Asking for Trouble (10 page)

Very deliberately she twisted one of the buttons on the front of
his
shirt, taking her time before she answered.

“Maybe.”

“That’s better than a flat-out no,” he said, suddenly invigorated. He leaned over the front seat, gave the cab driver directions, and sat back beside her with a satisfied smile. They both turned to gaze out the rear window as the cab pulled away from the curb. They sighed their relief together and then laughed themselves silly.

T
HEY HAD TO RIDE
across town to the police impound parking lot, but they passed the time feasting on jelly doughnuts and coffee, which they shared with the driver, and telling legendary tales of their past. They’d both had grandfathers with a love for water sports from whom they’d inherited their own passions. She couldn’t bear fishing but she loved sailing, while Tom enjoyed both immensely.

So often it struck her that they suited each other perfectly. Not like a hand in a glove, which was too perfect. But more like two pieces of a puzzle, where the connection between them was asymmetric and uneven. She had a tendency to fly off the handle and react to her emotions, while Tom was quick to think and saved his reactions until the crisis was over. Each of their personalities integrated with and compensated for the other’s, and the bond between them merged in a unique but satisfactory fashion.

Standing beside Tom’s classic white Lincoln in a huge lot while he answered a hundred questions and signed almost as many forms, Sydney pondered the possibilities of a future with Tom.

She conjured up pictures of a beautiful beach house with a white picket fence around the deck. There were children in sparkling white swimsuits playing in the surf. She saw herself waving to them fondly, dressed in a bright white sundress and a white lace broad-brim hat, with Tom in a white summer suit standing beside her looking content and well fed. Wouldn’t life be grand? she mused with a deep, wistful sigh.

“I didn’t have to go through that much trouble to buy the damned thing,” Tom said, his key in the door of the passenger’s side. It was daylight. He’d spent ten hours with her, and he still hadn’t told her what he did for a living. He needed to tell her about his life, about who and what he was, but for the life of him, he didn’t know how—and it was beginning to eat at his nerves. “Lord, you’d think it was my fault it was stolen.”

She floated, half-dreaming, around the front of the car to get in as he held the door open for her. The force with which he slammed the car door had little effect on the sound it caused inside the well-built car, but it was enough to bring Sydney’s head out of the clouds and make her take notice.

Tom was distracted and frustrated when he got in beside her.

“What’s wrong, Tom?” she asked in a soft voice, leery of his anger, unsure of how to respond to it. She watched as he opened his mouth to tell her, thought better of it, and pressed his lips tightly closed. His body drooped, he sighed heavily, giving her a weary smile.

“I think I’m getting tired,” he said, but she didn’t believe him. The agitation was gone from his voice, but whatever caused it was not. She could see it in his eyes, though she couldn’t identify it.

It embodied a mixture of emotions ranging from dread to resignation to fear and despair. He lowered his eyelids as if to conceal the conflict within him and went to great pains not to look directly at her while he started the car and maneuvered it out of the lot.

He had to tell her. He knew that. But after all she’d been through, how was he going to explain his life to her without sending her away screaming? Why did life always have to be so complicated? he wondered angrily.

He paused. Pondering life’s complexities wasn’t going to get him what he wanted. He knew that too. His energies would be better served if he could concentrate on a solution, he resolved. And there was a solution. There had to be. There was something about Sydney that made his heart smile. She was a counterbalance to the rest of his life. Even her phobic fear of dying had a way of certifying his convictions that life was precious—too precious not to do all the things you wanted to do, not see all the things you wanted to see, or not to be with the person you loved.

He’d made his share of mistakes. He’d done things and then wished he hadn’t, seen things that were better left unseen. But nothing in all his life had felt as right or as natural to him as being with Sydney.

Timing. It was always a matter of timing, he decided. Telling her at just the right time with just the right words. Problem was, he ruminated, their timing seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the universe.

She remained silent as well, pondering the sudden tension between them and fighting the urge to ask questions. It wasn’t polite to pry, but that was exactly what she wanted to do. His abrupt, undefined change in demeanor was bewildering, and it hurt. She’d trusted him and confided her darkest secret to him, yet he didn’t seem to trust her.

