The Wind Is Rising 1

by Daniel Steele

  She stopped talking. She lay against me, not crying, not sobbing, talking softly as if discussing her life at school as a little girl. I held her lightly, trying not to touch her with my male hands.

  “I had watched and observed my brothers. And while I wasn’t the best driver in the world, I was able to take an old Ford pickup used for errands and got it out onto the road. In the confusion, no one followed me. I wondered later why they hadn’t called the police, but they must have known that if I ever talked, all of them would go to prison.

  “I had four older sisters, all of whom had fled as soon as they could marry and never came back. But from my mother, I knew where one of them was. She lived in Homestead, where she had married a Navy man. I managed to get there and I collapsed on her front door.

  “She and her husband took me in. Later we talked and I found out he had done the same thing to her, to all my sisters, until they had gotten old enough to run away. Her husband had wanted to kill him and my brothers, but they were violent men and had ties to organized crime from the days before Castro. She just wanted to make a life for herself.

  “I lived with them for five years. She taught me how to be a woman, what decent men were like and how to find them. She helped me get my GED and then I went on to Junior College. I learned about cellphones and satellites and all of the world that I had never known about. Her daughter became my best friend. She lives and works in Jacksonville now trying to help other children who need someone in their lives. I hope that someday you can meet her.”

  She stopped talking and it was a few minutes before I realized that she was through.

  “Myra…”

  I realized I had absolutely no idea what to say to her.

  What I said next came out of nowhere.

  “Is Myra your name? Or Martinez?”

  “No.”

  “Did you….do you know what happened to your father and brothers? Are they still out there? Are you afraid they might find you someday?”

  “No, Bill, I’m not afraid of them anymore. They’re all dead.”

  “God works in mysterious ways.”

  “Not mysterious. They were violent, evil men. Their fate as ordained.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  She turned in my arms so she was staring up into my eyes. Her luscious body pressed itself against mine but I couldn’t return the pressure.

  “My father and two brothers died that day. I looked for the others years later, and bad luck dogged them all. They all died, of one thing or another.”

  She stared into my eyes.

  “You’re not holding me the same way, Bill. You’re not rubbing your cock against me, or playing with my titties. Have you changed your mind about wanting me?”

  “No. You’re the same woman you were a few minutes ago. But how can you enjoy me….any male…after that?”

  “It was a long time ago. I did have problems, once, dealing with male attention. But I can’t help the body or face I was given. I realized my father and brothers were animals. Most men are not like them, thank God. And I am….a passionate woman. I rediscovered that…later.

  “My father and brothers abused me….but they paid. And no man has ever touched me since that time…unless I wanted him to.”

  I held her lightly in my arms, like a figure crafted from easily shattered glass.

  “Why, Myra. Why tell me all this? And what should I call you, anyway?”

  “Myra is my name now. And I told you….because…I think we are about to become lovers. And you deserve to know who I am. Who I really am.”

  “I know who you really are. You’re Myra Martinez, the most beautiful woman in Jacksonville. A good, honest woman. A woman who was my friend. A woman I hope is still my friend.”

  “I hope I will always be your friend, Bill Maitland.”

  She reached up and untied the knot holding her blouse and then slipped it off her shoulders. Reaching behind herself, she did something and the heavy duty bra slipped off to fall on the blanket under our feet.

  The moonlight transformed her into an earth mother goddess. Her breasts hung heavy and swollen down to her waist. The only woman I’d ever seen remotely like her was Debbie, and even Debbie hadn’t looked like this. Her nipples were large and swollen and the areola were the size of dinner plates, a softer color in the moonlight against the flesh of her breasts.

  She smiled up at me and placing her hands under them, lifted them up to me for inspection.

  “Are they as beautiful as you thought they’d be?”

  “More.”

  I dropped to my knees, placed my hands under hers and pulled them up. Pulling one breast to me, I opened my lips and suckled the nipple. She stroked the back of my hand with her other hand.

  “You can have me, Bill. Anyway, anything you want. I’ve wanted this for a long time. But you have to make me a promise first.”

  I looked up at her, unwilling to stop what I was doing.

  It was hard to make words.

  “A promise?”

  “A promise. And then I will be yours.”

  “What? Anything. Everything. The moon. The stars.”

  “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep. And think about what you say before you agree.”

  I made myself let her breast drop.

  “Alright. What promise do you want from me?”

  “I want you to promise me, to really promise me…that you will not fall in love with me.”

  I just stared at her. Then I stumbled to my feet.

  “How can I possibly make a promise like that? And why would you ask it?”

  “If you promise me, I know you’ll keep your promise. Or at least try with everything that’s in you. And why? I know you, Bill Maitland. I know you from what I’ve seen of you and what I’ve heard of you. You are a passionate man….a serious man. You fell in love with Debbie and you loved her until she pushed you away. You fell in love with Aline, the Frenchwoman, and you would have stayed with her if she hadn’t left. You aren’t a shallow man. What you feel, you feel deeply. It’s why you’re the attorney you are, the prosecutor you are, the man you are.”

