9
Although there are plenty of parking spaces on Lake Avenue after seven P.M.—as Olivia Trelawney well knew—they are few and far between at five in the afternoon, when Hodges and Janey Patterson get back from Sunny Acres. Hodges spots one three or four buildings down, however, and although it’s small (the car behind the empty spot has poached a little), he shoehorns the Toyota into it quickly and easily.
“I’m impressed,” Janey says. “I could never have done that. I flunked my driver’s test on parallel parking the first two times I went.”
“You must have had a hardass.”
She smiles. “The third time I wore a short skirt, and that did the trick.”
Thinking about how much he’d like to see her in a short skirt—the shorter the better—Hodges says, “There’s really no trick to it. If you back toward the curb at a forty-five-degree angle, you can’t go wrong. Unless your car’s too big, that is. A Toyota’s perfect for city parking. Not like a—” He stops.
“Not like a Mercedes,” she finishes. “Come up and have coffee, Bill. I’ll even feed the meter.”
“I’ll feed it. In fact, I’ll max it out. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“You learned some stuff from my mom, didn’t you? That’s why you were so quiet all the way back.”
“I did, and I’ll fill you in, but that’s not where the conversation starts.” He’s looking at her full in the face now, and it’s an easy face to look into. Christ, he wishes he were fifteen years younger. Even ten. “I need to be straight with you. I think you’re under the impression that I came looking for work, and that’s not the case.”
“No,” she says. “I think you came because you feel guilty about what happened to my sister. I simply took advantage of you. I’m not sorry, either. You were good with my mother. Kind. Very . . . very gentle.”
She’s close, her eyes a darker blue in the afternoon light and very wide. Her lips open as if she has more to say, but he doesn’t give her a chance. He kisses her before he can think about how stupid it is, how reckless, and is astounded when she kisses him back, even putting her right hand on the nape of his neck to make their contact a little firmer. It goes on for no more than five seconds, but it seems much longer to Hodges, who hasn’t had a kiss like this one in quite awhile.
She pulls back, brushes a hand through his hair, and says, “I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon. Now let’s go upstairs. I’ll make coffee and you make your report.”
But there’s no report until much later, and no coffee at all.
10
He kisses her again in the elevator. This time her hands link behind his neck, and his travel down past the small of her back to the white pants, snug across her bottom. He is aware of his too-big stomach pressing against her trim one and thinks she must be revolted by it, but when the elevator opens, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are bright, and she’s showing small white teeth in a smile. She takes his hand and pulls him down the short hall between the elevator and the apartment door.
“Come on,” she says. “Come on, we’re going to do this, so come on, before one of us gets cold feet.”
It won’t be me, Hodges thinks. Every part of him is warm.
At first she can’t open the door because the hand holding the key is shaking too badly. It makes her laugh. He closes his fingers over hers, and together they push the Schlage into the slot.
The apartment where he first met this woman’s sister and mother is shadowy, because the sun has traveled around to the other side of the building. The lake has darkened to a cobalt so deep it’s almost purple. There are no sailboats, but he can see a freighter—
“Come on,” she says again. “Come on, Bill, don’t quit on me now.”
Then they’re in one of the bedrooms. He doesn’t know if it’s Janey’s or the one Olivia used on her Thursday-night stays, and he doesn’t care. The life of the last few months—the afternoon TV, the microwave dinners, his father’s Smith & Wesson revolver—seems so distant that it might have belonged to a fictional character in a boring foreign movie.
She tries to pull the striped sailor shirt over her head and it gets caught on the clip in her hair. She gives a frustrated, muffled laugh. “Help me with this damn thing, would you please—”
He runs his hands up her smooth sides—she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch—and beneath the inside-out shirt. He stretches the fabric and lifts. Her head pops free. She’s laughing in little out-of-breath gasps. Her bra is plain white cotton. He holds her by the waist and kisses between her breasts as she unbuckles his belt and pops the button on his slacks. He thinks, If I’d known this could happen at this stage of my life, I would have gotten back to the gym.
“Why—” he begins.
