Laura Lippman - Baltimore Blues

"How early?"

Kitty peered at her own handwriting. "Five-fifteen."

"Typical Rock. He wants to see me, but he doesn't want to sacrifice a second of morning light for his row. He's so efficient he'll probably do push-ups and sit-ups while we talk."

She grabbed her groceries and headed to the back stairs. But she couldn't resist looking back over her shoulder at Crow. He was smiling, as if he knew he would have made contact on his second attempt. It had been a strange week. Make that a strange month.

Technically the difference between getting up at 5 A.M. instead of 5:15 is fifteen minutes. But for Tess the earlier hour was much more difficult, especially after a week of not rowing at all. She contemplated staying in bed, pretending she had never gotten Rock's message. But that was why people called the store. They knew Kitty was more reliable than Tess's answering machine.

She detoured through the bookstore, careful to lock it. She still didn't trust the alley, not in the dark. She drove through downtown in silence, not awake enough to stomach the radio, or any sound at all.

The boat house was dark, with no cars in the parking lot and no sign of Rock's bicycle. Of course he knew she had a key-it was a copy of the one he had pilfered. She locked her purse in the trunk, unlocked the door, threw her key ring in an empty locker, and stretched out on a mat in the small workout room between the two locker rooms. A bar with about forty pounds on it lay nearby. Mindlessly she picked it up and began doing bench presses. It only weighed fifty pounds, much too light for her. What had happened to her 100-pound goal and the seven-minute mile? What had happened to all her goals for the fall? They had been subsumed by what she once thought would be the easiest job she ever had.

She heard footsteps in the men's locker room and glanced over, expecting Rock's sturdy calves to come through the swinging door. Instead she saw the lower half of a crabber, a bushel basket in gloved hands, heavy black rubber boots on his feet. Sneaking a bathroom break and taking a shortcut through the building-not permitted, but what did she care? She continued to pump the bar, indifferent, until her eyes traveled up and she noticed something odd. The crabber was wearing a ski mask.

"Look-" she began as the crabber fumbled in his bushel basket, then took out a revolver.

"I'm sorry," he said, and took aim.

Tess threw the bar at his head. It caught him in the chest, knocking him down with a hard thump, the handgun flying from his hand. Only fifty pounds, but the bar had done its job. But when she tried to rush past him toward the locker rooms, he grabbed her ankle, pulling her to the floor. Now he was crawling toward the gun and trying to hold on to her ankle at the same time. Tess kicked free, got up, and fled down the circular staircase, sprinting to the storeroom where the boats were kept.

It was dark there, and she could only hope he wouldn't know the location of the light switches, hidden behind a small closet door at the foot of the stairs. If he stopped to look for them, she might have time to go out the dock doors. Behind her she heard his heavy tread on the metal stairs. Scared to stand upright, she crawled across the floor, ducking under the rows of hanging boats. Oh say can you see …Why was "The Star-Spangled Banner" playing in her head?

The concrete floor was cool on her palms and knees. By the dawn's early light …Of course, she was worried about the dawn. Finding the logical connection almost made her smile. Soon the pale morning sun would start streaming through the oblong windows on the dock doors. But if she raised the doors, she would be backlit, the perfect target.

She pictured the boat house's layout in her mind. The doors to the dock were about sixty feet away, three of them, one at the end of each long narrow aisle. A gunshot could destroy one of the Baltimore Rowing Club's beautiful shells. Silly, but she'd hate to have that debt follow her through eternity.

Tess kept crawling until she ran out of room, wedging herself into the southeast corner. Perhaps she could hide until the other rowers started arriving. She glanced at her watch-5:20. No, ten minutes was too long to play this game of hide-and-seek, assuming anyone even showed up that early. Most of the rowers didn't arrive until six. The light would start coming in, his eyes would adjust to the darkness, he would find her. She could hear one of his rubber boots squeaking as he walked back and forth, sighing patiently. He was keeping sentry along the west wall, waiting for her to rush the stairs.

Would she make the paper? Given the hour, she had a good chance at the front page. The street final of the evening paper was always looking for a cheap, late-breaking crime to create the illusion there was news in the later editions. She tried to write the story in her head. A twenty-nine-year-old city woman was found dead today …City Woman was quite famous, almost as famous as City Man. She died, she fell, she was rescued. But what would be the phrase, stuck between two commas, that would summarize Tess's life for posterity? The appositive, it was called. Baltimore native? Former reporter? Bookstore clerk? Lanky brunette with overbite? She imagined the rewrite man bent over his keys, happy with the details of her death, the tiny, knowable mystery of it all. Rich, but not too rich, easily captured in 400 words and fifteen minutes. A death dispatched in one edition, then reduced to a brief.

The twenty-nine-year-old native, who police described as an unemployed woman playing at detective …Yes, that would be it, except it should be whom. Whom police described.

The boot was squeaking, coming closer now. Only one squeaked. Up one aisle, down the next. Dawn was filtering into the boat house, sneaking in around the edges of the heavy metal doors. And now that Tess thought about it, wasn't "dawn's early light" redundant? What else could the dawn's light be? The boot seemed to chirp an off-key accompaniment to the song in her head. And the rockets' red glare/The bombs bursting in air . God, she hated that song.

She tried to shrink into the corner and had to stifle an involuntary cry when a splintery piece of wood pressed into her back. A broken oar. At first she cursed the lazy rower who had left it there. Then she grabbed it, squeezing it tight as she listened to his boots. Otherwise he was silent, unnervingly so. He wasn't stupid, the kind of person who felt he must explain why he was killing someone. Had he killed Abramowitz? Or Jonathan? Either way, it didn't matter to him if Tess went to her grave knowing the full details. It was only important she go to her grave.

She heard the squeaking boot again, heading up the final aisle. Her aisle. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Straight toward Tess's hiding place. Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

She considered her options. She could stay hidden, assuming she was hidden. She could beg, stalling for time. Both were cowardly, prone to failure, and not entirely out of character for her. She waited, listening to his footsteps, watching his feet approach in the dim light. If she could see his feet, it was only a matter of moments before he could see her. She thought about how a race started, a sprint, the kind of race decided with the first few strokes. " Êtes-vous prêt? Partez!" Are you ready? Go! And then the gun would go off.

No penalties for a false start here. She was so low to the ground, oar in hand, her cheek brushed the cement floor. His rubber boots were about eighteen inches from her nose. A Hail Mary ran through her mind, followed by the one ragged piece of Hebrew she knew from Passover. Why is this morning different from all others? Because someone is about to kill you.