Kiss

by Ted Dekker

  “Of course I am.”

  Wayne looked at her sideways. “You know, it’s entirely possible that the MDMA was Rudy’s.”

  Possible, but highly unlikely. Rudy wouldn’t even take a cough suppressant when sick, or aspirin when achy. “I doubt it.”

  “But you doubt it was yours too.”

  It went without saying, didn’t it? Twelve hours earlier she wouldn’t have imagined feeling the need to guard what she said to this man. Now she was suspicious of every word and what it would reveal of her.

  “I’m thinking about that third person,” she ventured.

  “Your phantom passenger?”

  The needle of impatience in his tone pricked Shauna.

  “And the witness who saw him. Her. Whatever.”

  “Shauna, just because some mystery reporter—”

  “I know, I know. But let me do this, please?” She doubted she’d find a record in the report of another witness, or another passenger, but she wanted to read it with her own eyes.

  “Why the sudden urge to turn detective?”

  “It’s not sudden. I want to stay out of jail.”

  He turned in to the parking lot. “You’re on edge. Everything okay?”

  Shauna looked out the window and decided not to answer. Silence might be her most convincing answer. And again, he didn’t press her.

  They parked and she shucked her jacket as she climbed out of the cab. The day was turning out to be warmer than she had expected.

  Inside, Shauna and Wayne found the appropriate clerk behind a Plexiglas partition, paid the fee, and a half hour later held a copy of the report.

  Shauna sat down in a lobby chair to read.

  “We can take it with us,” Wayne said, bending over her.

  She waved him off and left him to pace in the dull waiting room, which was dotted with dusty silk plants and cheap prints of modern art.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, she perused twenty-five pages of information she already knew. The account Wayne had offered was just as helpful as this verbose document, and far more concise. She had swerved her little Prius into the path of an oncoming truck. Both the truck driver and one witness—the driver of an SUV that she’d nearly clipped—claimed she was driving erratically, lost control of the car, slammed into the truck’s grille. Substance abuse was suspected. Rudy was ejected through the side door, which opened on impact, before she went over the guardrail.

  No other witnesses.

  No other passengers.

  Reporting peace officer: Deputy Sheriff Cale Bowden. She would talk to him.

  Still reading, Shauna carried the report back to the clerk’s window.

  “Is Deputy Bowden here today?” she asked over the top of the report.

  “The deputies don’t work in this office,” the petite woman said.

  “Of course.” Shauna wondered which office was his home base. “I meant—”

  “But it happens that he’ll be by today around eleven thirty to deliver some paperwork.” The clerk grinned. “They say he never brought it in person before I started working here.”

  What was that supposed to mean? Shauna didn’t know and, honestly, didn’t really care.

  A large, plain-faced clock hung on the wall behind the woman. Ten fifteen. “Do you mind if I wait? I have a quick question about this report.”

  The woman winked at Shauna. “I’ll let him know if you promise not to steal him.”

  Shauna smiled. She imagined it looked more like a wince.

  “Why do you have to talk with the deputy?” Wayne asked when Shauna dropped back into the chair and told him what she was doing.

  “I need—if there’s any possibility that someone else saw what happened, I want to know.”

  Wayne placed his hand in hers, and she found the gesture unexpectedly comforting. What was happening to her, that now she couldn’t even trust the way she felt about a person? One hour this way, the other hour that. She let the report fall to her lap.

  “Listen, babe. Plenty of people saw what happened.”

  “Two, according to this. Rick Bond, whose truck I hit, and”—she found the right page to make sure—“Frank Danson. I guess I almost hit his SUV too.”

  “Two’s enough. Even if you found three, or four, what will that change?”

  It wouldn’t change anything. Rudy would still be disabled. Drugs would still have appeared in her loft. Why in the world was she here, after all?

