In Big Trouble

Chapter 12

They ended up Earl Abel's, the restaurant that Emmie had mentioned, the place where secrets came out as the sun came up. But Crow just ate ice and played with a piece of pie, while Tess was almost too weary to lift the forkfuls of German chocolate cake to her mouth. Almost.

"Still not much of a night person, are you? You row in the mornings still?"

"Oh, yeah," Tess said automatically, as if he had asked if she was breathing on a regular basis.

"Of course you do. You row in the morning and you eat at Jimmy's for breakfast. You walk Esskay twice a day, and you always take the same route. You hang out in Kitty's kitchen, you argue with Tyner. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was."

"Not exactly." He might consider her life boring and static, but there were changes, significant ones. She just didn't know how to explain Jackie and Laylah, or even Detective Martin Tull, who had come into her life as Crow was leaving it. Nor could she explain the mix of feelings that came over her as she sat in her office, balancing her books. She felt a frisson of pride, yes, but also a suffocating sense that life was closing in too quickly, setting around her like a quick-drying concrete. She thought of her parents, going, to the same jobs every day for almost thirty years now, of how moody and distracted Tyner had been as of late. Every bowl of porridge was too cold for him, every bed too soft. It wasn't that long ago she had yearned for such sameness and security, but now that she had it, she was beginning to see the charming precariousness of her old life.

"How did you know about Hector's, anyway? Not exactly your kind of place."

"Emmie mentioned it when she came to see me today."

"Emmie came to see you?" She had been wrong, Crow could fake ignorance exceedingly well. Tess decided to let it go, for now. She'd find out eventually what he had been doing in her room.

"Yes. We went to lunch together."

"She's a good kid."

"A little…odd," Tess said. She thought it was a polite way to describe someone who was several Prozacs short of a prescription, but Crow frowned and shook his head.

"She's a brilliant singer, fucking brilliant. You can't expect her to be without a few idiosyncrasies. That's what makes her an artist."

"If you say so."

Crow crunched a piece of ice. Other than his haircut and a new range of frowning facial expressions, he hadn't changed that much, either. He had always chewed his way through a glass of postperformance ice in his Poe White Trash days.

"So, what did you think?" His voice was too casual.

"Of what?" Of Emmie?

"Of Hector's."

"The Shiner Bock was very good."

"No, of us. The band."

Tess hesitated. She thought the band was terrific, but she was reluctant to praise his new life, after the way he had mocked hers.

"At first, it felt a little over the top to me, too conscious of whatever musical style you were aping. I couldn't see that you brought out anything new in the covers you did. I thought it was gimmicky, blending all those styles. But then, I began to like it. It was like bluegrass and zydeco and-what did you call it?"

"Conjunto. Together."

"Conjunto," she repeated after him. "Anyway, I got used to it, and the differences weren't so jarring and I listened to the voices, and the instruments, and it all fit. It was the best performance I've ever seen you give." Then, grudgingly: "Emmie is extraordinary."

"Yes, she is."

"She told me-" But she didn't know how to finish that sentence.

"About her and me? I should have seen that coming, I guess, when she asked me where you were staying. Emmie is big into confession, but always on her own terms. It hasn't occurred to her yet that it's frequently hell for other people, when you always say exactly what you're feeling."

"Were you in love with her?"

He crunched another mouthful of ice. "We were a comfort to one another. Sort of the way I was a comfort to you, after Jonathan. A bookmark you put in your heart to keep your place, until you remember how to love again."

"That's not fair, Crow. I never thought about Jonathan when I was with you."

"Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, I was a comfort to her. Then, suddenly, she didn't need to be comforted anymore, not by me. We've been not-together now longer than we were together. But I feel responsible for her."

"Why?"

He started to say something, stopped, started over. "I don't know. Maybe I'm just a self-interested shit, who doesn't want to see her self-destruct when we've honestly got a chance to go somewhere with our music."

An uneasy silence fell. Tess was still smarting over his bookmark comment. It hadn't been like that, not quite.

"If you're so interested in Emmie's welfare," she said at last, "you might want to say something to her about her choice of men. I saw the guys she was cozying up to at Hector's. Men like that are not big on teases. She's going to get in over her head, and you're going to have to come on like Mr. Macho. I hear that got you canned at Primo's."

