Thicker Than Blood (6 page)

Turning when she got no response, she saw him loping toward her, his business suit seeming slightly out of place as he wedged his way between a nurse still in uniform and a probable hooker examining a tear in a fishnet stocking.

“What I have here are two tickets for the Ferris wheel,” he announced.

“Oh, no. I don’t do rides.”

“They make you sick?”

“No.”

“Then come on, it’s good for the soul.”

“My soul is fine as it is, thanks.”

Hank caught her hand and looked into her face. “I know there’s a little kid in there somewhere. She’s way too busy being a grown-up.”

Inexplicable anger welled inside her. Looking down, she extricated her hand. “I guess you prefer childish behavior.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Life’s a little grim without a little of it.”

“So now my life is grim.” She turned, intending to stalk off, but there were too many people to walk quickly.

He followed in awkward silence.

A woman wearing leather and chrome knocked over a Coke bottle with a rubber ball and gleefully clapped her hands when she won a pint-size stuffed panda.

Rachel stopped. The stream of fun-seekers made its way around them. She tilted her chin at Hank. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry.”

Hank’s puzzled look faded to an uncertain grin.

“I’m out of sorts. I was rude. I apologize. Let’s do the Ferris wheel.”

He followed her to the gate and they watched the huge wheel bring a seat to the platform.

When the attendant raised the bar, Rachel hesitated. “I haven’t been on one of those things since I was a kid. I threw up.”

“I thought you said they didn’t make you sick.”

“I forgot,” she said, but got in anyway.

He settled onto the seat beside her. “If it happens, promise you’ll lean over the side. This is a new suit.”

She laughed. “Count on it.”

Cool air rushed softly across her face as the wheel slung them slowly skyward. It halted, teetering at the top. Feeling somehow vulnerable, she drew her shoulders up. Peering over the rooftops, she was surprised to see all the way to the garage. “I think I can see the lights in my apartment.”

“Where?”

The seat swung dizzily as she leaned forward to point. Her hand brushed his as she grabbed the cross bar.

“It won’t fall,” he said.

The wheel began its downward slide.

“What makes you so sure?” she shouted.

“Odds are against it.” he touched the back of her shoulder, then put both hands in front of him on the bar.

When they bounced to a final stop at the bottom Rachel declared, “I’m starving,”

He offered his hand to steady her exit from the seat. “I thought Ferris wheels made you throw up.”

She took it. “Not any more, I guess. I want a hot dog.”

They doused their buns with everything available, although in the dim light at the side of the concession stand they were hard-pressed to identify the contents of the condiment bowls.

Hank downed his in four bites.

“Your eyes are watering,” Rachel said, handing him her cup of lemonade.

“Jalapeños.” He wheezed and drank some lemonade. “So what’s next?”

“A teddy bear. Or a panda will do.”

He spent eight dollars missing the row of dingy mechanical ducks at the next game booth.

He handed her the gun. “You try. I think it’s rigged to miss.”

She nodded solemnly and shot down five ducks before pausing.

Hank whistled.

“My father taught me,” she said when the man handed her a small brown bear.

“A dead-eye with a rifle and a trigger-happy knee. Not your average femme fatale.” He laid an arm lightly on her shoulder. Laughing and from time to time pointing at some oddity, they toured the remaining tents and booths.

An old woman with stringy black hair thrust a long-stemmed rose into Hank’s hand. “Para la señorita, señor,” she lisped, her mouth showing places where teeth should have been. “Take it,” she said to Rachel. “You’ll get precious few pretties when you’re old.” The woman bowed her head in studied supplication. Her scalp showed blue-white through the thinning hair.

Hank took the rose and shoved a five-dollar bill into the woman’s gnarled hand.

When the woman departed Rachel said, “You paid her too much.”

“She seemed so…pathetic.”

“She’s probably got fifty thousand dollars in the bank.”

“You always believe the worst case scenario?”

“And I’m usually right.”

Rachel caught sight of a clock behind a man hawking fresh-pulled taffy. “It’s almost eleven and we’ve got nine blocks to walk,” she said and quickened her pace.

