by Steven Swaks
“I don’t know.” She looked at Jessica and Tracy. “Let me talk to your dad. He can call his friend at the police station. Funny, it seems I’ve done that recently.”
Tracy looked away.
~
Jessica’s father, John, was used to living in cheap hotel rooms. He did not even see the mass-produced paintings on the wall anymore, the stained carpet, or the bolted shelving between two walls in lieu of a true desk. The color and the pattern of the comforter changed from room to room, but they generally kept the same unimaginative look of twisted curves or flowery arrangements.
John walked to the bathroom and stood above the white sink. The late-forties man cupped his hand under the running faucet and splashed some water on his face. He dabbed a clean towel on his cheeks and sighed.
The man felt lonely. He was still fairly good looking and fit for his age. Some ladies even fell once in a while for his green eyes and shy dimples when he smiled, but he never did anything about it, not for lack of opportunities, but simply because he still loved his wife.
He walked out of the bathroom and sat at the narrow hotel desk. A quick glance through the window confirmed there was nothing to see but another parking lot in a commercial zone beneath a gray January sky.
He was unwrapping his Subway sandwich when his cellphone rang. He picked up.
“Hon, it’s Jane.”
“Hi, what’s going on? You’re calling early tonight.”
“I’m fine, how was your day? Any sale?”
“Couple of stores. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” He leaned back in a light office chair.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to jump on you so early.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of being married for so long. I can read you like a book.”
“I guess. John, some kid’s father from church is bothering Jessica…” She walked through all the relevant details of the story in a few minutes.
John mostly stayed quiet, only interrupting her to clarify a point or two.
“What do you think? What can we do?” She asked as a conclusion to her briefing.
“If this guy touches my baby, I’m going to chop his head off.”
“Tracy already took care of the threats. We need something more productive. I don’t even know if what he did is legal.”
“I don’t know, either. I need to talk to Frank.”
“That’s what I was thinking. I hate to bother him again, but I’m afraid the situation could get worse. Who knows how far this guy could go?”
“No, I agree, let me call him before it’s too late, and I’ll call you right back. Don’t worry. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
They both hung up.
John rubbed his chin and dialed right away.
Frank Burns picked up after one ring. “Is your daughter in my jail again?”
“No, Frank, it’s about Jessica.”
“Jessica is in my jail?” The massive, well over six foot, 220 pounds, bold chief of police asked from his living room recliner. His feet flew on either side of the foot rest. His Budweiser beer was on the end table next to him. He paused the movie he had just started.
John ran his friend through what happened and concluded with the unavoidable questions, “What do you think? Did he even do anything illegal? What can we do?”
Frank rubbed his salt and pepper goatee. “That’s a sticky one.”
“Isn’t it some kind of harassment? She’s a kid for crying out loud!”
“Well, technically she’s not. She’s over eighteen. Look, the guy didn’t do anything illegal. For one thing, he went to the school to apologize. It’s weird, I know, but for now, there’s nothing much we can do about it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me! Isn’t that sexual harassment?”
“Not really.”
“So we’re just supposed to suck it up?”
“Hold on, I’m not done. Like I said, PD can’t do much about it. But you could apply for a protective order if the guy continues his little circus.”
“A protective order? How does that work?”
“You can file a stalking protective order through the court. If a judge grants the order, the guy will get served. If he violates that, he may go to jail. You have to understand that this finding by the judge to grant the order is a civil finding, not a criminal one. You say that he knows her through your church?”
“Yeah, his kid attends the Friday evening program.”
“But this guy is not Jessica’s counselor or anything like that, right?”
“No, why?”
“If he occupied a position of authority, if he was a teacher, counselor, a cop, or something like that, then it would be easier to come down on him, but I understand that it isn’t the case.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Well, I don’t know what else to tell you,” Frank relaxed in his armchair.
“You’ve done a lot already. I’m sorry to bother you again.”
“Ah, you didn’t. You should stop by one of these days. We could get a beer in the backyard and talk about those days in high school.”
“That would be great. You take care of yourself, Frank.”
“Bye now.”
They both hung up.
Another update on the phone and Jane caught up with their options. “A judge, a restraining order? Isn’t it a little drastic?”
“It might be.”
“The court system is a can of worms, John. Once it’s opened, you don’t know how far it’s going to go. Not to mention the church; everybody is going to talk about it.”
“It’d better be justified if we decide to do anything.”
“Why don’t we wait and see if he bothers her again?”
“Tracy could pick her up at school just to be on the safe side. She has nothing else to do anyway.”
Jane had a short bitter smile, “That sounds good.”
They both said goodbye.
Jane walked down the narrow corridor to her daughter’s room. Pictures from the girls’ childhood were splattered on the wall. There was a time when everything was easier. Tracy wasn’t in her ever-extending rebellious teenage stage, and John was home every night. She missed those days.
She knocked on Jessica’s door in a soft touch.
“Come in.”
She opened the door and closed it behind her. “What are you doing?”