"Who says we got canned, Kleinschmidt?" Again, that strange twisted smile she still couldn't get used to seeing on Crow's face. "And who says she's teasing? Almost every Saturday night, she goes home with whatever guy has tattoos and piercings approaching the triple digits. I've tried to talk her out of it, but she assures me that she'll never get involved in anything that would make her miss Sunday breakfast at the Alamo."

"Breakfast at the Alamo-is that some code?"

"One of Emmie's many rituals. She likes to get some tacos and coffee, then sit in the gardens there and read the paper. She told me it started when she was a teenager, and trying to cultivate a reputation for eccentricity. An affectation that metamorphosed into a routine, you know?"

"Yeah, I do actually." Tess smiled. "Although I went the other way. I always tried to pass as conventional-school sports, jock boyfriends, bourbon choked down in finished basements with knotty pine walls."

"Whereas I had to do anything and everything to stand out-down to purple dreadlocks." He noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing her Cafe Hon T-shirt. "Or dying my T-shirt orange, because I couldn't have a Cafe Hon T-shirt like everyone else in Baltimore, oh no."

"I always saw you as this blissed-out boy who followed his heart."

"Was I?" Crow furrowed his brow, as if trying to remember someone they had both once known, many years ago. "I'd like to think so. I'd like to think there was a time when I just did what I wanted to do and didn't have to run it through eighteen different filters. A time when I knew what I wanted, and was sure of what I could do."

"What do you want right now?"

"I want-I want-" He was laughing, completely at ease for the first time.

"No thinking," Tess said. "Just say what you want, the first thing that comes to your mind. More pie, another cup of coffee? A Rolex, a new guitar, a chartreuse Cafe Hon T-shirt, a first edition of Poe's Eureka…"

"I want-" They were both giggling now, giddy as a couple of drunks.

"Say it, Crow."

"I want to make love to you."

All the other sounds of the restaurant seemed to disappear. Tess looked down at her plate. His voice had been low and sure, without a single teasing note to get them off the hook. She realized she was forking her cake in half. Not eating it, as Jackie would say, yet still obsessed with it. She didn't feel quite so tired anymore.

Crow wasn't finished. "I want to take you back to my house and take all your clothes off and put you in my bed and keep you there until we both walk funny, as if we'd been out to sea for weeks and weeks."

She wanted him, too, which surprised her, yet didn't surprise her. She wanted him because he had rejected her, and that left her feeling unfinished. A psychiatrist would say she only wanted the men she couldn't quite have, and she supposed her life so far supported this thesis. But now Crow was sitting here, saying she could have him. In which case, she shouldn't want him at all, right? So if she went with him, she was actually doing the right thing, right?

"What do you say, Tess?" Whatever filters Crow had learned to put up between himself and the world were gone now. He looked younger and older, very pure, as if he couldn't tell a lie to save his life. Yet he had been lying to her right and left over the past twenty-four hours. Which made him a bum, which made him her dream man, which made her-Jesus, didn't her brain have an off-switch?

"Tess?" he asked again.

"I think that could be arranged," she said.

Earl Abel's wasn't even two miles from the duplex Crow shared with Emmie, but it took them a long time to travel those two miles. It was as if they were in such a hurry that they had to keep slowing down. First in the parking lot-Crow wouldn't even let her get her key in the door lock, he had to kiss her right there, much to the rowdy amusement of some college boys who had arrived at the restaurant after a long night of partying.

"Nail her, man," one yelled.

"Get a room," another called out.

"Nail her, then get a room," a third suggested.

"What about your car?" Tess asked Crow, coming up for air.

"Leave it. Let them tow it. I don't care."

When they were finally in her car, he kissed her at stoplights, holding her face in his hands until horns sounded behind them.

"My place is closer," Tess said, even as La Casita's flickering neon sign flew past.

"No," Crow said. Now he was trying to kiss her as she drove, lifting up her hair in the back, pressing his lips against her neck and her throat. "I don't want to feel like some john you picked up in Brackenridge Park. Turn right here, onto Mulberry. Can't you drive any faster?"

She thought she was going pretty fast, but she was like a drunk who couldn't distinguish fifteen miles per hour from ninety-five. She was losing all her senses, except those Crow had engaged. His hand was under her T-shirt now, on the small of her back.

"How much farther?" she asked.

"Left here, then right on the second street, Magnolia Drive. I'm at the end of the block."

