Echols, Jennifer (4 page)

"There were no men in the cell with her."

"Would you give it a rest, After?" Lois said.

"Better yet," I said weakly, "give it a rest right now."

The cop removed his fingers from my wrist. "Do you have any medical conditions we should know about?" he asked me in his Official Capacity.

"Do I? What year is this?" I remembered running five miles that morning. "No, not today." I sat up slowly on the desk.

"Here, sweetie." Lois handed me a Sprite. I popped the top with tingling fingers and took one gulp.

"Drink faster," the cop said. "You can't have food or beverage in the cell."

"You are
not
going to put her back in there," Lois said in disbelief.

"Lois, I didn't pick her up for jaywalking. You're going to let her spend the night sipping Sprite and watching

TV?"

"The other three are spending the night at home with their mamas, in bed."

They stared each other down for a few seconds. "Shouldn't you be on patrol?" Lois hinted.

The cop cussed, stalked across the room, and flung open the door. This time an even larger piece of the cold night stepped inside as the door closed very slowly. He was gone.

"Thank you," I sighed.

"Mmmm-hmmm." Lois helped me down from the desk and back to my metal folding chair. She sat down, too, and spoke softly into her headset.

When she stopped talking and looked at me again, I asked. "What's his problem?"

"He's a good cop," she said. "A little too good, maybe."

"What's so good about him? He harassed me." I set down my Sprite and put my head in my hands. "If this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, I'll be gone to Birmingham soon. All I want is to graduate in June. And go to Miami next week."

She murmured into the headset. Then she asked, "Miami? What for? Spring break?"

"Yeah," I said dreamily.

"With your folks?"

"No, thank God. Tiffany and Brian and I are going with a bunch of seniors from school. It's chaperoned, but loosely. Everybody wants to go on this trip. Each year, the football coach gets the cheerleading sponsor drunk on the first night, and nobody hears from them again until the end of the week. It's a tradition."

Lois slumped a little in her chair. "I hate to be the one to break this to you, sweetie."

"Break
what
to me?" As if spending the night in the police station was too good to be true.

"I hope you don't think the officer who arrested you is through with you. I overheard him on the phone with the Powers That Be a little while ago. He's got your number."

"He's got my number?" Did she mean my phone number? He was planning to call me, despite his wife and fourteen children and the storage shed? He must he going through a midlife crisis.

"He's hitting you where it hurts," Lois said. "He wants to make sure you kids don't get out of these charges with your parents paying a fine. He wants
you
to pay. But he wants you rehabilitated, not sent to juvy. So he came up with a plan."

"I hate plans."

"One of you will spend a week riding with the fire truck, one with the ambulance, and one with the police patrol. All the people you dragged out to the railroad bridge in the middle of the night."

"What about the fourth one of us?" I asked, knowing the answer already.

She rolled her eyes. "I think everyone assumes that lawyer will get his druggie son off, like he always does."

Of course.

"And by the end of the week," she said, "you'll have to turn in a proposal to the Powers That Be for a project to discourage other kids from doing what you did."

God, how Goody Two-shoes. But I was sure I could bullshit my way through this stupid proposal in my sleep. "It doesn't sound too bad. The riding around part actually sounds like fun. Maybe they'll let me drive." It probably
would
sound like fun if I didn't feel right now like I'd been run over by that train.

"They want you to do it during the night shift," she said.

"I can handle that."

She shook her head sadly. "They want you to do it during your spring break, so you can spend a week on night shift without missing school."

It took a second to sink in. Then I screamed, "What? That cop is the Devil!"

"No, he just understands how teenagers think."

I wasn't sure this was true. The cop thought I had plans to spend my spring break getting drunk and showing off my tits. Yes, there was that. But there was more. I felt tears well up in my eyes as I pictured the vast blue Atlantic. My parents used to talk about taking me to Florida someday when they'd saved up money. That talk stopped a few years ago. Now I'd spent my entire life five hours from the beach without ever seeing the ocean.

