Wolf in the Shadows (13 page)

He brought the wine and set it down with a sour look at a quartet of noisy tourists drinking fruit-garnished concoctions and
talking about their visit to Sea World. I fished my I.D. and Hy’s picture from my bag and laid them on the bar next to a twenty.

The bartender noted all three, cocked his head, and waited.

“Sunday night,” I said, “around eight. This man was in here?”

He nodded.

“You serve him?”

“One beer. He nursed it, maybe forty-five minutes.”

“You talk with him?”

“He’s not the kind who chats up the bartender.”

“What else?”

“He asked for change for the cigarette machine, bought some, and left.”

But Hy didn’t smoke. So far as I knew, he never had. “You’re sure he bought cigarettes?”

“Winstons.” He motioned to the bar’s left. The machine was the only thing in here that the decorator hadn’t managed to trick
up.

The tourists called for another round. The bartender excused himself, muttering under his breath. I sipped wine, glanced through
the door to the lobby; the man in western wear hadn’t moved. Quickly I reviewed my options and decided how to handle this.

When the bartender came back, I asked, “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“That’s it. He was a nice, quiet customer—and from me, that’s praise.” Another sour look at the tourists and he began fixing
their drinks.

It wasn’t much information for twenty dollars, I thought, but left the bill on the bar next to my half-full glass of wine.
Then I moved toward the hallway leading to the rest rooms and stopped at the pay phone. After a brief call to Reliable Cab
Company, I stepped through the parking-lot exit.

The air was still sultry at half past midnight—unusual for San Diego in June. Soft halos from security lamps relieved the
darkness. I saw no one on foot or in any of the cars. Moving casually, I turned toward the wing where my room was. Held down
my pace and regulated it, listening for a counter rhythm. For a moment I heard nothing but the slap of my own shoes; then
I heard others, like a soft echo of mine.

I kept walking slowly, went as far as the door to my room, then hesitated, feigning indecision. Began walking again, toward
the motel next door. The footsteps—at some indeterminate point behind me—stuttered. Then they came on regularly again, their
sound deflected faintly off the surrounding buildings. I gave no sign I was aware of them, just moved in my ambling out-for-a-stroll
pace toward the next motel’s main entrance. The footsteps stopped; my tail was allowing me some distance.

Big mistake. Once inside the lobby, I put on speed. Slipped around a tall planter and ducked my head, moving even faster.
The bar and ladies’ room entrances were exactly where I remembered them.

I pushed through the swinging door of the rest room, heart pounding now. On my way past the mirrors I caught a startled look
from a woman who was combing her hair. Caught a glimpse of myself, too: grim, intense, focused.

Out the other swinging door and into the pool area. Darkness there except for the bright aquamarine rectangle. No hesitation
now—a jog to the right, up some steps, through the gate in the enclosure, and into the gardens.

White crushed-shell paths winding through the shrubbery. Small lights bordering them, and a soft glow from some of the guest-room
windows. I chose a path, plunged off it, ran along its side, out of range of the lights.

No point in listening for a pursuer; I couldn’t have heard one. No point in looking back; it would only slow me.

Gardenias there—sweet, decaying fragrance. Something else, a bitter-smelling plant. Around a hedge, and then the lights of
Paoli’s Restaurant shining bright across the parking lot.

The lot was at a lower level, bordered by a four-foot-high retaining wall. I crouched on top of it, jumped, feet hitting the
concrete and pain shooting up my legs. Ignoring it, I ran for the shelter of the cars and dodged through them.

At the last row of cars, I stopped, leaning against one. Glanced back at last.

No one.

I scanned the front of the restaurant. And saw Reliable Cab number 1102, waiting just where I’d asked for it to be. I hefted
my bag and began running toward it.

Sist’r Rabbit was on the way to her brier patch.

The house lay dark and silent, burdened by age, neglect, and—to a person who knew its recent history—disappointment. I pulled
the key that had been mine since high school from the lock, shut the door behind me, and dropped my heavy purse on the floor.

Heat was trapped in there, mustiness, too. Out of habit, I moved down the hall toward the kitchen. The floorboards creaked,
the joists sighed. Other settling noises formed a chorus of complaint.

