Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (20 page)

“He’s out of jail?” I said.

“He never actually went to jail. When he was arrested for attacking you and Desmond he got bailed out. Then he jumped bail, and—now don’t blow a gasket—Detective Kylie let him go.”

“When was that?”

“Three and a half months ago. About two weeks after—”

“
Kylie
let him go? Are you sure?”

“It’s right there in his record. To me it looked like Kylie was probably using him as an informant, so when Rydell got sober this morning I … let’s just say I got it out of him that they did have a deal.”

“What was it?”

“Don’t know. I had to go to roll call, and by the time I could get back, he was out again.”

“I don’t believe this!”

“That kind of thing goes on all the time. It’s how we get information about the big bad guys. We use the little bad guys.”

“There is nothing little about Marcus Rydell. So this is little as in not as important.”

“Little as in not gonna get Kylie a promotion to lieutenant. I’d bet my badge he’s using him to get information on Sultan. Putting him away will get Kylie a lot of attention higher up.”

I had never seen a sneer on Nicholas Kent’s boy-mouth before, and it put five disillusioned years on his face. I was sure the one I was wearing added about twenty to mine.

“So all this time Marcus Rydell has been free and Kylie didn’t bother to tell me so I could make sure Desmond was protected.”

“Desmond
and
you.” Nick slid the cup away from him with the back of his hand. “Look, I’ll make sure Palm Row is heavily patrolled, and whatever else I can do.”

“Thanks, Nick. I really appreciate this.” I stared at his cup and looked back up at him. “Kylie promised me he’d keep me informed.
I
was the one who told him Sultan was still alive. Not only does he owe me, but you would just think that he would want to, I don’t know, protect and serve.”

“That’s what he thinks he’s doing.” Nick looked at his watch.

“Go on if you need to,” I said. “I just have to sit here for a minute.”

He stood up and fished in his pocket. “I’m sorry we’re not taking better care of you, Miss Allison.” He dropped a dollar and change on the table.

“
You
are,” I said.

But as I watched him make his way to the front of the diner, I wasn’t sure of that at all. Nicholas Kent couldn’t be everywhere, and evidently Marcus Rydell could. Even without closing my eyes I could see his massive black form in the alley behind Ms. Willa’s and feel his hard shoe smashing into my side. And hear Desmond scream
Mama!
as he was flung from those monstrous hands.

There was no way I was ever going to hear that again.

I bolted from the booth and headed for the door. I don’t know if I would have remembered Flannery if the Nudge hadn’t hauled me back to some semblance of sanity. When I turned, Kade and Flannery were already on their way to me. Even in my current state I noticed that she was sneerless. And that she had fluffed up her helmet hair.

I forced myself to say, “How was the milkshake?”

“Not bad,” she said. “Kade says they’re not as good as the ones in Boston though.”

I expected Kade to corroborate with some witty remark, but he was giving me a look so full of something unspoken I could almost hear it.

“So, listen, Allison,” he said. “Call me later when you have a minute to talk in private … about your financials.”

What? Had he suddenly discovered an IRS problem over chocolate milkshakes?

He shifted his eyes to the top of Flannery’s head and then back to me. She, meanwhile, was tucking her hair behind her ears and, quite frankly, looking coy.

Oh, for Pete’s sake. Had she made a move on him, right there at the counter at Georgie’s?

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get back to you ASAP.”

“Do,” he said.

He glanced at his cell phone, muttered something about Chief expecting him, and took off. Flannery tracked his progress all the way out to the parking lot.

For the next two hours, all she could talk about was Kade. All I could think about was getting to Detective Kylie.

CHAPTER NINE

I couldn’t go to Kylie right away. After I took a furious Flannery to Ms. Willa’s for penmanship instruction, I had to pick up Desmond from school. He jettisoned himself out the front door almost before I pulled the Harley up to the curb. Four of his pubescent female friends cut a path for him, and he didn’t give them a glance.

“I take it things didn’t go well,” I said as he jammed his helmet onto his head.