My first thought was for myself, of course. But my next thought was for my mom. While someone else supposedly chaperoned me in Miami, my parents were planning to take their first vacation in four years, to Graceland. They could still go while I served my time on night shift. Anyone else's parents would go. But I knew my mom. She would stay home now. Hell, she'd ride with me in the cop car if they let her. She would cancel her vacation because of me, and I would suffer the Punishment Worse Than Jail: guilt. It was enough to drive a girl to drink. Again.

"I know it seems like the end of the world to you," Lois said, patting my knee. "That's exactly what he was counting on. But an adult can see that you are very, very, very lucky, and you should be grateful. Isn't this better than going to court?"

I considered this question. Bad things could happen at court. Probably I wouldn't get locked up, but there was an outside chance. I shivered and pulled my jacket closer around me.

If I got to ride in the ambulance, it might be better than going to court. I did not like ambulances, and I liked being closed into them even less. But Quincy, my paramedic friend, would ride with me. He understood my problem and could help me out. He'd been an ass to me at the bridge, but I figured he'd been putting on a Disapproving Adult act in front of the other Disapproving Adults.

Riding on the fire engine would be even better. I'd get a lot of sleep. There wasn't much to this town, so there wasn't much to catch on fire. Definitely better than going to court.

But I might have to ride with the cops. Specifically, my cop. In that case, I wasn't so sure it was worth it.

Chapter 4

Lois got off work at 6 a.m. and offered to take me home. She said I was supposed to stay in jail until my parents came to sign me out. But when I told her if they hadn't shown up by now, they wouldn't be here until the lunch crowd thinned out, she said screw that. Her exact words were, "Screw that. I'll take you on home, hon."

Like any fifty-year-old who had a little money saved up and considered herself a free spirit, Lois drove a VW Bug with a yellow faux flower in the dashboard bud vase to match the yellow paint job. As we stopped at the edge of the jail/courthouse/city hall parking lot to turn onto the highway, a police car pulled in. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cop raise his hand in greeting to Lois—and then he
erked
to a stop half in the parking lot, half on the highway. Yes, it was my cop. I wouldn't have thought he would notice me in the passenger side of Lois's car with the streetlights glinting off the windshield. However, I did have blue hair, which was like walking around with a Sims arrow over my head.

He rolled down his window and scowled at Lois, willing her to roll down her window, too. Uh-oh. He would call her out for transporting a hardened criminal without authorization. He would take me back inside. My heart pounded and my body braced for another blow from this man who'd decided I needed a nemesis, as if I didn't get enough of that from my dad already.

Lois floored it. The g-force pressed me back against the seat as the Bug tore onto the highway. The little engine whined in protest. "Give it a rest, Officer After," Lois muttered. "I'll put you over my knee and spank your bottom."

I turned to stare at her in surprise.

She glanced nervously over at me. "What."

"Nothing." I didn't want to admit I'd been too drunk to figure out the cop's name until now. And since she was nice enough to drive me home, it seemed rude to broach the subject of sexual relations during the graveyard shift at the police department. If she wanted to engage in extramarital spanking with a man ten years her junior, well, that was between her and Officer After and his wife and fourteen kids and Lois's iguana, et cetera. Though I seriously doubted that Lois—or anyone else—ever inflicted corporal punishment on Officer After. The whole way home she checked her mirrors, expecting blue lights to burst on behind us. But he had let us go.

She pulled into the diner parking lot. Gravel popped beneath the tires. Wiping his hands on a rag, my dad glowered out at me from behind the counter. Then he turned back to the grill.

"I don't want to see any more of you," Lois told me, "at least until next weekend. Keep your nose clean." She tapped the tip of her nose twice. Some of her heavy makeup had rubbed off overnight. Red veins showed through.

Yes ma 'am, I will,
would have been the polite thing to say. But I did not make promises. "Thanks for everything."

Instead of the diner, I headed for the trailer. It had come with the diner. My parents had decided we would live in it temporarily to save money until the diner got established as the town's premier eatery and they could afford to build their dream home. We lived here still.

