After Midnight

by Merline Lovelace

  She could hear, too, the taunts she’d endured from the older kids at the regional elementary school she’d attended. They’d called Helen trailer trash, had jeered and quoted their daddies as saying the waitress served up sex along with the Blue Crab’s watered down whiskey. Jess had never heard the term whore until the day she took two boys down into the schoolyard’s dirt playground.

  The sheriff had come to their trailer that night, too, she remembered, and suggested Helen put a check-rein on her kid before she got into a fight she couldn’t get out of. Jess had never told her mother what sparked that particular brawl, just as she’d never asked why Helen often dragged home only short hours before dawn some nights.

  Eight-year-old Jessie Yount might not have heard the term whore before, but she’d learned to recognize the particular stench men left on her mother’s body.

  Nothing good ever came of the night, she thought savagely, yanking on her favorite T-shirt. Nothing!

  With the T-shirt skimming her high-thigh bikini briefs, she retreated to the kitchen and slapped together a ham and cheese on rye. Armed with the sandwich, a giant-sized bag of Lay’s potato chips and a diet Coke, she settled in front of the TV for a serious bout of late night movies.

  Inevitably, the rumors began to circulate the squadron.

  Jess had expected that, too, since most of the civilians she commanded had lived in the local area all their lives. It took less than a week after the gala in DeFuniak Springs for the ugliness to get back to her.

  She heard them first from her deputy. As usual, the tall, cadaverous Al Monroe beat her and everyone else in to work. Tossing her briefcase onto her desk, Jess accepted a mug of throat-closing Valvoline he brewed before Mrs. Burns could dilute it to less toxic levels.

  “What do you do, Al? Sleep here?”

  “Not much to interest me at home since Luanne died.”

  During her brief association with the man, Jess had discovered that he rarely talked about the wife he’d lost a few years ago. And it was rarer still for him to plop down in one of the chairs beside Jess’s desk and shoot the breeze. Al was usually all business, ready to brief her on the night’s activities before their seven-thirty stand-up with the division chiefs.

  This morning, however, he slouched in the leather armchair and rested his mug on his ornate silver belt buckle. Jess still found it remarkable that this quiet, gray-haired civil servant had purchased his first motorcycle a few months after his wife’s death, then pushed the Hawg through wind and rain and stinging Death Valley sands to win a 3,000 mile cross-country race sponsored by Harley-Davidson.

  “What’s this I hear you lived around these parts as a kid?” he asked after Jess had skimmed the MICAP report from the previous night.

  Carefully, she laid the report on her desk. “Yes, I did.”

  “You never mentioned it.”

  “I lived a lot of places as a kid.”

  Bethany, Pennsylvania. Dothan, Alabama. Choctaw Beach, Florida. Odessa, Texas. Apache Junction, Arizona. Those were the stops Jess could remember. There were others, made less than memorable by a whole string of roach-infested apartments and musty trailers as Helen drifted from job to job and man to man.

  Al’s long, bony fingers played with the handle of his mug. “Rumor has it your mama once waitressed at the Blue Crab”

  “Rumor has it right. She did.”

  “Can’t say I ever stopped in there myself, but I heard tell Wayne Whittier had a lively business going until the place burned down.”

  “My impression is you didn’t miss much,” Jess replied coolly. “I seem to remember my mother telling me that ole Wayne watered his drinks and mixed lump whitefish into his so-called blue crab special.”

  They were dancing, each waiting for the other to flirt close to the real issue. Jess folded her hands around her coffee mug and left the next move to Al.

  “Eglin’s the largest employer in this neck of the woods,” he said after a moment. “The only employer, really. At least half of the civilians on base have lived around here all their lives. Some of the people who work for you probably remember your mama.”

  Some might even have had sex with her. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. He was just trying in his own quiet way to warn Jess that the gossip mill had started churning out its inevitable grist.

  “I hope they remember her.”

  She wasn’t aware she’d set her mug aside until her left thumb went to work on the scarred tissue of her right hand.

