Blacklist

CHAPTER 30

I awoke from my most familiar nightmare. My mother had disappeared. I was looking for her, panic-stricken, because the only reason she would leave was that she didn’t love me any more. The search changes from dream to dream; this time I was in the dark culvert that connected New Solway with Anodyne Park. Behind me I could hear a hissing and knew, dreamwise, that it was the hissing of tires in the mud. I ran pell-mell until I crashed into the evergreen bush. The wheels came closer and I saw a giant golf cart about to run me over. I woke, my heart pounding, my arms and shoulders so stiff it was painful to move them.

When I pushed myself up on the narrow bed, my stomach muscles trembled. I sat blear-eyed, wanting just to lie back down and sleep for a hundred years. Until I felt well. Until Morrell came home. Until these times of fear and brutality passed. I thought of the horrors wrought in the hundred years now ending and didn’t think waiting another century for peace would bring much solace.

I maneuvered myself to the head of the bed and found my watch. One o’clock-in the afternoon, given that the gray March light still seeped in through the dirty window. The single bar of the space heater did no more than take an edge from the cold room. I lay back down, pulling the army blanket up to my nose.

My mother died when I was in my teens. Like many people who lose a parent young, I believed it was my fault, some failing on my part, that had made her leave. All the times I’d upset her, racing into trouble with my cousin Boom-Boom… If I had come home on time, practiced my music as she so often begged me… and on mornings-afternoons-like this, awakening in pain brought on by one more headlong plunge into danger, my heart twisted again. My mind told me differently, told me of the cancer that went unchecked, untreated, for too many years-like many immigrant women, she would not let a doctor, especially a man, examine her in her private spaces; the bleeding that went on and on after a miscarriage couldn’t overcome her revulsion against exposure.

I shut my eyes to keep from looking at the crucifix. It was two feet high, with thorns and blood no less vivid for being covered in dust. I should have put it in the linen closet with the one from Benjamin’s room.

I knew I would feel better if I took a bath and started stretching my muscles, but the routine felt old and dreary to me-sore joints, stretch, recoverin order to overtax my body another time. It’d started as a teenager when I’d gone cold into a basketball game, suffered the next day, and followed Coach McFarlane’s advice on stretches and warm-ups. In the years since, I’d had too many job-related injuries, too many days when I’d woken up feeling as sore as though I really had been run over by a giant golf cart. The thought of beginning again with heat and exercise only annoyed me. What was I pushing myself for, anyway? So I could keep racing around town looking for crooks and murderers that no one wanted me to find?

In the interview with Kylie Ballantine that I’d read at the library-was it only two days ago?-she’d said when she was twenty she could take a three-week vacation and be back in shape after one day’s hard work, but that she’d reached an age where missing a single day took three weeks of conditioning to recover. And so she worked out every day. My heroine.

I pushed myself upright once more and stumbled into the bathroom. I began doing the things I knew I needed to do to recover-not easily, since the guest bathroom (to give the chipped, stained fittings and cracked walls a fancy name) had no heat. At least it made me move fast. I jogged back to the narrow bedroom, which felt downright cozy in contrast. I put the two

army blankets on the floor and spent half an hour stretching out my legs and arms. I must have torn a muscle in my left trapezius, from the knife stabs it gave me when I extended my arms, but when I finished I thought my legs would carry me along.

I couldn’t bear the thought of last night’s torn and filthy clothes, but my suit was in the trunk of my own car out in New Solway. I put on the stained, rank sweatshirt and tried not to think about it.

On my way downstairs, I looked in on Benjamin. He was still asleep.

I found Father Lou in his study, working on his Sunday homily. He grunted when he heard me come in, but kept typing until he finished a passage. He used an old Royal electric, banging away with two fingers. I did leg lifts while I waited to keep the circulation going.

“Kid still sleeping?” Father Lou said, when he finally looked up. “Listened to the noon news. Guess he’s the Arab they lost out in DuPage. You think he’s a terrorist?”

I made a face. “I don’t think so, but I can’t say I know what signs to look for.”

The priest wheezed hoarsely-his idea of laughter. “Neither does the FBI. Don’t imagine a county sheriff is any smarter than the Bureau. What’s the boy’s story?”

“I don’t know how or why, but Catherine Bayard-the young woman who got shot last night-scooped him up and took him out to this deserted mansion near her grandparents’ country estate.” I explained who the Bayards were, and how I’d come to be involved in the situation.

“Romeo and Juliet,” Father Lou echoed my own image. “They in love? They making love?”

I shrugged. “Benjamin has pretty strong feelings for her, but she-1 think with her it was quixotism-wanting to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps. Catherine lives in a larger milieu than Benjamin, with school and horses and an important family; he had only her to think about for three weeks or however long it’s been. But-she didn’t tell her grandmother what she was doing, and I’ve seen her with her granny-they’re pretty close. So I don’t know what she feels for him personally. Maybe he’s exotic, Egyptian, a bluecollar youth. For some rich kids, crossing so many boundaries of race and class can seem daring, even exalting.”

