Fire & Frost (14 page)

THE MORE SHE REGAINED her strength over the next day, the more that night in the tub seemed like a daring dream. But it had happened, and she’d liked the woman she was back there. What’s more, the incident had made her feel closer to Max, easier with him, and she sometimes imagined he felt it back.

She had the crazy thought that this was what a relationship was made of—taking risks and letting yourself be undone, undignified. It was surprising and fascinating.

He certainly seemed to take more command of the place—she noticed it in the bigger-than-usual way he sat on the furniture, and his heavy stroll; it was as though he’d sunken more deeply into life.

He also seemed more on guard. He really thought the next attack could be any minute. It frightened her. She wasn’t strong enough to fight like again.

The next day she took her own bath, and afterwards, she went down to her lab and ordered up steak dinners from one of the photos in her gourmet magazine as a surprise for Max.

She wasn’t quite up for steak when the dinner arrived the next day, but she sat across from him with a bowl of Donkey Kong Crunch and watched him devour both meals. She’d never seen a man so in love with being alive. The way he relished every bite of his food, how badly he wanted to walk around outside on sunny days. The way he padded down the stairs in the morning, opened the refrigerator, and then peered in while stretching like a grizzly bear, it made her want to be better for him, to be the woman in the bath for him, doer of scary things.

She could never tell him how she felt. She couldn’t stand the silence. The pity. But she could do the second scariest-ever thing: she could try to give him a natural term of life. Total freedom and autonomy. He wouldn’t need her anymore, but that was the gift of it—he’d be his own man. He could laugh at her and leave her. He wouldn’t go back to Chicago, but there was a whole world out there for him.

You won’t ever do what really scares you,
he’d said.

Well, he’d eat his words when he learned of this new plan. He might eat his words on the way to California or something, but still, he’d see she wasn’t some sort of coward, hiding behind magic.
If he leaves, he leaves, whatever will be, will be,
she told herself, ignoring the knot forming her stomach. Only a weak person kept people around by force. And anyway, she knew how to be alone. She knew how to live without love.

Jophius jumped up on the chair next to her. Jophius had taken to following her around everywhere. She put a handful of cereal in front of Jophius, and he gobbled it up in snorty delight, teeth flashing.

“That’s nice,” Max said.

She grinned. “He likes to eat at the big table.”

Max rolled his eyes and sopped up the gravy with a biscuit.

A tweak of the code—she felt sure that’s all it would take. But what tweak? That was the million dollar question. She’d figure it out—she always triumphed when she put her mind to something. In the technical realm, anyway. And she did things that scared her all the time—he was wrong to say she didn’t.

Jophius scrunched his nose and eyes in pleasure as she rubbed his ear. If the tweak worked, she could give Jophius a natural life, too. Jophius would stay.

THE TRAIN TO CHICAGO
THA-LUNKED
along the Mississippi past snowy river towns and half-frozen wetlands. Veronica sat next to the window, snuggled down inside her thick, black overcoat. Her furry black hat was adorned with a big jeweled pin, giving her the mysterious elegance of a woman from another era. As if she felt him looking at her she turned to him with a smile that lit her delicate features. Max resisted the urge to pull her snug to him; instead he offered her favorite part of the paper, the Dear Abby section.

“Thanks.” She took it and folded it neatly.

He missed the intimacy he’d felt with her in the bath, but he certainly didn’t want to see her broken again to get it back. If regaining her strength meant she needed him less, so be it. Though lately he felt like she was determined not to need him. And she was back to spending endless hours in her lab again, too. And here they were, pit bull and witch, riding a train. Handling business, albeit with a new level of friendship between them.

The train had left St. Paul at dawn. All the way to the station, he’d had the feeling of them being followed, watched. He didn’t feel easy on the train, either. Salvo would move fast and hard.

They’d be in Chicago after lunch. Chicago, the home he longed for and dreaded seeing. The home he could never have back. Mostly he couldn’t get his little girl out of his mind. Did she carry his death in her eyes? Back when he was a cop he’d seen a lot of kids carry death and trouble in their eyes. He didn’t want that for Teresa.

