What Are Friends For?

by Patricia McLinn

  “Omigod! Zeke. How long has it been?”

  Now if that wasn’t the most inane thing she’d ever said. As if she wanted to bring that up at all, much less first thing. Besides, they both knew the last time they’d seen each other had been the day they’d graduated from high school. More accurately, the night.

  Unless he’d forgotten.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she added.

  He chuckled—dry, assured, even a little wicked. Quite unlike the almost always serious guy who’d been her lab partner. “Well, I do—can you take these handcuffs off me?”

  Oh, God. Oh, God!

  She had put the Lilac Festival Grand Marshal, Chief Judge, Guest of Honor and potential savior of the Village of Drago in handcuffs.

  Not a great start.

  “Hey, Zeke! Welcome back to Drago,” Benny said.

  Right before her eyes, this new Zeke morphed into an echo of the high school Zeke—the Zeke who’d shut down when he had to deal with strangers.

  “You wouldn’t remember Benny,” she said. “He’d graduated by the time we were in high school.”

  “Yeah, don’t remember you at all, but Darce talked me into buying stock in Zeke-Tech when it went public.”

  ‘She talked all of us into it,” said Sarge. “And she wouldn’t let any of us sell. Even when it dipped along with the rest of the market, she was a bulldog chewing on our tails to hold on. With that stock split last year it’s looking good to send my kids to college.”

  Sarge’s long-windedness appeared to have given Zeke time to recover.

  “I’m glad,” he said. It wasn’t eloquent but it sounded sincere, and when he shook hands with Benny and Sarge, he looked the other men in the eyes, and she could tell they were completely won over.

  “Say, why don’t you come down to the station and take a look at our setup,” invited Sarge. “We got the best coffee in town, and doughnuts.”

  “No, thank you.”

  The abrupt refusal seemed to deflate the other two police officers, but not Darcie. After that year as lab partners, she knew that No, thank you was actually a big improvement on No, that’s wrong, which was a step up from You screwed that up. Again.

  Zeke knew tech like nobody’s business. Tact? Forget it.

  “Give the guy a break, Sarge. He’s just gotten into town. He probably wants to get home, see his mom, get some rest.”

  “His mom’s not at home. She’s at bingo at St. Ambrose’s. It’s Monday.”

  “Oh, right.” She was losing it if she’d forgotten bingo night. “And that means you can’t get in the house, Zeke. Unless you have a key?”

  “No. I’ll go to St. Ambrose’s.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Darcie said, talking over hoots from Benny and Sarge. “It could be worth your life if you interrupt.”

  “Couple years ago they had a fire alarm, and one woman whacked the fireman trying to get her out with her purse. Kept yelling she was one square away, one square away,” Sarge said.

  “I’ll get some coffee at the café.”

  Darcie shook her head. “Closed on Mondays. Loris plays bingo, too.”

  “Crenna’s, then.”

  “Closed down three, four years ago,” Benny said.

  “And Dairy Queen’s not open for the season yet,” Sarge added. “Like I said, best coffee’s at the police station.”

  Zeke raised his hands in surrender.

  “Why don’t you and Benny go ahead, Sarge. I’ll lead him back to the station,” Darcie volunteered.

  After more handshaking, the other officers departed, leaving her with Zeke in the gloomy parking lot.

  He scanned her face, then glanced down at the uniform that identified her as one of Drago’s finest. His brows lowered. “I never expected to see you like this. I guess this explains why your signature was on that letter.”

  What did being a Drago cop have to do with being co-chair with Jennifer of the town’s biggest event?

  “We better get going. If we don’t show up at the station soon, there’ll be another APB out, and this time it will be for you.”

  She turned toward her car and took two steps when his voice came from behind her. “Uh, Darcie?”

  She pulled in one long breath through her mouth, then released it slowly through her nose as she faced him. “Yes.”

  “It’s good to see you, Darcie.”

  “It’s good to see you, too.”

  Now there was an understatement—considering what she hoped to get out of him during these next three weeks.

