Accompanying Alice (3 page)

“Huh?” Alice’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. She shut it with a snap, and the soft line of her jaw firmed. “What am I supposed to do, let you waltz in and take over my life and my home at will?”

Gabriel ran a hand regretfully through his hair, wincing slightly, and fingered the gun. “You don’t have much choice right now, Alice,” he said. “And neither do I.”

Something inside Alice snapped. She rounded on him ferociously. “I’m tired of people telling me there’s no choice. There’s always a choice whether you want to make one or not.” Her voice faded abruptly. What was she doing yelling at a man with a gun in his lap—even if she did believe him?

She believed him.

With only part of herself she watched him reach across the car to turn the key in the ignition, heard the car jump to life. She looked at his hand. Beneath the mud and grease it was a neat hand, long fingered and strong, nails and cuti
cles trimmed, nothing ragged about it. The hand of a gentleman. Or a well-paid crook.

“Come on,” he urged, voice gentle despite the tightness in it, bass-rich beneath a veneer of gravel. “However many
choices
we’ve got, we can’t sit here talkin’ about ‘em. They’re out there looking for me. We
have
to go.”

Facing him, she squeezed her hands around the steering wheel until her nails cut into her palms and her knuckles ached from the strain. Oh, God, she believed him. She hadn’t intended to, but she did. And that meant she’d let him stay with her. Willingly. Just another man she’d say
yes to when what she really ought to do was give him a punch in the gut and a firm no. Why was it that, when she was so strong in other ways, she’d let herself get into that yes-no-maybe so habit with men? First there’d been her father and the dare-to-challenge-yourself camp she hadn’t wanted to attend at fourteen that had cost her a broken ankle and torn ligaments in her knee. Then there’d been Matthew in the back seat of his car when she was sixteen and fertile.

She mentally ticked off the rest of them. The real estate agent who’d sold her the house for more than it was worth. The man at the dealership who used to work—and work and
work
—on
her car until it really should have been better than factory fresh ever thought of being. Five years ago when her former boss insisted she become manager of the bookstore when she wasn’t sure she wanted the extra responsibility even though she had already shouldered most of it…

Well, maybe she shouldn’t include him. He’d only wanted to promote her to the position she’d taken on by default, pay her what she deserved for it and…

Off topic, Alice
, she admonished herself, and came back to the point. Anyway, that brought her up to this guy with the gun, sitting in the car beside her
now
...

In
resignation she faced forward, shifted the car into drive and pulled away from the side of the road. “Where...” She paused, suddenly knowing that, in spite of anything else, she had to help him because instinct told her it was the right thing to do. Period, exclamation point, and damn her mother, anyway. “Where to first?”

*

They drove in near silence, attention focused deliberately away from one another on things that were less unnerving.

The air between them was stifled, tense, unsure. Gabriel gave directions circumspectly. Alice followed them nervously. Further talk seemed inappropriate—they weren’t here to get to know one another—and the rarely tongue-tied
Alice couldn’t seem to find anything to say, anyway. Gabriel sank inside himself, as though wrestling with the demons of his own disbelief, offering and inviting nothing.

Rain fell in sheets, cut a blinding path across the empty pawnshop parking lot as she pulled in and, at Gabriel’s direction, angled the car sideways as close as she could to the front door. Across the street near the intersection of M-59 and Voorheis Road that officially divided the in-decline City of Pontiac from more rural Waterford Township, yellow buses stood in line at the corner waiting for traffic to clear. Around the corner stood the steepled church and once-Catholic grade school Alice had attended. When the time had come for the girls to go to school, Alice had scraped together the tuition to send them there, too. Cattycorner from the pawnshop was the independent family-owned grocery store where she’d shopped all her life; a couple blocks down was the Irish pub where, on rare occasions, she met her sisters for drinks.

Her lips worked over her teeth as she struggled to collect her bearings. Funny, she’d always thought of this industrial suburb in the northwest Detroit area as a large city. Now as she really looked at it for the first time in years, Pontiac seemed suddenly small-not unlike the shrinking world around it, she supposed-unwittingly giving her more in common with the man beside her than she would have liked. Common ground usually meant common interests, and she really didn’t think she wanted...

She licked her lips nervously, trying to un-sidetrack her thoughts, and eyed the pawnshop with misgivings. He’d said he had something important to pick up here. Proof, he’d said, evidence that would make her more comfortable about having him in her life. At a pawnshop?

In the midst of her childhood stamping grounds, the place had stood here as long as she could remember. She’d never been inside, though her family had frequented the television
repair shop adjoining it. Pawnshops belonged in sleazy, addict populated downtown areas and detective novels, not in suburban neighborhoods. She glanced at Gabriel for direction. He’d made no further threats, either overt or implied, but she still didn’t feel safe with him. He wasn’t a
safe
kind of guy. He was the kind of guy who’d attract trouble in the middle of an empty field without another living soul around for miles. The intense broody type who belonged on the back of a motorcycle with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. The type who attracted women because he was dangerous and needed saving.

The kind of guy who’d attracted her when she was sixteen, then frightened her so badly she’d turned tail and rabbited straight into the arms of someone safe like Matt.

