Her eyes came open in the middle of the night and she knew that something was wrong without even turning her head.
The Commerce Vista ran right up to the edge of the highway, and it didn't have any of this exit-ramp nonsense. One minute you were going sixty miles an hour and the next minute you were skidding across yellow dust and broken glass, trying to kill speed. Whenever someone performed this maneuver, Eleanor heard it and opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was always the white aluminium front of the mobile home. If the car then turned on to her particular lane, its headlights would sweep across the surface.
It had just happened a few seconds ago. And now she heard footsteps crunching in the gravel, right outside of the car.
She lifted her head slowly and quietly. A man was walking in front of her car. A beefy, bearded white man, young-looking but with the bulk of middle age, dressed in jeans and a dark windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap. He moved confidently, as if he belonged in her front yard, as if he belonged on her front step.
Which he definitely did not.
Eleanor had practiced this; she had been ready for it since the first night in the Annex. As the man was mounting the steps to their front door, his back turned to her, she rolled out the front door of the car, dropping to her knees, pulling the gun out of the glove compartment, and took cover behind the corner of the mobile home, sighting down the side of the house, drawing a bead on the center of the man's windbreaker. From here he looked exactly like a silhouette target at the firing range.
He hadn't heard her yet. She raised her head for a second and looked at his car. It was a beat-up old sedan with no one else in it. The man had come alone. His mistake.
"Freeze! I'm covering you with a .45," she said. "I'm an Army veteran and I have fired hundreds of rounds into targets that were a lot smaller and farther away than you are."
"Okay," the man said. "Can you see my hands? I'm holding them up."
"I see 'em. Why don't you lace them together on top of your head and then turn around to face me."
"Okay, I'll do that," the man said. He did.
"What are you doing here?" Eleanor said.
"My job."
"You a robber?"
"No. I'm a cop. Detective Larsen of the Commerce City Police Department."
"Can you prove that?"
"I can prove it by showing you my ID," Detective Larsen said. "But in order to do that, ma'am, I'll have to take it out of my pocket, and it would be a shame if you misinterpreted that as reaching for a gun. So let's talk about this for just a second and see if we can negotiate a way for me to extract the ID from my pocket without giving you the wrong idea."
"Don't worry about it," Eleanor said, pointing the gun up at the sky and coming out from behind her cover. "Only a cop would talk like that."
"Well, let me show you my ID anyway," Larsen said. He turned sideways so that she could see his butt. He slowly reached around into his back pocket and took out a black wallet. He underhanded it twenty feet to Eleanor, then left his hands well away from his sides while she opened it up and looked at it.
"Okay," she said, tossing it back. "Sorry if I spooked you."
"Normally I'd be real pissed," he admitted. "But under the circumstances, ma'am, it's all right. You Eleanor Richmond?"
Larsen's face went all fuzzy and out of focus. Eleanor's eyes were filling up with tears. She didn't even know why, yet. "I got the feeling something real bad happened," she said.
"You're right. But it's going to be okay, considering."
"What happened?"
"You son is in the hospital in serious but stable condition. He's going to be all right."
"Car crash?"
"No, ma'am. He was shot."
"Shot!?"
"Yes, ma'am. Shot in the back by a suspected gang member, in downtown Denver. But he's going to be okay. He was very lucky."
Suddenly Eleanor was seeing clearly again. The tears had gone away. It was so shocking that just for a minute, curiosity overwhelmed everything else.
This was terrible. She should have been freaking out and panicking. Instead, she felt eerily calm and alert, like a person who had just been sucked out of an airliner into a cold, scintillating blue sky. Her life was completely falling apart now. She felt the complete abandon of a person in free fall.
"My son was shot and you're saying he's lucky?"
"Yes, I am, Mrs. Richmond. I've seen a lot of people shot. I ought to know."
"Detective Larsen, is my son in a gang and I don't even know about it?"
"Not as far as we can tell."
"Then why did they shoot him?"
"He was using a pay telephone downtown. And they wanted to use it."
"They shot him over a pay phone?"
"As far as we can tell."
"What, my son wouldn't let them use it?"
"Well, no one uses a pay phone forever. But he didn't give it up as quickly as they wanted him to. They didn't want to wait. So they shot him."
She frowned. "Well, what kind of a person would do something like that?"
Detective Larsen shrugged. "There's a lot of people like that nowadays."
"Well, why are our presidential candidates running around having sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses when we have people growing up in Denver, Colorado with no values?" Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered.
"Presidential politics aren't my speciality, ma'am." "Well, maybe they ought to be."
A few weeks later, Eleanor found herself sitting on a rather nice, brand-new wrought-iron bench in front of the Boulevard Mall in downtown Denver. She was in no mood to be at a mall, but circumstances put her here a couple of times a day.
Her son was convalescing, and taking his sweet time about it, at Denver County Hospital, which was a mile or so down south of the state capitol and the high-rise district. This part of town included the hospital, various schools, and museums - all of the municipal stuff. It also included the old downtown shopping district, which had been badly in need of some really devastating urban renewal for quite some time.
Just recently the urban renewal had come in the form of the Boulevard Mall, a brand-new pseudoadobe structure built on the bulldozed graves of more traditional retail outlets. It was near Speer Boulevard, only a few blocks from the hospital. A lot of bus lines converged there. Denver had hired some publicity genius who had come up with a catch phrase for the bus system: The Ride. This being the automotive West, where only tramps and criminals were thought to take public transit, the buses were slow, few, and far between, and so Eleanor had been spending a lot of time taking The Ride lately, or waiting for it, which was even more humiliating.
She consoled herself with the fact that it made sound financial sense. Sitting down with her calculator, like the banker she had once been, and weighing all the alternatives, she eventually figured out that the most logical way for her to spend her time was to take The Ride downtown twice a week, to this neighborhood. Along with all of its municipal buildings, it included a few big old mainline churches, several of which had gotten together and started up a food bank. Originally it was just to help Mexicans live through the Rocky Mountain winter, but in recent years it had started to attract a more diverse clientele. So while Eleanor was out of the house picking up cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal, and beans, Doreen was keeping an eye on Mother. In return, Eleanor gave Doreen some of the food and watched Doreen's kids for a couple of hours a day. This was known, among intellectuals, as the barter economy.
Since the shooting, she had added an additional stop: she would go out and visit Harmon, Jr., at Denver County Hospital. Harmon had learned, from his father, to hold his feelings inside and not complain about things, so sometimes it was hard to tell how he really felt. But he seemed to be doing okay psychologically, much better than Eleanor would have been if she had been shot in the back for no reason. As Harmon, Jr., came out from under the shock and the effects of the drugs, he got his old spark back, plus a little bit of a macho swagger that had not been there before. He had been shot and he had survived. That was one way to get a name for yourself in high school. The macho bit was cute, as long as he didn't take it too far.