To Protect & Serve (5 page)

As she turned first one corner and then the next, it all seemed so easy—just leave him behind, and he would be gone. However, long after she was home and in bed, the will to deny that that last glance was destined to stay with her forever vanished as well. He would be in her heart forever. And, she knew in every part of her that the ‘what ifs’ dogging her mind would never really fade away.

“So what time did you finally make it home last night?” Dustin asked as he and Jeff sat on crates in Dustin’s kitchen carefully wrapping plates in newspaper.

Jeff shrugged. “Three or so.”

Dustin’s eyebrows arched. “Three or so?  Hm. That could be good. So how was...”

“Lisa,” Jeff supplied although just saying the name knifed through his heart.

“She was good-looking.”

“Yeah.”

They wrapped and then wrapped again. After a few seconds Dustin looked at his friend. “So?”

“So, what?”

In exasperation Dustin sighed. “So what happened?”

There were a myriad of reasons that Jeff didn’t want to divulge the whole story, and he wasn’t at all sure which one was the most relevant. “I took her to her car.”

The newspaper in Dustin’s hand crunched. “No kidding? Cool.”

“Yeah, well, except that I didn’t exactly get her number or anything.”

A scowl dropped onto Dustin’s features. “You didn’t? Why not?”

Because I was an idiot.
Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know if she would’ve given it to me anyway.”

“So you didn’t even ask?” Slowly Dustin shook his head as Eve strode through the kitchen and ran her hand over the broad expanse of her husband’s shoulders. “You’re never going to believe this one.”

“What’s that?” she asked, spinning her long hair over her shoulder as she turned.

“Romeo here didn’t get her number.”

Eve dropped her gaze on Jeff. “What? Why not?”

“He didn’t think she would give it to him,” Dustin said, filling in all the blanks so Jeff wouldn’t have to. “That’s great, huh?”

“But you talked to her, right?” Eve asked completely into the conversation.

Jeff stumbled on that one. “Well, yeah.”

“So then you’ve got to know something about her. Where she lives, where she works…”

“She owns her own business—an ad agency in the Travis Tower.”

“Well, hallelujah,” Dustin said with relief. “At least you’ve got a little bit of a lead.”

Focusing his attention on the newspaper and trying not to drop the plate, Jeff shrugged. “Yeah, but what am I going to do? Knock on every office door in the building until I find her?”

“If that’s what it takes, yes!” Dustin said. “For Pete’s sake Jeff, I’ve known you for what? Almost a year now, and she’s the first girl I’ve seen you so much as get a ‘Hi’ out while she was around.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not like she really wanted to be there with me. We were just kind of prisoners of the situation.”

“Gee, thanks,” Dustin said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but I’m not blind either. I saw how you were looking at her.” A small light sparked in the middle of Dustin’s eyes as he reached over to Eve and ran a hand down her arm. “It’s the same way I look at my baby.”

Eve’s eyes went soft as she looked down at him, and Jeff’s heart turned over. With one tug Eve sat on Dustin’s lap, and an anvil of envy dropped into the pit of Jeff’s gut. If he just hadn’t been so stupid… “You know, if you two keep that up, the movers are going to get to box this stuff up themselves.”

With the tip of her nose, Eve rubbed across Dustin’s, and Jeff could tell he could have been a wall decoration for as much as they knew he was in the room. Then Dustin looked over at him past the fall of wavy black hair that Eve trailed behind her as she laid her head on her husband’s shoulder.

“Find her office,” Dustin said seriously. “Trust me, it’s worth it.”

“I didn’t say midnight, I said navy!” Lisa said as she slung the ad board mock-up to the desk in frustration. “No, no, no.” She fought to collect herself as Kurt shifted feet on the other side of her desk. “Look, just pull up the color schemes on your computer.” Her hand clicked the mouse. “It’s the one on Mountain, not the one on Lilac.” She handed the ad board back, and Kurt started to leave. “I need that back in ten.”