  “She was a good mother, Al. I loved her very much.”

  The soft, fierce reply seemed to answer the rail-thin deputy’s inner questions. With a nod, he turned the conversation to the status of the special wing struts urgently needed by one of the test squadrons.

  The blasted wing struts still occupied Jess’s mind when she cruised onto the Bay Bridge just past nine that night. After a whole day spent fielding increasingly frantic calls from the test squadron commander and hourly updates from her combat operations chief, Jess had secured a promise from the depot manager to expedite on the struts.

  She’d call the ops center later to verify that the expedite had been placed in-system, she thought as the wind whipped her hair and the Mustang’s headlamps stabbed the slowly darkening bay. Traffic was slow tonight, thank goodness, with only the occasional car whizzing by. One nosed up behind Jess, its lights glaring in her rearview mirror.

  She’d just reached up to flip the mirror to night driving when the vehicle behind her pulled out to pass. The next instant, it swerved back, slamming into the Mustang’s left rear fender. Like lovebugs locked in a grotesque mating dance, the bigger, heavier vehicle shoved the convertible sideways.

  “Shit!”

  Jess fought the wheel for two or three terrifying seconds before the Mustang crashed through the bridge’s guardrail and sailed into the darkness.

  As long as she lived, Jess would remember the few terrifying moments while the Mustang’s twin headlights sliced an insane arc through the night and the black, silent bay rushed up at her. They seemed to last ten lifetimes, those few seconds. If she screamed, she didn’t hear it. If she swore a vicious stream of oaths while her hands clamped like a vise around the wheel, she had no awareness of it. All she saw, all she knew, was that she was going to hit and hit hard.

  Arms braced, legs stiff, boots shoved hard against the floor she still wasn’t prepared for the impact. Metal shrieked. Glass shattered. She flung an arm up to protect her face and died a thousand deaths while the Mustang seemed to hang suspended, nose down in the water, rear wheels high in the air and spinning, then slowly, so slowly, sank into the inky blackness.

  Chapter Seven

  Wilena Shaw contacted Steve aboard the 37-foot Albin trawler-style boat he called home a little before ten o’clock to advise that a vehicle had plowed through a guardrail and gone off the Mid-Bay Bridge.

  He’d just popped the top on an ice-cold brew and propped his crossed ankles on the rear deck rail. The air around the rickety dock where he kept the Gone Fishin’ moored was alive with night sounds. Lulled by the rhythm of waves lapping against the hull, of frogs croaking in the reeds and the occasional splash of a night-feeding predator, Steve was mulling over the report he’d received this afternoon from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement on the McConnell case. The gruesome finality of the remains the ME’s office had released for burial pretty well closed the case. Just to be sure, though, Jim Hazlett had conducted another interview with the widow.

  No, Mabel had reiterated, she didn’t know her husband had decided to take out his trim little sailboat the day tropical storm Carl had whipped up so unexpectedly.

  No, she couldn’t imagine why he was wearing dress slacks and his favorite wing-tips when he went overboard instead of shorts or jeans and rubber-soled boat shoes.

  Yes, she understood that the blunt trauma to his skull was consistent in shape and size with the cleat on the gunwale, and that the small volume of water in his lungs indicated he’d in al
l likelihood hit his head and lost consciousness before he drowned. She was grateful, she must be grateful, he hadn’t thrashed about in the angry bay, terrified and increasingly weak, until he slipped beneath the gray waters a final time.

  Steve might be grateful, too, if not for those damned wing-tips.

  The shrill of his phone jerked his thoughts from Reverend McConnell’s footwear, and Wilena’s report of the incident on the Mid-Bay Bridge claimed his instant attention.

  Although the bridge was in Okaloosa County and thus technically not Steve’s responsibility, the rescue operation had closed down three of its four lanes and was starting to back up traffic along the major arteries feeding onto the bridge.

  “Captain Dubois said to tell you he’s got a squad car working traffic control down-county along 98,” Wilena advised in her smoky, come-hither contralto. “He says traffic is still moving along Highway 20, but thinks we should put out an advisory.”

