We were moving toward the front door in the living room.
“We’re a match made in heaven,” she said and kissed me. “Put your arms around me and mean it,” she added, her face inches from mine.
I could feel her breath, smell her hair. Her eyes were large and brown and moist and maybe a little tired. I kissed her back. She opened her mouth, arms around my neck. I felt her breasts warm against me. I told myself not to think of my dead wife. I failed but it didn’t stop me from holding Sally and letting the kiss stay warm.
She gently removed her arms, patted my cheek and stepped back, smiling at me.
I opened my mouth to speak but she cut me off with, “Nothing to say, Lewis. Nothing to explain or talk about. It’s okay.”
She opened the door and I stepped out into the cool darkness. Standing on the landing, I told her more about my day, the person who tried to run me down, about Dorothy Cgnozic. Sally listened, nodded a few times while I talked. I kept it short, very short, and I didn’t mention that Ames and I were going to break into the Seaside Assisted Living Facility in a few hours.
“Forty-six eleven Tenth,” she said, starting to close the door.
“Forty-six eleven Tenth,” I repeated.
“That’s where Yolanda Root is staying.”
She closed the door.
I watched the parking lot as I moved down the stairs. Nothing moved but the leaves on the bushes from a gentle breeze.
I drove back to the DQ parking lot, checking my rearview mirror for anyone who might be following me.
The DQ was a few minutes from closing. I got to the window in time to order a large black coffee. The thin black girl behind the counter, Teresa, was working two jobs. Teresa was nineteen. She had two children under six years old. During the day she worked in the bakery section of the Publix on Fruitville and in the evening she was behind the counter at the DQ. Her mother watched the kids.
“Want a Blizzard?” she asked, wiping her hands on a white towel. “On me. You’re my last customer as a night counter girl. Dave promoted me to day manager.”
“Publix?”
“They’ll have to get along without me,” she said with a smile, showing white, slightly large teeth. “Raise makes up for it and I can see my kids at night, have dinner with them.”
“I need the coffee to stay awake,” I said.
“Okay, the coffee’s on me,” she said.
“I accept,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Two sugars and cream?” she said. “Right?”
I always took three sugars, but I said, “Right.” She got the coffee and handed it to me. I toasted her with it.
“Did he find you?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Man who was looking for you,” she said. “Looked like he was coming down from a bad high, you know? Shaky, nervous-like.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Bigger than you, older than you, one of those little beards, real white.”
“The man or the beard?” I asked.
“Both,” she said.
“When did he come by?”
“Few hours ago, maybe.”
“Did you see his car?”
“Didn’t notice,” she said. “Got to finish cleaning up.” I went to the steps of the two-story office building at the back of the parking lot. I held the coffee cup in my left hand and fished for my keys with my right hand.
I looked back as I went up the concrete steps. There were two cars in the DQ parking lot, Teresa’s 1986 Toyota and mine. No cars were parked across Washington. Traffic moved by. It never stopped, but around eleven each night it slowed down to a rumble of trucks and a swish of cars going over the speed limit.
The phone began to ring before I could turn on the lights. I hit the switch, kicked the door closed, pocketed my keys and took my coffee to the desk.
“Yes,” I said, picking up the phone.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It was the same man who had threatened to kill me and I was reasonably sure he was the one who had talked to Teresa. He sounded about five levels above nervous.
“For what?”
“Trying to run you down,” he said. “I’ve been telling myself that I just wanted to frighten you, but if you hadn’t jumped out of the way, I might have killed you. Are you all right?”
“Nothing broken. Nothing bleeding. Come on up and we’ll talk about it,” I said, moving to the window and taking a sip of coffee. He couldn’t be far.
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry but I really do have to stop you. Please just stop, let me punish myself. Seneca was right when he said, ‘Every guilty person is his own hangman.’”
“You going to try again to kill me?”
“You’re not going to stop trying to find me, are you?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then… I’m really sorry. I’ve got to get home now.”
He hung up. I turned off the office light after I hit the switch in the back room where I lived, kicked off my shoes, turned on the television and the VCR and inserted a tape before sitting on the bed, where I hit the button on the remote.
Stagecoach came on. It was dubbed in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. Julio at the video store down the street had sold it to me for three dollars. I hadn’t known it was in Spanish until a few seconds ago. I’m sure Julio hadn’t either.
I watched Andy Devine and George Bancroft jabbering at each other in voices that weren’t theirs. The guy who dubbed John Wayne tried to mimic the Duke, but didn’t come close. I turned off the sound and kept watching. I knew almost every word of the movie.
As I watched, I followed the instructions on the tube I had taken out of my pocket and rubbed the white cream on my knee and shoulder. It went from cold to warm, tingly electric. It seemed to be working.
When the Plummer brothers were dead and John Wayne and Claire Trevor had ridden off in the buckboard, I put in a tape of The Woman on the Beach. Joan Bennett spoke English. I finished my now room-temperature coffee.
When the clock said it was time, I turned off the VCR and the lights and dropped the empty coffee cup in the garbage. After a quick stop in the washroom halfway down the walkway outside my office, I went to my car and drove to the Texas Bar amp; Grille to pick up Ames and commit a felony.
7
Ames wore his well-worn jeans and a plaid shirt and denim jacket. No slicker. No shotgun. No Stetson on his head. This was a simple break-in.
“Mornin’,” he said, getting into the car and handing me a cardboard cup of coffee. He had a cup too.
“Thanks,” I said. “Flashlight?”
Ames reached into his pocket and came up with a black penlight not very different from the one I had in my pocket.
Ames didn’t put on his seat belt. He never did. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe they worked. He just didn’t like the government, any government, telling him what he had to do to protect himself.
Ames didn’t really like anyone telling him what to do for any reason. Even Ed was careful when telling Ames that there was something he wanted done in the Texas Bar amp; Grille. “Would you do the windows today?” or “Mind getting the garbage out early tomorrow?” were the ways Ed respected Ames’s self-respect.
There wasn’t much traffic at one-thirty in the morning, but there was some. I sipped coffee, drove and didn’t turn on the radio.
“Saw Flo, Adele and the baby,” I said. “They’re fine.”
I glanced at Ames, who nodded to indicate that he had heard, registered and approved of what I had said. That was all we said for the twelve-minute ride. I drove at about ten miles an hour after I turned down the narrow road that led to the Seaside from Beneva.
The front-canopied entrance to the Seaside was dark behind the glass doors. There were cars, seven of them, at the end of the lot. Some of them must have belonged to the night staff. A few of the cars might even belong to residents still able to drive. I didn’t park near the other cars. Ames indicated that I should pull into a corner space under a tree where the parking lot lights didn’t hit
“We go in over there.”