Fever(11)

He picked out a package of tea, took it up to the quick-check. Misnomer tonight; there was a line and the checker was slow. Three stands over, the blond woman got through with her purchases before he did and was gone by the time he left the store.

His car was parked on Taraval, near Nineteenth Avenue. He headed that way, feeling twinges in his bad leg; cold had that effect sometimes. There was a small, covered parking lot on that side of Safeway, and he was just starting past it when he heard the voices.

Man saying, “Come on, lady, show my buddy here.”

Woman saying, “Leave me alone.”

Another man saying, “Just one look, I never seen somebody with half a face before.”

Runyon paused to look over there. The blond woman in the scarf. The two males had her backed up against one of the slant-parked cars, crowding her. Late teens—he could see them plainly in the floodlights. She was holding her grocery sacks up high in front of her chest, like shields. He heard her say, “Please, just leave me—” before the bigger of the two suddenly reached up and tore the scarf away from her face.

She cried out, dropped one of the sacks—it broke apart on the concrete, scattering the contents—and tried to pull away, her free hand pawing at the scarf. The entire left side of her face had a frozen, twisted look; her mouth might have been split in half, one side normal, the other bent and the lip curled up over her teeth. One of the kids said, “Hey, man, didn’t I tell you?” and the other one laughed like a hyena, and by then Runyon was on them.

He caught the big one by the shoulder of his denim jacket and yanked him aside, at the same time giving the other a hard push in the chest. That freed the woman; he heard her heels beating on the pavement as she ran out of harm’s way. His attention was on the two teenagers.

One of them said, “What the fuck’s the idea?” Spiked hair, pimples, straggly chin whiskers. The bigger one-buzz cut and longer whiskers—just glared. Runyon knew the type. Bullies. Tough on the outside, mush on the inside. Not dangerous unless they were cornered or thought they had the upper hand.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“You want a piece of us, man?” the other one said.

“You want a piece of a jail cell?”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“Christ, Curt, he’s a cop.”

The shorter one put his hands up, palms outward. “Hey, man, we weren’t doing anything. Just having a little fun, that’s all.”

“If hassling a woman is your idea of fun, you’re pretty damn stupid. Go on, get out of here. But I’ll remember both of you. I hear about you hanging around here hassling anybody again, you won’t like what happens.”

They went. Looking back over their shoulders at him, muttering to one another. He watched them out of sight, uphill on Taraval, before he looked for the woman.

She’d gone to the far end of the parking area, up against the shrub-topped retaining wall on the Eighteenth Avenue side. Now, hesitantly, she came back toward him, still carrying the one grocery sack. The scarf, he saw, had been retied to cover the left side of her face. When she stopped near him, she stood in a half-turned posture, her right side toward him.

“You okay, miss?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Kids these days. No sense of decency.”

“I’m used to it,” she said flatly.

“Used to it?”

No answer to that. Instead she bent and began picking up the spilled groceries one-handed. Runyon said, “Here, let me help,” and took the second sack and refilled it, crawling halfway under one of the parked cars to retrieve a can of soup. “Looks like that’s everything.”

“Thank you again.”

“Your car in here?”

“I can manage.”

“I don’t mind. Heavy cans in this bag.”

She hesitated, shrugged. “At the back wall.”

He followed her to where one of those small, box-shaped Scions that look like recycled postal delivery vans was slanted. Chocolate-colored, which made it even uglier. She keyed open the trunk, set the one sack inside, waited while he put the other one beside it. When he straightened he was close to her, close to the uncovered side of her face. And what he saw in that one eye, clearly visible in the trunk light and floodlights, shocked him.

He was looking at pain.

He’d seen pain in another woman’s eyes not long ago, a woman who resembled Colleen, but it was nothing like this. This was raw and naked, the kind that goes marrow-deep, soul-deep. The kind that had stared back at him from his mirror throughout Colleen’s illness and in all the days since her death.

“If you’re done staring,” she said, “I’d like to leave now.”