One False Move (3 page)

“Hey, man,” he said and Ramerez nodded without looking up. “How ya doing, Danny?”

This time Ramerez did a double take, his eyes getting wide as he recognized Jared.

“I brought us some takeout,” he told him, wanting to calm his worries and holding up the bags. “Chinese.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What are you talking about? You didn’t think I’d come by and say hey?”

Ramerez finally got the door opened, but now he hesitated.

“You did me a big favor,” Jared said, this time with a smile. “I just wanted to buy you dinner and say thanks.”

Ramerez was studying him, meeting his eyes as if looking for the truth there. Then suddenly he looked away and shrugged. “You don’t owe me anything. Your redheaded friend already paid me. Even threw in a laptop computer.”

Jared smiled again; it didn’t take much to buy off someone like Danny Ramerez. He understood him all too well. That’s why he couldn’t trust him. “Hey man, it’s just some kung pao chicken and chow mein. A few egg rolls. It’s no big deal.”

He let Ramerez think about it while he stood there pretending it
was
no big deal, still not making any attempt to leave. Finally Ramerez shrugged again and waved him into the small apartment that looked like a cross between a rummage sale and a garbage dump. A pile of clothes covered a threadbare recliner, and Jared could smell what had to be dirty socks or rotten eggs. Magazines and comic books were stacked on the floor. A collection of beer bottles and cans shared the shelves with discarded take-out wrappers and foam containers. A cardboard pizza box lay open on the coffee table with two pieces left, the toppings suddenly skittering out of the box.

Ramerez started shoving things aside as if to tidy up for his guest. While he moved stacks and collected trash, Jared pulled out an oversize, black trash bag from one of the take-out bags and began laying it over the scuffed linoleum floor in the middle of the room. Ramerez glanced at him a couple of times before he stopped.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to make a mess,” Jared told him.

Ramerez laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

He came over to take a closer look, examining the plastic and even walking onto it, stepping carefully as if looking for a trap. But, of course, he didn’t see it. He was still looking down at the black plastic under his feet when Jared whipped the knife out from the same take-out bag. All it took was one slash up under and across the throat, so quick that Ramerez saw his own blood splatter the plastic. He grabbed at the wound, his fingers slipping into the gaping flesh as if attempting to hold it together. His wide eyes met Jared’s, shock and realization contorting his entire face before he finally crumpled onto the plastic.

Jared looked around the room and decided on the recliner. He shoved the clothes off, checked for cockroaches, then grabbed the other take-out bag and sat down. Danny Ramerez wasn’t going anywhere. There was no big hurry to take out the trash. Jared Barnett pulled out a plastic fork and the container of kung pao chicken and began to eat.

7:00 a.m.
Omaha, Nebraska

Melanie Starks quickened her pace. The sun peeked over the bell towers of St. Cecelia’s Cathedral. The days were already growing shorter. Summer was almost over but was making one last grand stand. It was only the beginning of her walk, and already Melanie could feel her breathing becoming labored. The air was thick and heavy with moisture.

She studied the horizon in the opposite direction. Having cursed sunrises for years she almost hated to admit how much she enjoyed them now. But this morning’s sunrise gave her a bad feeling, even a sudden chill as a trickle of sweat made its way down her back. The sun was barely able to squeeze through the storm clouds that were gathering, a gravestone-gray sky streaked bloodred. It was an eerie combination, and she could hear her mother repeating one of her silly superstitions:

“Red sky in morning,
Sailors take warning.
Red sky at night,
Sailors delight.”

The weather only seemed to fuel her restlessness, to ignite her disappointment, her frustration…Oh, hell, she should call it what it was—her anger. Yeah, that’s right. She was angry, pissed off. Jared hadn’t been back two weeks and already things were changing.

She resented having to cut short her morning walk. What was it about
his
sudden freedom that took precedence over her own? That’s what it felt like when he called last night and left the message to meet him for breakfast. Summoning her as if he could still boss her around just like when they were kids. He used that brief yet demanding tone of his, “Meet me at that place we talked about. It’s time.”

