Come Morning

Chapter 27

When Louise turned the corner, she saw Taps talking and gesturing earnestly on the pay phone. Beside her, Grace drew in a sharp breath.

“That rotten son of a bitch! Stop the car!”

She was out before it stopped moving, leaving her door hanging open and Louise gaping after her, open-mouthed, as she ran across the grass strip toward the phone where Taps was just saying

“Okay, that be cool...”

Grace snatched the receiver out of hand and slammed it back onto the hooks. He backhanded her across the face, yelping in astonishment, “You crazy, woman? Wuffo you—”

Grace was yelling, “He saved your life! You owe him!”

He grabbed her by the arms and started shaking her, barely aware of Louise’s pale shocked face framed in the open car door a few yards away.

“We got the bonds, all of ’em!” Seeing some of the wildness fading from Grace’s eyes, he gingerly released his grip on her arms. In a quieter voice, he said, “Wasn’t no way we could do that except make sure he couldn’t ever come back at us.”

“You did it ’cause he saved your ass in prison,” said Grace in a low, intense voice. “There ain’t a livin’ soul in this world you’d do that for, an’ you can’t stand thinkin’ about it.” She gave a harsh laugh. “And now Brother Blood’s gonna take you down, nigger.”

Taps hesitated when, in the background, their car suddenly fishtailed away, so abruptly that Grace’s open door slammed shut. He felt sudden fear. Grace wasn’t hardly ever wrong, and now the white bitch Runyan had brought along had cut out with their car, stranding them. But he said, “You... You’re crazy, woman.”

“Don’t you see it yet?” she asked in an almost tired voice. “Brother Blood, he’s gonna start wonderin’, How that man know to call me at the dealer’s unless he was in on it an’ just chicken’ out at the last minute?” Over his protestations, she continued, “It’s what you’d think, was you. Ain’t Brother Blood gonna be any different.” She shook her head and turned away from him. “I ain’t hangin’ around to die with no boot dumb as you.”

Taps let her get almost to the sidewalk before he called after her, “But I got the bonds, baby!”

She turned to look at him, almost with pity. “You got shit, Taps. You think Runyan didn’t know you planned to cross him when you asked he th’ow those bonds down to you?”

She trudged away, her steps tapping out a jaunty staccato in marked contrast to the slump of her shoulders. Taps wanted to run after her, grab her, make it right. But he had to know about this first. He ripped open the black stuff bag with his switchblade in a frenzy of anticipation and dread. It was full of newspapers folded to the approximate size of bearer bonds.

Runyan stepped into Brother Blood’s private elevator and pushed the GARAGE button next to the LOBBY and PENTHOUSE buttons. Tight security. He touched the bulky oblong under his sweater. If Taps was waiting for him across the street from the garage entrance, then everything was straight; if not, yet another friend had betrayed him. He was running out of people who hadn’t tried it, one way or another. Even Louise...

Ashcan that. It was all in the past. They were together now for the long run.

Taps Turner had a terminal case of the stupids, thought Brother Blood. Planning to steal the bond stash — with a white dude, yet! — and then chickening out and thinking he’d be dumb enough to swallow the con about stumbling across the robbery! No, Taps was dog meat right now, he just didn’t know it yet.

Brother Blood was a tall lean bald hollow-eyed man, impeccably dressed in a three-piece midnight blue suit and mirror-shined black oxfords. He leaned forward to peer out of the windshield past the beefy shoulder of his bodyguard as the stretch limo whispered down the deserted street beside his apartment building.

They turned the corner. The driver pushed the remote electronic-eye activator. Fifty yards away, the heavy steel mesh gate began rattling upward. As it did, a lean dark-haired white man in black slacks and black sweater emerged from the garage, walking quickly. His hands were empty, but Brother Blood’s practiced, suspicious eye could pick out the ex-con.

“That’s him,” he said to his driver. “Run him down.”

Much too late, Runyan heard the almost silent rush of the limo coming at him. Even as he hurled himself desperately to the side, he knew he would be dead before he hit the concrete.

That was when Louise, seat-belted in and with the accelerator floored, rammed Grace’s car into the rear fender of the limo. The impact knocked it sideways just enough so its nose missed Runyan by the necessary fraction as he landed, tucked, rolled, and came up running.

Not away. At. He was aware with an edge of his consciousness that Louise’s car, slewed around by the impact, had spun broadside into a power pole on the other side of the still-deserted street. No fire, no explosion, and she was trying to open her sprung door: probably unhurt. She had not only saved his life; she had bought him just enough time.

