Crescent City Connection

“Amazing Grace,” delivered in a female voice.
    You wouldn’t start a song
, he reasoned,
if you were about to turn the shower off.
Also, since it was a woman in there, she might put on her makeup or dry her hair before she came out of the bathroom. And he was ready to go.
    So he shoved the bundle under one of the beds, very gently unlocked the bathroom door, slipped quietly downstairs, and walked out the front door. Seeing a cop across the street, he made as if to lock the door and walked down the porch steps, bold as a banker. When he was far enough away from the house not to alarm the showering woman, he shouted, “What’s going on?” to further establish his bona fides. The officer only shook his head and continued his search. Summoning all his will power, Daniel began to whistle “Amazing Grace.”
    Walking briskly, as if he had to be someplace, but not so fast as to seem alarmed, he made his way to his truck, where he noticed for the first time that he was shaking so hard he could hardly find his keys. All he could think about was how angry his father was going to be.
    But to his utter surprise, the elder Jacomine, fiddling at his desk, broke into a smile when his son entered the house. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
    “Dad, we fucked up.” Might as well get it over with.
    “Oh, yeah, I know. Been listening to the radio. Thought you were the one down, boy. I’ve been worried.”
    “You have? About me?” Daniel was unaccountably touched.
    “You’re my son, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t I be worried?” His dad did not get up to hug him, but then he never did that. This was as good a reaction as could be expected.
    “We didn’t get her, Daddy.”
    “I know that, boy. I know that. Just tell me what happened. How’d you get away?”
    So he got to tell that part first, which was a blessing, as his father would say. When he told about unlocking the bathroom door, his father actually shivered. “Boy, you got balls of steel.”
    Daniel shrugged. “I spent years learning how to survive.”
    “Well, I’m proud of you. Real proud.” And without warning, he leaned back in his chair and laughed until he had to reach for a tissue to wipe his eyes. “So the woman in the shower might not figure out what happened for days.”
    “Could be years if she doesn’t clean under her bed very often—and from the look of it, she doesn’t.”
    “Still, there’s the locked back door. And you brought the paper and mug in—damn clever to think of that, by the way.”
    Daniel basked in his father’s too-rare praise. “She’ll just think she did it herself. You know how people are—she’ll say to herself, ‘I must be crazy; I did that and forgot about it.’”
    “You didn’t tell me how my granddaughter is. How’d she look?”
    “Great. Except for being bald.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t understand kids anymore—she dyed her hair black and cut it so short she almost looks bald.”
    His father actually laughed. “She probably thinks that’s some sort of disguise. So tell me something else, boy.” The laughter was gone now. His father leaned forward on his desk, eyes narrowing. His dangerous look. “How’d a smart boy like you let Devil-Woman follow him to that juice bar?”
    Well, fuck.
    He wasn’t going to take this. He’d done so well even his father admitted it; he wasn’t about to get blamed for something he didn’t do. “Daddy, I swear on my darling mother’s head—” that ought to get him “—I didn’t get followed. I didn’t spend all those years in Idaho learning survivalist techniques so I could do a damn-fool thing like that.”
    “Well, how do you account for the fact she got there at the same time you did?”
    “If she’d followed us, we’d never have gotten as far as we did. The woman’s a detective—she did what we did; looked up Isaac’s last employer.”
    His father stood up. “Detective, my fucking foot. Son of a motherfucking bitching bastard. That woman’s the spawn of the demon Lilith and the clove-footed beast from below.” He was spitting. “’Therefore says the Lord God … behold, I am against you; and I will execute judgments against you in the sight of the nations. And because of all your abominations I will do with you what I have never yet done and the like of which I will never do again…. You shall be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror, when I execute judgments on you in anger and fury, and with furious