Death at the Wheel (34 page)

"Should I come?"

"As often as possible and only with me."

"You are okay," he said, a sigh of relief in his voice.

"Dom says at least I haven't lost my sense of humor."

"What have you lost?" he asked, suspicious.

"Some skin. Some security. And my car."

"The next one better be a HumVee."

"A what? It sounds like a buzzing insect of the blood-sucking variety."

"Sort of a cross between a jeep and a tank."

"Does it come with bodyguards?"

"That could be arranged. I was thinking of Rapunzel's tower myself. I'd build it and put you up there and..."

"And I'd let my hair down and you'd climb up...."

"And we'd make whoopee."

In the background, I could hear other voices, the crackling of radios, someone yelling. "Where are you?"

"Crime scene," he said. "Guy shot his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Killed the wife, the boyfriend may make it. It's touch and go right now. In front of their kid." His anger that this kept happening was heavy in his voice. And yet he had the time for me.

"Maybe I should be building that tower for you."

"How about a tower for two? As long as I know you're out there waiting for me, I can handle—" He stopped abruptly. "I should go. Bastard's out there somewhere with a whole arsenal. And his four-year-old kid."

"I had a terrible fight with my mother tonight. I walked out of Michael's engagement party. She'll probably never speak to me again."

"Don't worry. She'll speak to you. If she doesn't speak, she can't tell you how wrong you were and how badly you hurt her feelings." I could hear someone speaking in his ear. "Gotta go. I'll call you tomorrow...." A pause. Someone shouting at him. "They think they've found him. I've got to—"

"Andre?"

"Yeah?" The response of someone who's already gone.

"Be careful."

"You know it," he said grimly. "You, too. You be careful, too."

I put the phone down and picked up my drink, bourbon, which, Dom knows, is like mother's milk to me. No. Not like mother's milk. Not from
my
mother. Why had I let myself lose my temper like that? It wouldn't do any good. She hadn't heard what I was saying. Now I had both of them mad at me, and probably Michael and Sonia, as well, and I'd gained nothing from it. She wouldn't see me any differently and she wouldn't treat me with any more respect, understanding, or consideration. I just hadn't been able to help myself.

Inwardly I sputtered and fumed and replayed the argument, alternating, like avant-garde cinema, with clips from the accident, while I softened the memories of both by inhaling the soothing aroma of lavender and the water grew lukewarm. Once I picked up the drink, even though I knew that strong spirits are strictly forbidden to drug-taking slightly concussed accident cases like me. I was lucky Rosie and Dom hadn't given me a lecture instead. But they're real practical folk. They were letting me make my own choice. This time, I decided in favor of prudence, letting the melting ice turn my abandoned drink a nice pale gold.

Finally, Rosie stuck her head around the door. "Are you all right?"

"No. I'm brooding and obsessing."

"Good words," she said, coming in and closing the door behind her. "Ready to come out?" She tested the water. "Ugh. Too cold. Come on." She held out a big towel and I heaved myself upright and got wrapped in it. She searched through the medicine cabinet and found me a brush. "You'd better come and help me with Dom. He's storming around out there like an enraged water buffalo. I guess he didn't care too much for the policeman who questioned you at the hospital?"

"That would be putting it mildly. He was remarkably restrained, though. You would have been proud of him."

"I often am." She stared from me to the rejected glass as if remembering something. "When was the last time you ate?"

"I had a lovely brunch with the man of my dreams."

"No dinner?"

"Well, I was going to have dinner. My brother's engagement dinner, but I never made it to dinner. I had a huge fight with my mother and left before..."

"Uh-oh." Rosie shook her head. "Two sources of turmoil in one evening? On an empty stomach? I think this calls for some serious pasta." Dom and Rosie believe that food is the answer to most of life's problems. Food, discipline, love, and compassion. She handed me a nightgown—luckily she's tall, like me—and pulled a pair of socks out of her pocket. "Put these on. I'll get you a robe and then come in the kitchen. Helping me cook will give the water buffalo something to do. Hold still." She picked up the washcloth and scrubbed at a spot I'd missed. "There. Now you're beautiful again." She said it the way a mother talks to her child. "You want me to brush your hair?"

"That's okay. I can do it." She put the brush in my hand and went out. Rosie moves faster with her cane than most people who don't use one. When I first met her, she was in a wheelchair and her doctors doubted that she'd ever walk after being the victim of a hit-and-run driver. A drunk driver. But Rosie has more guts, grit, and courage than an entire football team; she pushed herself through an arduous and discouraging rehabilitation and taught herself to walk again. Dom had gotten himself assigned to traffic duty and had been so relentless in stopping and arresting drunk drivers, including some of the town fathers, that they'd promoted him to detective.

I looked in the mirror. Beautiful only in a mother's eyes. I looked pale, spotty, bruised, and worn. The whites of my green eyes reddened with weariness. Dom brought the robe, helped me into it, and tied it for me like I was one of his children. He finished tying it, straightened up, and held out his arms. "Hard day, kid," he said. I walked into them and felt safe.

"Rosie says you've been storming around like a water buffalo."

"Does she? Well, I get upset when bad things happen to my friends and bad cops make it worse."

"Crimmins?"

"Oh, he's not such a bad cop," Dom said, "he's just young and thinks he knows it all. I was probably a little like that myself. But I like to think I knew better than to be so rude and suspicious with an accident victim."

"I've dealt with cops who thought I set my own house on fire, tried to commit suicide, and even hit myself over the head with a frying pan. I'm getting used to it."

"That's just the problem," he exploded. "People shouldn't have to get used to it. A shocked and injured person should be treated with compassion." He cast a nervous glance toward the kitchen. Rosie worries about Dom's blood pressure. She's always on his case about his temper. "Let's go help the chef. She's making something very special for us."

