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The sergeant rolled his eyes. “Stella, you gotta work the public-relations angle here. What’s Pete gonna say when I tell him how you acted?”
That got my attention. “You’re not going to tell Pete, Randy,” I said. “I’m serious. He doesn’t need to hear about tonight from anybody but me, okay? Let me tell him myself.”
The sergeant sighed. “Stella, I gotta work with the man. You only gotta live with him. He’ll go easy on you, but me, I gotta cover my ass. How’s it gonna look, me letting you get hurt on your first undercover gig, huh? Besides, it’ll be all over the department by tomorrow. You can’t keep a thing like this quiet. I’m putting you in for a commendation.”
I frowned. “I don’t want a commendation, Randy—I want to make detective.”
Randy rubbed the five-o’clock shadow that made his already dark skin seem three shades darker. “You gotta be patient, Stella. You’ve only been with the department, what, four years?”
I nodded, feeling a knot tighten in my stomach. It was the good-old-boy system that kept me and Randy from getting ahead and he and I both knew it. It had nothing to do with time in or how well you performed.
“Just try, all right, Randy?” He nodded and held the door open while I hobbled out. “Leon brought your car over,” he said, and handed me the keys.
“Oh, great! You let him drive it?”
Randy smiled. “Stella, you gotta have more patience with Leon. He’ll get the hang of it sooner or later. Besides,” he added, “Leon was the only guy left on the squad tonight. We’re short-staffed. I had no other option. I never thought this—”
“Don’t worry about it, Randy. I know you were doing the best you could.”
I hadn’t told him about Leon and I wasn’t going to—nope, that was something I was saving for a personal face-to-face with the rookie.
“All right,” I said. “Whatever. Just don’t call Pete. Let me go home and tell him myself. Maybe I can make him see it in a positive light. I’ll tell him I tripped.”
“Stella,” Randy warned, “he’s the best officer in the department. He’s gonna find out.”
“Yeah, but maybe I can cushion the blow for him first.” I grinned. “That is one of the benefits of the job, you know. I get to keep the loincloth, and the girls at the club taught me a couple of moves I didn’t even know were physically possible. Maybe I can try my act out on Pete and he’ll—”
“Stella,” Randy said, “just go home and stay off your foot! I don’t want to see you back at work for a week, okay?”
“My plan exactly,” I said, and grinned at him as if I really meant it.
You gotta get up early to fool a cop like Pete O’Brian. He had a nose for trouble and would spot a lie a million miles away. I had to be more than a little clever.
I plotted Pete’s ambush the entire way home. He’d be asleep, naked like always, and I’d take him by surprise, slipping between the sheets, running my tongue all over his sexy, strong body. What man could resist a little midnight rendezvous?
I could tell him about Needle Nose later, and then he could strut around and tell me how he should’ve been there to take care of me. I could act as if I really needed him to save me from myself, which might not be too much of an act given the night’s events. I could even play the whole thing down, so he wouldn’t get jealous. I knew Pete would be just a little bit jealous. He always wanted to be the hero. One day I might break him of it, but not now. For now, I’d just keep training, honing my skills and trying to keep Pete from ever realizing that I was getting to be one hell of a cop. He’d come to accept me as an equal, maybe, one day, just not now.
I shook the negative feelings off and drove. I had the next couple of hours all planned by the time I turned into the trailer park. Pete might not like assertive, even aggressive, females on the job, but in bed it challenged him. Sex with Pete was great.
I cut the lights, turned off the engine and coasted to a stop in front of our single-wide trailer. Pete loved surprises, especially naked, under-the-covers surprises. Well, he was going to see a new side of me tonight, all right, the blond exotic-dancer temptress was on her way to blow his mind in a way he wouldn’t soon forget.
Too bad my partner, Lou Ann, beat me to it.
