“I’ll follow you home,” I said.
“No, you will not.”
“Please.”
She kissed me lightly on the mouth. “See you in the morning, Kemosabe.”
The sun dropped below the campus buildings. I watched her drive away, her taillights winking like rubies in the shadows.
Chapter
18
IT WAS A weeknight, and few vehicles were on the two-lane street she took into the north end of the city. The sky was black, creaking with electricity, like someone crumpling cellophane. Her windows were down. She could smell the clean odor of a storm and the coldness of the dust blowing in the street. Then at a stoplight, at an intersection where there were no other cars, she smelled gasoline. The light changed and she shifted into first gear and drove through the intersection, then looked in the rearview mirror just as heat lightning flared in the clouds. For an instant she thought she saw a drip line on the asphalt that led to her back bumper. She looked at the gas gauge. It was on empty.
There was a weed-grown vacant lot on each side of the road, a deserted house on one corner, a spreading oak on the other, a few lighted houses a block farther on. She was two miles from home, but she remembered a filling station three blocks back that was still open. She made a U-turn and drove slowly toward the stoplight. Then her engine coughed and shook once and died. She shifted into second and popped the clutch, trying to restart it. Her right front tire struck the curb, her headlights dimming as the battery went down. A car going in the same direction passed her. She tried to wave the driver down, but he kept going. The wind began blowing harder, buffeting her car, the first raindrops hitting the windshield as hard as hail.
She rolled up all the windows. A pair of headlights came around the corner and approached the rear of her car. The driver had his high beams on. He pulled to the curb forty feet behind her and cut his engine but left the lights on. The sky was black, the raindrops on the windshield as big as nickels. No one got out of the car.
She pumped the accelerator and pushed the starter, then gave up and pulled the keys from the ignition and bunched them in her right hand, allowing one key to protrude between her index and middle fingers. She stared into the rearview mirror until her eyes watered. The driver turned off his lights. The windows in the car were as dark as slate, impossible to see through; steam was rising off the hood. She opened her door and stepped into the rain.
“Who are you?” she called.
There was no response.
“I have a pistol. I’ll use it,” she said.
The car was a 1949 or ’50 Ford, with an outside spotlight on the driver’s side. When lightning split the sky, she saw a man’s face behind the wheel. He was wearing a dark cap with a lacquered bill. The door made a screeching sound when the driver opened it. He had on a heavy rubber slicker and unshined black shoes and trousers with a stripe down the leg. Another man stepped out on the passenger side. He was also wearing a slicker and a cap with a bill; he carried a flashlight and a one-gallon gasoline can. The two men walked toward her. The driver was tall, blade-faced, in his thirties, his expression calm, reassuring. He was standing four feet away.
“Saw you sputter. Figured it was a fuel problem,” he said. The rain was sliding off his cap and slicker. He felt under the bumper and smelled his hand. “You probably got a hole in your tank.”
“You’re not cops,” she said.
“Why do you think that?”
“Your coats are wrong.”
“We’re not Harris County cops, but we’re cops,” he said. “You’re lucky we came along. This is a bad neighborhood.”
“I live here. There’s nothing bad about this neighborhood,” she said.
A car was coming up the street. The other man waved it by with his flashlight.
“I can walk to my house,” she said.
“We’ll take you,” the driver said.
“No, you won’t.”
“That’s a strange attitude, missy,” he said. “We’re police officers trying to help. Is there something in your car you don’t want us to see?”
“You’re not cops of any kind,” she said. “Your shoes have eyelets in them. They reflect light.”
The two men looked at each other. “You need to get out of the rain,” the driver said. “We also need to take a look inside your car.”
“Get away from me,” she said.
The driver twisted her wrist and pulled the keys from her hand. Then he threw them on the floor of the car and shoved her inside. When she tried to get out, he slammed her down again and handcuffed her to the steering wheel. He looked over his shoulder. A car was coming, its tires whirring on the asphalt. Its lights flashed across his face. His hair was uncut and his mouth had an overbite; he was older than she had thought. He blocked her from view while his friend waved the car on.
“My father will be looking for me,” she said. “He knows the streets I take to get home.”
The driver rubbed the back of his hand along her cheek. “I hate to do this to you, missy. But a job is a job. You should have stuck to your studies and such.”
The other man opened the passenger door and leaned inside.
“What are you all doing?” she said.
She heard the second man unscrew the cap from the can, and smelled the gasoline splashing on the floor and the plastic seat covers. She jerked against the handcuffs.
“Listen to me, missy,” the driver said. “I want to make this as easy as possible. I’m going to give you a shot. I guarantee in ten seconds you won’t feel a thing. Close your eyes.”
She thought the size of her heart would shut down her lungs. Her eyes welled with tears. “Why are you doing this?”
“People always try to buy time. It won’t change the outcome, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You’re in a bad position to be giving orders.”
