Liberty or Death (7 page)

It was hard to be a successful woman in a man's world, and the cop's world, despite the progress women had made, was definitely a man's world. A woman as attractive as Norah Kavanaugh walked a fine line. Act too tough, they call you a ball-buster; act too feminine and no one feels safe working with you. So you act like one of the guys, always weighing and analyzing as you try to strike the right balance. It's like trying to juggle while you're keeping your balance on a rolling barrel. I didn't envy her. But no one ever said it was going to be easy.

I was working on that balance myself, playing Dora the timid. It was hard going. I'm used to being tough, forceful, and in charge. I'm bad at holding my tongue. I leaned wearily against my car, acutely aware of my body, of how physical everything seemed compared with my ordinary life, where I lived so much in my head. "Anything new on your end?"

She shook her head and I knew, from her face, that if she'd had even a tidbit to give me, she would have. I'd never met Norah Kavanaugh before, but I knew she was involved with a state trooper herself, so she lived daily with the same fears I did. She had her own gun and her own Smokey the Bear hat and her own share of trooper attitude. She carried herself in a firm, no-nonsense way, and I was willing to bet that she could lock emotion off her face just like Andre, but we were both tough gals with lovers' hearts and guys in dangerous jobs.

"It's hard to believe," she said. "He was snatched in broad daylight, and no one saw a thing. No one who can be bothered to come forward. We keep hoping." She broke off with a bob of her head, a little embarrassed at giving me the party line. "How are you holding up?"

"If I survive a week at this job, I'm going to need a month to recover. I forgot how hard manual labor is."

"I know what you mean. I did an undercover in a Boothbay Harbor restaurant a while back. Nothing in life has ever made me so glad I'm a police officer. You ask me, they ought to take every kid who's thinking about dropping out of high school, and put them in a mandatory work program for a few months. It would do more good than a year of lecturing at them. Same thing with juvenile offenders. Skip jail, make 'em peel potatoes. There's nothing like hands-on experience."

This time it was more like an impish grin than a smile, a surprise after her cautious reserve. She wasn't much like Amanda, another trooper Andre had worked with a lot last year. Amanda had a big smile, sparkling eyes, and taffy-colored hair. Amanda had been open about her interest in Andre. Too open for my taste—at a point where I was struggling to balance independence and interdependence. Back then, I was struggling over how to deal with Andre's need to protect me when those protective instincts got in the way of my work—at least as I perceived it—and he'd been struggling to give me the freedom I wanted. Amanda's openness and simplicity must have seemed very attractive, a mirror reflecting back what he wanted to see.

I didn't think Kavanaugh was open or simple. She was more like me—an ambitious and independent woman trying to find a man whose own complicated jigsaw edges fit together with hers. The gap in my life caused by the absence of my adjoining puzzle piece was as raw as a fresh cut. Like me, the guy in her life was a cop. She'd had to deal with his protectiveness. I wished I could talk with her about that. She'd understand. But tomorrow was rushing toward us. I didn't know about her day, but mine was starting at six.

"They all call you 'honey'?" she asked.

"Until I want to throw up."

"And you can't talk back." She checked her watch. "How about Thursday, same time, same station?"

"Sure. If I don't show up, it's because I fell over."

"You have any trouble getting away?"

"Merchantville goes to sleep early."

She shook her head, her expression wary. "Don't count on it," she said. "Keep your eyes open, you'll see a lot of movement. But you weren't followed?"

"I did everything Jack told me to do, and I didn't see anyone."

"All right." She snapped the notebook shut and tucked it away. "Just keep paying attention, okay? Try not to underestimate them. The people we're dealing with aren't stupid. And they're quite paranoid. Have you got a gun?"

"I don't know how to use one." That wasn't quite true. More than one innocent soda can had met a terrible fate at my hands, shot full of holes. Bottles were more fun but shooting bottles wasn't ecologically sound. Cans could be recycled, wounded or not, but not even a good doobie like me was going to pick up a million shards of shattered glass.

