Echols, Jennifer (12 page)

Chapter 11

He let me drive! It took him until night four, but he let me drive!

Well, only for a few minutes. And only a few feet. And not the police car.

A March storm had blown up, soaking the cold night with rain. A car skidded off the slick road at the Birmingham Junction and got stuck in the muddy shoulder.

While the driver pressed on the gas, John threw his weight onto the back bumper. The tires spun, and the car didn't budge.

I got out of the cop car to help, despite the rain. Not that I really expected to be of assistance. But it was better than waiting around for John, making him fruit cobbler in my mind. He signaled the driver, and we both pressed our weight against the back bumper.

At least, that's what I thought. I pushed as hard as I could, and the tires spun. Then I looked over at John.

He was standing up. Staring at my ass. Now that he called my attention to it, I
did feel
a draft where my jacket rode up as I bent over. He was staring at the tattoo on my lower back of a bird escaping from a cage. That tattoo had cost me months of tips. The artist charged me extra because getting a tattoo at under eighteen was illegal without my parents' consent.

I straightened and put my hand on my back. I hoped John wasn't considering a sting operation on a Birmingham tattoo studio. It was out of his jurisdiction.

No...he was considering 6:01 a.m. Thursday. He focused on my hand where he'd seen my tattoo a moment before. Slowly his eyes moved up my body to meet my eyes. He blinked against the rain and remembered he was On Duty.

Then he squinted at the driver. "This is too distracting. Go trade places with that guy. It's
his
Goddamn car."

So I slipped into the driver's seat and watched in the rearview mirror for John's signal. When he pointed at me, I stomped the gas. The tires spun, then caught. The car shot forward. I checked the mirror again. The driver was wet with rain but otherwise spotless. John, plastered with mud, wiped dirt from his mouth with his sleeve.

The driver happily skidded away. Back in the cop car, John blew mud out of his nose with a Kleenex from the trunk. "I hate to go home and change with less than two hours left in the shift. What do you think?" He sneezed.

"If I were a criminal—and I am
not
—I wouldn't find you very intimidating right now. I would find you bedraggled."

"'Nuff said."

His apartment was in one of those complexes with twenty buildings, all the same, that had sprung up along the interstate. They housed people who worked at the car factory here in town but didn't want to commute from Birmingham. That is, people with no life.

It was only a minute's drive from the Birmingham Junction. Why, he could probably hear the car crashes from his patio. He definitely could hear the drone of the interstate. I heard it as soon as he pulled into a space and turned off the engine.

We sat there in silence, except for that hum of distant eighteen-wheelers, for ten seconds.

"Should you come in?" he asked.

"Why not? You don't want me to see your apartment?"

"It's not that. Somehow it just doesn't seem appropriate."

"I'm going to see it at 6:01 a.m. Thursday anyway. Unless you want to do it behind the storage buildings."

In the dim lights of the parking lot, I couldn't see him blushing. But I could
hear him
blushing as his breaths came more quickly.

"Yeah," he said, "but that's twenty-four hours from now."

I looked at my watch. "Twenty-five."

He pulled my wrist toward him and looked at my watch himself. Which sent sparks shooting down my arm, because he could have looked at his own watch. He chose to touch me instead.

"And forty-seven minutes," he said so close to my shoulder that I felt the low notes of his voice vibrate through me. "But if you stay in the car, I'll have to leave the keys so you can keep the heat on. And now that I've let you behind a steering wheel once tonight, I'm afraid you'll go for a joyride."

I smiled and winked at him.

"Come on in."

I expected his apartment to have walls, carpet, and kitchen tile the color of masking tape, as virgin as the day he moved in. Or little touches of homeyness, calico curtains and cookie-scented candles, left by the cobbler-baking phantom wife. This is not what I got. The living room was a gallery. Bold drawings crowded the walls, some framed, most tacked up bare.

My first thought was shock at what cool taste he had. My second thought was wonder at how he paid for actual drawings by actual artists. My third thought was suspicion the drawings were all by the same artist. They were similar in style, somewhere between photographic realism and manga. And similar to the little sketches in the margins of Johnafter's Spanish homework,
perro, sombrero, corazdn.

"You can draw!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah," his voice echoed from the kitchen.

"I mean
really draw,
like a professional. How can we claim to call a truce, and be friends, and plan for 6:01 a.m. Thursday, when you're hiding this whole other side of yourself from me?"

"I told you I would major in art, hypothetically."