  “Tell him to go ahead. Has Okaloosa requested any other assistance?”

  “Negative, Sheriff. They’re getting all the help they need from the Coast Guard and from Eglin. More than they need, probably, since it was a military officer who went in.”

  “Have they fished him out?”

  “Her.” The dry response was an unspoken comment on his sexism. “Yes, they have. Funny thing, you running a background check on the colonel just last week and tonight she ends up in the bay.”

  “Christ!” Steve’s heels hit the deck. “Are you saying it was Lieutenant Colonel Blackwell who went off the bridge?”

  “Ten-four, Sheriff.”

  “What’s her condition?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll find out. Hold on.”

  He sat clutching his beer, his jaw tight, until Wilena came back on the line.

  “Word is she’s pretty shaken up, but all in one piece.”

  “What hospital did they take her to?”

  “Apparently she doesn’t require medical attention. She’s still at the bridge.”

  Emergency response vehicles lined the bridge when Steve arrived on-scene. Squad cars flashed strobe lights. Portable spots illuminated the gaping wound in the guardrail where repair crews sweated to rig a temporary fix. A Coast Guard patrol boat from the nearby Destin station idled below, its powerful searchlights stabbing the black water around a flashing buoy that presumably marked the location of the submerged vehicle.

  Steve wasn’t interested in the vehicle, only its driver. She was huddled in the back of a squad car. Someone had draped a lightweight blanket around her shoulders. Beneath the blanket, her wet fatigues clung to her like a second skin. Her hair straggled over her shoulders, and the angry bruise on her right cheek tied Steve’s gut in knots. The flash of recognition, almost welcome, in her eyes when she spotted him loosened the knots a little. A very little.

  Wondering how Jessica Blackwell had gotten to him so hard and so fast, Steve hunkered down beside the squad car’s open door. “You okay?”

  “More or less.” The welcome disappeared, replaced by the careful distance she always maintained with him. “What are you doing here? Isn’t this outside your jurisdiction?”

  “I heard you decided to go para-sailing without a chute. Thought I’d come view the results.”

  A shaky hand reached up to finger the swelling on her cheek. “From the feel of this, I’m guessing they’re pretty ugly.”

  “Think so?”

  Curling a knuckle under her chin, he tipped her face to the light. Her pupils dilated instantly, and the tight cinch around Steve’s chest eased another couple of notches. She didn’t appear to be in shock. Or doped up. Or suicidal, all of which were distinct possibilities when someone drove off a bridge.

  “I’ve seen worse,” he said with considerable understatement. “Still, you should have let the EMS folks transport you to a hospital.”

  She drew back, breaking the contact. “It’s just a bruise.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was sideswiped.” Fury surged into her voice, set her shoulders to shaking under the blanket. “Some idiot pulled out into the passing lane, then evidently changed his mind. When he swerved back in, he rammed my car’s fender and shoved me into the railing. I don’t know if the bastard was drunk or blind or both, but he should have stopped. Dammit, at least he could have stopped.”

  Christ, a bump and run. It took a real slime to send another driver sailing off a bridge and flee the scene.

  “Sit tight. I’m going to go talk to the officer in charge.”

  The Okaloosa County deputy sheriff controlling the scene was more than willing to share the data he’d collected so far with Steve.

  “We’ve got two good sets of skid marks. The colonel’s, where she jammed on the brakes just before butting through the rail, and the second driver’s.”

  With Steve pacing beside him, he walked about twenty yards past the sparks showering from the acetylene torch welding the temporary guardrail into place. The pencil-thin beam from his flashlight picked up the black scars on the concrete.

  “The sonuvabitch fish-tailed to a stop right about here.”

  “Think he was DUI?”

  “Hard to tell. You can see how he laid a good three feet of rubber when he took off again.”

  “Did Colonel Blackwell note the make or type of the vehicle that hit her?”

