CHAPTER NINETEEN

The building was abuzz with the story of Mr. Abelard's heart attack.

Allison got one version from Mr. Strevyk on the corner, another from Mrs. Petronile as she crossed the street, a third from Teddi Lace in the lobby – Teddi had been the one to find him, clutching his chest and gasping for air in the laundry room, where he'd gone to look for a lost sock – and Eva Cesare in their shared kitchen.

"The poor man," Eva said, shredding lettuce with the same sure and perfect strokes she might have used while performing surgery. "Smoking like he does, three packs a day at least. I've never seen him without a cigarette in his mouth, have you?"

"Sure, I have," Allison said. She was rooting around in her half of the cupboards, starved from her day's exertions and hoping to find something, anything other than that sole can of ravioli. "Mrs. Abelard won't let him smoke inside. He has to either go out front or on the balcony."

The door to Eva's side was open. She kept her apartment as clean as an operating room. It was tidily decorated, too. A cross and a picture of Jesus leading fluffy white lambs over a hill hung on the slice of wall that Allison could see through the doorway. Below it, at a card table, Hector Cesare frowned over a textbook and chewing the end of a pencil so hard that it was a wonder he hadn't bitten it in half.

Her search turning up nothing more interesting than a box of instant pudding, a can of creamed corn, a half-full jar of peanut butter and a packet of ramen noodles, Allison tried the fridge. Carton of milk two days past the expiration date, tub of margarine, lots of Mountain Dew and a lone orange soda, assorted heels of bread she hadn't gotten around to throwing away, strawberry jam, mayo-ketchup-relish all in a row, and last but not least a plastic container that had originally held cake frosting but now imprisoned some alien leftover life form. Might've been chili. She wasn't about to open it and look.

"I should marry Jamie Tremayne," she said, selecting the least crustlike of the pieces of bread and making a PB&J. "He's always got food."

"You can eat with us," Eva said. "I'm making tacos."

"I've mooched one meal already this weekend."

"Really, there's plenty."

The sizzling aroma of ground beef browning, and the heap of freshly-grated cheese made up her mind for her. "Okay, twist my arm. Thanks. Tell you what, tomorrow night I'll cook."

In the other room, Hector raised his head. "Uh-oh."

"Don't uh-oh me, smart guy," she said. "I can cook."

Which was not strictly a lie. She could read directions and follow a recipe with reasonable success more often than not. Now that she could finally remember the difference between the abbreviations for teaspoon and tablespoon, she did okay. Eight or even nine times out of ten, the end result was usually edible.

"Yeah," Hector said. "Frozen hamburger patties."

"Ha, ha. All right, what do you think I should make? Go ahead. Challenge me. I'm not afraid."

"Chicken cordon bleu," he said.

Eva snorted. "Hector, do you even know what chicken cordon bleu is?"

"Sure I do," he said. "But I don't know what Beef Wellington is."

"God, Beef Wellington," Allison groaned. "My father loves that. It's a pain and a half to cook, puff pastry, soooo good, and really bad for you, so we'd only have it on his birthday."

"Cool, you can make that," Hector said.

Allison held up her hands. "Not so fast. I've never made it. I've only seen it done."

"Chicken cordon bleu," Eva said, "is breast of chicken wrapped around ham and white cheese, breaded, fried, and baked."

"Or," Allison said, "you can buy pre-made ones and just throw them in the oven."

"Cheater," Hector said.

"When are you going to make us dinner, then?" she asked, lobbing a bit of lettuce at him. "Or are you all talk? Huh? Can you cook?"

"I can make enchiladas."

"He can make enchiladas," Eva agreed. "They look funny, but they taste good."

She served up the tacos buffet-style, with dishes of refried beans, lettuce, cheese, salsa, chopped onions, and spicy meat. The shells were crispy, warmed in the oven, and Allison ate two more than she intended.

"Hector is staying here tonight," Eva said when they were done eating. "Our mother and stepfather have been fighting."

