There’s my penny-pincher gene showing up again.
I could feel that Sandy was back already. I’d taken longerwith Mac and the wreckage than I realized. I could smell that she was there — I recognized her Creole beef stew withsome Cajun bite to it. She must have started that in the afternoon whilechewing her fingernails for my callback requesting free taxi service.
Whoever said that the way to a man’s heart is through hisstomach wasn’t blowing smoke out his ass, just to tangle up the anatomicalmetaphors beyond all reason. Sandy had her faults, but that woman knew goodfood. Maggie could just about boil water without burning it, so I’d handled thekitchen magic when we lived together. Cash wasn’t much of a cook, either, Iknew that, not one of her prioritiesin life, and trying to juggle a kitchen one-handed didn’t look like much fun tome. I guessed I might be cooking for her, at least for a while. Beyond that,who knew?
Which, tangentially, switched my thoughts back to taxiservice. Sandy was boiling up egg noodles to go under the stew, couldn’t make those ahead of time and still have themat their best, so I started calling some names I’d seen around town — CommunityAction Programs and the likes, the ones with the handicap vans for elderly anddisabled clients. Turned out the first three I called were geared to Medicareand Medicaid billing, and I didn’t qualify.
But the helpfulpeople referred me to a commercial taxi service that ran accessible vans, didn’teven charge extra above the city’s standard taxi fares. Maybe they marked itoff as charity against their taxes or something.
They seemed like nice people, both the Community Action folksand the taxi service. Maybe I wouldn’t vote for squid evolution, after all.Even though chromatophores are cool.
By the time I got done with that, Sandy was dishing outnoodles and burying them in thick stew. Wonderful stuff, high-grade beef savorywith cloves and garlic and onions and red wine, bacon, bay, carrots, more thana dash of Tabasco, she called it a daube,whatever that meant down in the bayous. To me, it translated as good. Believe it or not, the chemicalburn in my mouth and gullet and flushing into my blood eased some of thoseaches.
It improved my outlook on life considerably.
We didn’t talk much over the food. She needed to know about myleg, how it happened, why my shields hadn’t worked. Professional stuff. She didn’t need to know much about Cash, hercondition and security details, and didn’t ask. Sandy had been a cop. She knewthe drill.
She didn’t question my calls about transportation. She’d seenme struggling to get out of her car. She didraise an eyebrow when I told her I had to go out, would be gone a lot for thenext few days and nights. But “don’t ask, don’t tell” ruled. I was pretty sureshe figured most of it out. She wasn’t dumb.
Anyway, I called the taxi and we hugged and she told me towatch my ass and I went about my business. That woman and baby, Becky and Rob,I could tell their deaths still hurt Sandy. Sometimes cops don’t have a lot ofsympathy for the stiffs we see in the course of business — so many of them arebad-neighborhood scum themselves, losing side of a drug deal gone wrong, johnsor pimps laid out on a morgue slab for trying to beat up the wrong whore,drunks who tried to drive through a tree, that sort of thing.
Add in Reverend Fred and his boyfriend and the other bits ofhis conspiracy, whatever his conspiracy had been. Yeah, that sort of thing.
But the woman and her kid, that was the other face of crime.Innocents. I became a cop to protect people like that. I owed them justice. Ithink Sandy understood.
She left the remains of the stew in my refrigerator forwhenever I next wandered through, damned little there was of it after sufferingthe ravages of the two of us, and I packed some stuff and descended to mychariot. Nice driver, like I said, he showed me where some custom grabs lurkedinside the van and held my crutches while I hoisted my bulk in and settled, andthen he drove like a sane man.
I showed him my badge and warned him that I had reason tothink someone was following me at times, so he didn’t quibble about circlingthe block and dodging through parking lots and such. After a bit of a JamesBond shuffle, I had him drive to the park and wait while I maneuvered out ofthe van and located my hawk and had a chat with her. No news. As far as I couldtell, she hadn’t flown over either my place or Nef’s in the last day or so.
Don’t get me wrong. That is “my hawk” as in the one I knew.Not any claim of ownership. We were hunters together, she and I. Partners. Sheliked cruising thermals, anyway, and this added spice.
Anyway, the meter was running all the time. I climbed back inthe van and we swung by Cash’s place so I could pick up some of her own stuffto make hospital a little less institutional.
And I stared at the crater in her parking lot. At least twice as wide as mine, twice as deep.Like I told you, I’m not a bomb-squad guy. I couldn’t remember whether thatmeant twice as much explosive, or four times, or what. And the crater centeredfurther forward in the parking space — what hadbeen the parking space, I mean. So that confirmed my earlier suspicion aboutbomb placement.
But what spooked me was something else entirely. The buildingdamage, the pattern
