Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

Rachel stepped forward without hesitation and raised the trunk lid.

Except for a bag of clothes I’d been meaning to drop at the Salvation Army, the trunk was empty.

Rachel had been holding her breath. I heard her slowly releasing it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought for sure…”

She slammed the trunk closed angrily.

“What, you’re upset that she’s not in there?” I asked.

“No, Jack, I’m upset because I’m being manipulated. He had me thinking in a certain way and that was my mistake. It won’t happen again. Come on, let’s check the house to be sure.”

Rachel went back and turned her lights off and then we went through the back door and into the kitchen. The house smelled musty but it always did when it was closed up. It didn’t help that there were overly ripe bananas in the fruit bowl on the counter. I led the way through, turning lights on as we went. The place looked unchanged from the way I had left it. Reasonably neat but with too many stacks of newspapers on tables and the floor next to the living room couch.

“Nice place,” Rachel said.

We checked the guest room, which I used as an office, and found nothing unusual. While Rachel moved on to the master bedroom I swung behind the desk and booted up my desktop computer. I had Internet access but still couldn’t get into my Times e-mail account. My password was rejected. I angrily shut down the computer and left the office, catching up to Rachel in my bedroom. The bed had been left unmade because I wasn’t expecting visitors. It was stuffy and I went to open a window while Rachel checked the closet.

“Why don’t you have this on a wall somewhere, Jack?” she asked.

I turned. She had discovered the framed print of the full-page ad that had run for my book in the New York Times . It had been in the closet for two years.

“It used to be in the office, but after ten years with nothing else to follow, it sort of started mocking me. So I put it in there.”

She nodded and stepped into the bathroom. I held my breath, not knowing what kind of sanitary condition it was in. I heard the shower curtain being slid open, then Rachel stepped back out into the bedroom.

“You ought to clean your bathtub, Jack. Who are all the women?”

“What?”

She pointed to the bureau, where there was a row of framed photos on little easels. I pointed as I went down the line.

“Niece, sister-in-law, mother, ex-wife.”

Rachel raised her eyebrows.

“ Ex-wife? You were able to get over me, then.”

She smiled and I smiled back.

“It didn’t last long. She was a reporter. When I first came to the Times we shared the cop beat. One thing led to another and we got married. Then it sort of went away. It had been a mistake. She works in the Washington bureau now and we’re still friends.”

I wanted to say more but something made me resist. Rachel turned and headed back to the hallway. I followed her into the living room. We stood there, looking at each other.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to think on it. I should probably let you get some sleep. Are you going to be all right here?”

“Sure, why not? Besides, I’ve got a gun.”

“You have a gun? Jack, what are you doing with a gun?”

“How come the people with guns always question why citizens have guns? I got it after the Poet, you know?”

She nodded. She understood.

“Well, then, if you’re okay, I’ll leave you here with your gun and call you in the morning. Maybe one of us will have a new idea about Angela by then.”

I nodded and knew that, Angela aside, it was one of those moments. I could reach out for what I wanted or I could let it go like I had a long time before.

“What if I don’t want you to leave?” I asked.

She looked at me without speaking.

“What if I’ve never gotten over you?” I asked.

Her eyes dropped to the floor.

“Jack… ten years is a lifetime. We’re different people now.”

“Are we?”

She looked back at me and we held each other’s eyes for a long moment. I then stepped in close, put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her into a long, hard kiss that she did not fight or push away from.

Her phone dropped out of her hand and clunked to the floor. We grabbed at each other in some sort of emotional desperation. There was nothing gentle about it. It was about wanting, craving. Nothing loving, yet it was all about love and the reckless willingness to cross the line for the sake of intimacy with another human being.

“Let’s go back to the bedroom,” I whispered against her cheek.

She smiled into my next kiss, then we somehow managed to get to my bedroom without taking our hands off one another. We urgently pulled our clothes off and made love on the bed. It was over before I could think about what we were doing and what it might mean. We then lay side by side on our backs, the knuckles of my left hand gently caressing her breast. Both of us breathing in long, deep strides.

“Uh-oh,” she finally said.

I smiled.

“You are so fired,” I said.

And she smiled, too.

“What about you? The Times has to have some kind of rule about sleeping with the enemy, doesn’t it?”

“What are you talking about, ‘the enemy’? Besides, they laid me off last week. I’ve got one more week there and then I’m history.”

She suddenly was up on her side and looking down at me with concerned eyes.

“What?”

“Yeah, I’m a victim of the Internet. I got downsized and they gave me two weeks to train Angela and clear out.”

“Oh, my God, that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t come up.”

“Why you?”

“Because I have a big salary and Angela doesn’t.”

“That’s so stupid.”

“You don’t have to convince me. But that’s how the newspaper business is run these days. It’s the same everywhere.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, probably sit in that office and write the novel I’ve been talking about for fifteen years. I think the bigger question is what are we going to do now, Rachel?”

She averted her eyes and started rubbing my chest.

“I hope this wasn’t a one-time thing,” I said. “I don’t want it to be.”

She didn’t respond for a long time.

“Me, neither,” she finally said.

But that was all.

“What are you thinking?” I asked. “You always seem to go off to dwell on something.”

She looked at me with a half smile.

“What, you’re the profiler now?”

“No, I just want to know what you’re thinking about.”

“To be honest, I was thinking about something a man I was with a couple years ago said. We’d, uh, had a relationship and it wasn’t going to… work. I had my own hang-ups and I knew he was still holding out for his ex-wife, even though she was ten thousand miles away. When we talked about it, he told me about the ‘ single-bullet theory.’ You know what that is?”

“You mean like with the assassination of Kennedy?”

She mock-punched me in the chest with a fist.

“No, I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens-death, divorce, infidelity, whatever-nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.”

She nodded. She believed it.

“What are you saying, that he was your bullet?”

She shook her head.

“No, I’m saying he wasn’t. He was too late. You see, I’d already been shot by someone else. Someone before him.”