The Crime Writer

Chapter 28

Mort pulled back from the window, knocking aside a mannequin, and jumped off the display ledge, running for the door. I bolted.

Dodging honking cars, I sprinted across the street, tangling up with a pissed-off biker on the far side. Mort was at the curb, waiting for a break in traffic. I yanked my cuff free from the bike chain and ran up the street. A bus was just starting to pull out from a stop. I drew beside it, banging the side and yelling. It stopped with an angry hiss, rear doors yawning. Mort hurdled the biker and kept coming.

Afternoon commuters overloaded the bus. I shoved through them, tripping over paper bags and knees, waiting to hear the doors suck closed, but they held open on a lethargically timed delay. Horns bleated; the bus was nosed out into the slow lane.

I stumbled up to the front, the bus driver now joining the protests. Through five or six arms dangling from straps, I saw the rear doors begin to slide closed.

A thick hand snaked into the gap, blocking the rubber bumpers.

As Mort pried the rear doors apart, the front ones opened in unison.

I ducked down, slid off the front stairs on my ass, spitting out onto the curb in time to see Mort's boot vanish up into the bus. The doors snapped shut with a pneumatic wheeze, and the bus veered out into a stream of traffic.

Standing, I dusted myself off. The bus passed, Mort's face a blur through the smudged side window. He caught sight of me and moved to the rear, bucking like a dog in shallow water. He cleared the people on the back bench as if parting curtains, leaning forward menacingly, breath fogging the glass.

I stepped out into the now-empty lane, meeting his gaze as the bus accelerated through the intersection.

His lips moved. I see you.

"I see you, too," I said.

As I jogged back to the Highlander, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

Junior said, "I'm at the corner of Daly and Main. Gas station."

I was more relieved than I would have thought possible.

"How'd you get this number?"

"Ms. Caroline."

"What'd you tell her?"

"That you leave me to get chased by a buncha black guys so you could break into a murderer's Volvo." He laughed. "Juss kidding, homes. I say I wandered off to get me some eats."

I hopped into my car and headed to pick him up. He'd managed to run nearly three miles. I found him sitting on the concrete wall by the bathrooms, smoking a cigarette. He was new to the game, still working on a cool-looking exhale. I parked and walked over. I debated telling him how worried I'd been, but it would have been awkward for us both.

"What happen?" he asked.

I told him.

"Big Brother got some moves." He held up his hand, and we high-fived. "Even if he is old."

"I'm thirty-eight."

"Like I said." He tapped the pack of Marlboro Reds against the heel of his hand awkwardly, a trick he'd probably just picked up.

"When I was a kid, my grandfather caught me smoking and made me finish the whole pack," I said. "Every last one. I got so sick I never smoked again."

"Yeah? Any other a' them folk tales you got to tell?"

"No. But why don't you give it a go?"

He shrugged. "'Kay." He teased out another cigarette and held it up ceremonially before lighting it. He went after it quick and hard, the cherry lurching several millimeters a pull. He finished, lit the next off the butt.

After he'd smoked two more, I asked, "How do you feel?"

"Great."

The next three cigarettes he seemed to enjoy even more.

"How about now?"

"Million bucks."

By the ninth he'd mastered the French inhale. By the thirteenth he was blowing smoke rings. He crushed the fifteenth on the wall between his knees, paused to stretch his arms happily to the sky, then lit up another.

I climbed up on the wall, sat next to him.

"Bum one off you?" I asked.

Caroline looked me in the eye as if she were sizing up an opposing boxer. Her index finger moved from her chest to mine. "There's no chemistry here."

"It's just dinner," I said.

She crossed the shag rug and settled behind her desk, as if she felt better with a large object between us.

I peered at the photographs on the bookshelves. Group-home kids of all ethnicities lined up for the Matterhorn, like a carefully cast Disney brochure photo. A crew of counselors around a campfire, kids sprawled in the foreground and across laps. On the side of the desk, there was a picture of Caroline laughing, arm around a black kid in his early teens. She was younger, her face unmarred yet by injury, and her beauty was radiant. I pointed at the picture. "Who's that?"

She slammed the photo flat and slid it into a drawer.

I said, "I meant the boy."

She flushed. Her collar fluttered from the pivoting fan. With quiet dignity she reached back into the drawer, removed the picture, and propped it up again. "That was J.C. I had a lot of jobs before this one."

I checked my watch. "I called Kasey Broach's apartment manager this morning. If his answering machine is to be believed, he's available only from six to six-thirty. To implement the Caroline Raine home-visit rule, I've got to get moving. I'd love you to take up my invitation to dinner tonight, but your deliberation is getting unflattering, and I'm fragile."

Her lips twitched not quite a smile. "Don't invite me to dinner because you think it's doing me some favor." She stared at me evenly. "I'm just fine on my own."

"Yeah, you seem great the picture of well-adjusted, just like me. That's why I think you and I could use each other." I walked over, paused by the door. "Eight o'clock?"

She gave me a faint nod.

The counselor with the bitten-down fingernails stood just outside in the hall, pretending to tidy up the telephone table.

She looked up as I passed. "You hurt her, I'll kick your ass."

"I hurt her," I said, "I'll help you."