“It’s time,” she mimicked under her breath. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about. It was as if he was talking in code. As if they were kids again, plotting one of their childhood conspiracies. Ever since he had gotten back he
had
been planning something, something big or so he kept saying. But, of course, he couldn’t tell her until it was time. That was Jared, so secretive and always calling the shots. He expected complete loyalty with no questions and no hesitation. It had always been that way. Like the Rebecca Moore thing. Jared didn’t even bother explaining, instead he insisted the police got it wrong. Melanie knew that could happen. She’d seen it happen years before.

She pumped her arms, keeping her pace and not letting her anger slow her down. She hated that Jared made her feel like she still owed him. It didn’t help that she wasn’t there for him during the trial.

It was as if nothing had changed in the five years he had been away. And yet everything had changed.
She
had changed, or at least, she thought she had. Although it couldn’t have been very much. Why else would she be rushing to meet him, rushing once again to do whatever her big brother told her to do? Like cutting short what had become her daily ritual, her daily gospel and the replacement for a quick fix of nicotine and later still, for four cups of hot scorching coffee. The coffee had helped her get through the initial withdrawal from the cigarettes. Now this new addiction, a three-mile morning walk, replaced the caffeine.

She didn’t need Dr. Phil to see she had simply transferred compulsions. She took the same walk every day at the same time. Even walked at the same pace. Only today she had to quicken the pace if she intended to meet Jared. Quicken, she decided, but not cut short. She pushed back her shoulders as if this one defiant thought was the same as standing up to her big brother. Something she had never been able to do in the past. But that was the past. Maybe Jared needed to see that she wasn’t that same little girl he could boss around. She was an adult, a grown woman with her own son. She had been forced to grow up while Jared seemed to live in the past, even moving back in with their mother when he was released from jail.

That was a mistake. Their mother was crazy with all her black magic and superstitions. Certifiably crazy or so she and Jared liked to claim, making up any kind of excuse for why she kept picking loser husbands like both their dads. Saying their mother was crazy seemed better than admitting she was simply stupid. Maybe that was Jared’s problem. Melanie thought about teasing him that maybe he had inherited Mom’s crazy gene, though she knew full well that she would never dare to tease Jared. He would see it as a betrayal, and he would remind her, again, that all they had were each other because of the past they had survived and the secrets they continued to share.

Melanie turned left at Fifty-Second and Nicholas Streets and headed into the Memorial Park neighborhood, a stretch of huge brick homes with carefully manicured lawns. Not a ceramic gnome in sight. That made her smile, thinking of her son, Charlie’s, newest obsession of stealing lawn ornaments, even though it annoyed her as much as it amused her. She couldn’t help thinking that maybe it was another example of like mother, like son. After all, she had taught him well, making a game early on of their escapades. It may have started as a game, but it bugged her that Charlie still treated stealing as a game, completely unaware of the risks and dangers. Yes, she had taught him well, maybe too well.

She’d brought him in when he was only eight. They stole packs of ground beef—quickly graduating to T-bone steaks—from the HyVee on Center Street, stuffing them into his school backpack. Charlie became so good at it she didn’t even notice him steal the Hostess Twinkies and Bazooka bubble gum until they appeared later on their kitchen table, alongside the packs of meat. He was a natural, and now, nine years later, with that baby face and lopsided grin, he could still get away with almost anything.

Their game had started as a matter of survival, a way to supplement Melanie’s string of shitty jobs. So what if Charlie swiped a few silly lawn ornaments as long as he brought home a leather jacket or enough CD players to pay the rent? What did it matter that he still considered hot-wiring Saturns a game? Maybe it was that carefree attitude that kept him from getting caught, though Melanie worried that it had more to do with luck than attitude. They had had a long string of good luck, and lately she found herself not trusting it to hold up. But she didn’t dare tell Charlie that.

