Joe slanted a skeptical gaze at his bird, and his suspicions were confirmed when Sam cocked his head to one side and the telephone just happened to ring again.
'Pity's sake.' His mother spun toward the kitchen.
'My dad ate a bug,' Todd told Joe, drawing his attention to him. 'We roasted hot dogs and he ate a bug.'
'Yeah, Ben took him camping because he thinks the girls and I are turning him into a sissy,' Joe's sister elaborated as she sat on the sofa next to him. 'He said he needed to get Todd away and do man stuff.'
Joe understood perfectly. He'd been raised with four older sisters, who'd dressed him up in their clothes and made him wear lipstick. At the age of eight, they'd convinced him he'd been born a hermaphrodite named Josephine. He hadn't even known what a hermaphrodite was until he'd turned twelve and could look it up in the dictionary. After that, for several weeks, he'd lived in fear of growing big breasts like his oldest sister, Penny. Luckily, his father had caught him checking out his body for weird changes, and he'd assured Joe that he wasn't a hermaphrodite. Then he'd taken him camping and fishing and hadn't made him bathe for a week.
His sisters stuck together like Bondini and never forgot a damn thing. Growing up, they'd loved to harass him, and they'd been just plain hell on his psyche. But if he ever suspected that for one second the men in his sisters' lives weren't treating them right, he'd gladly beat the shit out of them.
'And I guess a bug landed on Todd's hot dog so he cried and wouldn't eat it,' Tanya continued. 'Which is completely understandable, and I don't blame him one bit, but Ben grabbed the bug and ate it, trying to be macho. He said, 'If I can eat the damn bug, you can eat the damn hot dog.'
Sounded reasonable. 'Did you eat the hot dog?' Joe asked his nephew.
Todd nodded, and his smile showed his missing front teeth. 'Then I ate a bug too. A black one.'
Joe looked into his nephew's freckled face, and they shared a conspiratorial smile. The 'I can pee standing up' guy-club smile. A smile girls could never understand.
'They hung up again,' Joyce announced to the room.
'You need to get Caller ID,' Tanya advised. 'We've got it, and I always check to see who's calling before I answer.'
'I just might do that,' his mother said as she lowered herself into an old tole-painted rocker, but just as her butt hit the seat, the ringing started again. 'This is getting old,' she sighed and rose. 'Someone is playing on the phone.'
'Use last call return. I'll show you.' Tanya stood and followed her mother into the kitchen.
The girls dissolved into a new fit of laughter, and Todd covered his mouth with his hand.
'Yep,' Dewey said without taking his eyes off the Duke, 'that bird is flirting with disaster all right.'
Joe wove his fingers behind his head, crossed his ankles, and relaxed for the first time since the theft of Mr. Hillard's Monet. The Shanahans were a large, rowdy bunch, and sitting on his mother's couch surrounded by the commotion felt like coming home. It also reminded him of his own empty house across town.
Up until about a year ago, he hadn't worried all that much about finding a wife and starting a family. He'd always thought he had time, but getting shot tended to put one's life in perspective. It reminded a man of what was really important in life. A family of his own.
True, he did have Sam, and living with Sam was like living with a naughty, but very entertaining, two-year-old. But he couldn't build campfires and roast weenies with Sam. He couldn't eat bugs. Most of the other cops his age had children, and as he'd lain around his house recuperating, with nothing but time on his hands, he'd begun to wonder what it would be like to sit on the sidelines at a Little League game and watch his kids run around the bases. Seeing his own children in his head was the easy part. Picturing a wife was a bit more difficult.
He didn't think he was too picky, but he knew what he wanted and what he didn't want. He didn't want a woman who freaked out about little things like monthly anniversaries and who didn't like Sam. He knew from experience that he didn't want a vegetarian who was overly concerned about fat grams and the size of her minuscule thighs.
He wanted to come home from work and have someone waiting for him. He wanted to walk in the door without dinner in his hand. He wanted a down-to-earth girl, someone who had both feet planted firmly on the ground. And of course, he wanted someone who liked sex the way he liked it. Hot, definitely hot. Sometimes down and out dirty, sometimes not, but always uninhibited. He wanted a woman who wasn't afraid to touch him or afraid to let him touch her. He wanted to look at her and feel lust twist low in his gut. He wanted to look at her and know she felt the same thing for him.
He'd always figured he'd know the right woman when he met her. He didn't really know how he'd know, he just would. He'd feel it smack him between the eyes like a knock-out punch or a bolt of lightning, and that would be it. He'd know.
Tanya walked back into the room with a frown wrinkling her brow. 'That last call return number belonged to mom's friend Bernese.
Why would Bernese make a prank phone call?'
Joe shrugged and decided to throw his sister off the track of the real culprit. 'Maybe she's bored. When I was a rookie, an old lady called in about once a month to report that someone kept breaking into her house, attempting to steal her priceless afghans.'
'And they weren't?'
'Hell no. You should've seen those things- all bright green and orange and purple. Damn near made you go blind just looking at 'em. Anyway, she'd always have Nilla Wafers and root beer waiting for us. Sometimes old people get real lonely and do weird things just to have someone to talk to.'
Tanya's brown eyes stared into his, and her frown deepened. 'That's what's going to happen to you if you don't find someone to take care of you.'
The women in his family had always nagged him about his love life, but ever since he'd been shot, his mother and sisters had stepped up their efforts to see him happily wed. They equated marriage with happiness. They wanted him to settle down into their version of a nice cozy life, and while he understood their concern, they drove him crazy with it. He didn't dare let them know he'd actually been giving it some serious thought. If he did, they'd be all over him like magpies on roadkill.
'I know a really nice woman who-'
'No,' Joe interrupted, not even willing to consider one of his sister's friends. He could just imagine having every little detail reported back to his family. He was thirty-five, but his sisters still treated him as if he were five. As if he couldn't find his own ass if they didn't tell him it was at the bottom of his spine.
'Why?'
'I don't like nice women.'
'That's what's wrong with you. You're more interested in the size of hooters than personality.'
'There's nothing wrong with me. And it's not the size of hooters, it's the shape that counts.'
Tanya snorted, and he didn't remember ever hearing a sound like that coming out of a woman before.
'What?' he asked.
'You're going to be a very lonely old man.'
'I have Sam to keep me company, and he'll probably outlive me.'
'A bird doesn't count, Joey. Do you have a girlfriend these days? Someone you might consider bringing around to meet your family? Someone you might consider marrying?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'I haven't found the right woman.'
'If men on death row find women to marry, how hard can it be?'
Chapter Four
The small historical district of Hyde Park lay nestled at the bottom of the Boise foothills. In the seventies, the district had suffered from neglect brought on by an exodus to the suburbs and the popularity of strip malls. But in recent years, its businesses had been given a face-lift and a fresh coat of paint, and they had benefited from the resurgence of life back into the city.
