Cry Uncle (34 page)

Pamela had heard her tell the story three
times already that evening, so she wandered away from the bar to
greet Mona Whitley, who was seated primly by herself at a table
near the door. “I’m so glad you decided to stop by,” Pamela said,
settling into a chair across from Ms. Whitley.

Dressed in a decorous suit of gray linen, Ms.
Whitley nursed her bourbon and eyed Lizard with less than complete
approval. “It’s past Elizabeth’s bedtime,” she observed.

Lizard frequently stayed up later than nine
o’clock, but even though the custody battle was over, Pamela
decided the social worker didn’t have to know that. “This party is
in her honor, so it would be a shame if she couldn’t be here.
Besides, she can always sleep late tomorrow.”

Ms. Whitley appeared skeptical. “I’m still
not convinced that the Prescotts wouldn’t have provided her with a
more stable environment.”

“
Stability isn’t
everything,” Pamela argued gently, surprising herself. Her life had
been perfectly stable until a couple of months ago, when her car
had journeyed the last few miles of Route One, depositing her on
Key West. She used to treasure the stability of her existence. It
indicated that she was in control of things.

Maybe someday she would want stability and
control back in her life. But not tonight. Tonight belonged to Joe
and Lizard.

“
And my Aunt Joyce,” Lizard
continued, her strident voice slicing through the cacophony of
conversation and music, “she was so...” Lizard searched the room
until she found Pamela. “What’s that word you taught me,
Pam?”

“
Negativity,” Pamela
supplied. She and Lizard had thoroughly analyzed Aunt Joyce over
the last twenty-four hours. Although Lizard had never known the
Prescotts’ intentions regarding her custody, and although Pamela
had exerted herself not to badmouth Lizard’s relatives, the child
had been bubbling over with questions about why the Prescotts had
acted as they had, buying her presents and treating her so nicely
and then abruptly departing.

“
Aunt Joyce is grumpy,”
Lizard had remarked. “She always complains about stuff, like the
toy store shoulda had the dolls at the front, not at the back.
She’s just always finding something wrong with stuff.”

“
That’s called negativity,”
Pamela had explained.

“
Yeah, that’s the word,”
Lizard said now, beaming at her audience. “Nativity. My Aunt Joyce
is very nativity.”

“
I really do think nine
o’clock is too late for a five-year-old,” Ms. Whitley persisted,
although the words seemed to emerge from a great distance, through
a dense fog. Pamela wondered how many bourbons the social worker
had consumed.

“
We’ll be getting her home
soon,” Pamela promised, then rose and sauntered across the room,
grinning and nodding as Joe’s numerous friends shouted greetings
and good wishes at her. A month ago they’d been toasting her
wedding to him. Today they were toasting something much more
significant.

Standing behind the bar, his earring
glittering and his chin scruffy because he’d skipped shaving that
day, Joe wore a quiet smile. He looked as if he couldn’t quite
believe his good fortune. Every now and then he glanced at his
niece, who swung her legs, kicking the vertical panels of the bar,
and who danced her Barbie doll among the glasses and bowls of
pretzels until the doll’s molded high-heel feet landed smack in the
middle of a plate of sliced lemons, squirting citrus wedges and
juice in all directions.

Joe didn’t scold. He was obviously too happy
to be upset about a mess that was meager by Lizard’s usual
standards.

Noticing Pamela’s approach, he signaled Brick
to cover for him and strolled to the end of the bar. With a flick
of his head, he motioned for Pamela to join him at the back
door.

She edged past the crowd of revelers lining
the bar until she reached Joe’s side. He looked formidably
handsome—more handsome than when he’d made love to her, and his
blue eyes had glowed with passion and yearning and satisfaction.
They glowed tonight, but not with lust, not for Pamela.

She could accept that. The fact was, Joe and
Lizard were a team, a family, the rationale behind just about every
step he had taken over the past few months—the past few years.
Pamela had never been more than a means to an end, a peripheral
part of the story.

Touching her elbow lightly, he ushered Pamela
down the hallway to the back door and out into the small lot at the
rear of the building. Pamela recalled the first time he’d brought
her there—to propose marriage. The spotlight above the door still
flooded the lot with a silver-white glare, highlighting the coppery
streaks the sun had painted into Joe’s tawny hair and casting his
deep-set eyes in shadow.