The whole thing shook when I slammed the metal door behind me. The floor creaked as I walked to the bathroom. After my fainting spell in the jail, my body wanted to go for a jog and prove to me that it was not sick, it was not wasting away, it was okay. But my head throbbed. I needed more time to recover from the beer. And I was scheduled to work all morning. Something in my dad's glower had told me I'd better not use jail time as an excuse to skip out of work. I could jog later. I showered with the curtain open, mopped up the water on the floor with a towel. Then I slipped on a low-cut shirt that seemed inappropriate for work, yet 50 percent less inflammatory than my
Peer Pressure
T-shirt under the circumstances, and went to face the music.

I made my entrance through the front door so I could bus dishes and greet my dad with my arms already full. My mom sat in a booth with a couple of regulars, probably complaining to them about what I'd done now. She looked like the
before
on one of those TV makeover shows. Bad perm. Forty pounds overweight. Enormous T-shirt with a picture of a kitten, paws on its head, and a thought balloon: "Is it the weekend yet?" Which made absolutely no sense because both my parents worked through the weekend. We all did.

When my mom saw me, she opened her mouth. Her eyes darted to my dad behind the counter. She closed her mouth and watched me with a tortured expression as I passed. I knew my dad had coached her:
When Meg comes in, don't you go over there and hug on her like she won a beauty contest.

Without a word to anyone, I stacked dishes into the washer, tied on my apron, and took customers' orders. I waitressed and cooked, cleaning each little mess before my dad could point it out to me. If I worked fast enough, adrenaline put up a wall between me and my throbbing headache.

T was chopping sausage and reliving my jail time, wishing I knew exactly where Officer After had put his hands as he picked me up off the floor so I could turn the tables and get him in trouble with the Powers That Be, when my dad grumbled from the grill, "You've got a lot of nerve to come back here."

His beard hid his chin, so I couldn't tell anything from the set of his jaw. But his blue eyes snapped at the eggs on the grill. This was new territory. He might have washed his hands of me, but he'd never suggested I couldn't come home. Until now.

Normally the implied threat would have scared me silent. But Officer After had shocked the life out of me quite a few times over the course of the night, and I'd had enough. I banged the knife down on the cutting board beside the sausage. "Oh, you're kicking me out of the 'house'?" I made finger quotes. "And you're 'firing' me?" My parents made me work, but they didn't pay me. I reminded them of this whenever I got in trouble. "Good luck getting Bonita to cover my shift. She keeps her grandkids in the mornings."

He glanced up to make sure my mom was on the other end of the kitchen, out of earshot. Then he hissed, "I don't give a shit what your mother says. I'm tired of you playing her like a piano. I'm taking her to Graceland like we planned."

"You—" I stopped short. There was no point in whispering.
You 're sending me to juvy? He
would say I'd sent myself. Just then my mother dropped a baking pan with a
clang like
the jail cell door closing. The blood drained from my face and pooled around my feet. My heart sped up, pumping nothing. But I would not let my dad see me faint over this. I leaned farther forward over the counter and chopped more sausage, wondering vaguely where the knife would cut me when I lost consciousness.

My dad growled at me, "
You
are going to spend your spring break pulling night shift with that cop After, like the DA said on the phone. And then you're going to work morning shift here. If you have the energy to get yourself arrested in the eight hours you have left in the day..." Expertly he slid his spatula under the eggs and flipped them to cook on the other side without breaking the yolks.
"Vaya con Dios. "

I watched the eggs sizzling on the grill, the yolks slowly growing darker. "What do you mean, I'm pulling night shift with After? I thought I might be on the fire truck or the ambulance."

"That's not what the DA said." My dad turned to me for the first time, blue eyes hot with fury. "You think you've got some more to learn riding in the ambulance?"

"Been there, done that," I sang, using the knife to scrape the sausage from the cutting board into a bowl. I pretended to put together the rest of the hash brown casserole with busy efficiency like I was kicking ass on
Iron Chef
But I was thinking of Officer After, his dark eyes sliding to my cleavage, his phantom hands on my helpless body. Now that I knew about my punishment, I rather liked the idea of taunting him with my sexy if by some chance we happened to be paired together. Screw his wife.

