Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [81]
Britney and I found the blinking lights oddly amusing, but Allyson had not been happy about the extra attention while out in public.
“Sorry about the airport,” I said, shaking hands with Wesley, holding it until he gave up. He trotted out the marine-sergeant death grip every time we met. “One of the men in the department died this week, so I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
Putting on a false joviality that Karrie, always fascinated with the specter of bad relatives, was quickly picking up on, they mentioned the airport fiasco several more times, reassuring me after each reference that being old and abandoned in a strange airport hadn’t bothered them at all, that they’d rather enjoyed the long line at the car rental place, and that being independent with their own vehicle would be a pleasant change from having me cart them around as in years past, that neither of them minded getting lost in Federal Way, and that they were finally learning how to read their two-dollar map.
I would be reminded of the two-dollar map again and again the way a sailor’s wife reminded him he’d gotten the clap from a two-dollar whore. Had Lorie been here, the guilt factor would have whittled her down to nothing, but I had no time for it.
“Look,” I said as Mayor Haston walked through the front door and greeted Karrie. “I understand you want to see the girls today. Fine. Take them out to lunch. Go to Snoqualmie Falls, whatever. Just have them back in time for dinner at five. We’re going to eat at my place. Can you be there?”
“Of course we’ll be there,” Wesley said. “That’s why we came.”
“Just the three of us?” Lillian asked. Her table count always left out Allyson and Britney, a fact that Allyson never failed to take note of.
“If you bring the girls back, that’ll make five. I’ll be bringing a friend. So there’ll be six.”
The room filled with an uncomfortable silence as Wes and Lillian realized I was stepping out of my usual pattern—that I was taking charge.
After half a minute Lillian said, “Well, girls. I suppose we’d better shake a leg. We wouldn’t want to be in anyone’s way, would we?”
They were halfway out the door when I turned to Haston, his face still stained from yesterday’s explosion, bandages on his chin and across the bridge of his nose.
“Did you cancel the committee?” I asked. “Because if you did, I’ll have channel five out here. They talk to me, I guarantee you’re going to end up looking like a jackass.”
Ben Arden and Ian Hjorth must have heard the word jackass, because they were both in the room in a flash. Wes and Lillian were listening in the doorway, my curious daughters behind them.
“I formed the committee. I can disband it.”
“God, Haston. Your only child was in the back of that truck. I don’t know if she has any symptoms yet, but if she does she’s on the seven-day timer just like . . .” I remembered my girls in the doorway and stopped myself. Motioning for my in-laws to leave, I continued. “Why did you call the committee off?”
Until that moment, this had been a contest of wills between the regulars in the department and Haston. That it hadn’t occurred to him he might be endangering his own daughter’s life amazed everyone in the room, him included, because when he began speaking he stuttered. Karrie stared at her feet.
“Do you?” he asked, turning to his daughter. “Have any symptoms?”
“I can’t believe you canceled everything, Father. Why did you do that?”
“You have symptoms?”
“I want to know what difference it makes. Jim has them.”
“He does?”
“Yes.”
The room grew silent. My in-laws and daughters had left. I hadn’t been aware that Karrie knew, but the look on Ian’s face told me everyone in the station was aware of my predicament.
“I made a few calls,” Haston said. “That was all there was to it. Some