Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [96]
The baby sucked his fingers furiously and poked out his butt, making Savich grin.
“He’s nearly down for the count,” Sherlock said, lightly touching the baby’s head, covered with his father’s black hair. “He sucks his fingers when he doesn’t want to be disturbed and he knows you’re talking about him.”
“What do you think, Adam? Six-ounce free weights for my boy?”
Adam stared at the big man holding his kid who was madly sucking his fingers, then threw his head back and laughed. “This is not good. I can nearly see him lifting three envelopes in each hand.” And he laughed and laughed. “Maybe he can even handle a stamp on each envelope.”
There were ten pizzas spread around Thomas Matlock’s living room an hour later. Hatch was hovering over the large pepperoni pizza, his shaved head glittering beneath a halogen floor lamp, talking even as he stuffed a big bite into his mouth. “Yipes, this sucker’s really hot. Oh boy, delicious. But hot, real hot.”
“I hope you burned your tongue,” Adam said as he pulled the hot cheese free of a slice of pizza from another box that was closer to him than to anyone else, and reverently lifted it up. “Serves you right for being a pig. I love artichokes and olives.”
“Nah, my tongue isn’t burned, only a bit of a sting,” Hatch said, and pulled up another piece. After he took another big bite, he said, “Now, to make sure everyone’s on the same page. All federal agencies are up to date on Krimakov. The New York Bureau guys are going over the car the guy dumped you out of, Becca, with every high-tech scan, every piece of sophisticated equipment they have. Haven’t found anything yet. I was really hoping they would find something, but this guy Krimakov is careful, real anal, one of the techs said. He didn’t leave anything helpful. Rollo and Dave, who left Riptide yesterday, sent the FBI all the fingerprints we got in Linda Cartwright’s house, all the fibers we bagged. No word yet. The woman he killed in Ithaca, and stole her car—they’ve combed the hills for witnesses but came up empty. All that boils down to nada, nothing, zippo.” And then he cursed in some language Becca didn’t recognize. She lifted her eyebrow at him. Hatch said, flushing a bit, “That was a bit of Latvian. A nice set of words, full-bodied and pungent, covers a lot of the hind end of a horse and what one could do with it.”
There was laughter, lots of it, and it felt so good that Becca looked around at all the people she hadn’t even known existed until very recently. People who were friends now. People who would probably remain friends for the rest of her life. She looked over at the baby lying in his carryall, sound asleep, a light blue blanket tucked over him. He was the image of his father.
She looked at Thomas Matlock, who was also looking at the baby and smiling. Her father, who hadn’t eaten much pizza because, she knew, he was so worried. About her.
My father.
It still felt so very strange. He was real, he was her father, and her brain recognized and accepted it, but it was still too new to accept all the way to the deepest part of her that had no memories, no knowledge of him, nothing tangible, only a couple of photos taken when he and her mother were young, some when they were even younger than she was now, and stories her mother had told her, many, many stories. The stories were secondhand memories, she realized now. Her mother had given them to her, again and again, hoping that she would remember them and, through them, love the father she’d believed was dead.
Her father, alive, always alive, and her mother hadn’t told her. Just stories, stupid stories. Her mother had memories, scores of them, and she had stories. But she kept quiet to protect me, Becca thought, but the sense of betrayal, the fury of it, roiled deep inside her. They could have told her when she was eighteen or when she was twenty-one. How about when she was twenty-five? Wasn’t that adult enough for them? She was an adult, a real live independent adult,