Through the Grey, page 12
Another young man in a similar hoody ambled toward them from the apartment and motioned them to follow him into the muddy park.
The carjacker twitched his gun at Lois. “Get out th’car, gran’ma.”
Her stomach heaved and she knew she would have thrown up if she’d had anything to eat that morning. But she managed to say, “No.”
“Say what?”
“I said no. I’m not getting out. You’re just going to shoot me and steal the car and I’m not going to make it any easier for you.” She was shaking and felt hot and cold with fear, but she sat defiantly behind the wheel and gripped it with white fingers.
He swore, reaching for the keys.
Lois snatched them before he could and tried to nip out the door, but her two seat belts—one across her lap and the other, separate, across her chest—got in the way. He booted the other door open and came around the car to yank her out of the driver’s seat as she stuffed the keys down her blouse.
Rolling his eyes, the boy hauled her onto her feet and shoved her toward his friend waiting beyond the fence. “You see what playin’ by the rules get you? Fucking seat belt just slow you down. Now we gonna talk to my man, see what we gonna do with you, crazy-ass bitch. And don’t think I won’t go for them keys, old lady. Your flabby old tits don’t scare me none.”
He stuck the gun into her back and prodded Lois forward. Her knees were wobbly, but she marched ahead, telling herself if he was going to shoot her, he’d have done it already, and he wasn’t half as scary as some of her husband’s friends had been… He was just here and he had a gun and that was bad enough.
“Hey, Ringo, what you bringin’ me a geezer for?” the other thug called out as they got near. “What we gonna do with that?”
Oh, goody: another stupid boy who thinks he’s a gangster, Lois thought.
“Gonna take the car, man. Right after we ice this bitch,” Ringo replied. “What you think? Where the rest of the posse?”
As she’d expected, they were going to kill her. She should have been scared, but mostly it just made her angry to think of these two punks shooting her and stealing Duane’s car. They were just kids but they thought they were tough guys and they were going to shoot her. This sort of thing wouldn’t have happened back in the day… Her eyes prickled with furious tears.
The other boy shrugged. “They ain’t comin’. You want t’prove you got the balls, man, you got to do it your own self.”
“Fuck!” Ringo shrieked. “Fuck those motherfuckers!” Enraged, he shoved Lois and she stumbled to her knees. “You think I gonna rob a bank on my own, Rosie? Fuckin’ errand boy?” He jerked the gun up and pointed it on its side at his friend. “Think I’m gonna make my way dealin’ for small change and greasin’ motherfuckers for Fat Dog? This my score! This my mark, man! You gonna come wit me. You gonna crack that bank wit me, or I gonna blow you all over this fuckin’ park!”
Rosie shook his head and sighed. “Put the heat away. Ringo, I ain’t got no dispute wit you. I come along, you want me to…” He shrugged. “But who gonna drive that piece of shit you got?”
“Don’t you call my husband’s car a piece of shit, you potty-mouthed SOB,” Lois muttered. Her chest hurt almost as much as her knees did, sunk into the cold mud. This was doing her health no good at all. She was cold and she was hungry and she wanted to piss. But, maybe…if she played them right, she might still see her doctor tomorrow. Practical, that’s what Duane always said: “Got to be practical about these things.” He’d said it just before he ratted out his bosses. And about an hour before someone blew his brains out for it. Still, an hour was an hour…
Rosie and Ringo both stared at her. “What you say, gran’ma?” Rosie asked, turning his head on its side to look at her. He was better-looking than the boy with the jewelry in his face, but still no Rock Hudson, and all he had in common with Rosie Greer was his color.
“I said,” she gasped, “my husband’s car isn’t a piece of shit.” Lois raised her head and glared at them. “Duane would die if he heard you say that—if he wasn’t already dead, rest his soul. He loved that car! I still take it to the shop twice a year.”
Ringo stuffed the gun into the back of his belt and nodded at his buddy. “She right. Look like crap, but it run nice. An’ it a classic. We get another couple gee for that. Once we done.”
