The Best Revenge Page 10

  Her affect didn’t reflect her words. No joy sparkled in her eyes, and her wide mouth was set flat. Her right hand was doing the kneading now, higher on her leg, near her hip. She pushed her dark hair away from her face with her other hand before she rested the tip of her index finger on her upper lip.

  “And that’s when the pain began?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think it was right around then. At first I thought it was just because I was doing so much. You know, activity-wise. The people I was hanging around with in Sydney lived for the water, and I wanted to try every single activity they were involved in. I was learning to surf and trying to learn to windsurf and I met a guy who had a boat and he was teaching me to wakeboard. When I wasn’t in the water, it seemed I was out bushwalking with friends in the Blue Mountains. I assumed the pain in my legs was just because I was so active.”

  “Did you see a doctor while you were there?”

  She shook her head. “Idated a doctor a couple of times while I was there. He was interesting. But no, I didn’t go to see anybody for the pain in my legs. I thought it would go away.”

  I could have asked another question. A few came to mind. But my scorecard showed that I’d already asked one too many, and I was curious where Kelda was going to wander next if I didn’t get in her way.

  “When I was in Sydney I met another Kelda, too. A girl from Queensland. Her grandmother was from County Cork, just like mine. She’s the only other Kelda I’ve ever met.” She smiled self-consciously. “She reminded me of Jones. Same blond hair, same fair skin, same green eyes. Almost as skinny.”

  “Jones?” I asked.

  Kelda’s face softened. “Yeah, Jones. I haven’t talked about Jones, have I? A friend from college. My best friend, really. My best friend ever. Joan Samantha Winslett.” She crossed her legs. “The day we met I saw her name written on a class roster at DU. It said ‘Winslett, JoanS.’ The space was missing between then of Joan and her middle initialS . When I saw it I read it out loud as ‘Winslett, Jones.’ She was standing next to me and thought it was hilarious. We became great friends; we were even roommates the last couple of years at school.

  “Right from that first day I always called her Jones. No one else did. It was just our thing, part of our bond, I think. Anyway, the Kelda I met in Sydney reminded me of Jones.”

  Intuition, I’ve decided, is a combination of experience and attentiveness and maybe some other magical things that I haven’t yet isolated. The amalgam, whatever its actual components, was shouting at me that Jones wasn’t just some old friend of Kelda’s.

  “Was?” I asked. “You said itwas your thing.”

  “I did say that. Jones is dead. She died that same year while she was living in Hawaii. She was an artist.”

  The non sequiturshe was living in Hawaii/she was an artist hung in the air between us like a mist that refused to settle.

  I compared the time periods in my head. “Jones died while you were in Australia?”

  Kelda looked back up at me, her eyes moist with tears. “I’m not ready to talk about Jones yet. Okay?”

  The statement was poignant for many reasons. The most important was that it told me that Kelda was aware that talking about Jones was one of the crucial things that she and I needed to do.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’d just like to point out that when you started talking about the beginning of your pain, it didn’t take very long for your mind to go to your friend, Jones.”

  The look she gave me was steely—some alloy ofYou want to make something of it? andPlease don’t make me talk about her.

  It wasn’t the first admonition that Kelda had communicated to me. The first had come during our initial session and had to do with the fact that she wasn’t using her government health insurance to pay for her treatment; she was paying for the psychotherapy herself. She admitted that the FBI wasn’t aware that she was seeing a neurologist for chronic pain, nor were they aware that she relied on narcotics to function, and she certainly wasn’t planning to make them aware that she was seeing a psychotherapist for issues that might be related to her pain.

  She’d even admitted to me that she had devised a few different ingenious systems—including an old IV bag taped to her back with a tube down the crack of her ass—that had, so far, successfully allowed her to thwart the FBI’s best efforts to discover the morphine derivatives in her urine.

  She’d made clear to me that I wasn’t to divulge either the fact of, or the nature of, her treatment to anyone. It could cost her her job if the FBI learned that she was taking narcotics on a regular basis.

  I had assured her that I had no wish, and certainly no obligation, to inform the FBI about anything having to do with her psychotherapy.

  Despite some gentle encouragement on my part, we didn’t talk any more about Jones that day.

  As the session came to a close, Kelda collected her things to leave the office, stood, and said, “I gave somebody your name. As a therapist, I mean. That guy who was just released from death row? Tom Clone.” She stood. “You may have heard that the press has been speculating that it was an FBI agent who helped discover the evidence that got him freed from prison. Well, they’re right, it was. I’m that FBI agent. I’m the one who found the knife you might have been reading about.”

  She took a step toward the door, then turned. “Hope your arm feels better, Alan. Next time try to step over the dog. I’ll see you in a week.”

  I was halfway home, caught in traffic on South Boulder Road, when I stopped wondering about Jones and my arm began to hurt again.

  It made me think about the Mini.

  I didn’t know at the time, of course, that it was the wrong association.

  But it’s the one that I made.

