I Got You, Babe (21 page)

Ahh.
Sandy’s goal: to marry off her brother. John’s goal: to make sure that never happened.

“I mean, what do you think of this place, Alice? It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

Actually, it didn’t look so bad to Renee. She personally never knocked the dust off anything until she couldn’t recognize the shape of the object beneath it.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said.

Sandy smiled. “A forgiving woman. My brother could use one of those.”

Renee didn’t know how to respond to that, except maybe to laugh out loud at the thought of her and John together. As a couple. The cop and the fugitive. Opposites did attract once in a while, but that was ridiculous.

“Actually, I think John took it harder when our father was killed,” Sandy said, jumping back and forth between subjects like a kid playing hopscotch. “He was shot in the line of duty. It happened about seven years ago.”

“Your father was a cop?”

“Uh-huh. It was a routine traffic stop. He had no way of knowing that the guy he pulled over had a dead body in the trunk that he didn’t want discovered.”

“That’s awful. So both of your parents are gone?”

“Yeah. It’s just us kids now, and aunts and uncles and cousins. And grandparents.”

“Are your other brothers married?”

“Dave was. He lost his wife in a car accident about a year ago, when their daughter was six months old.”

“That’s terrible!”

“He’s doing okay. If anybody can handle it, Dave can. It’s a struggle with the baby, but we all help out. He’ll get married again. It’s just a matter of time. Now, as for Alex, he never has a shortage of women around, but the idea of marriage kind of rubs him the wrong way. And John’s too wrapped up in his job to even think about dating, much less getting married.” Sandy gave her a sly smile. “But they can’t hold out forever.”

Renee couldn’t help smiling back. The longer they talked, the less weird it seemed, and the more she forgot she was here under false pretenses. Just for a little while it was nice to relax a bit and let herself believe that she was John’s sex toy rather than an undercover fugitive. Sandy’s nonstop chatter made her feel like one of the family when she hadn’t even
met
the family.

As if she ever would.

But even as they talked, John’s imminent return was never far from her mind. Where was he, anyway? And what was he going to say when he came back and found her talking to his sister? Surely he’d put on that cop face of his and play it cool until he found out what lie she’d told to cover things up.

Surely he would.

Wouldn’t he?

John told himself as he drove to the south side of town that he had one goal, and it was a simple one: he was going to check out the convenience store where the robbery took place. But he wasn’t going as a cop, because the last thing he wanted was for word to get out that he was nosing around in this case. Somebody might ask why, and he didn’t want anyone to eventually associate him with Renee. He had no business even being back in town right now. If Lieutenant Daniels found out he hadn’t finished the term of his exile, he’d pay hell for it.

He decided he’d just poke around a little. Ask a few questions. Talk with the woman who’d gotten shot, if she was there, and find out her take on the night in question. And he was sure that when he was finished doing that, he’d see how mistaken he’d been. He’d see that nobody but Renee could have committed that crime, and once he was convinced of that he wouldn’t have a bit of trouble taking her to jail.

Ten minutes later he pulled up to the Handi-Mart, one of those tacky little convenience stores with hand-drawn ads in the window advertising cheap cigarettes and milk for a dollar ninety-nine per gallon. A barefoot woman in a long flowered dress stood outside talking on her phone while a toddler wearing only a diaper and a Cookie Monster shirt hugged her leg.

John went inside the store, bells clinking against the grimy glass door. A geeky-looking Middle Eastern kid wearing wire-rimmed glasses stood behind the counter. According to his badge, his name was Ahmed.

John browsed the store nonchalantly for a moment, then came to the counter with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of 7UP.

“Hey,” he said, looking around questioningly as Ahmed rang up his purchases. “Isn’t this the store that was robbed a little while back?”

“Oh, you bet!” Ahmed’s face broke out in a huge, toothy grin. “And the owner got shot right in the arm.” He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger. “Pow! Just like that!” Ahmed had clearly watched one too many action-adventure movies.

“An older lady, I hear. That’s a shame.”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “No shame. Mrs. Bunch is a tough old broad. That’s what she says.”

