The Heart Heist (32 page)

What surprised him, what amazed the hell out of him, was that Gary hadn't ripped anybody off. Something had changed over the last two months. Something -- or more likely someone -- had brought out a side of Gary's character that Marty had lost hope even existed.

God knew, Marty had trusted Gary too much in the past, but as they got closer and closer to Chino, he grew more and more grimly certain that to shut Gary back inside would be a terrible mistake.

All right, so part of his grim certainty came from a purely selfish perspective. With Gary stuck behind bars, it would be up to Marty alone to sift through the plot that was protecting the Holiday Bomber. He would have to attempt contact with Rogers' superior, if such a thing existed, and expose the fraud.

But another part of Marty's feeling came from pure unselfish instinct. Gary didn't belong in prison any more.

He made some quick calculations. By creative reasoning he could make a case that with the sentence reduction, Gary's full term was only fifteen years. That would put him up for parole after seven and a half. He'd already served five. In two and a half years then, he could be out.

Two and a half years. Marty shook his head, more depressed than before. He had a feeling that two and a half
days
in Level Four would undo most of the good that a couple of months in Freedom -- and a certain lady mayor -- had wrought.

~~~

From his position on the living room sofa, Matt watched his sister step into the hall from her bedroom. The mug she used for tea was in her hand. Matt's attention wandered from the television news as Kerrin pushed open the kitchen door. Since they'd caught the Holiday Bomber there wasn't anything that interesting on the news anyhow. So he watched his sister.

There was a disguised listlessness in her movements, and her face wore the same masked blandness as the morning she'd come in to the summer school classroom and announced that she was taking over the class.

Kerrin had seen the class through its remaining week with a credible facsimile of her normal good spirits. She'd gone on to plan the new school year and managed miscellaneous scraps of town business with more credible good spirits. It was all just a little too credible to be credible.

Frankly, Matt thought it a load of bullshit. Even he felt hurt at the way Gary had taken off so suddenly. He imagined his sister felt about a hundred times worse. And the more he imagined that, the madder he got at Gary.

"Matt?" Kerrin looked surprised to see her brother blocking her way in the hall.

"Mayor Horton," Matt asked, "could a concerned citizen have a word with you?"

"Well, sure." But Kerrin didn't look too eager. Maybe she knew what was coming. As she set her mug of tea on the desk in her bedroom, her face strained with the effort to look normal. Matt wheeled himself inside and closed the door.

"What's up?"

"I feel terrible," Matt said.

Kerrin's face instantly softened with concern. She sank sideways into the seat behind her desk. "Oh, Matt, what's wrong?"

"This thing that happened between you and Gary -- it was all my fault."

"What?" Concern transformed quickly to alarm.

Matt's mouth twisted bitterly. "To think. I practically handed you to him on a silver platter. I could kick myself."

"Matt -- " Kerrin looked nonplussed. "For crying out loud, no one handed me to anybody on a platter. And for the record -- " the blandness in her expression fell away, revealing a far more sincere fierceness. "For the record, I don't regret a thing about my relationship with Gary."

Matt frowned at her. "How can you say that?" His sister had had so few relationships with men -- she didn't know that it wasn't right to act like a doormat. "The guy left you." Surely she didn't need to be reminded.

"Oh, Matt." Her voice went soft as she looked away. "He didn't want to leave."

"Yeah, right. He had 'other obligations.'" That was the lame excuse she'd given the summer school class. Matt gave his sister a hard look. "But all right, let's buy the fact that he didn't have a choice, he had to leave for some odd reason. So why the hell didn't he take you with him?"

Kerrin closed her eyes and made a funny choking noise.

Matt rolled closer to her chair. "You would have gone, wouldn't you? Even though you've always said you'd never leave Freedom, if Gary had wanted you to, you would have gone with him. But he didn't ask you, did he?"

Kerrin's hands shot up to cover her face and her delicate shoulders shook. Her voice was tiny. "He couldn't ask me, Matt. Oh, God."