But once the car was parked, Crow simply began kissing her again. It was as if he didn't want to risk letting go for even the moment it would take to run up the walk. She wasn't so sure she wanted to leave the car yet, anyway. The truth was, it was delicious to neck in a car again, to feel sixteen again. She could have been parked in front of her parents' house, testing the boundaries as she had done back then, wondering how far she would dare to go with her father not-sleeping just yards away. One more minute, the boy would ask. Just a little more. Can I-? Will you-? And she assented, silently, always silently, for if she spoke of what she was doing, she would betray how conscious it was, how much she craved it, how she was really the one who was setting the pace, pushing them further and further on each date. Part of her wanted to keep going. Part of her yearned for Patrick to come charging out of the house and yank her from the car, and back into the safety of her childhood. When he didn't, there was nothing to do but keep pushing forward, until she found herself on her back in the Enchanted Castle. Sixteen had really been too young, she knew that in the split-second it had taken her high school boyfriend to finish. With the loss of virginity, a girl lost her best reason for saying no. From that moment on, she had to choose, and choose carefully, there was nothing between her and her desires. That had been the terrifying part, not the sex itself.

The strange thing was, it was no less terrifying now.

And then, with the suddenness of a nightmare, she was sixteen again and the thing that had never happened was happening-the car's doors were being thrown open, and there was yelling, and heavy, thick arms reached in from the darkness to drag the two of them apart.

"Put your hands up and step away from the car," an amplified voice called from beyond a bank of lights. The light was so bright that Tess couldn't see anything, but she was aware of running car engines and the sudden sound of a helicopter overhead.

"It's not what you think," she said, struggling against the arms that held her. Her braid had come loose at some point and her hair was flying around her head in snaky Medusa tendrils. Crow was lying in the street, a police officer's knee in his back, his hands being cuffed. Four other officers stood in a circle around him, and when Crow tried to raise his head, one pushed him back to the pavement with his foot.

"Leave him alone," Tess screamed. "He wasn't doing anything."

"Do you live here?" one of the officers asked impatiently. The one who had been holding her arms had finally released her, but she could still feel his bulk at her back.

"No, it's his place."

"Fine." He walked over to Crow, bent down, and took the keys from his pocket, using them to open the door. It seemed as if dozens of officers followed, although Tess later realized there were no more than six. Her sense of time was also off-it felt like hours passed, but her watch said only fifteen minutes had elapsed when they returned, toting a rifle bagged in plastic. A plainclothes officer had arrived at the scene, and they showed him their find with great excitement. But he shook his head, and although Tess could not hear what he said, he seemed angry and upset.

"Is this your shotgun?" the plainclothes officer asked Crow, now handcuffed and in the back of one of the patrol cars.

"I've never seen that before in my life."

"Do you have a search warrant?" Tess asked.

"We had a warrant for the arrest of one Ed Ransome and this was under the bed in what appears to be his room." The cop turned back to Crow. "And if this is the gun that killed Tom Darden, you're going to have a lot of explaining to do."

"Killed who?"

"Shut up, Crow," Tess called to him from the curb, where they had left her in the care of a big beefy police officer. "Just shut up and don't say anything until you get a lawyer."

The detective walked over to her. "You might want to heed the same advice, miss."

"Are you taking me in?"

"We've got a few questions to ask you. Unless you want to change your mind and file a rape complaint, then we'll make sure you get to the emergency room. How about it?"

It was first light now, a pale, ghostly rim of color showing at the horizon. Tess was aware of people streaming out on their lawns in bathrobes and night-clothes, staring curiously.

"Were you here waiting for us?"

"We had officers waiting here for him and officers following you. You threw us off when you left the restaurant in only one vehicle-but not for long."

"You brought the cops here? You brought the cops to me, to this house?" Crow called out from the patrol car. "Jesus, Tess, how fucking stupid could you be? I trusted you, and you screwed me again."

"I didn't-"

Two cops were pushing Tess into another patrol car now, slamming the door, so her protestations to Crow were cut off.

"I want a lawyer," she said, but it came out as a undignified whimper. Specifically, she wanted Tyner, and she almost cried at the thought of how far away he was. Lord help her, she'd give anything to hear that cranky old bastard screaming on the phone at her.

"You won't need one, miss," said the detective, who had taken his place in the passenger seat. "You're not being charged with anything. We'd just like to take you downtown and ask you what you know about your friend, Mr. Ransome."

"I know he couldn't kill someone under any circumstances."

The detective had sorrowful, cocker spaniel eyes. "Then maybe you don't know him quite as well as present circumstances would suggest."