  She shook her head clear and withdrew her hand from Wayne’s. She was here because Wayne was hiding something from her. Maybe there wasn’t some-one else in her car that night, but Wayne wasn’t telling her everything, which meant she’d have to find out the whole truth on her own. If she were braver she would come out and ask him about the conversation she’d overheard. What did he think she was lying about, and why did he need to keep an eye on her? What was he hiding?

  The questions made too little sense in her own mind to imagine what they would sound like if spoken aloud.

  He checked his watch in response to her long silence. “Look, I’m going to go down the street and pick up some breakfast while we wait. Hungry?”

  No, she wasn’t. Not one bit.

  “I’ll rustle up a breakfast burrito, be back in maybe fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You want some tea?”

  Shauna leaned her head against her propped-up fist.

  “If they have any.”

  He patted her knee. “Back soon.”

  Shauna tried to think through what she would ask this Deputy Sheriff Bowden when she saw him. By chance did you leave any critical information out of your report? Did you interview any witnesses who asked to be kept anonymous? This would take some careful two-stepping.

  She read the report one more time.

  “How can I help you, young lady?” Shauna flinched out of her hyper-focused state.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting you so soon.” She checked her watch. It was only ten thirty.

  The appearance of the man standing in front of her did not match her prior experience with Travis County police officers. Instead of the straightforward expression, the professional bearing, the detached tone of voice, Deputy Sheriff Bowden smiled at her as if she were a former girlfriend whom he was happy to run into.

  She prepared to stand, but he sat down in the chair next to her, slouched in it so his legs angled toward hers, and set his right ankle on his left knee. He was fit and strong and maybe a little too pleased with himself for that middle-aged accomplishment. He colored his hair with something cheap and dark that clashed with his pale complexion.

  Something about the line of his nose, which turned up a smidge at the end, reminded her of someone. Who?

  She glanced at the clerk’s window and saw the woman who’d helped her get the report staring at them. She did not look happy.

  “So what’s a pretty thing like you doing in an ugly place like this?”

  And with that clichéd line, Shauna was able to make the connection.

  “Cale Bowden. Your brother is Clay.” Clay used to say stuff like that to her all the time.

  The deputy’s happiness seemed to increase at this revelation. His dark eyes brightened from sultry to sweet. “That’s right. The baby of the family himself. You know him?”

  “Went to high school together.”

  “See there? You and I have something in common already.” Deputy Bowden changed his position so that his hand touched Shauna’s arm. “Except Clay always did let the good fish slip off his hook.”

  Shauna failed to anticipate a conversation of this nature. “It wasn’t like that, really.” She felt herself blush and picked up the accident report off the seat next to her and looked for Wayne. He could only have been gone a couple of minutes.

  “I was hoping you could help me.”

  “Your wish is my com—”

  A thwack sounded and Bowden ducked. Another officer had entered the room from behind them.
He carried a rolled-up newspaper, which he had used to smack Bowden in the back of the head.

  “Save it for after hours, Bowden,” the man said, not breaking stride.

  “Just helping a good citizen,” Bowden said to his back, still grinning. To Shauna the deputy said, “That one wears his briefs a size too small, if you know what I mean.”

  Hit by a bolt of clarity, Shauna knew exactly what Deputy Bowden meant. She lowered her guard, lifted her eyebrows to make her eyes larger, and said, “Maybe we could talk over coffee? When you have the time, I mean? I’m sure you’re very busy.”

  Bowden pushed off the chair and held out his hand to help her up.

  “You must have been reading my mind,” he said. “I have a half hour coming up, and I know this great place down the street where . . .”

  He was still speaking when Shauna slipped her hand into his. She sensed, out of the corner of her eye, the clerk crossing her arms. Shauna couldn’t be sure of this, though, because as she stood she was overcome by a much stronger sense, a frightening combination of vertigo, tunnel vision, and collapse. She gripped Bowden’s hand tighter to keep from falling.

  Another blackout? Please, no.

