“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
There was a pair of handcuffs in the bottom catch-all drawer of my desk. I didn’t have to tell Tamara to get them; she was already crawling that way. Runyon rolled Valjean over, and I yanked his arms behind him and snapped steel around both wrists a few seconds later.
It took a couple of tries to get up on my feet, a little effort to stay there. I leaned a hand against the desk to steady myself, jerked back because of a flash of pain in my popped knuckle, and switched support to the other hand. Runyon was up, too. Except for a grayish tone to his skin, you couldn’t tell that he’d come within inches of dying. Tamara’s eyes were huge, a lot of white showing, and there was blood on her lower lip that hadn’t been there before — fresh blood where she’d bitten through the skin.
Runyon said to her, “Good job with that scream. Helped with the distraction.”
“Yeah, well, wasn’t all good. I think I peed in my panty hose.”
“Damn lucky, all of us. If we hadn’t been on the same page...”
“But we were,” I said.
There were noises out in the hallway, but nobody tried to come inside. The air was hazy with aftersmoke from the fired rounds and foul with the stink of burnt powder. I saw holes in the plaster next to the door, another in the door itself. Saw something else, then — the source of the booming crash of metal that had shaken the floor. One or more slugs from that last burst had taken down the old, ugly chandelier that had hung between the skylights. It no longer looked like an upside-down grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass testicles; now it was just a mangled pile of scrap.
Tamara said, “I always hated that thing.”
“So did I.”
“Place’ll never be the same again.”
“No. No, it won’t.”
The three of us stood there, looking at each other.
“Sweet Lord Jesus,” she said.
Christmas
Tamara
She hadn’t been looking forward to Christmas Eve, but it turned out all right. Better than all right. Everybody being nice to her because of what’d happened on Tuesday, tiptoeing around, avoiding the subject. Good thing; wasn’t anything to say that hadn’t already been said ten times. Like Ma going off about criminals and lunatics running loose and how she couldn’t sleep as it was, worrying about Pop all the time; Pop saying okay, if his youngest daughter insisted on doing detective work, then she’d better start keeping a handgun and learning how to use it; Claudia rapping about the evils of guns and urging her to join the gun-control group she and Brian belonged to; Horace trying to talk her into going into another line of work, any kind of computer job where her life wouldn’t be at risk.
But not tonight. Tonight there was a tree big as ever, all tinseled and strung with lights, and wine, and too much food — ham, roast beef, salads, cookies, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie — and talk about music, politics, football, all sorts of neutral stuff. Ma was happy because the family was all together and she was doing her homey thing; Pop was happy because Sweetness wasn’t being smartass and disruptive; Horace was happy because of all the food and because his girlfriend wasn’t being smartass and disruptive; Claudia was happy because her little sister wasn’t being smartass and disruptive and because she was with her oreo (no, be fair now, Brian wasn’t so bad once you got him out of a three-piece suit and away from a lawsuit), two of them holding hands and eye-humping each other the whole time. And she was happy because she’d quit letting everything get under her skin, quit fighting herself and the people around her, just started going with the flow.
Ever since Tuesday, she’d felt like a different person. Scared as hell while it was going down, shaken up for a while afterward, and then cool with it. Somehow easy in her mind. Sort of... what was the boss man’s word? Mellow. Right, sort of mellow. Even if it didn’t last, she liked the feeling. It was like when she was a teenager and she and her girlfriends used to smoke J’s, only this was a legal high, a natural high.
Dinner, presents, talk, dessert, more talk: the time slid by fast and easy. Seemed they’d just got there and then they were at the door, exchanging hugs and kisses, saying good-bye. She even let Brian kiss her, half on the mouth. Whoo. She must be about half stoned.
In the car as they started back to the city Horace said, “Really nice this year. Everybody seemed to be having a good time.”
“Yup.”
“But you didn’t say much. Sure you’re okay?”
“Yup.”
“Well, you seemed... I don’t know, not subdued exactly...”
“Mellow?”
“That’s it. Mellow. How much wine did you have?”
“One glass. How about we put on a CD?”
“What would you like to hear?”
“Classical. Yo-Yo Ma.”
She picked one at random, slid it in. Beethoven, Symphony #5 in C Minor, Opus 67. Recognized it on account of she liked classical music. Didn’t say so to friends, family, wouldn’t even admit it to Horace half the time; wasn’t supposed to be cool to like long-dead white guys’ music, or much of any kind except rap and jazz. So all right, so she wasn’t cool sometimes. Who cared?
In the flicker and shine of passing headlights she watched Horace listening to the cello passages, his ugly face almost handsome. A tenderness came into her. She loved him, no question about that. He was her man. Always would be, one way or another. But the thing was, the relationship she had with her job and with Bill was another kind of love, almost as deep in its own way. Tuesday afternoon, what they’d shared... you couldn’t get much closer, more intimate. Jake Runyon had been part of it, too. Three of them working together, a unit, a team... kind of a professional ménage à trois. That was the only reason they were all alive right now.
So she was staying home, just as she’d pretty much known all along she would. The Bay Area was her center, the place she belonged. But that didn’t mean she was giving up on Horace. After he left for Philly, well, maybe they could keep up a long-distance relationship, for a while anyway. Wouldn’t be easy, but love was never easy. She’d always hated that Bobby McFerrin song, but hey, could be the message had some truth after all. Don’t worry, be happy.
She put her head back, closed her eyes, let the soothing sounds of Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma wash over her. Alive and well, young, part of a team, plenty of future prospects; coming from her family, going home with her man. Wasn’t much more you could ask for on Christmas, was there?
Jake Runyon
Most of the day before Christmas he spent driving around the city, and Oakland and Berkeley and the other East Bay cities, familiarizing himself with streets and neighborhoods. Early dinner in a Chinese restaurant on Taravaclass="underline" egg rolls and mooshu pork. Back to his apartment building before seven.
A family party was going on in one of the other units — Yuletide music, laughter, kids’ happy squealing voices. The sounds followed him upstairs, penetrated the walls faintly once he was inside.
He checked his answering machine. No messages. There hadn’t been any messages since before last Saturday. He stood for a time looking down at the phone, listening to the distant pulse of music and laughter from below. Then he caught up the receiver, tapped out Joshua’s number.
Recorded voice. But a different one this time, computer-generated, telling him that the number he had called was no longer in service.
Had his number changed. And the new one would be unlisted.