"It'll be better once Juan comes home," Hector said. "But today it was pretty bad. I had to get out of there."

Because Eva had cooked, Allison volunteered to do the dishes. Eva protested but gave in, as she had to work that night.

"I swear I don't know how you do it," Allison said. "School, shifts at the hospital, and keeping a job. It's a miracle you don't explode. Me, I have to be at the store at nine tomorrow to help Uncle Bob tag all the new donations, and I'm whining."

"That's nothing," Hector said. "We go to seven o'clock Sunday services at church, too."

"Great, now I feel extra guilty."

Hector chuckled. "Church will do that."

When the kitchen was clean, Eva put on her sky-blue uniform and headed out. Allison said good night to Hector and shut the connecting door. By comparison to Eva's, her apartment was in need of federal disaster relief.

She put off housework to made her weekly duty-call home, which she always tried to do on Saturday nights because her parents would be out at the theater, the opera, the ballet, or some political function. She talked briefly to the housekeeper, then to her brother Andrew and finally, to Missy for almost an hour.

With that out of the way, she straightened up, lugged a load of laundry down to the first floor laundry room, forgot her soap and had to run back up, got the load started, and sat down to decide what to do about the buttercream-leather purse.

Tomorrow, she would take it to the police. She'd been dithering around for too long already. Let the police handle it, let the police worry about it. Allison "Scoot" Montgomery was done. Having that hairy guy on the bike following her had spooked her. It was all preying on her nerves, and taking the fun out of her main joy in life.

Come to think of it, she realized with dismay, she'd seen him in Century Plaza too. He had been in heavy-metal attire instead of wanna-be Rambo, but it was the same slab-muscled orangutan all right.

He had seen her take the blonde's purse, and now he was following her? That was too disturbing even to consider.

She sat cross-legged on the floor with the purse in her lap, debating what to do with the contents. Try to clean her prints off? The problem with that was that she'd also be cleaning the blonde's prints off, and the blonde might be of great interest to the police.

True … but the greater interest the blonde was to the police, the greater their interest in the circumstances of her purse being stolen would become. And the greater their scrutiny of Allison.

If she dumped it anonymously at the 10th Street Station, they wouldn't necessarily know to connect it to her. Her prints weren't on file anywhere that she knew of, and as long as she was cautious from here on out …

No. Too dangerous. Better to wipe everything and hope for the best.

But that wouldn't give the police a lead on the blonde.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it," muttered Allison. "Doing the right thing gets a lot harder when you're a criminal."

Then, like a bursting ray of light, she thought of the miniature tape recorder. The blonde must have been the one to put the tape in the machine, and Allison had not taken it out. Her prints would be nowhere on the cassette. But the blonde's would have to be.

Satisfied, she got a box of tissues and a spray bottle of watered-down blue window cleaner and proceeded to swab everything she had touched. Since she didn't have latex gloves, she made do with her ordinary winter knit gloves.

At last, she was left with the envelope of money, and that same dilemma.

She really, really wanted to keep the cash.

It was really, really wrong to keep the cash.

Once, she had amused Missy by fashioning devil and angel puppets out of red and white socks and putting on little skits with them. Sometimes she had rested the puppets on her shoulders and made them talk in funny voices. Those puppets were still at the house, in Missy's room to remember her weird big sister by. Allison raised her gloved hands to her shoulders nevertheless, and worked her fingers like mouths.

"That money doesn't belong to you," the sweetie-syrupy angel-voice said. "It's wrong to keep it."

"It's wrong to steal purses," the gruff-raspy devil-voice said. "But you do that all the time, and you keep the money."

"This is different."

"No, it isn't."

"This is blood-money! Tainted! Dirty money!"

"All the better reason to keep it and put it to good use," the devil said. "Help people with it."

Allison stopped, shook her hands, looked at them. Whenever the devil started saying things about helping people, she knew something was way off-kilter.

