn’t do any
good to sign it, but it couldn’t hurt to try and help someone else’s dream come true, however futile the struggle
seemed to him. As he drove with his window down, and the music on loud, he found himself enjoying the tang from the salt flats
where salt was being dried for commercial use. It was strong and pungent yet hauntingly familiar. Slipping along the fringes
of several commercial centers of small urban areas, he found himself struggling with the vast emptiness of the artichoke farms
and the emptiness of the sheer drop off into a sullenly still Pacific to his right.
*
Reality intruded with
the grim look on both Inquisitor’s faces, the sheen of disgust, already having convicted him and looking toward his
shorthand recorded statement for the evidence they need to build up their convictions. He knew it, but what else could he
do? He faced that with every new graduating class that had Norris Cheel for its Watch Sergeant. It astounded him that he could
still give so much emotion to it after seventeen years!
It was assumed that the burned bodies
discovered by the drivers were those of the three crew members, two males and one juvenile female, and it was pretended that
they believed this was a hate crime against the two men who’d only recently come ‘out of the closet’ about
a relationship nearly everyone around them assumed anyway.
He was allowed to leave
and got a ride with the mouthy blonde with the hard set lips who hated the people in authority who’d confiscated all
the really great footage, so all they had to show on the news that differed in any way was that they were closer to the scene
when the initial blast took place.
“
How much of this is on the record? “ He asked wearily.
“ Sleep with me and find out. “
She replied suggestively as she turned out the headlights. When he leaned forward she looked startled and started to
purse her lips to receive the roughness of his lips on her but instead he bent forward, kissed her nose and pulled the knob
back out to light up the area indecently with the halogen exposure against the pale yellow garage door.
“ I’m afraid sleep is all you’d get. “
“ Al, wait! I really am so tired I’ll probably ram someone in the morning commute just
from road rage. If I promise to keep my tape recorder turned off and my pants on, will you let me stay and sleep? There’s
so many question I want to ask you! And you’re a dam hard man to get a hold of! I could get to the President, or my
ex-husband even, easier than I can get a hold of you! You’re answering machine and I are on a first name basis, for
gawdsakes! “
Al Hoag laughed and relented. He liked her spunk. But he needed her fearlessness in being near him. Too many had died
because he loved them. Or killed because of it, if he included the Lass. And someone with good common sense, a cop’s
instincts and a lack of coyness based on being the baby sister of five older brothers seemed so welcomed he knew he should
have questioned the ‘rightness’ of it, but just as this moment he and Heaven weren’t on speaking turns,
and didn’t care what Hell thought!
“ Come on in. “
The living
room was so neat, it made her nervous about his living alone, but the refrigerator had hand prints on the outside and little
on the inside. His bedroom had the slightly closed in odor of unwashed socks and his bathroom made her wince. All in all she
felt right at home!
Though she yawned herself awake listening to the early News edition of the footage she and Darrel had gotten back as
live feed but knowing ‘the good stuff’ they’d agreed to hold back for a documentary
made her so angry and resentful that she was kept awake despite the deepest need for sleep!
When he pushed a plate of steaming eggs and silver dollar pancakes in front of her, she raised an eyebrow in question.
“ What I hae is the freezer. T.V. dinners and the like. Betty freezes me up a few breakfasts
that I can pop in the microwave for times like these. “
Betty
Bauer, Herb’s wife, the one with the killer legs and the million dollar smile! He and Herb Baer had clung to each other
after they got discharged from the Army and then, with the black beauty’s help, he’d gotten up the nerve to ask
his childhood sweetheart to come south to LA and marry him. They might all have regretted her decision to leave her father
and brothers ‘alone’ in the house as her father had thundered at her, convinced she would burn in hell as a whore
because he didn’t believe the hobo boy he’d run off would really marry her just because he sent the bus fare from
Iowa to Sin City, California. Odd that she had died in a fiery hell, but looking at the sad faced man from under her lashes
she couldn’t help but envy the dead girl for having been loved the way he seemed capable of loving, even after all the
hell he’d gone through since.