John heard the shuffle of feet and turned to see someone coming out of the back room, a tiny, gnome-like woman he estimated to be somewhere between eighty and eight hundred. Her sparse white hair lay against her scalp in wispy ringlets, and her face had the deep, fissured look of a dried-up river basin. She wore stretchy pink pants and the same kind of cheap red cotton coat worn by every convenience-store employee in America. Her name tag read
Trudy.”

“Now, Ahmed, you’re talking about me behind my back again,” she said. “What kind of crap you dishin’ out?”

“No crap, Mrs. Bunch,” Ahmed said, his hand over his heart. “I tell the truth.”
“You tell the truth, huh? Then tell me what you were doing in the bathroom all that time yesterday right after the
Playboys
came in.”

Ahmed gave her a crafty smile. “This is America. Constitutional law. Fifth amendment, you know?” Then he turned his smile to John and added a furtive thumbs-up. Miss October. Harley and Ahmed. Appreciation for the naked female form knew no cultural boundaries.

Trudy shook her head. “You’re a smart-ass, you know that, Ahmed?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am told I have a very smart ass.”

“Are you the lady who was the victim of the robbery?” John asked Trudy.

“Yep. You must have read about it in the paper like everybody else.” The old woman cackled. “Nothin’ like getting robbed to make you famous. I was almost this famous when I got robbed back in ’82, but I didn’t get shot then. Gettin’ shot now that’s what really gets people talkin’.” She leaned over the counter. “Wanna see my scar?”

Before John could answer one way or the other, she hauled up the sleeve of her red jacket. “Looky here,” she said, pointing to the remnant of stitches on her upper arm, circled by a faint ring of black and blue.

John felt as if he’d entered a carnival freak show. He gave a low whistle. “Pretty nasty.”

“Yep. Took ’em half an hour to dig out the bullet, it being deep in the muscle and such.”

John nodded with as much awe as he could muster. “I read that it was a woman who robbed you. What did she look like?”

“Well, first off, she was pretty tall.”

“How tall?”

“Maybe five-eight. Or ten.”

“Wow.”

At the expression of awe in John’s voice, the old lady immediately upped the ante. “Maybe six feet. Or I don’t know--maybe even six-two. It’s hard to say.”

Just pick the most impressive number,
John thought, as Trudy added even more credence to what cops generally believed-eyewitness testimony could be some of the flakiest evidence of all. In this case it was especially true. From Trudy’s vantage point, just about any woman who walked into her store would look like an Amazon.

“And mean-looking, too,” she went on. “She wore these big, dark glasses and all this fire-red lipstick. And she had this deep voice, kinda like Bette Davis in
Dead Ringer,
where she killed her twin sister and assumed her identity. That’s what the robber sounded like. Couldn’t forget that.”

John thought about Renee’s voice, middle range, and relatively soft when she wasn’t shouting at him about something. But a person’s voice was just one of many things that could easily be disguised.

The woman crinkled her nose. “And something else. Now, I know I’m a fine one to talk, being as how I buy most of my clothes down at the Wal-Mart, but that woman had a bit of trouble puttin’ a look together, you know?”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“She was wearing this god-awful leopard-print blouse. And these black spandex pants. And white shoes. Big white shoes. That woman had some good-size feet on her.”

Renee wasn’t exactly petite, but her feet weren’t in the gargantuan range, either. Another exaggeration? Probably. If Trudy could make her perpetrator grow six inches in six seconds, how accurate was her shoe-size assessment? Also, Renee’s fashion sense seemed a bit tamer than animal prints, although there was the matter of disguising oneself to commit a robbery. It wasn’t unusual for a robber to dress outlandishly, then dump the disguise somewhere and walk away looking normal to take the heat off.

“And gloves. Black ones. Oh! And her earrings! Huge, dangly things shaped like rainbows. All those gaudy colors with a leopard-print shirt.” Trudy’s face crinkled like a raisin. “Never seen anything so ugly in all my life.”

“You must have a really sharp eye to catch all those details,” he told Trudy.

The old lady cackled again. “Nah. Not really. A blind man in the dark couldn’t have missed that getup.” She leaned toward John and dropped her voice. “Just between you and me, I been having a little problem with cataracts lately. Things are a little blurry around the edges.”

John’s heart skipped. The woman who’d fingered Renee was telling him she couldn’t see? “But the newspaper said you positively identified the woman who robbed you.”