Rosie shrugged again. “Whatever you say, dog, but…who gonna drive it? Can’t go park it like a citizen, or bust the bank while five-oh tow your ride.”
Lois pushed herself to her feet, panting and wincing from the stiff protests of her joints. “I can drive it. “
“You? You crazy, gran’ma?” Rosie inquired. “We ain’t takin’ no blue-hair on no bank job.”
Ringo looked doubtful. “I dunno…”
“Ringo, you lost your fuckin’ mind? She gonna drop us off, then tear-ass over to the po-po turn us in. She a citizen,” Rosie added, looking over at Lois. “Ain’t you, gran’ma?”
“You boys have no idea…” She tried a grandmotherly smile, but she was pretty sure it looked more like the rictus of a corpse.
Brickman went with Solis to Harborview. He claimed he wanted to interview the witness himself, but Solis suspected he just wanted to see if the SPD—in his person—fell on its face. On the way, Solis made a lot of phone calls for information on Lois Wilkins. There was something he felt he should know, but he couldn’t put his finger on it…
Mrs. Wilkins’ doctor met them outside her room in CCU. “She’s not doing well,” he warned them. “She missed a cardiology appointment this morning and we were already worried about her. Trauma to the chest from the impact with the steering wheel is making a bad situation worse. So don’t upset or excite her. You can have ten minutes, but then you’ll have to go. You understand?”
Solis nodded. Brickman was too busy checking messages on his iPhone to do more than grunt. They started toward the room, but Solis’s phone rang and he paused to answer it. He listened to the caller, thanked them, and shut the phone off. He looked puzzled.
“It was her husband’s car,” he muttered. “She inherited it.”
“Huh. Who was the hubby?”
“Duane Wilkins. Should I know that name?”
Brickman pulled an incredulous face. “You don’t know who Duane Wilkins was?”
“No. Should I?”
“If you ever handled a corruption case in Seattle, Wilkins’s name would have come up. He was killed in ’73. ‘Made man’ as the lingo has it. Informed on his bosses during the indictments of ’71 and ’72. Found in a garage, shot in the head, which was taken as a warning since the usual method of offing rats in Seattle is drowning in shallow water. You should remember that the next time you find a vic face down in three feet or less.”
“I was eight years old in 1973. You weren’t even an itch. So how do you know this ancient history?”
“Drugs are still the number one field of study at Quantico. We know every notable mob murder in the last fifty years.”
Solis grunted. “Drowning. They used to do that in Cali, too.”
“Colombia? The cartel wars?”
“Si. My father was a cop in Cali.”
“Runs in the family, then?”
“Not so much.” Solis turned away from Brickman and went into Mrs. Wilkins’s room.
She’d shown them. First she showed them the gun in the glove compartment. That had been Duane’s too, but she didn’t feel any attachment to it and she didn’t mind so much when Rosie took it away from her. She’d given them the car’s registration and her driver’s license, too.
“That’s insurance,” Ringo said, as if it were his idea. “So’s you don’t run off on us.”
Lois pressed her lips together and didn’t say a thing.
Then she showed them what Duane had taught her about driving the Olds. It was harder than she remembered, even with power steering, but she did all right. She’d always done all right. Her chest ached, but she ignored it. Another hour and she could go to the doctor. She just had to get through with these stupid boys.
Ringo, the punk with the piercings, whooped it up as Lois maneuvered the car around the streets of south Seattle. “Check it, dog: granny kickin’ it old skool!” And he’d laughed at his joke. “You pretty fly…for an old lady.”
“I’m old, not dead.”
“Yet,” Ringo reminded her. “You want t’keep it that way, you just drive that good on the backside of this job. We might even let you keep this fine car. What you think, Rosie?”
Rosie scowled and she knew he wasn’t any more taken in than she was. “Whatever you say, bro. Whatever.”
Lois kept her mouth shut. Her initial dislike of Ringo had already been surpassed, but she knew better than to talk. Not in Rat City. Driving wasn’t the only thing she’d learned from her late husband.
