Come Morning

Chapter 5

The three-sided air shaft held trash cans and opened out into the alley. Runyan dropped the edge of the shade and turned back into the dimness of the room, naked. He had a gymnast’s finely muscled body. Louise was pulling the wisp of bra up against her ripe, beautifully shaped breasts.

“Uh... I’m sorry I... uh... started out so rough,” he said. “At first I was afraid that after all this time I might be impotent. Then I just...”

She straightened, buckling the bra, then pulled on her blouse. She winked bawdily at him. “After eight years, you’re entitled to poke a little fun.”

Runyan felt an unexpected surge of sad anger. This had been the fulfillment of every sexual fantasy through seven years of endless nights, and she was acting as if...

“What was this for you? Kicks? Tease the animals?”

There was a hint of wicked laughter in her voice. “I did more than tease the animal. And—”

“What are you after?” He had grabbed her shoulders and was shaking her, all his doubts rushing back. “What do you want?”

She didn’t try to break free; she seemed used to coping with men to whom violence came easily.

“What do you want?”

Runyan’s hands dropped away. He said in a low, angry voice, “I don’t want to go back inside. I don’t want you yelling rape unless I talk to you about the diamonds. I don’t want—”

“But want do you want?”

He responded with silence; he had no more answer for her than he had for himself. She turned away with an abrupt briskness that made the last hours just another prison-born fantasy, picked up her purse and sunglasses and walked right out of the room without a backward glance.

“Hey!” yelped Runyan, stunned.

He started to follow her, then realized that he was naked. He turned back to snatch up his pants.

The door at the foot of the stairs swept away her reflected image as she went through it: cool, self-contained, sure of herself, almost haughty. Only she had to lean against the front of the building for a moment, she felt so shaky inside.

She started walking, buffeted by inner gales. A Chinese youth wearing a white gauze mask against pollution was unloading canned goods for the grocery store next door. A heavy-faced white man’s eyes gleamed greedily at her from between the stems of a split-leaf philodendron in the window of the Chinese restaurant on the corner. In the parking lot the attendant stripped her with his eyes as he took her money and got the Lynx.

She was shaking so hard she could hardly get the key into the ignition. Her arms ached where Runyan had gripped them. She’d meant to control the situation, control him, control herself; instead, she had seduced herself with his vulnerability. She’d remembered him walking away from the prison like a jaunty, scared little kid, and all of a sudden she’d been out of control, hung out on the cruel edge of passion where she couldn’t get down and it had just kept happening until it almost hurt...

The memory caused a slight involuntary contraction in her pelvis, as if marking the onset of yet another orgasm. She’d lost it, lost it all. He’d gotten what he wanted; what reason for him to come back to her now?

At the entrance of the lot she waited as the light released a burst of rush-hour traffic up Leavenworth; then she eased her foot off the brake. But Runyan came charging across the street, shirtless and barefoot, wearing only his trousers, and she felt a fierce surge of elation. Walking out had been the perfect gambit after all.

Runyan slammed his open hands on the hood as if to stop her, then moved along the flank of the car to her open window like someone gentling a spooked horse. “I thought of a title for your book. Bad Time. A con is pulling bad time when—”

She started to laugh, she couldn’t help it. Relief, but he couldn’t know that. She took her hotel room key from her purse and held it up where he could see it.

“It’s a terrific title,” she said. “We can talk about it in the morning. Ten o’clock in the coffee shop.”

She let the car ease forward so he had to step back or get his bare toes run over. Not knowing why, she blew him a kiss as she shot into the street just ahead of the next barbarian horde released by the stop lights at the corner below.

Runyan stared after her, shifting his bare feet on the cold dirty blacktop; the kiss she’d blown him burned in his mind. She still could be using him, just trying to find out about the diamonds. He glanced down toward the YMCA, three blocks below, then started to trot in that direction, his bare feet pad-padding on the filthy sidewalk.

Everybody said it in the joint: When you first got out, you were so bombarded with stimuli that you’d be overwhelmed if you didn’t stay locked away inside yourself. She had already unlocked him, made him vulnerable.

Just don’t keep the appointment with her in the morning. Just stay away. Just forget her.

But he was running now, the blood being pounded back into his icy feet. Passing under a raised fire escape, he leaped up and tapped the bottom step with both hands. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tapping in a rebound.

