You really lucked out, he told himself.
He put together a fresh bandage of gauze and tape and pressed it over the wound.
In his bedroom, he combed his hair and got into a robe. He went into the kitchen for a beer. As he opened the refrigerator, the doorbell rang.
He hadn’t really expected Gloria to come by. He’d seen the look on her face when Joan got into the ambulance with him. She hadn’t bothered to show up at the emergency room. But she must’ve decided to come by, after all, and offer her sympathy or congratulations—or interview him for the
Standard.
Maybe she’s not here for that, he thought as he approached the door. Maybe she wants to comfort me. I could go for some comforting of the right kind.
He opened the door.
“Hey there, tiger.”
He felt a smile break out. “My own Chuck Norris.”
“I brought you some medicine,” Joan said, and lifted a bottle of champagne from the paper bag she was bracing against her chest. Dave saw the foil-wrapped top of another bottle inside the bag.
“Come on in,” he said.
She shrugged with one shoulder. “I just wanted to drop these off for you. I’m not in the habit of barging in on people.”
“So break the habit.” He waved her inside and shut the door. “Sit down, make yourself comfortable. I’ll put some clothes on.”
He hurried to his bedroom. There he shed his robe and stepped into underwear and corduroy pants. He put on a plaid shirt, slipped his feet into moccasins, and rushed back into the living room.
Joan was bending over the coffee table, setting the twin bottles of champagne on top of the flattened bag. She smiled at him, straightened up, and rubbed her hands on the sides of her skirt.
The skirt was very short. It was part of a white denim dress that had a zipper up the front. The zipper wasn’t pulled to the neck. The opening showed a narrow V of skin. Joan’s sleeves were rolled halfway up her forearms.
“I like your outfit,” Dave said. “You seeing Harold later?”
“I doubt it. Threw this on figuring it might perk you up.”
“Consider me perked.”
She went with him into the kitchen.
“So, how are you feeling?” she asked. “That was a nasty gash he gave you.”
“It’s not so bad.” As if calling his bluff, the wound burned him with pain when he reached into a high cupboard for wineglasses. He grimaced.
Joan put a hand on his shoulder. “You’d better take it easy, pal.”
“I wonder how the others are doing.”
“I just stopped by at the hospital.” Joan took the glasses from him and headed for the living room. “It was touch and go with Willis for a while, but he’s going to make it. They think they saved the kid’s ear. It’s a bit mangled, but it’s back on his head.”
“Thanks to your lightning foot,” Dave said, not even trying to keep his admiration out of his voice. “You
destroyed
that guy.”
Joan looked around at him. A corner of her mouth was tipped crooked. “That’s what the doctors think too.”
“Are you kidding?”
“He still hasn’t regained consciousness.”
“Is he going to?”
“They don’t know.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Hey, it’s his tough luck. Come on, let’s drink. Sit down.”
Dave lowered himself carefully onto the sofa. Leaning back against its soft cushion, he watched Joan peel the foil off one of the bottles. “The cork isn’t plastic,” he said. “Must be good stuff.”
“Safeway’s best.” She removed the wire hood and dropped it onto the table. Clamping the bottle against her side, she began to twist the cork out. “Any heirloom pottery you’d like me to target?”
“Just don’t hit me.”
With a loud
pwomp,
the cork shot across the room and landed in a rocking chair. A wisp of white vapor curled out of the bottle’s mouth, but foam didn’t gush out.
“Nice job,” Dave said.
Joan filled the glasses. She handed one to Dave, took one for herself, and sat down beside him. “Here’s to quick reflexes and narrow escapes,” she toasted.
“I’ll drink to that.”
They clinked the rims of their glasses and drank. “Real good,” Dave said.
“I nearly picked up a six-pack instead, but I figured, what the hey. Isn’t every day we get a chance to subdue a pair of knife-wielding bad-ass cruds. Calls for a celebration.”
“That it does. How’s my guy?”
“His arm’ll be good as new by the time he leaves prison. That’s maybe ten years down the road—assuming Willis doesn’t succumb.”
“He’s not a juvie?”
Joan wiggled her eyebrows. “Nineteen.”
“Great. How old’s his buddy?”
Her cheery look slipped a bit. “Same. Not that it matters much. I don’t see a trial in his future.”
“He’ll be all right.”