She drove them up to the industrial district, to the Marine Bank, at Ringo’s direction. It was an old building and mostly alone in the midst of parking lots and warehouses beside the train tracks. There was plenty of open space to turn the car, even with business traffic, and lots of directions to go once the job was done. She had to hand Ringo that: he’d picked a good spot.
She slid into a loading zone in front, hung up her handicapped placard, and watched the boys run into the bank. She kept the engine running, unlatched her shoulder belt, and started beating the inside of the windshield on the passenger side with the heavy steel buckle.
Lois Wilkins looked tiny in the hospital bed, though she wasn’t really a small woman; she was, Solis thought, taller than he was. But her toughness was failing. The strength he’d felt in her arm on the medic gurney wasn’t going to be enough for this fight: he could hear it in her breathing, like he’d heard it before. Her voice trembled as she struggled to answer his questions and her pain made him feel ill.
He tried to ask the questions gently, but he didn’t think he’d have time to ask twice. “So they carjacked you and made you drive them to the bank. Why did you wait for them? Why didn’t you drive off?”
“They knew where I lived…” Mrs. Wilkins whispered. “I was afraid…they’d tell someone to come after me.”
“Like someone came for your husband?”
Mrs. Wilkins began to cry. “They said they just wanted the car. But, but…I thought…they were going to kill me. I couldn’t let them…take Duane’s car…”
The bank alarm started clanging as the two young punks rushed back out, bags bulging with small bills, and Lois was waiting. They didn’t notice the crack.
Ringo jumped in first, screaming at her and waving his gun without a care for where he was pointing it. Rosie was a second behind him, but it was a second too far.
As Rosie reached for the car door, Lois stomped on the accelerator.
The Olds burst forward, spinning Rosie onto the sidewalk. Lois gunned the car toward the lane of oncoming traffic as she clawed the unbuckled shoulder belt from under her arm.
“What you doing, crazy bitch?” Ringo shouted, trying to bring his gun to bear on her as the Olds lurched and scraped into the car in the other lane, fishtailing away from the impact. Lois turned her head and body toward the young punk as he was tossed around, unbuckled, in the white bucket seat.
Lois ground down on the gas pedal with one foot and yanked on the wheel, overcorrecting as she turned and whipped the heavy metal end of her shoulder belt into Ringo’s face. “Granny’s kickin’ it old skool, you little bastard!” she screamed.
She lashed the belt across his hand, knocking the gun away as the car careened into another parked by the curb. Then she hit the windshield with the belt as she wound up to smash him in the face one more time.
Blood flew around the inside of the Olds as it rocketed forward, ruining the white upholstery and the fake burl wood dash as the car lurched and slid.
Lois twisted back into her seat and stood on the brakes with both feet, bracing her arms on the top of the steering wheel to protect her head. The disc brakes grabbed all four wheels and locked up, the Olds screeching and rocking up onto its front fender.
Lois slammed forward as the car stopped, banging into the steering wheel hard enough to knock her breathless.
Ringo was flung up against the cracked windshield with a grotesque, wet thud and a snap of his neck. The glass ruptured and he crashed outward in a rain of a million tiny glass puzzle pieces. His foot in its oversized sneaker caught in the twisted frame and his body thumped onto the hood, broken and still.
Blood spread across the faded green paint job.
The patient monitors were screaming. Doctors and nurses rushed into the room, pushing the policemen aside. Solis could barely hear Lois Wilkins saying “I couldn’t let them take my husband’s car. He loved that car…”
Brickman backed out of the room shaking his head, dazed. “Jesus. She fucking killed him.”
Solis shrugged. “Self-defense. He was going to kill her and take the car.”
“That’s a bit more than self-defense, man. She laid a trap. She still remind you of your mother?”
Solis nodded. “Yes. My mother killed three men in Cali when I was twelve. They tried to rape her because she was married to a cop they didn’t like. All she had was one shotgun shell and a kitchen knife. Imagine what she could have done with a Cutlass?”
