Five Uneasy Pieces

“I said do it!” Her voice spiked into a nervous falsetto on the word “do.”

“Why don’t you put that away?”

“Why should I?”

“Well, at the risk of offending you, you’re not exactly convincing me that you’ll actually shoot.”

She just stared at me. We were heading into the heart of old-town Ocean City. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, because the Route 50 drawbridge was up. In the distance, I could hear the clatter of the roller coaster and the screams of people on it. The streets were crammed with hordes of college students, young couples, and bikers.

“You’re really going to shoot me?” I said. “Right here, in the middle of traffic?”

Reluctantly, she lowered the gun into her lap.

“Better,” I said. A cross-street was coming up, so I slowly nosed my way to the left on the one-way road. I managed to get all the way over before the intersection, so I made the turn, went one block over, and turned left again to go back the way I’d come.

She seemed to relax a little, although she didn’t let go of the gun. She had that peculiar combination of worldliness and innocence that you see in a kid that’s grown up too fast.

“I take it there’s somewhere you’d like to go?” I said.

She looked at me sideways. “I wasn’t sure if you’d take me there.”

“You could always ask.”

“Delaware?”

Delaware wasn’t far; it wasn’t around the corner, either. Ocean City, Maryland is on a thin finger of real estate sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Isle of Wight Bay. From the southern-most end of town, where we were, it might take twenty minutes to reach the Delaware line, if traffic was good.

“Where in Delaware?” I asked. She could have been talking about a beach town; she could be talking about Wilmington, on the other side of the state.

“Between Fenwick and Bethany Beach? It’s not far.” She was starting to sound hopeful.

“Well ...” I wondered where Mendez might be. She might have arrived while all this was going on. The last time I’d tried to reach her, there was no answer. The silence was filled briefly with a bizarre duet courtesy of Miles Davis and a city bus.

The girl reached for her purse and put the gun in it, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a pink Zippo lighter. She eyed me with curiosity as she lit up, still waiting for an answer.

“Bad for the baby, isn’t it?” I said.

“So what are you now, my mother?” Suddenly, she sounded as if she were speaking through clenched vocal chords. She took an aggressive drag on the cigarette, then tapped it extraneously on the sill. “I don’t need a lecture on my health, okay?”

“What is this, maybe your eighth month? Ninth?”

She sighed. “Can we skip the maternal chit-chat, mom?”

“And can we skip the sarcasm? I mean, who’s doing whom a favor here? Understand this—I’m not your mom. I’m only asking because you look like you could drop that load any second. And I don’t make deliveries. So, you start going into labor, I don’t care where you say you want to go—we’re heading for the nearest hospital. Clear?”

“Okay, whatever.” She plucked at her dress, as if to remove lint, and did another tap or two with her cigarette. I supposed this was her notion of acting cool and collected. She looked about as cool as a dental patient waiting for a root canal.

“Don’t be a hard ass, okay?” she said. “Anyway, don’t worry about all that. Everything will be just fine.” Her voice trailed off, as if she didn’t quite believe that last point.

As we cruised past the steadily-climbing, numbered side streets, I wondered just what the hell I was doing. My line of work does not encourage voluntary heroics. There’s no percentage in it. But when I looked at the waif-like girl, something made me want to help her. Maybe in certain respects, she reminded me of myself. If I thought real hard, I might remember what it was like to be that age and to think you know everything.

The cell phone in my lap chose that moment to ring.

I snatched it up. “Where are you?” I said.

“Stuck on a focking runway.” When Mendez was mad, her accent was usually strong. Tonight, it was positively robust, even over the phone’s static. “Someone stole my focking cell phone. I had to borrow this nice gentleman’s.”

“I see.”