“I bet you have.” Matt put his attention where she wanted it: on her. “You seem a lot happier than at Christmas. Can I credit the avant-garde Zeke?”
“Oh, he’s okay, really. Underneath it all. Young guys aren’t worth much these days, but they’re all I have at my age.”
“They grow out of it.”
“That’s why I put in the time. Besides, I need an ally against my family, and you’re not here.”
“I was only here for a couple of days before.”
“Seemed longer.” She smiled at him, fairly tremulously for a Chicago girl. He glimpsed the pressured teenager from Christmas ready to commit crushes with an older cousin she’d never seen before. She’d been unhappy about her family not allowing her to go to art school in California, but settling for art school in Chicago had done her good, despite Zeke, and in Matt’s absence, she’d taken his mother under her wing.
They were good for each other, the older and younger woman. Matt suddenly understood that spasm of jealousy. Krys was having the kind of almost-adult relationship with his mother that he never would have. Or maybe he would someday, thanks to Krys. So get over it.
“You’ve done so much for my mother, Krys. Thanks.”
“Oh, she needed some prodding to get out of the old ruts. And it’s not for charity. She backs me up with my folks about art school.”
“And about Zeke?”
“No. Nobody would back me up about Zeke.”
“Then I will.”
“You that eager to get rid of me?”
“I don’t think I ever had you.”
“Oh, yes, you did.” She tossed her tangled locks. “But I was an impressionable kid then. Thanks for being nice to me, though.”
“Not hard. So do you think…Mira will go for the life drawing class?”
“Maybe. In a couple of years. She’s got quite a flair for color and line. You should see if you’ve inherited an artistic streak.”
“Not me.”
She glanced at his jacket. “Maybe the girlfriend who picked out your jacket is the artist.”
“Maybe.”
Krys’s fingers flicked across his sleeve. “Nice. She is still your girlfriend?”
“Friend.”
“Still?”
“Still.” He felt the hesitation flicker over his face. Dare he be friends with anyone, any woman, with Kitty O’Connor hovering in the wings? And was he right to feel safe here? What about Temple back in Vegas? Kitty the Cutter might be angry he’d slipped her leash. She might decide to teach him a lesson, and no one was nearer at hand for that than Temple….
Krys’s smile was probing, hopeful. “You don’t look so sure.”
He threw lame excuses, flailing to get back in the here and now. “I work midnights. I travel a lot. Hard to keep up friendships.”
“Poor guy. If you’re ever in Chicago on short notice—”
“I’ll let my mother know. That new apartment your idea? Like the job?”
“She needed to escape the family thumb, like me. It’s handy to have a chaperon sometimes, you know?”
He nodded.
“And sometimes not.” Krys nodded toward the end of the room.
His mother and Zeke had intersected on their way back to the table. His mother was obviously asking Zeke a few too many questions.
“Looks like you two will look out for each other.”
“Yeah. It’s cool. She’s not my mother, and she’s not my generation. But in some ways, she’s almost my age. It’s like she didn’t live twenty years of her life. I’m dragging her kicking and screaming back into her twenties.”
Matt smiled. Mira and Zeke were bearing down on them, and Mira was dusting off the shoulders of Zeke’s carefully battered jacket.
Chapter 27
Cousins Under the Skin
A long, long time later, the vehicle jolts its last jolt and comes to a stop.
This hurls us hitchhikers against assorted meat patties, but by then we are not feeling much.
I force myself to my feet (apparently my toes have chilled to the point of numbness) and stumble over to rouse the Yorkies.
“Up and at ’em, bowheads! We need to be lurking near the doors so we can scram when we have to.”
“Scram?” cries Golda’s faint, squeaky voice from behind a leg of lamb. “I can barely stagger.”
“There will not be time enough for me to do another emergency airlift on you two. If we don’t get out fast enough, we will either be smashed in the doors or tossed to the carnivores. Which route of doom you prefer depends on if you like your bones ground up fast or slow.”
They shudder in tandem, making their silky hair shimmy like a go-go dancer’s fringe. But they crawl gamely over the meat mountains and we all huddle behind a side of beef.
“When I say go, just go. Do not look down, do not look back. Just jump and run. Pretend Midnight Louise is on your tail.”
“She is not so bad,” Groucho objects in his best falsetto growl.
“Okay. Pretend…the Medellin cartel is on your tail.” These are drug sniffers in training, after all.
“We are on their tail,” Golda sniffs grandly.
For pipsqueaks, this pair must have nothing but nerve under that hair.
The latch squeaks and then turns.
Daylight tears a widening rent in the darkness that hides our presence.
The stack of steaks by the opposite door vanishes. We hear thumps and bangs, and men grousing.
“Now,” I say, sticking the tip of a shiv into each little form.
Squealing like mice, the pair squirt out of the door. I am right behind them, but somehow I end up hitting terra firma first—oof!—and they land on me. Double oof.
We do not waste time discussing our exit order, but roll and scramble under the truck’s welcome shadow, much as it stinks of gas and oil.
“Did you hear mice?” one man is asking the other, his work boots still for a moment.
While the other guy tells him he’s crazy and hearing things, we belly-crawl to the truck’s front. It is hard to see much but stretches of sand. I prod Golda out for a few seconds of recon. She reports a shaded area with a roof at three o’clock low.
Gee, that makes me miss my old man, Three O’Clock Louie, who is basking in the sun of Lake Mead while I am directing a raid on the ranch.
“Make for the shade,” I tell the troops, then head off myself like a black bolt of cold lightning.
There is nothing but open ground in the desert, and a frontal assault is the best—heck, the only—approach.
Two gray bolts of lightning speed after me. Those canine shrimps can really move their pins when they have to.
We are reunited again in a dimness that gives us a cloak of invisibility.
“Looks like we made it unnoticed,” Groucho notes, pausing to scratch at a sand flea that has managed to leap aboard despite our velocity. Some species are impervious to every trick and they are usually parasites.
I must agree. The two men are still unloading hunks of meat and any tracks our daring dash across the tundra may have left are being scrubbed away by a constant riffle of desert wind.
I pause to tidy my whiskers and straighten my cravat.
It is a good thing, because a long, low growl behind us that sets the floor beneath us vibrating announces that we do not have company, but that we are company. And maybe even dinner.
Chapter 28
K as in Karrot Stick
The Big Town felt a planet away.