But if he'd not only masterminded the demise of my spring break but also
chosen
me to spend it with, he was back in control. Maybe he even intended to have his way with me. Stranger things had happened. More horrible things.

And I would deserve it.

*

"You stay in the vehicle," Officer After commanded me. "I may have to draw my weapon."

I frowned across the front seat at him. I had thought he might make me sit in the backseat tonight. Glory be, I had graduated to the front. And he didn't have a military haircut anymore. In the week since our unfortunate meeting, it had filled out into an almost normal haircut. He no longer looked like he'd just gotten back from Iraq.

Then I glanced at the rusty Caddy ahead of us on the shoulder of the highway, awash in broad strokes of blue from the police car lights. "Your weapon? Do you mean your gun? Why? They were just speeding."

"You haven't seen what I've seen. Yet." He used the controls in his door to raise my window, which I'd kept down all night despite the cold.

"Part of my assignment is to go with you everywhere and find out what your job is really like. I can't do that from the car."

"I think there's a rule that when my weapon comes out, you stay in the vehicle."

"No rule like that was specified by the Powers That Be."

He sighed through his nose. "If you get wounded, I'm pretty sure I'll be reassigned to jail guard duty." "I won't get wounded."

"I'm not going to argue with you. Do what I say." He opened the door.

"Wait a minute," I said, putting one hand on his bare forearm.

He looked down at my hand.
Don't touch me while I'm in uniform.
So much for his wanting to have his way with me.

I snatched my hand away. "Sorry. Reflex. But look, you can't leave me locked in your car. What if
you
get shot and I'm stuck in here?"

I didn't believe he'd get shot. I didn't believe
anyone
would get shot. Not considering how we'd spent tonight's patrol. After all his tough talk when he arrested me about how he wanted me to
see something,
this is what I had seen: I had seen a city cop herding cows out of the mayor's strawberry fields and back into the pasture next door. And I was paying this cop's salary with my tax dollars. Or I would be, if I were paying taxes, if I worked a paying job instead of slaving without pay at the diner. I owed, like, a dollar every year in taxes on my tips.

We had harassed a lot of innocent people. We chased skateboarders away from the sidewalks in the roundabout in the center of town. We chased kids parked in pickup trucks away from the back of the movie theater. Lois was right when she said Officer After knew how teenagers thought. Sneaky shit.

We had worked a fender bender at the Birmingham Junction, the intersection of the highway through town and the interstate to Birmingham. The Birmingham Junction was famous for wrecks, but this one wasn't even interesting—just a shattered taillight and a couple of infuriatingly polite Japanese businessmen from the car factory.

We had driven down to the bridge with the headlights off three or four times to make sure kids weren't drinking there. Ides of March my ass. It wasn't bad luck Officer After had caught us at the bridge. He caught us because he haunted that bridge, just as if he were the ghost of someone who'd died there himself.

We had eaten dinner, or whatever you called the 1 a.m. meal, at Eggstra! Eggstra! I could tell Officer After did this every night. Purcell served him coffee and cooked for him without asking for his order, just like he did for me. Weird that this had been going on in my backyard and I didn't even know, because I usually got off work around ten. While Officer After and I ate, the diner got slammed with the crowd heading home from the demolition derby. Of course Purcell wanted me to take orders and serve drinks while he cooked, and of course I refused. It was bad enough that my parents didn't pay me for working there. I sure as hell wasn't going to work there for free when it wasn't even my shift.

Purcell actually had the nerve to start cussing at me. I guess he wasn't worried about his job security. Our town offered plenty of jobs for an illiterate, and most of them probably paid better.

He cussed at me, that is, until Officer After half stood. That's all it took. Purcell suddenly became engrossed in flipping the chopped steak on the grill. Officer After went back to eating like nothing had happened, without looking at me.

Without talking to me, either. We'd spent most of the night in silence. And when we parked by the highway, cut the lights, and waited for speeders, it was like a game of sleep-chicken. Who would snore first?