She was starting to cry. Matt sat perfectly still, horrified. Never in his life had he seen his sister cry. Never. No matter what bad thing happened, even his own accident, Kerrin didn't cry. She was the type of person who always looked on the bright side, the type who kept an illusion of some wonderful future possibility that would make everything all right again. Kerrin didn't appear to be looking on the bright side now. She was out and out sobbing.

"Kerrin -- " Matt was used to feeling helpless, but this was worse than most times.

"Oh, Matt," Kerrin sighed out between sobs. "Gary couldn't ask me to come with him. He went to
prison
."

Prison?!
Matt's jaw dropped open as his sister sank onto the floor by his feet. His hands automatically clutched her hair as she put her head in his lap and wrapped her arms around him. He'd often joked to himself that his sister was out to lunch, but this was much too far out there. Gary gone to prison!

"What for?" Matt asked, determined to steer the woman back to rationality. "Why'd Gary go to prison?"

"Oh, I don't know." Kerrin sniffed, gaining some control over her sobbing. She kept her head in his lap while her hand played with the loop for his belt. "Grand theft or some such thing. I wouldn't know the exact charges."

"Grand theft," Matt repeated, grimly certain now that his sister had gone around the bend. "And just what did he steal?"

"Who knows? It was over five years ago." Kerrin sniffed again and tugged lightly on his belt loop. "Something big, probably. He's pretty much a career criminal."

A career criminal. Matt looked down at her tear-splashed face and cleared his throat. "Um, are we talking about the same Gary Sullivan here? The guy who bought and paid for a
telephone directory
?"

Kerrin leaned back from his lap and rubbed her nose, sniffling some more. When she looked up, Matt could see that her eyes were clear, utterly rational. Could she be serious here?

"He's spent the past five years in Chino," she said. "I think he made some decisions during that time, about how he wanted to run the rest of his life."

Hell on ice, she
was
serious. "Gary was in Chino." It was almost impossible for Matt to believe this absurdity.

"
Is
in Chino," Kerrin corrected. For a minute Matt was afraid she was going to burst into tears again. "For another
ten years
!"

"Holy Moly." If what Kerrin was saying could possibly be true, then this was completely horrible. Matt hadn't even kissed Elaine, and he knew how he'd felt when he'd thought she might be moving out of town. That separation would have been nothing compared to this.

"It was going to be twenty." Kerrin stopped a sob. "But they knocked ten years off for this special job he was doing for the Department of Water and Power."

Kerrin was veering back into the twilight zone. "The Department of Water and Power?" Matt echoed. "What do they have to do with this?"

"Everything. They're the ones who had the clout to get Gary out of prison. They wanted him to try finding holes in the security system at the plant just outside of town. Gary's supposed to be good at that sort of thing."

Kerrin was shifting gears much too fast for Matt. "What about teaching summer school?"

His sister gave him a wry look. "I believe that was your idea."

Matt cast his mind back to the Independence Day parade. "Oh." The initial annoyance with which Gary had met him began to make some sense now. A few other things clicked into place as well. "Why'd the DWP want to find holes in their security system?"

Her eyes were guileless. "Isn't it obvious? This is an important junction. Most of Los Angeles' water flows through here."

"Yeah, but why now?" Matt persisted. "Why all of the sudden they're worried?" The Los Angeles aqueduct had always been a controversial project. The battle over water rights between the major metropolis and the Owens Valley had heated up courtrooms for almost a century now. Matt tried to beat down his growing excitement.
Nah, it couldn't be
.

But why not
? This was just the sort of project the Holiday Bomber latched on to. Just the kind of thing he loved.

"Who knows what moves the small minds at the DWP." Kerrin shrugged. "Nobody around here has ever figured them out."

She was right. Forget it. Nothing this exciting ever happened in Freedom
. "Besides," Matt sighed out loud. "They already caught the Holiday Bomber."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing." Matt looked down at his sister, sitting on the floor. Her dejection wasn't hidden any more. She was purely miserable, and he couldn't blame her. Sheesh, Gary Sullivan was in prison. It boggled the mind. "How long has it been since you last saw Gary?"

