Lucas and Sherrill watched, appalled, as the car hit first the black man and then the concrete wall.
The black man was dead in a tenth of a second; he'd felt nothing but a sudden apprehension. As for Carmel, the transition from life to death was so sudden that she never felt it.
In the silence following the shattering impact, an even dozen oranges bounced and rolled in the dirt along the street, bright and promising like the best parts of a broken life.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Charlie Ross and his yuppie flip-fone pals at the Merchants Bank in Portland,
Oregon, had invented a new classification system for women. One that went down, not up. One duckling was a woman who bordered on the acceptable. Ten ducklings was a truly ugly duckling.
Ross was hacking his way through the billing entries for that month's box rentals, and incidentally keeping his eye on the safety-deposit counter while the regular clerk was at lunch, when a six-duckling came to the counter. She was bad news. If you were even tempted to throw her a mercy fuck, you'd want to put a rug over her head first. All of that went through Ross's bottlecap-sized brain as he pushed himself up from the desk and dragged his lard-ass over to the counter.
The woman was small, dark-haired, olive-complected. She had a mole by the corner of her mouth, a notable mole, nearly black, and another one beside her nose. And she wore over-sized glasses, the kind that are supposed to turn dark in sunlight, but always made your eyes look yellow when you were indoors. She handed him a key and he took it, ran it through the file machine, found her card, and brought it to the counter for her to sign.
But she was no longer looking at him: she was looking at the television that the bank had screwed to the ceiling of the lounge area, where visitors waited while their spouses or friends went into the vault. The TV was permanently tuned to
CNN Headline News, which at that moment was showing the wreck of a bloody-red
Jaguar that had plowed halfway through a cement-block wall.
'Ma'am?' Ross said. 'Ma'am, can I help you?'
The woman apparently didn't hear him as she drifted closer to the TV, listening, looking up at it, her mouth half-open.
'Happened last night,' Ross said helpfully. He'd already seen the loop a dozen times. The ugly duckling watched until another story started, this one involving a dog getting oxygen from a fireman, then turned back to the counter. He dropped her from six ducklings to four: she had a really nice ass, like a gymnast's. She seemed dazed.
'Hope it wasn't somebody you knew,' Ross said.
'No, no. I just wish they wouldn't show so much violence on TV,' Rinker said.
She signed the card and pushed it across the desk at him. He noticed that her hand was trembling, and he hoped it wasn't some weird foreign disease.
Lucas had been patched up in the emergency room and sent home. The patching had been messy. A slug had burned through the skin on the side of his neck, leaving a groove, which was sewn closed. A fragment of lead – he'd been hit by a storm of ricochet fragments
– had pierced the skin on his skull, behind his right ear, but hadn't reached the bone; the fragment was removed with tweezers, and two stitches used to close the wound.
'Just like that Wooden Head guy,' Sherrill said happily. She'd cheered up a lot when the doctors said that he wasn't badly injured.
Another fragment had struck his hip, which also made Sherrill happy.
'Hit in the butt,' she said. 'Hip.'
'Looks like a big butt to me,' she said. 'Your hip is over here, on the side.'
More fragments were taken from his side and legs. To get at one, just over his kidney, the doc had to make an additional small cut. The wounds in his legs were all superficial, but nasty; three got stitches. When it was done, they gave him a sample pack of ibuprofen and told him not to play basketball that weekend.
'That's it?' he grumped. 'Don't play basketball?' 'Well, we also extend our deepest sympathy,' the doctor said.
Lucas got down from the examining table, put on his pants, tottered to the door.
'You know what hurts the most?' he asked Sherrill. 'I really dove into her apartment. She was blasting away and I really racked up my elbow and ribs. I'm gonna be sore for a week.' 'Better than the alternative,' she said.
He was sore for a week, and hobbled by the feeling that all the stitches were about to unravel. But the stitches came out on Thursday, and by Friday, when
Malone came to town with her FBI team, he was beginning to loosen up.
'No sign of Rinker,' Malone said. She was sitting in his visitor's chair, wearing a somber blue suit with a red necktie. 'But we'll get her.'
'I don't know,' Lucas said. 'She's smart, and she had nine or ten years to figure out how to hide. She could be here in the U.S., up in Canada, Australia,
India, the Caribbean, and with her Spanish, anywhere in South America. God only knows how much money she had by the end.'
'We put her out of business, anyway. I just wish I'd been here for the shootout with Carmel.'
'Really? Why?'
'I mean, if I coulda gotten wounded like you did… you know, not too bad, but go to the hospital…'
'Excuse me, but I think you left your brain out in the hall,' Lucas said.
'You're just an ignorant local cop,' Malone said. 'You know what it's worth to be an FBI agent wounded in the line of duty? And if you're a woman? My God, I'd be up there.'
'Like an under-assistant deputy director, or something.'
'At least,' she said. 'So… how're you feeling?' 'Not bad. I could probably manage a foxtrot, if somebody pressed me on it.'
'Consider yourself pressed,' she said.
On Monday, Sherrill went to the FBI office to make a statement. When she came back, she dropped into Lucas' visitor's chair and said, 'I just talked to
Malone.'
'Yeah?' He was peering into the thick black volume of the Equality Report. He was on page five-twenty-nine, less than a hundred to go. Pushing a boulder up a hill would have been a snap compared to the Report. 'Does she still think she's gonna catch Rinker?'
'I don't know exactly what she thinks,' Sherrill said. 'When I talked to her
Friday afternoon, she was like really quick, incisive. Executive – maybe that's the word I was looking for. Really tightly wound, you know?'
Lucas turned the page, kept reading.
'But this morning, I mean, she was a lot looser. Hair was a little messed up, you know – she actually giggled once. Lipstick wasn't quite straight.'
Now Lucas looked up. 'What?'
'Giggled. Like, girly-giggled. In fact, she looked like somebody who'd had her brains foxtrotted loose.'
'Detective Sherrill, aren't you in the middle of a case? I mean, I've got to read this report.'
'That's what I thought,' Sherrill said.
The commission had nine members: the chairman, a desperately fading politician named Bob, once known in the State House for his fine ethics, and viciously ridiculed in the same institution after he lost his seat to a twenty-six-year old spitballer; seven members of affected constituencies; and Lucas. After the routine Roberts Rules of Order opening, the meeting devolved into a nasty fight about whether adding to the list of minority or disability statuses would dilute the authority of prior assertions of those statuses… or that's what Lucas thought somebody said.
He wasn't sure. Passing through a bookstore earlier in the day, he'd discovered that Donald Westlake had revived the 'Richard Stark' Parker novels, and Lucas had Backflash buried in the pages of the Report. By the end of the meeting, he was more than halfway through, just finishing a chapter that ended with the word
Asshole. He agreed.
The night was straight out of a country-and-western song, one of those smooth warm evenings made for rolling around in a hay mow with a farm girl. Even the traffic seemed subdued, as though people had abandoned their cars to walk.
Lucas' neighborhood was quiet, with only occasional cars rolling along the boulevard between his house and the bluff that dropped to the Mississippi. As he pulled into the driveway, he realized that he needed milk and cereal, if he wanted to eat at home the next morning; and he'd noticed a slight puffiness around the waist that needed to be trimmed away, and eating in a diner wouldn't help that. He thought about it, and decided to leave the car in the driveway. He popped the door, swivelled, reached back to pick up the copy of the Report and the novel, started to climb out of the car…