Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (4 page)

What was wrong with Penn?

Whatever it was, its symptoms were to worsen.

For after five minutes of battle with the fish—it seemed like half an hour, and Nina’s forearms had begun to ache—the struggle began to go her way, and the tiny spot in the churning green ocean where line entered water was now no more than twenty feet from the side of the boat.

“Watch----------------! The --------------------------- is going to-----------------”

Jump.

And the fish did jump, leaping and writhing and spraying and flashing in the sun, its t-shape now a full two feet out of the water.

Hammerhead shark.

HAMMERHEAD SHARK!

Nina’s first impulse was simply to throw the rod away and tell Penn to take them both home.

Then she thought about
Jaws
.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

The shark whapped flat back into the water then, but the fight in him was doubled, and the boat began to skull even faster in the direction of the Christmas Tree-lighted rig.

Was he intending to take them under it?

And then it happened.

The thing Nina was probably never to forget.

The thing that showed her, clearly, just how ill Penn really was.

For ‘ill’ was the only way to describe it.

Penn rose from her pilot’s seat in the stern of the boat, made her way to a storage compartment, which she opened, and pulled out a forty-five automatic.

This was, Nina remembered, the same weapon that had been used during a tense confrontation at the Aquatica.

It had saved their lives then.

Was it to do so again?

No, it wasn’t.

Because Penelope, who in any other circumstances, in any other normal life, would have sighted the gun carefully, waited until the next leap, and––BAM––blown the two-foot shark completely apart so that nothing remained save a circular mass of chum and red writhing intestines, purpling up the water—

––simply watched that next leap.

And did nothing.

Nothing at all.

Until, with her face frozen on the horizon, her eyes seemingly peering out beyond the shark, and even beyond the oil rig, she carefully lifted the lid of the storage compartment, and gingerly placed the weapon back where it had come from.

Then she produced a hunter’s knife from the broad leather belt she was wearing. She leaned over the side, and, with a deft movement, severed the fishing line.

“To hell with him,” she said, quietly.

What was wrong with Penelope Royale?

For Carol Walker, the day following her firing began in depressing darkness. By the time she left for Pilsen, a scudding layer of gray clouds washed over the city, turning umbrellas inside out and soaking the sidewalks, which glistened in the glare of headlights. Rain––especially unseasonably cold September rain––made everything harder. Crossing Michigan Avenue, bumping into people who had their heads bent into scarves and their eyes fixed on the pavement…now crossing the sidewalk, remembering it was four forty-five and people would be sprinting desperately from the seventy-eight bus up Wabash toward Union Station, up toward Ogilvie––avoiding bicyclists, who seemingly did not care who crossed their paths…watching fearfully, furtively, all of the people in the world, who were running, peddling, hurrying, mumbling...just panicked by the fact that it was Friday afternoon and THEY MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO GET TO THE SUBURBS ON TIME!

Of course, in these same stations––Union, Ogilvie––equal numbers of people just as harried, were pushing each other off the platforms, out of the trains, through the revolving doors, down the escalators…just as panicked that it was four forty-five and THEY MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO GET INTO THE GREAT CITY OF CHICAGO ON TIME!

She made her way up the stairs to the Pink Line Wabash stop. There, seated on benches, huddled beneath warmers, clustered shelterless and peering down at the tracks below them, or the city stretching westward—people were miserable. No one smiled. A few read newspapers, but most seemed close to despair, blankness, complete lack of touch or contact. Here and there, up and down the platform, a group of teenagers ran into each other and giggled, or pushed each other precariously near the chasm over the electric tracks. Everyone else in the station hated them intensely.

Finally, the train came; she squeezed her way onto it, wondering vaguely if someone would try to pick the pocket of her trench coat, wondering vaguely if she would care.

Twenty dollars were folded carefully in the shirt pocket of her blouse.

She was to meet a man named Michael in Pilsen.

She’d gotten an enigmatic, typed note late the previous afternoon, in an envelope containing a twenty dollar bill.

HEARD ABOUT YOUR FIRING. BAD LUCK. HAVE A NEW EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY TO PUT FORTH TO YOU. MEET ME AT 216 BLUE ISLAND ROAD IN PILSEN. USE THE MONEY TO BUY FOOD. KEY IS UNDER THE MAT WHEN YOU ENTER FROM THE STREET. (THERE WILL BE BEER IN THE REFRIGERATOR.)
 
MICHAEL

What a strange thing for her to be doing!

She thought she could remember this ‘Michael’ person.

He’d been at one of her presentations, and had introduced himself.

The last name was German,
she thought,
but she could not remember it.

What she did remember was that he was slight of build—not too much taller than she herself—and that he had a nice smile.

Had she been attracted to him?

Surely not.

After all, she’d seen him no more than two minutes.

Certainly she had not been attracted to him!

Would he ask her to go to bed with him?

