CHAPTER ELEVEN

Allison didn't want to leave Uncle Bob's office. She was filled with an irrational surety that the moment she set foot back in the store, she'd see the petite blonde with the jade pendant come striding through the front doors like a gunslinger.

Irrational. Yes. It was totally irrational. There was no way for the blonde to have found her. Scoot had been well out of Century Plaza by the time she could have gotten her feet and her bearings back.

Even if someone had followed, Scoot would have lost them during the transition back into Allison. Booger might not have been the greatest guard-dog, but he would have given her some kind of indication if a stranger had been nearby.

So, though she was holding her breath in anticipation and dread, she made herself leave the safety of the office.

Betty was long gone, and business was picking up. It usually did in the afternoons, once school got out and more people left work. Weekends were the busiest, except for holiday Mondays when Uncle Bob liked to sell everything at half-off.

The Beekers had evidently decided on the headboard and were now trying to figure out how they were going to get it home. They didn't have a car; Allison knew that Mr. Beeker was a janitor up at Dixie Lanes, the bowling alley on the corner, so he walked to work. And Mrs. Beeker took the bus to the big Shop-N-Go grocery store a mile up Prewett, where she worked nights as a checker.

Uncle Bob, done dealing with one problem customer, moved on to a young guy who wanted to donate his computer. By the look of him, he was an Atherton College student who must've just upgraded, a dude who'd gotten a Dell. Sadly, the thrift store couldn't take used computers. Something about the tubes or the chemicals. Then Uncle Bob hustled over to the Beekers and offered them the services of Donny Fielding. Donny, who had played high school football before discovering beer and flunking out, was a moose whose main talent was lifting and carrying heavy things.

Allison took up a post by the donations bin, where a long table had been set up for sorting. She dragged a large cardboard box up onto the table and opened it. Clothes. Baby clothes. Though they'd been washed, the ghost-smell of old spit-up wafted out.

She took cute tiny garment after cute tiny garment from the box, inspecting each. A small hole or missing button was okay, but anything with huge rips or broken zippers went into a second bin destined for the dump. As she went, she scribbled prices onto cardstock tags and stapled them to the sleeves, cuffs, necklines or waistlines. Fifty-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, a buck twenty-nine.

Shooting wary looks at the door each time it opened, she told herself not to be so jumpy. All right, maybe she had reason to be jumpy. Maybe Scoot had gotten them both in over their heads this time.

But what, really, could the mystery blonde do? It wasn't like she'd go to the police. How would that look? Call up and report a stolen purse … one that happened to contain a firearm and a pile of cash? Not likely.

From the baby clothes, she moved on to a box of old magazines. Women's magazines, outdated copies of Cosmopolitan and Glamour and Elle. The smell lingering on these was like some Dickensian spirit, the Ghost of Perfume Samples Past, but it was a far sight better than stale baby-urp.

She bundled the magazines back-to-back and slipped each pair into a clear plastic bag, which she folded over at the top and sealed with a row of staples. Cardstock tag – ninety-nine cents. What a bargain. Double feature.

Next was a purse. Not one of her donations. It had been cleaned out, except for a balled-up gum wrapper caught in the lining. She bent a cardstock tag around the handle, stapled it. Two dollars and forty-nine cents. It could go hang on the rack with the rest of the purses, backpacks, fanny packs and tote bags … some of which were hers.

That was the trick, one of the perks of her job. Once she had gone through the purses, spying into the lives of the women who'd owned them, she always brought them here. The purses, maybe the occasional wallet or scarf or pair of gloves. They'd be tagged and put on display, and if anyone should ever happen along who recognized a particular bag, well, Sherwood Second-Hand got donations all the time. Often anonymously. There were mornings when Uncle Bob or Allison showed up to unlock and found the bin so full that the excess had been piled against the front doors.

Oh, but she wished she had gone through the rest of the buttercream-leather purse. She had been so spooked that she'd only wanted to get out, get away. Not wanting to find anything more. Anything worse.

What could be worse?

Opening a plastic grocery sack that bulged with someone's unwanted shoes, Allison made a wry noise. She could have found a severed hand in there, for gosh sakes … that would have been worse. Or hard drugs, or kiddie porn.

She had been lucky in her purse-snatching career so far to have run across comparatively few really bad things. A fair amount of pot, either in baggies or in joints, which she had thrown away. A vial that she surmised had been crack cocaine, which she had chucked down a sewer grating. Once, horrible Polaroid photos of a woman and a Doberman, which she had burned and felt unclean for days afterward.

Maybe, she thought as she lined up the individual shoes in hopes of finding their mates, she shouldn't look through the rest of the blonde's purse after all. Maybe she should stuff everything back in there, weight it with a couple of bricks from the vacant lot, and toss the whole thing into the river.

Sneaker … pump … slipper … aha! Another sneaker. Which didn't match. Leopard-print ankle boot with stiletto heel. Snazzy! The matching boot had the heel broken off, though, too bad. Into the reject pile.

Somehow, she got through her shift. She sorted, she hung up clothes, she took a turn on the register when Lyle went on break, she directed traffic as Donny single-handedly moved the sections of a donated sectional sofa into the furniture area.

By quarter to seven, her nerves had calmed. She was no longer sure that the blonde was going to walk in and accuse her, or skip right over the accusations and put a bullet between her eyes. The spent adrenaline left her feeling tired and hungry, and all she wanted was a big meal and then a long sleep with the covers pulled up over her head.

She and Uncle Bob were the last ones to leave. "Plans for tonight, Allie-girl?" he asked as he locked up.

"I told Jamie that I'd come over for dinner."

He smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Oh-ho!"

"Don't you start," she said. "We're friends, that's all."

