Winter's Daughter (12 page)

Tannis shook her head, but Dillon stepped forward and said, "Sure, thanks." Tannis gazed at him as he accepted the sandwich and hungrily bit into it. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn it was the first decent mouthful of food he’d had all day.

How easily he does it, she thought in admiration.

Binnie grimaced sympathetically when Dillon handed the sandwich back to her. "Yeah, I know—tuna fish." She shook her head. "I told the guy I was a vegetarian, and he brings me tuna fish. Probably shouldn’t complain though. People sure have been nice today. Sure you don’t want a bite? It’s got alfalfa sprouts."

Tannis glanced up at Dillon, and again felt that odd little bump beneath her ribs. Distracted, she shook her head and stood up. "Think I’ll go over to the culvert and see if I can find Clarence. You coming?"

Binnie shook her head. "I believe I’ll sit here in the sun a while longer. Arthritis," she explained matter–of–factly for Dillon’s benefit. "Always gets bad when the nights turn cold."

"Where will she go?" Dillon asked in an undertone as he fell into step beside Tannis’s shopping cart.

Tannis shrugged and muttered, "She’ll be okay. Binnie’s been on the streets a long time." But she wished she felt better about it herself. Not that it was ever easy, but today she was having a hard time keeping any kind of clinical perspective at all. She thought it must have something to do with Dillon’s presence. For some reason, being with him was making her feel— vulnerable. As if he’d barged into her heart and left the door wide open.

To fortify herself, she began to explain to Dillon about the Ninth Street culvert. Most east–west streets in the city deadended at Los Padres Creek; one of the few that didn’t was Ninth Street, which happened to be a state highway. Where Ninth Street crossed the dry creekbed there was a culvert big enough to drive a pickup truck through.

"It’s not a bad shelter," Tannis told Dillon. "The only trouble with it is that when it’s most needed, it’s not available."

Dillon laughed. "Well, yeah," he said, "I see what you mean."

They were standing on the sloping concrete bank of the dry wash that in rainy weather would be a raging torrent. "I would imagine that anybody desperate enough to sleep in that culvert this time of year sleeps with one eye on the sky."

Today, though, the skies were clear, and the wash had the look of an encampment. There were cardboard boxes and tattered mattresses on the floor of the culvert, and people lounging in the sun with their backs to the graffiti–covered concrete buttresses. Somebody even had a fire going in a ten–gallon bucket, the kind that had once held some sort of industrial goo.

Tannis found Clarence sitting about halfway up the side of the concrete embankment, the plastic trash bag that held all his worldly possessions tucked between his feet. He was a very thin man, with haunted, sunken eyes and shoulder–length hair that had probably once been blond. Like so many of the street people, it was impossible to guess his age. Tannis was learning that poverty and hopelessness extracted a much greater toll on both the body and the soul than time did.

"Is this the high–water mark?" she asked, squatting down beside him.

"What the heck," Clarence said with a whimsical shrug, "it’s been a dry year, but why take chances?" He squinted at Tannis. "Haven’t seen you in a while. Thought maybe you’d gone to the shelter."

"Nope, been looking for you."

He shrugged again, looking apologetic. "I can’t go to the shelter. I’ve tried, but—"

"I know," Tannis said, patting his hand. "It’s okay." And then, softly she asked, "Clarence, have you eaten today?"

His smile was wistful. "Oh, I went over to the Rescue Mission last night. Guess I’ll probably go again. They were okay about letting me stay outside, and the preaching’s not that bad." He looked at Tannis. "You?"

It was Tannis’s turn to shrug. "I’m doin’ okay." Thinking of what Binnie had told her, she added, "Handouts have been pretty good since all the stuff about the homeless in the newspapers."

Clarence gave a dry chuckle. "Yeah, kind of jogs people’s consciences, I guess. It’ll pass—always does." He looked away from her, down to where Dillon stood talking to The Showman and another man Tannis didn’t know. After a moment he nodded toward the little group and said, "Who’s the new guy?"

"Friend of mine," Tannis said. "Name’s Dillon. He’s okay." Clarence nodded and fell into one of his brooding silences while Tannis went on watching Dillon move among the mattresses and cardboard boxes below.

He’s okay.
Whatever it was about Dillon that had attracted her that very first morning was working its magic on the inhabitants of the wash. In bemusement Tannis watched him squat down to speak to Crazy Frankie, who was sitting on his mattress, muttering to himself. Frankie wouldn’t answer, of course—he never did—and after a moment Dillon stood up and went to warm his hands over the fire in the bucket. Again Tannis noticed how naturally he seemed to blend with the homeless people. It must come, she supposed, from all those years of experience as an undercover cop.

Cop.
She’d forgotten about that. She had an idea that once a cop, always a cop at heart, and that could prove awkward at her next stop. She didn’t know how she was going to manage it, but somehow or other she was going to have to make that next stop alone.

"Ready to move on?" Dillon asked when she joined him down in the wash.

"I just remembered a couple of things I was supposed to do for my sister," Tannis told him, lying glibly. "Completely slipped my mind. Listen, why don’t you stay here and get to know these people a bit more while I run my errands, and I’ll meet you back at your office in— say, two hours?"

Dillon’s eyes probed hers in a way that made guilty shivers go up her spine, but he nodded and said simply, "Fine. See you later." And then, with the bracketed smile that always made a little pool of warmth inside her, he added, "Take care now. Make sure you get there before dark."