When I switched on the kitchen light, the enormity of the changes overwhelmed me. No cheerful flowered dishes in the glass-fronted
cupboards; no bright pottery bowls and red canisters on the counters. Those things had all gone to Ma’s new kitchen in the
Rancho Bernardo home she shared with her new love, Melvin Hunt. The room smelled wrong—of cleanser rather than hearty cooking.

I crossed to the sink, peered out the window at the dark rectangle of garage. I hadn’t expected anything, but it still seemed
strange not to see lights, not to hear the whine of power tools, a baseball game on the radio, Pa’s reedy voice raised in
one of his dirty ditties. But Pa had been traveling around the country in his new camper for three months now—traveling,
I suspected, with a new woman friend. Funny none of us had dared ask about that; was Pa really such a private person that
he’d have resented his grown sons and daughters inquiring into his new life?

I turned my back to the window, leaning against the sink, shutting my eyes and listening. Traffic noises—had there been any
at this hour—were muted here at the far end of the cul-de-sac, but even so, the house had never been so quiet. There was
no laughter, no bickering, no shouts and taunts and sudden bursts of song. The voices of my parents, us five kids, our friends
and relatives, even the most recent grandchildren, had been stilled. All that spoke to me were memories.

What was I
doing
here?

Well, for one thing, this house was the best refuge I knew from RKI’s surveillance. For many years Pa—now there was a true
paranoid—had insisted on an unlisted phone number. Since the divorce, the property wasn’t even in his name on the tax rolls;
in order to divide their community property with Ma, he’d been forced to sell, and he’d struck a bargain with the only family
member who had any real money, my sister Charlene’s husband, country-music star Ricky Savage. A few years back when everybody
else had given up on Ricky being anything but a backup musician in a second-rate band, Pa had loaned him the money to cut
one final demo record. Ricky had hit it big with “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind,” and since then he’d looked for a suitable
way to pay Pa back for his confidence in him. The divorce crisis was made to order: Ricky bought the house and signed an agreement
saying Pa could live there as long as he wanted; the property was now listed in the name of a corporation Charlene and Ricky
had formed for tax purposes.

Conceivably RKI could find me here, but it would take them longer than I intended to stay.

After catching the cab at Paoli’s Restaurant, I’d had the driver take me to the Westgate Hotel downtown. I entered by a side
door, crossed the lobby, and at the main entrance hailed a second cab. That one took me to the Hilton at Mission Bay, where
I waited half an hour, then took another cab here. Three different cab companies, three different pickup points, and none
of the drivers had seen me catch my next ride.

Now that I was here, transportation would pose no problem. During my most recent conversation with my brother John, who lived
in nearby Lemon Grove, he mentioned that he’d stored his four-wheel-drive International Scout in Pa’s garage. The problem
of having too many vehicles and too much junk in one’s garage should be called McCone’s Syndrome, and John freely admitted
to suffering from it. I was welcome, he told me, to use the Scout the next time I visited Pa. Again a tendency toward paranoia,
which my big brother also freely admitted to having inherited from Pa, was working in my favor: should RKI go looking for
any relatives of mine in the area, they wouldn’t find John; his home, telephone, and vehicles were all under the name of his
house-painting company, Mr. Paint.

Now I pushed away from the sink, took the garage keys from the drawer where they were kept, and went outside. The garage stood
at the far end of the property, beyond a bedroom wing that extended from the original house. The house, I reflected as I made
my way through the dark backyard, had always possessed a peculiar chameleonlike quality. It had gone from being a small two-bedroom
rancher on a large lot to a sprawling five-bedroom architectural horror that ate up the land on either side of the original
structure. Baths had been added; the kitchen had been moved twice; a family room had been added, then turned into a bedroom,
and a second family room had been built behind it. Rooms changed function and occupant so fast that you needed a chart to
keep track of them, and in the end both the floor plan and the exterior only dimly resembled what the builder had intended.

The normal family would have been driven crazy by the constant upheaval, but since a state of good mental health hadn’t prevailed
in the first place, the McCones blithely accepted chaos as the status quo. So what, Ma claimed, if you absentmindedly went
to what used to be the kitchen for a midnight snack and instead found yourself in your older brother’s room, surrounded by
a dozen pubescent boys leering at your shorty pajamas? Frequent change, my seafaring father claimed, was a good character-building
experience.