"Nice young man, though," Uncle Bob said. "Smart as a whip."

"I don't think he's my type."

"Sweetie, you don't have a type."

"Gee, thanks. I'll go out with anybody, is that it?"

"I didn't mean it like that." He gave her a thoughtful look. "It's not the wheelchair, is it?"

"No! How shallow do you think I am?"

"Well," he said, drumming his fingers on his chin, "you are a Montgomery."

Allison stuck out her tongue. "I'm half Sherwood, aren't I?"

"Don't know," he said. "I think your mother had all her Sherwood blood transfused right out of her when she married your dad."

"So true!" Allison said, resisting with effort the urge to roll her eyes.

"Not the chair, then?"

"No, Uncle Bob, it's not the chair! If you must know, it's that I don't think I'm his type. We're friends. A guy and a girl are allowed to be friends nowadays without it having to turn into some complicated thing, you know."

"Now, how could a clever, pretty girl like you not be his type?" He regarded her skeptically. "You're not saying that … well, that Kurt Oberdorfer might be more of his type?"

"I never said that, and I'm not saying it now."

"All right, all right, your nosy old uncle will keep out of your business. See you in the morning."

He had parked in the lot between his store and Dixie Lanes, an arrangement that the bowling alley managers allowed because Bob Sherwood, along with Gus Oberdorfer, Mike Hartnet, Ralph Wilkowsky and Al Chesterton formed the core of the longest-running bowling teams Dixie Lanes had ever seen. The Sixth Street Strikers, as they called themselves, held a canned food and toy drive every Christmas, sponsored community events like egg hunts on Easter and Halloween trick-or-treating at the local shops, and took turns supervising the Little Strikers junior bowling league. If the neighborhood was a small town unto itself, that bunch comprised its town council … old white guys to a man.

Allison watched him go, then turned back down 6th and headed for Jamie's place. He didn't live above his store the way Needles and Tisha, Nathaniel Caron, and several of the other area business owners did. Instead, he had a ground-floor two bedroom unit in the Greenview Apartments, a fancier building than Allison's.

Halfway there, she remembered she had offered to bring dessert, and took a quick detour around the block to the bakery. It was two doors down from a Weight Watchers, which had always struck Allison as fiendishly sadistic.

The bakery was warm, well-lighted and redolent with brown sugar, cinnamon, dough, and chocolate. A man who looked like he had never and would never attend a Weight Watchers meeting if his life depended on it – which in fact it might – was in the process of sliding a sheet of cookies into one of the ovens. More cookies sat cooling on wire racks. They were chocolate-chip-walnut by the lumpy look, each one the size of a hubcap, and Allison's mouth watered.

She bought a Dutch apple pie from Mrs. Oberdorfer's friend Netta, another sweet-faced older lady with a hint of an accent and long pure-white braids that had probably once been as yellow as daffodils. She also caved in and bought a couple of the cookies, and sampled the broken pieces of gingerbread and shortbread piled in shallow bowls atop the glass display cases.

Walking back, she passed the Weight Watchers again just as a group of heavyset women came out. Allison felt them staring at her, at the slim girl carrying what was obviously a pie-box and a white bakery bag. The combination of resentment, envy, raw craving hunger and self-disgust in their expressions made her want to flinch.

Across Dunley from the Weight Watchers, to make matters worse, Lucky Sue's Diner was upwind and giving off powerful grease fumes. Everything at Lucky Sue's was griddle-fried or deep-fried. Burgers, bacon, chicken, onion rings, onion blossoms, fries, curly fries. It was also one of the few places in town that had deep-fried Twinkies on the menu.

A few minutes later, relieved to be away from the baleful glares of the overweight women, Allison and her pie and cookies arrived safely at Jamie's front door.

The Greenview Apartments were not totally inaptly named; it was possible to see some greenery from the windows on the east side of the building, where trees and a small neighborhood park and a parochial elementary school stood on Pine Street. Jamie, however, had a view of the covered parking slots and the alley and the stairs that climbed the side of the Eight Ball Bar to the pool hall.

He had left the door ajar for her, and she nudged it open with her foot. "Hello?"

"In here!"

His apartment was three times as large as hers and much nicer, with all of the furnishings down low and widely spaced to accommodate his chair. She had only been here a few times, once to help Donny deliver the mammoth roll-top desk, but had been given the grand tour.

The second bedroom had been turned into a study, with even more bookshelves for a guy who already spent his days surrounded by them. Here was where Jamie wrote his stories, and where he fussed over them endlessly, not wanting to send them out to magazines unless they were perfect. He had both a typewriter and a computer, and said he preferred the former for his writing while the latter was primarily used for games and surfing the 'net.

Jamie had goldfish and angelfish and neon tetras in an aquarium with a bubbling sunken ship fixture, and a single irritable Japanese fighting fish named Bruno. Bruno had elaborate scarlet and indigo fins and lived in a glass punchbowl, endlessly cruising its watery home with such menace that you expected to hear the low, thrumming theme from Jaws.

Allison found Jamie in the kitchen, aggressively bright with yellow cabinets and white tile. It was full of good cooking smells that reminded her of the kitchen at home, though certainly not of her mother. Marian only ventured into the kitchen to give instructions to the cooks and caterers.

"I brought pie," she said.

"Hostess pies from the 7-Eleven?"

"Real apple pie from the bakery." She set the box on the countertop. "How's the meatloaf?"

"Coming right along." He had potatoes boiling on the stove, a pot of brown gravy simmering, and an orange mound of baby carrots poised to go into a third pot where water steamed.

The question, which had come and gone in her mind all afternoon, popped out before she knew it was going to.

"Hey, Jamie? Would you kill someone for fifty thousand dollars?"

**