SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (65 page)

One of those writers at a conference might actually be well-read enough to someday notice one of his books was plagiarized from an old, out-of-print novel. And then where would he be? Without work of any sort. Without an income. He'd have to pay back all the money he'd taken from publishers. They might prosecute . . .

How could he go to work like other people? He couldn't. His rage against the human race boiled too close to the surface to permit him to interact with other people on a daily basis. He'd lose his mind. He'd take up an assault rifle and mow down everyone in an office building. And that's where he would have to work if he could not sell his books. In an office, typing reports or entering data on a computer like all the other numb, brainless hordes of white collar workers.

No, he had to refuse the panel invitation, send the note to the anthologist, sign the agency renewal contract, and perhaps then he could return to work on this new book he had under contract. All of these petty duties would help keep his mind occupied.

As long as Mother did not call out for him. Or die while he was looking the other way . . .

~*~

The night was as muggy as only the semi-tropical summer climate in Houston could be. Late-night drivers wove slowly through the streets, semi-trucks hauling produce into market from the “Valley” in South Texas lumbered restlessly down the avenues. Overhead, a pale gray, three-quarter moon ducked in and out through scudding cloud cover.

“Lookit the scandalous, man. We ought to bust her. Hey, Ray-Man, get the breakdown.”

Big Mac heard the Spanish-accented voice intrude on her dream—she was lying beneath a big blooming apple tree, watching bees pollinate the blossoms. She could smell the sweet scent of spring flowers, the crushed fragrant grass beneath her head.

“Wake you, bitch!”

Big Mac struggled up from the dream into the dark, humid alleyway. She opened her eyes, blinked, saw figures surrounding her, spears of darkness blacker than the night. She rolled over and stumbled to her feet. She found herself cornered by a Hispanic gang. Sleep still owned her vision and made it blurry, but her mind came suddenly alert. She felt the siren of danger wailing through her veins.

“You boys get on outta here. Leave me ‘lone.” She stood shakily behind her shopping cart, holding tightly to the handle. All thought of the pleasant dream was gone. Fear of the present situation displaced apple blossoms, grass, sunny days, and comfort.

“She sho is a lizard-butt. Might be fun taking her down.”

The one called Ray-Man came from the Chevy lowrider with a shotgun. “I got the breakdown,” he said.

Mac realized he meant the weapon; it looked like a sawed-off shotgun. Idiot-ass kids and their instruments of death. “I don't have no money, y'all know that. Now get on away from here.”

“Man, she is one eastly mother, she so eastly she need her face mashed down.”

There were five of them grouped in a semicircle around her. She had her back to the brick wall of a building and her cart in front of her. Could she shove through them? Could she talk them out of whatever they had in mind?

“I say we get in the bucket and leave her here.”

Mac turned to the one who had said that. She tried appealing to him with her eyes. "That's right,” she said. “This boy's right. I didn't do nothing to you. Why don't you go off and pester somebody else?”

“Whassa matter you, Shank? You boned out? You think we oughta do a ghost?”

Mac had no idea what they were saying. The way the gangs spoke was like a foreign language. She just hoped she'd see it coming if they rushed her or if they lifted the “breakdown” to kill her. She needed at least two seconds to prepare herself for heaven. The inside of her mouth had dried into a desert floor and her heart thumped like an agitated Gila monster trapped against her breastbone.

“What you say, old eastly mama? Think we ought to bust you?”

Mac thought the speaker was probably the leader. He talked more than the others and looked the most menacing. There was a hardness in his eyes that she had seen before. They were killer eyes. Stone and ice. Merciless.

“I . . . I just wish you'd go away. I don't want no trouble. I was just . . . just sleeping here.” She didn't want to stutter, but couldn't help herself.

The leader rattled off something in Spanish to his companions and they laughed. She tried to smile, but expected it came out more of a grimace. She could feel her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. She was trembling, but hoping they wouldn't notice. She held onto the bar of the shopping cart to keep her arms steady.

“My friend . . . my friend's a cop. Anything happens to me, he'll find out who did it.”

