order based upon her blood, sex, age, body type, and over fifteen other cate-gories. There are five doctors and a nurse for each patient. And the process may take up to four months.”
We’d covered it all before but Bonnie found solace in details.
She felt that if she dotted every
“How do you know that you can trust them?” I asked. “This could just be some scam.”
“I’ve been there, Easy. I visited the hospital. I told you that, baby.”
“But maybe they fooled you,” I said.
1 8
C i n n a m o n K i s s
I was afraid to hope. Every day I prayed for a miracle for Feather. But I had lived a life where miracles never happened.
In my experience a death sentence was just that.
“I’m no fool, Easy Rawlins.”
The certainty of her voice and her stare were the only chances I had.
“Money’s no problem,” I said, resolute in my conviction to go down to Texas and rob that armored car. I didn’t want Rayford or his partner to die. I didn’t want to spend a dozen years behind bars. But I’d do that and more to save my little girl.
I went out the back door and into the garage. From the back shelf I pulled down four paint cans labeled Latex Blue. Each was sealed tight and a quarter filled with oiled steel ball bearings to give them the heft of full cans of paint. On top of those pel-lets, wrapped in plastic, lay four piles of tax-free money I’d come across over the years. It was my children’s college fund. Twelve thousand dollars. I brought the money to Bonnie and laid it on her lap.
“What now?” I asked.
“In a few days I’ll take a flight with Vicki to Paris and then transfer to Switzerland. I’ll take Feather and bring her to Dr.
Renee.”
I took a deep breath but still felt the suffocation of fear.
“How will you get the rest?” she asked me.
“I’ll get it.”
1 9
4
Jesus, Feather, and I were in a small park in Santa Monica we liked to go to when they were younger. I was holding Feather in my arms while she laughed and played catch with Jesus. Her laughter got louder and louder until it turned to screams and I realized that I was holding her too tightly. I laid her out on the grass but she had passed out.
“You killed her, Dad,” Jesus was saying. It wasn’t an indict-ment but merely a statement of fact.
“I know,” I said as the grasses surged upward and began swallowing Feather, blending her with their blades into the soil underneath.
I bent down but the grasses worked so quickly that by the time my lips got there, there was only the turf left to kiss.
I felt a buzzing vibration against my lips and jumped back, trying to avoid being stung by a hornet in the grass.
2 0
C i n n a m o n K i s s
Halfway out of bed I realized that the buzzing was my alarm clock.
It felt as if there was a crease in my heart. I took deep breaths, thinking in my groggy state that the intake of air would somehow inflate the veins and arteries.
“Easy.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“What time is it?”
I glanced at the clock with the luminescent turquoise hands.
“Four-twenty. Go back to sleep.”
“No,” Bonnie said, rising up next to me. “I’ll go check on Feather.”
She knew that I was hesitant to go into Feather’s room first thing in the morning. I was afraid to find her dead in there. I hated her sleep and mine. When I was a child I fell asleep once and awoke to find that my mother had passed in the night.
I went to the kitchen counter and plugged in the percolator. I didn’t have to check to see if there was water and coffee inside.
Bonnie and I had a set pattern by then. She got the coffee urn ready the night before and I turned it on in the morning.
I sat down heavily on a chrome and yellow vinyl dinette chair.
The vibrations of the hornet still tickled my lips. I started thinking of what would happen if a bee stung the human tongue.
