Cry Uncle (18 page)

***

AS IT TURNED OUT, arriving at the Shipwreck
early had been a wise move. Lois was the only one there, and she
was having a time of it dragging the heavy tables from the main
room’s periphery back to their usual places. She’d already swept
and mopped the floor, but the rafters were still draped with white
ribbons, and empty plastic champagne cups kept turning up in odd
places—on a window sill, under the juke box, lined up like ducks in
a shooting gallery along the ceramic edge of the urinal in the
men’s room.

“
So,” Lois said, holding a
plastic trash bag open for him to toss in his collection of used
cups. “How’s holy matrimony treating you?”

“
I’m not sure it’s holy,” he
grumbled, refusing to meet her dark-eyed gaze. “Pam and I were
married by a judge, not a minister.” He climbed onto one of the
tables and started uncoiling the white streamers from the
rafters.

“
Okay, so how’s legal
matrimony treating you?” Lois chattered up at him. Fortunately, she
didn’t give him a chance to answer, but instead launched into a
monologue about how lovely the wedding had been. “I wept through
the entire ceremony, Joe—and for many hours afterward. It was so
beautiful. The judge’s words, the ring, the music.... By the way,
who the hell is this Pamela person, anyway? Where did you meet her?
I mean, really, Joe, how long did you even know her before you went
and got yourself shackled? Not that it wasn’t one of the most
beautiful shacklings I ever saw, and the cake was incredible if I
must say so myself. But honestly, Joe, what the hell was it? Love
at first sight?”

Lois’s words reminded him how very few people
knew the truth about his marriage. Kitty knew, and his lawyer, and
the happy couple themselves. “Yeah,” he fibbed, trying not to sound
too gruff. “It was love at first sight.”

“
I’m not sure how I feel
about love at first sight. It’s supposed to be very romantic, but
it doesn’t seem all that practical.”

“
It can be damned
practical,” he argued. If any word described his marriage to Pam,
it was practical. He carefully unsnagged a thread which had gotten
caught on a splinter in the wood, then let the long white ribbon
drop, deciding it looked like nothing so much as toilet paper as it
drifted to the floor.

Lois scooped it up and shoved it into the
trash bag. “Well, I would never have guessed her to be your type,
Joe.”

Neither would I,
he thought uneasily.

“
I mean, you always used to
go for big bazooms. This Pam person, whoever the hell she is—if I
may speak frankly, Joe, she has more class than your usual
squeezes.”

“
Maybe that’s why I married
her,” he snapped, wishing Lois would shut up. He leaped down from
the table and took the trash bag from her. “I’ll go stick this in
the Dumpster.” He would do anything—even volunteer for a garbage
run—to get away from Lois and her unintentionally annoying
banter.

Outside in the alley, he unwound. What the
heck—he couldn’t be having a worse time with Lois than Pamela was
having with Lizard. The notion of Pam standing in one of those
interminable lines at the Motor Vehicle Department, with Lizard
screeching and moaning and making an all-around nuisance of
herself, brought a smile to his lips. It wasn’t that he wished
Pamela ill. It was just that if he was going to be miserable, he
wanted his wife to be miserable, too.

It turned out that the remainder of his day
was more or less unremittingly miserable. The early crowd started
dribbling in shortly after noon. They tended to be mostly dissolute
would-be writers, many of them sporting Hemingway beards and
running at the mouth about the Great American Novels they were
going to write if only they had a free half-hour. Yet instead of
rambling self-indulgently about their great oeuvres and their
chronic writer’s blocks as they usually did, they all spent the
afternoon slapping Joe on the back, congratulating him and dishing
out advice on how to keep the little lady in line, or on her back,
or whatever. Joe had to grin good-naturedly and pretend he
appreciated all their suggestions.

“
Never bring her flowers
when you’ve done something that would upset her,” one of them
admonished him. “Iif you fool around on the side, don’t bring her
flowers. It’s like hanging a neon sign around your neck
saying,
Guilty
.”