"Right. I will." Feeling thoroughly dishonest, Tannis waved and began pushing her cart laboriously up the long incline that led to the street.

I wonder what she’s up to, Dillon thought as he watched her go.
Errands for her sister, my foot.
It had been as patently clumsy a lie as he’d ever heard. He was a little amused by it, and a little disappointed too; he’d have liked to think she trusted him.

Still, whatever she had in mind to do, it was obvious she wanted to do it without him tagging along, and he respected her right to privacy. When he set out to follow her, it wasn’t because of any wish to invade that privacy but because he couldn’t stand the thought of her walking alone through the bleak and lonely streets.

The vacant lot was one of those eyesores that seems to fall through the cracks of even the best intentioned bureaucracies. Adjacent to an abandoned garage and service station, it had at one time been the repository for the station’s overflow of cars and parts. Now foxtail and tumbleweeds grew high and thick around the stripped–down car bodies and empty oil drums, the dry grass a seine that trapped windblown refuse like fish in a trawler’s nets. It was a bleak place, reeking of failure and disillusionment. And to all appearances, except for Tannis and her shopping cart, it was deserted.

When a different movement caught the corner of Dillon’s eye, he assumed it was a cat hunting field mice in the weeds. Crouched in listening silence behind a half–stripped car abandoned along the side of the street, he heard whispers, quickly shushed. And then, like nocturnal creatures emerging from their burrows at twilight, small, dark heads began to appear amid the jumble of scrap metal and junk.

Children.
Dillon counted three, and then a girl who couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, carrying a toddler. And finally a woman leading yet another child by the hand, calmly watching Tannis’s approach with pride in every line of her rail–thin body. Dillon heard the staccato sibilance of Spanish, soft ripples of irrepressible childish laughter, and repeated often and with excitement, the single syllable, "Win—"

Children.
Of all the homeless, the plight of the children was the most intolerable. An old, familiar rage caught at Dillon’s gut, writhing and twisting inside him, rising into his chest, hampering his breathing. It was such a helpless feeling, that rage against the injustices and cruelties of life. Fighting to control it, he closed his eyes and leaned his head against the car’s rusty fender.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw Tannis take a bag of groceries from its hiding place under the odds and ends in her cart and give it to the woman. Next came a plastic bag of oranges, which was immediately opened and its contents distributed among the children. They ate the fruit like voracious animals, devouring every bite, while Dillon watched, tasting his rage like acid in his throat.

Why hadn’t she wanted him to know about this? He didn’t understand it. Didn’t she know he could help?

Tannis had been struggling with something tied to the handle of her cart. Finally, after pulling off a glove with her teeth, she managed to get it unfastened. Now she held it out to the woman in triumph—a pair of children’s tennis shoes dangling from their laces. Dillon saw then that the child whose hand the woman held so tightly was barefooted.

It was too much for Dillon. Unable to look anymore, he sat on the pavement with his forearms resting on his drawn–up knees and his head back against the side of the car, fighting anger and the urge to jump out of his hiding place and get those kids into the hands of the Red Cross, or maybe one of the county agencies. He kept telling himself to wait until he’d had a chance to ask Tannis what was going on. He kept telling himself she must have a reason for trying to keep this from him.

He waited until he heard the sounds of the cart and Tannis’s shuffling footsteps going off down the sidewalk. When he finally crawled out of his hiding place, the vacant lot was once more, to all appearances, deserted.

As he followed the bobbing purple pompon through the crowded streets and lonely back alleys of Los Padres, Dillon did a lot of thinking about Tannis Winter, social psychologist, crusader, do–gooder, and, possibly, damn fool. She was a puzzle, and she was beginning to frustrate him terribly. He realized the more he found out what kind of a person she was, the more he wanted to know her. And yet, in some indefinable way she seemed to keep him at a distance, putting up a thin but impregnable wall around her he couldn’t penetrate.

Like that blasted bag lady’s makeup of hers. It was becoming unbelievably frustrating to him to realize he’d still seen her only once without it. For those few tantalizing, bewitching minutes in his office, she’d been unguarded and open, both physically and emotionally. That meeting seemed distant and vague to him now, like a half–remembered dream. He wasn’t certain whether he was beginning to forget or whether he was embellishing his memories, turning them into full–blown fantasies. He knew only that ever since then, seeing her in her disguise made him want to strip away the coat and wig, scrub off the makeup and latex wrinkles, and kiss her until the walls came tumbling down.

It was nearly dusk when Tannis entered the part of the city known to the street people as The Alley. The name had come to mean more than the alley itself; it referred now to the surrounding neighborhood as well. The actual alley bisected several blocks of squat brick buildings that housed an assortment of massage parlors, adult bookstores, bars and liquor stores, X–rated video stores and movie theaters. A few legitimate businesses still survived behind steel mesh and iron grids, catering to the people who lived in the decaying apartments above the stores. For the most part, the rent–paying residents tried to ignore their neighbors—the ones who spent their nights huddled in cardboard boxes and makeshift tents, and their days crouched on sunny sidewalks and in sheltered doorways, drinking, sleeping, and trading in drugs.

Partly because it nudged up against the back doors of City Hall, and partly because it really was the heart of the city’s skid row, The Alley had received the brunt of the mayor’s clean–up campaign. As Binnie had said, the cardboard boxes and tents had been torn down and their occupants scattered. Now, though, just two days after the sweep, the former residents were already beginning to find their way back.