Pulse

73

P earl shouldn’t have followed Jody the next morning, but she did.

Things were accumulating in a way that made her uneasy. Who was this Sarah Benham woman, and what was the basis of her friendship with Jody? What might Jody do to get herself into the kind of trouble that would follow her all her life? Pearl suspected her daughter wasn’t far from going to the demolition site of Mildred Dash’s apartment and causing a problem. Youth often thought that if enough hell was raised, a solution would be forthcoming.

Why was Jody so discontented? Such a pea under the mattress? Pearl thought about Jody’s father. He’d been, if anything, too mellow. It had been as if his music sweetened his life. Even more than Pearl had sweetened it. He had always been too preoccupied to get into the various kinds of trouble that seemed to attract Jody. Where the hell did Jody get-?

Pearl put the question out of her mind so she could concentrate on what she was doing. Following her daughter, as any good mother would.

Ahead of her, Jody paused to look at some junk in a street vendor’s cart. T-shirts, caps, belts, paste jewelry, silver and gold chains, sunglasses, and visors-the gaudy display seemed to sway in the morning breeze. Or maybe that was an illusion.

Pearl moved over to a florist shop doorway, out of the stream of pedestrian traffic. While she watched her daughter absently pick through the street vendor’s merchandise, she was thinking Okay, or No, no, don’t buy that.

Mom interfering by telepathy.

Jody did buy something. Apparently some small piece of jewelry. Then she walked on.

As Pearl followed, Jody broke into a jog in order to join a knot of people hurrying across an intersection with the traffic signal.

Uh-oh.

Pearl knew she’d have to jog to keep up, maybe cross over the other way and keep pace on the opposite side of the street. If traffic would cooperate.

All she could see of Jody now was her head of springy red hair. She decided her best bet would be to reach the intersection where Jody had crossed and see if she could catch a break in the traffic.

Pearl thought she might make it and was approaching the curb when a large shadow engulfed her. She slowed, glanced back, and saw that one of those red double-decker sightseeing buses was about to make a right turn in front of her.

She slowed to a walk, giving ground to the behemoth.

When she was almost at a stop, something rammed into the small of her back and shoved her from behind.

She was in front of the turning bus.

Pearl instinctively brought up her hands and slapped at the front of the bus with both palms. She pushed away from the warm wall of metal as the bus came at her. It wasn’t moving fast, but fast enough that she couldn’t get out of its path. She was in so close she wasn’t sure if the driver was even aware of her.

Her palms were stinging, her locked elbows straining, as she backpedaled and tried to hold the bus at bay.

Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall…!

Her maneuver worked, but not for long. She found herself falling. There were shouts, the hissing of air brakes.

Someone or something had her left upper arm in a strong grip and yanked her sideways and away, as the bus hissed and squealed to a stop.

Pearl lay limp on the pavement, breathing in the smells of oil and heat and exhaust fumes. She saw that one of the bus’s tires was only inches from her twisted right leg. People were gathered around her, trying to help, touching her almost everywhere in order to reassure themselves, and her, that she was alive and not dead or seriously injured.

Pearl brushed them away and managed to get to her feet, leaning against the stopped bus for support.

Standing, squinting, she looked around her. Somebody had given her the extra few inches of pavement she needed in order to survive. Whoever had grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side had saved her life.

She looked at the stunned, silent faces, and knew no one.

Then a hand touched her shoulder and she heard a familiar voice.

“You okay?”

Pearl’s savior, Nancy Weaver.

The killer had a way of moving at a near run on a crowded sidewalk without attracting attention. He’d pushed Pearl slightly harder than he’d intended, and she’d almost been killed. He hadn’t wanted her dead; he needed her alive-at least for a while longer.

Fortunately some other woman, very much alert, had kept Pearl from perishing beneath the wheels of the bus. The killer smiled. That wasn’t Pearl’s fate at all. He would decide that.

This was a message to Quinn as well as to Pearl: Anything could happen any time, anywhere, to anyone. But they already knew that. Brakes could hiss, tires screech on concrete, and then Wham! And it’s a different world.

The message, a simple reminder: My choice.

“I had my choice,” Weaver said, later at Q amp;A. “I could save Pearl and make sure she was all right, or I could go after whoever pushed her.”

Pearl was sitting in her desk chair, bent forward and holding a damp washcloth on her knee where she’d skinned it. The knee had tiny bits of asphalt in it and stung like hell. Pearl was getting sore all over, the way it was sometimes after an auto accident. She was grateful for what Weaver had done, but anger and humiliation were also in her jumble of emotions.

Weaver must have been tailing her.

Then she thought about what almost happened and her anger paled.

Someone tried to kill me.

The others, Quinn, Fedderman, Sal, and Harold, were listening and watching the two women.

“Didn’t you even get a glimpse of whoever shoved you?” Sal asked in his gravelly rasp. It almost hurt Pearl’s throat to listen to that voice.

“All too fast,” Pearl said, “and from behind.”

“It could have been one of two people,” Weaver said. “Keep in mind that I was concentrating on Pearl, on what was happening, so the rest was just an impression. Both possibilities were average height and build. They sort of crisscrossed behind Pearl just before she was shoved, so there was no way to know who did what.”

“You think they were working together?”

“Naw. Nothing like that.”

“How were they dressed?” Quinn asked.

“One guy in a brown suit. The other had on jeans, maybe, and a light blue short-sleeved shirt. Hair color on both of them was brown. Dark, anyway. Neither had a shaved head or a full beard, nothing like that. Average size, maybe on the slender side.”

“Not much of a description.”

“I was busy saving Pearl’s life.”

“Tailing her so you could report to Renz.”

“Doing my job.”

“Question is,” Fedderman said, “why did the killer take a run at Pearl?”

“If it was Daniel,” Quinn said.

“Be too coincidental if it wasn’t.”

“To Feds’s question,” Harold Mishkin said, “I think the answer is Quinn. This is a game to Daniel, and Quinn’s the dragon he has to slay. He’d see it as a triumph over Quinn if he could get Pearl. Even if he didn’t actually kill her. It’d raise the stakes of the game even higher.”

“And he’s a high-stakes player,” Pearl said.

Sal was staring at Mishkin. “Sometimes you surprise me, Harold.”

“We’ll see what Helen has to say about it when she comes in,” Harold said. But they all knew that Helen had more or less weighed in on this one already.

Weaver went over and got a cup of coffee. She sipped it while she walked back to the group. Her hand holding the cup began to shake, and she held the cup with both hands to steady it.

“This was close,” she said. “It wasn’t for show.” Some of the coffee sloshed onto her hand. “Damn it!” She glared at all of them. “I thought you people were protecting Pearl with your own tail.”

“I took it off,” Quinn said, “once it became known you were keeping a loose tail on her for Renz.”

Weaver smiled miserably. “You weren’t supposed to know that.”

“Everybody knows everything eventually,” Quinn said.

Nobody spoke for a while, everyone thinking it was the who, what, when, and how much that made a difference.

Everyone but Quinn. He was thinking about what happened to Pearl. So close. But was it meant to be that close? This wasn’t a knife in the dark, slow strangulation in a hog-tie, or artfully applied pain that eventually became shock and death. This wasn’t the way the killer took his prey.

This was a message.

“There’s nothing more to say on this for now,” Quinn said. “Meeting’s over.”

“One thing,” the now perfectly calm Pearl said, looking at Weaver. “Thank you, Nancy.”

Rare for Pearl.

The text message Pearl received on her phone fifteen minutes later was succinct and untraceable:

Whew!