Countdown: Ethan

by Boniface, Allie

  “Go on. We’ll meet you downstairs in an hour.”

  He rubbed the back of his head with a huge palm. “You’re sure?”

  Sarah had already moved into the kitchen, where she flipped on the blender and poured more tequila into the pitcher.

  “I’m right downstairs if you need me,” he said as he left. “And lock the deadbolt,” he called from the other side of the closed door.

  Dakota did.

  “What the hell’s on that flash drive, anyway?” Sarah set fresh drinks on the table.

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know. He called me about it earlier when I was on the plane. I thought it was work stuff.”

  Sarah swiped salt from around the rim of her glass and licked her finger. “I’m guessing it’s a little more than that. Let’s look at it.”

  But Dakota wasn’t sure she wanted to. Her heart still skipped in her chest every few breaths. I didn’t know that man. The fire in his expression, the rough way he’d stood there, smirking and threatening the two of them...she’d never seen that before. Ever.

  “He scared me,” she said without moving. “And I—” She stopped. “Was he always like that? Did I just miss it?”

  Sarah leaned against the counter and shrugged. “It’s too hard to tell, when you’re all wrapped up in someone. Your head takes a vacation and your heart’s on overdrive.”

  “I thought I was in love with him.”

  “Aw, honey,” Sarah said. “I know. And I’m sorry.”

  Dakota stared into her glass and wondered if she could find the answer in the depths of a margarita. It was worth a shot.

  “So where’s that flash drive?” Sarah asked. “Do you have it?”

  “I threw it into my purse when I found it this morning.”

  “Where did he leave it?”

  “Plugged into my computer.”

  Sarah hauled out her laptop and plunked it onto the table. “He’s dumber than I thought.”

  With trembling fingers, Dakota searched her purse. Nothing. She dumped the contents out onto the floor. Cell phone, lipstick, mini hair spray and deodorant, mints, gum, pens and two notepads. “Here.” Smaller than she remembered, the tiny stick collapsed inside itself. A metal ring on one end looked as though it might once have attached to a lanyard. She handed it over.

  Sarah plugged it in and opened the only file on the drive. Dakota closed her eyes.

  “Holy shit,” her friend said after a minute. “No wonder he wants this back.”

  7:00 p.m.

  The ER doors swung open, and Mike hobbled out into the waiting room, crutches under his arms and his ankle wrapped in a soft cast. Beside him walked a pretty nurse with bright green eyes. Probably in her mid-twenties, Ethan guessed. With one hand on Mike’s elbow, she guided him across the room, smiling up at him every few steps.

  “Here’s your Vicodin prescription.” She pressed a slip of paper into Mike’s hand as he balanced on one crutch. “And don’t hesitate to give your regular doctor a call if the pain gets worse or the swelling doesn’t go down after a day or so.”

  Mike nodded. “Thanks.”

  Ethan rose, leaving the month-old Sports Illustrated on the seat beside him. “So? Did you break it?”

  “Just a sprain. Doc wants me to stay off it for a few days.”

  “Good thing.”

  Ethan led the way out into the early evening, glad to leave the hospital’s oppression behind. His skin, crawling with memory, welcomed the fresh air. 24-HOUR EMERGENCY CARE proclaimed the sign beside the door in red and blue. Not an exaggeration, Ethan thought. Round-the-clock attention. Round-the-clock heartache. Never-ending waiting, hoping, praying in a chapel where he didn’t think God had been for a long, long time. The smell of that sterile environment did more to kill the soul than any cancer ever could.

  The automatic doors slid open behind them as another nurse stepped out for a cigarette. For a moment Ethan thought he recognized the mustached young man, but then the light caught the orderly’s face and it was a stranger after all.

  “Let me get the car.”

  “Thanks.” Sweat beads lined the edge of Mike’s forehead.

  As Ethan approached his Corolla, he noticed as always the dings in the passenger side door and the streak of paint where Lydia had sideswiped their neighbor’s BMW. They’d fought about it for two days.

  The idiot was parked in the middle of the road! she argued, her cheeks crimson.

  It doesn’t matter! he replied. You hit him. Our insurance is gonna go through the roof.

  She’d turned away, angry, until he cooked her dinner and played the Stevie Wonder CD she loved. They spent the next day playing hooky from work and making up. His eyes burned. He’d take back every last time they fought, even without the makeup sex, if it meant he could see her again. Ethan fumbled with the car key. He cranked up heavy metal on the radio and squealed the tires as he pulled around to where his friend waited. Get me the hell out of here.

