CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Jeanette stared into the cop's mirror shades and felt her life flash before her eyes. Seeing once again how miserable, sucky and empty it had been only made her more determined to cling to it.

Her gut reaction was to floor the gas pedal and burn rubber out of the lot where she'd pulled over to call Rayburn. Or of drawing the gun she'd used to shoot Weasel and letting the cop have it right between the eyes … then flooring it.

He was a recruiting-poster perfect young officer, with a dusky complexion and a jaw Tom Cruise might've envied. His long, lean body could have been designed to show off his uniform. He was hatless, black hair cropped short. The brass tag affixed to his pocket read "Avery."

Behind him, idling, was a patrol car. A chunky older cop filled the passenger seat, observing through the windshield as he ate not a doughnut but one of those nutritious energy-bar things. By the look on his face, he found it to be about as appetizing as a piece of cardboard. He would be slow, too slow to get his lard ass behind the wheel in time to give chase if she roared away. They might already have noted down her plates. She could change her plates. Could ditch the entire car.

Officer Avery rapped on the window again. She could see his eyebrows over the sunglasses, raised inquisitively. He smiled. It wasn't Rayburn's smile. Avery's teeth were the tiniest bit crooked, which was probably why he had been forced to resort to a career in law enforcement instead of modeling. Maybe, once he had earned the money for some cosmetic dentistry, he would trade the beat for the catwalk.

The smile, even with its minute imperfection, was open and friendly. Her apprehension ebbed, but only a little.

She rolled down the window. "Yes?"

"You okay, ma'am? I saw you sitting here with your head down and got worried."

"Fine," she said, hesitated, then added with a heaving sigh, "Well, not so fine, really." She held up the phone. "I just had an argument with my boyfriend."

His handsome face creased into lines of sympathy. He doffed the shades, revealing eyes as warm and dark as cocoa. "Oh, hey. Sorry to hear that."

"Am I blocking the way?"

"No. I wanted to check and make sure you were all right, that's all."

"That's very kind, Officer." She mustered what she hoped looked like a brave it-hurts-but-I'll-get-through-it smile.

"I'd arrest him for you if I could," he said. "It ought to be a crime to upset a pretty lady on a nice day like this."

Holy God, was the cop flirting with her? Seeing her as a freshly dumped blonde and thinking to score on the rebound?

It was all Jeanette could do to keep from screaming with laughter, and she wondered what the hell had happened to her lately. Always, she'd prided herself on being cool, being in control. And now, all because of Scoot, her composure was shattered and her nerves were twanging like banjo strings. Her emotions kept bounding from one wild extreme to another.

"Thank you, Officer," she said. "I shouldn't keep you from your duties. You've probably got dangerous bad guys to catch."

"Guess so," he said, and slid the sunglasses back on. To hide a touch of disappointment in those cocoa eyes? "Hope you and the boyfriend work things out." He almost sounded like he meant it.

"I'm sure we will."

Jeanette could hardly believe it when he sketched her a dashing little salute, then turned and ambled back to the car, whistling. He got in, said something to the other cop. The other cop snorted and looked over at Jeanette. She waved. Both of them waved back, and then drove off.

"Jesus," she murmured, resting her forehead against the upper curve of the steering wheel. "That, I did not need."

She waited until the patrol car was good and gone before starting up her engine. The close call and surge of adrenaline had left her starving, so she made a sandwich shop her next stop. A large diet cola, a chicken club wrap, and a bag of chips later, she was on her way once more.

It was after three when she reached her destination. After taking a slow cruise through the neighborhood, Jeanette parked half a block from Dunley Street, in a lot between a bowling alley and a thrift store. She locked her car – she always drove the anonymous late-model Honda Civic on these trips; it was a medium-beige that could pass for white, tan, gold or light green depending on the lighting.

With her keys and phone tucked in the pocket of her track suit, and her gun staying in the audio book case under the seat, she set off down the sidewalk.

The thrift store should have been open, but was dark and the sign was turned to 'Closed.' Glancing in, she saw the usual racks of used clothes, the usual ugly furniture, the usual broken, crappy toys. It reminded her of her childhood, of having to wear those clothes and sit on that furniture and play with those toys, and she angled across the street to get away from the unwelcome nostalgia.

On this, the south side of 6th Street, was a place called Needles & Nails, offering "tattoos and body piercing while you wait." Jeanette frowned. Of course it was "while you wait;" what the hell else would someone do? Drop off their skin to be tattooed and come back to pick it up later?

Next door to the tattoo parlor was the Luv Shak, with crotchless panties and see-through nighties and miniature bull whips on display in the window. Then a cigarette store … class all the way here on 6th Street.

Everybody she saw looked equally poor and disreputable. This was the world she had wanted so badly as a child to get away from. To rise above. Kids in hand-me-downs, alcoholic men with tempers, women overweight from only being able to afford cheap, greasy food.