Joan shrugged, forced a smile, and took another sip of champagne. “His name’s Woodrow. Would you believe it? Woodrow Abernathy. A name like that, he’s trotting around with a purple broom on his head like some kind of a freak out of
Mad Max.
Did you see him stick that kid’s ear in his mouth?”
Dave nodded. He watched Joan’s eyes. Her eyes usually seemed confident, somewhat amused. Now they looked a little frantic. He saw confusion in them, and pain and fear.
“I mean, if Woodrow was hungry, he could’ve had a hot dog.”
“You did the right thing,” Dave said. He patted her thigh, meaning only to comfort her, but the smooth feel of her skin sent a sudden surge of heat through him. He brought his hand back quickly and rested it on his own leg. “The creep knew what he was doing.”
“My first kick did the job.”
“He was still armed.”
“I could’ve taken the knife away. I didn’t have to demolish him.” She finished the champagne in her glass, filled the glass again, and topped off Dave’s. “I shouldn’t have done it,” she muttered.
“He’ll probably be all right. If he’s not, you can figure you saved somebody down the road. His next victim…victims.”
“Yeah. I’ve been telling myself that. Shit.”
“Is this the first time you’ve ever hurt someone?”
“Broke a guy’s collarbone last year. Stopped him for speeding and he threw a punch at me. Hardly in the same category as scrambling a kid’s brains.”
“Comes with the territory,” Dave said. “I killed a guy once. Back when I was LAPD. A drug bust. The guy sprayed a Mac 10 in my direction.”
“Jesus.”
“Wonderful thing about those weapons, you have ’em on full auto and they spit themselves empty in about two seconds. The bastard really filled the air with lead, but he ran clean out of ammo about the time he’d worked the spray in my direction. While he tried to change magazines, I put four rounds in his chest,”
“Jesus,” she said again.
“It was a pretty clear case of him-or-me, don’t you think?”
“I’d say so.”
“The guy was scum. He’d spent half his life behind bars: a few years here for assault with a deadly weapon…a few years there for rape…a few more for armed robbery. At age eighteen he was out long enough to blow away a creep who stiffed him in a coke deal, but the search warrant didn’t hold up, so the charges were dropped.”
“Not a nice guy,” Joan said, looking and sounding more like her usual self.
“Not nice at all. And then he tries to mow me down with a goddamn submachine gun. And I drop the hammer on him, and the guilt turns me into a basket case. I was messed up for
months.
Makes no sense at all.”
“Makes sense to me. Now.”
“That’s how I ended up here. Small town, I figured it’d be
peaceful,
you know? And it generally is. It’s no L.A. What brought you here?”
“A family move. Mom married a poet who’d been out here for a writers’ convention and couldn’t wait to get back. You know how artsy this place is.”
“The town’s schizophrenic,” Dave said.
“You noticed, huh? Downtown thinks it’s Carmel, and the south end’s a mecca for rednecks.”
“And you throw in the military for some extra color.” He remembered the way she’d acted with the sailors yesterday. “Were you in the Navy or something?”
“My dad was. We lost him in Vietnam. The Mekong Delta. He was a gunner on a patrol boat.” She took another drink of champagne. “Anyway, so Mom had this thing with the poet, and she moved us out here. That was three years ago. I got started on a master’s program in library science at the university…”
“You, a librarian?”
With the back of her wrist, she knocked him gently in the arm. “You got a problem with that, tough guy?”
“Hard to picture you. How did a future librarian end up a cop?”
“Mom and her poet pulled a disappearing act. I needed a job, and I met some cops during the investigation. Beth Lanier and I hit it off pretty well. She’s the one who put the idea into my head. The rest is history.”
“How come I didn’t know about all this?” Dave asked.
“Never asked.” Smiling, Joan took his empty glass, set it on the table with hers, and drained the bottle into them. She started to open the second bottle.
“I was here when you joined the force,” Dave said. “Nobody ever said anything about your mother disappearing.”
“Lone Wolf Carson? There’s probably a lot of stuff you never heard about. Everybody but you musta knew.” She laughed softly. “Known,” she corrected herself.
She aimed the cork at the rocking chair where the first had landed, and shot it. This time, foam began to gush from the bottle. “Whoa shit!” she gasped. The white froth tumbled into the glasses, filling them both too fast, and kept rolling out, so she swung the overflowing bottle up to her mouth and gulped the suds.
