by Jane Graves
She held the sack beneath the dashboard and flicked the lighter beneath it, shifting her gaze to Leandro every few seconds to make sure he was still reaming the old guy out. In moments the sack flamed. She tossed it onto the floor of the backseat, then reached for a couple of other sacks and tossed them on top of the burning one. The flames spread.
Renee put the Bic back in the console. At the same time she spied a key. Praying it unlocked the handcuffs, she plucked it out.
Just then Leandro gave up and started back toward the car. She stuffed the key into her pocket, shut the lid of the console, and stared at the dashboard, trying to look nonchalant. Behind her, another sack caught fire, then another, and another....
Leandro yanked open the door. “Old fart,” he muttered, climbing into the car. “He coulda made it. But no. He had to park his hemorrhoidal ass at the crossing the minute he saw a few red lights, and now the train’s coming. At the rate it’s moving, we’ll be sitting here for a week.”
Renee glanced down the track to see the train finally make an appearance. It chugged along like an overweight asthmatic at about fifteen miles per hour, its cars stretching down the track as far as she could see.
“They ought to jerk his driver’s license,” Leandro fumed. “If he even touches a set of car keys, he ought to be shot. And you can bet your ass I’d volunteer for the job.”
The burning sacks cracked and popped, but Leandro was so consumed with his loudmouthed trashing of anyone over age seventy that he didn’t notice. Renee waited, her heart beating madly. The flames grew. She waited another second, then another, and then...
“Fire!” She let out an ear-piercing squeal and pointed madly to the backseat. “Fire! The car’s on fire!”
Leandro snapped to attention and spun around, his eyes flying open wide. He put a knee in the driver’s seat, leaned over the back of the seat, and slapped at the burning sacks, only to pull away with a painful hiss, shaking his hand.
He leaped out and flung open the back door. While he was whacking away at the flames with a file folder, Renee scrambled over the console and out of the car—no small task with her wrists still handcuffed. The moment her feet hit pavement, she ran.
“Hey! Get back here!”
He took off after her. She was less than three strides ahead of him, and he made up the ground in a hurry. Alongside the old man’s car he reached for her arm and missed. Then he dove at her, his arms around her hips, and sent them both crashing to the road. Renee’s knees skidded across the pavement.
Ignoring the pain, she whipped around and smacked Leandro on the side of the head. He recoiled, cursing wildly, then fumbled around and managed to catch her wrists below the cuffs. He hauled her toward him until they were nose-to-nose, his eyes wild with anger and his teeth bared. A little foaming at the mouth and he’d look just like a rabid dog.
Renee smiled sweetly. “How do you like your barbecued Jeep? Well done?”
He spun back around. Smoke was pouring out the back car door. He could hang on to Renee, or he could put out the fire. He couldn’t do both.
With an anguished groan, he let go of Renee and jumped to his feet. He pointed down at her. “Stay there!”
Yeah. Right.
As he hurried back to the burning vehicle he hollered at the old man, who gawked out the window of his car with his jaw hanging down to his chest. “Make sure she doesn’t get away!”
Renee leaped to her feet again, infused with hope. If Leandro had resorted to deputizing senior citizens, he probably wasn’t in complete control of the situation.
The train was less than twenty yards from the crossing. She wove through the gates, and in a single bounding leap, she flew over the tracks and landed on the other side. Seconds later the train filled the railroad crossing. The last thing she saw before it blocked her view was Leandro peeling off his tank top to whack away at the flames. Watching him go nuts over that wreck of a car was a beautiful sight, but she couldn’t hang around to bask in the moment.
She pulled the key out of her pocket, fumbled it into the handcuff lock, and held her breath. She twisted it a little and heard a tiny click. The right cuff fell open. Her luck was holding after all. She unlocked the left one, too, then threw the cuffs as far as she could on one side of the road and the key on the other.
Once the train passed, Leandro would be after her again— in his car if he managed to put out the flames, or on foot if it had completely gone up in smoke. Either way, his nasty attitude had already taken a turn toward the homicidal. If he nabbed her again, by the time he dumped her on the steps of the police station they’d have to use her dental records to identify her body.