He’d kept his best foot forward all night, showing her only his finest side. His intellect, wit, confidence, enthusiasm ... the giving side of himself. Except for an occasional display of understandable anger, he’d hidden all his weaknesses. But it wasn’t anger she’d glimpsed in his expression. It was something else, something that made him feel uncertain and troubled. It was something he didn’t think she could understand, something he thought was beyond her empathy and compassion. It was something he was afraid to tell her.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked, breaking the silence awkwardly, trying to sound incredulous.

“No.” She was more curious as to what he was hiding from her, but knew she couldn’t force him to believe in her. Still, maybe with time ...

“Six-fifteen. What respectable restaurant serves breakfast at this hour? We can’t even get an Egg McMuffin yet.”

“Who’d serve us anyway? I look like I’ve been in a wreck and you look—” she glanced down at the shirttail hanging out from under his jacket, “shredded. We’d look very strange, even at McDonald’s.”

He took stock of the blood on their clothes and the mass of wrinkles that had at one time been their carefully chosen first-date duds and gave her a wry smile.

“You’re a slob,” he said, teasing her.

“Ha. This from a man who looks like he went to college and majored in hog calling?”

He gasped dramatically. “That from a woman who’d wear a pink suit that clashes with her orange hair?”

“Oh yeah? Well, at least I ... Oh, Tom, your eye.”

He glanced at the light green discoloration under his left eye in the rearview mirror. “Hey, I like the way this green sets off the black and blue around my cut, don’t you?” he asked.

“Sure. I clash, but you’re color-coordinated. Typical male,” she said, brushing him off lightheartedly.

“There’s nothing typical about me, and you know it. I happen to be—” he broke off as he glanced up into the rearview mirror again. “Aw, hell! Now what?”

Sydney turned and saw red and blue lights flashing.

“The registration’s in there,” he said, indicating the glove compartment under the dash. There was a distinct edge to his voice as he tried to control his irritation.

He pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and rolled down his window in a jerky, agitated motion. She handed him the registration card and glanced back to see that the police car had pulled up behind them.

“Were we speeding?” she asked.

“No.”

“The taillight,” she said, feeling absolutely brilliant. “It’s broken, remember? Maybe he wants to tell you about it.”

He nodded, but he was afraid to be too hopeful. The night had put a severe strain on his power to be optimistic.

They heard footsteps approaching the car. Tom turned his head to greet the officer. He stuck his nose into the barrel of one ugly, lethal-looking gun. Out of reflex more than true feeling, he muttered an oath in shock and surprise and didn’t move a muscle. He should have been expecting this, he thought fatalistically.

Sydney’s door flew open in that same moment, and she twisted in her seat to see the gun’s twin aimed straight at her chest. She began to pray. “Oh, dear Lord.”

“Keep your hands in sight,” the policeman told Tom, his voice loud and full of authority. With his weapon in Tom’s face, he lowered one hand to release the latch on the car door, but he didn’t open it. “Get out.”

Using his knee and foot, Tom pushed the door wide and got out.

“Assume the position,” the officer barked.

“Now you,” Sydney’s officer said in much the same tone. “Keep your hands visible at all times.”

She swung her legs to the ground and bent her head to stand, her right hand in the air. She turned to face Tom across the roof of the car with a thousand questions in her eyes. Her palms were damp, and there was a crushing tightness in her chest. It was her immediate assumption that she was going to spend the rest of her life in prison for ... Lord, what
had
they done? it occurred to her to wonder.

“Can you tell us what this is all about, officer?” Tom asked in a cautious and overly civil voice, as the man ran his hands up and down his body. “Obviously this isn’t a routine traffic violation.”

“Shut up.”

“Listen. We have a right to know why you pulled us over.” A wave of pure pain washed into his features as Sydney turned and glared at the man groping her from behind. He couldn’t hide his emotions any longer. “I demand to know what this is all about.”

She was confused and terrified. She trembled as she felt the cold steel of handcuffs being snapped tightly around her wrists in front of her. She was hot and then cold. It was hard to take a complete breath. What was happening? Her mind was so muddled, she couldn’t grasp a clear thought.