Something special was a pasta that looked like long ringlets served with a sauce of sun-dried tomatoes and smoked cheese and roasted eggplant and red peppers and olive oil. It was sensational. So were the bread and the salad.

"Here's to midnight dinners," Dom said, raising his glass. We drank. "Only next time, Thea, you don't have to take such extreme measures to get an invitation. Rosie is always happy to have someone to cook for."

"Besides the water buffalo," she said. "It's all old hat to him." I didn't think Rosie's cooking would become old hat, even to an undiscriminating beast like a water buffalo, and I said so.

"When did she start calling you a water buffalo?" I asked.

"It's a term of endearment," Rosie said. "Don't you think it fits him?"

I shook my head. "No horns. Old accountant is what comes to mind."

"Oh, he's horny enough," Rosie said. "I keep thinking as he gets older he'll slow down, but I'm seeing no signs of it." Now that their kids had left and Dom had stopped treating Rosie like an invalid, they were pretty frisky. I'd dropped by more than once and found them pink faced and in robes in the middle of the day.

Dom made a threatening gesture with his fork. "See if I come rescue you again."

"Oh please! Threaten me with no more of Rosie's cooking, or that you'll never loan me your sweats and wash out my undergarments again, but please don't say you'll never come and rescue me. It's one of the foundations of my existence."

It was true, I realized. Dom and Rosie had become very important to me. The kind of parents I would have chosen if I could choose. Thinking about parents plunged me back into a welter of gloom.

"I keep hoping I'll never have to," he said.

"I don't deserve this from you. From anyone," I said, waving my hand at them, at our feast. "I keep trying to stay out of trouble but I just don't seem to be able to."

"It's not like you drove yourself off the road, Thea," Rosie said. "Isn't the real question would you stop helping people because it would make you safer?"

"That's what that cop at the hospital thought," I said, ignoring her question. "He thought I drank too much at a party, had a fight with my mother, and went out and caused an accident. He wasn't even listening when I told him about the car that bumped me."

"He was a jerk," Dom said, "instead of jumping to attention when you told him you thought the car had been tampered with, he... hey, wait a minute!" He stared at me, his detective's eyes gleaming. "What did you just say?"

"I said he wasn't even listening."

"I mean the rest of it...."

I tried to remember. "He wasn't even listening when I told him about getting bumped."

He shook his head impatiently. "That's not exactly what you said."

"When I told him about the car that bumped me," Rosie said.

"Exactly!" Dom said, getting excited. "At the hospital, she said she didn't know if it was a car or a truck or a van. Now she says it was a car!"

"Calm yourself, Dom," Rosie said. "She probably didn't mean anything by it."

"Did you?" he demanded. "Was it a car?"

"Why does it matter?" Rosie asked.

"Because I was expecting to be bumped—that is, I was expecting I might have some trouble—from a guy who drives a van. And if it wasn't a van..." I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, trying to bring back the memory. "It's no good," I said, after a minute. "I can't remember."

"Try harder," Dom said.

"Leave her alone," Rosie snapped.

"It might be important."

"It might be," she agreed. "But aren't you the guy who just a minute ago was criticizing cops who bully people when they've been in accidents and they're vulnerable and in pain?"

The water buffalo looked sheepish. He pointed at an empty chair. "It weren't me, Black Bart, it were him."

"Tell me another one," Rosie said. "Come on, Thea. Bedtime. I'll get you settled and then I'll send Dr. Florio in to apologize and give you your medicine." She steered me into the bedroom and tucked me in, just like I'd imagined she would. She didn't even make me brush my teeth. Dom came and brought me painkillers and a sort of an apology. But it was okay. Nice as it was to have Rosie protecting me, I knew he was right. If I'd seen a car, that might be significant. If only I could remember.

"I'm sorry about the car. About not remembering."

"You can't force it. It may come back to you, completely out of the blue. Or over the next few days as you get farther from the accident. Don't mind my impatience. I should know better...."

"Someone tried to kill me tonight." The words had a hard, ugly reality when spoken aloud.

"It does appear that way," he agreed. He didn't suggest I had an overactive imagination or try to soften things. Andre wouldn't have asked him to take me in if the dangers hadn't been real.

"But I don't know why. Other than Duncan Donahue. And he doesn't have a reason."

"Since when have we expected killers to be reasonable?"

"I do. I believe people have to have reasons for... for the awful things they do. Maybe not logical ones, but reasons."

"So we're saying the same thing. And you're convinced that it wasn't just an accident?"

"You heard what I told Crimmins. A car bumping me... that could have been accidental. But the steering... that was no accident. And even if it had been, how would you explain the man who set the car on fire? Someone tried to kill me, Dominic." It must have been a delayed reaction. I'd told Crimmins about it and hadn't felt a thing. Now my skin crawled horribly as I thought about being burned. My throat tightened, choking me, as I imagined not being able to get out of the car. Supposed I'd been more seriously injured? I would have been a sitting duck. A roast duck.

An earthquake of emotion—the aftershocks of fear, frustration, and rage—shook me from head to toe, setting off a tsunami of tears. "You'd better get out of here," I warned. "It's going to blow." He sensibly left me alone to scream and cry and pound the stuffing out of my pillow. When it was finally over, I fell into an exhausted sleep. A sleep tormented by dreams in which I rolled down endless slopes, crawled through many broken windows, and chased a formless, faceless man through an unending rainy darkness.

 

 

 

Chapter 27

 

Morning came, as it always does, bringing with it the wretched agonies that are the aftermath of a bruising experience. Even my ears and the soles of my feet hurt. Outside the window, rain splattered steadily against the glass from a leaden gray sky. April showers may bring May flowers but today the weather too closely matched my mood and I didn't need any more gloom.