Not One Clue_ A Mystery - Lois Greiman [22]
“Better now than when we’re in the trunk,” he said.
Pulling out my cell, I snapped it open. “Hello.”
“Christina McMullen?”
I scowled. The voice was breathless and rushed. But it seemed too soon for another catastrophe.
“Yes?”
“Christina, this is Ramla Al-Sadr.”
“Ramla.” I focused on the conversation, momentarily forgetting how the lemons had felt against my palm. “What’s wrong?”
There was a pause. Usually when there’s a pause in one of my conversations someone drops dead. “I am not sure.”
So far so good, then.
“I received a call from a strange man.”
Getting worse. “There are a lot of them out there,” I said, and shifted my gaze to Rivera. He was scowling. Maybe his coppie-sense was buzzing. Or maybe he was always scowling when he wasn’t thinking about being naked in the backseat of a Saturn. As for me, I was struggling to keep things light, but I could already feel the muscles in the back of my neck cramping up.
“He said I must go to the airport at once,” Ramla said.
“What airport? Why?”
“He said he would call with more information later.”
“And you don’t know who it was?”
“No. But I cannot go to the airport, Christina,” she said. “My husband, Taabish, he is gone for the business. I am in Simi Valley with my children and cannot leave them.”
“You think this has something to do with your sister?”
“I do not know what to think.” There was a pause. “My sister, she has no passport,” Ramla said, and began to cry.
I tried to console her, but the truth is that overt displays of emotion make me itchy. We Midwesterners are more comfortable with snot than with tears. It’s a condition that conflicts almost constantly with the sappy Celt in me.
In the end I promised Ramla I would go to the airport in her stead and wait for the man to call her again. I snapped my phone shut and dumped it back into my purse.
Rivera’s eyes were shooting sparks. “You don’t have to try so hard,” he said.
“To prove I’m nuts?” I guessed, and wondered rather dismally what I had gotten myself into.
“Give the lady a beer,” he said.
I took a deep breath, gathered my keys, my nerve, a little bit of sanity. “Not right now,” I said. “I’m driving … to the airport.”
“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll head on home. Catch a rerun of Friends, maybe surf for porn. Then tomorrow I can enjoy your obituary with my morning coffee.”
“I thought you didn’t drink coffee.” I turned away, but not before I saw him grind his teeth and follow me.
I drove as fast as the traffic on the 110 allowed.
“Tell me what she said.” Despite Rivera’s dissertation on how he planned to spend his evening, he was sitting beside me, in the Saturn’s passenger seat.
“A strange man called her,” I said.
“I got that part.” He was using his patient tone. I hate his patient tone almost as much as I hate Brussels sprouts, which, by the by, barely deserve to be classified as food.
“Then you know about as much as I do.”
“I’ve got to tell you, knowing some stranger has called my next-door neighbor rarely prompts me to rush to the airport.”
I gave him a look. He gave it back. Grumpy as hell. Maybe he really didn’t want to read my obituary in the morning paper. So I told him the whole story about how Ramla had been worried about her sister in Yemen. How I had promised to look into things. How I had even farmed the problem out to Brainy Laney, only to learn that things were looking up for Aalia and her hubby. I didn’t leave out any salient points. Hardly.
“So this guy’s been knocking her sister around for years,” Rivera said.
“I believe so.”
“And your neighbor honestly thought the bastard had suddenly been canonized?”
There may have been a certain amount of carefully restrained vitriol in the statement. I had to assume it was brought on by the thought of wife beaters. He had never seemed sexier. Except maybe in the shower. “I take it you don’t think people can change.”
“It generally takes a high-caliber handgun