Her first thought was to hop the train and let it carry her down the tracks, but while it was moving slowly, as trains went, its speed was still too great for such an arm-wrenching experience. If Leandro thought that was what she’d done, though, it might buy her a little time.
She turned and jogged toward the diner, praying some other means of escape would present itself, and fast. No matter what she had to do, she wasn’t going back to Tolosa.
No matter what she had to do.
John DeMarco sat at the counter of the Red Oak Diner three miles outside Winslow, Texas, with the front page of the Winslow Gazette spread out in front of him and his hands wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee. He took a sip of the thirty-weight liquid and winced, wondering how much more of this stuff he could drink before he overdosed on caffeine.
He glanced out the window. Evening was edging into dusk, filling the countryside with the muted shades of twilight. Soft sizzling sounds came from the kitchen, like raindrops on a tin roof, mingling with the muffled conversation of a gangly teenage boy and his mousy girlfriend, who were sharing an order of fries in a booth by the window.
This place was like a hundred other backwoods multipurpose establishments—a diner that also carried convenience store items, a small collection of action-adventure videos for rent, and a rack of magazines that centered around four topics—hunting, fishing, hot cars, and sex—aimed directly at the rifle-toting, tobacco-chewing, kick-ass locals on the assumption that they could actually read. Marva Benton served up Texas home cooking guaranteed to clog your arteries, while her husband Harley ran the cash register and shot the bull with the locals. Just about anything you needed to sustain life you could find at the Red Oak, as long as you didn’t set your standards too high.
For the past week John had made a valiant attempt to forget about his job and concentrate only on sleeping late, dressing like a slob, and sitting by the lake with a fishing pole in one hand and a beer in the other.
Easier said than done.
This was the third night in a row he’d come here for dinner. He had to drive twelve miles, but it sure beat cooking, particularly since the cabin he was staying in didn’t have a microwave oven. Or an oven, period. Or a television. A hot plate, a Hide-A-Bed, and indoor plumbing—that was about it. The boredom factor had settled in about fifteen minutes after his arrival, so when he found this diner he considered himself lucky.
Take my cabin for a week or so, Lieutenant Daniels had told him. Do nothing for a while. Just sit. Think. Clear your head.
What Daniels had really meant was Get a grip on yourself, and don’t come back until you do.
Harley rang up a Hot Rod magazine and ten gallons of gas for a twenty-something cowboy type in skintight Levi’s and a plaid western shirt. The guy sauntered out of the store, giving John a territorial stare from beneath the brim of his hat that said I can tell you ain’t from around here, so watch yourself.
Harley pushed the cash register shut, then gave John a gregarious grin, displaying brown teeth, gold teeth, and no teeth all in the same mouth. “So, John. How’s the vacation going?”
John was already on a first-name basis with the proprietors of the Red Oak, a familiarity that appeared to be commonplace in rural Texas. Back in Tolosa he didn’t even know his next-door neighbor’s name.
“Slow,” J
ohn said.
“Well, slow’s good if you’re lookin’ to relax, right? Take a break from the big city?”
Big city? John had to smile at that one. Tolosa, Texas, was hardly a major metropolis. But from Harley’s point of view, John figured that Tolosa’s four movie theaters, two shopping malls, and population of ninety thousand made it look like Tokyo compared to Winslow.
“So what do you do for a living, John?”
He sighed inwardly. Sometimes people acted funny if they knew they were talking to a cop. “Just between you and me, Harley, I’d rather not talk about what I do for a living.”
“Which is it? Low pay? Long hours? No respect?”
Harley had just described a cop’s life perfectly. “All of the above.”
But as irritating as those things were, they weren’t at the heart of John’s frustration right now. Nobody in his right mind became a cop and expected to get rich, work short hours, and have people pat him on the back, so he’d been prepared for all of that. But what he hadn’t expected were the massive injustices of what was supposed to be the criminal justice system.