They stood in the hot, sea-scented evening,
enjoying the fresh breezes. A horde of souped-up motorcycles
rumbled down the street, briefly roiling the air. Joe waited for
the noisy caravan to pass before addressing Pamela. His smile
became sheepish, yet there was an edge to it, something she
couldn’t identify. “It’s a good party, isn’t it,” he said.

“
It’s a wonderful party. How
did you organize it so quickly?” She knew Joe had spent most of the
day at Mary DiNardi’s office, finalizing the paperwork that would
enable him to adopt Lizard formally. Pamela herself hadn’t even
known there would be a party until Joe had called her at five that
afternoon and told her to bring Lizard down to the Shipwreck for
the festivities.

“
Kitty threw it together.
She was almost as excited by the news as I was.” He shook his head,
disbelief rising to the surface again. “Pretty amazing, isn’t
it.”

“
What’s amazing? Kitty being
excited?”

“
Life in general.” He seemed
to wrestle with his thoughts. He gazed past Pamela, as if unable to
look directly at her. “I got Lizard without a fight, and your thug
is in the slammer. It turns out you and I didn’t have to get
hitched, after all.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Pamela, yet
she couldn’t deny it. The very issues that had compelled her and
Joe to latch onto each other had resolved themselves. She and Joe
wouldn’t have to pretend to be married any longer to satisfy judges
and social workers. Pamela wouldn’t have to stay in Florida any
longer to elude Mick Morrow. With the reasons for this marriage
dissolved, the marriage itself could be dissolved as soon as she
and Joe agreed to it.

His thoughts apparently paralleled hers. “So,
what happens now?”

She peered up at him. He’d shifted his gaze
back to her, and she understood what was lurking beneath his
hesitant smile. Lizard was settled; now he wanted everything else
settled.

Pamela wasn’t ready to settle things with
Joe, not until she knew which way to settle them. She had made love
with this man, weathered his moods, bonded with his niece. She’d
temporarily abandoned her career—and ever since she’d crossed paths
with Jonas Brenner she hadn’t given a thought to the strip-mall
project she’d had to pass along to Richard Duffy when she left
Seattle. That realization startled her. How could she have
forgotten about the strip-mall? She’d been incensed about having to
relinquish the project, hadn’t she?

She wished she could read Joe’s mind. He
wasn’t asking her to stay. He wasn’t telling her to leave. If he
did either, she wasn’t sure how she would respond. He wanted to
know her plans, but for once in her life, she didn’t have any.

“
I’d like to complete work
on Birdie’s house,” she said. “I can’t very well leave it
half-done.”

He continued to stare at her, inscrutable.
She wished he would ask her to stay—and then she recoiled from the
wish. How many times did she have to convince herself that theirs
wasn’t a real marriage, and that her home and her life were at the
other end of the country?

“
I’ll help you finish it,”
he offered. “The two of us working together, we ought to be able to
do the job in a week.”

“
Well, then there are the
uneven floors. And I wanted to widen that front hall...” As long as
she kept tinkering with Birdie’s house, she wouldn’t have to go
home.

“
Yeah. And didn’t Lizard
want to put a tree house in the living room?”

Pamela’s laughter sounded hollow. Why did a
stubborn voice inside her keep crying that she didn’t want to leave
Joe and Lizard and Key West? This wasn’t her home. Joe wasn’t her
type. The life she’d been living here wasn’t her style.

“
Whatever you want,” Joe
said, as if once again keying in on her thoughts. “You want to
stick around, it’s no problem. You’re welcome to stay for as long
as you want.”

That wasn’t what she longed to hear. She
didn’t want to be welcome—she wanted to be needed. She wanted Joe
to beg her to stay, because she was good for Lizard, because he
liked having her around. Because he loved her.

Oh, God. She must be insane, yearning for
something so inappropriate, so illogical.

“
Well,” she said briskly,
“let’s finish Birdie’s kitchen and then we’ll see.” Perhaps if she
stuck around long enough to complete the construction job, Joe
would decide he wanted her to stay, after all. Perhaps she could
seduce him, and...

