“You want some water?”
He nodded, quick up and down jerks of his head.
“I’ve got some bottled water in my purse.”
She turned her back to him to get her purse off the door and in one desperate motion he pulled the knife out from under the mattress and tossed it toward the six inches of open space.
Ms. Lam turned back toward him as if in slow motion. He held his breath, his peripheral vision catching a glint of metal as the folding knife sailed toward the window.
Instinctively, he coughed, leaning over, hoping to muffle the sound when the knife hit the window sash and fell back into the room.
“Here you go,” Ms. Lam said, twisting the bottle open. “Take a couple of drinks.”
John did as he was told, then chanced a look down as he wiped his brow, scanning the carpet below the window. Empty. The space was empty.
“That’s good, now,” Ms. Lam said, patting his back. “You just had a bad spell, didn’t you?”
He nodded, unable to answer.
“Let’s look under the mattress now.” She shook her head when he offered her the water. “You keep that. I’ve got plenty more in my car.”
John stood up, his legs still shaky. He looked again at the window, the empty space on the carpet beneath it. The knife had to have gone out the window. There was no other explanation.
When John had propped the mattress against the wall, Ms. Lam requested, “Box spring, too.”
There was no roach under the bed this time, but the carpet was still caked with grime. John was so nervous about the knife that he could have fallen to the floor.
“Go on and put it back.” She thumbed through the books on the table beside his bed. If she saw the torn photograph of his mother, she didn’t say. “You finish your book? Tess of the D’Urbervilles?”
“Uh,” John said, surprised by the question. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell me, John, who christened Tess’s baby?”
He stared at her expertly made-up eyes. She blinked. “John?”
It was a trick question. She was trying to trick him. “Tess did,” he finally said, and even though he knew he was right, he was terrified of being wrong. “The priest wouldn’t do it, so she did it herself.”
“Good.” She smiled, then looked around the room again. “No luck finding another place?”
She had asked this once before. “Should I be looking?”
Ms. Lam tucked her hands into her narrow hips. “I don’t know, John. Looks like you’ve outgrown this place.”
“Well, I-”
“There’s a house over on Dugdale. A Mr. Applebaum runs it. I’ll put in a call for you tonight if you like.”
“Yeah,” he said. She hadn’t offered to help him before and he was worried that she was now. Still, he said, “Thank you,” and, “that’d be nice.”
“You move real soon now, hear? As in tomorrow.”
He didn’t understand the rush, but he said, “Okay.”
She pulled her purse over her shoulder, digging inside for her keys. “And John?”
Yes, ma am?
“Whatever you just threw out the window when my back was turned?” She looked up from her purse, flashing him a cat’s smile. “Make sure it doesn’t follow you to your new place.”
He opened his mouth but she shook her head to stop him.
“I don’t like it when somebody tries to set up one of my charges,” she told him. “When you go back in-and trust me, sixty-five percent of your fellow parolees tell me that you will-it’s gonna be because you screwed it up, not because some dipshit, Barney Fife, Atlanta cop has a hard-on for you.”
His heart was in his throat. Michael had called her. He had found what John had left in the bottom of his toolbox and decided to do something about it. The only reason John wasn’t in jail right now was because Ms. Lam played by the rules.
“Watch yourself, John.” She pointed at him with her car keys. “And remember, hon, I’ll be watching you, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Betty’s toenails clicked along the road as Will took her for her evening walk. He had tried to take the dog running their first day together, but ended up having to carry her most of the way. It had unnerved him the way she had adapted to the up and down jogging of her body, tongue lolling out, back legs tucked neatly into the palm of Will’s hand, body pressed close to his chest as he tried to ignore the strange looks people were giving him.
Poncey-Highlands was a middle-of-the-road kind of neighborhood with its mixture of struggling artists, gay men and the occasional homeless person. From his back porch, Will could see the Carter Center, which housed President Carter’s library, and Piedmont Park was a short jog away. On the weekends, Ponce de Leon took him straight up to Stone Mountain Park, where he rode his bike, hiked the trails or just sat back and enjoyed the sunrise as it peered over the largest chunk of exposed granite in North America.
As beautiful as the north Georgia mountains had been, Will had missed the familiarity of home, knowing instinctively where everything was, the areas that were safe, the restaurants that looked shady on the outside but had the best food and service in the city. He loved the diversity, the fact that there was a Mennonite church across from a rainbow-colored hippie commune at the end of his street. The way the homeless people went through your trash and yelled at you if there wasn’t anything good inside. Atlanta had always been his town, and if Amanda Wagner knew how happy he was to be back, she would have jerked him up to the hills faster than he could say, “chicken-fried steak.”
“Hiya.” A passing jogger flirted, his cut chest glistening in the evening moonlight. Having lived in a city with a large gay population for his entire life, Will had learned to take these casual passes as flattering rather than a challenge to his manhood. Of course, walking a six-pound dog on a hot pink leash (it was the only one he could find that was long enough) was asking for attention no matter where you lived.
Will smiled to himself at the thought of how ridiculous he must look, but his smile didn’t last long as his brain returned to the topic that had been plaguing his thoughts for most of the day.
He was stalled in the case and the more he thought about it, the more his initial bad feelings about Michael Ormewood were amplified. The detective came off as an okay guy when he was right in front of you, but closer examination showed some flaws, the biggest being that he had used his job to force women to have sex with him. That was the one detail Will could not get past. Prostitutes weren’t walking the streets for the great sex and stimulating conversation. They took money, and Will guessed you could construe that as consent, but there hadn’t been any money exchanged when Michael had done it. He had used the power the badge gave him to control the women. That was rape in Will’s mind.
Yet Will was having a hard time thinking of the guy he’d spent most of the last two days with as a rapist. Father, husband, seemingly a well-respected cop, sure. But rapist? There were definitely two sides to the man, and the more Will thought about it, the less he was certain about either one of them.
Working with the GBI, most of Will’s time was consumed with chasing down horrendous criminals, but if his stint in the mountains had taught him one thing, it was that people were very seldom either really good or really bad. In Blue Ridge, where poverty and plant closings and a strike at the local mine had practically crippled the small mountain community, the line between right and wrong had been blurred. Will had learned a lot up there, not just about human nature but about himself.
Region eight of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was the largest district in the state, serving fourteen counties and stretching all the way to the Tennessee as well as North Carolina state line. The men Will met at the northwest Georgia field office were pretty callous about the locals, as if they were above the people they were meant to be serving. Will’s chief was called “Yip” Gomez for reasons Will had never been able to determine, and the man had jokingly told Will the first time they met to give up on trying to enjoy any of the local talent. “I’ve already had all the ladies who still have their own teeth,” he had laughed. “Slim pickin’s, my boy. Slim pickin’s.”