‘ Allen MacKendrie Hoag. The PR man’s
‘dream’. ‘ His ex-partner Ezekiel
“Zee” Rowan had called him during one of their interviews once she learned the bearded and suspicion laden cop
had been stuck with the investigation no one else wanted. But Zee Rowan had screwed around on his patient wife once too often
and she’d dumped him, finding a comfort in this quiet, deeply committed man that she understood now, as she took his
plate and rinsed both of them off before she put it in the half-filled dishwasher next to the sink. She didn’t know
how much noise it would make, even though it looked new, like the bulky Microwave Oven taking up most of the counter in the
1940’s bungalow.
When she came out to ask where she could sleep, she found his clothes piled carelessly on the low slung ‘modern’
coffee table and his hair sticking out wildly from the Navaho blankets he’d pulled over his nakedness.
“ Let’s hope the sheets are clean! “ She
whispered, even though there wasn’t anything or anyone else in the tiny house.
Fire
engine sirens set her teeth of edge as she stepped out of the shower and reached inside the narrow closet for a neatly folded
towel reserved for guests. She figured she qualified for that. The others looked clean, but who knew? Pulling on one of the
soft but pressed shirts from his closet, after discovering that his shoes were on shoe trees and his shirts were segregated
by color and season, again making her a little leery of him, she paused in the doorway, knowing the backlight
would make her legs look good with out betraying the fact that she hadn’t shaved them in the last three weeks.
The snoring from the couch was loud and raucous, and one badly burned and scarred forward extended beyond the arm of
the couch, arising a pity in her that she lavished on few people. Her parrot Sam or the three goldfish she’d never gotten
to naming, maybe, but never to human beings. They didn’t deserve it. For some reason she couldn’t identify she
didn’t class him as ‘human’. He was something apart, like her. A senescent being, but one she felt instinctively
she could trust, Herself-she didn’t! So she turned around and shut the bungalow’s single bedroom door before her
‘maternal’ instincts surfaced and she felt the need to walk around the couch and make sure the blankets hadn’t
fallen off!
*
When she woke to the sound of the shower running so near to her ear, she startled violently and reached for her glasses,
wondering why her bedside clock wasn’t in the place where she left it? When she realized it was a different style and
in a different place she had a moment’s panic. Had she slept with the man in whose bed she’d obviously awakened?
Why couldn’t she remember anything? She wasn’t hung over, so she hadn’t fallen off the
wagon! She had an inane wish to call her Sponsor and commiserate with him about not having fallen back on her previous
sins, but he was probably at work by now, and she wasn’t sure that was in the Twelve Step Handbook!
When the water stopped, with an ominous threat and rattle from the ancient pipes she knew she had to gather her wits!
Sitting upright in bed with the sheet as protection, she waited for whoever it was to walk out the door. But he’d taken
the time to shave, she could hear the water in the sink running and she recognized the interrupted pattern of water splashing,
so she had time to leap to her feet ands throw on her sports bar and jeans first, and then her shirt. It smelled of smoke
and she was beginning to wake sufficiently to remember some of the details. With only four hours sleep a part of her brain
refused to even attempt to function!
She poured a coffee of hot coffee, winced when she opened the refrigerator door and saw she’d
have to drink it black, but then a delight taste curled itself against her tongue and when the cop walked out instead of her
cameraman Derrick, she laughed out loud in relief and started likely the man. Something she hadn’t risked doing for
a very
long time!
After a long and silent ride down the Coast road toward Santa Cruz, they ate at a weathered redwood picnic table just
outside the century old cemetery where the birds sang and the grass bloomed, despite the heat of summer, just like he promised.
“ This would be a great place for a murder. remote, out of the way... “
She mused, burning her tongue on the oversized Styrofoam container of milk and coffee he’d brought to her.
“ Aye. “ He agreed socially.
“ Und so convenient for burying the body, Who would think tae look in a cemetery and be concerned
about seeing a fresh grave? “
“
You’re being much too agreeable! “ She snarled, but as his smile
faded, she was sorry she’d done it.
Touching the back of his hand lightly, to catch his attention, she fought for a way to phrase the question she had
in mind.