Was it any wonder I’d chafed every moment my earthquake cottage was under renovation?

I was crossing the patio that stretched between the family room and the fence at the finger canyon’s edge when I stopped suddenly,
alerted to something unfamiliar. I looked around, didn’t see anything at first. What …? Oh, no—Pa had filled in and paved
over the swimming pool!

Of course, it had never functioned as a real pool, had been defective when Ma and Pa bought the house, and a sonic boom from
a jet out of NAS Miramar had finished it. But for years it had made a splendid vegetable garden, well drained and full of
rich earth we’d had trucked in to cover the rubble. Now—where once tomatoes, eggplants, corn, melons, and a riot of beans,
peas, and zucchini had grown—there was nothing but concrete. I stood dumbfounded, my foot scuffing at the recently poured
white surface.

What next? I thought.

I continued on to the garage and opened its side door with some trepidation. But there was nothing bizarre inside, just Pa’s
covered cabinetmaking equipment and a full range of symptoms of McCone’s Syndrome, crammed from floor to rafters. John’s red
Scout was nosed into the last empty space. I went over there and slipped inside, discovering the keys were in the ignition
and the registration and insurance card in the glove compartment. In a plastic recycling bin bolted down in the rear carrying
space were flares, a first-aid kit, Thomas Brothers guides, and a jug of drinking water. Three sleeping bags were wedged into
the wheel wells. I checked the gas, oil, and battery and found them in good working order.

How unlike John, I thought. I knew that in recent years my big, brawling brother—who had seen the inside of as many jail
cells as Hy—had undergone a startling metamorphosis into responsible business owner and part-time single father, but I never
could think of him in his new form. To me he’d remained the incorrigible who’d begun his impious career by being expelled
from Catholic school at age nine and more or less culminated it by blowing up his wife’s empty car the night she announced
she was leaving him. Now, apparently, I would have to recast that image.

Back in the house, the kitchen clock showed three-ten. That couldn’t be! I checked my watch. Oh, yes, it could, and I wasn’t
a bit sleepy. Also, I had another task to accomplish.

For as long as I could remember, Pa had kept his .45 Smith & Wesson revolver in a lockbox under a pile of old towels on the
top shelf of the linen closet. I went there and dragged it down. Finding the key to the box was no problem; Pa thought he’d
secreted it ingeniously, but he hadn’t counted on having a budding detective in the family. Since I was fifteen I’d known
it was taped to the bottom of his nightstand drawer. I got it, took the gun out, checked its condition. Then, in yet a third
hiding place under the kitchen sink, I found ammunition. I loaded the gun and placed it in my bag.

By now I was more awake than ever. Finally I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of wine in the fridge, and with glass in
hand began to prowl through the house, checking doors and windows. Dust in the dining room. No furniture in the living room—that
had gone to Rancho Bernardo with Ma. The bedrooms, even Pa’s, contained so few traces of their former occupants that they
might as well have been motel rooms. Mine made me particularly sad, even though the things I cared about from my childhood
were now stored in my garage in San Francisco. So sad, in fact, that I knew I couldn’t sleep there. I pulled the quilts and
pillows off the bed, shut the door, and dragged them down the hall to the couch in the family room.

The family room was too tidy. No toys on the floor, no books and magazines scattered about, the TV set rolled back into one
corner. I opened the sliding door to let some of the trapped heat escape, then took my wine out to the single lounge chair
on the patio.

Had the house been so bereft of life in December? I wondered. Or was it merely Pa’s absence that made the difference? I thought
back to Christmas Day, when I’d met here with John, his boys, Charlene, Ricky, and the aptly named little Savages. We’d all
cooked dinner for Pa, and the occasion had been cheerful, even festive. But in retrospect, I decided everyone—including Pa—had
worked hard to ignore an underlying depression. Unlike the mood at Ma’s Christmas Eve buffet, when with considerable relief
I’d been able to let go the last of my reservations about her new relationship with Melvin Hunt.