Bill Pronzini: Fever

He picked out a package of tea, took it up to the quick-check. Misnomer tonight; there was a line and the checker was slow. Three stands over, the blond woman got through with her purchases before he did and was gone by the time he left the store.

His car was parked on Taraval, near Nineteenth Avenue. He headed that way, feeling twinges in his bad leg; cold had that effect sometimes. There was a small, covered parking lot on that side of Safeway, and he was just starting past it when he heard the voices.

Man saying, “Come on, lady, show my buddy here.”

Woman saying, “Leave me alone.”

Another man saying, “Just one look, I never seen somebody with half a face before.”

Runyon paused to look over there. The blond woman in the scarf. The two males had her backed up against one of the slant-parked cars, crowding her. Late teens-he could see them plainly in the floodlights. She was holding her grocery sacks up high in front of her chest, like shields. He heard her say, “Please, just leave me-” before the bigger of the two suddenly reached up and tore the scarf away from her face.

She cried out, dropped one of the sacks-it broke apart on the concrete, scattering the contents-and tried to pull away, her free hand pawing at the scarf. The entire left side of her face had a frozen, twisted look; her mouth might have been split in half, one side normal, the other bent and the lip curled up over her teeth. One of the kids said, “Hey, man, didn’t I tell you?” and the other one laughed like a hyena, and by then Runyon was on them.

He caught the big one by the shoulder of his denim jacket and yanked him aside, at the same time giving the other a hard push in the chest. That freed the woman; he heard her heels beating on the pavement as she ran out of harm’s way. His attention was on the two teenagers.

One of them said, “What the fuck’s the idea?” Spiked hair, pimples, straggly chin whiskers. The bigger one-buzz cut and longer whiskers-just glared. Runyon knew the type. Bullies. Tough on the outside, mush on the inside. Not dangerous unless they were cornered or thought they had the upper hand.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“You want a piece of us, man?” the other one said.

“You want a piece of a jail cell?”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“Christ, Curt, he’s a cop.”

The shorter one put his hands up, palms outward. “Hey, man, we weren’t doing anything. Just having a little fun, that’s all.”

“If hassling a woman is your idea of fun, you’re pretty damn stupid. Go on, get out of here. But I’ll remember both of you. I hear about you hanging around here hassling anybody again, you won’t like what happens.”

They went. Looking back over their shoulders at him, muttering to one another. He watched them out of sight, uphill on Taraval, before he looked for the woman.

She’d gone to the far end of the parking area, up against the shrub-topped retaining wall on the Eighteenth Avenue side. Now, hesitantly, she came back toward him, still carrying the one grocery sack. The scarf, he saw, had been retied to cover the left side of her face. When she stopped near him, she stood in a half-turned posture, her right side toward him.

“You okay, miss?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Kids these days. No sense of decency.”

“I’m used to it,” she said flatly.

“Used to it?”

No answer to that. Instead she bent and began picking up the spilled groceries one-handed. Runyon said, “Here, let me help,” and took the second sack and refilled it, crawling halfway under one of the parked cars to retrieve a can of soup. “Looks like that’s everything.”

“Thank you again.”

“Your car in here?”

“I can manage.”

“I don’t mind. Heavy cans in this bag.”

She hesitated, shrugged. “At the back wall.”

He followed her to where one of those small, box-shaped Scions that look like recycled postal delivery vans was slanted. Chocolate-colored, which made it even uglier. She keyed open the trunk, set the one sack inside, waited while he put the other one beside it. When he straightened he was close to her, close to the uncovered side of her face. And what he saw in that one eye, clearly visible in the trunk light and floodlights, shocked him.

He was looking at pain.

He’d seen pain in another woman’s eyes not long ago, a woman who resembled Colleen, but it was nothing like this. This was raw and naked, the kind that goes marrow-deep, soul-deep. The kind that had stared back at him from his mirror throughout Colleen’s illness and in all the days since her death.

“If you’re done staring,” she said, “I’d like to leave now.”

“I’m sorry, I…”

“Don’t be. I told you, I’m used to it.”

She slammed the trunk lid, and without looking at him again she got into the car and backed it up and left him standing there alone, the glimpses he’d had of her face and her pain still sharp in his mind.

The kinds of things women will talk about to each other, casually, in public places and in front of men, never cease to amaze me. There doesn’t seem to be any subject matter too personal, too outrageous for discussion.

Cosmetic surgery, for instance.

Intimate cosmetic surgery.

Nip and tuck the likes of which I couldn’t have dreamed up in my wildest fantasies.

Friday night I found out far more than I ever wanted to know about this topic. And in the unlikeliest of places-over dinner in a moderately expensive, sedate Italian restaurant in Ghirardelli Square.

The two women in question were Kerry and Tamara. Since my semiretirement, and even more since her struggles with breast cancer, Kerry and I had been spending a lot more time together. She was cancer-free again, after months of radiation therapy, but she was still taking medication and still working through the psychological effects, and she would need regular six-month checkups for the rest of her life because there was always the chance that cancerous cells could recur. Time had become a major factor in both our lives. A cancer scare coupled with advancing age makes you aware of how little time you may have left and how important it is to make every minute you have together count. So we did family things with Emily, and on at least one weekend day or night the two of us went to restaurants, movies, plays, the symphony at Davies Hall, the new de Young Museum, a 49ers game at the ’stick.

It had been Kerry’s idea to invite Tamara to join us for dinner at Bella Mia. Tamara hadn’t been getting out much since her long-time, cello-playing boyfriend, Horace, who had moved east for a year’s gig with the Philadelphia Philharmonic, decided to play permanent bedroom music with another woman. There was nobody new in her life. By her admission and complaint, she hadn’t gotten laid since Horace left ten months ago-a tragedy of large proportions for a hormone-rich twenty-six-year-old. Added to all this was the fact that her best friend, Vonda, had turned up pregnant and was about to be married. She’d become a little reclusive away from the agency, and sometimes moody and mopey and grumbly at work. Kerry thought an evening with us might cheer her up, which I considered a dubious notion. I expected Tamara to decline the invitation, but she jumped at it. Good sign. Maybe it meant she was tired of the shell she’d crawled into and was ready to break out. Why else would she want to hang with a couple old enough to be her parents, if not her grandparents?

So there we were at Bella Mia, in a corner booth, sharing a bottle of good Chianti and chatting along comfortably about general subjects while we tucked into steaming bowls of minestrone. And then Kerry made the mistake, in my opinion anyway, of asking Tamara about Vonda’s wedding plans. This led into the nip and tuck business.