“Hey, essey, this bitch must drop a dime on the pigs for her living. ‘Nother good reason to bust her.”

Ray-Man cocked the shotgun.

Mac felt her heart lurch. “Wha . . . what's dropping a dime? I don't mess with no dope.”

The boys laughed and slapped one another on the back. Suddenly the leader said, sober and serious now, “That's a snitch, eastly. You snitch to the cops, that what you do?”

Mac pondered her answer. Decided the truth would serve her best. “Yeah, I'm a snitch, I drop a dime. And my cop's in Homicide and he's a hard man. He'd track you punks down and step in your faces if you mess with me. I seen him do it before. I don't think you want him on your case.”

The leader looked over to Ray-Man, thinking it over. The boy to Mac's left, the one who wanted to leave said, “Let's bail. This eastly ain't worth it, man. She's just an old Sopwith Camel and she don't need jacking up.”

The leader spat toward her. Mac turned her head aside and watched from the corner of her eye.

“Okay, Shank's prolly right. We do what he says this time. She's just scuz, not worth our time. Let's bail.” He waved the gang toward the car and then backed away slowly himself, keeping his steady gaze on her.

“You tell your friend and we find you again, eastly. Next time I don't let nobody talk me outta busting you.” He nodded and left then. The Chevy roared to life, tires squealing and smoke trailing as it raced from the alley into the night.

Mac stood a long time with her hands locked on the metal bar, leaning into it for support while her heart slowed. She knew her escape this time had been narrow, merely a spit and a whistle between her and the grave. Things on the street were getting worse than they ever used to be. Once, you could depend on people leaving you alone when they could see you had nothing, when you slept on cardboard, and dressed in rags. No more. It was people like her who were the easy victims, the ones taken out just for kicks or for initiation into a gang. The news on the street was that the latest floater in the bay had been a homeless man.

She had to find Samson, tell him she'd changed her mind.

She wanted to see what a roof over her head and a safe haven at night might feel like. She was entirely too old for this shit. And too scared.

~*~

The time was closing on noon when Mac saw Samson at a hotdog stand. She trundled the shopping cart up to him and bumped his backside.

“Hey . . . ! Oh, it's you. How's it going, Mac?”

“I needta talk to you about that offer you made.” Samson squinted down at her over the hot dog he held. He took a bite, chewed, spoke with his mouth full. “Let's go sit over here.”

She followed him to a low brick wall beneath the shade of blooming crepe myrtle trees unruffled and still in the hot air. They sat next to one another.

“There was a gang of boys woke me up last night,” she said. “Might have killed me with a shotgun. Just dumb luck they decided not to.”

Samson frowned. “Fucking gangs. There's more and more of them.”

“Anyway, it scared me like I ain't been scared in a long time. It seems living out here just ain't what it used to be.”

“Will you move into my house then? I'd be less anxious about you if you would.”

Mac waited a beat and then nodded. “I'd like to try it. Maybe part of the day I can stay out on the street and still feel . . . free. And at night I can stay there. Would that be all right?” She looked at him, asking for his permission and hating having to ask anyone for anything.

“However you want to work it is all right with me, Mac. I'm hardly ever home, you might not see me much. I sleep there. But sometimes I don't come in at night either. We'll live our separate lives, how's that?”

“I don't have to cook your dinner and shit?”

Samson laughed and that made her grin too. She realized, after she'd said it, that it sounded like she was saying she might cook his dinner and then go shit.

“I'd rather you not cook my dinner. I don't eat there much. My hours are just as erratic as yours. But at least you'll have your own room and there will be food in the fridge when you want it.”

“I ain't giving up Big Macs.” The very idea of doing without a daily Big Mac made her queasy. What was she going to eat in Samson's house? Macaroni and cheese? Frozen pizza?

“You do what suits you. C'mon, I'll take you there now so you can get settled in. I don't have to be at work for another couple of hours.”

She rode in his car without talking too much. He asked about the gang. What they were like? Had she seen them around the area before? Did she think they were really dangerous types? And she answered with monosyllables. He decided they might be Mexikanemi.