It wasn't like Prewett. Prewett was sleazy but defiantly proud of it. As if there was a certain sneering joy in seeing how low you could sink. This neighborhood had the feel of desperation, of mostly decent people fallen on hard times and trying with varying degrees of success to brake their slide. A lot of the people looked old, fixed-income and dispirited.

The cross street was Dunley. Weasel had said Jon was shot over on Dunley, and the news had mentioned him breaking into an apartment. She could see three apartment buildings. One was directly across the street, old and dismal. The other two, closer to Pine than to Dunley, were newer and nicer.

She looked both ways, up and down Dunley. A 99-cent emporium, a diner, a dog groomer, a locksmith, a used bookstore, a hot dog stand and a junkyard. Straight ahead on 6th, she saw a bar, a teriyaki place, and a psychic.

Maybe she should ask the psychic how to find Scoot.

Scoffing under her breath, she wandered around looking for evidence of a break-in and a shooting. There was no helpful yellow police tape in evidence on any of the apartments in the vicinity, and she finished up at the used bookstore. It was open, with a few people browsing the stacks.

Jeanette pretended to do the same while she listened in on their conversations. She reasoned that the event would be a hot topic among the locals, excellent gossip fodder, and she was right. Within ten minutes, she'd learned that the crappy corner apartment building was where it had happened, and that the intruder had been shot by someone named Hector.

Hector.

No wonder Scoot went by a nickname. What sort of parents in this day and age tagged their kid with Hector?

"How is he?" a white-haired lady with a sweet, dimpled face asked the wheelchair-bound guy behind the counter. "The police aren't giving him trouble, I hope."

"He had to go to the station and talk to them again today," the young man in the wheelchair replied. He was handsome in an appropriately bookish, unconventional way, with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, but his mouth was set in a grim line and his eyes smoldered with anger. "I don't think they're going to charge him. They'd better not. All he was doing was defending Allison."

"Eva says that the man who attacked her is lucky to be alive." The old lady shook her head and clucked her tongue. "Poor Allison. Have you heard from her? Is she all right?"

"She called me from Bob's last night. God, it makes me sick!" He slammed a fist on the counter, causing books to fall over and a small cloud of dust to arise. "If I'd been there, that jerk wouldn't be so lucky."

"Now, Jamie –"

"Please don't 'now, Jamie' me, Mrs. O. You didn't hear her. She could barely talk from him throttling her, and Eva said she was beaten to a pulp."

Peeking at them from the mystery section, idly running her finger along a row of book spines, Jeanette frowned.

What the hell was this? Allison? Who was Allison?

All right, yes, Bigfoot Jon was a hairy ape and a pig and ten other kinds of animal, and she could easily see him knocking a woman around, even raping one if he thought he could get away with it. Aside from providing drugs to the brain-dead Steffi or renting the strutting disease-factories on Prewett, that might be the only way someone like him could ever get any sex.

But why last night, of all nights? Why, when he'd been so close to finding Scoot, had he taken time out to go after this Allison? Crime of opportunity? Had the dumbshit broken into the wrong apartment? Caught some pretty girl in her underwear and just gone berserk with lust? He was a brute, but was he that stupid?

"How could something like this happen?" Mrs. O. fretted. "We try to keep things nice, just a few nice and peaceful blocks in the middle of all this city with its noise and crime. Our little haven. Our little corner of the world. Everybody knows everybody else. We all do our part to look out for one another. And then some horrible stranger comes along."

"If I'd been there …"

Mrs. O. gave him a kindly look that Jeanette could read all too well, even from here. It said, without coming right out and putting it into words, that it was nice of him to feel that way but what, really, could he have done? Him being in that chair and all.

What she actually said out loud was, "What matters is that Allison will be fine, and Hector too. I am no fan of violence, of course, but it would be a real shame if Hector got in trouble for doing what was only right. It's like with that dirty man who frightened my granddaughter so. He got his arms broken, and maybe that was wrong, but I'd stand before the throne of the Father Almighty and say he deserved it."

Jeanette wished they would quit with the speeches and tell her how to find Hector.

The damage was most likely already done. The gun and everything else would be in the hands of the police. They would have contacted Westbrook. They'd be trying with every means at their disposal to figure out who the owner of the purse was. Who the people on the tape were.

Still, there was a slim chance that Hector hadn't been entirely honest. He wouldn't want to confess to a career in purse-snatching. He might have spun some yarn about where he got the gun.

No matter what, she had to know. Had to find him. It was this not-knowing that was driving her crazy. This sense of not being in control. She couldn't walk away and leave it like this. Even if nothing ever came of it, she'd spend the rest of her life with her mind worrying at it like a dog with a bone.

"Is Hector still staying with you?" Mrs. O. asked Jamie.