“Teenagers. Everything too intense all the time. Probably gave her word not to tell a soul and felt that included the whole world. Girl’s at Northwestern Hospital-they medevacked her into the city. Know the chaplain there. He says a bullet nicked the humerus, cracked it, not life-threatening. You going to see her?”

“Probably. But I don’t think I should tell her Benjamin’s here. When she was protecting him, she didn’t have all the law enforcement agencies in the country breathing down her neck. I’ll let her know he’s safe, but I don’t think she should have to worry about standing up to interrogation on his safety.” I picked at a hole in the chair I was sitting in. “I don’t know how serious the Feds and the rest of them are going to be about wanting to find Benjamin. They may talk to me and let me go after that, or they may try a trace on everything I do. To be on the safe side, I think I need to assume that all my phones-home, office, mobile-and possibly even my e-mail will be monitored.”

“Think they’ll charge you under this Patriot bill, whatever it is?” the priest asked.

I grimaced. “I hope not-the last few years I’ve already had more jail time than I can really use. Anyway, if the FBI gets involved, and if they really want Benjamin, they can put enough people on me that I may not be able to shake them. So once I show up at home, I won’t be able to get back in touch with you. Or vice versa. If you can’t keep Benjamin, let me know now so I can try to come up with some other safe house.”

“Don’t seem to be able to keep track of their own weapons these days, the Feds. Shouldn’t think they’d have the manpower to follow one gal like you around town. Still, better safe than sorry. Baker Street Irregulars-I can send some of my toughs over to you on bikes-your office still over there near Milwaukee, right? Easy ride for these kids. If you want me-” He grinned, showing his yellow teeth. “Say a prayer, God’ll let me know” Meaning, I could come to church.

“As far as young Ben goes, I’ll sort him out,” Father Lou went on. “Think you’re right, think he’s a scared kid on the run. In which case, I’ll keep him until we figure out where else to send him. If he’s doing something he shouldn’t be, give him to Uncle Sam. Let you know, either way.”

“There’s one other thing about him,” I said. “I think he saw some part

of what happened to Marcus Whitby Sunday night. He would stand at the attic window watching for Catherine, and you get a view from there of most of the pond. If he saw the person who put Whitby into the waterI want to know.”

Father Lou thought it over, decided it wasn’t an unreasonable request, and nodded agreement. “See what I can get him to say. What’s happening with Morrell?”

My stomach tightened. “He’s off on some hot lead that he didn’t want to reveal on-line.”

“And you’re angry.”

“I’m angry. I’m supposed to weave tapestries while he does God knows what, in God knows whose company.”

The priest gave his wheezy laugh again. “You weave tapestries, my girl? You ain’t the passive waiting type, so don’t sit there feeling sorry for yourself. Get off your tail and get to work. I have to finish my sermon.”

I blushed in embarrassment and stood up. Father Lou saw the flash of pain across my face from my shoulder. I tried to make light of it, but he led me through the church to the school on the far side. Even on a Saturday afternoon, the gym was filled with kids, some shooting baskets, but most working out on boxing dummies. St. Remigio’s routinely won state boxing titles, and every boy in school dreamed of making the team.

Father Lou stopped to correct one boy’s arm position, set another closer to the bag, and warned two others not to bring personal fights into his gym. They all nodded solemnly. Father Lou had the magic touch of believable authority in this world. He might chew out his kids, but he never let them down.

He took me into a small infirmary built off the gym. He handed me a towel to use as an improvised robe and told me to take off my sweatshirt. I sat on a stool with my back to him, draped modestly in the towel, while he ran his hands along my shoulders and upper back. When he found the spot that made me squawk loudest, he rubbed something into it.

“Used this on horses when I was a boy. Got them back between the traces in no time flat.” He gave another of his sudden barks of laughter. “Put some in ajar for you, get someone to rub it in if you can’t reach the spot. Best if you tape it up. Leave that stinking shirt here, take one of ours.”

He handed me an orange and gray St. Remigio’s sweatshirt, faded from much washing, but mercifully clean. When I pulled it on, my trapezius already moved a bit more smoothly.

He escorted me out the back door of the school to my borrowed wheels. “You get in trouble, girl, come back here. No one to look after you but those two dogs and an old man.” He laughed again. “Probably only got six to seven years on Contreras, but I fight regularly and he don’t: INS, city cops, they’re around here all the time. FBI wants to join in, won’t bother me.”

When I put the Jaguar in gear and drove off, my shoulder moved only a little better, but my spirits were easier. The voice of believable authority – it worked on me, too.