Her breath stuck in her throat behind the fine bone of shame she’d never quite managed to get rid of whenever she thought of that mistake. But now was not the time to consider past mistakes, nor the time to make new ones. Especially not to make new ones. She dragged her thoughts into the present, let her eyes focus on Gabriel. He picked the gun out of his lap and tucked it into his jeans at the small of his back underneath his shirt, then took her hand and jerked his head to indicate she should follow him. Her skirt caught on the corner of the seat when: she started to slide across the car. She tugged it loose and lifted herself over the slight bump in the center of the bench seat. Gabriel towed her through the rain and into the shop.

A bell rang over the door as it swung shut behind them.

Voices seemed to rise at the back of the store in response to the bell. Alice looked around; the place was nothing like she’d imagined. No army-jacketed, suspicious-looking characters lurked in the shadows. No guns lay invitingly behind unbreakable aquarium-like counters. No frightened-looking chain-smoker stood behind an iron cage backed by bulletproof glass. The store was dim, but from dust and clutter rather than furtiveness. Bicycles crammed the floor at the
front of the shop, lined a side wall, hung suspended from the ceiling alongside radio-controlled miniature cars, orange pup tents, and drab camouflage tarpaulins.

Everywhere Alice looked there seemed to be a resting place for other people’s cast-off hopes and dreams: camp stoves, gas heaters and propane canisters littered deep shelves piled high with typewriters, desktop copiers and radios. Expensive new fishing equipment looked as dull as the much used rods and reels that overshadowed it. Army surplus camping supplies made the unused, scientifically designed, brand-name paraphernalia beside them looked like bright, untried uptown yuppies standing next to never-been-innocent mercenaries. A glass-fronted counter to the side and behind more bicycles showcased both fine and not so fine jewelry. Newer electronics equipment filled the back wall behind a long wooden counter.

At the same time that Alice wanted to hold herself tightly away from the things other people had clutched, used and sneezed on, she found herself strangely thrilled at the discovery of a place full of buried treasure at economy prices. Whether or not she could actually get herself to come in here alone, scrounge thoroughly, then buy some of this stuff, she didn’t know. She canted a tentative glance at Gabriel, who lifted his chin and indicated the back counter, stepping aside for her to precede him down the narrow aisle that led to it. Gathering a shallow breath, Alice did so.

A doorway covered by strings of wooden beads stood to the right of the counter. A man in his mid-thirties, who appeared to have been watching them, stepped through the beads in response to a cough from Gabriel. “Picking ‘em up?” he asked without preamble.

Nodding, Gabriel slid two fingers into his left boot, withdrew a pawn ticket and tossed it onto the counter. “Last time,” he said.

“Good thing you came in when you did, then. Had a
buyer for ‘em in here yesterday. Told him to come back today. Gettin’ tired of movin’ the damn things around.” The man behind the counter picked up the ticket, fingered it. “You’re almost a month late. You weren’t so regular ‘bout comin’ back for ‘em I wouldn’t even’ve held ‘em an extra week. Would’ve sold ‘em if you hadn’t come in today.”

Gabriel’s knuckles whitened over the edge of the counter. “I hear you,” he said softly.

The pawnbroker eyed him uncomfortably for a second, then tapped Gabriel’s ticket on the counter and disappeared with it through the beads. Expression remote, Gabriel looked after him, jaw tightening and straining over thoughts Alice couldn’t imagine. All at once, as though some new problem had just occurred to him, he dug into a hip pocket and pulled out a money clip, fanning quickly through the few bills on it. The pickings were a trifle slim. His mouth thinned for an instant. Then, looking like what he was, a man who’d run out of choices, he drew Alice aside and asked quietly, “You got any cash?”

“Let me check,” she replied automatically, then caught herself with her hand in her purse. She should have anticipated the question, but somehow she hadn’t. For all his other flaws, he didn’t look like a man who took money from women he was barely acquainted with. “Do I have any
what?”

“Cash. Money. Moola.” Gabriel sent an uneasy I’d-rather-do-anything-else look toward the beaded doorway. “I’ll sign a receipt. You’ll get it back.”

Alice stared at him. Lord, he did have nerve. What was it the Samaritan code had to say about lending money? She clamped her lips together hard. Oh, yeah.
Give it freely,
she
answered herself in her mother’s voice,
so beggars don’t have to steal.
She pulled out her wallet, opened it and, without counting the bills, handed him its contents. “This is not an auspicious beginning for our relationship,” she whis
pered tartly. The Samaritan code said nothing about keeping pointed comments to herself.

“We don’t have a relationship,” Gabriel assured her, sorting the bills and tucking them into his money clip. “You’re an accident, default, luck of the draw, that’s all.”

“That’s
all?”
By the sudden sensation that she’d burst into flame, she knew her face and neck had turned red and she was about to explode. People shouldn’t treat people like pebbles in a stream bed, like mechanical drones without personality or function other than that programmed for them. That was just plain wrong. On the other hand...

She swallowed inflexible judgment with difficulty. She’d spent the thirty years since kindergarten learning to douse the fuse on her temper once it had been lit. She struggled with it double time now. “I don’t know about you, but some guy sticks a gun in my face, kidnaps me, takes my money and tells me he’s commandeering my house, I have a
relationship
with him whether I want one or not. It’s not based on trust, of course, but it is a relationship.”