Kerrin toyed with an eyelet of the lace on her bed. "Three weeks." She made it sound more like three hundred years. "And five days." The muscles around her eyes tightened and Matt could see she was only inches away from crying again. He was quickly discovering there wasn't much worse in the world than his stars-in-her-eyes sister breaking down into tears.

"Well, hell, Kerrie, if it seems like forever to you, imagine what it must feel like to Gary."

Her hand clenched in the lace. "I don't want to imagine that."

"For the love of heaven, you ought to go visit him."

She raised her eyes, and he saw all the longing in the world shining out. "There's nothing I want to do more. It's all I can think about." Her eyes lowered again, as did her voice. "Gary made me promise I wouldn't."

Noble little idiot, and just like him too. A career criminal, huh? That must have been in another dimension. Matt reached down and grasped Kerrin's shoulder. She looked up at him in surprise.

"If he isn't bitterly regretting that promise right now," Matt said, "I'll -- I'll eat my hat!"

Kerrin looked like she'd stopped breathing. "Do you...really think so?"

"I know it. At least that's how I'd feel. Jesus, Kerrin. He'd be so happy to see you he wouldn't be able to walk straight."

"Oh, I don't know." Kerrin bit her lower lip. "Gary's pretty...adamant about things."

Matt's hand tightened around her shoulder. "What about you? Aren't you adamant about anything?" He looked deeply into her watching eyes. "Or are you just planning to move on with your life? Forget about him and go on to the next man?"

A light of fire finally came into her listless eyes. "I don't mean to sound melodramatic about this, Matt, but there isn't going to be another man."

"That's kinda what I thought." Matt used his hold on her shoulder to give her a small shove. "So, what are you waiting for?"

"Oh, Matt, it isn't that easy."

She was despairing, and that wasn't like Kerrin either. What had gotten into her lately? Matt watched her slowly rise to her feet. He hated to see her like this.

"Ker?"

She went over and picked up her tea. "Hmm?"

"Are you going to go to L.A. and see him?"

She frowned over the lukewarm liquid. "I'll think about it."

She wasn't even going to try. How could she just give up? Matt gritted his teeth, wondering how far he was prepared to go to force her to do the right thing. "Kerrin, I'll make a deal with you."

She looked at him over her tea.

"You drive to Los Angeles, and take me with you." Matt's heart skittered around in his chest as he hesitated just this side of safety, of ignorance. "While you go on to Chino and see Gary, I'll stay and see that neurologist at UCLA."

Kerrin slowly lowered her mug of tea. "Why do you want to see a neurologist?"

"I'll tell you...after I talk to him myself. Do we have a deal?"

"If you have to see a doctor, Matt, you'd better go whether or not I visit Gary."

Matt's voice was like steel. "Do we have a deal or don't we?"

She looked properly scared, but that couldn't be helped. At least Matt was keeping this from his parents. They'd had enough grief from his situation. "All right," Kerrin said, "we have a deal."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The din in the mess hall was overpowering. The smell wasn't much better, redolent of over-boiled vegetables and tasteless potatoes. To Gary's right, where Willie used to sit, he now enjoyed the company of Hickey, who ate with slurps and guzzles. To his left was Souter, a weasel of a man who never met anybody's eye. Across the table was the new kid, not so new anymore. Not so new at all, in fact. He'd made a point of letting Gary know his curriculum vitae, which included an impressive list of the toughest prisons in the country.

Now he regarded Gary across the table with that look. It was a look worthy of the devil himself, shrewd and knowing, as though he were privy to the weakness that could make you his slave. The yellowish cast to his eyes had whitened in the two months Gary had been gone and now his dark pupils seemed to bore at one out of his ebony face.

"You." Eldridge's voice, though low, carried like a church minister. "You aren't going to make it, man."

Ignoring him, Gary set to work on his mealy potatoes. He was concentrating on his starches in an attempt to get his weight back up.

"You got soft out there. What you've gone and done is turned straight." Eldridge said this as though it were a bitter scandal. "You're straight now, man, and straights can't make it in this place. You're going down."

"What do you care?" Gary was provoked enough to reply. There was enough truth to the guy's words to raise a wall of anger inside. He wanted to be normal. He still wanted that so badly he could cry. But Eldridge was right. Normal people didn't live in prison.