Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (13 page)

In his rush to reconstruct, he’s forgotten she’s newly pregnant and still recovering from another huge shock. He took neither condition into consideration when pole-vaulting to conclusions and staggering her with the results.

“Can I get you something?” he says after she uncovers her ears and smoothes her hair away from her face. “Are you going to be sick? Shall I get Colin?” He half-rises from his chair.

“No! Stay there! Whatever you do, do
not
get Colin! He must
never
know of this. Never! If he thought he contributed in even the smallest way to Rayce’s death, I hate to think what might happen.”

She has a point. This isn’t in the category of kickstarting a memory. This is about creating a new memory Colin might not be able to live with.

“And you mustn’t tell Amanda,” Laurel continues. “No one else can know about this.
No
one. Do you understand?”

He remains on the edge of his chair; he does understand her concern, he does support her in theory, and he is duty-bound to disagree in the face of her shortsightedness.

“But,” he begins.

“No!”

“
But
,” he repeats, “If this very strong likelihood—
extremely
strong likelihood—is never revealed, Rayce’s death will always be labeled a suicide. Are you saying that’s preferable to exposing the truth?”

“The people who knew and loved Rayce don’t believe for a minute that he took his own life. They’ll persist in that belief whether or not we give them a reason—a reason that could destroy another life. If that’s selfish of me, too goddammed bad. Colin’s already under a tremendous load. He already feels an inordinate sense of responsibility for my father’s death and for David’s. Anything more—
especially
if it has to do with Rayce’s death—could break him.”

Nate focuses on the intense colors of the Vlaminck water scene displayed on the end wall. He wants to smile; he wants to laugh. This is, after all, a former officer of the court—a former ADA, at that—demanding that he withhold evidence in a capital case. And he is, after all, an old hand at withholding evidence for reasons that weren’t always as good as hers.

“You do know that you’ll have to tread extremely carefully, as will I,” he says. “And I don’t mean just with Colin. If ever a match is established between the coke Rayce swallowed and the shitload fed to your father, there could be endless repercussions.”

“That’s not apt to happen. You heard Grillo. He said the FBI doesn’t even want to hear about looking for a match, and he said the local task force isn’t interested.”

“For the most part . . . For the most part, he said of the local task force, and by that I believe he meant
he
wasn’t in full accord with their stance.”

“So what? He’s just one investigator and if he does get lucky and does bring about a match, he still won’t know how the coke got into Rayce’s pocket. Someone would have to furnish that information and I know it won’t be me.” Laurel stabs him with a determined stare. “Are you ready to say the same? Are you ready to ignore what you uncovered today and get rid of any samples that may have been removed from the scene?”

Does he really have a choice? Does he really want to become her adversary? Her enemy? Who needs this shit, he wants to say as he prepares to give in to Laurel’s stringent demands, Amanda’s reasoned arguments, and Colin’s offer of employment. After he flushes those two samples he has in his pocket, of course.

Four days after the giant mistake, Hoop is still holed up in the motel. He leaves his room only to do his job and pays one of the maids to bring carryout meals from the restaurant. The TV he broke and paid for still hasn’t been replaced, so watching the local news is catch-as-catch-can when maintenance tasks take him to rooms with sets that work. For reading material, he relies on random sections of newspapers scavenged from wastebaskets and the one fresh whole copy bought from the machine in the motel lobby.

The bought one he hung on to for what all it had to say about the shocking demise of the prominent attorney and the horrifying attack on Colin Elliot’s brand new wife. The parts of the story that interest him most, tell how the police have no strong leads toward catching the unknown attacker and how the survivor of the attack was too distraught to give a detailed description of the knife-wielder.

He’s read those parts a dozen times by now and they still don’t ring true. He still smells a rat in there someplace. The cops must have found his knife by now. How could that not be considered a lead? The new wife must have got over being distraught by now and remembered at least one thing about what he looks like. And nothing’s been said about the death of her father—about the dope put in the old man’s water jug. Wouldn’t somebody have figured that out by now? Are they playing dumb or are they playing him for a jackassed-fool?

He slides the Styrofoam container his supper came in to one side and pushes back in the rickety replacement desk chair like he needs extra room to decide if they do take him for a fool. But till he comes across good reason to believe they don’t, his best bet is to lay low and do whatever else he can to change his appearance.

The gash on his chin has blood-stiffened black threads sticking out of it like prickers and an oozing crust along its length that’s ugly enough to make most people forget anything else about his face. His hacked-off hair would be the attention-getter if it weren’t for his chin, and when his chin’s healed up some, that’s the area he’ll have to work on. For now, the damage done with the bent scissors is mostly hidden from questioning eyes by the Yankees baseball cap and by avoiding people as much as possible.

Keeping to himself is no big deal; he’s had lots of practice, after all. The hardship is going without television—that, and the freedom to come and go when he wants. Like now, when he should be on the way to the storage yard to tell Audrey everything he couldn’t bring himself to tell her earlier in the week.

But it’s not dark yet. He leaves his seat at the desk, leans over the heating-cooling unit to peer out the window. Although the days are getting shorter with August more than half gone, there’s still too much light left at seven-thirty in the evening to risk the walk along Route 22. And it would have to be a walk because the damaged bike is too wobbly to ride next to a busy highway.

He stays put for a while, taking what relief he can from the recirculated air blasting out of the air conditioner. He can be glad the fan works even if the cooling part doesn’t, and be glad he’s got a roof over his head and food in his belly. Things could be a lot worse. He could be living in a truck inside a storage unit.