  “All she could see in the rearview mirror were its headlights. But chances are it left a shitload of paint scrapings on her car. Soon’s they haul the wreck out of the bay, we’ll send the fragments off to the lab in Tallahassee, see if they can find a match in the National Automotive Paint File.”

  Fortunately, the NAP file allowed labs across the country to establish the color, year, and make of an automobile from microscopic chips of paint. Unfortunately, the case backlog in Tallahassee meant it might be weeks or even months before their specialists got to these particular paint chips.

  Like every other state agency, the forensics lab was understaffed, underfunded, and unable to keep pace with the recent boom in DNA analyses, ballistics tests, and drug IDs. In the heirarchy of demands, an incident that didn’t involve death or serious injury got shoved to the bottom of the pile.

  “I’m guessing a turn-around time of eight to twelve weeks on the paint samples,” the deputy warned, confirming Steve’s guess. “I’ve got a drug case from last December I’m still waiting for labs on. Meantime, we’ll send out an alert for any damaged vehicle matching the color of the scrapings.”

  “Would you keep my office posted on the responses to the alert?”

  “No problem.”

  Steve’s glance went to the woman in the back seat of the patrol car. “Are you finished with Colonel Blackwell?”

  “Yessir. We were just waiting on the Coast Guard to verify the name of the salvage vessel that’s going to retrieve her vehicle before we drove her home.”

  “I’ll take her. You can radio our dispatch when you get the information and I’ll relay it or call her at home.”

  “Okay by me.”

  When Steve hunkered down beside the patrol car a second time, Jess’s brief flash of fury at the driver who’d sideswiped her had obviously faded. Even the cool, collected Colonel Blackwell wouldn’t have the strength to sustain a raw emotion after what she’d just gone through. He’d bet she used every ounce of reserve she possessed to claw her way out of her car after it nose-dived into the bay.

  As if to prove him right, a sudden bout of shudders racked her. She wrapped her arms around her waist and made a valiant attempt to subdue them, but Steve knew she’d relive those seconds when the black, silent water shrouded her a thousand times, ten thousand times, before the terrifying memory dimmed to merely frightening.

  “Come on, I’m going to take you home.”

  Impaled on a spear of quiet panic, she stared at him with wide, blank eyes. Steve cursed under his breath and drew her out of the patrol car, handling her as carefully as a first-time father with a new baby. The blanket
slipped from her shoulders. She took one step, or tried to. Her knees buckling, she went down. Steve caught her before she hit the pavement.

  “I can walk,” she protested as he scooped her into his arms. “I…I just need a moment to get my land legs back.”

  “My car’s right here, Jessica.”

  She mumbled something inarticulate.

  Steve bent, drawing in the scent of wet, starched canvas from her clammy fatigue uniform. “What?”

  “Jess. I prefer Jess.”

  Right,” he replied, shifting her higher against his chest. “Jess it is.”

  Despite those long, slender legs and trim rear, the colonel was no lightweight. He liked the feel of her, the firm, solid flesh, the curve of shoulder and hip and thigh.

  Shielding her body with his, he carried her past the sparks still geysering from the acetylene torch to his vehicle. He felt her small, almost imperceptible flinch when she saw the bristling antennas and gold star painted on the side panel, but she made no comment as he reached for the door handle.

  The drive home helped Jess regain a small measure of her shattered equilibrium. She stared straight ahead, hands gripped tight in her lap. She ached to huddle next to Paxton, to siphon off more of his strength and warmth.

  She kept to her side of the seat, still shaken by her spear of sheer, mindless relief when she’d first spotted him. Tall, solid, his jeans riding low on his hip and his shoulders taut under a faded red T-shirt, he’d cut a straight path through the swarm of emergency vehicles. She’d come within a breath of sobbing out his name, and that disturbed Jess almost as much as her dive into the bay.

  When she climbed out of Paxton’s patrol car, her legs were shaky and the acrid taste of fear still thickened her throat, but she managed what she considered a very credible poise given the circumstances.

  “Thank you, sheriff.”

  She held out her hand, intending to send him on his way and retreat into her sanctuary.