Winter's Daughter (4 page)

"And didn’t tell anyone." Tannis sighed and closed her eyes. "All right, so I’m—a little rattled, I guess. Something happened today. Something that kind of scared me."

"More than ’kind of,’ I’d say," Lisa murmured. "So what was it?"

Tannis threw her a frustrated look and picked up a hairbrush. She shrugged. "Oh, nothing really important, just this wino followed me, and then tried to waylay me. No big deal. I handled it okay. In fact—" She paused to smile grimly. "The last I saw of him, he was being hauled off by two cops in a patrol car."

"Doesn’t sound like anything you haven’t had to deal with before," Lisa said, the little crease of concern hovering. "Nothing your self–defense classes haven’t prepared you for. And if the guy’s been arrested—"

"I know." Tannis dropped the brush onto the table–top and turned to face her sister. "I know. There was just something about this guy that got to me." She doubled one hand into a fist and pressed it against the towel, just under her breasts. "I felt it—in here. And it’s funny, because at first, when I saw him, there was something about him that really attracted me. I even gave him an orange, and then he gave me a flower." She touched her hair and smiled, remembering. "And then—" she hugged herself and shrugged "—I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I just wanted to run away."

"Understandable," Lisa said dryly. "I’d want to run away all the time if I were doing what you’re doing, living on the street, with those—" She broke off, shuddering.

"But that’s just it, Lisa; I’ve never been afraid on the streets before. I don’t think I realized, when I decided to do this for my doctoral project, that I was going to find such—
rapport
with those people. For one thing, they’re not ’those people’—not anymore. One thing I found out right away was how little difference there is between most of them and any one of us."

"There but for the grace of God—?"

"Exactly. They’re people just like you and me, but they’ve had a little bad luck. For some of them, having no money, no job, and no home is the problem; for others it’s a symptom of the problem—mental illness, mostly. And for a few, it’s a way of life. Those are the ones that really fascinate me, they’re the ones I want to do my study on—the ones who live on the streets because they choose to, for whatever reasons. The ones who actually prefer it to living in permanent homes."

Her voice had deepened, gone husky with emotion the way it always did when she talked about things that interested her. It had that passionate intensity most of the time, she realized, simply because she was interested in nearly everything.

"I want to know why, what makes them tick. And I need more time, dammit. I can’t afford to come running home just because some
bum
gives me a case of the jitters!"

"So you’re going back?"

"Yes," Tannis said firmly. "Tomorrow."

"Well," Lisa said, getting up with a sigh, "I suppose you have to. I know nothing I or anybody else can say is going to stop you. But at least you know this guy’s in jail."

"Dillon, for cryin’ out loud, what are you trying to do to me?"

Dillon nursed one eye open and squinted up at the Los Padres chief of police. He muttered sourly, "Took you long enough. Where the hell have you been?" There was a dangerous light in Logan Russell’s eyes.

"I was in Santa Monica." he said with exaggerated precision, showing his teeth, "at a meeting with the President’s Task Force on organized crime. Naturally when they yanked me out of a roomful of the top names in law enforcement in the entire state to tell me two of my own officers had just arrested a skid–row bum claiming to be my best friend, the newly elected city councilman, Dillon James, I dropped everything to come a–runnin’!" His voice, mild to begin with, had escalated to a roar that was only partly mitigated by a strong New Orleans accent.

When Logan paused, swearing, to drag a hand through his thinning blond hair, Dillon asked incredulously, "And you believed a story like that?"

Logan gave a disgusted snort. "It sounded just like something you’d do." He stood aside and gestured for the uniformed guard beside him to open the cell—reluctantly, Dillon thought.

"You know, Logan, this is all your fault," he said as he slipped through the gate.

Logan jerked his head back as if something unpleasant had hit him in the face. "My Lord—what have you been wallowing in?"

"About a pint of cheap whiskey. Listen, if you hadn’t talked me into coming back here and running for public office after I got out of law school—"

"So what is this, some kind of sick revenge?" The question was tossed back over a linebacker–broad shoulder as they hurried through the squad room under the interested scrutiny of half the law enforcement personnel of Los Padres. Pausing before his office door, Logan cast a nervous look around and dropped his voice to a raspy whisper. "Dillon, if this leaks, if the papers get hold of this, Flintridge will have my ass in a basket!"

Dillon chuckled as the door clicked shut behind him, then said placidly, "Don’t worry about the mayor, I’ll handle him."

"Yeah? You gonna ’handle’ this too?" The police chief reached for a sheet of paper and shot it across his desk at Dillon, missing him by a mile. Dillon snagged it and sat down in a chair to read it, ignoring Logan’s pained look at the state of his clothes.

After a moment he swore softly and tossed the memo back on Logan’s desk. "You’ve got to be kidding."

"Nope. Already under way." Logan sat on one corner of his desk and crossed his arms on a torso only slightly thicker than when it had filled out an LSU football jersey.

Dillon sat forward. "Logan, you know this isn’t the answer."

