Tough Customer (27 page)

She gave Ben a long, measured look, which he avoided by staring at the tent in the covers formed by his toes at the foot of the hospital bed.

Neither of the Loflands had accepted her apology, at least not out loud. They, especially Amanda, would probably continue to harbor resentment against her, and she couldn't really blame them. Ben had come close to losing his life.

However, short of groveling, she could do nothing more to make reparations, and she wouldn't further humble herself to these two, who were too ungracious to accept her apology.

"I'm going to Houston tonight, so I can be at the office the first thing in the morning to present the campaign on schedule."

Amanda's whole body jerked. "Without Ben?"

"He'll get equal credit."

"Oh, I'll bet."

"I'll see to it that he does, Amanda. I promise you."

The woman dismissed the value of Berry's promise with a haughty sniff.

Berry looked down at Ben. "I'll do right by you, Ben. You'll receive equal credit."

He bobbed his head. "Sure. Thanks."

Berry had hoped for a better outcome. She was disappointed with the note on which the visit was ending, but she'd said what she had come to say. The couple remained mute with animosity. Without another word, she left them.

Out in the corridor, a hospital worker wearing a hairnet and green scrubs was pushing a rattling metal cart stacked with lunch trays. She fell into step beside Berry. "You're Ms. Malone, aren't you?"

"That's right."

"Your friend is going to be fine."

"Yes. He seems to be improving."

She hurried on, but the staff member kept pace. "Shame about that Coldare boy. My son played baseball with him."

"It was tragic."

"That guy who shot him..." She tsked. "He needs to be caught. And soon."

"I couldn't agree more." Having reached the elevator bank, Berry punched the Down button.

The woman pushed the rattling cart past her. "The reward ought to help."

Berry looked after her with puzzlement. "Wait. There's a reward? Since when?"

Over her shoulder the woman said, "I heard it on the radio about a half hour ago. Your mother put up the money."

WASTE OF MONEY IF YOU ASK ME."

"Well, I didn't."

Caroline's calm retort served to make Dodge edgier, if that was possible. Every time he lit up a cigarette, she frowned in silent disapproval, which robbed him of the pleasure of smoking it, which was creating a drastic shortfall in his minimum daily requirement of nicotine. He figured he was running at least a quart low. His system was craving it. His skin was itching from the inside. His piss factor was high.

But they were in her car, so even if he wanted to defy her objections and smoke, he couldn't. Soon as they got to where they were going, though, he'd smoke one down to the filter, and if she didn't like it, that was just too damn bad.

He'd volunteered to drive because that at least kept his hands busy. "Is there only one Walmart in town?"

"Yes. Do you need directions?"

"Nope. I spotted it yesterday."

"Before or after your chat with Grace?"

It pleased him that his conversation with the bartender still rankled Caroline, but he took it no further than to shoot her a wicked grin. "Twenty-five grand?" he said in reference to the reward she had offered the sheriff's office. "They'll have every nearsighted redneck in southeast Texas playing I Spy with Oren Starks."

"I'm sure Ski will have trained personnel filtering out the crank calls that come into the hotline."

"For all that'll help," he said under his breath. "The task force set up a hotline for information on the bank robber. Know what we got?"

"Reports of a Russian submarine in the shipping channel, UFO sightings, the Second Coming, a pack of rabid wolves running amok in the medical district, and a woman who called nightly offering free sex to whoever was interested."

"I told you that already?"

"Thirty-one years ago, you ranted about it whenever you got frustrated over the case."

"Then you must've heard it a lot."

"At least a thousand times."

"Huh."

"I'm sure Ski expects to get a number of kooks calling in," she said, "but he might also get a useful tip. Besides, putting up the reward made me feel like I'm contributing to Oren Starks's capture, rather than sitting around and doing nothing."

Dodge mumbled something.

Caroline looked at him. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Something about money. What did you say?"

"I said you won't miss the pocket change."

"You said more than that."

"I left out the expletives."

"Why were you using expletives?"

"Would you rather I'd've repeated them to you?"

"Why were you using expletives in regard to my money?"

He recognized her tone. She wasn't going to let the matter drop, which was fine with him, because her financial status had been eating at him, and he'd just as soon air his grievances.

"You wouldn't know a financial problem if it bit you in the butt, because you've never had one." Seeing her angry expression, he added snidely, "Well, have you?"

"I've been fortunate."

"I'll say. Fortunate enough to marry the rich, successful boss." Because he was feeling particularly fractious, he'd pushed, and he knew immediately he'd pushed too far.

Coldly she said, "Don't you dare criticize me for marrying Jim."

"I didn't."

"Not in so many words, but it was implied."

"You're hearing implications that aren't there because you're supersensitive on the subject of your marriage."

"I have no reason to be supersensitive on the subject."

"No?"

"No. I had a good marriage that lasted for twenty-six years. Up till the day Jim died, we were happy together."

"Congratulations."

His sarcasm didn't escape her. "You wish I'd been unhappy?"

Raising his voice, he said, "I wish you'd been happy with
me.
"

"Whose fault is it that I wasn't?" she fired back.

He swore. Neither said anything for a while, then he asked, "How'd Malone die?"

She took so long to answer, he thought she might refuse to. Finally she said, "He had a stroke. Sitting at his desk in his office. It left him in a coma. He died two days later without ever waking up, which was actually a blessing. The neurologist told me that Jim had sustained extensive brain damage."

Dodge drove in ponderous silence. Then, "So you loved the guy."

"Yes, Dodge, I did. Mostly I loved him for loving me and Berry. She was almost a year old when Jim asked me to marry him. He'd been a confirmed bachelor for forty years but was willing to take on a wife and baby."

"He wanted you. You had a baby." Dodge gave an eloquent shrug.

