toy – making a face exactly like this. He thought about AK at that age, already having acquired the big green eyes and high cheekbones she would keep through adolescence. Her laugh on the old videos was a close relation to her teenage giggle, and her polite stubbornness was hardwired in the womb. Now he tried, but couldn’t extrapolate a killer from these pudgy little hands and thin blond hair.
Minutes later, outside, at the door to Joan’s Spyder, she asked, “Do you have an hour?”
“Jackie’s got dinner at five.”
“That’s more than an hour.”
“I suppose it is.”
Marty’s was close to the train, and did a fair six o’clock business during the week. The Sunday crowd, lined up around the bar, heads angled at a spring training Cubs game, was sparser. Over whiskeys on the rocks and a table tent advertising hot-and-spicy chicken wings, Joan asked Davis how he was doing.
“How am I? Fine.”
“What’s with the birthday visit?”
“Just a whim.”
“Uh-huh. How’s Jackie?”
“She’s fine.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
Goddamn, Joan. Subtle like a frying pan to the temple.
“What have you heard?”
“Are you having an affair with Martha Finn?”
Davis coughed a half-swallowed sip of whiskey into his glass. “What?”
“It fits. You show up at her house on the kid’s birthday, conveniently when her husband is out of the house. I ran into Gregor exactly the same way a few years back when he was diddling that one, you know, Sante Gramatica. Remember?” She started whispering, one sentence too late. “Anyway, it’s okay with me if you are. I just wanted to make sure you were discreet.” She paused to assess how her speech was coming off and might have decided it sounded thick with ulterior motives because she added, “For the sake of the practice.”
He laughed, and it looked natural to her. She relaxed.
“Sorry. I thought I had to ask. Professionally.”
“If I had a nickel for every time someone thought I was having an affair…,” Davis said.
Without even a grin, Joan put a dime on the table and slid it in front of him. “So things with Jackie are good?”
“I didn’t say that.” He shrugged, surprised at his own candor, having been put on edge by Joan’s directness. “AK would have graduated from Illinois this June.”
“I know.”
“With the exception of her – episode – a few years back, Jackie’s handled it better than me, and that’s put a strain on things at home. She’s been able to move on in many ways, but I just can’t stop thinking about Anna Kat. Every day, I remember a new thing. By the time I’m sixty, I’ll have replayed every second of AK’s life in my head. Reincarnated her in carbon copy. Repeated every move she made right up to the end.”
“Do you think that’s healthy?”
“I’m sure it’s not. It’s like I have to live her life for her because she’s not here to do it herself. And it’s not just her. I spend more time in the basement with my dead relatives than I do upstairs with my own wife. I’m an asshole.”
Joan frowned for a long moment, then ordered two more drinks with a gesture. “Can I tell you a story?” she asked.
Passing through the revolving doors of the medical center into the Houston night, Joan felt like she was swimming in steaming black liquid. Hair went limp across her scalp. Blouse adhered to her skin. She didn’t sweat; the city sweated on her.
When she arrived from the Bay Area for her residency in January, she found Houston more hospitable than she expected. There were decent bookstores and an active theater community and a good symphony (not that she ever attended). The people were friendly (although most folks she met were, like her, from elsewhere) and the winter days pleasant when it wasn’t pouring rain. The summer nights were something else, however. In the summer, it was like breathing coffee.
This neighborhood on the southwest side of the nation’s fourth-largest city was the site of a de facto evacuation every night at six. It was empty now except for the hospital and a few gated apartment complexes and the Taco Cabana down the street, where insomniacs and night-shifters sat at tiny, unbalanced Formica squares and paired hastily made fajitas with cold bottles of Dos Equis. Right now she was more tired than hungry.
Across the street, into the parking garage, Joan took long, swift steps with locked knees. Sleepiness aside, she felt hyperaware in the lonely fluorescent-lit concrete cavern.
When she’d parked here, seventeen hours ago, there were minivans so tight to either side that it strained muscles in her thighs just to climb out of the car. Now her used Taurus was an orphan, almost completely alone on level eight.
Joan didn’t pick the man up until he was twenty yards from her and closing. He might have crossed over from level seven, heading up. He looked to be in his thirties, but might have been a hard-living twenty-something. He wore a wedding ring – or a ring on that finger anyway – and he had a hoop in his left ear.
“Miss? Miss? I’m really embarrassed about this, but my car got towed and I’m just three dollars and seventy- five cents short of the fee. Is there any way you can help me out?”
Joan’s hand went into her purse, where her thumb found a folded-up five and her pinky sought out a lighter- sized canister of pepper spray. She watched him walk toward her. He wore an open blue windbreaker, presumably to ward off a sudden shower, and his striped shirt was tucked into acid-washed jeans. Low on his forehead he had an Astros cap, but not one with the current logo. His auburn facial hair reflected a few days of neglect, but wasn’t organized into anything you could call beard or mustache.
In his left hand he had a thick ring of keys. Among them, she glimpsed one of those frequent-shopper discount cards from a large chain grocery. Later, she’d wonder why she found that detail so benign.
She grabbed the five.
The fist with the keys struck Joan across the cheek and she yelped as she fell into the car door. He grabbed her by the hair and twisted her head back and forth while ripping the purse off her shoulder. He pulled a gun from the rear of his waistband and pressed it above her ear like he wanted it to stick there by itself.
“Get in the fucking car and drive,” he growled, pushing her into the driver’s seat and throwing her own keys on the floor mat, where she had to grope for them. As he hurried to the passenger side, she never thought about running, never presumed she could outpace him.
He directed her down, out of the unmanned garage, and east on Bellaire, then northeast on Main, away from the med center toward downtown.
“Do you have a family?” His voice was cold and hard to understand, like a robot mumbling.
She nodded, trying to keep the tremble in her hands away from her voice. “Parents. Brothers. Not around here.”
“I mean kids,” he said testily, waving the gun at her in a hammer motion.
She shook her head. He didn’t say why he wanted to know, exactly. “You have to take care of your own,” he said.
“What?” She wondered right away why she was asking him questions that could encourage or antagonize him, or both.
“No one else matters,” he said in a dreamy, drunken octave one register higher than he likely intended. “Your son. Your mom. Your goddamned fucking wife.” He ordered her east on Memorial. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“Sugarland,” she said.
He bisected her purse, opened her wallet, and lifted her license to read it in the passing streetlights. “Liar,” he said, and leaned his head indifferently against the window.
They didn’t drive far, to an empty lot surrounded by office buildings. In six hours there would be five thousand people within screaming radius. Just now, there was no one.
He grabbed her hair again. “Get in back.”