She inhaled, held it, let it out. "All right. I'm going to keep it. I'm going to find ways to spread some around so no one can figure out what I did, but I found it, I'm going to keep it. F.K. Finders-Keepers."

All of the other items went back into the purse, which she put in the seat of the recliner and left her gloves lying over the arms so she wouldn't forget and leave new prints. She'd have to think of some clever explanation as to why she'd be wearing winter gloves on a warm day, though.

The envelope of cash, she returned to its hiding place under the recliner's cushion. Then, biting her lip thoughtfully, she masking-taped it to the back of the recliner's elevating foot pad, and closed it all up.

She changed into socks, cotton drawstring pajama pants and a camisole top, then climbed into bed with a J.A. Jance novel and a bag of peanut M&Ms. After a few chapters, she put both on the shelf by the lamp, switched it off, and snuggled under the blanket.

The building was never silent, but the noises were familiar enough that she was able to tune them out.

In her dream, she and Jamie were on the top of a bluff, the landscape falling away below them in a steep rocky precipice toward the dark-green tops of pine trees. A zip line stretched from the bluff down at a sharp angle toward a river below. Jamie stood next to her, legs all hard muscle in snug biking shorts, excellent legs. He urged her to go ahead and go first, and he'd be right behind her. She hung onto the triangular trapeze-thingie with white-knuckled, sweaty-palmed hands, the wind blowing her hair back from her face and making her eyes water, terrified but unable to say no or step back. Boulders, dislodged from the side of the cliff, bounced downhill with a rolling, grinding sound.

All at once she was wide awake, her hands clamped into tight fists around nothing, the wind still blowing her hair.

She opened her eyes. More light than usual streamed in from the building next-door, because her curtains belled out in the draft from the open sliding glass door that led to the little balcony.

That door had been shut and locked when she went to bed. She was sure of it. She'd triple-checked. But the lock was a flimsy thing, and the door didn't fit well in its frame. It could be wobbled until the lock came loose, and then trundled back on its tracks. When it was, it made a sound very much like that of the boulders in her dream.

In the deepest corner of darkness, over by the bathroom, a large and hulking shadow moved.

Allison kicked off the covers and shot out of bed like she'd been fired from a cannon. She hit the floor running. It was a small room and she'd be at the hall door in a couple of strides –

Something flung into her legs from behind. It made a terrific metallic clatter. She tripped, fell, and hit hard on her belly. Winded, she thrashed free of the metallic thing – it was the folding tray table she kept beside the recliner to hold drinks, snacks, and the remote control.

Sucking in a new breath, she was about to shriek for help when someone knee-dropped onto her back. A hoarse, coughing groan burst from her. In the next apartment, Mr. Kaminski's television blared on and on about the latest kitchen gadget that could be yours for only nineteen-ninety-nine, but wait, there's more!

A hand seized her hair. Another clapped over her mouth. The weight on her back moved, straddling her, knees digging into the sides of her waist. Her first crazy thought was that it was the blonde woman called Jade. But Jade had been tiny, and whoever was on her was big, heavy.

She bit hard on the hand over her mouth. She tasted dirt, sweat, oil, pizza. The grip on her hair became a fist and yanked. Some strands ripped loose from her scalp but the rest held. Her head was forced back. The other hand squeezed her jaw with nearly bone-cracking force.

This wasn't happening. This was a nightmare. Her strange, scary-pleasant dream about Jamie had taken this dark, awful turn …

No, she wasn't dreaming! She was awake, and approaching panic.

The man – it was a man, had to be, too strong, the hands too big to be a woman – let go of her jaw and Allison gasped for air. He looped something around her throat and pulled it tight, cutting off her breath just as she started to inflate her lungs.

Her fingernails scrabbled at it. A wide strap. Leathery. A belt? She was strangling, choking. Her windpipe was closed to a pinhole. She bucked and thrashed, struggling, clawing at the belt and the floor, trying to drag herself out from under him.

Then he wrenched her over onto her back and gave the belt another yank, and she couldn't breathe at all. "Fuckin' hold still," he snarled.