“ You used to live here, didn’t you? “
“ Aye, near here. A little further down the road. We used tae come up here on our vacations
to watch the gray whales migrate. Then when she died, I bought the little apartment, but life as a country cop just didn’t
suit me. I wanted ‘hard crime’, tough guys to beat up, so I went tae San Francisco, got the crap beat-out of me
by a ‘fey’ longshoreman, I foolishly called a ‘queer’ instead of ‘a homosexual’!
When I got out of the hospital, my partner’s ex-wife let me sleep on her living room couch and we talked. She knew a
side o’ Nora Sue I never guessed und I got over the fantasy that I hae loved her half as well as I could imagine her
tae be, now that she was dead. But it also allowed me to stop being so angry a’ maeself. Then SHE came and said she
was going to hae my baby, and Georgiana took a step back, thinking I could be happy with the person we all wrongly assumed
Loraine to be. Then she married Samuel Lovich, and became as evil
as he. “
“ Georgie wouldn’t take you back? “
“ I wouldn’t let her. “ He answered
at length, draining the remainder of his coffee in a single gulp. “ Then Wee Mattie was born und
I slowly stopped being damaged goods. I needed tae get mae own life straightened out if I was to be a gud role model for the
wee lad...he’s helped mae to be better than I wud ever hae been, left tae own devices. Und what about ye?
“
“ Nothing so blinding or so heroic. I was a late in life baby to a couple who only had an
interest in one another. I went to school to find finds and affirmation, I went to Journalism classes because I had a crush
on an English Lit professor, who was married and tenured! He assured me I’d find better luck in the next class, and
I figured he felt the same way about the new class of Freshmen, so I made a vow to be my own voice of approval and not to
be that dumb again. Does that make me ‘damaged goods’? “
She challenged.
“ No. But doing what ye j’ust did tears the cloth in yer own heart, Lass. It is’na
necessary around me. I like ye inspite o’ yerself! “
She laughed, so simply and light that a near by Mocking Bird mimicked it perfectly at the first attempt and she leaned
her lips against his in a tender and non-possessive manner, reward by his brief but welcoming return on her own.
“ Cory is waiting for us. Did ye get enough tae eat? “
She started to make a flippant remark to push him away, then stopped, dusting herself off and accepting his help.
“ Yes, thank you. “ She answered simply, and she
was shocked by the way in which his fingers closed around hers as they neared a small, flat marker buried almost flush with
the ground.
She wondered who it was, for it was very old and well worn, but the reverence of the moment, when she herself possess
none, stopped her.
“ The man was killed in the last Indian war in these hills. He stumbled to the door of a trapper’s
cabin, in a Calvary uniform, but died before he could give his name. They’re weren’t any papers on him, the Indians
had taken that with most of his scalp. I feel like him sometimes. I on’na hope when it comes my time, someone at least
cares enough tae give me a Christian burial, whether they can put my name on the headstone o’ nay. “
“ Like those poor bodies that were raised at the Marina Thursday? “
She could have bitten off the end of her tongue at the sudden look of pain on his face.
“ You drive. It’s your car. Once we get tae town I’ll take a Greyhound back over
the hill. “ He said coldly, their intimacy and closeness shredded. A Monarch butterfly
fluttered near her hand as she stood on the driver’s side of the little grey Volvo. She wanted
to smash out her hand and crush it against the heated top of the car, or tear its wings off in her fury at what she’d
just destroyed, but the slam of the passenger’s side door impelled her to get into the heated interior and stare out
over the steering wheel at the road which dipped and wound itself into the back door of Santa Cruz.
Once they arrived in Capitola and were ushered into the Chief of Police’s office at the bottom of the enormous
train trestle, all went well until Cory Shepherd learned that she wasn’t the Scot’s ‘new dig’ but
a television reporter, then he lost his leer, got coldly formal toward both of them, suspecting she was wearing a hidden microphone
and tape recorder.
“ That was fun! “ She complained bitterly as they
stood in the parking lot outside the one story City Hall building. “ Where do we go from here?
“
“ The rest o’ the way in’ tae Santa Cruz. Ye can drop mae off
a’ the new Muni complex. “
He seemed determined to stay as distant
from her as the proximity of the front seat of the car would allow.