Jamie shook his head, dashing Jeanette's spark of hope even as it ignited. "I offered, but he said he was going to go home."

"He's tried so hard, that boy. The family he comes from, it's a wonder he isn't mixed up with crime or drugs."

Jeanette stifled a bitter laugh. Not mixed up with crime? Since when?

"He said he had never picked up a gun before in his life," Jamie said. "But if he hadn't, who knows what might have happened? That son of a bitch would have killed him, and Allison too."

"It's like we aren't safe in our own homes anymore," Mrs. O. said, and sighed with the weight of all the world on her stooped, frail, elderly shoulders. She shuffled off into the dusty stacks, leaving Jamie rearranging the books on the counter with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary.

Jeanette left the bookstore a few minutes later and headed back toward the corner. As she neared the Dunley Apartments, she saw a car pull up and let out a tall, slim girl with a chestnut-colored ponytail. The girl was moving slowly, with an invalid's stiffness, and as she turned to say something in through the open door to the driver, Jeanette saw that her face and neck were blotched with fresh bruises.

This, she surmised, had to be Allison. Even in a neighborhood like this, she doubted there would be more than one beaten, half-throttled girl out and about on the streets. Jon had really done a number on her.

Allison reached into the back seat of the car and got out a heavy duffel bag. The man behind the wheel tooted the horn and drove off. Allison waved. Then, with a quick glance around – Jeanette watched sidelong, pretending to fix her attention on the view visible through the dog groomer's window, a chubby young man wrestling a soapy mutt – the girl ducked her head and hurried toward the apartment building. She moved like she wanted to get inside before any of her neighbors saw her. No wonder. It couldn't be fun, being the talk of the town.

Despite the recent trouble, no efforts had been made to beef up the building's security. Jeanette passed by and took a cursory look. The front entrance had a lock that could be jimmied with a paper clip, if it even bothered to latch shut at all thanks to a warped frame. The fire doors at the end of the downstairs hall and the bottom of the stairwell were both propped open by doorstops, no doubt in direct violation of code.

Inside, the small lobby was threadbare brown carpet and peeling paint. It was stylishly furnished with a couple of large fake plants in terra cotta pots, a vinyl couch mended with strapping tape, a coffee table listing toward one uneven leg, an untidy pile of the Sunday paper, two mismatched chairs, a row of mailboxes and a large corkboard for posting messages.

Jeanette saw the girl, Allison, disappearing up the stairs. A quick scan of the intercom buzzer buttons mounted by a speaker on the wall beside the front door revealed no Hectors. There was a "Vance, H." on the fourth floor, though. Hector "Scoot" Vance.

An alley ran around the back of the building. Balconies jutted out over it like fungal growths, those shelf mushrooms that sprouted on rotting logs. A chain-link surround enclosed a bunch of large metal trash cans with the lids off, and burst-open bags suggested that some of the tenants tried their luck hoping to score a basket rather than bother with walking all the way down the stairs, disposing of their trash, and walking all the way back up.

So this was where Scoot lived.

She started on her way, meaning to come back later when she would be at less risk of attracting attention, then stopped short. Her gaze was drawn back to the garbage cans.

Something looped down over one of the rims. A strap. A familiar buttercream-colored leather strap.

Forgetting caution, Jeanette unhooked the latch on the chain-link gate and pushed it open. It squalled on rust. A thin, scruffy cat streaked out of the space behind the cans, hissing balefully. She ignored it.

The strap belonged to her purse. She pulled it out from under a few plastic bags of kitchen trash, none of which had yet broken open or split and spilled their festering contents. The purse was clean aside from a few specklings of coffee grounds and one Popsicle wrapper pasted to the side.

The zippered opening gaped wide. It was not, as Jeanette had expected it to be, empty. She dug through the contents feverishly. Compact, lipstick, tape recorder, other personal effects. But the manila folder was gone. The envelope of cash was gone. The envelope with the gun was gone.

She experienced a moment's jubilation at the discovery of the miniature tape recorder, a moment that lasted until she realized that the tape inside was gone.

Scoot must have listened to it. And what? Decided to hide it? Decided to destroy it?

Hoping for the latter, hoping to find a crushed case and loops of filament-thin tape tangled through the garbage, Jeanette bent over the cans again.

Movement above her made her glance up. Someone had just come out onto a second-floor balcony.

It was the girl, Allison. That bruised face was impossible to mistake. She was holding something small in her hand, poking at it with an outstretched finger. It looked like a cell phone.

Jeanette didn't move. She couldn't yet figure out how this girl was connected to Bigfoot, or to Scoot. All she knew was that she'd be hard-pressed to explain why she was digging through the trash.

Allison held the phone to her ear, her bruised face wearing the expectant, apprehensive look of someone waiting for a call to go through.

With a bright electronic chirping, the cell phone in Jeanette's pocket began to ring.

**