  Mike dumped his crutches inside the back and hopped into the passenger seat. “Thanks, man. I know it sucks for you, being here.”

  Ethan didn’t answer.

  “I appreciate it, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Ethan grunted and headed for Mike’s place.

  “Had a date planned with Angela for this weekend. We were supposed to go golfing, maybe get dinner and a movie after. Guess I better call and see if she’s up for staying in and tending to a cripple instead.”

  “Guess so.” Ethan wondered sometimes how Mike kept himself out of trouble. A different woman on his arm every weekend, and none of them seemed to mind. Blue eyes, dimples, and a keen sense of timing and scheduling kept everyone happy. Of course, Mike never got serious with any of them, and sometimes Ethan suspected his buddy envied what he and Lydia had. Once upon a time, anyway. Didn’t matter now. Single was single, and Mike sure enjoyed the bachelor life more than Ethan did these days.

  Twenty minutes later, he swung the car into the driveway of Mike’s house, a tiny one-story on the outskirts of the city. Three newspapers lay on the doormat.

  “You don’t read the paper anymore? I had a good editorial in there yesterday.”

  “Don’t get all uptight about it. Work’s been keeping me at the office until almost midnight every day this week. Big case coming up.” Mike balanced himself on one foot while Ethan maneuvered the crutches from the back seat.

  “Here.”

  “Thanks. Come on in for a beer.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t have anywhere to be, that was for sure. Scooping up the pile of papers, Ethan dropped them inside the foyer on his way in. As always, Ethan admired his buddy’s bachelor pad, decorated with masculine good taste and grown-up boy-toys the envy of everyone at Mike’s law office.

  “Sit.” Ethan took the crutches from Mike and leaned them in a corner. “I’ll get the beers.”

  Mike sank into the leather sofa and nodded. He flipped on the seventy-two-inch-television. “Thanks. Might be some chips or pretzels if you want something to ear.”

  Ethan grabbed two bottles from the fridge and rifled around in the cupboards until he found some salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Joining Mike on the sofa, he drained the beer and broke open the bag of chips. For a while they sat without talking, watching first a college cheerleading competition and then one of those shows where people stole someone’s car and made it over in twenty-four hours.

  Mike’s cell phone rang.

  “Yeah. Hey, Paul. Naw, just a sprain.” He passed the remote to Ethan, who flipped channels for a while until he found a local news station with a good-looking blonde doing the weather. Temperatures in the nineties the next three days, she promised. With a chance of showers later that night or tomorrow morning.

  Won’t do anything except add to the damn humidity, Ethan thought, and then wondered when he’d become an old man who watched the weather channel and argued with the reporter inside his head. He switched the channel back to the cheerleaders.

  “I think I’
m done for the night,” Mike said. “But Ethan’s probably up for it. Stop by and drag him out, will ya? Otherwise he’ll stay inside and stare at the walls. Yeah. See ya” He hung up. “Paul and Howie are still going downtown, around eight. Go with ‘em.”

  “Christ, no. You think I can stand Howie for longer than an hour or two?”

  “So stay for an hour or two. Have a beer. Listen to some music, check out the women. Please check out the women, huh? You need to get laid.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You wish.” Mike grinned and kept going. “Get a phone number. Then go home. Or come over here. I’ll probably be climbing the walls, anyway.”

  Ethan resisted the urge to say no. Again. The way he usually did. Then, for some reason, the woman from the park appeared in his mind’s eye. Curly hair. One hand on her hip. A smile that curved up and invited him to stay. I turned around without even getting her name. Idiot.

  “Yeah, okay. I gotta go home and hit the shower, then.”

  “Get a number,” Mike repeated.

  Ethan didn’t answer. Turning the doorknob, he nodded a goodbye and headed for his car. Clouds scuttled across the sky. One beer, he told himself. Maybe two, if he found someone worth talking to. Mike was right. Everyone was right. It was time to jump back in, step to the plate and take a swing. If he missed, well, at least it wasn’t because he was sitting at home afraid of the pitch.

  “Now you should call the cops,” Gunnar said after watching the two-minute video of the police chief bullying his drug dealer. He frowned as Sarah’s computer screen turned black.

  Dakota stared into space. “Tommy died,” she said abruptly. She’d dismissed it at the time, a few weeks back. So had everyone in town. A guy like that didn’t have much of a place in Little Lakeside. When the news reported the accidental death of the homeless guy who lived under a bridge at the far end of town, everyone pretty much accepted it and moved on.

