“That man in the car. He shot at me!”
“No!”
“Didn’t you hear it?”
“For goodness’ sakes,” she said. “Isn’t that terrible. I thought it was a backfire. I had my eyes fixed on the ice. Gotta be careful, you know. My sister slipped and broke her hip last winter. Had to put her in a home. Never did recover right. It’s not so bad, though. She gets green Jell-O for dessert twice a week at lunchtime.”
I ran a shaky finger over the holes in the Dumpster where the bullets had impacted. “This is the second time today someone’s shot at me!”
“Getting so a body can’t go out of the house,” Mrs. Karwatt said. “What with the ice and the shooting. Ever since we put a man on the moon the whole planet’s gone to heck in a handbasket.”
I was looking for someone to nail for my sorry life, but I didn’t think it was fair to lay it all on Neil Armstrong.
Mrs. Karwatt pitched her bag into the Dumpster and headed back to the building. I sort of wanted to go with her, but my knees were shaky, and my feet weren’t moving.
I wrenched the door open on the Buick and collapsed onto the seat, hands clutching the wheel. Okay, I said to myself. Get a grip. These were two freak incidents. The first shooting was mistaken identity. And the second shooting was…what? A death threat.
SHIT.
I pulled the cell phone out of my shoulder bag and dialed up Morelli.
“Someone just shot at me!” I yelled into the phone at him. “I was getting into my car in my parking lot, and this guy in a ski mask drove up and told me to lay off looking for Mo. And then he shot at me. Warning shots, he said. And then he drove away.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you in immediate danger?”
“No.”
“Did you make a mess in your pants?”
“Came damn close.”
We were silent for a couple beats while we digested all this.
“Did you get his plate number?” Morelli asked. “Can you give me a description of the guy?”
“I was too rattled to think to get the plate. The guy was average build. White. That’s all I’ve got.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah.” I nodded my head in the car. “I feel better now. I just…I had to tell somebody.”
“While I have you on the phone…” Morelli said.
Damn! I forgot I was avoiding Morelli! I snapped the cell phone closed. No sweat, I told myself. No harm done. But probably it’s not a good idea to hang out in the lot. That left me with two choices. I could go with my plan to visit my parents, or I could return to my apartment and hide in my coat closet. The coat closet held a lot of appeal short-term, but at some point I’d have to venture out, and by that time I’d most likely have missed dinner.
Go with dinner, I thought. Do the coat closet later.
My mother wasn’t smiling when she opened the door.
“Now what?” she said.
“I didn’t do it.”
“You used to say that when you were a little girl, and it was always a fib.”
“Cross my heart,” I said. “I didn’t shoot anybody. I accidentally got knocked out, and when I came to I was sharing a hallway with a dead guy.”
“You got knocked out!” My mother smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I have to have a daughter who goes around getting herself knocked out.”
Grandma Mazur was in line behind my mother.
“Are you sure you didn’t pop him one? I could keep a secret, you know.”
“I didn’t pop him!”
“Well that’s a big disappointment,” she said. “I had a good story all ready to tell the girls at the beauty parlor.”
My father was in the living room, hiding in front of the TV. “Unh,” he said, never moving a muscle.
I sniffed the air. “Meat loaf.”
“Got a new recipe from Betty Szajack,” my mother said. “She puts sliced olives in her meat loaf, and she makes it with soaked bread instead of crackermeal.”
The best way to defuse my mother is to talk about food. For thirty years, we’ve expressed love and anger in terms of gravy and mashed potatoes.
