“God, can you turn around?” Laura said. “I’d sure hate to get stuck here.”
“We’ll be all right. I’ll hang a left at the next corner and then we’ll drive back to Marymount Avenue.”
“I wondered where you were going. I should have said something.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.
That boil of feelings, of profound tenderness and profound rage, churned up inside of me again.
“Things’ll work out with Sandstrom,” she said, and then smiled. “Maybe she’s just starting her period.”
And I couldn’t help it. The rage was gone, replaced by pure and total love. This was my friend, my bride, my lover. There had to be a reasonable and innocent explanation for the letter. There had to.
I started hanging the left and that’s when it happened. The fuel pump. Rain.
The Toyota stopped dead.
“Oh, no,” she said, glancing out the windshield at the forbidding blocks of falling-down houses and dark, condemned buildings.
Beyond the wind, beyond the rain, you could hear sirens. There were always sirens in neighborhoods like these.
“Maybe I can fix it,” I said.
“But, honey, you don’t know anything about cars.”
“Well, I watched him make that adjustment last time.”
“I don’t know,” she said skeptically. “Besides, you’ll just get wet.”
“I’ll be fine.”
I knew why I was doing this, of course. In addition to being rich, powerful and handsome, Chris Tomlin was also one of those men who could fix practically anything. I remembered her telling me how he’d fixed a refrigerator at an old cabin they’d once stayed in.
I opened the door. A wave of rain washed over me. But I was determined to act like the kind of guy who could walk through a meteor storm and laugh it off. Maybe that’s why Laura was considering a rendezvous with Chris. Maybe she was sick of my whining. A macho man, I’m not.
“Just be careful,” she said.
“Be right back.”
I eased out of the car and then realized I hadn’t used the hood latch inside. I leaned in and popped the latch and gave Laura a quick smile.
And then I went back outside into the storm.
I was soaked completely in less than a minute, my shoes soggy, my clothes drenched and cold and clinging. Even my raincoat.
But I figured this would help my image as a take-charge sort of guy. I even gave Laura a little half-salute before I raised the hood. She smiled at me. God, I wanted to forget all about the letter and be happily in love again.
Any vague hopes I’d had of starting the car were soon forgotten as I gaped at the motor and realized that I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at.
The mechanic in the shop had made it look very simple. You raised the hood, you leaned in and snatched off the oil filter and then did a couple of quick things to it and put it back. And voila, your car was running again.
I got the hood open all right, and I leaned in just fine, and I even took the oil filter off with no problem.
But when it came to doing a couple of quick things to it, my brain was as dead as the motor. That was the part I hadn’t picked up from the mechanic. Those couple of quick things.
I started shaking the oil filter. Don’t ask me why. I had it under the protection of the hood to keep it dry and shook it left and shook it right and shook it high and shook it low. I figured that maybe some kind of invisible cosmic forces would come into play here and the engine would start as soon as I gave the ignition key a little turn.
I closed the hood and ran back through the slashing rain, opened the door and crawled inside.
“God, it’s incredible out there.”
Only then did I get a real good look at Laura and only then did I see that she looked sick, like the time we both picked up a slight case of ptomaine poisoning at her friend Susan’s wedding.
Except now she looked a lot sicker.
And then I saw the guy.
In the backseat.
“Who the hell are you?”
But he had questions of his own. “Your wife won’t tell me if you’ve got an ATM card.”
So it had finally happened. Our little city turned violent about fifteen years ago, during which time most honest working folks had to take their turns getting mugged, sort of like a rite of passage. But as time wore on, the muggers weren’t satisfied with simply robbing their victims. Now they beat them up. And sometimes, for no reason at all, they killed them.
This guy was white, chunky, with a ragged scar on his left cheek, stupid dark eyes, a dark turtleneck sweater and a large and formidable gun. He smelled of sweat, cigarette smoke, beer and a high sweet unclean tang.
“How much can you get with your card?”
“Couple hundred.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Couple hundred. I mean, we’re not exactly rich people.
Look at this car.”
He turned to Laura. “How much can he get, babe?”
“He told you. A couple of hundred.” She sounded surprisingly calm.
“One more time.” He had turned back to me. “How much can you get with that card of yours?”
“I told you,” I said.
You know how movie thugs are always slugging people with gun butts? Well, let me tell you something. It hurts. He hit me hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to fill my sight with darkness and blinking stars, like a planetarium ceiling, and hard enough to lay my forehead against the steering wheel.
Laura didn’t scream.
She just leaned over and touched my head with her long, gentle fingers. And you know what? Even then, even suffering from what might be a concussion, I had this image of Laura’s fingers touching Chris Tomlin’s head this way. Ain’t jealousy grand?
“Now,” said the voice in the backseat, “let’s talk.”
Neither of us paid him much attention for a minute or so.
Laura helped me sit back in the seat. She took her handkerchief and daubed it against the back of my head.
“You didn’t have to hit him.”
“Now maybe he’ll tell me the truth.”
“Four or five hundred,” she said. “That’s how much we can get. And don’t hit him again. Don’t lay a finger on him.”
“The mama lion fights for her little cub. That’s nice.” He leaned forward and put the end of the gun directly against my ear. “You’re gonna have to go back out in that nasty ole rain. There’s an ATM machine down at the west end of this block and around the corner. You go down there and get me five hundred dollars and then you haul your ass right back. I’ll be waiting right here with your exceedingly good-looking wife. And with my gun.”
“Where did you ever learn a word like exceedingly?” I said.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was just curious.”
“If it’s any of your goddamned business, my cell-mate had one of them improve your vocabulary books.”
I glanced at Laura. She still looked scared but she also looked a little bit angry. For us, five hundred dollars was a lot of money.
And now a robber who used the word “exceedingly” was going to take every last dime of it.
“Go get it,” he said.
I reached over to touch Laura’s hand as reassuringly as possible, and that was when I noticed it.
The white number ten envelope.
The one Chris had sent her.
I stared at it a long moment and then raised my eyes to meet hers.
“I was going to tell you about it.”
I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have looked in your drawer.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. But I still owe you an explanation.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?”