Splicer (23 page)

The McEwan house was a remodeled Victorian two-story with glowing oak flooring, crisp white walls and a massive wooden table in the main room that was built from the planks of a demolished wartime bowling alley. In the back, behind the renovated kitchen, was a porch/storage room converted to a guesthouse. It had it's own entrance onto a densely treed backyard with an oval swimming pool. This was Rusty's home for the past week. Although he was told he could wander free in the main building, he felt like an interloper.

Jayne's collection of music and books was unusual. She had a large collection of CD's - many of them unfamiliar to Rusty, who generally stuck to mainstream rock and roll. She collected Celtic and Gaelic folk music peppered with modern Jazz and surprisingly, a number of Tony Bennett collections. Her walls were filled with books, the majority of them on the subject of Law. She also had a well-stocked section on Forensics and Criminal Investigation - another on Ethics and Philosophy. But there were surprises too. LaVey's
Satanic Bible
was propped up between a Tom Clancy novel and a worn copy of 
Little Women
.

Rusty had picked up the Bible out of curiosity and was scanning it, unable to sleep, when he had the sudden urge for something cold and wet. He pulled on his bathrobe and a pair of jeans and quietly snuck into Jayne's kitchen. It was long after one in the morning. He had been up early, but couldn't sleep. The run in with Grieves had pumped him up, but the scene on Bay Street with the mystery tracker had lit a fire in his brain. The news about Shay had hit him harder than he expected. His paranoia machinery was over revving. And Jayne was being affected by it too. She hadn't smiled today and had blamed it on her workload but Rusty thought he knew better.

Rusty popped open the fridge and grabbed a mineral water, then thought better of it and exchanged it for a vodka lime cooler. The label read 8% alcohol. It was cold and bittersweet and for a few seconds Rusty forgot about threats on his life, his truncated career, and rubbing up against forty. He had the bottle straight up, his eyes closed, when the room’s lights flashed on. He spasmed, spilling lime drink down the front of his chest, choking on the laced sugar-water. For the first time that day, he heard Jayne laugh behind him. And when he looked up, he choked briefly again on his midnight snack and broke into laughter with her. She was crouched slightly by the kitchen door, wearing a striped nightshirt, a length of plumbing pipe in her hands.

"Wait! Let me guess," he said. "Mrs. White did it ... in the kitchen ... with a lead pipe."  Jayne convulsed and dropped the tubing noisily on the floor, which sent Rusty into another fit of hysteria. Jayne was laughing so hard she was doubled over, her hands on her stomach. She stumbled over to the counter by Rusty, trying to catch her breath, but every time she looked up to see her suspected intruder, vodka lime running out of his nose, his hair standing up at the back, she was overcome. She reached out with her hand, waving it back and forth, pleading with him. And then when she just began to get control, he would spit out another spray of his drink and that would set her off again.

Jayne finally pulled the bottle from his hands, took a sip and set it on the counter, her hair in disarray around her lowered face.

She croaked. "Oh God. I thought I would explode."

"I did," said Rusty, wiping his chin and his chest with a paper towel. She smiled and pulled a handful of hair away from her face.

"It's good to know I still can." She smiled, her hand out, gesturing. Rusty looked at it, hovering in front of his face. It was shaking slightly, the fingers small and narrow like a child's.  He took it with his right hand. Jayne lifted her head, still smiling, then seeing the look on his face, her eyes narrowed slightly. He was looking at her hand, cradling it.

"Are these the hands that would have
brained
me with that plumbing pipe?" he asked. She tilted her head slightly, confused. He had a distant look. "I was thinking tonight," he added thoughtfully. "What if this was my last day on the planet?"

"And ..." she said, warily.

He looked right into her sleepy eyes. "So I made a list of things I had to do. Before my time was up." He reached out and took her other hand, pulling her toward him. "It's a short list." She resisted, but he could tell she was curious.

"Someone once said -
it’s a crime to have lived and not loved,
" he declared, mockingly serious. Then he pulled her hands to his side, moved close, and kissed her. After a moment she pulled back slightly.

"Who said that?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

"A troubled philosopher. A man smitten in his prime by a woman of unique intelligence, yet unable to declare his love for her. Ever."

She turned her head and lightly took his upper lip in her teeth. Breathing into his mouth the scent of musk and lime, she asked  "And who might that be?"

"Me," was all he said. She bit into the soft flesh of his mouth again and pulled on it. He moved against her, feeling all the soft heat of her body through the nightdress. Her tongue touched his and he felt a jolt of energy - like a living thing, it left a coppery after-taste in his mouth.

"Your place or mine?" she giggled.

Jayne was quick in court. Now Rusty knew she was even quicker in bed. The need to wash away the lingering anxiety and fear of the past days drove them both into a kind of frenzy that surprised him. She was hungry. She made his skin red and his backside prickle with her heat. He dove into her with abandon, lingering as long as he could. When he finally climaxed, she took control, turning him over and applying herself in earnest to an encore. She screamed, uninhibited, throwing her shoulders back above him. He arched his back till his muscles cried out and bit into her arm when he came again.

As he rolled into a ball, under the covers, she leapt off the bed. She returned moments later with a jar of pickles. She crawled in beside him and unscrewed the top.

"I'm afraid to ask what you have in mind," he said, only his face exposed, looking at the jar. She was sitting up, naked. Rusty was taken with her casualness over their nudity, so soon. She pulled out a large pickle and summarily bit off the end. He grimaced reflexively.

"Don't worry," she smiled, "with these, I hardly need you."

He pulled himself up to a sitting position. "Give me one of those."

She turned, bent down and licked his chest, which still tasted vaguely of lime. She handed him the jar.

"I don't think the first word that popped into my head when I first met you was
sensual
."