She opened her car door and leaned in, coming out with a shoebox. She held it out reluctantly. "Jack wants you to have this."

I took the box cautiously. "A gun?"

Kavanaugh nodded. "And a permit. And ammunition."

"A permit? How on earth..."

"We issue the permits, Thea."

"But I don't want..."

"None of us wants any of this, do we?" she said. "Humor him. Jack is in a very hard place, you know, trying to let you be a player when he wants to lock you up somewhere. You don't have to use it." She fell silent, wondering, I knew, where she was supposed to draw the line in her communications with me. Cops are an us vs. them group. I wasn't one of them, but I was one of theirs. There was a tendency to treat families like treasured mushrooms. Kept in the dark, but cherished. Her eyes fell to my waistline, a little embarrassed. "And there's Andre to consider. Above all, he wants you safe."

"He probably wants me to be crocheting blankets, too." It wasn't quite true. Andre had an instinctive protective side—how could he not, given what he did—yet he respected me for what I was, fiercely independent and a risk taker.

"He knows you won't be, doesn't he?" she asked.

"Would you be sitting on your hands if it were Tommy Munro instead of Andre?"

"You know the answer to that."

I did. The cops would have done their best to keep her behind the lines, so Tommy wouldn't worry. And Norah Kavanaugh would have moved heaven and earth to rescue her man. Her man. God! It was so primitive. But then, love
was
primitive. It was an incredibly powerful, deep-seated thing that wasn't subject to rational control.

I opened the box and took out the gun. A nice fit in my hand. Small. Feminine. Almost pretty. "What's this? A Barbie Smith & Wesson?"

Kavanaugh looked grimly from me to the gun and back again. "It's enough firepower to stop someone in their tracks, if necessary, and allow you to get away. It may look pretty but it's plenty lethal." She sounded disapproving. "I don't know why Jack had to go and get some girlie-looking gun, but people do funny things. Maybe he thought you'd take it more readily if it was attractive." She quickly walked me through loading, holding, and firing. Doing what she could to protect me.

Pistol-packin' momma? I tried it on. It was a bad fit. I put the gun back in its box. Circumstances were forcing me to do a lot of strange things. This was just one more. "Tell Jack thanks a lot. And tell him that I've promised to be careful."

She nodded, a single, decisive bend of her head. She still seemed angry but I didn't think the anger was directed at me. She was angry that we were in this situation at all and she was angry that I was being treated like a girl. And I thought that part of her anger was that she, too, felt like she had to be protective, when what she wanted was to tell me to buck up and go give 'em hell. When she wanted the two of us to go over the
hill
together and bring back bad-guy scalps on our belts.

I wanted to stay. Just standing there with her, I felt closer to him. But I was running out of steam. "Is there anything else I should know? Anything special I should be looking for?"

She shook her head. "Just keep doing what you're doing. Keep your head down and your ears open. Don't do anything to get yourself noticed. Pay special attention to names... anyone who seems particularly militant, who might be a leader... anyone whose name comes up in other people's conversations a lot, that people seem to defer to." She turned to go. Stopped, considering, and turned back. "I know you think you've got to do this," she said, "and I understand that. But I'm not sure you understand how dangerous your situation is. These are not nice people, Thea. They don't play by our rules. They do horrible things." She shook her head, her lips tight as if she'd already said too much. "Just be careful, okay?"

I nodded and filed the information away for future processing, wondering if I could stay awake long enough to drive home. Right now, being careful meant keeping the car on the road. And home was a ridiculous term for where I was staying.

"I'll go first," she said. "You wait ten minutes before you leave. I'll be parked somewhere along the way, watching your back. But you won't see me."

