Cry Uncle

CRY UNCLE

Judith Arnold

Smashwords Edition

***

Copyright 1995 by Barbara Keiler

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Prologue

JUST
LEAVE
, Pamela ordered herself.
Get out. Save your life.

Two suitcases—a Pullman and a folding
bag—stood by the door, her trench coat draped over them. The lights
and the air conditioner had been turned off, the drapes drawn
against the early morning fog. The traveler’s checks she’d
purchased yesterday were stashed carefully in an inner pocket of
the Pullman. In her purse she had her passport, her driver’s
license and her credit cards, each of them required for travel, for
escape.

She allowed herself a farewell look at the
living room. Her gaze took in the dramatic abstract sculpture
adorning the far corner, the wall of glass that faced Puget Sound,
the gleaming hardwood floors. The sleek white L-shaped sofa. The
glass-topped coffee table. The Dhurrie rugs. The Waterford crystal
coasters, stacked neatly beside the matching cut-crystal ice bucket
on the wet bar. The embroidered silk throw pillows. The plants, a
ficus and a couple of philodendrons, standing lush and green in
ceramic pots.

Oh, lord, the plants. She should have given
them to someone to water in her absence.

But she’d been preoccupied by so much else:
arranging to have all her mail forwarded to her attorney’s office,
discontinuing her newspaper delivery, emptying the refrigerator.
Packing. Figuring out where on earth a woman could hide so a hit
man wouldn’t find her. Dreaming about when she could come back and
resume her normal life.

If the plants die, they
die,
she thought.
Better them than me.

She hated running away like this, ceding
control over her existence, depending on the whimsies of fate to
determine her course. But as long as Mick Morrow was out on bail,
free to roam Seattle looking for her, she had no choice.

She checked her watch: six-thirty. She ought
to be sipping a cup of fresh-brewed coffee right now, and scanning
the front page of the newspaper, after which she would don an
elegant business suit and drive down to Murtaugh Associates, where
she would take her place at her drafting table or behind her desk
and contemplate her next assignment—an assignment she’d had to
relinquish to Richard Duffy because Mick Morrow was on the loose.
She’d done the preliminary designs for the strip-mall face lift.
She’d made the presentations and won the client, but now Richard
was going to get to oversee the project. Pamela no longer had a say
in it.

She no longer had a say in anything. Ever
since she’d realized that the same car was following her for the
third time in one week, driven by the same man she’d testified
against in court, she’d lost her sense of safety.

The police thought she was paranoid, and
maybe she was. They’d sworn they had an officer on Mick Morrow’s
tail twenty-four hours a day, and he hadn’t been anywhere near her.
She wished she could believe them, but she didn’t.

Without her testimony, the District Attorney
would have a difficult time winning a murder conviction. Pamela had
already seen Morrow commit murder once. Was it really so terribly
paranoid to believe he’d commit murder a second time, if murdering
her guaranteed his freedom?

She wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
She was going to disappear.

Chapter One

NONE OF THE WOMEN in the Shipwreck looked
like wife material to Joe.

The usual crowd filled the tavern: sun-burned
beach bums, a few arty types, some Navy guys and the standard
allotment of amateur fishermen, professional fishermen and big
talkers eager to regale any sucker who wandered by with stories
about the one that got away. The Shipwreck’s female clientele fell
into similar categories—boaters, Navy personnel, beach bunnies,
artistes. Joe knew at least half of them. The other half he figured
he probably didn’t want to know.

“
She’ll be here,” Kitty
promised, sidling up to the bar and slapping down her tray. “I need
two rum-runners and a Cutty on ice.”

Joe wrenched his attention from the noisy,
dimly lit room, with its knotted plank flooring, its walls draped
with weathered nets, and its ceiling equipped with broad-blade fans
that churned the sticky air without doing much to cool it. In front
of him the bar stretched left and right, his personal chest-high
fortress. In front of the bar stood Kitty, his head waitress.
Despite the heat, her skin was dry, her platinum-blond hair only
the slightest bit droopy.

“
Two rum-runners and a Cutty
on ice,” he repeated, reaching for glasses. “What time did you tell
her to come?”

“
I didn’t. She’ll get here
when she gets here, okay?”

“
This is important, you
know.”

Kitty snorted. “If it’s all that important,
why don’t you marry me?”

Grinning, Joe cascaded a generous portion of
scotch over the ice cubes in a highball glass. “That would make me,
what? Your fourth husband?”

“
Fifth, but who’s
counting?”

“
You know I love you, Kitty.
But you’re exactly what I don’t need right now.”

“
Yeah, tell me about it.”
She returned his grin, then waltzed off, her tray balanced above
her shoulder on one splayed hand. Joe observed the sway of her hips
with detached admiration. She had big curves top and bottom, and
she dressed in clothing that flaunted them—tonight, a snug T-shirt
and fire-engine red shorts. Her legs were a tad thick, but her
other dimensions were superlative enough to overcome that flaw. She
probably would have been even more attractive if she didn’t bleach
her hair. Toward the end of every month, the dark roots made her
look a little seedy.

Joe and Kitty had slept together once, years
ago—between her second and third husbands, if he wasn’t mistaken.
But they hadn’t set the world on fire, and they’d decided that from
that point on they would be just friends. In any case, a four-times
married bleached-blond woman whose brassiere cups runneth over
wasn’t the kind of woman Joe needed right now.