Since the windshield was bullet-proof glass, the bodyguard, a thick-set black gorilla with wary eyes, already had his door open and his head and arm stuck out to fire at Runyan. But Runyan was high in the air; a piston-drive snap of both legs kicked the door shut again.

The bodyguard slumped down halfway out of the car, his skull creased on one side by the edge of the door, on the other by the edge of the frame. Brother Blood, partway out of the back seat, looked up into the black eye of his bodyguard’s gun in Runyan’s hand. He threw his arms up and wide; Brother Blood was a survivor too. Runyan gestured him away from the car and up against the wall of his building with movements of the heavy-caliber automatic.

“I won’t forget this,” he said in a soft deadly voice.

“Don’t,” said Runyan. He swung the gun toward the chauffeur, who was trying to fit himself under the dash like a stereo.

“I... I just drive, sir,” the chauffeur said quickly.

Runyan gestured again. “Not any more. Not tonight.”

The chauffeur opened the door on his side and scuttled out on his hands and knees, then came erect and backed away into the center of the street, arms high, face gleaming with an earnest sweat of nonviolent intentions.

Louise had managed to kick open her car door. She ran across the street to the limo. She slid in under the steering wheel. Runyan heaved the unconscious bodyguard out of the way so he could get in beside her.

“I think we probably should leave,” he said.

Louise rammed it into reverse and gunned it backwards, bouncing off the curb into the street. The back wheel rubbed on the fender, but would turn. Runyan slammed his door as she put it into drive and shot ahead down the street. He tossed the guard’s .45 out into the gutter through the still-hanging-open back door, then slammed that, too.

“Thanks, darling, is sort of inadequate,” he said.

“All part of the service.” Laughter danced in her eyes; she was having the time of her life. “Burbank airport?”

“You got it.”

Louise suddenly sobered. “What are we going to do, baby? You’re as bad off as you were before. Taps has the bonds and you still have to find the cash somewhere to—”

“We have the bonds,” Runyan corrected her. He pulled up his sweater and took out the wad of securities. “I figured Taps for a double cross, so I kept them just in case.” He laughed. “I’ve learned something in the last eight years.”

It was well after dark when Louise drove across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. They had left Grace’s plane at the little country airfield, returned the Park Service jeep to the chain link fence behind the maintenance shed, and slept into the early afternoon before breaking camp and packing up their gear. On the way up, Runyan was delighted to catch a glimpse of Moyers’s car behind them on the freeway.

“This is the next tricky part,” he told her as they took the first skyway off-ramp after the bridge. “We have to stash the bonds without Moyers knowing anything about them. I think it’ll work because he’s relying on that beeper he planted on our car. Turn here.”

Louise swung the Toyota into First Street from Mission. It was an area of sandwich shops, a coin arcade, wholesale office furniture dealers. To their left crouched the dark mass of the Trans-Bay Terminal; it also housed the Trailways Bus Depot.

“Slow around the block twice,” said Runyan. “The second time, use the alley.”

He jumped out of the moving car, cut behind it ducking other vehicles, took a long running leap to the sidewalk. Before the startled Louise even lost sight of him in her rearview mirror, he was into the terminal.

Hidden from the street but able to see cars after they had passed, he waited just inside the door. Thirty seconds later, Moyers drove by. Runyan grinned to himself and turned away.

He crossed the nearly empty, echoing, low-roofed waiting room, past the lighted ticket windows to the bank of coin lockers flanking the Fremont Street entrance, chose one in which to stuff the thick sheaf of securities from under his sweater. Key in hand, he walked over to one of the phone booths and entered it.

Louise had gone out First Street to Folsom, turned left, at Fremont had turned left again. She kept checking the rearview mirror, but she saw no sign of Moyers. Was he back there? Or had he guessed Runyan’s strategy and stopped by the terminal to check out the waiting room?

She waited for a rattling almost-empty electric trolley to leave the terminal, then turned into Mission, at First turned again to start her second round. A motorcyclist paced her for half a block, ogling her and darting his tongue in and out between bearded lips.

What if Runyan wasn’t...

He would be there, dammit.

She turned into Howard instead of going down to Mission again. Buses used this street for picking up and dropping off passengers. As she slowed beside the bright wedge of light from the side door of the terminal, Runyan came flying out and dove head-first into the door she had reached across to fling open. As she goosed it away, Runyan looked back over his shoulder. Moyers had just turned into the far end of Howard.

Runyan turned back with a huge grin on his face. “Baby, we made it,” he said.