Looking up at him, she saw wild matted hair and camo fatigues. It was him, the guy on the bike, the one who'd followed Scoot. He had found her again, found where she lived, knew her secret.

She got a finger under the belt and tried to loosen it. He smacked her hands away, then punched her in the face. It was like a bomb going off inside her skull. The back of her head hit the floor. Bright lights exploded in front of her eyes. The world flickered. She went limp, dazed and incoherent. Hadn't she done this already today? Hadn't she knocked her head at the skate park?

He groped at her chest, then tore her camisole top apart like tissue paper and his filthy, callused hands were on her bare breasts. He grunted. Still straddling her, he sat back with his weight resting on her pelvis and unfastened his pants.

Allison was distantly aware of this, distantly aware that the son of a bitch meant to rape her, but her main concern at the moment was the fact that she couldn't breathe. Her vision was a foggy field, her ears both ringing and feeling stuffed with wads of cotton. Her chest burned and throbbed.

His weight shifted again, sitting on her thighs. The drawstring of her pajama pants popped as he tugged.

Once again, she worked a finger under the belt. It loosened. Even as she took in a welcome breath, the air flooding her tortured lungs, she got the belt over her head and off so that he couldn't yank it tight again.

"Hey!" He snatched for it, missed.

Her throat felt lined with sandpaper. She wheezed and hacked.

He struck her again, a glancing blow off the cheekbone as she jerked her head aside. She swung the belt at him. It whistled through the air and slapped across his face. He howled and rocked back in shock.

As he did, Allison lunged out from under him with all her might. Rug burn scoured a layer of skin from her back. He overbalanced and toppled sideways, crashing into a small freestanding bookshelf. It toppled, spilling books, knick-knacks and her collection of trinket boxes everywhere.

But he was off her, and she scrambled to her feet.

"Help!" It came out a raspy croak. Pain tore through her abused throat like a cluster of fishhooks.

"Fuckin' bitch!" He threw himself after her.

Allison backpedaled and swung the belt again. It smacked his arm. He caught at it and almost got it away from her.

"Someone help me!" This time it was a thin teakettle squeak.

"I'm gonna fuckin' kill you!"

She backed into the low coffee table that held her television, and without a moment's debate flipped the whole thing over. The television hit the floor and the screen smashed.

He rushed her, roaring like a wounded bear. Allison cracked him another one with the belt, with the buckle end. It gouged a furrow in his cheek but it didn't slow him. She leaped sideways and he tumbled over the upended coffee table, splitting it with a noise like a splintery gunshot.

Mr. Kaminski banged on the wall. "Do you know what time it is?"

"Help!" Allison coughed, and now her throat felt lined with a cheese grater.

As she ran for the hall door, the hairy guy heaved up out of the coffee table wreckage like a breaching whale. His hand closed on her pajama pants. With the drawstring broken, they slid down her legs and entangled her, and she went sprawling again.

All of the knives were in the kitchen, she didn't have anything like pepper spray …

She rolled over, sat up, and that was when he tackled her. His weight drove her down onto her back, with him on top. She felt something stiff prodding at her thigh.

Revulsion sparked new strength and she hammered blows at his head. She hit him in the ear, over the eyebrow, on the chin. Her attack rattled him enough to let her twist away again, and she fetched up against the recliner with a jarring jolt. The purse fell on her, heavy as a sack of bricks, dumping its contents all across the carpet.

His hand got her hair again.

Allison screamed. This time it was a shrill, splintery cry, louder than any of her previous efforts.

"Did you hear me?" Mr. Kaminski called, pounding on the wall again. "I'll complain to the manager. I'll call the cops!"

The guy whirled her around and slammed a fist into her stomach. She curled up into a helpless ball and heard animal noises barely recognizable as coming from herself: moans, sobs, ragged panting.

"Okay," he said, his own breathing labored. "Okay, you fuckin' bitch. You ready for it? You fuckin' better be, because you're gonna get it."

**