“You wanna know what I think about that Mosquito woman?” he said.

“We probably ought to wait until we’re off the school grounds—”

“She need a man.”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. “She what?”

“You tol’ me I got to kill hate by showin’ love, only I ain’t got it in me, Big Al. Not with her.”

“I didn’t say you had to kiss her feet.”

“That’s good, ’cause that ain’t happenin’. But somebody got to, ’cause she needs a lotta love if she gon’ stop bein’ hateful, now. And I know that thing.”

I turned to adjust the mirror that didn’t need adjusting so he wouldn’t see my grin. “Do me a favor, Des. Don’t try to find her a boyfriend.”

“I was thinkin’ Stan the Man.”

“Absolutely not.” Although the thought of the biggest player among the HOGs pursuing the Mosquito was the most amusing image I’d conjured up in a while.

I loved that kid so much.

It swelled in me so hard I had to force myself not to drive straight to the police station and crawl right across Detective Kylie’s desk. As it was, I peered into every black car all the way back to Palm Row, looking for Marcus Rydell’s dark face in the front, and a twisted man with an eye patch in the back. At the very least I didn’t want to leave Desmond home alone while I went to pick up Flannery at Ms. Willa’s, so I asked Owen to do it. That set me back approximately five light years in getting anything out of the girl.

“It wasn’t bad enough I had to do freakin’ calligraphy for ten hours?” she said when she stomped into the kitchen. “Then you had to make me ride with Mister I-have-to-give-you-sixteen-examples-for-everything?”

Owen may have been the master of metaphor, but Flannery was without peer as the queen of hyperbole.

She shut herself up in her room after supper, which gave me a chance to contact Kade. Since the September nights were finally cooling down to the low eighties, I sprayed myself with Off! and made the call from the side porch. The less Desmond was privy to info about Flannery the better.

“Thanks for getting back to me,” Kade said.

“So what happened? Please don’t tell me Flannery propositioned you. No, go ahead and tell me. Although what I’m supposed to do about it I have no idea—”

“She didn’t proposition me. Geez, Allison, I didn’t need that visual.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Occupational hazard. So …”

“We were talking. Well,
she
was talking, and she let it slip that she’s from Hastings. I know she didn’t even realize she said it.”

“Hastings, Florida?”

“I asked her if she was enjoying St. Augustine and she said it was no big deal, that she used to come here for field trips when she was a kid. Then she went on about how this was a weird town but at least it was better than Hastings.”

“That’s just, like, fifteen miles south of here. Maybe less.”

“I know. I looked it up. You want me to check—”

“No, I’ll call Nick Kent. I don’t want you mixed up in this any more than you already are. Could you get disbarred or defrocked or whatever it is they do to lawyers?”

“I’m good.”

“You are. Seriously. I have to piece things together from things she almost says and then doesn’t, and she won’t even look at Chief. But you sit down with her for five minutes and we practically have coordinates.”

“You’re forgetting Desmond.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He got her to tell him her name. She confided in him about the Hot Spot.”

I moved further away from the door and lowered my voice. “I’m not using Desmond to get things out of Flannery. She uses him enough on her own. When she needs something, he’s ‘Desi,’ her new best friend, and he gets all dewy eyed. The rest of the time she treats him like he’s an annoying little creep, and I’m watching his heart break.”

“Back away from the teenage romance,” Kade said. “Mama can’t fix this by teaching him to swim. You can’t fix it at all. Besides, guys can handle getting their hearts broken a coupla times.”

“Oh,” I said.

“If Flannery lets anything else slip, I’ll let you know. I’m not going to be too obvious, though.” He laughed. “I don’t really have to be. As much as she talks, sooner or later something’s bound to squirt out.”

When Kade and I hung up, I left a message with Nick Kent about Flannery. Then I checked Desmond’s room. He was sprawled across the bed, fast asleep with his head on his sketchpad, a pencil still dangling from his fingers. He was going to be ticked off when he woke up the next morning to find out he’d drooled on his drawing. All I could see of it was a tangle of curls covering the top half of the page, and I hoped Kade was right about guys handling heartbreaks.