“
You’re the boss,” another
chimed in. “Don’t ever let her forget that.”

“
If things get stale, go the
vibrator route,” yet another recommended. “Works every time—as long
as you’ve got fresh batteries on hand.”

Joe barely had time to
recover from the afternoon crowd when the evening crowd arrived.
They were worse, because they were his friends. The fishermen and
Navy guys couldn’t stop riding him about his impetuous marriage.
The ladies seemed to think Joe was twice as irresistible, now that
he was officially out of reach. Men shook their heads and offered
their condolences; women whispered that if he had any problems with
his wife, he could unburden himself to them. A few romantically
inclined women played
Stand By Me
on the juke box so many times Joe almost stopped
liking the song.

No, he still liked the song. It was just that
whenever he heard it, he wanted Pamela in his arms, dancing with
him, smiling, looking slightly dazed, slightly amazed, and utterly
beautiful in her simple white dress. The song made him remember how
easily he and Pamela had moved together on the dance floor, how
well their bodies had matched, how natural it had felt to have her
in his arms. It made him remember how much he’d wanted to take her
home, and carry her into his house, and make her his wife.

He stayed until closing time, ignoring Brick
when he grunted that Joe should go home to the missus. Joe stayed
past when Kitty sashayed out the back door, swearing she was
bushed. He stayed until the last bleary-eyed beer-drinker shuffled
out the door.

The bar’s silence was eerie.
In the shadows, in the whisper of the air conditioning, he could
almost hear the echoing strains of
Stand By
Me
. He contemplated removing that disk from
the juke box, but decided to leave it in for now. By tomorrow
night, the novelty of his marital status would have worn off;
people would leave him—and the song—alone.

He gave the bar one final wipe, then locked
the cash register. Glancing up, he noticed that the steering wheel
clock on the wall read ten past two.

She had to be safely in bed by now. He would
be able to go home and get to his own room without running the risk
of seeing her and yielding to temptation. And he’d sleep late
tomorrow, and maybe, if luck stayed with him, she would go out
early and he wouldn’t have to see her in the morning, either.

He drove down Duval Street, which was still
lively with traffic and noisy pedestrians at that late hour, and
south into his own slumbering neighborhood. The front porch light
of his house glowed. Pamela must have left it on for him.

Damn her for doing something so thoughtful.
The plan was that he’d dive into bed without thinking about her,
without being touched by anything she did or was or meant to
him.

Okay. So she was considerate. As long as he
didn’t see her, he could stand a bit of consideration on her
part.

He climbed up the porch steps and let himself
into the house. The hall light was on, too, but the upstairs was
dark and silent. Everybody was asleep.

He tiptoed down the hall to make sure the
back door was locked—and spotted her on the screened porch,
sprawled out on the cushions of the wrought-iron sofa in the
corner. She was sound asleep, a book open across her chest.

She must have tried to wait
up for him. Like a good wife, a
real
wife, she’d sat up and read, waiting for her man
to come home from the late shift at work.

Damn her all over again. If she was going to
do stuff like this, leaving lights on for him, struggling to stay
awake so she could greet him when he finally got home...if she was
going to act like a wife, he was going to have one hell of a time
trying not to act like a husband.

Sighing, he went out to the porch, located a
book mark on the table, and tucked it into her book. Then he
gathered her into his arms. She seemed heavier tonight than she had
last night, because she was asleep. But he’d gladly take the extra
weight. If she woke up, if she opened her eyes and smiled and
whispered his name, he would turn left at the top of the stairs,
not right, and refuse to release her until he’d reached his own
room, his own bed.

Thinking about it made him hard. Feeling her
silky hair brush against his arm, her cheek nestle against his
shoulder and her knees bend around his other arm as he carried her
up the stairs made him more than hard. It made him feel protective
and bewildered and—damn her to high heaven—affectionate.