I saw her car sitting on the pad next to Pete’s Jeep. Had she heard about Needle Nose and come to tell Pete? I hopped out of the Camaro and let the door shut quietly behind me while I fumbled for my house key. She could have listened to the scanner and heard about me being hurt. She came over to reassure Pete and wait for me, I told myself, but the explanation didn’t quite fit. In the first place, why would Lou Ann and Pete wait for me in the dark? Secondly, Lloyd was sitting on the stoop and there was only one reason why Lloyd ever sat outside on the stoop.
I walked slowly across the grass to the trailer, my heart pounding hard against my chest. There was a very dim light flickering in the master bedroom. As I drew closer, the not so gentle shaking of the trailer walls crumbled my frail tower of denial.
I walked up to Lloyd and patted him on the head. He looked up at me with huge brown sympathetic dog eyes and whined.
“I share your pain,” I whispered. “Is this why your real mom left?”
Lloyd licked my hand and looked away. I’d struck a nerve. We both knew, in our heart of hearts, that the only reason Pete kept the little black-and-white spotted mutt around was that he hoped maybe one day Tracy would come back for him. He never said as much, but you could tell. It was all in the way he ignored the dog but refused to get rid of him, or in the way he sighed sometimes and said, “Tracy used to…” Before now, I’d prayed Tracy never returned to claim her prize. Now I realized why she’d left in such a hurry, never to return.
Lloyd whined again, reclaiming my attention by butting his head against my leg. The only time Lloyd camped out on the back steps was when Pete and I had sex. Lloyd’s nerves couldn’t take it. He always tried to jump up on the bed and rescue us from ourselves. This distraction seriously irritated Pete, so Lloyd got shoved unceremoniously out the back door, where he waited with an almost unbearable level of trembling separation anxiety.
“You’re a good boy, Lloyd,” I said, and bent to pet him again. “Now you stay here and let me handle this.” Only I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to do, or how I was going to deal with my partner and my boyfriend betraying me. It was one thing to stay tough on the outside, but inside I was shaking harder than Lloyd.
I slipped into the kitchen, padding barefoot across the floor in an attempt to catch them unaware. This stealth was completely unnecessary. You could’ve driven a truck through the quaking trailer and not disturbed Pete and Lou Ann. When I reached the doorway, he had her up on all fours in the center of our bed. Her enormous breasts swung back and forth as he hung on to her hips, driving into her with everything he had.
“You’ve been a bad little girl, haven’t you?” he snarled, slapping her fat butt with a loud crack.
Lou Ann was pleading. “No, Daddy, don’t spank little Lou Ann!”
“Bad girl!” Pete cried, and brought his hand down again with a sharp smack. “Bad, bad girl!”
“Oh, I’d say she isn’t the only bad kid in the classroom,” I said.
They jumped apart, Pete shoving Lou Ann so hard she collapsed in front of him with a gasp and had to struggle to flip back over.
I don’t know when I pulled the gun out of my pocketbook. All I know is, I was standing there and it was in my hand, and the violent side of me was in complete control again.
“I wouldn’t move,” I said, when Pete appeared to be considering it. “Really.”
I aimed and put the first bullet into the wall beside his head.
Pete froze and put his hands out in front of his body like a traffic cop. “All right, baby, all right. Now, just calm down. I can explain.”
“Fuck you, Pete!” I said. “You can’t explain fucking my partner any more than Lou Ann here can explain fucking my boyfriend, can you, honey?” I put the second bullet into the mattress six inches away from her thick left thigh and was rewarded with a terrified shriek.
“How long have you two been meeting like this?” I asked, trying to recall all of Lou Ann’s recent sick days.
“Baby, I swear, this was the first time!” Pete said. “Now baby, really…” He started to shift toward me, and I lifted the gun, aiming it dead center at his chest.
