“Adam and Boy, stand by to pick up,” Sloate says into his radio.
The girl has almost reached the corner now.
Sloate looks over his shoulder to see one of the unmarked cars approaching, either Adam or Boy, he can’t tell which just yet. The other car is just behind it. In less than a minute, the black girl will enter the Impala, and the following detectives will split up into the two cars, one maroon, one green, hoping she’ll lead them straight to where the kids are stashed.
She is turning the corner now.
A flash of lightning illuminates the western sky.
Big one coming in off the Gulf.
In that instant, an orange-colored garbage truck makes a left turn onto Graham, braking when the driver spots the Impala. Sloate can no longer see the girl as she gets into the car. A maroon Buick pulls up to the curb alongside him. Through the windshield, Sloate recognizes Danny Ryan at the wheel. Adam car then. He pops open the front door, climbs in.
“Don’t lose her,” he warns. “She’s just ahead of that garbage truck.”
Behind him, Di Luca and Cooper climb into Boy car, the green Olds. The Cape October PD favors GM products.
The blue Impala is moving away from the curb.
As Ryan makes his right turn from Citrus onto Graham, Sloate catches a quick glimpse of the slender woman driving the car, long blond hair trailing almost to her shoulders.
The garbage truck is in motion again.
It blocks the street completely, parked cars on either side of it.
Ryan leans on the horn.
But by the time they pull around the truck, the street ahead is empty.
The blue Impala has vanished from sight.
And so have the black girl and the blonde who picked her up.
Reginald Webster is sitting on the front-stoop steps when Alice gets back to the house at eleven-thirty. He is wearing white slacks and white leather loafers without socks. A blue blazer with brass buttons is open over a white linen shirt. The house behind him is still and dark. Rafe’s rig is nowhere in sight. Webb’s own rented Mercury convertible is parked out front, the top down. The hasty rain has come and gone. The late morning is still. She pulls the Mercedes truck into the driveway, and gets out. Webb rises the moment he sees her.
“Thought I’d missed you,” he says.
She merely nods.
She does not need Reginald Webster here this morning. Or any morning, for that matter. An hour and a half ago, she turned over a bag full of hundred-dollar bills to the woman who has her children. The cops seem to have deserted her after promising they’d do all they could to get her kids back, and now the money is gone, and her kids are still gone, and apparently those jackasses from the FBI are gone, too, and so is Rafe. So Alice is all alone here, except for Mr. Reginald Webster, standing here on her doorstep and looking as if he’s dressed for a regatta at the local yacht club.
“Want to have lunch with me?” he asks.
“How’d you find me here?” she asks.
“Looked up your name in the phone book. You’re listed, you know.”
“I don’t usually…”
“I’m sorry…”
“…mix business with…”
“I just thought.”
“…pleasure.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. Really. I just thought… your accident and all… your foot… you might be feeling down… you might want to go out for a quiet lunch in…”
“No.”
“…a good restaurant…”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
“I have other things to do today.”
“Sure. Just thought I’d…”
“And in any event…”
“…drive by, see if you were free or not.”
“…I don’t date.”
He looks at her.
“Not since my husband died. I haven’t dated anyone. I doubt if I’ll ever date anyone ever again, as long as I live.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“Although this wouldn’t be a date, you see.”
“Then what would it be?”
“Not in that sense.”
“In what sense would it be what?”
“I guess in a sense it would just be two lonely people talking and perhaps enjoying each other’s company. Is what I thought it might be.”
“I’m not lonely,” she says.
“In that case, I was mistaken, and I sincerely apologize,” he says. “Good day, Alice, I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”
He turns, and is starting toward where he parked the Mercury at the curb when she says, “Wait.”
The street is still and silent.
Webb stops, turns to face her again.
“I’ll find some other houses for you to look at,” she says.
“Please do.”
“When… this is resolved.”
He looks into her face.
“When what’s resolved, Alice?”
“This… this thing I’m going through.”
“What is it?” he asks.
She almost tells him.
But her children are still in danger out there.
“Nothing,” she says.
He nods.
“Okay,” he says. “Call me when you have some houses to show.”
“I will,” she promises.
Alice doesn’t know anyone who was a stockbroker during the eighties who is not now a millionaire. The eighties were when you could make a killing on the Street. Eddie got into the game a little too late. After he earned his master’s, he worked too long in the business office of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, missing out on all those big downtown opportunities. He didn’t join the esteemed brokerage firm of Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich until after Jamie was born. That was eight years ago. By then the ship had sailed, and though Eddie made a very good living, and the family never wanted for anything, his chances of striking it rich on the Street were gone. He told her once that he regretted ever having gone to business school at all.
“What would you rather have done?” she asked.
“Be a pirate,” he said, and laughed.
Some pirate; he was thirty years old when they moved down here to the Cape, still wearing a crew cut, still looking like a fresh-faced bumpkin from Kansas — which impression was false, even back then when she’d first met him. Eddie was originally from Greenwich, Connecticut, son of a judge in the lower circuit court, now deceased. His mother was gone, too, both the victims of a terrible automobile accident some seven years ago. This was the main reason Eddie insisted on changing his death benefit policy to one with a double-indemnity clause, even though the yearly premiums would cost more.
“You never know what might happen,” he said.
You never know, she thinks now.
You never know that your husband will sail out into the Gulf alone like a pirate, you never know there’ll be ten-foot seas that night, and a wind blowing out of the east. You never know that your husband, an expert sailor, will drown in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, you never once in your life imagine something like this can ever happen to you.
Until it does.
She has often imagined him alone on that sloop, battling the waves that eventually washed him overboard. She has often thought if only she’d been there with him, the two of them together might have conquered whatever seas came at them, together they might have brought that boat back to shore, back to safety.
You never know what might happen.
When he left the house that night, he was wearing jeans and a paler blue shirt, a yellow windbreaker, a peaked white captain’s hat. He was wearing his hair longer. A loose shock hung boyishly on his forehead.
Had they remembered to say they loved each other? Before he left forever, had they remembered…?