Day One (16 page)

A deep disquiet rumbles through me. I need to leave. Quit my job, go find a new coffee shop to haunt. Create some distance and give Ruby Jane air. Drown my sorrows in a stranger’s lesser latte.
Hell, Common Grounds is a few blocks down the street and I’d only have to trade in two syllables. Instead, I’m sitting here like a nervous adolescent while she makes tea. My stomach is knotted up; I don’t want anything. I know she’ll bring me something anyway. That it will be something I like helps explain why I created this mess. I can hear her talking to Marcy, but I can’t make out the words. Shop talk, most likely, but I’m feeling paranoid. When she finally sits down, she doesn’t make eye contact. Or perhaps it’s me who won’t make eye contact. We both look at the fish as she slides a mug across the table top. The aroma rising from the surface of the cup offers me a small measure of comfort. Coffee, black: my current poison of choice. I lift my eyes.

“RJ, listen, I just want to say—”

“You don’t have to say anything. Really.”

“It’s just ... I feel like I owe you an apology.”

Her gaze bounces around, finds her tea cup. “If anyone should apologize, it’s me.”

I slump. It’s even worse than I thought. “How do you figure?”

“I just think—” She brushes her bangs off her forehead. “It wasn’t fair, what I did—”

“Ruby Jane, don’t. You have been my friend. I’m the one who crossed the line.”

“I don’t know why you think you crossed some line. Maybe I crossed the line.” She blinks, and light glitters in her eyes, silver reflections of fish. “Maybe no one did.”

I feel like she’s trying to somehow excuse my behavior, but the effort is only making me feel even older and more ridiculous. I sip my coffee, concentrate for a moment on the crisp warmth, the flavor of earth and cocoa. I’m trying to decide what to say, sure whatever I come up with will only sound foolish or desperate.

“Skin, we’ve shared a lot over the last few years. I’ve been closer to you than anyone else.”

“What about Pete?”

She looks away from her tea, meets my gaze at last. Her eyes are moist. “You’re sitting here, aren’t you? Where the hell is he?”

I am only too aware of Pete’s absence. Theirs had been a mercurial relationship from the start, erupting out of the hot flash of a murder investigation that ended with Ruby Jane gut-shot and half-dead, and Pete nearly so. After a long period during which my own emotional fluctuations were downright stable in comparison, he’d moved to California the previous year to work as the greenhouse manager for a plant nursery. It was supposed to be temporary, six, maybe eight months, a stop along the way to a planned transfer back to Oregon and an even bigger operation out near Woodburn. But he keeps not getting the transfer, continues to stay on in the Central Valley. As the months pass, an inertial stasis seems to have set in. Except for one thing.

“He flies up to see you fairly regularly though, right?”

Fire floods her cheeks. “You think I’m building a life around a once monthly weekend round trip from Sacramento? Even if he didn’t realize he was blowing me off when he took the job, I sure as hell did.” Her back goes rigid and she presses against the table top, mouth set into a hard line. I expect her to get up and walk away. But then her face softens and her hands relax, her shoulders drop. She shakes her head. “I like Pete. He’s a kind of weird I can appreciate. There was a time when we might have had a chance. But that was a long time ago. He’s never gonna get past himself.”

I’m not a stupid man. I’ve puzzled out crimes as petty and simple as car prowls and as complex as multiple murders and criminal conspiracies. I’ve served on organized crime task forces, held my own against hot shot defense attorneys on cross. Hell, I even manage to surf the internet without handing over control of my computer to Ukrainian identity thieves. But apparently I’m too damn dumb to understand what Ruby Jane is trying to say to me. I lower my eyes,
raise one hand to my neck. I try to resist scratching my red patch, but my fingertips brush the rough flesh, an involuntary reflex as old as I am.

Ruby Jane reaches across the table, snatches my hand away from my neck. I look up, meet her eyes. She’s smiling, melancholy. I let her pull my hand away from my throat. “Skin, you’re in your fifties and you still let that thing on your neck convince you that you don’t deserve anything good.” Her touch thrills me, an electric buzz in my spine. I don’t want her to let go. She doesn’t. “I get it. I’m smart and pretty and ambitious and young, or at least younger. But not nearly so young I can’t decide for myself whether I want a crusty grump with a face like a baboon’s ass to kiss me.”