“Do you feel like trying me, sweetheart?” I asked. “Because I don’t care if you do. Dead is dead, but I’m thinking I just might take the family jewels instead. Wouldn’t that give you a little more to think about? Wouldn’t that be just the right thing for this particular occasion?” I lowered the gun a few millimeters and smiled as his balls shrank up behind his already invisible penis. “Bad boy,” I murmured. “Bad, bad boy!”
I looked over at Lou Ann for a fraction of a second, knowing Pete would make a move if he found an opening. “So, you tell Dave and the kids you’re fucking Pete, or did you save that for me to do?” I asked her.
Lou Ann’s face paled. “Oh, Stella, don’t do that!” she cried.
I could feel my body begin to tremble with rage and grief. I couldn’t stay in the trailer too much longer or I really would hurt somebody, like maybe myself.
“So what did I do to deserve this, Pete?” I said, looking back at him, never moving the Glock from its target.
“Baby, you didn’t have a thing to do with this….” he began.
“Damn straight, I didn’t,” I said. “And I never will, not ever again.” I backed up a step. “That’s the trouble with weak men,” I said. “They can’t handle strong women. You and Lou Ann ought to be perfect for each other.”
I kept walking backward, keeping Pete in my sights, daring him to leave the bed before I turned and walked out of his life forever. I took in every detail of the room, memorizing everything, the way Pete and Lou Ann looked together naked, the way the sheets and blankets puddled in a heap at the foot of the bed, the fear in Lou Ann’s eyes and the blank look on Pete’s face. I was forcing myself to commit the unthinkable to memory so that I would never, ever be tempted by Pete’s charm to forgive him and start over. No, this was a lesson I was going to learn and never need to repeat, a lesson I’d somehow forgotten to learn from other lovers in the past and one that was almost killing me now.
I felt the shaking begin to get worse as I closed the kitchen door behind me and stepped out onto the stoop. I almost tripped over Lloyd in my hurry to get down the stairs and escape before anything worse could happen.
He yipped as I squashed his paw and stared up at me with his huge dark eyes.
“You were trying to tell me, weren’t you?” I said as I passed him.
I kept on going, crossing the dry, crunchy grass and half-running toward the car. I jumped in, started the engine and threw the car into Drive as Pete appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Stella! Wait!” he cried.
I put my foot on the accelerator, lurched forward, pulling even with the back steps, then stomped on the brakes.
“Honey, really, come on inside. Let’s talk about this,” he said. “Come on, Stel, where are you going to go, huh? Come on, baby.”
I saw a flash of Lou Ann behind him, hastily pulling on her jeans and hopping around on one leg. She was panicked; I knew that much, and that made me perversely happy.
I put the car into Neutral and opened the driver’s side door. Pete looked hopeful, probably thinking that with just the right approach he could smooth the entire thing over.
“Well,” I said. “I guess you’d better pick one of us. Tracy left you. She’s never coming back. Are you going to keep on waiting for a miracle, or are you ready to start over, too?”
Pete looked puzzled, then almost relieved, but it was Lloyd who never wavered. He bounded down off the steps, crossed the yard and leaped into the car with a joyful bound of doggy delight.
“Pete?” I said, my voice a sweet coo of encouragement.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Bite my smooth, tender ass!”
With that, Lloyd and I drove away, laying rubber down the narrow trailer park road, screeching out onto the main drive and flying away from Pete and Lou Ann as fast as we could, the cool night air slapping our faces and drying the tears that for some reason lasted only a few minutes.
Chapter 2
Lloyd and I drove around Garden Beach for the better part of an hour before I came to any conclusions or developed a working plan. My cell phone rang continuously and I finally had to turn it off so I could think without interruption. It seemed to me that I’d lost just about everything I’d come to Garden Beach to find. Losing Pete was probably the least of my worries. I’d also lost my partner—the person who was supposed to be watching my back had been flat on hers with my boyfriend. That hurt, but even that wasn’t my biggest loss.