After I covered him up, I took the phone upstairs and curled up on my window seat to call Chief. When it came to things Desmond, I knew there would be no incomplete sentences.

As expected, he was thoroughly the Chief I knew as I filled him in on what Nick Kent had told me. There were engaged “uh-huh”s and calming, “Go on”s. By the time I finished telling him, I felt like Marcus Rydell was all but back in the slammer.

“I guess it’s pointless for me to tell you not to go see Kylie,” Chief said.

“I have to confront him about this.”

“Is it also pointless for me to warn you not to inflict bodily harm?”

“I’ll restrain myself.” I sagged against the window. “I don’t know how much good it’s going to do. He’ll do exactly what he wants to do.”

“So why go?”

“Because–”

“You want me there?”

Okay, what was with the tears? I pressed my wrist against my mouth.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “If I go in there with legal counsel, won’t he get all defensive?”

“Kylie’s going to get defensive anyway, but you’re right. I think the real question is how we’re going to protect Desmond.”

I took a second to savor the “we” before I said, “I’m not leaving him alone when I’m not here.”

“I can help with that. How ’bout I take him this weekend? There’s a ride Sunday, and he and I will figure out something to do Saturday.”

How
’
bout you take me, too?

I pressed my lips together to keep from saying it out loud.

“Desmond’s not the only one who needs protection,” Chief said. “Sultan is after Desmond to get to you.” I could almost see him tilting his head. “We don’t even know if Rydell is still working for Sultan, but—”

“Kylie wouldn’t care about him if that wasn’t the case.”

“Which is why we need to assume that both you and Desmond are in danger.”

“Nick’s on it.”

“I’ll see what else I can do. Just watch your back, Classic. We don’t want to lose you.”

That “we” I didn’t like. It made me sit straight up on the window seat, insides twisting.

“Chief, where are we? You and I—where are we?”

In the silence I could hear him shifting gears. “I love you.”

“I got that part. But the other day at the beach you started to say that you can’t be my ‘something.’ My what? My partner?”

“No—”

“The love of my life?”

“No—”

“Then what? Tell me what it is that you can’t be, and I’ll tell you if I need for you to be it.”

“I can’t be your Band-Aid,” Chief said.

I shook my head. “My ‘
Band
-Aid?’ You’re gonna have to explain that one to me, pal.”

“I can’t be the one who covers up the wound so you think it’s fixed.”

“If you’re talking about Troy Irwin, he is not a ‘wound.’ He’s a ‘scar.’ We all have scars. Except maybe you, which is probably why you don’t get this. At all.”

“Let me guess what you’re doing right now, Classic. You’re pacing around the room, messing up your hair, picking up things and throwing them back down. Am I right?”

I stopped in the middle of the floor I hadn’t realized I’d crossed and pulled my hand away from my scalp. A pillow from the window seat lay at my feet.

“Lucky guess,” I said.

“That’s what you do when the truth makes you mad.”

I marched back to the window seat, holding the phone with
both
hands, but I couldn’t deny the surging anger. Maybe that was what kept me from being too afraid to ask, “Where does that leave us?”

“Right where we are. I’m there for you. I’m there for Desmond. But until I know I’m not just a cover-up for unresolved feelings, I’m not going any further.”

“How are you going to know that?” I said.

“When you know it,” he said.

I didn’t ask him how. I didn’t have to. The words were already Nudging in my head.

I told you: You’re going to have to go another mile.

“Are the doors locked?” Chief said.

Another gear change. For me, the temptation to shift into sarcasm was strong.
No, the doors aren’t locked. I thought I’d just air out the house tonight and let Marcus Rydell breeze on in here and take us all.

Only through sheer willpower did I say, “Yes. They’re all dead-bolted.”

“You want me to look into a security system?”

“No.”

Long pause. Then, “Get some sleep, Classic.”

