Magic Line (24 page)

‘Older people can be so selfish, can't they? If she can't drive it she should let you have it.'

‘We were kind of edging up to that deal when I . . . blew it. Blew the tire, blew the deal. And now that she's picked up stupid Zeb with the eyebrow ring, looks like she doesn't need her one and only granddaughter any . . . mmm.' She sucked hard several times, took the pipe out of her mouth and stared at it. ‘Whass matter with this pipe?'

‘Looks like it's empty. You mean your granny just found this person named Zeb? He just started helping her this week?'

‘Yes. He turned up at the bus stop Tuesday morning and carried her grocery bags home. So now he's her hero. They're fixing everything in her house and the last I heard he was starting on the neighbors.'

It can't be, Robin thought, but . . . the eyebrow ring and the tats . . . It wasn't possible he could have enough luck to find Zeb and a better car just by accident like this, but what if . . .?
It's too fantastic
. But it would be dumb to be this close and not find out. He looked at his watch, pretending to think about the time. ‘You know, I really have to go.'

‘Aw, come on, I'm just getting comfy.' She slid a fingertip slowly up his arm, along his collarbone and up his neck to his mouth. ‘'S'nice here in the shade. Let's light up another jolt and get better acquainted.' He sat watching her, getting impatient.
She should be limp by now. God, she's just one big appetite.

‘It's great, but I have to get going,' he said, keeping it amiable. ‘But listen, I'll make you a deal. You're a little too lit up to drive anyway, so why don't you move over here,' he opened his door, ‘and I'll come around and put a little more crack in that pipe. You can have fun while I drive you to your grandmother's house.' He was out, closing the door, walking around.

‘Oh, for God's sake,' she said when he opened her door, ‘why would we want to go
there
?'

‘Because if it turns out this Zeb character is the one I know, I have a little business to talk over with him.'

She tossed her hair back, sighed. He could see she knew, in the part of her head that was still tracking a little, that going to Granny's house was the oddest idea she had ever heard from a date. She was basically shrewd, too, so she must realize there was something damned odd about her new friend's interest in her grandmother's car. But he had said the magic word, ‘crack,' and the drugs owned her now, so she moved.

The keys were still in the ignition. He fixed the smoke first, held the lighter for her, got it going. She had trouble dredging up the name of the street, but she told him to head out Valencia and it would come to her. She never did get it all right, but as they approached the bus stop corner she recognized it and told him to turn right. She was slurring her words badly by then, and when they reached the unmanned gate on Camino de la Tierra, she just tapped his arm, said, ‘Mmm-mm,' and pointed inside.

Robin drove through the gate, past the empty caretaker's booth. He was taking it slow, letting Valerie point and murmur her way toward Grandmother's house. They rounded a little curve and then another, and there, just ahead, was a pink house with a gray Buick in its carport. An older model, true, but clean and well kept, looking like a trouble-free ride to Yuma and perhaps beyond.

And none other than his old friend Zebulon was unloading groceries out of the trunk.

Then Valerie balked. Some part of her mind recognized that going to Granny's house stoned, in the company of the ominously capable stranger who got her that way, was not going to get her a warm welcome. And Valerie was a girl who, having been granted a great many favors as she grew, now expected the path to be made smooth for her. Valerie didn't suffer rejection, she dispensed it.

‘I changed my mind,' she said. ‘Turn around.'

Robin half expected that a smile might break his face right then, but he summoned one from somewhere as he bent toward Valerie, said, ‘OK,' and kissed her lightly on the lips
. God, the smell.

‘Just give me a minute alone with silly old Zeb,' he said, turning off the motor right there in the street, putting on the brake. ‘Then we'll go get a great big pizza with everything,' he smiled wider, ‘and take it to your place with a lot of beer and eat naked. What do you say?'

That put a whole new face on the plan, and on Valerie. ‘What I say, Dicky Boy,' she said, purring like a happy cat, ‘is that I'm starting to think you are kind of a find.'