Darting around a broad Mexican woman, Rachel almost knocked over a short, thin man with a cane at the woman’s side. Hank had to jog to catch up.

When they reached the side door of the garage she already had the key in her hand. “Thanks. I’m glad you insisted,” she murmured, more to the key than to Hank.

“Me, too.”

“Go get your car. I’ll open the gate.”

He pulled up to the exit and lowered the window. “I trust you’ll give it a good home. Be careful of the thorns. It bites.” He thrust the rose at her and was gone.

The flower, its ruby red made black by the streetlights, was beginning to droop. Rachel told herself she should just toss it out. But in her apartment she filled an empty Coke bottle with water and slid the stem into it.

333

By morning, the rose had lifted its head. She carried it down to the glass booth with her.

Lonnie wasn’t there. She called, his name echoing through the garage. No response.

Thinking he might have overslept, she phoned his home, and when his machine answered, shouted into the mouthpiece, hoping to wake him up, until the final beep cut her off.

Rachel performed the opening chores herself. How could she have been so gullible? No one knew better than she the intricate patterns of the addict’s lies and denials.

Of course Lonnie was using again. She should have packed him off to some inpatient program. But she hadn’t wanted to deal with it. So she had played the game, listened to his lies. She was as angry with herself as she was with him.

When the flurry of noon traffic had subsided, Rachel headed for her apartment to grab a sandwich. Gazing dully at the elevator’s panel of buttons, it occurred to her that she was playing the same sort of game with that damn car, knowing full well that it was responsible for Jason’s death and doing nothing.

The decision came like a pinball finally slipping into the slot it has been avoiding: She would call the cops now. Right now. What harm could there be in an anonymous phone call? Why had she let her father and Bruno frighten her about it?

She got off the elevator at level C and walked briskly toward the water agency’s row of cars. She hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when she saw the gaping space, like a missing tooth, where the DeVille had been.

Chapter Eleven

The helicopter arrived mid-afternoon with a package for the water quality lab. Rachel locked up her little office, hoisted the box to her shoulder, and crossed the street to the InterUrban Headquarters, thinking she hadn’t hired Lonnie as a favor to him. She definitely needed another pair of hands and feet.

Still, she had been curious about the laboratory, had wondered just how much science there could be in a glass of clear water. So here was her chance to see it.

When she opened the door to the lab, a shaft of sunlight was slanting through the windows and bouncing across row upon row of shiny steel cabinets. She stepped inside, taking in computerized equipment that seemed to belong more to science fiction than to something as ordinary as water.

A man strolled toward Rachel, hands in pockets, the broad shoulders of a weightlifter straining at the seams of his immaculate lab coat. He gave her a wide, well-practiced smile, stuck out his hand and announced his name like an emcee introducing an entertainment act. “Harry Hunsinger. What can I do for you?”

“Just making a delivery.” She had seen him before. He drove a ruby-colored Maserati. She’d figured he must make pretty good money to afford it and wondered why anyone needed a car that went two hundred miles an hour.

“Hey, that looks too heavy for a lady.” He reached for the box, bringing his body close enough for her nose to fill with the scent of a designer cologne. The face that looked down on her was the sort that seemed calculated to make a teenager swoon.

Rachel slid the box to a counter, thinking he probably had great abs, probably took off work to go surfing.

He stepped toward her again. “Why have they got you delivering packages? Where’s the guy who usually brings this stuff?”

Rachel leaned away. “He’s sick.”

“Ah,” he sighed as if she had told him the secret of the universe. A look passed over his handsome face and was gone. “But I thought the garage ran the deliveries.”

“I do. I own the garage.”

“That right?” Harry Hunsinger leveled an intent gaze on her. It didn’t seem to go with the rest of him. “Mind telling him I need to see him when he gets back?”

“Sure. What about?”

“One of the boxes he brought over was damaged.”

“I remember it. But it wasn’t Lonnie’s fault. The package arrived like that.”

“I’m sure you’re right. Say, since this is your first visit, how about a tour?”

“Thanks, but I—” Rachel wiped her hands on her jeans, feeling tacky and somewhat soiled in the pristine laboratory.