Garden Beach, Florida, was a small town with a small police force. Pete and I couldn’t coexist in the same department. He was the department’s hero, the wonder cop who always got his man, or now, woman. It wouldn’t take long for Pete and Lou Ann to spread the rumor that I was unstable and that they were the two injured parties. They’d tell people about me firing my service weapon at them. My reputation, and worse, my opportunities with the force, would be dead, and even Needle Nose Robanski’s capture wouldn’t salvage that. No, if I was going to remain in law enforcement, I’d have to move on.
At 5:00 a.m., I pulled into the police department parking lot.
“I’ll be right back,” I promised Lloyd, and limped in through the rear entrance. I slowly made my way down the empty corridor to Randy’s closet of an office, stepped inside and closed the door behind me. I reached into my purse for the gun, dropped the magazine out, and left the police-issued Glock sitting empty in his top desk drawer. I grabbed my shield and felt tears stinging my eyelids as I ran my fingers over the gold-and-silver badge one last time. I dropped it into the drawer beside the gun, closed it and walked out of the office before I could change my mind.
I went into the women’s dressing room next, spun the combination to my locker and found the street clothes I’d worn in to work the night before—a pair of denim shorts, flip-flops and a worn T-shirt that said Garden Beach Police Softball League. I changed, slammed the locker shut and left before the first shift people started arriving. My ankle throbbed and I felt like shit. How had I so totally screwed up my life in such a short amount of time?
I spent the next three and a half hours with Lloyd, sitting on the beach, drinking coffee, feeding Lloyd a chicken biscuit I ordered but then couldn’t stomach and saying goodbye to my old life. I was feeling about as sorry for myself as Needle Nose was probably feeling over in the county lockup. Only, maybe Needle Nose was luckier. His future was all behind him. He could count on a trial followed by a thousand-year jail term. I had no idea what was going to happen with me.
At 9:03 a.m., I walked into the credit union and withdrew every last dime from my joint account with Pete. The grand total came to $384.96. I took the money and didn’t look back. What goes around comes around, I thought. Besides, he could always sell the clothes and few personal items I’d left behind, couldn’t he?
“Look at this, Lloyd,” I said when I got back to the car. “That’s all we had to show for ourselves, just under four hundred dollars. Ridiculous, huh?”
Lloyd looked over at me and smiled. His doggy tongue hung out the left side of his mouth, and his soft black-and-white ears drooped across his face, half hiding his eyes.
“I know it’s a small fortune to you. Hey, maybe that’s why your mama didn’t take you with her when she left. Maybe there just wasn’t enough dog-food money to go around, huh?”
I think this hurt Lloyd’s feelings because he sighed softly and turned away from me.
“Lloyd,” I said, trying to make it up to him, “both of us have been in bad spots before. You lost your mom, and I lost both my parents. You’ve probably had your share of bad love affairs and, well, we both know how my love life is going. But we can’t focus on the negative. We’ve got to be positive. Things are bound to look up.”
Lloyd didn’t seem too encouraged by this line of reasoning. He moaned, keeping his attention focused on the passing scenery.
“What I’m trying to say is, we’re survivors. We’ll get by.” My pep talk was starting to depress me, so I changed strategies. “What we need here is a little T.L.C and a fresh start. You’re going to like it where we’re going.”
I pulled the Camaro up onto A1-A and started to accelerate. Behind us, I could see the sparkling blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the sugary white sands that ran along the panhandle. It had been my oasis from the cold gray north, but no longer. I was leaving and maybe never coming back. I’d run away to Florida so I could find myself, so I could become someone else, someone I liked. What was I left with after six years of re-creating? I looked back at the ocean again. It had all been a mirage, a colorful, warm oasis that vanished when you stretched out your hand to touch it.
“Okay, Lloyd, it’s like Uncle Benny always says, ‘No matter where you go, there you are!’”
Lloyd belched.