6
DRAFTY
A twig prodded Kes in her upper left thigh—right where the tasset should have been and wasn’t. “Plague take it!” she spat and all the woods around went silent. “Whosoever designed this so-called-mail should be forced to wear it himself. With pattens and one of those ridiculous hats!” She slashed at the offending shrubbery with her sword.
The falling-stones sound of Angeli’s laughter came from behind her. “Oh, but I think your outfit is quite cheeky,” the little dragon said, with a giggle that set a small bush on fire.
Kes patted her free hand against her buttock and found a considerably greater degree of flesh exposed at the bottom of the brief…umm…brief than she had realized. She whipped around, glaring, and pointed her sword at her draconic companion. “I’ll thank you to stop sizing up my backside, wyrm, or you can walk in front and clear the way.”
It was an outrageous outfit: mail it may have been, but the hauberk was little more than a bandeau that shaped to her breasts with the familiarity of a drunken lord’s groping hands—and not much larger than the same—while the lower business was neither leggings, nor even chausses, but something far more akin to the tiniest of smallclothes that covered her derrière like peach fuzz. Steel peach fuzz that tended to pinch, chafe, and yank out any strand of pubic hair that happened to curl round the leather-bound edges. In addition, she had nothing like a proper gambeson and the rings pinched her skin—especially any bits which happened to be somewhat upstanding by dint of the irritation of cold steel nipping like a thousand insects. And it had a draft like a blacksmith’s forge in full roar. It rubbed Kes quite the wrong way, but it was all the covering she currently had, aside from inadequate boots and a hair ribbon. She’d donned the ridiculous ensemble that morning and used the ribbon to secure her hair in a plait, which she now twitched over her shoulder.
Angeli ducked its head and attempted an abashed expression—which resolved poorly on a face so scaled and inhuman. “It’s a nice backside…for a squishy-two-legs.”
Kes clonked the dragon on its snout with the flat of her blade. “It is not an ornament for the delectation of spark-wits. And extinguish that shrub before the whole copse is afire, if you please.”
Angeli grumbled a bit before it said, “Oh, all right, Grumpy.” It turned aside to pat out the flames with one partially-unfurled wing.
“I am not grumpy,” Kes said, kicking some dirt over the nearest smoldering plant life. Though, certainly she had a right to be.
“Are too.”
“Am not! Ow!” she added as an ember burned through her thin leather soles. “Blasted things!” They weren’t even proper sabatons—just soft boots. Fine for hunting, but not up to a real battle—or dragon fire. “I shall definitely kill the blackguard—”
“When we catch up to him,” Angeli said.
“Oh, we’ll catch him up. I’ve a good idea just where the toad’s got off to. Is all flora and fauna extinguished now, Angeli?”
The dragonet looked around, spotted a small smoldering weed, and sat on it. “All clear, My Lady Kes. Not even particularly singed, I’d say.”
“What you would say, my dear Angeli, is quite likely to get us both thrown out of even the lowest bawdyhouse. You have the tact of a leprous pickpocket.”
“Yes, but I’m charming about it! And I always leave a tip.”
Kes snorted. She hadn’t wanted the whelp, but it had arrived a few days before her twelfth birthday and nothing could make it go away. Six years on, whither went Kes, so went Angeli, and she was, by now, used to it, its bad jokes, worse timing, and fierce companionship. Truth to tell, she’d hardly know who she was without it—but she would never admit such a thing.
They left the scene of the minor conflagration with Kes in the lead and walked west. The sun was just behind them, but coming up quickly. The woody landscape was all very much the same and Angeli scuffed along in Kes’s wake. The dragonet snaked its head back and forth on its long neck, looking for something interesting in the underbrush, and frightening small animals and birds with little puffs of steam. It was quickly bored with their skittering, chittering, and running, and went back to merely dragging along behind the woman in the measly mail.
After a while, Angeli asked, “Are we going to High Tower?”
“Where else?” Kes replied. “Now hush.”
“But we don’t like High Tower. Do we?”
“It is of no consequence whether we like the place. It’s Assembly Day and therefore it is undoubtedly where our quarry has flown—”