Because of the new construction which
made Maid Street impassible to motor traffic, she couldn’t point to one of the class shops along the way and blithely
suggest they go in for a late lunch. She had to content herself with a full sized beef wrap at the Taco stand adjacent to
the new Metro site. She did her best to reengage him in active conversation, using her skills learned in difficult interviews
with uncommunicative targets for the news probes that made her and Derrick such a good team, but he eluded her as surely as
if his physical presence were as far away as his thoughts. Using her napkin to hold the remainder of her tortilla wrapped
meal, she seriously considered pounding on his chest to demand his attention and restart his heart! Since he seemed dead even
though he was still standing!
“ Excuse me. “ He said so politely that she actually
looked away and enjoyed the view of two girls in long skirts with flowers in their head, asking for ‘donations’
from the tourists passing-by, framing the shot and the verbal lead she’d use to open up the shot, and didn’t even
suspect his absence until a cab drove up. Two ‘teeny-boppers’ in expensive miniskirts obvious paid for by their
parent’s credit cards leaped inside, giggling furtively. They must have stolen a candy bar from one of the concessions
inside the glassed-in building! She raced to the cookie and milk window where she’d
wrongly assumed he’d gone to pick them up a snack, because she’d just remarked how good the freshly baked ‘Famous
Amos’ cookies smelled once the diesel from the blue and white buses were dissipated by the stiff ocean
breeze over the canal. But the Scots man was nowhere in sight! She hung around the door to the men’s room till a uniformed
security guard started looking hard in her direction, then she fled back to the parking lot where she’d locked the Volvo.
As she leaned against the open door behind the driver’s seat, exchanging her Tennies for hard soled shoes,
the walky-talky hidden under the jumble of old newspapers squawked back into life, manned by a desperate Derrick Warhol who’d
about given up on ever reaching her in time!
“
They’re back at SFX! The police made them turn around and come back for questioning. How soon can you get there?
“
“ Start filming without me, pretend that you’re looking at me when the other reporters
get there, and I’ll just jump into the place you have saved. Have you got any color filmed? “
“ I will when I get there in about twenty minutes. “ He promised,
sounding bitterly disappointed.
“ I’ll be there twenty minutes after that, unless I have to park! “
“ I’ll have Reggie in front of American Airlines. Throw him the car keys and
hustle your ass over here! “
“ I have
a full tank of gas! “ Carole Lindsey wailed. She wouldn’t by the time
she went to pick the car up if she gave that long haired freak her car keys.
“
You won’t by the time you get here. “ Derrick answered in ultimate
simplicity.
As she drove back along the flat coastline bordering cliffs that ran from the edge of the sea, upwards to many hundreds
of feet along cliff walls where mountain faces had been blasted off to make one continuous road from the City to metropolitan
and farm communities along the way, she had the strangest feeling she was being watched. Motels and gas stations zoomed past
her as if she were the one standing still, acres of Brussels sprouts, miles of empty land overgrown with grass, clusters of
expensive ‘ranch-style houses’ and when she was too weary to hold her shoulder blades upright any longer she tolled
along the flat dunes just outside the City and the squat, ugly windmill that marked her final destination. Because she didn’t
have enough money in her wallet, she’d have to cross city traffic to use her company credit card, but only planned to
fill the nearly empty gas tank to one quarter, for fear Reggie would slid the car to the curb wherever it ran out of gas and
just leave it. Then she’d have only to use ‘her’ shortcut out to the International airport, and the Press
Card stuck in rear windshield so no hot-and-eager rookie would try to pull her over and give her a ticket for speeding, then
she’d be there! In time for one of the biggest scoops in the recent decade! Why else would the FBI force the two younger
Devlon’s to cut their travel plans short and return to the US?
As she turned off a movement from behind one of the darkly tinted windows of a sleek black limousine caught her attention.
There wasn’t any reason but a reporter’s gut instinct to think it was the passenger nearest the window pointing
her out, but it was as real as a sock in the gut!
She knew he was in that long back
‘jobbie’ and it gnawed on her. Because she’d dared to trust another human being, and look what it got her?
A hustle instead of the Pulitzer Prize she craved!
End Chapter 2