He’d resisted going down to peek in on her these past months. It felt like haunting her, because he was a type of ghost. And what if she caught sight of him? It would mess her up big-time.

He flipped the paper to another section. More blather on Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.

She’d be three months older. Nine and a half.

There was a chance he’d catch sight of her while carrying out their plan. Who knows? It could happen. Maybe his sister and her family would take Teresa to the natural history museum today—the natural history museum was near the old stakeout point, their destination. And Teresa wouldn’t recognize him because Veronica was planning on glamouring them, magically changing their appearance. Still, haunting Teresa felt wrong.

He was less than a ghost, really, because one of these days his bitch queen would get pissed off enough at him that she wouldn’t want him around, and she wouldn’t even have to kick him out. Her simple inaction would end him. He was conscious of that fact each and every time he opposed her.

It was no way for a man to live. And it sure the hell was no way for a man in love to live.

He knew that if he mentioned the idea of seeing Teresa, Veronica would be all for it.
If you want to, why not?
She’d say.

But it didn’t sit right.

Going to Chicago, however, was unavoidable. They had to travel for the plan to work. Max had come up with it after Veronica had explained how she’d conjured up the video tapes from a photo. If she could do that, he knew where they could get all kinds of dirt on Salvo. Veronica had assured him over and over that yes, if he could snap a photo of a certain file cabinet, then she could produce that cabinet with its contents intact. “I got your brain when I ordered you, didn’t I?” she’d joked. “I got your mulish attitude, right?”

“So out of curiosity,” he asked, “what would you get if you ordered Don Johnson?”

“It depends on what picture I ordered him from. If I ordered him from a tabloid picture of him dining out at a Hollywood restaurant or something, I’d get the actual man. But if I ordered him from, like, a TV Guide picture where he’s being Detective Sonny Crockett? I’d probably get that character.” She snorted. “Ordering a character off the TV. That would be
so
irresponsible.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A character isn’t human. It would just be insane, that’s all. A Pandora’s box.” Then she looked at him, getting the real meaning. “You’re human. A real man in every way.
Every
way, Max. You have no idea—” she seemed about to say more, but stopped herself, realizing, maybe the flimsiness of her arguments. He was neither real nor human. A man, yes, which made it all the more excruciating. Being with her.

They’d stopped at a camera store in Paupesha yesterday and purchased a camera with a telephoto lens. They would take a photo of the file cabinet in Salvo’s lawyer’s office, get it developed at the one-hour place, and go home and conjure it. Then he’d raid the thing for information nobody was supposed to have. They’d be able to blackmail the entire Salvo family with it. The plan would protect Veronica forever. It was a good plan.

Except they might not have time to carry it out.

And what if he did catch sight of Teresa?

Stay away from her
, he told himself.
Photograph the cabinet and leave.

Frozen wetlands turned to snowy fields outside the window. Dead, brown corn stalks popped up from the unbroken white here and there.

With her rosy red cheeks and dark, pretty hair under that hat, Veronica looked like something off an old-fashioned Christmas card. Almost innocent.

He thought about her leg in the bath, under the water that danced with candlelight. Her leg was outrageous and wrong and wild and unconventional and it refused to behave, just like her. He’d wanted to warm her that night with everything he had. And to kiss every inch of that hated, misshapen leg, and the rest of her, too—exploring her, tasting her. He’d wanted to pull her to him and slide his hands under her wet tank top and touch her breasts, and take over her body and invade her senses from every angle and fuck her until she screamed his name.

He’d contented himself with keeping her from drowning. He was a gentleman, however ungentlemanly his thoughts had been.

She tucked her coat over her lap. Then she looked at him, caught him staring. “What?”

You’re beautiful and hard and a little bit bad,
he thought. Instead he folded up the front section of the paper. “Want this?”

“Nah.” She turned back to stare out the window.

THE FREYER-KOPPS TOWER HAD BEEN 80% vacant when Max’s men had taken over the 26th floor in order to stake out the 26th floor of the Griggs Tower across the street.

Three months later, the Freyer-Kopps was still mostly vacant.