"He didn't view Berry as a sacrifice he had to make in order to marry me. He accepted her without explanation or qualification. He loved her dearly and reared her as his own. Which was good, since he and I never had any children together."

"Why not?"

"No reason. Just one of those things. It never happened. We didn't let it become an issue. Both of us were very involved in expanding the business. We worked long and hard. And we were satisfied with the daughter we had."

Either his nicotine deficiency or this discussion about another man loving and rearing his daughter was making his chest hurt. But Dodge couldn't stop giving voice to the questions that had bedeviled him for three decades. "What kind of kid was Berry? Was she happy?"

Caroline looked across at him and smiled. "Very. Completely. She was exuberant. Smart. Precocious. Athletic. Competitive. Willful at times, but not bratty."

"Stubborn like you."

"Cunning like you."

"Did she have your redhead's temper?"

"I don't have a redhead's temper."

He laughed at her tart response, then she joined him. His laughter was the first to falter. "Did you ever tell her?"

"What?"

"Do I have to spell it out, Caroline?"

She turned her head away to gaze through the windshield. She was doing that thing with her hands, clasping and unclasping them, a habit familiar to him. She did that whenever she was organizing her thoughts, particularly distressing ones.

"Yes, I told her. Jim had adopted her and given her his name, but I thought she should know that he wasn't her birth father. I didn't want that to be a big, dark secret lurking in the background of our lives, just waiting to spring and inflict damage on our relationship."

It cut Dodge to the quick to be reminded that he'd signed away all parental rights to his daughter. It had been a sanitary procedure, handled by lawyers. At the time, he'd been angry and had thought he'd been given little choice.

He couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if he had raised a stink. Would the outcome have been different if he'd refused to relinquish the upbringing of his daughter to another man?

But now, as thirty years ago, he couldn't see any benefit arising from a tug-of-war that would only have prolonged the inevitable and created more hostility and heartache for everyone involved, particularly for Caroline and Berry.

"When Berry was old enough to know where babies come from," Caroline continued, "I told her that Jim wasn't the man who'd planted the seed in my tummy. Something to that effect," she said, smiling gently. "But I assured her that Jim was her daddy. She accepted it."

Dodge braked for a traffic light, touched his breast pocket where the packet of cigarettes beckoned to him, worked his bottom more comfortably into the driver's seat, and muttered deprecations at the driver in front of him who didn't know to pull into the intersection so he could hook a quick left when the light turned yellow, allowing Dodge to hook an even quicker one before it turned red.

He cleared his throat. "Wasn't she ever curious to know who the sower of the seed had been? She never asked what had happened to her real daddy, why he'd left her and didn't come back?"

"She brought it up only once," Caroline said. "She was of an age when I felt I should caution her against the pitfalls of having sex in the heat of the moment without using common sense or, if that failed, protection. And she asked if that's what had happened to me. She wanted to know if she'd been a mishap, an unwanted responsibility that a man had run away from."

She looked across at Dodge, and he looked back at her.

Caroline went on. "It broke my heart to hear the vulnerability in her voice when she asked that question. Apparently she'd been haunted by the thought that her conception had been an unhappy accident. She'd yearned to know the truth but hadn't asked for fear of having her supposition confirmed."

"Jesus," Dodge groaned miserably.

"I relieved her of the notion. I emphasized that she'd been conceived during a happy time, and that neither her father nor I had regretted the pregnancy. I told her that there had been issues between us that didn't relate to her, but that were serious enough to prevent us from being together, and that you--he--had seen the advantages of her staying with me." She looked down at her hands, still clasping and unclasping them in her lap. "She believed me. At least I suppose she did, because she never raised the subject again."

"And now?"

"Now?"

He gave her a dubious look. "She's a smart cookie, Caroline. How could she not have a clue?"

"Maybe she does. She hasn't asked outright, but she's pressured me for information about you."

"So she suspects that I'm not just a referral from a friend."

"Possibly. But it's quite a leap from expressing curiosity over your credentials to determining that you're her father. She might be putting two and two together, but it hasn't added up to four yet." After a moment, she added softly, "One thing, though."

"What?"

"Even if she is deliberating it, she won't reveal her hand until she's good and ready."

"Plays her hand close to her vest?"

She shot him a smile. "In that way she's like me."

Walmart came into view. The massive parking lot was in a state of barely controlled pandemonium. A few sheriff's office and state trooper cars were there with their colored lights flashing. Dogs were running in circles, sniffing the ground near a row of garbage receptacles. Onlookers were being held back by uniformed officers of various agencies, including the Merritt city police.

And in the thick of it was Ski Nyland.

Dodge understood why the deputy's telephone summons had been so abrupt. Presently he and several other badges were clustered around a potbellied, middle-aged guy wearing a blue Walmart employee vest. When Ski spotted Dodge pulling into the parking lot, he left the group and jogged toward them.

Dodge said, "He wants to jump our daughter."

Caroline said, "If I'm reading the vibes right, the feeling is mutual."

The moment Ski reached them, he asked, "Where's Berry?"

"She went to the hospital to see Ben," Caroline told him. "I couldn't reach her on her cell."

"Try again. Get her over here." As an afterthought he added a "please," although Caroline seemed not to have noticed his brusqueness. Responding to his sense of urgency, she immediately had accessed her cell phone and was speed-dialing Berry.

Dodge got out of the car and lit a cigarette.

Ski bore down on him, growling angrily, "What the hell, Dodge?"

Dodge clicked his lighter closed and blew smoke toward the sky. The deputy's anger needed no explanation. "I had a hunch, I acted on it."

"You tampered with evidence."

"Sue me. And, by the way, I didn't
tamper
with anything. I know how to handle evidence."