There was a moment of silence, during which Logan looked harassed. He took a deep breath and exhaled it audibly through his nose. "You know it and I know it, and so do my people. But dammit, Dillon, I haven’t got any choice. The statutes are on the books. Flintridge is within his authority as mayor of this town to demand they be enforced."

"Damn."

"Well, you can’t blame the man. He’s embarrassed. Can’t you see the headline?

"CRUSADING COUNCILMAN ARRESTED ON SKID ROW!

"It’s the kind of thing the wire services just love, you know that. This town has been working hard to attract the big–money tourist—move over, Palm Springs. This kind of thing is a little rough on the image, know what I mean? Flintridge would much rather look at a headline that reads:

"CRUSADING MAYOR ORDERS SWEEP OF DOWNTOWN STREETS—VOWS TO CLEAN UP SKID ROW."

Dillon slapped his forehead. "What are you going to do with ’em all, Logan? It’s January. They come from everywhere this time of year, looking for someplace to sleep where they won’t freeze to death before they wake up. There’s hundreds of them out there. The available shelters won’t begin to hold them. There just isn’t enough money in the city budget to put ’em up, not even for a few days, and the private agencies are already overwhelmed. What are you going to do with them?"

"You mean, what are
you
gonna do with ’em, Councilman James. That’s your problem, not mine. My job is to follow orders and clear ’em off the street."

"They’ll all be back in a few days, a couple weeks. You know that."

Logan nodded. "I do know that, yes. Unless, of course, you come up with a solution to the problems of mankind in the meantime?"

Dillon muttered bitterly under his breath.

Logan slipped off his desk and moved around it to his chair. "Dillon," he said in a kindly tone, "do me a favor, would you? Forget it for tonight. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway. Go home. Take a bath. You smell like a latrine."

"Thanks," Dillon said sourly. Gingerly he pulled out the front of his sweatshirt with a thumb and forefinger, sniffed, coughed, and got to his feet.

"Don’t mention it," the chief of police said cheerfully. "If you feel like it later, after you’ve had a bath, come over for a beer. Meredith and the kids’d love to see you."

"Thanks," Dillon said. "Maybe I will."

On the way down the backstairs of City Hall, he remembered he’d intended to ask Logan for a make on his "bag lady." Hearing about the mayor’s streetcleaning operation had driven that incident right out of his mind. He almost turned around and went back, but changed his mind when he remembered how itchy and smelly he was. It could wait until tomorrow morning.

"MAYOR ORDERS SWEEP OF DOWNTOWN STREETS—POLICE RAZE SKID ROW SHANTY TOWNS—HUNDREDS OF HOMELESS MOVED TO TEMPORARY SHELTERS."

Tannis saw the headlines on the front page of the Los Padres Daily Bulletin even before she sat down to breakfast. Her bowl of Shredded Wheat and her glass of orange juice landed fortuitously on the table as she snatched up the paper and sank with it into a chair.

"Oh, no," she whispered, turning cold. "They can’t do this!" Quickly she lowered the newspaper and scanned the article, trying to assimilate it, but instead of the words she saw faces—frightened, bewildered faces.

Where would they go? What would they do? A cardboard box wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. This "sweep" wasn’t offering any solutions—it was like sweeping dirt under a rug. And nobody seemed to care about what was going to happen to the people. People like Tannis’s friend Binnie. What would become of her shopping cart if she were forced to go to a shelter? Binnie’s cart was everything in the world to her; losing it would be like having her home burn to the ground. And poor Clarence, so claustrophobic he couldn’t even go indoors long enough to use the rest room. He’d go crazy in a shelter, freak out completely, and those cops wouldn’t understand. They’d think he was a lunatic and try to restrain him, and that would make it worse.

"They can’t do this," she said again, bringing her fist down on the newspaper with unfortunate consequences for the cereal bowl underneath. As the milk dripped off the table and puddled on the tile floor, Tannis was already in the garage, lifting her helmet off the handlebars of her Honda.

"I don’t know what to do," she said to Gunner a little while later. "This makes me so
angry.
"

"Anger’s fine," Gunner drawled in the soft rumble that seemed to come from deep inside his massive chest. "Temper isn’t." His eyes rested on her, serene and soothing as hot chocolate on a winter’s day.

Tannis looked down at the helmet in her hands and bit back a comment.

"You want to fight City Hall," Gunner went on in his unhurried way, "you got to fight their way, you follow me? Won’t do you any good, now, to go chargin’ up there throwin’ temper tantrums."

There probably wasn’t another person in the world, Tannis reflected, who could make her feel like a chastened child without also making her resent him for doing it. She was glad she’d stopped by the newsstand first; seeing Gunner always helped her put things in perspective.

The newsstand’s counter, built to the specifications of Gunner’s wheelchair, was a good height for sitting on. Tannis sat on it, balancing her helmet on her knee with one hand while she dragged her hair back from her face with the other. She filled her lungs, exhaled, wiggled her shoulders, and focused on the autographed photograph of Roy Campanella on the post behind Gunner’s head. "Okay," she said, "I’m calm."