  CHAPTER 14

  Kelda’s route back to Lafayette would take her down Arapahoe Road, on a path parallel to the one that her therapist, Alan Gregory, was taking to his house. Before she headed home, though, she decided to run a couple of errands in Boulder—Liquor Mart to pick up some beer from Crested Butte that Ira liked, and McGuckin Hardware to get some material to fix the screen on her bathroom window. There was no sense heading east before she allowed some time for the local roads to lose some of their rush-hour inflammation.

  Other than to notice that it pulled in just as she was walking into the store, she didn’t actually pay much attention to the burgundy Toyota pickup that followed her into the Liquor Mart parking lot. After she bought Ira’s favorite beer and left the store, she noted that the Toyota pickup turned from the lot onto Canyon Boulevard about ten seconds after she did.

  Could be a coincidence,she thought.Probably is.

  A few blocks east she turned right on Folsom and then immediately got into the far lane to turn left into the McGuckin lot. The pickup followed her onto Folsom but continued past her as she waited to turn. As the vehicle passed her she tried to get a look at the driver, but the sun visor blocked her view through the windshield, and the window tint kept her from looking into the pickup from the side. She thought that the driver of the truck was a man. The front license plate on the truck was missing. The one on the rear was obscured by a convenient splash of dried mud.

  A half block farther ahead the truck eased into the left-hand turn lane at Arapahoe Road.

  Had she been trying to do a one-vehicle tail—which she wouldn’t: any experienced agent would argue that they’re almost impossible to pull off unless the target is oblivious—she would have made the exact same maneuver that the pickup made before finding another route into the parking lot. She parked her car and ambled to the entrance to the hardware store, waiting just inside the door for the truck to reappear. A minute later she spied it as it pulled into the lot from the direction of Arapahoe.

  This is no coincidence.

  Errand accomplished, screen repair supplies in hand, she returned to her car and snaked through the lot until she could turn onto Arapahoe. When she pulled to a stop at the red light at Twenty-eighth Street, the truck followed
her onto Arapahoe. After the light changed she lost sight of the tail for a couple of miles but spotted it again thirty blocks later. The Toyota was a dozen cars behind her.

  Kelda lifted her Sig from her shoulder holster and set it on her lap. She edged her Buick into the right lane and slowed, hoping the driver of the Toyota pickup wouldn’t notice the speed change. But the tactic didn’t work. The truck stayed a few hundred feet back.

  Three miles farther east, Kelda approached the left-hand turn onto 111th Street that would take her to her tiny ranch. She knew she didn’t want to lead whoever was driving the truck back to her home, so she made a decision to bypass 111th and proceed up to 119th. She’d turn right instead of left and do some maneuvers to lose the tail in the residential clutter of the last decade’s orgy of suburban excess as she doubled back between Baseline and Arapahoe. Then she would head home and try to sort out what was going on.

  She accelerated gently as she approached 111th, keeping her eyes glued to her mirror as the distance increased between herself and the Toyota. Her impression was that the distance between the two vehicles was increasing much faster than she was accelerating.

  Kelda was a couple of hundred yards past 111th, staring into her mirror, trying to make sense of the rapidly increasing gap between her Buick and the tailing Toyota, when the Toyota slowed and turned onto the road that led toward her home. Absently she touched the handgun on her lap and returned her attention from the mirror to the road just in time to see the blunt yellow end of a school bus light up in bright red orbs a hundred feet in front of her.

  She slammed on her brakes but knew instinctively that she wasn’t going to be able to stop in time to avoid colliding with the back end of the bus. Escaping to the right shoulder was out of the question—that’s where the kids would be exiting the bus. Her only choice was to swerve into the oncoming lane of traffic. She tried to process the data that was screaming at her: at least three pairs of headlights were approaching in the opposite lane. She would somehow have to swerve between two of the oncoming cars in the instant before she impacted the bus full of children.

  The first car passed. Kelda’s heart pounded as she recognized that an Impala full of teenagers had just driven past her. The last two pairs of headlights appeared tightly spaced, but she determined that the gap would have to be large enough.

  The yellow wall grew closer. The red lights on the back of the bus flashed so brightly that Kelda could feel them as though they were pounding hard at her flesh.

  Kelda’s eyes locked onto the two child restraints she saw poking up in the rear seat of a Dodge minivan, and she began the sudden maneuvers she hoped would help her avoid an impact with the back of the bus.

  The bus was only feet away when Kelda yanked the wheel of her Buick to the left and simultaneously lightened the pressure on her brakes. Instantly, her car bolted into the oncoming traffic, eluding the back of the school bus by inches and heading at a sharp angle across the lane of oncoming traffic.

  The car hurtling at her was a new VW Bug that was painted a shade of yellow that nature reserved for bananas, birds, and tropical fish. The expression on the driver’s face was one of complete incredulity. Kelda’s appearance in the lane in front of her was so sudden that the young woman driving the VW didn’t even process the danger she was in—only shock was apparent on her face.

  In the next instant, Kelda recalled seeing the flash of yellow swim past her. But she wasn’t immediately sure whether it was the mustard yellow of the school bus or the neon yellow of the VW that flowed by in her periphery. She didn’t know for sure that she had escaped colliding with the onrushing vehicles until the left wheels of her Buick plopped off the macadam shoulder on the far side of Arapahoe Road.