  “We’ve been having trouble with the darned things for months,” Sarge said around another doughnut, jerking his head toward the bank of computers that Corine, the night dispatcher, commanded.

  Doughnut number two left Sarge four behind Zeke. There was one thing that hadn’t changed about Zeke since high school.

  Darcie’s shift had ended ten minutes ago. She’d put away her equipment, signed in her squad car and taken care of other details. When she’d returned to the bull pen housed in the basement of Village Hall, Zeke hadn’t budged. She could have waved breezily and walked away. The sole reason she hadn’t was that she didn’t want Sarge and Benny to mess up what she and Jennifer had planned.

  “We’ve had experts out the wazoo crawling all over this system, but when we have a lot going on, like that APB tonight, it crashes. At the worst possible time.”

  “Something could be drawing power all the time, but you only notice when the system can’t respond.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Sarge said, with a wise nod.

  Corine snorted. “I told you that the first night it happened, Archibald.” She was the only one who got away with calling him that. Corine had been with the department longer than he had. She’d been with the department longer than anybody. “I’m thinking it’s a hacker. Maybe that Wellton kid. He’s always getting packages delivered to him. Off the Internet,” she added portentously.

  Corine found anyone who ordered off the Internet inherently suspicious.

  “A hacker?” Sarge scoffed. “You back on that? That guy from Chicago said no way. He said if there ever had been a hacker, he was long gone and that wouldn’t still be affecting the system.”

  “Not necessarily,” Zeke said.

  “Hah!” Corine smirked.

  Sarge gave her a half-hearted scowl before presenting Zeke with an expression of earnest interest.

  “Really? No one would know better than the CEO of Zeke-Tech, that’s for sure. I bet you know a couple hundred gigabytes more than that guy from Chicago. Say!” he said as if he’d just thought of the idea, when Darcie would bet her next six months’ pay that he’d been maneuvering for this since the moment he’d realized who Zeke was back there in the D-Shop parking lot. “Maybe you could look, see if you spot what’s wrong.”

  “You are not going to ask the CEO of Zeke-Tech to fix our computers,” Darcie said. “Do you have any idea what his time goes for? You’d have to cut your pension in half to pay for him just putting his hand on the mouse.”

  Sarge blanched. That’s what she’d thought—he’d been angling for a freebie. The old opportunist was not going to try to weasel time out of Zeke when Darcie had much bigger plans.

  “I, uh, thought—”

  “And surely you weren’t going to hit up Zeke for free work. Do you know how many requests he gets every week for donations, for assistance? An average of thirty-seven hundred—more than five hundred a day, including weekends.” She shook her head, which required no acting. She’d also shaken her head when she’d read that statistic. A man hounded that much would have to build effective defenses. “We invited Zeke to come home as the honored guest of his hometown for the festival. We’re not going to start after him for things. We’re just glad he’s home.”

  She might have overdone the home stuff. Zeke swiveled his chair to stare at her. Not quite the intent look he used to give her in the lab when he was in scientist-in-command mode. Nor the even more intent l
ook the night before he left Drago…

  No, definitely not that look.

  This was more the way he had looked at her in the parking lot earlier tonight when he’d squinted his gray eyes against the lights. Like he was trying to bring her into sharp focus.

  She’d just as soon he didn’t succeed.

  Sarge was falling over himself to absolutely deny what Darcie had caught him at when they were interrupted by a new arrival.

  “Hello.”

  That’s all it took. No one moved, as if caught in a spell.

  The husky voice came from the stairway behind them. “I heard at the club that you’d arrived in town, Zeke. What a pleasure it is to have you back home in Drago.”

  Zeke rose and turned toward Jennifer Truesdale, who had stopped with one foot on the bottom step and the other a step above.

  Darcie didn’t need to turn her head to know what he would see—blond hair, smooth skin, big blue eyes and a figure that might be even better than it had been in high school.

  So she watched Zeke’s eyes. She saw them light up as if he’d spotted the promised land.

  If they’d all been back in high school, Darcie could have hated Jennifer. Darcie had been everyone’s buddy, Jennifer had been everyone’s princess. No, make that queen—homecoming, prom and, of course, Lilac Queen.