She studies me, the crusty grump. It’s an act I find undaunting— but only from her. I see the strands of grey at her temples again, and I realize I know exactly how old she is. Her age was one of those personal details about a crime victim I’d learned in the course of the investigation into the attack that had nearly killed her. She’s thirty-five, almost twenty years my junior. She’s not a child. Not a girl, but a woman who can look me in the eye and not flinch.

“You may not realize it, but I haven’t seen your neck since you came to check on me at the hospital the day I got shot. Remember that?” The question doesn’t require a response. “You’re a good, funny, smart man when you’re not awash in self-pity. Okay, so you’re retired. It’s not a death sentence. Stop acting like it is.”

Anyone else—Susan or anyone from my cop days—could tell me the same thing, use the same words, and they’d strike me as harsh or condescending. Raise my hackles and bring out the fight in me. But from Ruby Jane they’re like the gentle caress of a cool, damp cloth on my fevered forehead. I feel at once embarrassed and reassured. I open my mouth, intending what, I don’t know. But she isn’t finished, which saves me the trouble of saying too much.

“I was as much a part of what happened as you were. I’ve made more than my share of bad choices, but this isn’t one of them. My
mistake was not being sure of what I wanted, and instead of facing it I ran away. I’m not sorry you kissed me, and I’m not sorry I kissed you back. But before we can go further with this, whatever it is, we both need to be clear about something. I know why I kissed you, Skin. But do you know why you kissed me?”

“I ... Ruby Jane, of course—”

“No. Wait. Don’t just toss out an answer. Think about it. Did you kiss me because of how you feel about me, or did you kiss me because you’ve lost faith in who you are? I can be with the Skin who first walked into my shop two years ago and made fun of frou-frou coffee. I can’t be with the Skin who fears his own imagined irrelevance.” She lifts her free hand, touches my cheek. “Don’t you become Pete. Okay?”

“I couldn’t handle the jail time.”

She laughs quietly, then turns her head to the fish tank and stares into the water. Without releasing my hand, she reaches out and runs our interlocked fingers along the cool surface of the tank. A coral gourami bumps along the glass, following our fingertips.

The shop door opens behind me, bells jangling, and the fish darts away. Ruby Jane looks past my shoulder and I turn. I don’t know who I expect to see, but Susan isn’t it. She oughta still be hip deep in the operation at Mitch’s place. Neither Ruby Jane nor I speak as Susan crosses the café and stops at our table.

“Hello, Skin. I’m sorry to intrude. I tried calling, but you never answer your phone.”

I look over at Ruby Jane, then back to Susan. “Sorry. I must not have heard it beep.”

“I realize this is abrupt, but I need you to come with me. Something has come up.”

I don’t respond right away, and her gaze bounces between Ruby Jane and me, then down to our clasped hands. I wonder for a moment if she realizes what she’s walked in on. I don’t want her to even guess. When she turns her gaze back to me, RJ gently disentangles her hand from my own.

I lean back in an attempt to appear casual. “So what’s up? Did you find Eager?”

“No, it’s not that.” Susan has known Ruby Jane as long as I have, if not as intimately, but she hesitates the way she would in front of a stranger.

“What is it then?”

“Mitch is out of surgery.”

“That was quick. How’s he doing?”

“They say he’ll pull through.”

“That’s good, I guess. But what does it have to do with me?”

“He wants to make a statement.”

I’m surprised he didn’t lawyer up. “I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

“He says it’s a matter of life and death. Skin”—her fingers drum against her thighs—“he’s only willing to talk to you.”