“Okay, so he wasn’t the first to say it, he was just repeating it. That doesn’t make it any less true. I’m taking you home. We’ll go see Uncle Benny and Aunt Lucy. We could use a vacation, huh, boy? Maybe after a couple of weeks we’ll figure out where to go from there, all right? At least we left before they fired us. I could still work for another department. Maybe.”
Lloyd barked once and turned to look out the passenger-side window again. No matter where you go, there you are, I thought.
I reached over and switched on the radio. Granted, things were bleak, but that was a good thing, right? I mean, what was left to lose? What more could go wrong?
Ten miles later, Lloyd threw up his salvaged chicken-biscuit breakfast. It took another five miles to find an exit with a gas station and another thirty minutes to clean every crack and crevasse of the front passenger seat. By the time we got back on the road, I’d revised my opinion of our collective future. We were in the dismal swamp of life and sinking like elephants in quicksand. There was no happy ending and there would be no re-creating reality with pink-tinted glasses. Life just plain old sucked.
I turned the radio up and let Sheryl Crowe fill the empty space in my head. I didn’t want to think anymore. My logic was filled with more black holes than outer space, and thinking had become my biggest liability.
Lloyd must’ve agreed with me, because he didn’t say anything for the next 1,100 miles. We drove like participants in an around-the-world scavenger hunt, only stopping for gas and fast food. We slept in snatches at rest areas until at last, after twenty-eight hours on the road, we hit the familiar territory of my old hometown.
Lloyd woke up in time for our big arrival in Glenn Ford, Pennsylvania. He stretched and pulled himself up to stare out the windshield at the gray sky and billboards that advertised local businesses, whining a little and probably wishing I’d pull over and let him pee.
“Honest, Lloyd, it’s only two more miles. We’re about to cruise through midtown Glenn Ford. Look, there’s Banker’s Union. That’s where I had my first savings account!”
Lloyd was very unimpressed. When I turned onto the main drag I started the travelogue in earnest.
“Look, Lloyd, that’s Guinta’s drugstore. I used to stop in there every day on my way home from school and drink a vanilla soda.” Lloyd actually closed his eyes and shook his head softly. “Lloyd, there’s the place where they make the best hoagies! Lloyd! You’re missing small-town America. Come on, look!”
But Lloyd didn’t look and I didn’t have time to say another word. There was a loud explosion somewhere in the front of my car, and driving became difficult as the Camaro suddenly pulled hard to the right. Lloyd barked, and I gripped the wheel and with some effort pulled us up onto the tarmac of Carpenter’s Auto Body Shop, narrowly missing a rusted-out Oldsmobile.
I stared up at the sign. Carpenter’s Auto Body. Surely Jake hadn’t become a mechanic? I edged the car up a few more feet, felt the pull of the flattened tire and knew I had no other option. We were stuck here, Jake or no Jake.
I looked at Lloyd, then reached over and stroked his head. “It’s all right, sweetie,” I said. “We’re home. At least the car had the good sense not to blow until we made it.” I looked out the window at the unfamiliar auto shop and smiled. “Hey, we even broke down in a gas station! Isn’t it great? I told you life would look up!”
I swear Lloyd rolled his eyes at me.
The sign on the door of the shop said Closed in big orange letters. I looked at my watch; it was almost 11:00 a.m. How could it be closed? It wasn’t a holiday. I opened the car door, stepped out onto the tarmac and stretched. No sign of life anywhere. I walked around the front of the car slowly, obviously inspecting the right front tire. It was flat as a pancake.
I walked around to the back of the car, popped the trunk and stared inside at the space where the spare should’ve been, and then remembered I’d taken it out so I could fit my undercover equipment in its place. I shivered, realizing that the outskirts of Philadelphia were a lot colder than the Florida Panhandle in mid-November.
This was so not what I needed. A flat tire, no spare and me wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I stared back up at the darkened auto body shop. Maybe they were all inside drinking coffee and eating bagels. Maybe if I walked up to the door and banged, someone would take pity on me and come fix the flat.