He nodded, and his stringy brown-blond chin-length bob bounced with his head. As his bland-colored, baggy-clothed body exited her doorway, she laid her head on the desk in utter exasperation. Nothing was going right today. Nothing. Exhausted, she wound her wrist around so she could look at her watch as she blew the piece of hair that had fallen across her eyes up. Forty-seven hours, sixteen minutes and counting until her meeting Monday with Cordell.  The illusion that she could do this was evaporating before her eyes.

Forcing her head up to the crook of her hand, she snapped the mouse across the screen in aggravation. It would help if her head would quit pounding. She turned and started to type as she blew that straggly piece of hair back out of her eyes.

“Okay, think,” she coached. “This isn’t that hard. You’ve done this before. Think, Lisa. ‘Great.’ What would be great?” Youth Leaders for the Road We Can’t Even See Yet, flowed onto the little rectangle on her computer from her fingertips. “Too long.” A click to change the font, and she tried again. Making the Leaders of Tomorrow. “Boring. Boring. Boring. Ugh! This is nuts.”

“Umm, boss,” Sherie said as she ducked into the office hesitantly.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got that play thing tonight for Paige… Remember, I told you about it last week?”

None of her ideas were getting any better.

“So, I was just going to take off now. If that’s okay?”

Lisa looked up at her in confusion, and then the words actually got through the frustration and into her brain. “Oh, yeah.” She waved the secretary out. “Go. Go.”

“Great. Thanks. I’ll see you Monday.”

“Yeah, Monday.” Her attention never really lifted from the screen. Minutes after Sherie had disappeared from the front office, a thought suddenly hit Lisa and she jumped up. “Hey, Sherie!” However, when she made it to the outer office, there was no Sherie. “Okay, so I’ll just find it myself.” She went over to the filing cabinet and opened the first drawer she came to. “Not that one. No.”

A little harder than it needed to be, she slammed that drawer causing the pictures and knickknacks on the top of the cabinet to dance. She grabbed the next drawer but didn’t get the latch pushed far enough when she tugged. “Oh, come on.” She tried again and this time the drawer slid open. Her gaze bounced across the tabs. “Okay, here’s something that could work.”

“I’ve got this,” Kurt said from behind her.

She turned and nodded. “Put it on my desk.” Without really watching him, she looked through the folder in her hands. Finally something she could use.

“I’m going to get on out of here,” Kurt said. “I’ve got a date.”

“Okay,” Lisa said without really looking up, and before she did, he was gone. For good measure she grabbed the other two folders associated with the one in her hand and walked into her office reading all three simultaneously with each step. At her desk she sat down and pulled forward. That’s when she saw the brochure, meted out in one solid sheet of periwinkle. “I said, ‘Navy!’” she screamed to the empty room, slamming the folders down onto her desk.

Furiously she jumped to her feet and very nearly twisted her ankle on the little spot in the carpet that was a little softer than all the others. She yanked the door open. “Kurt!” But the call was met with only silence. As usual, she was all alone in this sinking boat.

The distinct feeling of a total life-shift descended on Jeff as he stood at the door of the fire station on Bagby Street Monday morning. If the others could do this, so could he. It was the only thought keeping him from running. With a small push, he entered the station and glanced around. The trucks, red and shiny silver, brought a smile to his face. Yes, he could do this.

Two young men, one Hispanic, the other too grimy to really tell, walked into the large open room.

“Hayes said, ‘Change the oil, not wear it,’” the Hispanic man said, laughing.

“Well, if you would’ve been helping me like he said...” the other man started but stopped when he saw Jeff standing there. Quickly he wiped some of the grime from his hand and extended it. “Hi. Can we help you?”

“I’m… here to see Captain Hayes,” Jeff said, pushing every bit of confidence he had to the surface as he shook the man’s hand.

The man who had
shaken his hand pointed up the metal mesh stairs to one side by the wall. “Up top.”

“Thanks,” Jeff said with a nod.