It was torture. I had gotten off work at Eggstra! Eggstra! that afternoon, gone for my jog, and then tried my best to sleep, but come on. I never slept at 3 p.m. And I was too keyed up about tonight. Now Officer After was making me pay. Wasn't it enough to miss spring break of my senior year in high school so I could ride around this town with a cop all night? He didn't have to bore me to death, too.

No chance of that now.

"You'll still be able to get out the door," he said. "I've set it so only the back doors are locked and suspects can't get out. And no one will be able to open your door from the outside. Suspects can't get in."

"Get
in?"
I echoed as he hauled himself out of the seat with lots of
clicks
and
clanks
from the equipment attached to his belt and closed the heavy door behind him with an official-sounding
thunk.
But he was bluffing, trying to scare me. The blue lights took swipes at the back of his uniform as he walked casually to the rusty Caddy and stopped just behind the driver's door. He bent to talk to the driver through the window.

And then he slowly reached back with one hand and unsnapped his gun holster.

Frantically I felt for my cell phone in my pocket. I did not call people, but I pressed the button to call Tiffany at the hospital. We weren't close like we were as kids. We were back to being the tentative friends we'd been since eighth grade. Or maybe a little less, now that I'd caused her to miss her spring break and lose her boyfriend. But at school on Friday, I'd traded cell phone numbers with her when she asked. She'd told me the paramedics watched TV or slept at the hospital most of the night. But they'd warned her that when they did get a call, all hell would break loose. She'd wanted someone she could call to save her in case the speeding ambulance turned over. This was a similar emergency.

"Hello?" she said sleepily.

"Wake up," I hissed. "It's Meg. I need you to be on 911 alert. If I scream, bring the paramedics to the highway between the Shop Till You Drop convenience store and the Golden Cherry Motel. The cop has his hand on his gun."

"He has his hand on his gun?" She was awake now.

"I thought it was just a traffic stop. He has his hand on his gun. I'm sure there's some way for me to alert Lois the dispatcher from inside the police car, but there's not a red button clearly labeled
Call for Help"
I let out a little whimper and wanted to kick myself. "What's he doing?"

"Standing beside the car, talking to the driver."

"Calm down, Meg. He radioed in about what he was doing, right? And if he wanted backup, they're on the way."

"But what if they're across town? And what if he gets gunned down on the highway? I would feel so much better knowing the ambulance was already headed over here. Oh God, why didn't I pay more attention to Resusci-Annie in health class? Never mind, I'll tell you why not. It was Derek Bledsoe's turn to resuscitate her before me, and he slobbered all over her. Somehow the fresh sheet of Saran Wrap over her mouth did not make me feel protected."

"Meg, would you calm down? I've never heard you this upset. Nothing upsets you. Except, you know, claustrophobia."

"Now he's dragging the driver out of the car, handcuffing him, searching him."

"Calm down. Get your mind off it." She paused. "Was your dad right about this policeman being the one from the bridge?"

"Yeah."

"Is he cute?"

Strangely, I felt myself blush. At least she
was
getting my mind off his imminent death. "You saw him that night."

"I told you at school. The only thing I remember from that night is babbling something about shandy and trying to blame it all on my grandmother."

"Right. Well, he has these beautiful dark brown eyes, sleepy eyes that look you over slowly."

"Oh!"

"Rut other than that, he's military cop guy. You know, perfectly pressed uniform, shiny boots."

"Oh." She sounded disappointed. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. "Be glad you don't have to spend spring break with
these
people."

"I
have
spent a lot of time with one of them, Quincy with the gray hair. He usually took me in the ambulance to the hospital in Birmingham."

"Really? Well, they are full of stories now. They say almost every household accident they get called to involves alcohol. Or a chain saw."

"Or alcohol
and a
chain saw."

"I see you've heard these stories. I'm like, people, I'm going to be an English major, not a doctor. And I'm never drinking again. So you really could skip it."

"It will pass, and they'll move on to the fireworks stories. At least you're getting some sleep."

She yawned. "You still haven't heard from Eric?"

"No." I
would hear
from him, though. He'd be furious with me right up until he was ready to make a booty call. That's how Eric worked. "And you still haven't heard from Brian? You haven't gone on an ambulance run and seen him on the fire truck?"