TWENTY-ONE

T
he price he had to pay for all the good meals he was eating, Zeb understood now, was that a couple of times a week he had to take Doris grocery shopping, which was about as much fun as a cold-water enema. She was picky about quality and she wanted to be sure she got value, so instead of just tossing things into a cart she read all the labels, debated the relative merits of competing brands, and consulted often with meat cutters and the people stocking produce. He suspected her of enjoying the process and wanting it to last, which probably wasn't a crime but was so opposite to how he felt about it that it almost gave him a rash.

He was feeling cranky anyway because she'd been on his case about a couple of tools he forgot and left out of the shed. He'd been shifting boxes around, taking a lot of stuff off shelves to find a quilt she wanted to mend with that thread she just got at Walmart. All the way to Walmart to buy some thread, could you believe it? And in the store, standing at the thread rack with a piece of fabric comparing, choosing, didn't she care that she was already old and the earth had turned several times since she began to look at thread colors?

When she finally found the quilt she wanted in the shed he had to put everything back, but naturally it couldn't go back just the way it was before. She had to direct him, tell him where to put every box. It wasn't hard work, just annoying because she kept changing her mind. She really cared about keeping the shed neat, and when they were done she said, ‘There now! Doesn't that look fine?' Zeb thought it looked just the way it did before they started. But Doris was so pleased, she fixed him a terrific salami sandwich for lunch with a wedge of cheese on the side.

After lunch though, as he was backing the car out to go to the store, she spied the rake and the crowbar. They weren't in the way of anything, just leaning against the front of the carport, where the shed abutted the house. He'd stood them up there, just for a minute, to get them out of the way of something he was moving and forgotten to put them back.

As soon as Doris noticed them she had a hissy fit about ‘tools lying around,' and ‘letting the place look like Appalachia.'

Zeb said, ‘Hey, don't worry, I'll get them put away before the queen comes for tea.' But instead of taking that for the little joke that was intended she got all huffy and said just because she didn't live in a palace was no reason her things couldn't be treated with respect. So by the time they got to the grocery store nobody in the car was talking about anything but the essentials.

Zeb pushed the cart and reached down the high things. There were long waits in the aisle while she made decisions, more as she carefully crossed items off a list held two inches from her eyes. Zeb got an inner vision of himself as one of a long line of leaf-cutter ants, carrying his precious fragment along a tree limb toward a distant nest.

By the time he got the groceries loaded in the Buick, his mouth felt like the desert and he couldn't remember a single food item he liked at all. Doris was cheerful now, though – shopping perked her up and she remarked on the freshness of lettuce and the price of bread. When they were nearly home, she said, ‘Let's put these things away fast and read a couple of chapters of our story before I have to start cooking.'

‘OK by me.' In fact, it was more than OK, it was very good news. To his surprise, Zeb had been pulled right into the story of the failing English merchant in Cuba and was crazy about the daughter in the book, Milly. He saw that she was willful and gave her father a lot of worry, but she was beautiful and loving and he wanted her to enjoy her pony in peace. He feared the advances of the devious Captain Segura, and was afraid her father wasn't clever enough to fool the spies.

Doris said
Our Man in Havana
was an amusing satire. Zeb didn't know what that meant but he liked the story. Anxious to find out what happened next he went right to work when they got home. And as fast as he carried sacks in, Doris put stuff away. At home, she wasn't making decisions any more and she knew where stuff went, so she sped up.

When he came out of the house for the last two bags, he blinked when he saw Valerie's car parked a couple of car lengths away. Or rather not parked, just stopped in the right lane. There was very little traffic in the streets around Doris' house so the car hadn't caused any problems so far, but why was Valerie just sitting out there?

And how in holy hell could that be Robin coming from her car?

Zeb stood still by the open trunk of the Buick and watched with his mouth open as Robin walked up to him, smiling. It was a funny smile, though, kind of frozen there, not at all heart-warming.