“In nineteen-eighty-four,” Samson said, “Huerta, while in prison, founded the Mexikanemi. Or La Eme, as they call themselves. He went to war with the ‘Texas Syndicate’ and there was a bloodbath. Forty-seven inmate murders and more than four hundred stabbings in one year. We've been trying to get them on the RICO laws, but it's tough sledding. They get together in prison and grow stronger. Now they're not only in the prison system, they've moved out into the cities. We have a big problem here in Houston.”

“They sure were a problem, all right,” Mac agreed. “Only way they let me go was I told them I had a cop friend.” She grinned at him. “You come in handy sometimes.”

At his house, within walking distance of the Montrose area where she had lived on the street, he took all her things from the cart and into the house, leaving them in one of the bedrooms. She stood looking around at the twin-size bed covered with a quilt, a small chest of drawers, and a bedside table with a reading lamp. It looked cramped to her. The walls felt as if they were closing in.

Then she thought of the gang leader's eyes looking at her as if he were a cobra and she a rabbit, and she knew it was either accept the enclosure of walls or die badly at the hands of a snake.

“Thanks,” she said to Samson when he had made a few trips and brought everything inside. “This is just fine. It's . . . nice.”

He showed her the kitchen and opened the cabinet doors so she would know where the dishes and food were shelved. His dog, Pavlov, followed her around grinning and hopping and butting her legs with his backside. She never much liked animals. Could she abide this place, really? It had been so long since she lived indoors. A lifetime ago.

“I have to leave for the station now, but you'll be fine, won't you?”

She said she would, she knew she would just as soon as she got used to things.

Then he was gone, the front door closing, and she was alone with the dog standing in the kitchen. Feeling lost. Wondering why the world had to be so relentlessly unforgiving to people like her who never really fit in anywhere.

~*~

“It's a funny thing about falling in love. You never expect it to happen and then it does. It's like finding a goldfish in your bathtub.”

Shadow thought about what Frank was saying to her. He sat at her table having a beer and she had talked about feeling something for Mitchell. She didn't name him, of course, she just said he was a male acquaintance who was turning into more than that.

“I'm not sure I'm ‘falling in love,’” she said, shaking her head in denial. “I mean, I don't know him well enough for that yet. I don't even like the idea of love. The last time I ‘loved’ someone, he destroyed . . . everything.”

“I knew a woman once for approximately three hours and I was in love with her.”

“Oh, really? When did this happen?”

He looked down at his bottle of beer. “It was a long time ago. I was a lot younger. I met her at a roller skating rink, of all places. I watched her for a while out on the floor and then I skated out and put my arm around her waist. We talked while we skated and then we sat down and talked some more. Pretty soon I thought: I'm in love with her. And I was.”

“How did it work out?”

“Not very good, actually. She had another steady boyfriend and they were both going off to the same college that fall. I think they were married in their senior years.”

“Oh. That's kind of sad.”

He shrugged. “It happens. But now I know falling in love can be something instantaneous. It doesn't have to grow over a period of time.”

“Well, I didn't say I was in love with this man I was talking about. I . . . like him a lot. He's . . . well, he seems to be a good man.”

“Are there any good men?” Frank laughed. “Besides me, of course.”

She smiled at him. “Not that many, take my word for it.”

“But you run into some pretty skaggy men in this place, that's all it is. It's warped your view of them.”

“They're everywhere, Frank. Not just in here. There are bad men everywhere.”

When Frank left her, she sat thinking about what love was and if she would ever feel it for a man again. It was hard enough to find a man she might trust, much less love. And she could not say why she trusted Mitchell Samson, knowing it had nothing to do with him being a cop; she should have distrusted a cop above all people considering the things she had done. It was the way Frank had said—some people just inspire you to confide in them or to love them, some attract you in a way that has no rhyme or reason. They appear in your life, goldfish in the bathtub.

She smiled.

Then darkness spread over her thoughts and she remembered the people who so easily tempt you and convince you they'd be better off dead.

“Hey, honey, mind if I join you? I don't go on for a few minutes.”