Survival Clause, стр. 38

We had family we could drop Carrie off with if we wanted a proper date, but there was no need to point that out. It was a kind gesture. “Thank you,” I said.

“No problem, princess.” She whisked Carrie off toward the kitchen.

I turned to Rafe, who reached across the table and twined his fingers with mine. “Just the two of us.”

“For the couple of minutes it’ll take her to show off the baby and come back.”

“We better make the most of it.” He lifted my hand and kissed my fingertips and then the inside of the wrist.

“That’s getting a little personal for Beulah’s,” I told him, and retrieved my hand. He chuckled, but didn’t try to hold on to it. “So this is one of the places where your friend checks in.”

Rafe nodded. “He has a couple ways of communicating if he needs to. But so far everything seems slow on that front.”

“Maybe there just aren’t any others to be rounded up. Maybe once Lance ended up in prison—” And his name hadn’t actually been Lance, but I still thought of him that way, “anyone else who was out there just decided to fade away quietly.”

“Might could be,” Rafe nodded and glanced at the menu. “You know what you wanna eat?”

I didn’t, so I spent a minute perusing the specials. We’d been at Beulah’s enough that I knew the standard fare well enough not to have to check that. “Cobb salad.”

“That don’t sound like it’s gonna be enough fuel for what I have in mind for later,” Rafe said, “but you do what you want.”

“If you’re looking at other women’s rear ends, don’t you think I should take better care of my own?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with your rear end, darlin’,” my husband informed me, “and if you’d been walking in front of me, I woulda been looking at it. Eat what you want.”

Fine. “What do you have in mind for later?”

“Nothing we can discuss in public,” Rafe said, and glanced around the interior of the restaurant. He’s adept at hiding his reactions, but I’ve known him long enough now—and have watched him intently enough—that I caught the slight check when he saw someone he knew.

“Who’s back there?” I made to turn, and he shook his head.

“Don’t. It’s Tucker.”

“Sergeant Tucker? From the police department?”

He nodded.

“Uh-oh.” This could get ugly. Or so I assumed. Tucker hadn’t been real happy when he slammed away from Green Street and Broad two nights ago, and he hadn’t liked Rafe much before then. “Have you seen him since?”

“In passing,” Rafe said, keeping his eyes on a packet of sugar he was turning over in his hands. “We haven’t talked.”

“Grimaldi talked to him, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I wasn’t there, though.”

Probably a good thing. “Did he have to go on administrative leave or anything?”

“No,” Rafe said, still contemplating the sugar packet. “He didn’t do nothing wrong. That’s why he’s gonna be even more angry about me picking him off of Curtis.”

“Has he seen you?”

“Not yet. He’s talking to Mo.”

Mo—Maureen Boyd—is one of the waitresses. A woman into her middle years, with an impressive beehive hairdo, she’s worked for Beulah’s practically as long as I’ve been alive.

“I’ve seen him here before,” I said. “With Felicia Robinson. A few days before… you know.”

Before Felicia had been shot and killed in the line of duty, by the same guys who had shot—and failed to kill—Rafe.

He nodded. “They were friendly. Tucker knows Felicia’s mama.”

“Well, just pretend you haven’t noticed him. If he wants to acknowledge you, he can. Otherwise, let him be.”

“Hard for him to get past me without some kind of acknowledgement from either of us,” Rafe said dryly, and of course that was true. There was only the one aisle, and it wasn’t wide. But at least there was no point in calling Tucker out prematurely. If he wanted to cause a scene, he could do it when he left.

Maureen made her way over to our table and cocked a hip. “Yvonne getting your drinks?”

I nodded. “She took the drink orders and the baby. I’m not sure where she got to.”

“Showing her off in the kitchen,” Maureen said, with a glance that way. “I’ll go check on the drinks. You folks know what you wanna eat?”

Rafe ordered the meatloaf. I went against my better judgment and asked for fried chicken with mashed potatoes and carrots. Salad would have been better for me, but if Rafe had plans for later, and he thought I needed to keep my strength up, I figured I’d better be ready for whatever he had planned.

Maureen wandered off again, and Rafe lowered his eyes back to the sugar packet. It was unusually coy of him—he doesn’t normally mind confrontation. When I commented on it, he told me, “Tucker didn’t like me to begin with. To him, I’m still that eighteen-year-old punk he arrested for trying to beat the crap outta Billy Scruggs, but now he has to be polite to me. And not just that, but I got Felicia killed—”

“You did not!”

If anyone had gotten her killed, other than the man who shot her, it was me. I was the one who had suggested that she could volunteer for the job of keeping surveillance on him.

He put a finger across his lips. “From where he’s sitting, I did. If it hadn’t been for me, Felicia would still be alive. He ain’t wrong.”

Perhaps not. But that didn’t make it Rafe’s fault.

“Don’t make no difference,” he told me. “He don’t like me. What happened the other night didn’t help. And one of these days, Tucker might be the only thing standing between me and another bullet. When that happens, I don’t want him to step outta the way because he’d rather see me dead.”

No. I didn’t want that, either.

“I’m trying my best to stay on good terms with him. Life ain’t making it easy.”

No, it wasn’t. “Just focus on dinner,” I told him. “If