The small bedroom was only lit with a desk lamp where Jessica was seated. “Homework, math.”
“Do you need help?”
“I should be ok. This chapter is not too hard.”
“I talked to Dad about what happened,” Jane said while sitting on Jessica’s bed.
“What did he say?”
“He called his friend.”
“The police chief?”
“Yes, the one who helped your sister.”
“So what can we do?”
“He said that Simons didn’t do anything illegal, but we could file for a restraining order against him.”
Jessica cringed. “Really? Isn’t it too much? Maybe I overreacted. He did come to apologize.”
“If you feel comfortable with that, we can wait and see what he does. Maybe it’s the end of it. In the meantime, Tracy can pick you up at school.”
“What about church?”
“There’re a lot of people over there, and Tracy will also wait for you. At least it’s going to keep her out of trouble.”
Jane stood up and looked at Jessica in the eyes, “He’s going to leave you alone, Jess, I promise.”
Headquarters
Ben backed up the ambulance in a bay surrounded by tall white walls. The crew stepped out and walked to the entrance.
“This station is a fortress,” Ben muttered before he pushed on the intercom button.
“Can I help you?” The dispatcher asked while looking at a colored surveillance screen of the ambulance bay and the two paramedics waiting by the back door.
“She’s toying with us,” Ben
said waiting for the dispatcher to buzz the door open.
“If she was a dude, I’d give her a big piece of my mind,” Ben said without meaning it.
“I heard that,” the female voice said through the intercom.
“Great… can you buzz us in?”
The buzzer went off and unlocked the door.
The two paramedics entered and crossed a medium-sized hangar with storage racks of spare medical equipment, bag valve masks, oxygen masks, cannulas, compresses of different sizes, backboards, cervical collars, and anything else necessary to handle different types of medical or trauma patients. A parked ambulance was not far from large spare oxygen tanks chained against the wall.
“We really need to have a code on that door, so we don’t have to deal with dispatch every single time we come in,” Ben said.
“It’s only after hours.”
“Well, it already feels like too much.”
The two men travelled from one surveillance screen to another. They first appeared in the bay, then through the hangar, and finally into the main corridor with offices on either side.
In the middle of the day, the headquarters buzzed with activity. Paramedics walked in and out. They responded to calls and came back while administrators did the not-so-glamorous part of the job. Secretaries walked by, folders in hand. Accountants stayed in their offices buried beneath piles of paperwork. New employees attended training sessions, and more experienced ones came to recertification classes. Other crew from more distant stations came to refill their supplies; they said hi to dispatch and avoided management as if they were wanted criminals in the Old West (perhaps they were too used to their freedom and not reporting to anybody). The operation manager enjoyed a narrow but deep office chair with a back climbing much higher than his skull in an old aristocratic fashion. An oversized white coffee mug sat on his right with a red and bold YOU’RE FIRED! inked on it.
On the left side of the main corridor, a silver key pad protruded out of the wall next to a white door. Ben knocked.
“What do you want?” A female voice asked through another intercom.
A camera with a red dot was pointed toward them and the entire corridor
“She sounds like your girlfriend,” Alex said quietly.
“Which one?”
“The one who’s going to dump you.”
“That doesn’t help,” Ben said. “Are you going to open?” He called louder through the door.
“We have an intercom,” the metallic voice said, “no need to get excited.”
“I’m going to strangle her,” Ben sighed.
A discreet click unlatched the door.
“How’re you guys doing?” The early thirties woman asked.
She could have been more attractive if she cared about her appearance, but she didn’t. Her black hair without real shape fell on her shoulders, and her light green eyes remained completely unnoticed under untrimmed eyebrows and above dark eye circles.
Jennifer liked working night dispatch because she didn’t have to deal with people. She enjoyed the lone time away from the daily tumult and even the crew responding to calls. She was only required to remotely turn on their bedroom light and announce the call information over the PA system. Once they came back, they mostly went straight back to sleep, unless the call was worth talking about, which rarely happened.
Her only companion was one of four wide multiscreen consoles facing her in a medium-sized square room with a large company logo painted on the wall. She had a call status screen, a moving map GPS with the current unit locations, a third screen with internet access, and a last one for close-circuit video surveillance.
“We’re doing great, sweet Jennifer,” Ben said with a charming smile.
She looked at him with dull eyes.
“That’s it, I have to ask,” Ben said sitting next to her, “when are we going out together? Just you and me?”
“If you’re still in this chair in five seconds, I’m going to kick you in the groin.”
Alex openly laughed, “You were asking for that one!”
“She doesn’t know it, but she’s in love with me.”
“That’s for sure, Benny, I don’t know it.” She sat deeper in her office chair. “Did you get anything interesting today?”
“Nah, typical routine, a shortness of breath, abdominal pain, and a two-car TC on the highway,” Ben answered without an ounce of excitement.
“Any patients in the traffic collision?”
“One neck pain, but he’s probably already out of the hospital by now,” Alex said.