He tried to slow to a walk. All the shit in the world might be coming down on him. He needed control. But somehow he was leaping up and whapping the next ladder with both outstretched hands — Kareem stuffing one on the fast break.

“YAHOO!” Runyan yelled. He leaped up and caught the rung of the next ladder, swung backward and forward, let go to land running, whooping, bounding down Leavenworth like an escaped panther joyous in the streets.

Through the glossy philodendron leaves, David Moyers watched Runyan leap down the far sidewalk like the last day of school, barefoot and shirtless besides. Moyers himself had a stocky, underexercised body which looked heavier than it was because of his habitual slouch and because of his heavy head, which contained a mind with nothing slouchy about it.

He tossed a handful of change on the counter. The ageless Chinese man standing in front of the delicate oriental wall mural with a red sign slapped across it, YES, WE HAVE BEERS, bowed deeply and grinned at him.

Moyers walked slightly splay-footed through the chilly spring evening. His car was in the same lot where Louise had left hers. He’d taken her license number and noted it was a Hertz, not because he suspected any connection with Runyan at the time, but because she belonged in that neighborhood like a gold ingot in a butter dish. With that thousand-a-night hooker stride the Supreme Court should have ruled on, the lobby of the Hilton should have been her hunting ground.

He got his bag of new workout stuff from the trunk and went down toward the Y, memorable as a phone book. His eyes fed data into his quick, obsessed mind without conscious attention as he thought about Runyan and the woman.

Damn her! He’d been willing to be patient; but three hours of fucking Runyan’s brains out had given her a definite edge. She was making things move faster then he’d anticipated, and he didn’t like the feeling of not quite being in control.

But Runyan, meanwhile, would have pumped a lot of his strength into her up in that hotel room; now he’d be feeling depleted and a little sad, and already disoriented from hitting the street for the first time in eight years. Maybe it was all for the best; maybe now was the perfect time to brace him up about the diamonds again.

Runyan leaped up to slap his chalked hands into the rings, kipped effortlessly into a full pressout, brought stiffened legs up straight in front of him, toes pointed, then swung legs and trunk down and around and into a planche, his rigid body now parallel to the floor. He was still in his slacks, shirtless and barefoot, revolving now into a shoulderstand with his toes pointed straight at the ceiling.

“Ah, Runyan. Drinking the sweet wine of freedom.”

Moyers wore a spanking-new red acetate track suit with white piping; on his feet were white Adidas with a red flash. Runyan pushed into a handstand, triceps bunched beneath his smooth hide, rings vibrating slightly with the effort of keeping them in. After a few moments, he lowered into the shoulderstand again. He’d learned how to tune out interruptions in the joint.

“Have you thought about Homelife General’s offer?”

Another handstand, the rings vibrating more noticeably now. Sweat was rivuletting the sharply defined cuts between muscles. He was panting.

“The diamonds returned to us, a percentage reward paid, no questions asked...”

Runyan returned to his original pressout position, body vertical to the floor, arms tight to the sides, elbows locked.

“Even if you duck me and recover the stones—” Moyers chuckled disbelievingly- “what can you do with them?”

Runyan began the slow agony of a crucifix — moving his arms out to the sides so his body began to lower into the widening gap between the rings. He was panting fiercely now.

Moyers said reasonably, “We’ve got tabs on every fence big enough to handle them...”

Runyan’s stiffened arms were straight out from his shoulders with his entire weight supported by his lats, delts, and the bunched, rock-hard trapezius muscles.

“Israel? Holland? As a convicted felon, you can’t get a passport...”

Runyan lost it, letting go with his left hand, swinging like a chimp, then dropping lightly to the floor.

“The little lady took it out of you, didn’t she?” asked Moyers with his nasty little chuckle.

Runyan snapped him under the nose, hard, with an index finger. Moyers sprang back in reflex, tears starting from his eyes. Runyan jerked his towel from the leather horse and slung it around his neck. The slapping feet of a couple of joggers on the mezzanine running track above them echoed through the gym.

“Who is she, Runyan?” Moyers, eyes still watering, gamely got in his way. “I’ll just check out her license number anyway.”

Runyan spoke for the first time. “Rental.”

“She had to show them a driver’s license.”

Runyan seemed uncertain. “I guess you’ll find out anyway.” His voice was defeated. “She’s writing a book.”

“Writing a book?”

“Exposing the insurance companies.”

Then, for the first time since he had walked away from Q, Runyan started to laugh.