‘So this is where you ran to,' Robin said. The smile was still pasted on his face but it was making Zeb shiver now. For one thing it didn't match the eyes, which had that glittery sheen they'd had when he first got out of prison. So when Robin reached out to him, instead of taking his hand Zeb backed away.

The smile turned mocking then and Robin said, ‘I need your car, gimme the keys.' He said it casually, in that way he had of saying or doing the most shocking thing in a matter-of-fact way, so you were thrown off balance and just did as he said. It was one of his oldest tricks; Zeb knew it well.

It had always worked on him before but Zeb was older since Monday. He had run from the stash house in terror, faced the fact that he was not cut out for a life of crime, and he wasn't about to quit being sorry as he read the accounts of the four men who died in the invasion. So he shook his head and said, ‘Not my car.'

It didn't work, of course – Robin didn't give a holy shit whose car it was. He didn't even bother to argue, just said, ‘Give me the fucking
keys
, Zeb.' He was getting angry about the delay so now he would inflict more pain than necessary to get what he wanted, because now he would enjoy doing it. Zeb knew that and got braced to stand the pain, since he knew he had scant hope of fending off any of Robin's attacks.

But then two more things happened at once. A Crown Victoria edged around Valerie's car and came to a stop at the bottom of the carport, and Doris came out of the house with her hand in her apron pocket, saying, ‘What's going on?'

A man and a woman got out of the Crown Vic, said something to each other across the car and walked toward them. Wait, they were pulling guns out from under their jackets – what was that all about? Doris paid no attention to them, just walked up to Robin, squinting, and asked him, in a voice Zeb had never heard her use before, ‘Who are you?'

Robin turned his cruel smile toward her and said, ‘I bet you're Valerie's Gram.' He had his back to the Crown Vic, hadn't seen it yet, but only had to take one step to get his left arm around Doris, pull her up tight against him and clamp her there securely while he threatened her with his right hand, which suddenly held the very small pistol he had shown Zeb before the home invasion. Doris gave a little squeak of alarm and began to squirm, trying to get loose.

But both of the people from the Crown Vic had guns in their hands, too, and were braced a few feet away now pointing them at Robin and Zeb, shouting, ‘Police! Put the gun down!' When Robin turned, surprised for once but still holding Doris with the gun in her ear, the woman yelled, ‘Put the gun down
now
!'

But Robin would never do that, Zeb thought – he was going to use Doris as a shield to help him escape and it didn't matter at all to him if she was alive or dead while he did that. He was already starting one of his bold maneuvers, walking toward the two people with badges instead of away, saying, ‘You people back up and put your guns down or I'll kill her right now.'

But as he made that move he passed in front of Zeb and in that two seconds, the last two he would ever get to do something right, Zeb grabbed the crowbar from the side of the shed and brought it crashing down on Robin's elbow, the one holding the gun, the only part he could reach without maybe hitting Doris. He knew his moving would force the plain-clothes detectives to shoot him – how could they not? But he saw the Derringer fly from Robin's hand and dove for it.

Then all the guns in the world seemed to speak at once. Zeb had one blinding, transcendent moment in which he thought he saw how he could do it all better the next time, and then something hit him in the head and he was gone.

TWENTY-TWO

T
estimonials and conferences with the lawyers took up the whole morning Friday. At one o'clock the chief sent up a couple of pizzas, ‘to celebrate your crew's fund-raising skills,' his note said. ‘Congratulations to you all on a job well done.' There was a postscript: ‘Ask for any help you need as you wrap up this difficult case.'

‘Oh, yeah,' Jason said. ‘Thanks a million for all that fine work – now go sit in the corner while we decide if you're fit to be a cop.' It was his first administrative leave and he was feeling the implied slight.

‘Hey, don't take it personally,' Delaney said.

‘What other way is there to take it?'

‘It's just a protocol they have to work through. Be grateful – it keeps the cop-haters from crying foul. You'll get cleared by a review board of your peers and that will be the end of it.'

‘Think of it as a paid vacation,' Ollie said.

‘Which I'm really ready for,' Sarah said. ‘Is it my imagination or was Thursday three days long?'