"You just figured that out now?" she said, looking surprised. As if to punctuate her statement, she popped the pickle into her mouth and sucked the juice out of it.

"Stop that. It must be illegal."

She laughed. "Well, if it is, you're an accomplice."

"Most people smoke after sex or eat ice cream, don't they?"

"I thought you didn't smoke," she said.

He shook his head. She turned to him. "There's something about pickle juice that I find so sexy. I don't know what it is. Some childhood puberty memory or something." She bit off another piece. "And it's obviously Freudian. Which is a lot of crap, by the way."

"Ooooh," he sang, his mouth full. "An anti-Freudian. Always wanted to have one of those."

"You just did," she whispered.

"Any connection here between this strange urge for pickles and that copy of the
Satanic Bible
I found on your shelf?"

She squeezed another pickle out of the jar. "I leave that there for nosey guests."

"Have you read it?"

"Of course I have," she said. They ate in silence for a few moments. Rusty placed an arm on her thigh, which caused her to move closer. Finally she said "Fine. I know it's killing you to know. I had a case a couple of years ago involving this family charged with child abuse. They claimed they were Satanists. I bought the book as part of my research."

"And ...?"

"All that Satanist nonsense you read about in the papers? Sacrifices and ritual killings?  It's all crap. Designed to divert the jury's attention away from how sick these people really are. Some lawyer invented the defense years ago and it keeps being dredged up. These people were just demented. Plain and simple. They used the Satanic label to somehow justify their acts. If you ask me, you can't justify that kind of thing. In any way. Satan or not."

"Did you get them off?" asked Rusty. The question brought a little chill into the room.

"I protected their rights." She dropped the last part of the pickle into the brine with a splash. Small drops of pickle juice dotted her chest. He moved to lick one of them off, then stopped. He leaned back and propped his head on one of her pillows.

"I want you again. Whenever you're ready, just let me know," he said.

She dropped her head forward revealing the long slow curve of her back. "Sorry." she said.

"I thought you'd be used to those kinds of questions by now."

"The rhetorical ones?"

"Listen, Jayne. I'm just a curious bystander to the whole legal process. It wasn't rhetorical. I really wanted to know."

She seemed to hang there in the room, lifeless, unbreathing. He could smell her perfume. "I guess all those years of living with a criminal lawyer - a really good one - has put me on the defensive permanently."

He dropped one eyebrow. "Who would that be?"

"My father," she said, catching his look and smiling again.

"Oh."

"Good comeback."

"I'm avoiding. It's what I do best. I thought the subject of your father might be a little too heavy right now. I'd love to hear about it, but it's up to you."

"You're being especially accommodating. Are you always this nice to people?"

"When I'm in bed with them."

She rolled over to face him. "I don't mind talking about it. Here it is in a nutshell, my troubled philosopher. He was a strong, very tough, dedicated human being. He had this effect on people. He had so much self-confidence - so much energy. Almost everyone felt like they were
less
than him, in his presence. Do you know what I mean? Like there was no contest. He was the Alpha of the Alphas. Very intimidating but very comforting. So as the only girl growing up in his shadow, what do you do?"

"Grow balls."

"Which is what I did. But I still loved him like crazy. And because of that, when my mother disappeared, we all had a real tough time trying to understand what was going on. That he could do something like that. Because he was like a rock. A huge righteous rock. But there was so much damning evidence. The eyewitness reports. The blood on the seat of the car they found. We all hated him then."

Rusty touched her hair. It was something he had always wanted to do. "How do you feel about it now?"

She shook her head. "You don't understand. My father went to prison. We were sent off with an aunt and uncle. It was horrible." He held her. She laid still, her breath on his arm. "He died there. Never knowing."

Rusty pulled her closer, aroused by her nearness and her heat but surprised by the affection for her that was growing in him like a hard knot in his chest. Then it struck him.

"Never knowing what?" he asked quietly. She seemed to shiver. Her arms were suddenly covered in goose flesh.

"That my mother wasn't dead."

The morning broke with a thunder clap. And an instant headache.

Rusty had drunk far more alcohol the night before than he had in years. He wasn’t doing well.

Rain was pouring down the bedroom window, the room dark and filled with shadows he hadn’t noticed before. One of the shadows might be guilt - another shame. He kept seeing Shay’s face, something he should have seen the night before. Not because he was making love to another woman but because he had chosen that method to escape reality. Sex would change everything, right? But of course, nothing had changed.

Rusty rolled over and saw the other side of the bed was empty. He put his hand on the sheets. The bed was still warm where Jayne had laid. He could hear sounds in the kitchen. What would Shay think? Why would she expect Rusty to act any different than he had a thousand times before. Avoid responsibilities - pretend a roaring train wasn’t speeding toward you at a hundred miles an hour. Some monster had killed his ex-wife, someone he had loved, and someone he had shared a life with. And what was he doing about it?

He held his head in both hands. For the first time in days he felt like bawling like a baby - but the tears wouldn’t come. There was too much anger. Why couldn’t he get his life on track? What was the missing element that continually escaped him?

He knew he needed to find Grieves before the cops did. Grieves had knowledge of the whole narrative tucked away in his deteriorating memory banks. Where was that asshole? He tried to think like him. Where would he go? What would he do? He had no friends or family to speak of.

Rusty was pretty confident Grieves’ wife would call him the instant he showed up at her front door – he just didn’t believe that would happen. Could he put himself in the head of a madman? A guy who thought about coding and programming and computer languages every minute of his life?

He jumped out of bed and threw on his underwear and raced into the kitchen.

Jayne was sitting at her small kitchen table, wrapped in a bathrobe, drinking tea. She looked worried. Probably wondering why she had ever invited Rusty to stay at her home in the first place.

“I think I know how to find Grieves,” said Rust
y.