She lifted her head and looked first at the women, then at the cops. Her mouth formed a surprised O. But before he could figure out what she was looking at, she turned away and followed the cop in the suit to the waiting car.
Pete looked again at the doorway and saw the third man emerge. He was still holding the cigarette, but loosely, as though he’d forgotten about it. He was big, like the plainclothes cop, but where the cop was all business and purpose, this one seemed lost. His shirt was wrinkled, his jaw blue where he hadn’t shaved. He stared toward Mrs. Malone as she got into the car and as he watched her, his face changed. From the dazed look of a man who’d just woken up, his expression set into something like fear.
Click.
The car started up and moved away. Pete started his own engine, and followed as closely as he could.
Ruth sat in the back of the car, still, silent, holding her breath for long, tense moments. Devlin was in front, in the passenger seat. She couldn’t look at him, but felt his eyes on her in the mirror now and again, the weight of his stare, the relief as he slid his gaze away.
She wanted to ask again where they were going but she knew they wouldn’t answer. She forced herself to be silent. To wait. They must be taking her to the kids. She should focus on that. On Frankie and Cindy.
The hot leather seat stuck to her legs through her cotton pants: her palms were damp. The siren was blaring and as they sped through lunchtime traffic, Ruth felt a thin current of warm air from the front windows drift back to her as she sat, stifled, trapped. The driver muttered something at an old station wagon that was slow to get out of his way.
She watched his impatience as though from a distance. Stared at the pink freckled skin emerging from his stiff collar, at the freshly cut hair, shaved too short at the back. She realized that it was the cop from the apartment. The one called Quinn. She remembered her anger at the sight of him on his knees by her bed and felt it fade, replaced by an unexpected dart of tenderness, by a desire to protect him. He was too young for all of this: to have a boss like Devlin, to be a cop in the first place.
She leaned back against the ripped headrest and closed her eyes. Wished she was somewhere cool. Somewhere with space and silence. Then came an unexpected memory of summers at her uncle’s farm in Nebraska, and an intense longing for the rippling shadows of the prairie grass in the evening, and the wide skies bleached by the fading light. She remembered the uneven creak of her Aunt Shauna’s rocking chair, the ice cracking in her glass of lemonade, wheat chaff dusting her skinny, tanned legs, and she wished herself there now: rocking gently on the porch, looking out over the darkening stretch of land, listening to the whispering breeze and the crickets and the hush of night in a town that was a thousand miles from New York in July.
The car stopped abruptly and she was brought back and jerked forward and had to put her hand on the seat in front to get her balance. The pink freckled neck did not turn.
She saw that they were in an empty lot in a neighborhood she didn’t know. Confused and suddenly panicked, Ruth looked at Devlin, but he was already out of the car and opening her door. To anyone watching, it might have seemed like courtesy, but these doors only opened from the outside. He bent and reached in and she flinched in horror as he fitted his wide palm into her armpit. She tried to move back, to shrug him off: she couldn’t bear that he should feel the dampness of her, that he should smell her on his hand—but he pulled hard and she found herself half out of the car and slipping on the rough ground, and then walking with him, his hand still tucked in that shameful place.
They stumbled on, Ruth’s blouse sticking to her and her ankles aching where the straps of her shoes cut into her heat-swollen flesh. She could feel that her face was flushed: partly heat and partly humiliation at what this walk—this man—was forcing her to reveal.
A fly buzzed around her face and she slapped at it, then another, and another. She waved her hand, fanned herself, tried desperately to hold onto some sliver of poise. So many flies. Could they smell her: that yellow, female stink of her? Her groin, her armpits, even the sweat running in dirty trickles down her neck and back. Staining her.
She was breathing hard through her mouth when she realized that it wasn’t herself that she was smelling and tasting. This was a new smell. A smell like meat that had lain too long in the sun. Something sweetish.
She saw a dark swarm of gathering flies ahead, heard their impatient buzzing as they jostled to get closer to that smell.