Sleep? Was he serious? When we hung up, I curled up in the window seat, clutching a pillow and knowing I would never sleep again until Troy Irwin was completely out of my life.

I woke up several hours later, startled by a dream of the Road King purring into Palm Row. Still, I peeked through the slats in the plantation shutters. Chief’s bike was parked in front of my garage. Once again with the tears as I crept downstairs and parted the curtains in the kitchen window. He sat with his back to me on the side porch, feet propped up on the railing. Waiting for something.

I spent the rest of the night in the red chair.

The next morning I walked Desmond into school, partly because I was convinced Rydell was hiding in the campus bushes and would grab my kid the minute he got off the bike, and partly because Desmond was so agitated about the slobber on his drawing and the Mosquito who waited for him on his last day of ISS, I was afraid he’d split before he got to the door.

Skeeter Iseley was right there waiting for him. She looked at me like she wanted to inject me with West Nile fever and pointed Desmond through the office door.

He was probably right. She did hate me. I prayed
GodloveherGod loveherGodloveher
all the way back out to the Harley and came to the conclusion that Desmond was wrong about her needing a man. I wasn’t sure any guy could survive.

I picked up Flannery and took her with me to communion at Sacrament Two. It was Mercedes, Zelda, Ophelia, and Gigi’s turn to host it, and Mercedes was at the front door taking the to-die-for homemade bread from Hank when we arrived.

Bonner was just pulling up behind us in the Jaguar that had been Sylvia’s. He’d bought it from me so I could pay for the Harley, and he coddled the thing like it was a newborn infant.

“What does that guy do for a living?” Flannery murmured to me as we crossed the tidily mowed lawn to the front door. “Those things cost over a hundred thousand dollars.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“I was supposed to be paying for one,” she said.

She looked quickly at me, aware, I was sure, that something had “squirted out.” The self-loathing in her eyes stopped me from pursuing it.

All I said was, “They ought to declare open season on these men.”

“What men?” she said.

“The men in our lives who’ve made us hate ourselves,” I said.

“Who made you hate yourself?” Flannery said.

I let Bonner pass us into the house and looked at her squarely.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” I said. “For every question about my past that I answer for you, you’ll answer one for me about yours.”

“I don’t really want to know,” she said, and banged through the screen door.

Nice try.

When I followed her in, Bonner was helping Zelda set up the communion elements on the coffee table.

Mercedes emerged from the kitchen and exchanged glances with Jasmine, who took my hand and pulled me until the three of us were crammed in between the refrigerator and the butcher block island.

“I know you want to talk about Flannery,” I said, “but we’re about to start—”

“Just this one thing, Miss Angel,” Mercedes said.

She pulled the pocket door closed and even at that brought her voice down to a gritty whisper. “Ophelia and Miss India are all
about
that child workin’ at Second Chances, designin’ outfits and helpin’ with customers.”

“India and I haven’t discussed that,” I said. “But Flannery isn’t working age. We can’t pay her.”

“We don’t care about that, now,” Jasmine said. “It’s just that it don’t seem fair that she won’t do the work on herself, but she gets to come in there and do the fancy job while Gigi and Rochelle, they startin’ to really try and they stuck plantin’ colly-flower with Mr. Owen.”

I looked at Mercedes, expecting the folded arms and the flashing eyes. But she was watching Jasmine and nodding.

“You agree, Merc,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am, only I think this got to be handled right so the child don’t—doesn’t—clam herself up any more than she already doin’.”

She was so beautiful at that moment I just wanted to stare at her and take her in. She pulled her velvety brows together. “Somethin’ wrong, Miss Angel?”

“No. But we need to get the whole group together and work this out. Flannery, too.”

“Mm-mm.”

“It’s what we do,” I said.

They both looked as if they would rather plant “colly-flower,” but they followed me. The rest of the group was gathered in the tiny living room, and Hank raised her hands, ready to say “The Lord be with you.”

“Wait,” I said. “We need to talk first.”

Bonner groaned. “I hate it when a woman says that.”