and she’d been crying.
“Thanks,” she said as she got into the Taurus.
“It’s okay. Where do you want to go?”
“How about that Carrows on Reynoso Drive?”
“You got it.” Colin nodded. “Want to tell me about it now or after we get there?” Colin pulled back onto the street. He noted the way the armed guard kept an eye on him till he did. If that guy wasn’t a vet, and likely a combat vet, he’d eat his shoes.
“Teo left me yesterday,” Louise said. “He skipped. He’s gone. He took his things and he bailed. I have no idea where he is.”
“Okay.” Colin didn’t say anything more until he got into the left-turn lane that would put him back on Hesperus. Then he asked, “Did he… hurt you before he left? Am I looking at a domestic-violence case? Last time I talked to you, you said everything was fine with you guys.”
“The last time we talked, everything was fine.” Louise laughto the sttterly. A moment later, she yawned and covered her mouth with her hand. “I keep doing that,” she said, as if annoyed at herself. “No, he didn’t hurt me, not the way you mean. Not so you could bust him for it.”
“Then what do you want from me?” He tried to sound patient, not pissed off. “If you need a shoulder to cry on, I’m not your number-one candidate any more. I’m sorry, but I’m not. When I called you, you know, it was to tell you I’m gonna marry Kelly.” Louise was the kind of person who could forget things like that when forgetting them looked convenient.
“Colin, I’m going to have a baby. That’s why he ran out on me.”
It was a good thing traffic on Hesperus was light, with no cars anywhere close to his. The Taurus jerked out of its lane for a split second. He had to haul it back over the yellow stripes. He hadn’t been so surprised since-since the day she walked out on him.
He started to ask if she was kidding, but he swallowed that question. She wasn’t. She’d never hurt him for the sake of hurting him-if anybody in the family enjoyed pulling wings off flies, it was Vanessa. He asked something else instead: “Are you sure?”
“Oh, you betcha,” Louise said. “The home pregnancy tests they have nowadays are just about as good as the ones doctors use. It says I am. And I feel like I am. I know what it’s like, even if it’s been a while. You don’t forget.”
“If you say so.” Colin hung a right on Reynoso Drive. “Do you, ah, know what you’re going to do about it?”
“No. Teo wanted me to get rid of it right away. I may, but I’m not going to do it like that-” She snapped her fingers. “I didn’t mean to get pregnant, but I may have it anyway.”
The Carrows was on the south side of the street. He waited in the center lane till he could turn left against the eastbound traffic without getting creamed. Most of the shops and eateries in the little center catered to Japanese. The lot was crowded. He finally found a space and slid in. He and Louise walked to the restaurant a few inches farther apart than they would have before they broke up.
He didn’t say anything till they were seated at a table that gave them a fine view of the cars going back and forth on Reynoso Beach. “What exactly do you want me to do about all this?” he asked then, picking his words with great care.
“Are you ready to order?” The waitress couldn’t have been more than twenty, and sounded as if she had not a care in the world. That was what twenty was for. Too goddamn bad it didn’t last.
“I’ll have the BLT,” Louise said.
Colin ordered a cheeseburger. The waitress went away. He repeated the question.
“I heard you the first time,” Louise said sharply. “Can you find out where he’s gone? Phone records or his plastic or whatever? His parents don’t know or they won’t say-I’ve already tried them.”
“Maybe,” Colin said. “If he’s left the county, I don’t have so many contacts. If he’s out of state, it gets a good bit harder. I can try, I guess. Where does he have relatives?”
“Some down in San Diego. Some in Mexico, too.” Louise looked rueful. “If he’s south of the border, it’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Pretty close,” Colin agreed. “Nobody down there would get excited about that kind of case.” Not many people up here would, either, although he might be able to call in some favors. On the other hand, he might not. The supervolcano and its disruptions made small stuff too small to worry about. And if Teo felt like disappearing into a refugee camp, he might not surface for years, if he ever did.
The food came then, interrupting his gloomy thoughts. The cheeseburger was… a cheeseburger. Better than fast food or Denny’s, nothing to jump up and down about even so. The way Louise demolished her sandwich said morning sickness hadn’t kicked in yet.
“Why did he just split like that?” Colin asked. “You two have-uh, had-been together a while now. Wasn’t it something you could have worked out between you?”
“I thought so, but he freaked. He didn’t want to be a daddy-no way, nohow.” Louise’s mouth twisted. “Sometimes you don’t find out what somebody’s really like till it’s crunch time. I got crunched, all right.”
“Yeah, you did. Sorry about that.”
“What am I going to do?” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Either you’ll have the baby or you’ll decide you don’t want to have it and you’ll take care of that.” Colin was no enormous fan of abortion. He could see, though, that a woman might not want to bear the child of a man who’d abandoned her-especially if she was a woman with some gray in her hair unless she touched it up. Raising a kid on your own was never easy. It got harder as you got older and tireder.
Through the tears, his ex looked indignant. She eyed him as if this were somehow his fault-or, at any rate, anyone’s but hers. “I can figure that much out for myself, thank you very much,” she said tartly. “What I wanted to know was how much help from you I could count on.”
“Huh? What kind of help? I’m not made of money, especially when I’m putting Marshall through school and he never seems to graduate.”
“But he sold that story! To a magazine! For money! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Well, it’s pretty good. But what he got is not quite a week’s rent on his place, and that’s before you chop taxes out of it. Besides, you pretty much cleaned out my bank account when you left.” He’d kept the house. She’d taken just about everything else they’d built up over all the years they were married. The lawyers called it a fair split. Colin hadn’t loved lawyers before the divorce. He was even less fond of them now.
“You’re being mean!” Louise exclaimed.
He exhaled through his nose to try to hide how angry he was. “Louise, you walked out on me. You were in love with Teo, and he was in love with you, and the two of you were going to live happily ever after. You got your half of the community property. Except for that, you didn’t want thing one to do with me any more. Months could go by without us talking. But now Mr. Happily Ever After finds out you’ve got a bun in the oven, so he takes off. And all of a sudden I look a lot better by comparison, huh? Is that where we’re at, or did I miss something?”
“You’re not going to help me?” If the Mask of Tragedy had a voice, it would have been hers then.
“You were the one who didn’t want me darkening your towels any more. You called me every name in the book. We are divorced, remember? Why should I care about the bastard of the guy you left me for?”
“Never mind the baby,” she said impatiently. “Didn’t you love me?”
“Yeah. I did. Past tense. I loved you longer than you loved me, as a matter of fact. I was a mess after you dumped me.” Colin bit back several other things he might have said. This was more than bad enough without looking for ways to make it worse. The waitress chose that moment to bring the check, too. After she hurried away, he went on, “Now I’ve found somebody else, too. I’ll do the best I can with Kelly. I think we’ve got a decent chance. That’s about as much as anybody can hope for these days.”
“And so you’ll throw me under the bus.” Louise would have been a star in Victorian melodrama.
You did that to yourself. One more thing Colin swallowed. “Look,” he said, “if I have a little extra, maybe I can chip in something. But if you think I’m going to go one inch further than that, I’m here to tell you it ain’t gonna happen. It’s over, Louise. I’m sorry-Christ knows I’m sorry-but it is.”
She glared at him. “You are a cruel, hard man. Your Kelly doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s getting into, poor thing.”
“For all I know, you’re right,” he answered. “But I’ll tell you one other thing.”