Max hit the elevator button.

Veronica had glamoured them both before they’d left the train station. It was hard for him to get it through his head that the woman standing with him—the suntanned blonde with her red polka-dot power suit and giant shoulder pads—was Veronica. It put him off balance.

“Dare I ask what you bespelled me to look like?” he said.

With an impish smile she pointed at a mirrored section of wall beyond a potted plant. He walked over and groaned at the image of a young buck in a fedora and an oversized jacket with rolled-up sleeves. His frosted hair dipped over one eye. He gave her a dark glance. “I’m that Hungry Like the Wolf guy.”

“Not exactly. But…” She shrugged. “…inspired by.”

“Thanks a lot.” The elevator door opened and they got in. He stabbed the button for twenty-six and the door slid shut. She’d made him into the kind of guy she wanted to be with, fresh off MTV. “Make me more regular. This is conspicuous.”

Veronica switched her briefcase to her other hand. “We look just right. FYI, there’s an ad agency and magazine offices in this building.”

“You call this just right?”

“I didn’t want you looking like a cop,” she said.

“The only alternative to cop is a ridiculous man-child who can’t even fill out a sports coat?”

She screwed up her eyes and lips in mock anger. He couldn’t help but smile. The face wasn’t hers but the expression was. He resisted the urge to grab her and kiss her.

She said, “Any more lip out of you and you’ll find yourself staring at Boy George in the mirror.”

The 26th floor was full of abandoned cubicles and cabinets, just as he and his men had left it after surveillance ended that past summer. He rolled a couple of chairs to the window. She sat in hers and spun around. He cranked up the back of another chair and knelt behind it, using it to steady the camera’s bulky telephoto lens. “There it is. Still in full view.”

He snapped a few photos. “Gotcha,” he said. He stood up and had her look through it. “The window to the right of the one with the blue blinds is Salvo’s lawyer’s office.”

“You sure they can’t see us?” she asked.

“This building has mirrored windows. Find the blue blinds?”

“Yes. Marble wallpaper?”

“Yup. It’s the middle cabinet stack we need. That cabinet holds the name of every judge, cop, and congressperson on the Salvo payroll, plus planted guys. We did everything we could to get a warrant. There was even some move to break in that I wasn’t supposed to know about. Couldn’t even breach the ground floor. So we had to sit here and salivate.”

“Push me up to the edge,” she said.

He pushed her to the window bank and she snapped a few of her own pictures.

“That’s all we need?” he asked.

She grinned. “It’s alls we need.”

If this worked out, she wouldn’t need him for protection anymore. He wondered if she was thinking about that. “Let’s get back to the station.” They had tickets for the seven o’clock. It wasn’t even four.

“You could see her.”

“It’s not rightful,” he said.

“It could ease your mind. She wouldn’t know.”

“
I’d
know,” he said.

“She won’t recognize you.”

“It’s not just that,” he said. It’s what he might see.

“Kids are resilient.”

He closed his eyes. The idea of leaving and not at least catching a glimpse of Teresa made him feel jumbled up. “I can’t.”

“I think you have to.”

“Don’t.”

She limped to him—even glamoured, she limped. It was one way their enemies might recognize them. He hadn’t said that, though. He didn’t want to frighten her.

She rested a hand on his shoulder and set her chin on her hand. “I’ll be the devil for you if you want,” she whispered. “It’s okay for you to hate me.”

“Veronica—”

“Shhh.” She flicked around her free hand. Scrying for Teresa. “Not very far,” she whispered. “Teresa plays the oboe?”

He hissed out a breath. “Friday after school band practice.” She’d had Friday band practice before his death. It struck him as strange that she’d still have it.

Veronica straightened up. “She’s at her school. In the gym. We could be there in ten minutes. I’ll make us repairmen. There’s a panel on the wall near the stage.”

“It’s not rightful.” And he didn’t want to see his death in her eyes. So many kids were walking around destroyed. He couldn’t bear that Teresa should be one of them.

“You need to give yourself a break sometimes,” she said. “You need to see that she’s okay.”