P. Tracy - Live Bait

He waited for one of them to protest, but it never came.

‘I’ll start getting the customers out of here,’ Jack finally said.

‘No you won’t. Come with me.’

Marty led them both to the bench at the greenhouse entrance, sat them down, then stood in front of them like some burly Colossus, facing the parking lot.

Lily had been acquiescent for about three minutes. Marty figured that was an all-time record. ‘For heaven’s sakes, Martin, do you expect us to sit here all day?’ she asked.

He didn’t even turn around to look at her. ‘Gino’s sending a car over. When it gets here, Jack goes back to the house and stays there with the officer, you hear me, Jack?’

‘I hear you.’

Officer Becker pulled into the parking lot a few minutes later, got out, and introduced himself to Marty. He was young, blond, and deceptively fresh faced, but Tony Becker had been at the warehouse when the Monkeewrench firefight went down last fall. It had hardened him in a hurry, made him watchful and sharp, and Marty liked the way his eyes kept moving, checking everything out.

‘This is Jack Gilbert,’ Marty explained quickly. ‘He’s the target. Take him back to the house and stay with him.’

After they left, Marty called Tim and Jeff over from the registers. ‘We’re closing the nursery. I want you two to get all the customers out of here.’

‘You’re closing the nursery?’ Jeff Montgomery asked.

‘That’s right.’

Both boys looked over his shoulder at Lily, who nodded slightly.

‘Okay.’ Tim Matson shrugged his broad shoulders, glancing back at the line at the registers. ‘We’ll just finish checking these people out…’

‘No. We’re closing now. This minute. Apologize, tell them it’s a family emergency, get them out of here. And then I want you two out of here. Don’t bother with the till, don’t bother with the tapes, just go.’

Marty knew he was scaring them – they looked like a couple of teddy bears with their eyes wide and suddenly worried – but that was what he wanted. Two scared kids hightailing it out of here, back at their own places, safe.

‘Is there a problem, Mr Pullman?’ Jeff asked. ‘Because if there is, maybe we could stay and help you out?’

‘You can’t stay,’ Lily said from the bench. ‘Somebody might be trying to shoot Jack. I don’t want you here. I want you safe.’

Tim and Jeff looked at her in disbelief, trying to take it in, and Marty knew they were thinking about Morey getting shot just a few days ago, wondering how and if it all pieced together, and what kind of an animal would try to destroy the family that had been so good to them. He prepared himself for a barrage of questions, but as it turned out, he’d underestimated them both, forgetting that they were nearly men, and that the protective instinct blooms early, pushing everything else aside. They both straightened, squaring their shoulders, puffing up.

Jeff, who’d been driving Marty crazy for days by ending every sentence with a question mark, suddenly looked like a man instead of a boy, his blue gaze steady, his mouth set and determined. ‘Is that why the cop came?’

Marty nodded.

‘One cop to guard this whole place? Let us stay, Mr Pullman. Let us help.’

Great, Marty thought. Just what I need. A couple of adolescent heroes. ‘Listen, kid, I appreciate the offer, but we don’t really think anything’s going to happen here. We’re just being extra-careful. Officer Becker and I have it under control, and the only thing that might mess it up is having to worry about the two of you on top of everything else. If you really want to help, get rid of the customers – right now – and go home.’

Tim, his dark hair dripping sweat, went immediately to the bench and sat next to Lily. ‘You shouldn’t stay here either, Mrs Gilbert. If we have to leave, I want you to come with us.’

Lily smiled at Tim and patted his hand. ‘You’re good boys. Stop worrying. Tomorrow we’ll put Jack in a safe place, and everything will be back to normal.’

Marty looked at her as Tim and Jeff started clearing out the customers. ‘How are we going to do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Get Jack to a safe place? ‘

‘Easy. You’re going to talk him into it.’

‘You don’t have enough scotch for that.’

‘Pfft. I have a case in the basement.’

It took Tim and Jeff half an hour to clear the nursery greenhouses and grounds of every customer. They’d been good about it, very professional, Marty thought, using the family emergency line, saying it with mournful expressions that quashed any shopper’s irritation almost before it took form. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ was a response he heard over and over as people filed obediently to their cars. Most of them probably knew about Morey’s murder on Sunday, and the idea of more misfortune striking this family had a sobering effect. A surprising number asked if there were something they could do. It wasn’t just Minnesota Nice – it was people nice, reminding Marty that the big scale still tipped way over to the side of good, and the bad was just a sprinkle. When you spent most of your life as a cop, most of your days on the dark side, it was good to be reminded of that once in a while.

Right up until the last minute, Tim and Jeff were still trying to stay on. They offered to patrol around the grounds all night, if not to stop trouble, to at least watch for it. The idea of these two kids walking the property in the dark made Marty shudder, because the feeling that something could happen was growing stronger by the minute.

It was the weather, he thought, when he finally put the kids in their beater cars and shooed them out of the drive, locking the gate behind them. You couldn’t see the big clouds yet – just a filmy white haze that lay over the sun like a cataract – but you could feel them coming deep in your chest, like when they put that heavy lead apron on you before X rays at the dentist’s office. The air was thick and hard to breathe, and leaves hung limply on every tree and bush.

Marty looked around the parking lot one last time – saw only his Malibu, Jack’s Mercedes, and Becker’s patrol car – and then, satisfied, walked around the big greenhouse to the planting beds in the back.

Lily Gilbert had always hated the straight lines that men were forever drawing all over the world. Lines were bossy, unforgiving things; harbingers of tyranny. Rows of crops, rows of buildings, and eventually, rows of people standing mute and still and fearful.

The front of the nursery had that kind of rigid order – the main greenhouse aligned with the street, the hedge aligned with the sidewalk, white lines in the parking lot telling the cars where to go. She had to put up with them in the front of the greenhouse, because that’s the way it was when they bought the place. But in the back, where the previous owners had lined up pots and plants like subjugated servants, Lily had destroyed the order of straight lines and created happy chaos.

Pea gravel walkways meandered like sleepy drunks through stands of potted trees and flowering shrubs, arcing around the perennial beds that provided cutting stock – the ‘mother beds,’ Morey had called them, where the seeds from a single flower produced hundreds of seedlings they would sell the following spring. And in high summer, little forests of ornamental grasses crowded some of the walkways, towering over giggling children who ducked beneath bobbing, seed-heavy heads as they followed the twisting paths through the lovely disordered maze of nature Lily’s hatred of lines had created.

She waited for Martin on a bench circled by potted lilacs. She’d forced blooms on a few of the shrubs so customers could see the color, but most were still flowerless, rather ordinary-looking plants with unremarkable leaves. The peasant plants, she called them, secretly pleased when for two short weeks every spring, the lowliest of these dressed themselves like gaudy monarchs.