  In fact, Darcie tried to hate Jennifer when they were younger. But even then she’d seen an innate niceness in the most popular girl in town. In the past few years they’d become real friends. Darcie was one of the few who knew exactly how far Jennifer’s life was from the golden image most people conjured when they looked at her.

  So she couldn’t even hate Jennifer for causing that dopey look on Zeke’s face.

  “Zeke, is it really you? I can hardly believe it! I mean, we’ve seen pictures, of course, with those articles in the business magazines, but you look amazing. Doesn’t he look fabulous, Darcie?”

  “Just great,” she muttered. Not that it mattered. Zeke had forgotten her existence entirely.

  Unfortunately Jennifer hadn’t, giving her an assessing look. Oh, hell.

  “I’m sure Darcie’s filled you in on the festival schedule, Zeke, and—”

  “Actually, we didn’t get around to that,” Darcie said, adding quickly to keep Zeke from mentioning drawn guns, frisking and handcuffs. “We’ll get him a copy of the schedule in the morning and go over it then.”

  “Good idea.” Jennifer slipped her coat off with the ease of a runway model, revealing a deep purple dress that shimmered subtly with every move. Its skirt widened before stopping above the knees, revealing slender calves above delicate feet shown off by strappy black heels. Darcie knew Jennifer had been at Drago Country Club tonight, but only because her boss had invited her. “We can adjust some of the times if they don’t work for you, Zeke, because we want to make this fun for you.”

  Jennifer continued talking about the festival with low-key cheerfulness. Darcie suspected she’d be good at selling real estate—if anyone around Drago had the money to buy a new house.

  Darcie’s attention stuck on the picture Jennifer made standing there in that purple dress. Darcie knew the dress was more than a decade old, the wear hidden by taking in seams when Jennifer lost weight a few years ago on the going-through-a-bitch-of-a-divorce diet. Darcie had been with her when Jennifer paid six dollars for the shoes at a consignment store in Chicago.

  Still, Darcie’s on-duty shoes had never felt clunkier, her uniform more blandly utilitarian—and designed for men to boot—her hair more brown and her body… Oh, hell. She never had been in Jennifer’s class.

  “Ashley?” Jennifer interrupted herself,

  At that single word, Darcie jolted out of her self-absorption. She twisted around to see Jennifer’s twelve-year-old daughter coming down the stairs.

  Ashley was adolescent gawky, but the promise of great beauty had earned her the solitary Junior Princess spot on this year’s Lilac Festival court—an honor that had given Jennifer major headaches with her previously shy and well-behaved daughter.

  “What are you doing here, Ashley?” Jennifer asked. “You’re supposed to be at Cristina’s.”

  Color flooded the girl’s cheeks, her chin came up and her mouth set with the mulishness Jennifer had been sighing over to Darcie two days ago.

  “I wanted to see if he—” her gaze touched Zeke, then bounced away, though she didn’t meet her mother’s eyes, either “—had really come.”

  “My sister sent her to find out,” said a new voice. A voice crackling and popping between childhood and adulthood.

  A stocky figure stood behind Ashley. From the way everyone else peered into the shadows, she wasn’t alone in having overlooked thirteen-year-old Warren Wellton.

  Now Darcie had a good idea what happened. Cristina Wellton, Warren’s older sister, a contender for the title of Lilac Festival Queen and Ashley’s hero at the moment, had wanted confirmation of Zeke’s arrival, along with a scouting report. But Cristina knew, or feared, Jennifer would be on hand and it was against the rules for contestants to meet judges outside official events until the queen was chosen. So she’d sent Ashley as her proxy.

  But how had any of these people known Zeke was in town, much less that he’d ended up at the police station?

  “Hello, Warren,” Jennifer said. “How did you get here? It’s late and…”

  “Mrs. Wellton drove us,” Ashley said.

  “But—” Jennifer started.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Stenner. She’s okay,” Warren said, hesitantly coming down three stairs.