Or would he have too much old world gallantry, Germanic reserve––simple courtesy?

Going to bed with Michael…and in Pilsen, for God’s sake.

Who went to bed with anybody in Pilsen?

She would not do it, of course. It showed too little respect for herself, for her values, for her upbringing.

Besides, he was not the German of her reveries.
That
German was tall. That fantasy German had the unruly lock of hair that all young German men seemed to have, as well as the habit of constantly throwing it back upon his head, constantly rearing his neck and shoulders violently upward so as to get rid of the stupid cowlick, get it far back from his face, making her ask herself as she saw the activity taking place over and over again, thousands of times each morning, millions of times by the end of each day…

“Why don’t you just cut the damned thing off?”

But this Michael did not have such an unruly lock of hair; he had a neatly trimmed goatee.

There was, in short, practically nothing at all sexy about Michael.

She did not find him particularly attractive.

And she would not go to bed with him.

She descended the stairs from the Pink Line station and began walking toward Pilsen. She was going through the hospital district now, and felt the same curiosity as she always did when visiting Pilsen (which she did with some regularity on festival days or holidays). She liked Pilsen. The trip into it always amused her, though, and disturbed her: the complete trip was divided, as Gaul had been, into four parts: in the northern neighborhoods, where she lived, people walked aimlessly, having been told that doing so would keep them healthy; in the Loop, everyone walked desperately, attempting to get into or out of the Loop as fast as possible; in the hospital district (through which she was now walking), no one walked at all, except for some rats, either dead or dying in the gutters.

In Pilsen, on the other hand (and she was now approaching Blue Island Street, a main artery)…in Pilsen, everyone was happy to be where one was. Exactly where one was. People moved, but circularly, not linearly. They did not want to go anywhere else, and, if they had come from somewhere else, it had been long ago to allow them to shake off the remnants of any type of displacement.

They were content to be behind the counters of innumerable Taquerios, making Boraches, or Gorditas, or Empiezas––and smiling through the windows at the people on the street, who, cognizant of the area’s rules against linear motion, sat upon benches and gazed into the restaurants, ogling food.

Or they were content to sit upon stone porches leading up to row houses, with a ten foot plot of garden in front of them, and seven deliriously happy children tumbling over themselves, screaming in ecstasy.

Or they sat in dark taverns, watching soccer games that never ended, and were accompanied by low rumblings of commentary from wall-bound televisions, from which, at precisely ten minute intervals, desperate screams of “GOL! GOL! GOL!” flooded into the barrooms, leaving the spectators, who were sipping one Carte Blanca after another, completely unmoved.

She entered a small place she’d discovered some months before. She bowed and smiled at the woman behind the counter, and the woman smiled back. They said some words in Spanish, then they bowed again and continued to smile. The woman was muscular and ravenblack-haired, but none of that mattered. All of it—her body, breasts, legs, white camisole top, red flower perched provocatively behind left ear, earrings dangling circular and golden below flower—all of the various aspects of her existence were obscured like daytime stars by the sun-like brilliance of her smile. It simply wiped everything else out. There might have been a great, even, sea of dull blue-white around it, but it was so dazzling as to make even that evanescence perceptible to the human eye.

“Ahh, dos Churachos…”

She responded to Carol’s hesitant order as one might respond to news of a birth.

“DOS CHURACHOS!”

“Y tres gorditos com pollo…”

“TRES GORDITOS CON POLLO!”

After a time, the order was placed, amid much celebration and congratulation (MUY BIEN: TRES TOSTADOS! PERFECTMENTE!)—and Carol had the feeling that even the loafers, passers-by, children, and non-leashed dogs (Thank God––finally dogs without leashes)—were nodding in approval, as though she were not buying dinner but taking communion.

“GRACIAS! MUCHAS MUCHAS GRACIAS!”

Six dollars and seventy-three cents for a brown sackful of aluminum wrapped—things. And seven small plastic cups filled with evil-looking multi-colored sauces. Red sauce; green sauce; brown sauce; milky white sauce…

Several people nodded at her as she left the taqueria, and, through the plate glass window, she could see the woman behind the counter jumping up and down, waving both arms in the air, and screaming, “ADIOS!”

She turned the corner, walked by two Catholic churches, a Lotto shop, a music store, four more taquerias––and came to the apartment where she was to spend the night, not going to bed with Michael.

It was a nondescript row house, green paint peeling a bit, but otherwise all right. On the steps of the row house next to it, a small boy sat perfectly still, watching her. He could have been a brown statue with a black, tousled wig. A cold north wind rustled through the wig, moving dark strands of hair here and there…but the statue itself did not move, and, as Carol ascended the stairs leading up from the street, she wondered how a young human could remain so completely motionless.

She opened the door and walked, a bit uncertainly, into the dark vestibule beyond.

Immediately before her was a doormat.