  She said, “Shit,” and skidded her car to a stop, two wheels in the dust, two on the asphalt shoulder. Traffic continued to surge by in both directions as though nothing had happened. The flow of the road returned to normal long before Kelda’s breathing did.

  Kelda retrieved her handgun from the floor below the steering wheel and slid it back into her holster. She waited what felt like forever for a break in the traffic that was sufficient to allow her to pull back onto Arapahoe again.

  She slowed after she completed the turn onto 111th, her eyes peeled for the burgundy Toyota truck. It wasn’t there. As she accelerated toward the speed limit, an uneven ribbon of pink grays hugged the fractured tops of the mountains of the Divide to her left. Sunset was in its final moments. High above the horizon in front of her, stars had begun to pop into the black sky.

  But there was no sign of the arrival of the monsoons.

  Unlike Arapahoe, 111th Street wasn’t a busy street. That night, traffic was even more muted than normal. Few cars passed Kelda as she covered the final mile that would take her to the lane that led to her house. No headlights appeared in her rearview mirror. She checked every few seconds to be sure.

  She tapped her brakes as she approached her lane. A car was coming her way from the north; she decided to wait until it passed to complete the turn. The car—a big SUV—zoomed past and she eased into a wide arc that would take her to the bank of mailboxes at the end of the lane. She moved the shift lever to “park” and pulled herself from the car to retrieve her mail. The adrenaline that had pumped into her veins was dissipating almost as rapidly as it had arrived, and as the hormone disappeared, the pain was returning to her legs. She felt deep aches in her calves and thighs as she walked up to the post that was topped with her galvanized mailbox.

  A loud click pierced the night.

  Kelda froze.

  A heartbeat later her right hand snaked inside her jacket. A starter motor whirred and in a split second she heard the roar of an engine revving much faster than any manufacturer would have recommended. She looked down the lane and then back out on 111th but she couldn’t tell where the vehicle was parked.

  A pair of lights flashed into her eyes from down the lane. Seconds later the glare boosted to bright and the roar of the motor began to quiet. She heard the crackling of tires on gravel as the car moved at a measured pace in her direction. She stepped behind the Buick and crouched down. Her Bureau training was almost instinctive; she was putting the engine compartment and the tire between her body and whoever was coming down the lane.

  The burgundy front end of the Toyota pickup emerged from the illuminated dust that was hanging above the lane. The visor was still down on the driver’s side of the pickup, and the tint on the glass was no more transparent than it had been earlier. The truck pulled even with her Buick and stopped. Kelda stayed low and held the Sig just out of sight.

  Ten seconds passed. Fifteen. Finally, the window cracked open about two inches.

  Kelda thought she smelled cigarette smoke emerge from the cab.

  A voice that Kelda was certain was male said, “Evening, darlin’.”

  Prehost?

  The window rolled back up and the truck turned south, back toward Arapahoe Road. Kelda watched it go until the two red taillights merged into a solitary pink dot.

  From her car, she grabbed her big flashlight and a few plastic bags and paced down the lane toward the spot where the Toyota had been parked. She held the big light in her left hand and her 9mm Sig Sauer in her right. She swept the dirt path with the beam of her torch, trying to determine exactly where the truck had stopped. Twice she paused and crouched to examine cigarette butts in the brush by the near side of the lane. In each case the butts had already started to disintegrate.

  A hundred yards down the lane a pair of headlights flashed on. An engine rumbled to life. Kelda skipped off the line and hopped the little fence that lined her property. The Sig felt weightless in her hand.

  The car approached. She could see the driver lean his head out the window. She crouched behind a fence post, and the Sig floated into firing position as though her arm were being lifted by a helium-filled balloon.

  “It’s me, baby. Ira.”

  She said, “Shit, Ira. You almost gave me a h
eart attack. A few more seconds and I would have shot you.”

  He pulled up opposite her and killed the engine.

  She said, “What the hell were you doing down there?”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “I came over to see you a while ago, and your car wasn’t here but someone else’s was. Some guy sitting in a truck seemed to be watching your house. I decided to see what he was up to, so I drove past him down the lane, parked my car, and pretended to go into Lucas’s place. Then I watched the truck. Do you know that guy?”

  “No. I was in Boulder seeing that shrink. I thought I saw this truck following me home but I thought I lost him. Apparently, I didn’t. Did you get a plate or a clear look at the guy?”

  “Negative on both counts. Obviously he knows where you live, Kelda. That can’t be good.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He drove by real slowly and said, ‘Hi, darlin’.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I think somebody was just letting me know that he can find me.”

  “Why? Does this have to do with Tom Clone?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Right now, I assume everything does.”

  “Was it one of the guys who hassled you on the way home from the penitentiary?”

  “I don’t think so. It could have been one of them, but if I had to guess, I’d guess not. The voice wasn’t right.”

  “You want some company tonight?”

  “I don’t think so, Ira. I’m tired. I just want to freeze my legs and try to get some sleep.”