“Busy, busy, I see. When was the last time you had an airlift?”
“A chopper? In this town? Four months ago? Five? This place is slower than anything I’ve seen. And trust me, daytime is as slow as night.”
“Funny, I was thinking it was busier.”
“You should take a day shift one of these days to see what’s going on.”
Her eyes opened wider. “A day shift? Me? And deal with administration, ops manager, and all those guys? No, thanks.”
“It’s your call.”
The crew retired to their room down the hall to watch television for a while before falling asleep. Tomorrow morning, another two paramedics would take over after a slow night. That was how Stone Falls functioned. It was slow, and they might as well say it, it was plain boring.
Dina’s Diner
Even if Dina’s Diner, DD’s for the locals, didn’t look like much from the outside (after all, it was buried on the first floor of an eighty-year-old three-story building on Main Street), it was an icon in Stone Falls.
New in town and willing to explore, a young couple entered the restaurant. To the right of a fairly large dining room, a long counter ran the entire length of the diner with bar stools bolted to the ground. Behind it, an older cook flipped pancakes and sizzled New York steaks.
The young woman looked next to her. Small frames hung on a wooden-paneled wall with candid portraits of faithful customers. There were older people, younger customers, or groups of friends waving at the photographer, all having a good time in the small diner.
“Howdy!” Amanda Walker, the owner, hollered from the other side of the counter. “Pick a table!” her voice was loud enough to cover the kitchen fans and ongoing conversations.
The young couple looked at the dining room which was already a third full. A few tables spread like a no man’s land between the griddle and the more comfortable and intimate red booths on the opposite side.
“Do you want a booth?” The young man asked his wife.
“Sure,” she quickly answered.
They sat on each side of a table and picked up a laminated menu.
“What are you gonna have?” he asked.
“Those steaks looked awfully good,” she said with a smile.
The man was wearing dark blue jeans, work boots, and a clean white t-shirt. The outfit might have been a bold choice if he was older and anything more than skinny, but at twenty-seven years old and with the stomach of an athlete, he almost looked like a model for a teenage clothing company. His short black hair and dark eyes were the final note attracting the ladies on a regular basis, but he didn’t care. He only laid his eyes on his sweet wife.
Amanda strolled to them. She put two ice waters on the table and took a small notepad from her front pocket. “What are you folks going to have today?”
They ordered their requests, a medium rare New York steak, hash browns, scrambled eggs, and English muffin for her, stuffed French toast for him.
Amanda looked at the woman. “You folks aren’t from here, are you?” There was something different about her. Amanda could tell that much, but she couldn’t pinpoint her origin.
“No, we’re not,” the young lady said.
“Oh, come on! Are you going to let me simmer, or are you going to tell me?” Amanda said with a spreading smile.
They both chuckled. “We’re from Alaska.”
“Alaska? Isn’t that something?�
�� She looked at her. “Are you native from up there?” The man was Caucasian, she could tell that much, but the young lady was still a mystery. She had a distant Asian look, shoulder length black hair, and darker skin.
“I’m from a Yupik Eskimo village called Eek. It’s in Southwest Alaska.”
“You’re an Eskimo? Are you pulling my leg?” Amanda said with a smile and a frown.
“I-i Yupiugua. Tauna atam apteqerru ukveqenrilkuvnga.”
Amanda’s mouth parted. “I’ve no idea what you said, but it sounded really neat!”
“I said that I was Yupik Eskimo, and I told you to ask him if you didn’t believe me.”
She glanced at the man, shaking her head. “Isn’t that something?” she repeated, “I’m forty-eight years old, and it’s the first time I meet a real Eskimo! I’m Amanda by the way,” she said extending her hand.
“I’m George. I was thinking your name was Dina,” the man said after shaking her hand.
“Nah, it’s more of a childhood nickname that stuck around, and it’s catchier than Amanda’s Diner.” She looked at his young wife.
“I’m Christine.”
Amanda took her hand with the fervor of a fan meeting a rock star. “An Eskimo,” she shook her head one more time. “I tell you what, the dessert is on me. You got to try our pies!”
Alex and Ben walked in dressed in their dark-blue paramedic uniforms. Amanda turned and glanced at them. “Hi boys! Take a seat!”
“Hi, beautiful!” Ben hollered.
“That was professional…” Alex said with a grin.
“Don’t get any ideas! You’re too young and too stupid for me, Ben!” A few customers chuckled throughout the diner.
They walked to a table toward the back of the restaurant.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t mind tapping her, Medic,” a man sitting nearby said quietly without lowering the newspaper he was reading.
“That was a joke. I’ve known her for years. I respect her, and I don’t want to tap her, like you said.”
The late-fifties man folded down the top half of his paper. “Didn’t you come to my garage before? Transmission leak, right?”
“That’s right, and I never went back. What’s the name of your joint again? Jim’s Repair & Body Work? I didn’t have a good vibe about your place, now I know why. I like to work with people who respect women.”