"Yeah, but I thought the bullshit you fed me about lifting up the human spirit was compensation for not being able to draw."

He laughed.

I took a couple of steps over so I could lean around the kitchen doorway and see his dimples. "What do you use?

Is this chalk?"

"Oil pastel, and some pencil." "Instead of paint?"

"More control." He had taken off his muddy boots and stood in his socks by the sink. He reached up his pants leg, unstrapped a gun in a holster, and slid it onto the kitchen table. Then he ran the edge of his hand down his pants leg and threw the mud in the garbage can.

"No matter how careful you are," I said, "there's going to be a mess, and you're going to have to clean it up afterward."

"Mmph," he said, scraping off more mud.

I began beside the kitchen and moved around the living room, examining each drawing. Every one was a treasure of color and penciled detail. I could have stared at each of them for hours, but I felt like I had to hurry and get them all in. I would be back here at 6:01 a.m. sharp tomorrow morning, at which point I would be busy doing something else. And after that, I would never come back.

The drawings were like a map of his trip through Europe. There was the pyramid at the Louvre, the Matterhorn, and beach after beautiful beach that could have been anywhere on the Mediterranean. People stood in the foreground with their backs turned, enjoying the view.

People, punctuated with the occasional green alien, or an elephant wearing a hat.

Strange that all this was hiding in that dark blue uniform.

In it, or behind it.

I made the entire circuit of the room, came even with the kitchen again, and stopped short in front of my favorite drawing so far. Venice, judging from the canal boats and the colorful buildings. A boy and a girl, too distant for details, stood in the middle of a bridge over the canal. But just to one side of them, the drawing dissolved into blank paper.

"That's one of my favorites," John said from the kitchen. "I hate that I couldn't finish it. The street flooded at high tide, and I had to move."

I nodded like I knew all about the streets flooding at high tide in Venice when you were trying to finish your drawing.

The last frame in the room, beside the front door, wasn't a drawing but a large photo of a family of four, with clothes and hair that would have been fashionable in the late nineties. Printed in black and white, the way people displayed photos that were really special. Blonde mother, dark father. The blond little boy with the dark eyes was John. The blond teenager with longish hair must have been his brother. Other than light eyes, he looked more like John than John.

"Does your brother live here in town?" I asked. Water ran in the kitchen. John was washing his hands. He dried them on a towel and looked at them. "John?"

He washed his hands again.

I used my best guilt-ridden murderess voice. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"

"Macbeth.
Tenth grade." He dried his hands.

"Does your brother live here in town?" I repeated.

"No, he left." He unbuckled his gun belt and laid it on the kitchen table beside the holster from his leg.

"Can I touch it?" I crossed the living room, into the kitchen, and peered at the guns in their holsters. "Do you think I'll shoot you?"

He watched me with an amused smile. "Actually, I was thinking I should show you some basics, as part of your education this week. Or in case I get knocked out in the next twenty-five hours, and you're left in the vehicle with an unconscious police officer and a loaded weapon."

I hadn't expected him to agree. "You can't be too careful with guns," I reminded him.

He picked up one of the pistols and showed me some basics anyway. How to take out the clip of bullets, and how to check for a bullet in the chamber. He seemed to be concentrating on the gun. But there was no way he missed the way my hands shook on the table as he went through these motions so familiar to him.

I didn't want to see his sympathetic look for a frightened girl. I hated myself for being frightened.

He offered the gun to me, with the muzzle pointed toward himself. "No bullets," he said. "Safe."

I held out my shaking hand, and he placed the gun in my palm.

"Heavy," I said. Foreign. Strange to hold it in my hand. Warm from his body.

I held it as long as I could stand it, then offered it back to him—with the muzzle pointed toward the door, not myself. "Okay, I'm through with it."

"So soon?" He took the gun gently back from me.
Click, click, pop,
and it was together again.

"I am full of fear."

"Of a gun?" He cocked his head to one side, watching me. His voice was honey as he guessed, "Of 6:01 a.m. Thursday."

I’d never been scared of sex. It was what might come after that terrified me, tethers tying me down here. I shivered.

He touched my shoulder. "God, here I am worried about what I look like to suspects when you're soaked, too. Come with me."

I followed him through the living room and into his bedroom. More drawings covered the walls. On his bedside table sat a police scanner, humming, occasionally crackling with Lois's voice.

He disappeared into his closet and brought out a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with the words
To Protect and Serve.