the gun in my gut. She was.”
“I don’t think I like having a partner who’s so besotted that he can’t even keep his own gun in his holster.”
“Is that some sort of weird sexual innuendo?”
“Not at all. Let’s get to the phone. I sure hope she didn’t think to cut the wire.”
“She never went inside the cottage.”
“Thank God for small favors. It’s about time we got one.”
Quinlan said, “Are your connections good enough to get us another one?”
“If not, I’ll call my aunt Paulie. Between her and Uncle Abe, they’ve got more connections than the pope.”
16
SHE KNEW JAMES would come here, maybe not immediately, but soon enough. She also knew she had time. Too bad she hadn’t thought to pull the telephone cord out of the wall. That would have really slowed him up. But she had enough of a head start.
She pulled the Oldsmobile into an empty parking spot just off Cooperton Street. She locked the door and walked slowly, wearing James’s jacket, which should make her look very hip, toward number 337, the gracious Georgian red-brick home on Lark Street. Lights were on downstairs. She prayed Noelle was there and not the police or the FBI.
She huddled low and ran along the tap line of shrubbery toward the downstairs library. Her father’s office. The room where she’d first seen her father strike her mother. That had been ten years ago. Ten years. What had happened to those years? College, with nightly phone calls and more visits than she cared to make, even unexpected visits during the week to make sure her father wasn’t beating her mother.
She’d sensed the festering anger in her father at her interference, but his position, more highly visible by the year, his absolute horror of anyone finding out that he was a wife beater, kept him in line, at least most of the time. As it turned out, she found out that if he was pissed off, he would beat her mother as soon as Sally left to go back to college. Not that her mother would ever have told her.
On one visit she’d forgotten a sweater and had gone quickly back home to get it. She’d opened the front door with her key and walked into the library, in on a screaming match with her mother cowering on the floor and her father kicking her.
“I’m calling the police,” she said calmly from the doorway. “I don’t care what happens. This will stop and it will stop now.”
Her father had frozen, his leg in mid-kick, and stared at her in the doorway. “You damned little bitch. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m calling the police now. It’s over.” She’d walked back into the foyer to the phone that sat on the small Louis XVI table, beneath a beautiful gilt mirror.
She had dialed 9-1- when her hand was grabbed. It was her mother. It was Noelle, and she was crying, begging her not to call the police, begging, on her knees, begging and begging, tears streaming down her face.
Sally had stared down at the woman who was clutching at her knees, tears of pain grooving down her cheeks. Then she’d looked at her father, who was standing in the doorway to the library, his arms crossed over his chest, his ankles crossed, tall and slender, beautifully dressed in cashmere and wool, his hair thick and dark, with brilliant gray threading through it, looking like a romantic lead in the movies. He was watching her.
“Go ahead, do it,” he’d said. “Do it and just see what your mother will do when the cops get here. She’ll say you’re a liar, Sally, that you’re a jealous little bitch, that you don’t want her to have my affection, that you’ve always resented her, resented your own mother.
“Isn’t that why you’re coming home all the time from college? Go ahead, Sally. Do it. You’ll see.” He never moved, just spoke in that intoxicating, mesmerizing voice of his, one that had swayed his colleagues and clients for the past thirty years. He’d kept a hint of a Southern drawl, knowing it added just the right touch when he deftly slurred the word he wanted to emphasize.