Too many more days and he’d start getting used to it. He watched Liz go around the table, picking up the girls’ empty cereal bowls. She poured all the leftover milk together, stacked the bowls three high, and piled the spoons on top. Off toward the dishwasher without missing a step.
Above his head, he could hear the morning ministampede. Didn’t seem to matter what time anybody got up, there was always the last mad rush to get ready for school.
First couple days here, he’d been nervous as a cat. It was like staying in a guest room at the zoo. If that wasn’t enough, Liz counted all his pills and wouldn’t let him drink more than one beer a day. Made him keep the goddamned walker by the bed.
But John was starting to feel a rhythm to the chaos by now. He’d even gotten to enjoy it a bit.
Liz’s husband, Bill, worked as a lineman for the power company; since the storm, he’d been pulling fourteen-hour days, leaving the house by 5 A.M., coming home to a plate of supper wrapped up in the fridge. But he always had enough energy left to help the girls with homework or spend some time horsing around.
John had always liked his son-in-law well enough; these past couple days, his affection had deepened a good bit. Part of him knew he’d think better of himself if he’d been more like Bill when he’d been Bill’s age.
Liz took the girls to school in the morning and worked part time at the city clerk’s. Since John had been there, she’d been to a school board meeting, gone to choir practice at the church, passed out Halloween candy for four and a half hours, and clipped about nine hundred coupons out of the Wednesday supplement.
The girls were thirteen, eleven, and eight now. The same tornado hit the bathroom twice a day.
And John had slept better the past couple nights than he had in the past ten weeks. The fact was, even sitting here now, his damned ruined leg didn’t seem to hurt quite so bad.
He could still use more than one lousy beer a day. But overall, John was starting to feel as though a hazy curtain had parted. A screen between him and the real world he hadn’t even noticed.
Maybe that sucker-punching shitbag had done him a favor. Maybe he’d gotten a bit off track, crutching around home all alone. Maybe sitting around feeling sorry for himself was part of the reason he’d been hurting so goddamned bad all this time.
The stampede descended and moved toward the kitchen. In the girls came, one by one: Natalie, the oldest, Emma, the middle, and Zoe, the baby of the bunch.
“See ya, Gramps.”
“Bye, Grampa.”
“Bye, Grampa.”
Three kisses, three hugs, single file.
“I’ll be back this afternoon,” Liz said, passing out lunch cards and herding everybody toward the coat room. “Call if you need anything, okay?”
John waved. “Drive careful, hon. You girls learn something.”
“’kay.”
“‘kay.”
“Yeah, right.”
Pretty soon they were on their way.
After the garage door came down and the sound of the minivan disappeared down the street, silence settled down over everything.
Monday morning, he’d been so relieved he could hardly stand it. Tuesday, the peace and quiet had still been just fine with John. Today, he already found himself looking forward to the end of the schoolday.
Hell. John felt lonely in the house by himself.
He hauled himself up and cruised around the table to the counter by the sink. He topped off his coffee, put the full mug on the table, and slid it back around to his chair a couple steps at a time.
When he finally got settled, he went back to the section he’d spread out in front of him. Liz and Bill took the Omaha paper as well as the Plattsmouth Journal; John stuck to the World-Herald with his coffee, just like he did at home.
He liked checking the Crime Watch column on the City page. They’d been running it for the past couple years, ever since the new chief took over. They’d give information about suspects in this case or that, print phone numbers for the tip lines, that sort of thing.
All week he’d been checking to see if they’d run anything about the break-in over at Matthew’s place. Nothing yet.
But today they’d run another bit that caught his eye.
Some kid being sought on a domestic violence warrant. They’d printed a picture of the kid and a picture of his car side by side. The kid looked like a cocky punk to John, but it wasn’t the kid’s face that bugged him.
It was the car.
He was almost positive he’d seen it before. And recently, too. Black GTO, ’71. Big spoiler on the back, BadGoat on the tags. There was something distinctive about the look of it, and those plates rang a bell.
All morning, he’d been trying to think. Between the way he’d been sleeping and getting his lights knocked out, the past two or three weeks had turned into a muddled gray soup.
BadGoat.
Except for trips to the doctor’s and across the street Sunday night, he hadn’t been anywhere but his living room in weeks.
But he’d seen that car somewhere. The more John thought about it, the more certain about it he was.
They had the tip line right there, printed in bold. He’d do his part and call in for once, if he could figure out where the hell he’d seen those plates. He sipped his coffee and thought about it. BadGoat. It had been nibbling at him before; now it was starting to gnaw.
What the hell.
It was only a quarter to eight in the morning; nobody would be back until four. He wasn’t going anywhere. It certainly was quiet enough around here.
John guessed he had time to keep working on it.
28
Tony Briggs wanted breakfast.
By the time they made the short haul back to Ray’s Expedition from the vacant river walk, he was so hungry he wanted to punch somebody. They stopped at Manley’s on Military and took the corner booth in back.
Connelle’s section. None better in the place. Connie had an ass like a basketball and biceps like a pair of well-fed snakes. She never wrote down an order, gave shit as good as she got, and could throw coffee into your cup from ten feet away.
There had been a few empty tables when they got there, but the bell on the front door kept jingling, and little by little the place packed in. Tony ordered the Manley Man Combo: waffles, eggs, bacon, link sausage, and a greasy pile of hash browns big enough to smother a fourth grader.
Ray had a glass of tomato juice and a plate of fruit.
A plate of fruit.
Jesus Christ. Tony hadn’t even known they even had fruit here.
They sat and ate, not saying much, sunrise climbing in through the open blinds. Beneath the general din of voices and silverware and clattering plates, Ray’s personal handheld unit crackled softly beside the napkin dispenser, tuned to the department all-channels frequency.
They caught the call at 7:35.
Southeast to dispatch, dispatch to Central, snow cone times two. Officers on scene, support units requested.
Tony washed down a mouthful of eggs with hot black coffee. He knew it was Uncle Eddie before hearing the address.
Two snow cones meant two bodies. The call could have indicated stringbeans or dresser drawers and it would have meant the same thing. Department radio protocol hadn’t changed, but a lot of cops on the street had stopped using the handbook code for homicide; it was the latest informal attempt to keep civilian scanner rats from showing up before the police, looking for action, contaminating scenes. Forget about the media.
The force had switched over to digital trunking systems three years back. Private gear like Ray’s on the table cost four times the old analog gear everybody owned.
Little by little, though, the civvie wannabes had caught up with technology. It wouldn’t be much longer before they caught on to the talk. It always happened eventually.