  The room tilted but she worked hard to keep her eyes open. She couldn’t pass out now. The walls shifted and began to rotate, but the deputy stayed fixed, so she held on and tried to keep his face front and center.

  The space around her spun, picking up speed, a centrifuge. The walls fell outward and the furniture moved out toward the collapsed wall.

  Her knees buckled.

  A chair flew by her and she grabbed it for balance.

  She fell anyway, or thought she fell, out of the vanishing room into the blackness of a starless night filled with the scent of fresh rain. But she wasn’t falling, actually, she was still standing on a wet bridge, one hand on a guardrail, dizzy from her shift out of reality.

  Another vision?

  She was leaning over the side to see what lay below. Gradually, her sense of vertigo settled. There was nothing to see at first except dancing beams of spotlights, though she heard the sound of traveling water. Then one of the lights came to rest on the partial undercarriage of a small car, more than half submerged at the riverbank fifty yards downstream, where it had been snagged by the bank. Two wheels protruded from the shallow river, which was slightly swollen from several days of downpour. Two Travis County sheriff ’s deputies were approaching the wreckage.

  Wayne Spade was in the water, crying out to the officers for help.

  “What a mess,” she heard herself say. But she was not herself. She stood in someone else’s skin. In fact, she was in someone else’s uniform. A brown sheriff ’s getup.

  She righted the body she was in and turned back to the sight on the four-lane bridge, illuminated by the spinning lights of emergency vehicles. She made a slow, methodical counterclockwise turn around the site.

  Directly in front of her, a cluster of EMTs hovered over a section of the pavement in the eastbound lanes. Rudy. Behind the hunched figures, a Chevy pickup idled in the outside lane. She recognized it as Wayne’s truck. The driver’s side door hung open, as if he’d come upon the limp form, slammed on the brakes, and jumped out.

  The dome light lit up the cab.

  In the westbound lanes, almost even with the Chevy, a large delivery truck straddled the double yellow center line. She walked around the truck, noting the crushed grille on the front and the damaged guardrail on this side of the bridge. The car must have gone over here, then taken the current under the bridge to the other side.

  A deputy spoke to the delivery driver. The driver’s hands shook—nerves, she guessed—and he wiped his cheeks with his palms again and again, trying to rid them of some invisible grime. He was babbling about what happened. It would take the deputy a while to sort out this account. Then the man doubled over and vomited. She jumped out of range, but the spray hit her shoes.

  She sighed and decided to talk with that one later.

  Ahead of her, about halfway across the bridge, an SUV obstructed the shoulder of the westbound lanes, and a driver, tall and irritable, leaned against the rear bumper, likely having been told to stay put until someone got to him. Clean-cut. Saturday casual. White collar. She assumed he was a witness.

  On the east side of the bridge, the sheriff ’s department had set up a barricade and was turning drivers back into a long and unfortunate detour.

  “Got a live one, Bowden!” someone shouted from below. She moved back to the guardrail and looked over again. All spotlights were on the flipped car, and on a figure the officers were lifting out of the water. They stretched out her body on the nearby bank.

  One deputy began administering CPR. Behind him, Wayne Spade paced, one hand on his forehead.

  She looked again at the victim.

  She was seeing herself, lying unconscious on the muddy slope.

  12

  Shauna opened her eyes. The room had stopped spinning. The walls were upright, the furniture in place. Shauna had dropped to her knees and leaned forward on one hand. Had she passed out? Oh, she hoped she had not passed out that time.

  She felt a hand on her back, and Wayne’s troubled voice. “What happened?”

  “Stood up too quick,” she heard the deputy say. “Went down like a boxer but hung on tight. See here?” He chortled at that.

  Shauna realized she still had his hand in a grip, her skin welded to his palm by some invisible heat. His fingertips were white. She let them go, too chagrined to meet his eyes, and he rotated and massaged his wrist. Wayne rubbed her back in a circular motion.

  “She’s been . . . sick,” Wayne said. “I should get her home.”