She spat in his face.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. He wiped her spittle off his cheek and mouth. “But you’re on your own now. Back away, Seth.”
The other man capped the can and stepped back into the rain, then kicked the passenger door shut, not touching any of the surfaces with his hands. The driver took a book of matches from his shirt pocket and pulled one loose. He shielded the matchbook with his body and dragged the match across the striker.
She held her eyes on his and pressed down on the horn with both her forearms. She never blinked, even when all the match heads flamed into a miniature torch.
“You should have let me inject you,” he said. “You’re pretty. I hate to do this. But you dealt it, little girl.”
Chapter
19
THE FLAME BURNED down to his fingertips and died in his hand. He dropped the remnants of the matchbook and stepped back from Valerie’s car. A big Buick with a grille that resembled chromed teeth roared down the street and came to a lurching stop two feet from Valerie’s fender. The driver’s door flew open, and Vick Atlas was in the street, his suit coat unbuttoned, a pearl-handled pistol pushed down in his belt. He was wearing his eyepatch. “What do you guys think you’re doing?”
“Mr. Atlas?” the driver of the Ford said.
“Get away from her car,” Atlas said.
“Yes, sir,” the driver said. He brushed the soot from the dead matches off his fingers and held up his hands to show they were empty.
“You with the can,” Atlas said. “Set it on the ground.”
“You got it,” the man said.
Atlas walked closer so he could see inside Valerie’s car. “Get those handcuffs off her.”
The driver reached inside with a tiny key and inserted it in each lock. His overbite and the vacuity in his eyes made her think of a barracuda swimming along the glass wall of an aquarium. He removed the handcuffs and dropped them into his pocket, never looking at her.
“I’ll get you for this, buster,” she said.
He didn’t answer. His attention was concentrated on V
ick Atlas. “We were going to scare her.”
“Who you working for?” Atlas said.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re telling me you don’t know who you work for? You think I’m dumb? That’s what you’re saying? You insult me to my face?”
“We get a phone call. We do the job,” the driver said.
“I know who you are,” Atlas said. “I’ll be dialing you up, know what I mean?”
“We’re gone, Mr. Atlas,” the driver said, stepping back toward his car, his hands raised.
“You’re gone, all right,” Atlas said. “You got till three.”
Both men got into their Ford. The man with the overbite started the engine and backed straight to the next intersection, then turned on his lights and headed down a side street. Atlas reached into Valerie’s car and offered his hand. “I’ll take you home, Miss Valerie. I’ll be dealing with those guys tomorrow. You’ll never see them again.”
She didn’t move.
“You don’t trust me?” he asked.
“How do you know my car won’t start?”
“If you could start it, you would have driven away from those bums. That’s what they are. Bums. They’re going to pay a price.”
“They were dressed like police officers. They could have pulled me over. I might have a tank full of gas. There’s no way you could know that someone punched a hole in my tank or damaged my fuel line.”
He smiled. “I’m getting confused here. I offered to take you home because I figured you were a little shaken up and didn’t want to be driving. I’m getting wet. You want a ride or not?”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Because I was coming to your house,” he said. “Because I wanted to tell you I heard somebody was going to do something bad to you. Can I get in the backseat? I’m getting soaked. I felt bad about what happened at the Balinese Club. That’s not my style.”
“Yes, it is. You’re a criminal.”
“Jesus Christ, are you nuts? I saved your life. Those are bad guys. I’m getting in the back. You don’t like it, that’s tough.”
She tried to lock the back door, but he pulled it open and got inside before she could push down the door button. He took out a handkerchief and blotted his face and hair. “Those guys are freelancers. You wonder who sent them after you? Probably Grady. You heard the guy—they wanted to scare you so you’d run back to Grady.”
“Grady wouldn’t do that.”
“You study psychology? He was strapped on the pot too long. He’ll do anything to get his way. His old man got him discharged from the Marine Corps so he wouldn’t have to go to Korea.”
“All right, you saved my life. Now please get out.”
“Do you have brain damage?” he said, tapping the side of his head. “I’m your friend. Look, you need a ride somewhere, call me. I’ll send a car service for you. You got guys bothering you, call me. I’ll put them out of business. You ask, you get.”
“I’m going to walk home now. Please don’t follow me.”
He leaned forward and cupped his hands on her shoulders. His breath was moist on her ear. He seemed to be gathering his words, his thoughts, before he spoke, as though about to say something he had never said and did not want anyone to hear him say again. “I got a thing for you. You’re like nobody I ever saw or met. I’m just a reg’lar guy. That means I’m not a bad guy, even though I look different and other people say I’m a bad guy. I’m not like my father. He hurts people because he likes it. I defend people. I stand up for myself and my friends. I’ll defend you. I’m different from other people. That’s all I wanted to say, Miss Valerie.”
The smell of the gasoline was overwhelming, dense and wet, clinging to the inside of her head and lungs. She couldn’t begin to sort out his words. She thought she was going to faint. She felt his fingers sinking into her shoulders. He shook her as though waking someone from a nap. “Talk to me.”
