Jocelyn regarded him skeptically, but he could see the concern blossoming beneath the surface.
‘I’m sorry to put this on you,’ he said.
She made a sound that was a cross between a snort and a laugh. ‘You’re not going to put anything on me, Mr…?’
She crossed her considerable arms, legs planted, an immobile force. She was the kind of foster mom who’d take you by the ear and drag you to Valley Liquors to fess up to stealing nip bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Mike knew her as he’d known the Couch Mother, which meant he could read her. The watery blue eyes. The feathered skin at her temples. The kindness etched into every crease of her venerable face.
He held a hand up, palm down, calming the waters or holding his balance; he wasn’t sure which. ‘Don’t trust anything you might hear on the news. Don’t trust anyone. Anyone, no matter who they say they are. If you turn her in, if you call the cops or Child Protective Services, she will be hunted down.’
‘Well, that’s quite a thing, isn’t it?’ She swallowed angrily, her neck clucking up and down, and looked away.
‘You know kids. Talk to my daughter and you’ll know I’m telling the truth.’
‘How’d you find me?’
He swung the rucksack off his shoulder, letting it thunk to the floor. ‘This holds two hundred thousand dollars in cash. It’s not blood money. It’s from our savings before all this happened. You can declare it as an anonymous donation, pay taxes, whatever. It’s yours to keep. Spend it on the other kids, too, so they don’t get jealous.’
‘Donations don’t work that way. I don’t want your money regardless.’
‘Keep it in case you need it.’
‘You’re not listening to me.’
‘Then will you guard it for me?’
‘Like collateral?’ She practically spit the words.
‘I will be back.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘I won’t do it,’ she said, with grave finality.
‘You will,’ he said gently. ‘I know that you will.’
‘Two hundred thousand.’ She set her hands on her hips, the flesh wobbling around her arms. ‘Why so much money if you’re coming back?’
His face felt unattached to him, a separate entity, a stone mask. If it cracked, it would crumble away and leave nothing behind. He heard a noise escape him, and Jocelyn’s stance softened. She lowered her hands to her sides, seeming to take pity on him as he fought for composure.
‘So she can have whatever she needs until then.’ He gestured at the rucksack. ‘Her clothes are in there, too. They’re her clothes. Buy whatever for the others-’
‘All my girls have their own clothes,’ she said indignantly.
‘And,’ he said faintly, ‘she has head lice.’
‘Splendid.’
‘I tried mayonnaise-’
‘It doesn’t work. You need the heavy-duty stuff.’
He toed the linoleum. It was no longer his right to object. ‘Okay.’
‘Any other problems? Drug-resistant tuberculosis, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘I can’t do this – I won’t do this – for long,’ she said. ‘It’s illegal, which puts the whole family at risk. I have no birth certificate for her. What am I supposed to do if-’
‘You don’t run a battered-women and children’s shelter for seventeen years without figuring out how to give people a new life.’
A glare. ‘You’ve certainly done your homework.’ She took a deep breath. ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Not so long that you couldn’t get the right folks in the right offices on the phone. If it comes to that.’
‘If it comes to that,’ she repeated sharply.
She let out an angry laugh, and he saw it again, the steel in her eyes that said she was the kind of woman who could figure out just about anything she decided was necessary.
‘And why should I believe you are coming back?’ she asked.
‘Because I told her I would.’
‘Then you’d better goddamned come back, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Turning to the stove, she dismissed him with a wave.
He pushed through the swinging door into the foyer. They were all as he’d left them, the girls fixated on the TV, the toddler twisting one-legged Barbie’s remaining limbs this way and that, and his daughter sitting on the bench just through the open rear door, her untied shoelaces scraping the concrete. Her fingers fiddled with themselves autistically in her lap. Her lips were bunching; she was doing everything not to cry. He filled the doorway. He didn’t want to blink – there was only this moment of seeing her, of capturing her image, and then it would be over. For a moment he thought he might just fly apart there in the doorway like a horror-movie effect.
Finally Kat looked up, fixing that amber-and-brown gaze on him. ‘Please, Daddy.’
Tearing his gaze from her, he turned away.
He drifted numbly through the front door and back to the stolen Camry. Snowball II remained on the dashboard where Kat had perched him. He held the tiny stuffed animal in his hands and looked at the house but couldn’t bring himself to go back in and deliver it to her. Resting it on the passenger seat, he drove off. A few miles up the road, he noticed the baby monitor down by his feet where he’d dropped it after the chase.
He threw it out the window.
Chapter 42
Mike blinked back to consciousness in a motel room with a vague recollection of driving for hours to put as much distance between him and Jocelyn Wilder’s foster home as possible. Space, he hoped, would lessen temptation. Snowball II was mashed in his fist, and between his legs was a brown-bagged bottle of Jack Daniel’s, though he had no memory of wanting to get drunk. He sat with the TV flickering across his face, pulling from the bottle, craving numbness, but he’d had no more than two gulps when he vomited in the corner. He saw himself from the outside – one shoe off, belt undone, curled on the coarse carpet. And then Annabel appeared, kneeling over him, hand on his shoulder, saying, It’s okay, I’m here, We’ll get through this together, but when he rolled over, she bled into a surprising blast of light from the high-set window.
He was cold in his bones where the rays couldn’t reach. He thought he should shower, but he found he already was, the scalding water raising streaks on his chest and arms, though he couldn’t quit shivering. Closing his eyes, he retreated into bleached-out memories of his mother. That yellow-tiled kitchen. Looking up as she’d bathed him, her black-brown hair draped along one tan arm. Patchouli and sage, the flesh-warm scent of cinnamon. That spot of blood – her blood? – on his father’s cuff.
A dead patch of time.
And then the room was dark and he was trembling beneath an icy spout, the hot water having long run out.
Next he was wet on the floor, wrapped in a bedsheet, hugging the shopping bag containing the gun and his remaining cash. The room was a mess – splotch of puke, tipped-over chair, sheets pulled onto the floor to form a nest.
The door opened, and a fall of light from the corridor landed on his face, making him blink. Then the door closed, heavy footsteps padded across to him, and a man’s shadow darkened his sight.
They were here, at last, to kill him.
‘Get up,’ Shep said.
A hand lowered into the fuzzy edge of Mike’s vision. Mike considered it with stunned incomprehension.
His voice, hoarse from disuse: ‘How’d you find me?’
‘You called me. You told me what you had to do. Now get up.’
Mike took his hand. Shep hoisted him to his feet.
Shep crossed and set a worn brown paper bag on the crappy kitchenette counter. He removed a sleek black cell, a Batphone replacement, and tossed it at Mike. Next came the Colt.45 and a police scanner, which Shep plugged into the outlet by the microwave: ‘-1080, you got a location? That’s affirmative. I’m on scene at 1601 Elwood, back window looks to be broken. How many units we got in the area?’ He thumbed down the volume, leaving it loud enough to keep an ear on, then unpacked can after can of SpaghettiOs, setting them in a row by the sink.