  Benny and Sarge frowned at him, still outraged that last summer he’d broken into Benny’s patrol car and somehow rigged the radio so it only received a hip-hop station. That had infuriated Benny. Sarge had laughed about it until the cost to replace the radio came out of his budget.

  But Warren wasn’t the lost cause her fellow cops thought he was, she was sure of it. Her heart twisted for him, because he had to assure people his mother was okay to drive, and, especially, because his mother wasn’t always okay to drive.

  “I hope my daughter didn’t inconvenience your mom too much, or you,” Jennifer said to the boy with a warm smile.

  “It’s just Warren,” Ashley started in apparent disgust at her mother’s concern for Warren’s convenience.

  Zeke interrupted. “My God, she’s your daughter, Jennifer?”

  Ashley preened a bit—something Darcie had never seen her do before. No doubt she’d interpreted Zeke’s expression as amazement at her beauty.

  Darcie wondered if Zeke’s reaction instead resembled her own amazement that anybody their age could have a kid who was almost a teenager when Darcie didn’t feel any older than that herself.

  Zeke turned from Ashley to Jennifer, and Darcie knew it didn’t matter why he was astonished. The bottom line was that he still looked at Jennifer with awe.

  At some level, Darcie heard Jennifer confirming that yes, Ashley was her daughter. But her thoughts were otherwise occupied.

  What had she expected? That everything had changed in the past sixteen years? Darcie was proud that she’d matured enough to see the good in Jennifer, to become her friend. But expecting Zeke to stop being gaga over Jennifer was foolish.

  She’d known that in high school. On graduation night she’d known exactly how things stood—and she’d still jumped him.

  “What’s going on here?” The deep voice of the latest newcomer to the doorway at the top of the stairs—this place had never been so popular—boomed the demand through the bull pen.

  Corine spun her chair back to the console, Warren shrank against the wall as much as his solid build would allow, Darcie wished she’d left on time and Sarge and Benny launched into overlapping, hurried and self-exculpatory explanations of the evening’s events.

  Chief Dutch Harnett had arrived.

  Great, just what she needed. The hard-nosed outsider who’d taken over Drago’s police department almost a year ago, and who showed no sign of
being a big Darcie Barrett fan.

  “So there was no sense,” Sarge was saying, wrapping up his explanation, “in Zeke going home—”

  “My mother’s house,” Zeke said under his breath.

  “—since she’d be at bingo. So we brought him here to give him a cup a coffee and some doughnuts to relax after…” Sarge trailed off with an apologetic look at Darcie.

  She stood at attention. “After I stopped his car as matching the APB.” No need to explain that. Chief Harnett seemed to hear every scrap of radio traffic, no way would he have missed an APB. “And put him in handcuffs.”

  That drew a wide range of responses. Jennifer gasped. Ashley gaped. Warren laughed. Zeke said, “No big deal.”

  None of those reactions particularly surprised Darcie. The one that did was the chief’s. His brows drew down in a scowl and his mouth was straight, but she could swear his eyes glinted with amusement.

  He cleared his throat. “As long as there’s no harm done and Mr. Zeekowsky doesn’t want to file a complaint…”

  “No. I’m glad Darcie was looking for the guy.”

  “Then, since bingo broke up nearly half an hour ago, I’d say it’s time for Mr. Zeekowsky to go home—to his mother’s house,” the chief corrected, proving he’d heard Zeke earlier. “Barrett, accompany Mr. Zeekowsky.”

  “Why? His car runs fine, and he knows how to get there.”

  “Officer Barrett?” No twinkling this time in the chief’s eyes.

  “I’m off duty,” she grumbled.

  “There’s no need,” Zeke started.

  “Officer Barrett will accompany you,” the chief said without looking away from Darcie, “to ensure nothing further untoward happens.”

  Chapter Two

  Darcie had had better shifts, she acknowledged as she trailed Zeke’s car through Drago’s quiet streets.

  Putting handcuffs on one of the New Technology’s best minds—or so said Time magazine—in the mistaken fear he might be a child kidnapper and molester was not the sort of thing that made it onto a list of career highlights. Add in that she had designs on this particular mind, along with its wallet, and this was not the best start.