Free Redhanded by Michael Cadnum Page B

trouble with a renegade spaghetti noodle, and finally got it into his mouth. “Your Dad thinks every human being should wear a forty-five strapped to his hip.”
    My mother beamed at my father through her lashes, renewing a time-honored disagreement. “Daddy has liberal views on gun control,” she said.
    â€œLiberal, as in—the more firearms the merrier,” said Dad.
    â€œAnd what I was thinking, Steven,” said Mom, giving me a sideways look. “Maybe you could come down and help out.”
    I took a sip of ice water.
    My mother could see my surprise, and my reluctance, so she sidestepped. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But in the next few days. Fly down to Palm Springs—Daddy and I can pick you up, and you’ll have a change of scenery.”
    I put down my fork. This was not the vision I had, Mom staying in the desert day after day. I knew that if Dad could work the magic on Mom that he did on half the women in the East Bay, she would come back and live with us.
    I said, “I’m busy with my boxing.” I’m fighting a grown man named Stacy Martell tomorrow, I wanted to say.
    You picture a man you are going to fight the next day very clearly, visualizing his nose and mouth and eyes.
    Mom absorbed this, or made a show of it. Then she asked, “Are you and that new girl Danielle still …” She made a little loop-the-loop with her fork, signifying anything from friendship to a passionate love affair.
    I had mentioned Danielle in my E-mail. “We’re friendly,” I said, matching Mom’s ambiguity with some of my own.
    â€œAsk about Raymond,” said Dad, looking right at my mother, giving her a pointed instruction that won a level glance in return.
    She took a few moments, touched a piece of bread into the olive oil on the plate before her, use-worn china, hard-to-break.
    Then she asked, “How is Raymond?”
    I explained that Raymond was still exercising out at the gym, pounding the speed bag, and maybe I was convincing, maybe I wasn’t. My father had remarked to me that Raymond was developing a “furtive way” of looking around at things.
    Dad smiled and put a hand out to touch hers. She took his hand, and there was something about the way she opened his palm and patted it, like someone about to tell a fortune, that gave me a little hope.
    That night, alone in my room, I picked up my phone.
    Danielle had a list of phone numbers, her pager, her computer line, her personal phone, her mom’s. Danielle belonged to a golden retriever club, a swim club, a church group that sells chocolate, and a volunteer organization that visits people in the hospital. I called a couple of her numbers until I got her mom’s voice on the answering machine again, telling me I had reached Binnie and Danielle.
    I knew what must be happening, Danielle sitting there in the kitchen, screening calls, TV remote in her hand.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    Did I hear a sharp burst of argument in the night? My father’s snappy counterargument, pretending he didn’t understand why she was mad at him? My mother restraining her shout with a whiplash whisper?
    I made myself not hear my father explaining that he liked his friends—his women friends, especially—too much to let them go.
    I tried to send them a thought, calm down .
    The next morning I got up before dawn.
    The kitchen was making little, meditative noises, the fridge humming, the electric clock on the wall counting down the seconds, a sound you would never notice in daylight. Henry was silent under his cover. My dad hated to throw anything away—the bird drowsed under an old pajama top.
    It was a comfy lope to the crest of the hill, and then an easy pace back down again, four miles round-trip, saving plenty of stamina for today’s three rounds.
    I opened the front door quietly, not wanting to wake anybody.
    I stumbled. My mom’s duffel bag was there, right by the door, with a