The hell with that. She wasn’t going to knock
herself out trying to convince him that he needed her. She would
finish Birdie’s kitchen because a professional didn’t walk away
from a project until it was done.

But given Joe’s lackadaisical attitude, she
concluded that he didn’t deserve a part of her future. She’d do her
job at Birdie’s and leave.

And she wouldn’t let herself mourn over it,
either. She would remain in control, her old, pre-Jonas self.

Joe seemed on the verge of speaking—although
Pamela wasn’t sure she wanted to hear anything else he might have
to say. Before he could utter a word, Kitty swung open the back
door and announce, “The Liz Kid fell asleep.”

Joe laughed. “Impossible. How could she fall
asleep when she’s got a captive audience?”

“
Maybe she was tired. I
think you better take her home, Joe—she’s sprawled out on the bar
and we can’t work.”

“
All right.” He checked his
watch and gestured for Pamela to accompany him back inside. “Let’s
get the monster home.”

Lizard was, indeed, sprawled across the bar,
one of her braids lying in a bowl of cocktail peanuts. The raucous
voices and thumping music had no effect on her. Her slow, rhythmic
exhalations caused the feather in her doll’s hair to quiver.

“
Keep partying,” Joe urged
his friends. “I’ve got to dispose of the body, and then I’ll be
back.” He heaved the slumbering child into his arms and balanced
her over his shoulder. Her arms dangled down his back; Pamela
caught the doll as it dropped from Lizard’s limp fingers. He
glanced at her over Lizard’s rump. “You want to stay?”

“
No, I’ll go home with
Lizard,” Pamela said, suddenly anxious to distance herself from Joe
and all his friends. “I’ll stay with her, and you can party all
night long if you want.” She pressed her lips together, repressing
her anger. No matter how hurt she was by Joe’s failure to express
any feelings for her, she didn’t want to interfere with his
celebration.

Acknowledging the crowd with more smiles and
nods, they made their clumsy way out of the bar and down the street
to Joe’s car. Joe arranged Lizard across the back seat, somehow
managing to get a seat belt around her, while Pamela took her place
in front and struggled to keep her bitterness suppressed. Really,
she shouldn’t resent Joe. He was offering her the escape he assumed
she wanted; he probably thought he was doing her a favor. If she
would rather stay in Key West, it was up to her to let him
know.

And even if things had been perfect between
her and Joe, she wasn’t sure she’d rather stay.

Joe cruised through the lively downtown
boulevards to his quieter neighborhood. It was nearly ten o’clock.
Anyone still awake at that hour was no doubt carousing in Old Town.
The houses lining the residential streets were mostly dark and
peaceful.

Reaching his house, he pulled into the
driveway and turned off the engine. “Why don’t I run ahead and open
the front door?” Pamela suggested.

“
Thanks.” Joe climbed out
and opened the back door to attend to Lizard.

Pamela removed her copy of Joe’s key from her
pocket and strode up the front walk. She had forgotten to leave on
the porch light—not surprising, since when she and Lizard had left
for the Shipwreck the sun had still been high above the horizon.
She scaled the porch steps carefully in the dark, and tugged on the
screen door latch.

A gloved hand reached out from the shadows
and clapped over her mouth before she could scream. The cold barrel
of a revolver jammed into the vulnerable skin beneath her chin. A
rumbling voice rasped, “Greetings from Mick Morrow.”

***

ONE OF THE GREAT MYSTERIES of the world, as
far as Joe was concerned, was why a kid weighed more asleep than
awake. He hoisted Lizard over his shoulder, where she joggled and
shifted like a forty-pound sack of potatoes. Her feet pounded
against his ribs; her hair snagged in his stubble of beard. He
couldn’t wait to dump her onto her bed—and then maybe talk to
Pamela some more, away from the noisy activity of the bar.

One of the other great mysteries of the world
was the way a woman’s mind worked—or didn’t work. As he lugged
Lizard up the front walk, he reviewed the few minutes he’d spent
with Pamela in the lot behind the bar. What did she want? Why
couldn’t she tell him? Her eyes said she wanted to stay on in Key
West, but her words implied the only reason she wanted to stay was
to work on Birdie’s house.