“Thank you, Vick,” she said. “But you must let me alone.”
He pressed his face into her hair. The rain was slacking, the windshield clearing. Then his breath left the nape of her neck.
“I’ll take you home now,” he said. “You can call the cops, or you can trust me to take care of what happened here. I hear your father is a war hero. Maybe he’s got some ideas of his own, the same kind I got. Hop in my car. Don’t dishonor what we got here.”
What we got here?
She opened the door and got out, her purse and her book bag gripped to her chest. Her blood had pooled in her legs; her body had turned to lead. He was getting out of the backseat, unable to hide his male arousal, his hair as slick as sealskin, his teeth showing behind his disfigured lip, his visible eye glimmering like a stone at the bottom of a dirty fish tank. “Hey, where you going? I’m not an ogre! Don’t treat me like this!”
She began running toward the intersection, gaining the curb, running along the edge of the vacant lot toward the lighted houses on the next block. She heard him open and slam the door of his car, then start the engine, pressing on the gas while in neutral. The moon had broken through the clouds, flooding the sidewalk and the vacant lot and the oaks and the yards with a glow the color of pewter. She ran into the lot so he couldn’t follow her with the car; she jumped across weed-spiked piles of building debris, a moldy mattress with a used condom on it, a pile of broken glass, the carcass of a dog whose skin had turned to a lampshade. She passed a horse shed built of slat wood and RC Cola signs and gained another sidewalk and ran across a lighted intersection into a neighborhood thick with live oaks and magnolia trees, the wide front porches hung with flower baskets and gliders and wind chimes, all the iconic images that should have offered reassurance and sanctuary but tonight did nothing of the sort.
She had given herself over to her worst imaginings, but she didn’t care. They were preferable to the memories that three men had just visited upon her and from which she would never escape. She didn’t look back until she had rounded the corner of the next block and saw her house. There was no traffic anywhere, nor anyone on the sidewalks or front porches or even in representation on a window shade, as though the earth had been vacuumed of humanity and turned into a stage set.
I TOOK OFF FROM work and stayed with her the next day. A tow truck pulled the Epstein car to the shop. Mr. Epstein talked to some uniformed cops, then to a plainclothes detective. None of them seemed convinced of Valerie’s account. Vick Atlas had a penthouse apartment in the Montrose district but had not been seen by anyone in three days. The father’s lawyer said he was in Mexico. No one answered the phone at the family compound in Galveston. Two days after the fake cops had terrorized Valerie, Detective Merton Jenks showed up at her house while I was there. I hadn’t thought I would ever be happy to see Merton Jenks again. When he knocked on the door, the living room shook. I answered the door. He took one look through the screen and said, “I should have known.”
“That doesn’t seem quite fair, sir,” I said.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Her name is Valerie.”
“Go get her. Her old man, too.”
“He’s not here.”
“Great,” he said in disgust. He opened the door and came in without asking. “Where is she?”
I called upstairs. Jenks’s eyes kept boring into my face, the source of his agitation a mystery, at least to me.
“Nothing I say to you kids seems to get across,” he said. “There’s not a lot of sympathy for you downtown. The consensus is trouble either follows you or you go out and find it. Right now I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
“Sir, they almost set her on fire.”
He walked to the stairs and hit on the banister with his fist. “We need you down here, Miss Epstein. Let’s go.”
“Why don’t you show some respect?” I said.
“You’d better shut up.”
“When you guys get scared, you take out your anger on people who have no power,” I said.
“W
hen’s Goldie going to be here?”
“Mr. Epstein?”
“Who do you think?”
“He’s at work,” I said.
I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was staring up the stairway at Valerie. She was wearing jeans and sandals and a tan cowboy shirt with rearing horses sewn on the pockets.
“I’m Detective Merton Jenks,” he said. “I want to get a confirmation of your account and ask you a few questions. It won’t take long, miss.”
“Did you find Vick Atlas?” she said.
“Not yet,” Jenks said.
“Then who is going to believe my story?”
“I’m not sure what your story is. That’s why I’m here.”
We sat in the living room under the ceiling fan, and she went through it again in detail.
“Atlas couldn’t explain how he knew you had run out of gas?” Jenks said.
“That’s right. How did he know those phony cops didn’t pull me over? They had a spotlight on the driver’s side like police cars have.”
“You think Atlas set up the situation?”
“That’s what I’d like to believe.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise they intended to burn me to death.”
“You spat in one guy’s face?”
“The one with the overbite.”
He removed a manila folder from his coat pocket. “I have two sets of mug shots here. Do these men look familiar?”
She took the photos from his hand and looked at them. She pointed at the profile of a man whose upper teeth extended over his lower lip. “This is the one who handcuffed me. I can’t be sure about the other one. His friend called him Seth.”