He blew out a long, weary breath.
Affectionate he could handle. Protective wasn’t like him—at least
when it came to anyone other than Lizard—but it was part of the
deal he’d agreed to when Pamela told him about her situation back
in Seattle with the hit man. And affectionate and protective were
enough to make him feel bewildered.

But he felt something more, too, something
restless, something troublesome, something as hot and steamy as Key
West in July. It made him walk faster, as fast as he could without
waking her, and practically hurl her onto her bed. Without even
stopping to pull off her sandals, he high-tailed out of her room,
sweating and aching and wondering how he was going to survive this
stupid marriage without losing his mind.

Chapter Eight

“
WHEN YOU SAY BINGO,” Mick
asked, “exactly what are you saying?”

“
I’m saying, I got a line on
her driver’s license.”

Mick pressed the mute button on the remote
control and leaned back in the overstuffed chair. The silent drama
being played out on the television screen across the room from
him—some gonzo was throttling some lady—was a scene Mick would
ordinarily have found engrossing. But Tony’s news was even more
engrossing, even if he didn’t trust the chump from here till
tomorrow. Sometimes he wondered whether the only good thing about
having Tony on his payroll was that Tony’s fellow police officers
believed him when he said Miss Hayes wasn’t in any danger from
Mick.

But other than keeping the Seattle Police
Department out of Mick’s hair while he tried to put the bitch out
of commission, Tony hadn’t delivered. Or more precisely, he hadn’t
delivered enough. Mick had been able to trace her credit-card
charges as far east as St. Louis, but from that point on she’d
disappeared into the black hole of cash purchases, leaving no
records, no trail. Where the hell had she gone? North to New York?
South to Atlanta? Back to the West Coast? He knew she wasn’t likely
to have flown out of the country; none of her bills was to an
airline. And besides, if she’d wanted to go continent-hopping, she
would have booked a flight out of Seattle, not St. Louis.

It was safe to assume she was still in the
U.S., and sooner or later she was going to run out of cash. But
where would she be when she had to go back to living on plastic?
When was she going to stick one of those gold cards of hers into an
automatic teller machine for a cash advance, and send Mick another
clue as to her whereabouts?

He tried to keep his temper with Tony. The
guy was risking a lot to dig up whatever information he could for
Mick. Of course, he could always stop, say no, tell Mick where to
shove his annual donation to the Tony Fund. But if he did that,
Mick could finger Tony for everything he’d done in years past,
which would expose Tony for the bad cop he was. So Tony had damned
well better keep trying to find Pamela Hayes.

“
Her driver’s license,” Mick
said impassively. After tasting success with the lady’s credit
report, and then winding up empty-handed, Mick wasn’t going to let
himself get excited about anything Tony had to tell him. Not until
it panned out.

“
More than that, Mick. Her
name.”

“
I know her
name.”

“
Not anymore, you don’t. She
changed it.”

Mick squelched the optimism
that threatened him. Until he had everything—which meant, until he
had
her
—he refused
to get his hopes up. “What did she change it to?”

“
This wasn’t easy to find
out,” Tony hedged.

Squeezing me for more money, Mick thought
angrily. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how hard it was to find out,” he
snapped. “Tell me her name.”

“
Brenner.”

“
Brenner what?”

“
Pamela Brenner. And she’s
traded in her Washington State license for a Florida
one.”

Mick’s pulse sped up. She was in Florida,
apparently planning to stay long enough to have changed her
license. Evidently she was really afraid of Mick, if she’d changed
her name, too.

Well, he’d never taken her for a fool. She
had enough brains to recognize that Mick was somebody she ought to
be really afraid of.

“
Florida’s a big state,” he
remarked. “Give me an address.”

“
I couldn’t get the address.
My contact in Florida got the heebie-jeebies and hung up before I
could wring anything more out of him. He wouldn’t even say for sure
that Pamela Brenner is the same person as Pamela Hayes. According
to Florida’s central computer system, someone whose license number
matched Hayes’s Washington state license changed her papers to
Florida. Maybe it’s her, maybe it’s not.”