She waved her hand. “That was a piece of cake once I saw them all standing there in that lineup, even though none of them was wearin’ them ugly clothes. All I had to do was pick out the tallest blonde.”

John couldn’t believe it. Even the most brainless defense attorney would have this woman discredited the minute she took the stand.

“Pretty smart, huh?” Ahmed said with a smile of admiration. “She picked right, too.”

“Yeah,” Trudy said. “Found out later that the one I fingered was the one they arrested. They found her with my money and the gun she shot me with. Am I good, or what?”

Suddenly the open-and-shut nature of Renee’s case seemed even fuzzier than before. It had taken him only two minutes of casual conversation to come to the conclusion that this particular eyewitness was loony. Why hadn’t the detective on the case made the same call?

“I have a few cop friends who work around here,” John said. “Do you remember the name of the officer on the case? The one who interviewed you after the robbery?”

Trudy got a thoughtful look on her face. “Started with a B, I think. Borstad, Botsdorf...”

Oh, God. Not him. “Botstein?”

“Yep. That’s the one. Real nice fella. You know him?”

“Yeah. Good old Botstein.”

He knew him, all right. Leo Botstein was a detective out of the South Precinct who’d been counting the days until retirement for approximately the last thirty-two years, and he hadn’t put in an honest day’s work in the last five. And now he’d finally made the leap. If John remembered right, his retirement party had been last night.

“Hey!” Trudy shouted. “You kids over there! Don’t you pick up those magazines unless you’re planning on buying them!”

John turned to see two teenage boys standing at the magazine rack, dripping with streetwise attitude. They wore ragged, oversize jeans that hugged their hips and baseball caps turned backward. The shorter of the two shot Trudy a practiced sneer.

“Aw, go to hell, you old bag! We’ll read whatever we want to!”

Trudy reached a gnarled hand under her coat and pulled something out of the stretchy waistband of her pink polyester pants. Something that looked suspiciously like a semiautomatic pistol. She leveled it directly at the kid in a two-fisted stance.

“Okay, you little bastard,” she said with a snarl. “Just who are you calling an old bag?”

The kid’s eyes widened. Clearly he hadn’t expected a woman who was the approximate size and shape of a troll doll to be packing enough firepower to blow his head off. He slapped his buddy on the shoulder, yanked the door open, and they peeled out of the store. Trudy stuffed the weapon back into the waistband of her pants. Ahmed gave her a big grin and held up his palm, and Trudy high-fived him. Then he turned his grin toward John.

“Mrs. Bunch. She takes no crap.”

John looked at the old lady, still astonished at her dead-on Dirty Harry imitation. “Now, ma’am, you wouldn’t go shooting a couple of kids just for reading the magazines, would you?”

“Aw, heck, no.” She snickered. “Sure scares the daylights out of them, though, don’t it?”

Looking down the barrel of a gun would pretty much scare the daylights out of anyone, particularly when the person holding that gun appeared to have a very large screw loose.

“You know,” Trudy said, “this used to be a really nice neighborhood. Kids had respect. Now they got nothin’ but smart mouths, just like Ahmed here.”

“Ah, but you would never point a gun at me for reading the magazines. It’s what you call a...perk?”

“Perk, my ass. If you stay in the john today as long as you did yesterday, I’m blowing a hole right through the door.” John tossed a five down on the counter to pay for the soda and chips. “You know, Mrs. Bunch, that armed robber almost made a big mistake messing with you. She’s lucky she didn’t get her head blown clean off.”

“You can say that again. If I’d been carrying my gun at the time instead of having it under the counter, there woulda been blond-bimbo brains all over the potato-chip rack.”

John couldn’t wait to dig into those Doritos now. “So what made the robber actually shoot you?”

“I went for my gun. I’m a little slower than I was a few years ago, but I still figured I could take her.” She patted the bulge under her coat. “That’s where my baby stays these days. I’d sooner walk around without my underdrawers.”

John had no desire to dwell on that mental image. “Now, why do you figure someone would want to rob a nice lady like yourself?”

“Probably to get herself some new clothes, considering the ones she was wearing looked like something out of a hooker’s garage sale. Course, I guess now she’ll have all the new clothes she needs, courtesy of the state of Texas.”