He needed someone proper and demure, someone
stable and respectable and...boring. The woman Joe was looking for
had to be bland and inoffensive. No dark roots, no wise-ass sense
of humor, no D-cup bra and sassy hip-wiggling. The woman he was
going to marry had to be exactly the sort of woman he’d never
bother with, if he had any choice in the matter.

But he didn’t have a choice.

When she’d arrived at the Shipwreck for her
shift that evening, Kitty had told him she’d found exactly the
woman for him. “She moved into my building just a few days ago.
Unattached, quiet, keeps to herself. I ran into her in the laundry
room, introduced myself and said, ‘I know a guy who’s looking for a
lady just like you.’”

“
What did she
say?”

“
Nothing. She just kinda
flinched.”

“
Great,” Joe had snorted. At
five o’clock, the bar had begun to perk up. The early-bird drinkers
had staggered home to sleep off whatever they’d spent the daylight
hours imbibing, and the evening drinkers were starting to trickle
in. Joe had been filling bowls with peanuts when Kitty had sashayed
in through the back door and filed her report on this new neighbor
of hers.

“
No, listen,” Kitty had
continued. “It wasn’t you she was flinching about. I said to her,
‘The guy in question is my boss, and he’s desperate to get
married.’”

“
Terrific,” Joe had
muttered. “You paint me as desperate, and she flinches at the mere
thought of meeting me. You have such a way with people,
Kitty.”

Kitty had brushed off his sarcasm. “Damned
right I do. Who gets the best tips around here?”

“
They’re tipping your
anatomy, not your personality.”

“
Whatever works. So anyway,
so I said, ‘Why don’t you mosey on over to the Shipwreck tonight
and check him out? He doesn’t bite.’”

“
That must have really
reassured her.”

“
All right, look, you don’t
want my help? Just say the word, Joe. Stay single and see where
that gets you.”

Where that would get him was alone and
bereft. His lawyer had told him that if he wanted to hold onto
Lizard he would have to clean up his act and settle down, attach
himself to a good woman and create a stable family situation. Joe
knew all the good women in Key West. Most of them were married, and
the rest, like Kitty, presented the sort of image that would have
the majority of family court judges delivering Lizard to the
Prescotts in no time flat. If this new neighbor of Kitty’s worked
out, Joe would be eternally grateful.

He wished he’d had more than a few hours’
warning that he was going to be meeting a prospective bride that
night. He’d showed up at the bar wearing his everyday garb—a loose
cotton shirt, old jeans and sneakers without socks. If he’d known
Kitty had invited a woman to stop by and meet him, he would have
dressed in something a little nicer—and he would have shaved. As a
rule he shaved only every third day. Tonight was day two.

He surveyed the room again. Two women huddled
in front of the juke box, their backs to him. Even in the dull
amber light he recognized one of them from the pink-rose patch on
the hip pocket of her shorts. Sabrina would have made a good wife,
he supposed—at least she would have been a pleasure to find in his
bed after a long day. She and Joe had been an item several years
ago. But one long weekend, when he’d tagged along with a couple of
buddies doing a round-trip sailing jaunt to Miami, Sabrina had
taken up with a biker. Sabrina had given him the boot after a few
weeks, but her attempt to reconcile with Joe had gotten kind of
complicated, and then Lizard had arrived, and Joe had found himself
with more important things to worry about.

Sabrina had been damned good in bed,
though—even if she had lousy taste in music, a fact he was reminded
of when she shoved her quarters into the juke box and the room
filled with the nasal whine of one of those one-named girl singers.
Someday when Joe had a free minute, he was going to yank all the
whiny-one-named-girl discs out of the juke box so he’d never have
to listen to them again.

Scanning the crowd once more, he noticed a
woman entering the bar. She was on the heavy side, maybe a few
years his senior, her hair a dark halo of frizz in the humid heat.
Okay, he thought magnanimously. Assuming she wasn’t too much older
than him, she’d do. If Joe were to marry someone past, say, forty,
a judge might not view it as a stable family situation. But
mid-thirties probably wasn’t too old. And so what if his wife
wasn’t exactly heart-stopping gorgeous? This was strictly business.
Joe didn’t have to love the woman. He just had to marry her.

He watched her weave among the tables,
heading toward him. Turning away, he checked his reflection in the
mirror behind the bar. What with the atmospheric lighting and rows
of liquor bottles lining the shelves in front of the mirror, he
couldn’t see much, and what he did see registered pretty low on the
first-impression scale. He ran his fingers through his long, shaggy
hair, scowled at the bristle of beard shading his jaw, and
straightened out his shirt. Spinning back, he presented the woman
with what he hoped was a congenial smile.

Except that she wasn’t there to receive it.
She had joined a group of guys at a table near the back. In fact,
she was perched on one man’s lap.

Suffering a twinge of regret tempered with
relief, he nodded to Lois, his other primo waitress, as she
hollered at him for a couple of Buds. He snapped off the tops of
two bottles, set them and a pair of iced mugs on her tray, and sent
her off to serve her customers.

No sooner had she departed than Kitty was
back, requesting two pina coladas. Joe busied himself with the
blender. He didn’t say a word, but Kitty apparently read volumes in
his silence, because she said, “Stop worrying. She’ll be here.”