After a month of investigation, John had finally nabbed a nasty little scumbag who’d been beating up senior citizens and then robbing them in the hallways of their apartment buildings. Only one of the victims agreed to testify—a stoop-shouldered, gravel-voiced octogenarian who told John, essentially, that he was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. Then the day before the trial, the old guy had a myocardial infarction and ended up a vegetable in the coronary care unit at Tolosa Medical Center. Later that day his family pulled the plug, and the prosecution’s case went to hell.
Without an eyewitness to tell his story, the defense attorney was able to fill the jurors’ minds with a truckload of reasonable doubt about the identity of the perpetrator. John showed up for the verdict, and when the jury pronounced the guy not guilty, his stomach twisted into a tight knot of fury and frustration. He tried to tell himself it was just part of the job. You won some, you lost some. The world went on. But all the while he seethed inside, hating the thought that some bad-to-the-bone, guilty-as-sin loser he’d fought to incarcerate was free to walk the streets again.
Then, as he came out of the courtroom, he saw the little bastard standing in the marble-tiled lobby, grinning like a hyena and backslapping his attorney. As if on cue, he turned and met John’s eyes. A slow, cocky smile spread across his lips, joined by a mocking stare that screamed louder than any words could possibly have.
I win, sucker. And that means you lose.
John wanted desperately to cross the lobby of the courthouse, back the guy up against a wall, and choke him until his eyes bugged out. As an officer of the law, though, he hadn’t been free to exercise that option. Instead he headed to the men’s room to cool off. He took several deep breaths and doused his face in cold water, hoping that would do the trick, and when it didn’t he spun around and whacked the paper towel dispenser with his doubled-up fist.
Now that had felt good.
It felt so good, in fact, that he did it again. And again. And again. And all the while he thought about how wrong it was that somebody could hurt defenseless people, take their money, then never have to answer for any of it.
Unfortunately, the bathroom fixture John was substituting for the guy’s face wasn’t in the best of shape, and slug number five dislodged it from the wall and sent it crashing to the floor. About that time, two uniformed cops wondered what all the noise was and hurried into the bathroom. To their great amusement, they saw that a certain police detective had gone three rounds with a paper-towel dispenser, leaving it bruised and battered on the floor in an uncontested knockout.
By the end of the day, John’s battle with an inanimate object was comic legend around the station, leading his colleagues to ask him if he intended to beat up a trash can next, or maybe take on a toilet or two. By then he truly regretted losing his temper, but that hadn’t stopped Lieutenant Daniels from calling him in and giving him a twenty-minute lecture on professionalism, impartiality, and the inadvisability of dropping by the courthouse for jury verdicts.
Forget guilt or innocence, DeMarco. Your job isn't to make sure justice is served. Your job is to bring the scum in so other people can make sure justice is served.
In John’s mind, those people were doing a piss-poor job of it, but in light of the circumstances he’d kept that thought to himself.
An emotionally involved cop isn’t worth a damn, Daniels went on. They do dumb things. You know, like murder an innocent paper-towel dispenser in the prime of its life.
The lieutenant had concluded his lecture by handing John the keys to his out-of-the-way cabin on Lake Shelton with the suggestion that he take a little vacation. John had read between the lines. The vacation wasn’t optional.
He’d reluctantly taken the keys and started out the door, but Daniels hadn’t been through with him yet. He’d mentioned— quite offhandedly, of course—that he’d made his annual contribution to the Joseph DeMarco Foundation to benefit the families of officers killed in the line of duty. And the timing of that remark had really pissed John off.
Eight years before, John’s father had taken a fatal bullet during what should have been a routine traffic stop, and it wasn’t by accident that Daniels chose that moment to mention the foundation set up in his honor. It was his not-so-subtle way of saying to John, What would your father think about how you’re behaving now?
If he were alive today, Joe DeMarco, the most by-the-book cop the Tolosa Police Department had ever known, would have plenty to say about what he would deem to be another of his son’s frequent lapses in judgment. And he would have said it far more vehemently than Daniels could ever have hoped to.
