Ransom River (13 page)

He figured he hadn’t heard everything on the scanner. This thing—the siege and then the shootout in the courtroom—it was big. Riss had started to tell him on the phone, before the TV crew interrupted her: Things had gone to hell in the courtroom, gotten crazy, a nightmare.

No, the gunmen had asked for plenty more than he’d heard about. And Rory had heard every word. She’d heard enough to talk about for seven hours. He took a drag from his Winston. Smoke lazed through the cab of the wrecker.

In the distance, in the trees apart from the crowd, a man moved. Casual and confident. From the shadows the man watched Riss walk away.

“Fuck me,” Boone said. “No way.”

Not the guy he ever thought he’d see here, and nobody he needed to talk to. He put the wrecker in reverse. Lights off, he drove away.

T
he sun cut through the blinds, low and gold. With a scratching sound the latch turned and the bedroom door burst open. Rory came awake in a rush. The dog bolted in, paws clattering on the hardwood, straight at her bed.

“Chiba, no,” she said.

He skidded up, whining a welcome, and stuck his nose in her face.

He was a Husky–Australian shepherd mix, blue eyed and half-deaf because of neglect as a puppy. She’d found him abandoned one day when she was on a run. He was limping along a road outside of town, a bit like her. She took him home. He was now healthy, loyal, and crazy. He jumped around her and licked her neck.

She hugged him and buried her face in his fur. “Hello, you nightmare.”

His tail battered the air. He always greeted her as if she’d been rescued from a mineshaft, and she appreciated the unconditional attention. With him she didn’t need to put up her guard. Chiba had no agenda.

Petra appeared in the doorway, mug in hand, wearing a T-shirt and men’s boxers emblazoned with
Polly wants a cocktail.

“Coffee’s hot,” she said.

“Thanks.” Rory fought her way out of the covers. She was stiff and sore.

“You turned your phone off, I presume.”

Rory pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “How many calls?”

“Fifteen on the machine. Mostly people who saw you on TV. I left a vodka bottle on the kitchen counter. Feel free to add it to your coffee.”

Under the slatted golden sunlight, the room looked less like a garret and more like a cubbyhole. Rory had unpacked some mementos. A brass Thai Buddha. Books—
The Great Gatsby,
Bangkok 8,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
Snapshots with kids from the school where she’d volunteered in Thailand, the girls bright and shy. A photo taken near Bulawayo, her kneeling next to young Grace. Grace, strong little arms squeezing Rory around the neck. A framed photo of her with her mom and dad. Another with her uncle Lee. He’d left Ransom River when she was a young girl, and she missed his confidence and mischievous smile.

Chiba parked himself in front of her, tail wagging. When she ignored him, he put his head on her knee and groaned, peering up at her with the mournful eyes of a Goya martyr. Rory scratched the ruff of his neck.

Petra leaned against the door. “Your baby.”

Rory didn’t look up. “Thank you for keeping a poker face when my mom said that.”

“Poker face? That’s nothing. Outside these doors, you live a poker
life.
”

“Maybe someday I’ll talk to her about it. But not now.” She glanced up. “Besides, why shouldn’t I play my cards close to the vest? It’s how I was raised.”

“You Mackenzies. You’d fit in at the NSA. For all I know, you’re your own little spy network. Or international jewel thieves. You could have liquidated an entire Al-Qaeda cell and buried them in the orchard and I’d never know it.”

“Plus we’re terrible cooks.”

Petra held her mug with both hands. “It’s okay. If you want to talk about yesterday, talk. If you don’t, don’t. Either way, I’m here.”

“Thank you.”

She felt a swell of affection for her friend, and the tug of her nerves tightening. She stood and went to the window and raised the blinds.

Sunlight shone through the leaves of the avocado trees in the backyard.
Petra’s place was a two-story farmhouse near the end of a road dotted with funky old homes. The neighborhood was guarded by orange trees and weighty pines, and butted up against the dry foothills at the northern edge of the city. Beyond the back wall, empty fields of yellowed grass led to lemon and avocado orchards. Rows of trees curved neatly over hillsides, vivid green. Beyond, the mountains rose, rocky and blue, outlined crisply against the sky.

Rory said, “Remember my worst-case-scenario game?”

As a teenager, she used to panic at the thought of things going wrong. At the starting line before a race, she would nearly freak out.
What if I lose?
Doom,
she thought. Shame. Expulsion from school. Poverty. Economic collapse, bread riots, flying monkeys attacking from the sky. Until, one day, about to vomit with nerves, she thought,
What’s
really
the worst that could happen?
Would she be dragged to the center of the football field and burned at the stake? No. She’d have to look at some other runner’s ass accelerating away from her. Big deal.

Since then, when faced with a challenging situation, she always asked,
Worst-case scenario?
And generally, the worst was not apocalyptic. Not slavery, prostitution, tattoos, or a job at the drive-through window at Arby’s. Yet.

Of course, some scenarios had turned out worse than she’d thought possible. Briefly she heard a shriek of metal and had a vision of sudden endings—of plans, love, possibilities. She forced it away.