Luck and a little bit of opportunity. That had been her ticket out of the stink hole she grew up in. For the last ten years she had provided a nice home for herself and Charlie in the middle of Dundee, a respectable Omaha neighborhood. A good family neighborhood, though not quite like this one, she thought as she looked around. She kept to the sidewalks, wondering if anyone behind these huge, decorative doors would understand. How could they with their polished black BMWs and Lexus SUVs in their driveways, not a missing hubcap or spot of rust in sight, let alone a homemade In-Transit sign Scotch-taped to the rear window?

She walked past the only pickup parked in the street, a white Chevy, and she knew before she saw the attached beat-up trailer that the truck belonged to a lawn service. Then she saw two young men, shirtless and glistening with sweat, down on their knees on the front lawn of the house. They both had what looked like oversize scissors, and they were cutting blades of grass from in between the pristine white picket fence, obviously unable to use the array of machinery on their trailer for fear of scarring the white wood.

Melanie resisted the urge to laugh. Jesus! What did it cost to have something like that done? She wanted to roll her eyes and make some sympathetic gesture in recognition of their plight, but then they would have known. They would have realized that she didn’t belong here, either, that she was an outsider, too. So instead she just smiled and continued walking.

She checked her wristwatch, a sleek, black-faced Movado with a single diamond that Charlie had given her on Mother’s Day. She didn’t bother asking him anymore how he got things or from where. She couldn’t help thinking the watch belonged in this neighborhood even if she did not. It was then that she saw the eight-by-ten piece of cardboard nailed to the tree. She remembered noticing the tree soon after it was ravaged by last week’s thunderstorms. The wounded maple managed to keep only its trunk intact, the branches ripped off, leaving behind what now looked like two severed arms, still reaching in surrender to the sky. This morning someone had added a hand-printed sign, a sort of public epistle that read, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” In small print below was written “Emily Dickinson.”

Melanie glanced at the house the tree belonged to, but didn’t slow her pace. She repeated the phrase to herself, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” She snorted under her breath. What the hell was that supposed to mean? And, besides, what did people with brick mansions and BMWs need to know about hope? What problems could they possibly have that couldn’t be solved with their money?

She remembered what Jared always said. That people who had money didn’t have a clue about people who didn’t have money.

Melanie looked back at the tree. Even from almost a block up the street that poor, ugly thing stood out in the middle of this picture-perfect neighborhood. It didn’t need a stupid quote from some dead poet tacked onto its pathetic remains to remind it that it didn’t belong.

“Hope is the thing with feathers?” she repeated, but still didn’t understand. Was somebody poking fun? Or maybe pointing out that they were above having an ugly tree in their front yard? Surely they didn’t think hope was going to save it, so it had to be a joke or some highbrow message. It didn’t matter. Why was she even wasting her time with it? One thing she knew for certain, hope was something only people in brick mansions could afford to count on. People like herself and Charlie and Jared counted on luck. A little bit of luck could make things happen. She and Jared had crawled up from the same stinking hole. That was the one thing they understood about each other.

She glanced at her watch again. Maybe things hadn’t changed as much as she thought, and she picked up her pace. No sense in pissing off Jared.

7:15 a.m.

Jared Barnett watched from across the street, three houses down, in a car he knew she’d never recognize. He had been here once before, but it had been at night, just to scope out the place. He had been pleased to discover no dog or even a trace of one in the backyard, only a shitload of mud and piles of some fucking pebbles that hadn’t set properly in the new walkways. He remembered because he’d worried that the sound of him walking over them would wake up the neighbors.

Now sitting here, he wondered why in the world she had chosen a huge, old two-story in the middle of Omaha when she could easily afford a new house out in some ritzy West Omaha suburb? But this was better for him. More traffic; it wouldn’t be unusual to have cars parked along the street. Anyone who saw him would simply think he was waiting for a girlfriend in one of the apartments across from her house.