A Day, A Week, Eighteen Years Earlier

B
ig Ed Gillespie first met Hiram Spaneker in a casino parking lot in Reno. Big Ed was twenty-two at the time, three weeks past being cut by the Oakland Raiders, dead broke and dead drunk. A decent senior year as linebacker for Southern Oregon University and a four-six forty got him invited, undrafted, to Raiders camp. His beer-drenched work ethic and inability to cope with pro blocking schemes got him sent packing again. He took his training camp pay—two weeks’ worth plus a modest signing bonus—to Vegas, where he distracted himself with craps and blow jobs purchased from plasticine women he met off full-color postcards. He burned through five grand in a baker’s week. When he checked out of the Barbary Coast eight days after his arrival, he couldn’t buy gas for the drive back to Medford. He sat in his car in the parking lot, windows open under the hot sun, and thought about a guy he knew who went to Australia to play Aussie Rules football. Whatever that was.

A couple crossing the parking lot caught his eye. They were holding each other up, weaving as ineffectively through the parked cars as he had through the silver-and-black tackling dummies. Just another afternoon in Vegas. His first thought was they must be
in the same shape he was in, broke, drunk, and short of options. Why else leave the casino in the middle of a hot afternoon? But as they neared his car he heard them laughing. Mid-fifties, overweight suburban types. Khaki and Keds, red cheeks and white arms. Big Ed got out of his car and approached.

“Do you folks know where the Lucky Duck Lounge is?” A name he made up on the spot.

The two turned as a unit and stopped, unsteady even with four feet between them. Sunlight gleamed off the woman’s hair, the color of L’Oreal brass.

“Lucky who?”

“Not you.” Big Ed waded in, one hand for each of them, the dregs of his last Jack-and-Coke doing his all thinking. He crushed the man’s larynx with a single strike, put his knee into the woman’s gut as he pulled her toward him. She gasped and started to call out, but too late. He cracked her head against the pavement while her husband clutched his throat, gagging.

They’d been happy for good reason. He pulled fifty-eight hundred bucks out of the man’s pocket, a roll of crisp hundred dollar bills, fresh from the cage. He left them in the parking lot and drove straight through to Reno. No idea if the woman was alive or dead, though he guessed the man would survive. Maybe never speak again. Either case, no point in hanging around in Vegas waiting for cops to start asking questions.

In Reno, he checked in to the Peppermill, but this time he stuck to bar sluts and nickel craps. When the dice went cold, he backed away, hit the buffet or returned to his room for a nap. He gambled enough to get his room comped, won enough to maybe nurse the old couple’s fifty-eight hundred bucks for weeks.

Then he met Charm Butcher.

She was practically his neighbor. Born and raised in Klamath Falls, fifty miles down the highway from Big Ed’s home in Medford. Tall
and blond with pillow boobs and a mouth to rival his ill-tempered conditioning coach back at S.O.U. She’d just graduated, though her alma mater was the type that advertised on late night television, and she’d come to Reno with a flock of girlfriends for a bachelorette weekend. When Charm saw Big Ed in the bar at the Peppermill, tan and fit and stretching his black Raiders t-shirt out of shape with shoulders like a pair of loin roasts, she decided he should be the one to deflower her virginal, soon-to-be-wed gal pal. And, what the hell, he could give her and the others a ride as well. He spent two hours slamming tequila shooters with the crowd of grain-fed Klamath beauties, then allowed himself to be led to a suite and straddled first by one, then another in succession. Big Ed awoke the next morning, naked and alone. When he finally collected his scattered clothing, he learned not only had the girls from Klamath Falls given him the ride of his life, rivaling even the team parties back in school, they’d left with the remains of his fifty-eight hundred dollars—more than three grand. All he had to his name was his car, a couple of changes of dirty clothes, and eighty bucks in Peppermill chips.

At first, Big Ed thought he could parlay the eighty bucks into some real cash. He’d been playing pretty well. But when he got down to the craps table, the bleat of the slot machines and the stench of the dealer’s cologne seemed to settle behind his eyeballs and lay siege to his concentration. His chips didn’t last through his first watered-down drink. It was noon, and he was more sober than he’d been in two weeks. He headed for the Fish Bar, the very spot where he’d met Charm and the girls the night before. He didn’t figure there was anything to gain admitting that he couldn’t pay for incidental charges to his room, so an hour and a half and six Blue Hawaiians later, he scrawled his name on the tab and then stumbled out into bright daylight.