  I put my hands on her bare shoulders. Her skin was hot to the touch, as if she were fevered.

  “I’m not in love with you, Myra. I don’t plan to fall in love with you. I don’t know that I will. But if I did, would that be so terrible?”

  I saw the same thing in her eyes that I’d glimpsed that night in her car after the costume party at Pelican’s. I still didn’t understand.

  “I cannot….I can’t…you cannot love me.”

  And then I understood and dropped my hands from her body.

  “Because you couldn’t possibly love me.”

  I remembered then Paula Donnally’s poisoned words and realized she hadn’t lied.

  “What is it about me that makes me worth fucking, Myra, but not loving?”

  Her eyes closed and I could see gilded tears gliding down her cheeks.

  “Don’t do this, Bill. Not now. Make love to me. Fuck me. Don’t ask me for what I can’t give.”

  I had a moment of sanity. I didn’t know that I loved her, could love her, wanted to love her. I knew that I wanted her body gleaming in the moonlight. I wanted to bury myself inside her while I milked those breasts of hers. I could have her body, just not her love. Nobody could be so stupid as to throw away the one for the other.

  And if I did wind up falling for her, well, I’d deal with that when the time came.

  “I promise.”

  She bent and rolled a condom on me.

  I think I was inside her before we hit the ground.

  THREAD ONE

  November 4, 2005

  Friday, 3 A.M.

  Spring City, Florida

  The night was silent. Gordon Evers padded quietly through the hallway leading from his bedroom toward the kitchen and the back porch. In his hand he carried his loaded Glock down by his side. As he came in view of the open back door he saw a dark figure standi
ng quietly there in the open doorway.

  As he crossed the last two feet, he reached out and enveloped the figure firmly in both arms.

  “I hate to hurt your feelings, Gord, but a water buffalo would probably have crept up more quietly.”

  “I caught you, didn’t I?”

  Evelyn Smith moved in his arms until she cradled her soft breasts against his chest, her velvety skin warming his body up and down. She kissed him hard.

  “But I wasn’t resisting too hard, was I, Chief?”

  “No, Lieutenant Smith, I will admit you didn’t put up a real struggle. I’ll go easy on you for that reason.”

  She rubbed her thighs against his soft penis, which didn’t take the bait.

  “I think I already disarmed you, Chief Evers.”

  “Momentarily.”

  She grinned.

  “Big talk.”

  “Want me to prove it to you?”

  She twisted again and that position was almost as bad as the soft cleft of her behind rested against him.

  “No Chief. I won’t want to be responsible for sending Spring City’s chief law enforcement office to the hospital trying to prove he’s superman.”

  She placed her hand over the cold surface of the Glock.

  “You don’t ever relax, do you?”

  Evers looked out into the darkness. The night sky at 3 A.M. was littered with twinkling stars. Spring City was far enough away from major cities that the night was almost crystalline, clear of competing street lights and rebounding automobile and truck headlights. Especially on a November morning, his duplex seemed in a world of its own. Beyond a fence he’d be in the backyard of a television repair shop and out his front door he was less than a half block from a street.

  The night was too quiet, as well as too dark. The thing had bothered him the most about the move from Jacksonville’s bloody streets down to the almost Mayberry-ish small town charm of Spring City was missing tonight, and that felt wrong too.

  He’d always been a city boy, a Jacksonville native and the first few weeks here in the summer four years ago he couldn’t sleep unless the windows were shut tight and he had the air going strong. It was the goddamned NOISE. He couldn’t believe it the first night. It sounded like the world’s biggest cricket was prowling around outside in the night, as loud as a jetliner coming in at JIA.

  Eventually he’d gotten used to it, though. Everybody did. And gradually, it became the white noise of rural Florida. You only noticed it when it wasn’t there. But when the temperature dropped, the insects must have hightailed it for warmer climes, or burrowed into the ground. Because the noises vanished. And then you could hear every creak of a settling house, the movement of cockroaches creeping in the kitchen, the soft pad of wild felines hunting for mice or scraps thrown out in back yards.

  There were times he almost couldn’t sleep because of the silence that lay like a blanket over the night.

  Evelyn Smith, all six-foot plus of long, lithe, honey-haired heaven leaned into him and he answered her, knowing she already knew the answer.

  “I’ll never really relax until that bastard is dead, or behind bars, preferably dead.”

  He looked beyond her into the darkness of his back yard. It was wrong to have to stand here with a Glock in his hand because you could never be sure what lurked in the darkness. It was wrong to feel that way in a small town where the biggest crisis was usually convincing a drunken husband or wife not to blow an offending spouse away with a shotgun for slipping the bonds of matrimony, or consistently leaving the toilet lid up, or never, ever learning how to cook a fresh bass the way Mama had cooked it.

  It was wrong to feel this kind of fear. He had run away from a life and a career, at least in part, because he was tired of living in that kind of world, the kind of world where drive-byes and savage family massacres and gang shootings had left too many scars in places that didn’t show.