“Don’t choke yourself,” Dave warned, laughing. He leaned forward and watched her throat work, watched champagne trickle down her chin and neck, down her wrist and forearm, watched the bottom of the bottle drip onto her leg and dress.
It was no longer erupting when she lowered it and sighed. She made a silent burp. Her face went red and she looked downward. “Gosh, I’m sorry.”
“No sweat.”
She rubbed her wet thigh and spread her legs and peered down at the upholstery. “Don’t think I got any on your couch,” she muttered.
Dave joined her in looking, but didn’t notice the upholstery. He saw only her smooth inner thighs and glimpsed her pink panties and felt a sudden swell of desire and turned his head away.
“Don’t worry about the couch,” he said, his voice coming out a little shaky. “I’ll get you some paper towels.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry.” He pushed himself up, wincing slightly as a burning sensation reminded him of his wound, then hurried into the kitchen and pulled a yard of paper towels off the roll beside the sink.
When he came back into the room, Joan was standing. She looked up at him, a self-disgusted smirk on her face. The front of her white dress was blotchy with wet spots that gave the fabric a slightly gray coloring.
She shook her head as she took the towels from him. Instead of using them on herself, she wadded them into a huge ball and picked up the champagne bottle and dried it, then got down on her knees and lifted the glasses out of the puddle and wiped their bases and moved them to a dry spot and mopped the table’s surface.
Dave almost told her not to bother. It was an old table and the champagne wouldn’t hurt it anyway. But he kept his mouth shut and watched her.
This was a Joan with all her toughness gone.
She stood up, the wad of towels in her hand. “Want to point me to a wastebasket?” she asked.
Dave stepped around the table and took the wet clump from her. He tossed it onto the table. He put his hands on her shoulders. He looked into her eyes.
She shook her head. “I’d better go.”
He said nothing. He eased her forward, and Joan wrapped her arms around him. Her smooth cheek slid against the side of his face. He felt the tickle of her breath on his ear, and he whispered, “You’re
taller
than me,” and he felt her laugh—gusts of warm air on his ear, her back shaking just a bit under his hands, her belly pulsing against his, her breasts moving slightly with her laughter, rubbing his chest.
She squeezed him hard, and he winced. “Ouch,” she gasped. “I’m sorry.”
He pushed a hand up into her thick hair and turned her head, turned her mouth toward his, pressed his mouth to her open lips, felt their softness and wetness, felt her breath enter him.
The doorbell rang and Joan lurched back and looked at Dave, her eyes wide and questioning.
He shook his head.
Joan ran a forearm across her slick mouth.
The bell rang again.
“Gloria?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“You got a back door?”
“Forget it. Sit down and have a drink.”
“God, Dave.”
“I won’t have you sneaking out.”
“I shouldn’t be here.”
“Yes you should. Sit down, relax.”
Grimacing, she bent over the table and picked up her glass. She took it to the rocking chair. She flinched as the doorbell rang again. Quickly she grabbed the two corks off the cushion, straightened her dress, and sat down.
Dave went to the door and opened it.
He forced himself to smile.
“How are you feeling?” Gloria asked, glancing at his chest, then gazing up into his eyes.
“Not bad.”
She stepped into the doorway, leaned against him, wrapped her arms around his back, and tipped her face up for a kiss.
Dave didn’t want to kiss her. He didn’t like the way she clung to him. She felt small and bony and tense, and she was hugging him too hard.
He wondered if Joan was watching.
Probably not, he thought. She was probably sitting in that rocker with her eyes turned in the other direction and wishing she were anywhere else.
He kissed Gloria on the mouth. Her lips were cool and stiff, but they parted and she thrust her tongue into his mouth with a nervous urgency that chilled him.
He backed away. Her eyes looked stunned, annoyed. “What’s gotten into…?”
“Joan’s here,” he said, and watched Gloria’s mouth snap shut. “Come on in.”
“Oh. Oh?” She made a tight, curled smile and stepped past him.
Joan rose from the chair. “I just dropped by for a minute to bring our conquering hero some medication.” A smile on her face (a smile that, to Dave, seemed sick with guilt), she raised her nearly empty glass for Gloria to see that the medication was champagne.