“Save it for the front desk, pal,” the policeman said, clicking Tom’s handcuffs into place from behind. He held the gun on Tom again as he bent to remove the keys from the ignition. “The only demand you’d better be making is the one to call your lawyer.”

“But we haven’t done anything to need a lawyer for.”

“That’s original.” The man’s attitude was thick with sarcasm. “You got any idea how many times I’ve heard that before?”

He walked past Tom to the trunk of the car. Sydney’s officer backed away from her in the same direction. They unlocked the lid and raised it into the air, before pulling open the false bottom of the trunk to expose the cargo area underneath.

“I suppose you have no idea where any of this came from, either?” the first officer said, speaking as if he wouldn’t believe a single word that came from Tom’s mouth.

Slowly, Tom walked to the back of his car. Curious, even in her fear, Sydney did the same. They both stared, open-mouthed at two dirty off-white pillow cases from which had spilled an array of paper money, watches, rings, various types of other jewelry, and a single silver candlestick.

“Oh, tell me this isn’t happening,” Sydney muttered. She looked at Tom, who stood with his head lowered and his eyes closed as if he were praying for it to be a hallucination.

“Look,” he said, feeling compelled to attempt an explanation, though he could feel the last threads of his patience unraveling and growing thin. “You’ve got it all wrong. This is an incredible misunderstanding, officer. My car was stolen last night. I just drove it off the impound lot.”

“Save it for the judge, pal. You have the right to remain silent, so use it. You also have the right. ...” He continued to Mirandize Tom while his partner returned to their vehicle to use the radio. When the officer began to recite Sydney’s rights, Tom stopped him.

“Wait a second,” he broke in. “The car belongs to me. She’s not involved.”

The officer looked back at her and asked, “Do you know that man?”

“Yes.”

“Were you in his vehicle against your will?”

“No.”

“Then you have the right to remain silent ...”

“Look at her,” he shouted angrily. “She’s hurt. How could she rob a pawn shop with one arm in a sling? It’s my car. I’ll take full responsibility. Call her a cab and let her go home.”

“Look, pal—”

“I’m not your pal.” Tom wanted that made perfectly clear.

“You stand there and keep your mouth shut and let me read the lady her rights. Then we’ll run you in, and you can do all your explaining to the detective assigned to the case,” the officer said in no uncertain terms.

Two hours later, they were sitting in a near empty room at the police station, apprehensive, exhausted, and exasperated.

Well, Sydney was sitting. Tom was pacing the room like a caged panther long overdue for his feeding. She wanted to cry so badly, she could taste her tears in the back of her throat. It was terrifying and humiliating to be handcuffed, photographed, fingerprinted, and interrogated like a common criminal, when she’d never so much as been sent to the principal’s office before. She hadn’t ever had a parking ticket. She wanted to cry, and she would have if it weren’t for Tom.

“I’m sorry,” he said, moments after they’d been brought together again and locked into the small room with a bare, unwelcoming table and four equally disagreeable chairs. “I should have checked the car out before I signed for it.”

“You couldn’t have known it was used in a robbery,” she said, weak with worry—her second career.

“I should have thought of the probability of it, though,” he said tersely. “Why else would they have left it in one piece? They were going to come back for it.”

“I can’t believe this is happening to us. I thought our luck had changed.”

“This is more than bad luck. This is ...” He shook his head as if their ill-fated fortune defied a definition. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the wall behind him. She didn’t have the heart to add her tears to his misery.

It was shortly after that that he began walking the short distance between the door and the wall, without uttering another word and quickly glancing away whenever their gazes happened to meet.

In silence they waited, two tattered and drained desperadoes, until Tom’s attorney was shown into the room.

He was a tall, distinguished-looking man in his late fifties or early sixties and, knowing a few attorneys herself, not at all the sort of person Sydney could connect with Tom. He was a somber person, who listened to them retell their tale of woe without the slightest spark of compassion or understanding in his demeanor. As a matter of fact, she got the distinct impression that he didn’t believe a word of what they were saying.