Now John was forced to vegetate in a backwoods cabin for a week, with the implication that he was to do some serious soul-searching and arrive at an effective means of controlling his temper. But as badly as he hated to admit it, Daniels was right. And his father would have been right, too, if he’d been around to orate on the subject. John knew he’d gone over the edge. Find them, arrest them, move on—that was what he had to do. Other cops seemed to have no trouble maintaining that all-important professional detachment. Why couldn’t he?
He finished off the last few sips of his coffee, managing to down it before it congealed into a dark blob of pure caffeine and crawled right out of the cup. Harley filled it again, then checked his watch. He called over his shoulder.
“Hey, Marva! John’s been waitin’ twenty minutes! Move it on the steak!”
A gravelly, two-pack-per-day female voice boomed out of the kitchen: “You want it fast, or you want it good?”
“I want it today!” Harley growled.
“Shut up, you old coot! You’ll get it when I bring it!”
Harley rolled his eyes a little, then leaned over the counter, his expression becoming one of a long-suffering saint. “Thirty-three years I’ve put up with that. Can you imagine?”
John didn’t buy Harley’s “poor me” routine for a minute. He knew shtick when he heard it, and this pair had mastered it. If they were smart, they’d start collecting a cover charge for entertainment. When he was younger and a whole lot more naive, John assumed that someday he’d have a wife he could fight with right up to their fiftieth wedding anniversary. But the older he got, the less likely it seemed that would ever happen.
The kitchen door swung open and Marva appeared, a gigantic horse of a woman wearing purple polyester pants and a Hawaiian-print shirt. Her iron-gray hair was swept back in a sweat-soaked bandanna. She slapped a platter down in front of John. The chicken-fried steak lopped over the edge of the plate, dripping gravy onto the counter. It smelled like heaven.
“There you go, sweetie,” she said with a smile full of hospitality. “That rotten husband of mine doesn’t understand that good things take time.” She shot Harley a look of total disgust. Right on cue, Harley sneered back.
Marva turned to John. “Thirty-three year
s I’ve put up with that. Can you imagine?”
With a weary shake of her head, she clomped back into the kitchen. Harley glanced furtively in her direction, then reached under the counter. “Hey, buddy. Take a look at this.” He slid a Playboy onto the counter and opened it to the centerfold, displaying a healthy brunette in all her naked glory. “Miss October. Ever seen anything like her in your life?”
“Can’t say as I have,” John said, admiring the photo. Hell, it had been so long since he’d seen a naked woman, he was surprised he still recognized one.
“Didja see Miss September?”
“Sorry. Missed that one.”
“Shoowee. She was better’n this one, if you like ’em blond.”
Just then Marva reappeared carrying a rack of silverware. She saw Harley’s reading material and rolled her eyes. She slapped the silverware onto the counter, then closed the centerfold and the magazine with a definitive whap, whap, whap.
“Dirty old man,” she muttered. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your hands off the smut?”
“I’ll show you smut, woman,” he retorted, meeting her nose-to-nose. Then the edge of his mouth rose in something that just might have been a smile. “Later.”
Marva rolled her eyes. “Promises, promises.” She turned to John, talking behind her hand in a loud stage whisper. “Ever since he turned fifty, that’s all I get. Promises.”
As she headed back toward the kitchen, Harley gave her a smack on her generous rump. She squealed and went on into the kitchen, then looked back out the window of the swinging door, shaking her finger at him before disappearing again.
“Women,” Harley muttered. “Gotta keep ’em in line, or they’ll walk all over you.”
John wasn’t sure who was keeping whom in line, but somewhere deep inside he felt a funny twinge of longing. No, he did not want to lose half his teeth, marry a backwoods Amazon woman, and run a shabby diner in the middle of nowhere. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when it was just him alone in a double bed, he wanted someone so badly he could taste it. But a cop married to his job made one hell of a poor husband. A cop who had a hard time controlling his temper when faced with the realities of the job made an even worse one.
