They left the Towers at a racewalk, uncertain what to do or where to go. Adrienne was convinced they should go to the police, but Duran was skeptical.
“All right,” he said, playing the devil’s advocate, “so what if we go there? What do we tell them?”
“About the trunks.”
“Okay. And then what?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, what do you think they’ll do? Do you think they’ll go to the apartment and search it?”
Adrienne thought about it for a long moment. Finally, she sighed. “No. They’d probably just charge us with breaking and entering.”
“Right,” Duran told her. “That’s what I think.”
“Then let’s go to my place,” she said. “At least we can get my car.”
Once again, he shook his head. “You might as well shoot yourself,” he told her. “There isn’t a chance in the world they aren’t watching it.”
“But I need stuff,” she said. “I need clothes. Makeup. Things!”
“Then you’ll have to buy them,” he told her. “Until the police start looking for Bonilla… I don’t think you want to go home.”
So they took the Metro to National Airport and rented a car, then drove to the Pentagon City mall, where Adrienne bought an overnight bag, some makeup and lingerie, and two dresses from Nordstrom’s. As they left the mall, Duran made a call to 911, saying, “I want to get something on the record—whether you do anything about it or not is up to you… “ Then he told them, succinctly, exactly what he’d seen in Barbera’s apartment, gave them the address and rang off.
On the way back to the Comfort Inn, it began to rain, just a few slanting specks against the windshield and then—before Duran could figure out how the wipers worked—an obliterating downpour that had him frantically pushing buttons and moving levers as he peered through the pearlized windshield.
When he finally located the knob that activated the windshield wipers, he turned to Adrienne and said, “I was thinking…”
Adrienne kept her eyes on the road. He was a more aggressive driver than she was used to. “About what?”
“All that electronics stuff.”
“Unh-huh… “ He didn’t say anything, so she prodded him. “And?”
“Well, I was thinking—maybe it had something to do with me.”
She just looked at him.
While Duran lay on the bed, lost in thought, Adrienne stood in the shower, relishing the hot water pounding down against the back of her neck and shoulders. She was thinking about Bill Fellowes, the intern from Howard University.
Like most interns, Fellowes spent a lot of his time doing shit work, but he was clearly going places. She’d gotten to know him when he’d been assigned to the Amalgamated case, helping her compile a database for the documents and work product. She remembered feeling guilty. Here was a guy who was law review and all that—and she was spending day in and day out, handing him papers to number and date-stamp. Then she remembered that she was law review, and what she was doing wasn’t any more interesting than what he’d been assigned. On the contrary, they were doing it together.
But the thing about Fellowes was, he’d assisted on a case in the spring that was actually pretty interesting (compared to the Amalgamated matter). Adrienne didn’t remember the details, but it had something to do with “recovered memory”—at least, she thought it had. In any case, there was an expert witness who’d testified on behalf of the firm’s client. She was certain of that because Bill was a gifted mimic, and she could remember the look on his sunny brown face as he reenacted parts of the trial over tequilas at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room. The doctor had been impressive—very cool and basso profundo.
She lathered her hair, squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the showerhead. She’d get the doctor’s name from Bill. Maybe the doctor would look at Duran and, even if he wouldn’t, he might be able to point her in the right direction—a colleague, or something.
After a minute or two, she rinsed the soap from her hair, stepped from the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. The bathroom was small and steamy, the mirror a gray cloud. Using a hand towel, she cleared enough of its surface to see herself, then yanked the hotel’s plastic comb through the tangles in her hair. It didn’t do much good. But it was the weekend—and it was all she had.
Finally, she pulled on her new panty hose and stepped into the navy-blue dress she’d bought. With her earrings in place, she emerged from the bathroom, transformed.
Duran looked up from the TV, and did a double take. “Hey,” he said, “you look… nice.”
“Thanks,” she replied, stepping into her shoes. “I’ll be back late, so don’t wait up. On the other hand—don’t get lost, either.”
“But… where are you going?” he asked, as suspicious as he was concerned.
“To work.”
“‘Work’? Are you crazy? We’re in hiding, for Christ’s sake! And it’s Sunday—you can’t go to work.”
“Got to.”
Duran snapped off the TV, sat up and looked directly into her eyes. “People are trying to kill you! Whenever that happens, you’re supposed to take a day off.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I won’t.”
“And what if they follow you?” he demanded.
“From here?”
He shook his head. “To here. From your office.”
“They won’t do that. They’d have to watch the office all day, just to see if I show up—and my apartment, too—because, when you think about it, I’m more likely to go there than to the office. Especially on Sunday, so… I’ll be okay. It isn’t like the KGB is after us.”
Duran fell back on the bed. “How do you know?”
She smiled. “Very funny.”
“You won’t change your mind?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Then I want you to call me,” Duran told her, “when you get there, and when you leave. Okay?”
She agreed.
The rental car was a metallic-green Dodge Stratus. It had that new car smell in spades, and kept fogging up as Adrienne headed north on Shirley Highway past the Army-Navy Country Club. The rain was lighter now, but the humidity was terrific and there wasn’t anything in the car to clear the windshield. So every half mile or so, she brushed the fingertips of her right hand back and forth across the glass, smearing it.
Not that it mattered. Her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking that Duran was right about going to work. The safest thing to do would be to stay away for a few days, and call in sick. But she couldn’t do that. Slough wouldn’t understand. And if she tried to explain it—if she told him what had happened—well, that would be even worse. Lawyers at Slough, Hawley did not get shot at. Or, if they did, they did not make partner.
And, anyway, she wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, she was all tapped out on the fear front, and had been for a very long time.
The thing about fear was that it was exhausting. She’d known that ever since she was a child. For years she’d lived in a state of almost constant anxiety. After Gram died, there was the fear that there would be no one to take care of her. Then, after a series of foster homes, and interim periods in “care,” there was the fear of getting hit, yelled at, humiliated, ignored, or bullied. Even the social workers scared her, the creepy way they held her hand and asked loaded questions whose significance and consequences she couldn’t guess. That she didn’t know the right answers was clear from the little twitches of disappointment in their eyes, the reflexive smiles, the rephrased questions. Once, she’d overheard them talking about a family’s interest in adopting “the younger child”—her—and she’d been scared to death. For weeks she wouldn’t let Nikki out of her sight, terrified that they’d be separated.
But those were the acute fears, the ones that rose and fell on an almost daily basis, like the tides. There was another fear, though, that was chronic and unchanging, an adrenal drain fueled by the worry that whatever sanctuary she and Nikki had found, it would soon disappear.