Later, when it’s full dark, he pays a visit to the supply room, again on the lookout for left-behind items that might come in handy. A jug of mouthwash would come in handiest right about now; the medicinal taste could be tolerated for the good it would do his nerves. All he finds along that line are a few sample-sized tubes of toothpaste and a small bottle of cough syrup missing just a swallow or two. He grabs the cough syrup as better than nothing, takes another look around and then leaves without the plain ordinary bandages he was also hoping to find.

He waits till he’s back behind closed doors before he downs the cough syrup in one gulp. There wasn’t enough of it to produce a real kick, just enough to make him want more of the ingredient that would.

He stretches out on the unmade bed and wrestles with the urge for a while. When he feels like he’s losing, he takes the urge into the bathroom, where he stares at his reflection without mercy—without the baseball cap, without the salvaged sunglasses, without anything covering the stitched-up wound on his chin that makes it hard to keep his mouth shut. For the first time in his grownup life he’s sorry his kind can’t grow beards. Not that a hairy face would do much good. Even if he had a beard and mustache to hide behind, he still wouldn’t be white.

In the end, he gives in, puts on the cap and sunglasses, sticks a couple of the cartoon-decorated Band-Aids on his chin and sets out for the Chink watering hole down the road a short piece. On the way there, he walks tall and proud like he’s got nothing to hide. The same goes for inside the place, where slinking along in a secretive way would make him a standout instead of the regular he’s been since the motel bar and restaurant were placed off-limits to motel employees.

He needn’t have worried about being noticed. At the bar, all the stools are filled and standees are lined up two-deep in places. They’re all fixated on a baseball game on TV with no eyes for any oddities in their midst. The tables are full, too, and the people there are only interested in what they can grab with their eating sticks. If anyone looks up when he passes, it’s to signal one of the busy waiters.

Hoop takes a position at the less crowded end of the bar near where he sits on quieter nights. Without being overly pushy about it, he shoulders close enough to the bar to ask for a shot of rye whiskey. He takes encouragement that the usual bartender doesn’t seem to recognize him. But that could be because the bartender’s too busy to say hello. Or it could be because Hoop didn’t order a beer with the shot, an order that always brings a scold for requesting two drinks at once.

Now that he bothers to notice, he sees that the bartender’s not scolding anybody tonight. People are getting whatever they ask for without any backtalk, making him wonder for the first time if backtalk’s just an act, a queer kind of entertainment brought out when things aren’t so busy.

Hoop downs three shots at sensible intervals before the ballgame ends and the crowd thins out some. He keeps a sharp eye on the TV and the nightly news wrap-up following the game. The same sharp eye notices that the bartender’s still not serving scolds with the drink orders and that one of the remaining barflies is a Chink, the one that’s always here and always nursing a single draft beer for most of the evening.

In all of Hoop’s eight or ten visits to the restaurant bar he’s never heard the draft beer guy say anything or seen him mix with any of the other Orientals. Tonight’s different, though; every time the bartender comes within range, the formerly silent guy’s got something to say. Even though he’s saying it in that squawky high and low-pitched talk they use, it’s easy to tell there’s a problem. And the bartender’s hand motions say it’s a big problem.

Whatever’s wrong is still wrong when the draft beer drinker makes threatening motions of his own and stomps out of the place. Hoop returns his attention to the newscast. When it ends without mention of Saturday’s doings in Glen Abbey, he whiles away the rest of the evening with another couple of shots. Wondering what the two Chinamen were arguing about takes the place of wondering if his changed appearance is fooling anybody.

At closing time he walks out to the bus stop with the bartender the way he always does. They’re not three steps into the smothering August night when the bartender demands to know what happened to his chin and his hair, like curiosity’s been killing him as well.

“Bike accident,” Hoop says. The haircut he blames on the muggy weather and hurries with the question his quick answers earned him the right to ask. “What was goin’ on back there when that guy started givin’ you a hard time?”

“Take long time find ghost ID. Want more money forge ID papers bring ode father Taiwan USA.”

“What’s a ghost ID?” Hoop says and gets an explanation that’s not easy to understand at first. When he does grasp that ghosting is the term for stealing the identity of a dead person, a dozen more questions come to mind right off. Up front is a question about why the old father needs fake ID in the first place. That one he doesn’t ask out loud because he thinks he already knows the answer. Either the father or the son has something to hide and that makes them related to him beyond the racial ties scientists say they have.

The next most important question he does ask out loud and he does get the answer most hoped for: With enough money, it seems that nearly anything can be bought from the Chink barfly.

After the bus wheezes off carrying the stretched-thin hard-up bartender to his other job, Hoop is too roused to return to the motel. Never mind that it’s like a sweat lodge out here and he’ll have to walk to the storage yard—that’s the direction he takes.

He rehearses what he’ll say, how he’ll speak his regrets even though it’s been done more than once before. He’ll list his failures and spell out what’s been learned from them. He’ll admit to the mistake made when he didn’t look before leaping. He’ll accept the shame of having been bested by a woman and then tossed off his bike with such force that he lost his weapon.

After that, he’ll remind Audrey and himself of the times when he did succeed, how he did eliminate several of the worst offenders and one of the surest threats to his freedom. He’ll tell of how he thought to put an old man out of his misery as a means of reeling in the very worst offenders. Then he’ll talk a little about the stick-to-itiveness that had him willing to await opportunity for hours, if not days, in attics and garages, and the chances he’s now willing to take to see this mission through.

By the time he enters the yard, he’s dizzied by the plans forming up in his head. After he shuts himself into the unit, lifts the cover on the load bed of the El Camino, and crouches down next to the paint bucket, he’s unminding of the heat and airlessness. He might even stay the night if it takes that long to explain everything to Audrey.