The door creaked up for her, like a monster in chains, and ten minutes later it creaked down after me. Maybe next time I'd bring a can of WD-40. I watched carefully all the way home, but I didn't see Kavanaugh or anyone else. I parked beside the Dumpster, shoved Jack's gift into my bag, and got out, locking the car behind me.

Just as I was sticking my key into the lock, I saw the glowing red end of a cigarette on the porch beside me, and a voice from the darkness asked, "So, honey. Where you been?"

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

Sure, Kavanaugh had warned me, yet only a minute before, the night had seemed benign. "Driving around," I said, trying to force the key into the lock.

"Kalyn said you were so tired you couldn't hardly stand up." Belligerent and disbelieving. Now I recognized the voice. The guy from the restaurant. The one who'd grabbed me. Roy something. Belcher.

Dammit! How I felt and where I went were no one's business. I made up a lie but didn't have to fake the shake in my voice. "I was. I am. But sometimes I think about my husband... that he might find me... or I think I see him. Then the fear comes and I can't sit still or sleep or anything, so I go out driving. It calms me down."

I didn't know what Roy Belcher knew about me or if he'd heard my story, but obviously he'd taken the time to question Kalyn. I didn't know what he was doing on the back porch of the restaurant in the middle of the night, either, and I didn't intend to stay around and find out. The marks he'd left on my arm told me all I needed to know. Belcher was violent and he was mean. The schoolyard bully grown up. Still traveling with a knot of admiring hangers-on. Still picking on weaker people for the fun of it. If I lived a thousand years, I'd never understand how someone's manhood was enhanced by picking on weaker creatures.

Finally the key slid home. I turned it and pushed the door open. "Good night."

"Hey," he said, and took a few steps closer, heavy feet thudding on the warped fir planks. Not so close he was touching me but close enough so I felt a ripple of goose bumps along my arms, a catch in my chest. "You don't have to run away so quick. I just wanted to say I was sorry about what happened this afternoon. I didn't mean to hurt you."

And I was born yesterday. Had Clyde made him apologize? Did Clyde have that kind of power? "I'm kind of used to that," I said.

"So I heard."

Of course. This was a small town. My business was everyone's business. I couldn't see his face in the darkness, didn't need to know this was a man I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw him. Which, even in my current buffed state, wouldn't be very far. With a beer-gut that big, he was an easy 240. Yet I wished him far, far away. The hair on the back of my neck prickled and I knew how it felt to be Dora, the runaway battered wife, always afraid of what might be coming out of the dark, unable anymore to believe in the goodness of men. "I'm fine, really," I said in a conciliatory voice. "It didn't hurt much."

"It won't happen again. I promise. I just wish you wouldn't of sicked Clyde on me." The cigarette arched through the darkness like a little red rocket. Then his heels clomped across the porch, and he was gone. A minute later, I heard an engine start.

I closed the door behind me and leaned against it. I realized that I hadn't been breathing. My undependable legs were shaking. I sat on the gritty stairs with my head in my hands. The stairwell was hot and close and smelled so strongly of cooking I could almost have wrung the grease out of the air. Was what was going on here transparent to everyone but me? While I naively thought I was undercover, were they—whoever they were—all watching me like a mouse in a maze? Despite the heat, my skin danced with goose bumps again. Was I making a big mistake being here? No one wanted me to be in this dangerous, scary place, not even me. But this was the only way I could think of to help. I grabbed the banister, pulled myself up, and climbed the stairs.

I pulled down the cracked green-canvas shades and closed the flimsy curtains. The dirty yellowed cloth crumbled to dust between my fingers. The shades covered the windows but moved in and out with the breeze, making soft scraping sounds on the sills like the room was breathing. The rough, unsteady breathing of someone ancient and unwell. I stripped off my clothes and stepped into the shower, bracing myself for the irregularities of the water. Tonight it wasn't so bad. I pulled on a nightshirt and climbed into bed, too tired even to think. I expected that the second my head hit the pillow, I'd be off to dreamland but the rustling of the window shades kept me awake.