“Oh, shut up.” She slides a hand down the front of him, pushing the zipper with her palm. His pants fall around his shoes in a jingle of change. “Save the talk for later.” She grabs the hardness of him through his underpants and wiggles it like a gearshift, making him gasp. “That’s a good start. Don’t go limp on me, Bill, don’t you dare.”
They fall onto the bed, Hodges still in his boxer shorts, Janey in cotton panties as plain as her bra. He tries to roll her onto her back, but she resists.
“You’re not getting on top of me,” she says. “If you have a heart attack while we’re screwing, you’ll crush me.”
“If I have a heart attack while we’re screwing, I’ll be the most disappointed man to ever leave this world.”
“Stay still. Just stay still.”
She hooks her thumbs into the sides of his boxers. He cups her hanging breasts as she does it.
“Now lift your legs. And keep busy. Use your thumbs a little, I like that.”
He’s able to obey both of these commands with no trouble; he’s always been a multitasker.
A moment later she’s looking down at him, a lock of her hair tumbled over one of her eyes. She sticks out her lower lip and blows it back. “Keep still. Let me do the work. And stay with me. I don’t mean to be bossy, but I haven’t had sex in two years, and the last I did have sucked. I want to enjoy this. I deserve it.”
The clinging, slippery warmth of her encloses him in a warm hug, and he can’t help raising his hips.
“Stay still, I said. Next time you can move all you want, but this is mine.”
It’s difficult, but he does as she says.
Her hair tumbles into her eyes again, and this time she can’t use her lower lip to blow it back because she’s gnawing at it in little bites he thinks she’ll feel later. She spreads both hands and rubs them roughly through the graying hair on his chest, then down to the embarrassing swell of his gut.
“I need . . . to lose some weight,” he gasps.
“You need to shut up,” she says, then moves—just a little—and closes her eyes. “Oh God, that’s deep. And nice. You can worry about your diet program later, okay?” She begins to move again, pauses once to readjust the angle, then settles into a rhythm.
“I don’t know how long I can . . .”
“You better.” Her eyes are still closed. “You just better hold out, Detective Hodges. Count prime numbers. Think of the books you liked when you were a kid. Spell xylophone backwards. Just stay with me. I won’t need long.”
He stays with her just long enough.
11
Sometimes when he’s feeling upset, Brady Hartsfield retraces the route of his greatest triumph. It soothes him. On this Friday night he doesn’t go home after turning in the ice cream truck and making the obligatory joke or two with Shirley Orton in the front office. He drives his clunker downtown instead, not liking the front-end shimmy or the too-loud blat of the engine. Soon he will have to balance off the cost of a new car (a new used car) against the cost of repairs. And his mother’s Honda needs work even more desperately than his Subaru does. Not that she drives the Honda very often these days, and that’s good, considering how much of her time she spends in the bag.
His trip down Memory Lane begins on Lake Avenue, just past the bright lights of downtown, where Mrs. Trelawney always parked her Mercedes on Thursday nights, and wends up Marlborough Street to City Center. Only this evening he gets no farther than the condo. He brakes so suddenly that the car behind almost rear-ends him. The driver hits his horn in a long, outraged blast, but Brady pays no attention. It might as well have been a foghorn on the other side of the lake.
The driver pulls around him, buzzing down his passenger-side window to yell Asshole at the top of his lungs. Brady pays no attention to that, either.
There must be thousands of Toyota Corollas in the city, and hundreds of blue Toyota Corollas, but how many blue Toyota Corollas with bumper stickers reading SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE? Brady is betting there’s just one, and what the hell is the fat ex-cop doing in the old lady’s condominium apartment? Why is he visiting Mrs. Trelawney’s sister, who now lives there?
The answer seems obvious: Detective Hodges (Ret.) is hunting.
Brady is no longer interested in reliving last year’s triumph. He pulls an illegal (and completely out-of-character) U-turn, now heading for the North Side. Heading for home with a single thought in his head, blinking on and off like a neon sign.
You bastard. You bastard. You bastard.
Things are not going the way they are supposed to. Things are slipping out of his control. It’s not right.
Something needs to be done.