  “And what are you doing up, with the back door open at 3 a.m.?”

  She ran her soft hand along his arm cradling her breasts.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Just…thinking about things. And nobody could get close before the lights and the alarms would go off. It’s safe. I just…wanted to enjoy the quiet.”

  And that was another thing. You shouldn’t need a state of the art home alarm system and a series of electronic triggers that would be activated when movement was detected and a siren would sound if anything remotely man-sized crossed the back yard. So far no cats or dogs had been able to set it off.

  “You’re thinking of him.”

  He felt the goosebumps on her and pulled his oversized Ralph Lauren robe she’d brought him their first Christmas together around to cloak her. She stretched back and he kissed one of her high cheekbones.

  “Un huh. I do sometimes. I miss him.”

  Into the tiny pregnant pause that followed, she twisted around and reached up to pull his lips down to hers.

  “You know you have nothing whatsoever to be jealous about, don’t you, Gordon Evers?”

  “I do.”

  “I mean it. You know that. Lee and I were together…we were lovers, but that ended long before you came here. Everybody has a past.”

  “I know you two were history, Evelyn. It was never a problem for us. He and I got along fine and he was straight about the two of you when he realized I was interested. Like you say, everybody has a past. And I don’t blame you for thinking about him. I miss him too, and it bugs the hell out of me that whoever killed him is running around free while Lee’s in the ground.”

  It bugged him not just that the peace of Spring City had been violently disrupted by his officer’s murder, but the way it had been done. No way in hell had a simple burglar surprised Lee or his dog. Lee was armed and he knew how to use weapons, both from Iraq and his duties as a police office for more than a decade.

  Still, somebody had killed a big dog and an armed police officer and set Lee’s residence in the woods on fire to cover the crime and make it look like a burglary.

  “The worst of it is,” she said, “sometimes I think we’ll never catch the guy. Lee’s death will go unsolved.”

  He squeezed her tighter in his arms, grateful as he was every time he held her that sometimes you get a second chance in life and in love. He had come here bleeding from a lot of wounds and she had helped him heal. He knew she had cared for the good-looking police officer who just never could grow up or learn to keep it in his pants. Lee Henry hadn’t been good husband material, but he had been her love once. She deserved closure in his murder.

  “We’ll get him, Evelyn. Trust me. We’ve gone down every trail there is, but there’s something out there that will trip him up. There are no perfect murders. That I do know from Jacksonville. There are always details, some little something that will trip you up.”

  She reached out to close the back door, keyed the electronic lock, and then twisted back in his arms.

  “When you say it, Gordon, I believe it.”

  “I’d do it for him, but I’ll do it for you. You need to be able to say goodbye the right way. I know he was important to you. And you’re important to me. You’ve the best thing about this place to me.”

  As they walked together back to his bedroom she said without looking up at him, “Have you gotten over her, yet?”

  He stopped.

  “What?”

  “The woman you ran here to get away from?”

  “I didn’t-“

  “Please, Gordon. I’ve been honest with you about Lee. And I know you came here because you were tired of being a homicide cop in Jacksonville. But I know there was a woman there. And if you can accept me having slept with Lee, I can accept the fact that there was a woman in your life – an important woman – up in Jacksonville.”

  “Of course, there were women, Evelyn. I wasn’t a monk, but-“

  “You don’t need to give me the details, Gord. But I know. It took you two years to let your guard down and let me into your life. I was beginning to won
der if it would ever happen. Whoever she was, she hurt you bad. And anyone who could hurt you like that, if she had loved you like you loved her, you never would have left Jacksonville.

  “But, you’re here, so she dumped you, or betrayed you, and you couldn’t stay there so you left Jacksonville.”

  He stood silently. She reached up to touch his face.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about her. But I think you know I moved on after Lee, I got over him. Someday, when you’ve completely gotten over her, I hope you’ll tell me about her.”

  He followed her into the bedroom.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  November 4, 2005

  Friday, 11 P.M.

  Jacksonville

  Debbie sat back on the couch in the den, watching the big screen Television From Hell in the den. For a change, BJ was home, up in his room on his desktop. He’d started to get more involved in on-line gaming and he was involved in some international Dungeons and Dragons type fantasy role playing epic. Odds were he’d probably play all night and she’d find him slumped over the screen at 7 a.m. in the morning. Not the healthiest way for an almost-15-year-old to pass a Friday night, but there were so many worse alternatives she didn’t have the heart to nag him about it.

  She herself had gotten in about 10:30, paying the babysitter that BJ had strenuously argued he didn’t need. She gone straight upstairs to the shower and washed off the perfume she’s put on for her date and the sweat her date had perspired all over her while dumping a respectable load of semen into the condom he’d responsibly inserted his again respectably-sized penis into before fucking her to a respectable orgasm.

  She grabbed a handful of popcorn- okay as long as you ate it without the butter – and chewed and swallowed while running through the date in her mind. Bob Squires was a defense attorney visiting from California who had wandered into her office two days before and did a cute job of flirting with her before getting back to business with Johnny August.