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Shouldn’t have done it here, you dummy, Daddy says.Should have waited. What if the Black singer comes out wanting you to get her a sandwich or a bottle of beer?
Too late now. He takes the pen, says numbers, and one by one writes down the four-digit code.
7
12:20 PM.
Holly finally feels it’s okay to stop by her apartment. Corrie’s at the Mingo, with a bit of shopping to follow, and Kate is Zooming in her suite—a CNN interview followed by a taped sparring match forThe Fiveon Fox News.
As a rule she’s no fan of country music, but she happened on an Alan Jackson song that so struck her that she loaded it onto her phone and tablet. The song is called “Little Bitty,” and she can (as she’s sure they say in John Ackerly’s AA program)relate. Her apartment is a version of that song: little-bitty washing machine, little-bitty drier,little-bitty stove on which she makes some tomato soup, little-bitty table at which she eats the soup and a toasted cheese sandwich.
She brought her dirty clothes with her in a laundry bag from the hotel, but her commitment to Kate nags her and she doesn’t want to be away long enough to wash and dry them. Nothing can happen to the boss while Kate’s in her hotel suite, but what if she takes a notion to go out? Possibly to engage with the right-to-lifers that have gathered across the street? It would be just like her. Imagining that scenario, Holly is haunted by thoughts of David Gunn, John Britton, and George Tiller, all shot to death for providing the service Kate has spent her tour advocating.
She expected that being here in her own place—a little-bitty apartment for a little-bitty private investigator—would bring her a measure of the serenity that’s been missing from her life ever since she foolishly agreed to be Kate McKay’s bodyguard. It has not. Something is nagging at her, and she should know what it is, but she does not. She thinks it has to do with her visit to the Mingo yesterday, but every time she tries to pin it down, all she can think about is how happy she was to see Barbara onstage, singing and doing cool moves. It was as if Barbara was doing for Holly something that Holly was too shy and insecure to do for herself.
She eats her soup. She nibbles at her cheese sandwich. She tries to think of what she’s missing. Tells herself it doesn’t matter, that when it finally comes to her it will be of no account—little bitty, in fact—but she doesn’t believe that. Something happened at the Mingo, something of which she should have taken note but didn’t. Did she see it? Overhear it? Both? It won’t come. All she can think of is how her heart swelled to see her young poet friend doing the various steps as Sista Bessie sang “Land of 1000 Dances.”
At last she pushes the uneaten half of her toasted cheese down the garbage disposer and rinses out her bowl. She puts the bowl in her little-bitty dishwasher, takes her bag of unwashed clothes, and heads back to the hotel. She will send them out to the hotel laundry instead.
And put it on her expense account.
8
12:45 PM.
Chrissy is dozing behind the snackbar when the lock on the rink’s lobby doors retracts with a thump. She comes awake immediately, clutching her gun. It’s the police, she’s sure of it, and she almost gets to her feet, ready to shoot it out with them, but some instinct keeps her hidden, although she’s on her knees with the .32 clutched in both hands, every muscle thrumming and every sense straining as the door opens. She hears someone grunting with effort, and the sound of shuffling steps. There are inarticulate vocal sounds, too. Chrissy thinks they would be cries, maybe even screams, but something has muffled them.
“Move, goddammit,move,” a man says. “Help me. Do the best you can.”
They pass through the lobby. Chrissy creeps to the edge of the snackbar and peeks around, ready to shoot if she’s seen, but she’s not; the newcomers are back to her. A man has his arm around the waist of a girl or a young woman. Her hands are bound behind her with what looks like duct tape. Her ankles are likewise bound, and one of her shoes is gone. Although the man is taking as much of her weight as he can bear, she can still only manage a series of drunken hops. They go into the arena.
Chrissy removes her own shoes, runs on tiptoe to the central door opening on the rink, and peers in. She could stand there totally exposed and not be seen. The man is guiding his prisoner slowly and patiently across the crisscrossing ties to what used to be the penalty box. He seats her on the bench inside, takes a roll of duct tape from the pocket of his sportcoat, and begins binding her neck and shins to one of the steel posts.
Chrissy considers shooting the man when he comes out, because he is of course the same man who killed the girl Chrissy has already found. He hasn’t killed this one yet—maybe means to rape her or molest her in some twisted way first—but Chrissy is sure he will.
Then the bound girl turns her head and Chrissy gets her first good look at her. Recognition is instant in spite of the tape over the girl’smouth. It’s Corrine Anderson, Kate McKay’s assistant. Corrie sees Chrissy as well. Her eyes widen. Chrissy pulls back before the man can follow his prisoner’s gaze—so she hopes—and runs lightfooted back to the snackbar.
Hashe seen her? She doesn’t know. If he has, she really will have to shoot him, but she no longer wants to do that unless she has to.
The man finally returns. She hears his footfalls approaching as he walks from one of the beams to the next, then the gritting of his shoes on the dusty lobby floor. She waits, gun clasped in her hands.
Look for his shadow, she tells herself, but the lobby is gloomy and there maybeno shadow.Listen, then, just listen.
The gritting steps don’t approach the snackbar, nor do they pause. The man goes back to the double doors instead. For a moment the lobby brightens as he steps out, then the gloom returns. There’s a clunk as he uses the keypad to lock the door. Ears straining, she hears an engine start up, then dwindle.
He’s gone.
9
12:55 PM.
Midday custom is slow at Happy, because there’s no juke, no TV over the bar showing sports highlights, and they don’t serve food other than peanuts and chips until evening, when it’s only hotdogs. John Ackerly is taking advantage of the lull to load glassware into the dishwasher when his phone rings.
“Hey, is this John?” It’s the voice of an old man who’s spent most of his life smoking two packs a day. There is a juke wherever his caller is; John can hear Bonnie Tyler telling the world about her total eclipse of the heart.
“Yeah, this is John. Who’ve I got?”
“Robbie! Robbie M., from the Upsala meetin? I’m at the Sober Club in Breezy Point. Borrowed Billy Top’s phone. You know Billy Top?”