“When I got called to jury duty, I asked myself, what’s the worst that can happen? And I thought, I’ll have to decide the fate of two people charged with murder and bear the weight of that decision. I miscalculated.”

“No reason ‘taken hostage’ should have come up on your worst-case dartboard,” Petra said.

“That’s not the worst case.” She turned. “The cops think I was working with the gunmen.”

Petra lowered her mug. “Girl, what the fuck?”

“They have video of the siege. And…” Her head pounded. “The gunmen
chose people to go with them. Me. I thought it was random, but apparently not.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know. And I’m scared.”

“The cops are scaring all the hostages, I’ll bet. Rory, it’s a dirty trick.”

“I don’t think so.”

“They’re hard-case cops. They think the gunmen were working with an inside man, so they try to frighten the shit out of all the hostages by accusing them of complicity.”

Hard-case cops.
Memory flickered again. Seth Colder, Mr. Once-upon-a-Hard-Case himself.

Petra said, “The cops probably have no clue what happened, so they accuse everybody to see if anyone freaks and confesses. It’s a dirty, low-down trick. Christ, Aurora. Do you really think you’re so special?”

Rory had to laugh. “Maybe not.”

But she recalled the grainy courtroom video. Reagan, stepping across prone bodies, aiming straight at her.

She said, “Last night I put in a call to one of my old law profs. David Goldstein—he was my advisor at UCLA. I left a message telling him I need a referral to an attorney.”

“You’re an attorney.”

“But not a fool. I need a criminal lawyer.”

For a second she felt leaden. How could she afford to hire somebody competent, who might want several thousand bucks up front as a retainer? Sell her car? How much could she even get for a beat-up Subaru?
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
She didn’t want to admit that she’d been knocked down again. More like bitch-slapped into a wall.

Petra crossed to her side. “It’s going to be okay.” She put a hand on her back. “Come on. Get coffee. The messages are on the machine. Including one from your aunt.”

“What?”

“Your aunt Amber called. Worried, wants to know all about it.”

Rory’s mouth slowly fell open. “Every time I think I’ve considered the worst case, the world creates a scenario beyond my imagination.”

Downstairs in the kitchen, Rory listened to the messages on the machine. Friends had called, and high school cross-country competitors. Former Peace Corps colleagues. A law school classmate.

“This thing is damned huge,” she said.

“I thought you knew that.”

The courthouse siege had to be the loudest thing to happen in Ransom River in decades. The city hated loud. Within Rory’s memory there were few comparable criminal outbursts—the hijacking of a gasoline tanker, an arson fire that leveled an entire subdivision under construction, the armored car heist that put the city in the news when she was a kid.

“Do I want to turn on the television?” she said.

Petra gathered her lesson plans from the kitchen table. “You’re the star of the day, whether you like it or not. Do you want to hear what they’re saying?”

She had to expect media attention. It was Southern California, where live criminal confrontation got higher TV ratings than hockey. And why not? Shootouts were cheaper to film than game shows. No sets, no salaries, no releases for contestants to sign.

She downed her coffee and aimed the remote at the television. Then, reluctantly, she played the last message on the machine.

“Aurora, it’s your aunt Amber. I saw you on the TV and talked to Nerissa. I can’t believe you were in that courtroom.”

Amber’s voice was raspy. It sounded like Virginia Slims.

“Anyhow, I wanted to know all about it. You take care, honey.”

Rory pressed Delete.

Petra said, “Told you. You’re a celebrity.”

“And she’s hoping it’ll rub off on her and her kids.”

Petra gave her a tart look.

“You heard her—she talked to Riss. Who put on an Emmy-winning performance last night,” Rory said.

“That was bizarre.”

“That was calculated. Riss has an angle. Guaranteed. One that has her at the focal point.”
And me in her sights.
“With Riss it’s always win-lose. My rule is to treat her like she’s a grenade with a pin that’s been pulled.”

It had always been that way. She tried to remember a time when it hadn’t. Maybe when Uncle Lee had been around.

On the television, catastrophic music erupted. Orchestral melodrama. A fanfare of menace. A red title burst across the screen:
Courthouse Siege: Nightmare in Ransom River.

It was a news special, recapping the attack. Rory shut off the TV. “I gotta get away from this.”

“Where are you going?” Petra said.

“Running.”

Then

“H
and me that wrench.”

Rory dug through the toolbox. Uncle Lee waited with his hand out. She lifted the wrench and set it on his palm.

He grinned. “Thanks, princess.”

She smiled, to the bottom of her shoes. Six-year-olds didn’t usually get to tune up a car. But Uncle Lee was letting her help him with the El Camino. His grin made her feel like she could float.

The car was in the shed. The shed was like a little barn, on the dirt road out on the acreage her parents owned near the edge of town. The El Camino was her dad’s car from when he was in high school. It was red and had muscles and he kept it in the shed under a tarp. He said it was going to be Rory’s when she got her driver’s license. That would be in ten years. She would be a
teenager.
The car was huge, and her dad was in the driver’s seat, watching Uncle Lee turn the wrench.