Harry’s grin was almost like a rubbing together of hands in anticipation. “Biggest and best laboratory of its type anywhere. Come on,” he said boyishly, flashing another glimpse of very white, very perfect teeth.

Rachel wondered what he had paid for an entire mouthful of caps. “I’ve only got five minutes.”

He looked at his watch, clearly an expensive one. “Okay, we’ll make it quick.” Putting a hand at the small of her back, he guided her down the aisle between cabinets, pointing, pronouncing eight-syllable words, and sounding as though he did all the work single-handed.

“What’s this used for?” Rachel asked when he began to wind down. She was pointing at the package she had delivered.

Harry picked it up, stared at it a moment, and frowned. “A special project.” He set the box down, turned back and folded his arms. “Just a little something we’re doing for someone else. We like to help out anyone, even competitors, if there’s a water quality problem.”

“Like what sort of problem?”

He shrugged. “This one’s a trace element. By itself, it’s not poisonous, but some of its compounds are toxic.” He put his hand on her elbow and moved her toward the door. “Water is about the closest thing there is to a universal solvent. You could call it the world’s best thief.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Picks up a little of everything it touches.”

“Thanks. I didn’t know there was so much to water quality.”

“Next time, we’ll do the full Cook’s tour—chromatograph, centrifuge, electron microscope, the works. Water’s a hot topic. I get a lot of TV cameras in here.” He preened as if about to face CNN and flashed another glorious smile.

So that was it. He was camera-ready. Rachel wondered what had become of all the owlish chemists with the thick glasses.

333

Andrew Greer set down his leather briefcase on the escalator long enough to poke at the cuff of his white shirt so he could see his watch. Gold-rimmed glasses gave his rosy, squarish face the look of a well-scrubbed, energetic scholar.

It was eight-oh-five. He’d left home at six-fifteen. He pulled the starched white cuff back down again. Other men at InterUrban wore striped, no-iron Oxford-cloth shirts. Every shirt in Andrew’s closet was very white. And very starched.

His wife Jackie’s deep brown eyes had narrowed slightly when he’d told her not to hold dinner, that he would be home late. They had already had all the arguments about his hours.

He examined the crowd milling in the foyer below the escalator. No matter how great his hurry, he always had the same thought when he entered headquarters: If there are three black faces in these exalted halls, I don’t see two of them. How’d you get here, black boy?

The shiny steel ridges on the escalator began to flatten. Andrew picked up his briefcase, stepped off, turned right, straightened his shoulders, and strode toward his corner office.

He had not only managed to get himself into this lily white crowd, he had made his way up near the very tip of the pyramid. So what if he was a token? Had he sold out?

He could almost see his marching, demonstrating sister Polly’s piercing eyes as she asked him that question every year at the Christmas family gathering. No. He always said no.

But lately Andrew wasn’t so sure. He’d made it a habit to be agreeable. He called it courtesy, he called it good manners. But Polly probably would call it selling out.

Jason was a hard man to work for. He had destroyed careers as if it were a hobby. When Andrew became Director of Human Resources, he had made it a studied habit to ignore the casualties of Jason’s games.

But now, in the power vacuum after Jason’s death, Andrew would begin doing things differently. He would be less agreeable. He would make that clear to whoever was Jason’s successor.

333

All day, Rachel had studiously refused to think about the missing Cadillac. But the moment she had closed garage gate number four, thoughts swarmed into her head like a Marine platoon taking a stronghold. She would have to make up her mind what to do, and she would have to do it soon.

If she talked to the police now, there was only her word, no hard evidence. Still, was that a reason to do nothing? The other side of herself fought back: What’s so bad about doing nothing? You just happened to find something. Suppose you hadn’t found it? The battle ended in a draw. She flung herself onto the sofa and opened a book.

After reading the same page four times, she threw the book across the room, went to the chest of drawers in her bedroom and opened the old wooden cigar box where she kept what little jewelry she owned.

The tie tack lay in a corner of the box beside a string of wooden beads. The etched tortoise did not look likely to sing.