  “No,” she said. Images of the bridge tilted behind her eyes. She tried to think of how to hold on to them without letting go of her reason for coming in the first place. “I need to ask about the report.”

  “What report would that be?”

  Wayne pointed to the chair, and Bowden picked up the paper on its seat. He looked at it, turned a couple pages, then frowned.

  “I’m wondering if there were any other witnesses to the accident,” Shauna said.

  Bowden flipped another page. “Senator McAllister’s kids. I remember the aftermath. What a mess.”

  What a mess.

  The deputies had called her Bowden.

  Like the coach had called her Spade.

  And the soldier had called her Marshall. Who often tapped his thumb on his thigh like Wayne.

  What were these images, these scenes? She might have said she was spying into the memories of other people. But that didn’t make any sense at all.

  Neither did the first thing she thought to say. “You saw them pull me out of the water,” she said to Bowden.

  “I saw—you’re Shauna McAllister?”

  The clerk approached with a paper cup, which she handed to Shauna. Shauna nodded before taking a sip of the water. Bowden swore under his breath, then morphed into the Travis County sheriff ’s deputy she’d expected in the first place.

  “I am not supposed to be talking to you before the trial. You send your lawyer in to ask those kinds of questions.” He held the report out and shook it, like he expected someone to take if off his hands. Wayne did. “You take the rest you need here and then move on down the road, hear?”

  “I need to know what you saw.”

  “All right there in the report,” he said as he turned to go.

  “I need to know what’s not in the report.” The remark did, in fact, sound as stupid as Shauna had thought it would.

  “Me seeing you get pulled out of the water is not in the report, for one, so you feel free to make up whatever else you like.”

  “But you wrote—” And then she could not remember where the lines stood between what she had read in the report and what she had seen in her vision.

  “I wrote the facts. And I have no recollection of watching you come out of the water.”

  “A reporter came to me, sa
id he knows a witness who says there was someone else in my car. Do you know anything about that?”

  Bowden stopped, turned, and crossed his arms. “Are you suggesting I falsified my statement?”

  “No! No. I’m just wondering if any details presented themselves later. Or some new information after your report was finished. Or—”

  “I didn’t. Who’s the reporter?”

  Smith, he’d said. Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to say the name. The deputy already thought she was nuts.

  Bowden sighed. “Ms. McAllister, I’m sure sorry for whatever you’ve been through. But I’m going to have to ask you to—”

  “The truck driver threw up on your shoes.”

  Bowden’s lips parted. With a sideways glance at Bowden, the clerk blushed and returned to the more sane arena behind her window.

  “What are you talking about?” Wayne whispered. He put his hand on the small of Shauna’s back.

  “No one upchucked on anything.” He looked at Wayne. “If you’re a friend of hers, I highly recommend she get some coaching before her court date. Talk like this won’t help her case at all.” Bowden looked at her again. “Sorry I can’t help you.”

  Wayne watched the officer leave. “You need to sit down a minute,” he said.

  She was already sitting down.

  Shauna sat in the soft sofa chair in her bedroom, holding the report on her lap in both hands. Wayne was on a call in his room—some urgent weekend fire to put out at McAllister MediVista’s Houston office. Khai had unpacked and put away Shauna’s things while she was out with Wayne. Clothes and shoes were arranged in the closet. Books on the case out in the living area. Toiletries in the bathroom. The cedar elephant stood on the dresser.

  Shauna read the deputy’s account of her coming out of the water twice. Deputy Andrews administered CPR for approximately fifteen seconds before resuscitating her. And so on and so forth. In retrospect, she had to admit that nothing in the report could definitively be construed as his personal eyewitness account. He might not have seen anything and relied solely on his deputies for information.

  She stared out the window without really seeing. She could not explain what had happened, could not explain how she had seen what she had seen—including herself stretched out on the weed-lined, muddy bank of the river’s tiny branch.