“We’re going to need the pressure hose to get you cleaned up,” the Hispanic man said as Jeff mounted the first three steps.

“Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try,” the other man shot back, and Jeff laughed. At the top of the staircase, he met up with a door marked simply,
Captain
. A knock and then a louder one, and he heard the voice from the other side.

“Come in.”

It seemed to take all of his strength to open that door, and once he did, he looked inside fighting the urge to run. “Captain Hayes?”

The man sitting in the chair behind the desk looked more like a statue than a person. He looked up as Jeff entered, and never really meeting his gaze, Jeff stepped over to the desk and extended his hand.

“Jeff Taylor, Sir. We had an appointment.”

“Of course, Taylor. Please, have a seat. You’re here about the opening.”

“Yes, Sir,” Jeff said, wishing his head would quit nodding. “I am.”

“This is all very nice,” Burke Cordell said, laying an old, withered hand across the paperwork Lisa had carefully laid out for him, “but I’ve been thinking about doing something a little different with this thing.”

“Different, Sir?” Lisa cleared her throat. “Um, what did you have in mind?”

“Well, what I’d really like is more of a cooperative effort. I mean we’ve had these kinds of conferences before, and only the students who are
the go-getters come. Then we put up speakers from the various local business firms, and it gets to be more of a recruiting merry-go-round than really teaching anyone anything about leadership.”

Feeling like he was attacking every idea she had just put forth, Lisa curled her fingers around the folders in front of her. “I was under the impression that business leaders were what you had in mind.”

“It was.” The old man’s face fell in thought. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and every conference is for these same two percent of the kids. What about the other 98 percent? How do they determine their roads in life? Why can’t we give them some options too?”

“Yes, Sir,” Lisa said, faltering for a second. “But this is a leadership conference. Aren’t the leaders supposed to be the top two percent?”

After a beat, Tucker Cordell, Burke’s grandson who Lisa had no doubt was the exact model of the top two-percent go-getter that the old man was referring to, laid a hand across the table narrowly missing hers. “I think what Grandfather is saying is that he would like to include some more blue-collar types in this conference.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Burke shot back, sending Tucker skittering back to his seat. “I’m just saying there are other types of leaders that make this country great—sure business is a component, but it’s not the whole enchilada.”

Jumbled messages were running into each other in Lisa’s brain, not the least of which were the ten thousand not at all liking the unspoken invitation in Tucker’s eyes when she looked at him. “How about this?” She tossed her head back. “There’s the volunteers that work over at the homeless shelter. Maybe I could get some of them to come and give addresses.”

“See, now that’s the kind of thinking I like,” Burke said, nodding. “What else you got?”

“Well, there’s the city engineering department. The ones who keep up the bridges and the parks, they might be interesting.” She wrote that thought down on the paper in front of her.

“Keep talking.”

“And then there’s the road crews… and the police department…”

“And the fire department.” Burke pointed at her paper so she would write that down
too. “In fact, I’ve even got a good friend over at the station on Bagby. Anson Hayes. He’s a captain over there. I can set something up for you to talk with him if you’d like.”

Her brain didn’t like the detour that her heart had suddenly taken, but she nodded in spite of herself. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

Jeff wasn’t sure if they would even have the phone hooked up yet, but he had to tell somebody, so he dialed the number and sat on the sofa in his little apartment. When the other side clicked, the feminine voice said, “Hello?”

He smiled. So they were farther apart, it didn’t mean that he’d totally lost his friends. “Hi, Eve. Is Dustin there?”

“Yeah.” In the background there was a tremendous crash and a not so subtle string of curse words. “Baby, it’s for you.”

Without even trying, Jeff heard the curses that followed his friend to the phone. “Yeah?”

“Maybe I should’ve come and helped you move in too,” Jeff said, enjoying ribbing his friend. “Sounds like you could use the help.”

“Oh, yeah? You try moving a six-ton box of shoes up a flight of stairs.”