I hoped he had made sure of tomorrow. I’d be seeing her then. When I thought of it I had to take a deep breath and hold it for half a minute. By then my heart rate had returned to normal.
The drive down had been more tiring than I had expected. My eyes were heavy and as early as it was I hopped into the shower, cleaned up, brushed my teeth and got into bed.
Some dreams are impossible to remember. They get scrambled and exist beyond comprehension. This dream was different. Bettie was outside my door. I could smell her perfume. She was staring at my door and never noticed the black draped figure tiptoeing up the porch stairs behind her. He was carrying a longbladed knife in one hand and the other was stretched out to muffle any sound she tried to let out.
And I couldn’t turn the knob! I couldn’t get the damned door open!
I pulled and twisted but the knob wouldn’t turn and just before I could let out an agonizing howl of despair my eyes flew open and I muffled the yell that nearly came out of me.
Sweat had drenched me. My pulse rate was incredible. It was five minutes before I went back to normal. This time I forced myself to sleep.
It was still dark when I awoke. In the east the sky was barely showing the first edges of light and I knew that in an hour a new time of life would begin for me.
I made coffee, had two cups, then got dressed, climbing into a short-sleeved sweatshirt and my old khakis and sandals and went out on the porch to watch the sun come up. In New York it would be late morning before it rose above the apartment rooftops.
From next door I heard the first bark of a large dog, a short, throaty good morning kind of sound the big ones make to get their owner out of the sack. Then there was just the muted murmur of a lovely girl saying something sweetly unintelligible to her canine pet and the wild beating in my chest was almost painful because I knew it was her! All I needed was any sound. One small sound and now I knew. Bettie was alive!
And now I was alive too.
But all I could do was ease myself to the edge of the old wooden rocking chair and sit there, immobilized by what was about to happen. I had lain in the wet grass outside Buck Head Benny’s shack where he was holed up with three of his gang of damned killers all armed with AK’s and sawed-off twelve gauge shotguns, looking for more cops to kill. My backup was still a mile away and all I had was ... .45 with four shots left in the clip and their door swung open with a tiny creaking noise and they all came out too fast. They were ready but they didn’t know where I was until Buck Head Benny spotted me and raised the AK in my direction, but before his finger could tighten on the trigger I took him down and he spun into a crazy twist, the AK going into its staccato chatter with the spasmodic yank on the trigger dying men make and the chopper took out all of his killer buddies behind him.
Then I wasn’t afraid of anything.
Now even breathing didn’t come easily.
Her door swung open and the dog came out, a huge beast for a racing greyhound. And he heard me. He didn’t just sense me. His ears twitched as he picked up the sound of my breath, but there was no angry retort in his posture. For a second he was immobilized and I saw her hand come out, reach down and felt the stiffness in his stance and she said, “Tacos, is someone here?”
Only ten feet separated us. A million miles of ten feet and I had to squeeze in all those twenty years of thinking and dreaming about what I had thought was completely lost, then suddenly face it up close, only ten feet away.
She hadn’t changed at all.
Her beauty was still untouched — shoulder-length brunette hair, the narrow oval face, the pert nose, the ripe full mouth. In a pink short-sleeved top and white shorts and open-toe sandals, she was fresh and vital and tanned, a long-legged beauty still seeming to emanate an invisible radiance and I knew it was something that only I would see.
I said in an unhurried voice, “I’m your new neighbor, miss...”
And something odd happened to her face.
It was a bee-sting reaction without any pain, a brief moment of total consternation, and if I weren’t very much aware of what was happening, I wouldn’t have noticed before she quickly returned to a perfectly normal stance.
A voice she hadn’t heard for twenty years had been suddenly awakened in her memory, but it didn’t last long. How many times before could that have happened? When another few seconds passed I knew that she had frozen the episode in her memory banks.
“I’m Jack Stang, ma’am. It’s nice to see you.”
My voice located my face for her and she looked directly at me without seeing a damn thing. There was no opaqueness to the pupils of her big hazel eyes. They were the same color she’d always had and when she blinked she kept every expression absolutely normal.
Few would ever suspect that she was totally blind.
She called back, “And I’m Bettie Brice from Staten Island! Mr. Kinder, the manager here, said you’d be arriving. I hope you enjoy Sunset Lodge, Mr. Stang. Do you have friends here?”
I let out a chuckle and nodded, even though she couldn’t see it. “Oh, yeah, I have quite a few here already.”
“That’s nice,” she said. Then she frowned and added, “For some reason your voice is familiar, but I’m sure we haven’t met before.”
“Well, we’ve met now,” I told her, “and that’s what’s important.”
“Yes, it certainly is,” she answered, then gave me an airy wave and went down the steps to the sidewalk, Tacos, the greyhound, leading the way. He almost hugged her legs, alert to her every move.
When she stopped for a second it was as if she were going to retrace her steps, then she made a tiny shrug and went toward the end of the street.
Chapter Four
The new black Ford was identified with a lettered logo on its front doors that read
SUNSET LODGE
SECURITY
Beneath it in smaller letters it said,
Darris Kinder
Captain/Manager
All very simple. Nothing ostentatious. The only difference was the sound the engine made. It wasn’t an ordinary Ford vehicle at all. This was a highly refined chase car that could match any vehicle the state of Florida had on the highways. The sound wasn’t noisy. It radiated power. Maximum power.
Darris Kinder came out from under the wheel, scanned the area quickly and quietly and shut the door very softly. No dome light had gone on over his head when the door opened and I felt a touch of identity with the “Captain/Manager.” He was a rangy, fifty-ish guy with a dark crewcut, light blue eyes and Apache features. When he walked up the path to my porch, it was with a military tread.
I held out my hand and said, “Semper Fi, Captain Kinder.”
He grinned back at me and answered, “It shows?”
“Only to another old gyrene. Come on in.”
Before he walked through my door he gave another long glance around the neighborhood, then walked in and parked himself in the big rocker.
I said, “How long were you a cop?”
“Fifteen years in Newark. Made Lieutenant before I got this deal offered to me down here. Instant Captain, a fivefold increase in pay and a budget bigger than a lot of cities set aside for their police departments.” He paused, his eyes searching my face, “You had a great record, Captain Stang.”
“Call me Jack. I’m retired, Captain.”
“I think you know better than that,” he said. “We never really retire, do we?”
My answer was silence and a grin.
“I always make courtesy calls to new arrivals, but you are not new to me at all. When Dr. Brice purchased Miss Brice’s house, he made me a confidant in the situation that had occurred, and to what would happen... if any word of this leaked out.”