  But no one deserved to be beaten to death.

  She watched the clip for a third time. The camera zoomed in and then backed off; the view wavered a bit as the two men talked. Quiet conversation. A pat on the back. Something that looked like a slip of paper being passed from Sean to the dealer. And then the rage. The attack. The camera dipped down toward the ground for an instant, and when the bare spot of ground came back into view, Tommy was hunched over in the middle of the street. She could hear the man’s grunts as he held up both hands against the attack. He tried to say something. He tried to dodge under the bridge. But back came Sean’s fist, again and again, square into Tommy’s face. Like a rag doll, the old man stumbled, lost his balance and fell into a dumpster.

  “Turn it off.” Dakota pressed a hand against her mouth to keep herself from vomiting. Again she heard Sean’s voice, laced with sarcasm. I am the police, sweetheart. “And I can’t call the cops. They won’t care.”

  She’d heard enough stories from Sean to know how the men in blue stood up for each other. Some no-name dealer’s death in a state miles away didn’t matter to anyone down here. Plus, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he would do if he found out she’d reported him to the authorities. Look what he’d done to Tommy.

  Sarah nodded. “She’s right. No one in the state of Tennessee is going to care about what some two-bit cop did up north.”

  Gunnar ran one hand down his chest, clad in a carefully pressed blue polo shirt. “Even with this evidence? He‘s not gonna give up, you know. Not until he gets this back. A call to the Memphis station might scare him off a little.”

  “I don’t know.” Dakota wrapped her arms around herself. Suddenly, she had no energy. “I’m not going out tonight.” She’d never felt less like dancing or eating or listening to music in her life.

  “D.”

  “I’m serious. What if he follows us? Or what if he breaks in after we leave?”

  “I have an alarm system.”

  Dakota dropped her head onto the table. “Forget it.”

  “Well, if he does decide to come back, we shouldn’t be here, anyway.” Sarah patted the back of Dakota’s hair. “But maybe Gunnar’s right. Maybe we should call the cops.”

  Tears squeezed out from behind closed lids. “I’m sorry,” Dakota mumbled into the tabletop. All she’d wanted to do was escape. Instead she’d gotten her best friend and a really nice guy involved in her melodrama. Who knew that evil followed you around, skipped town and snuck through doorways to make your life a living hell?

  “Stop apologizing,” Sarah said. “I needed a little excitement in my life, anyway. Too damn boring these last few weeks.”

  Dakota blew her nose. “Liar.” But she felt marginally better.

  Gunnar dialed the phone. “Hello? I’d like to report an assault...”

  SEAN SCANNED BEALE Street for an open parking space and found none. Cursing, he swung around the block and tried another avenue. A few raindrops spattered down on his windshield and he flipped on the wipers. “Sonofabitch.”

  He sure hadn’t planned for it to take this long. And he hadn’t expected some goddamned neighbor twice his size to come busting into Sarah’s apartment and play the hero. His jaw twitched. It’s about more than the damn computer file now. No one makes me look like an fool. No one backs me into a corner. And I don’t leave any place until I’m good and ready.

  After retreating from the apartment without the flash drive, he’d dropped off the rental at a full-service car wash and strolled into the strip mall across the street. Not too soon, either. A Memphis PD car had pulled into the Country Gardens Apartment Complex less than ten minutes later. Sunglasses on, hat pulled low, Sean enjoyed a double scoop of coffee ice cream while the overweight detective walked up to Sarah’s apartment.

  Called the cops on me, huh? He licked at his cone in circles, smaller and smaller, as he narrowed his eyes and counted off twenty-five minutes before the cop walked returned to his car. Fine. Two could play this game.

  Sean swerved around a group of guys crossing the street and laid on the horn. “But don’t think you can beat me at it, sweetheart,” he muttered. His cell phone buzzed. Third message of the day from Mollie. He ignored it. No time for that. No time for any of it. He scanned the blocks ahead for a place to leave his car.

  “Damn.” A red convertible slipped into the last spot in a public lot. For an instant he thought about parking in front of a fire hydrant and sticking his police ID on the dash, but he didn’t need to announce to the local police department that he was in town. Not after Dakota’s visit with one of Memphis’s finest just hours earlier. The fewer people who knew, the better.

  At the next traffic light, he turned and headed back toward the last parking garage he’d seen, a few blocks down. After finishing his cone and picking up his car, Sean had waited patiently until Dakota and Sarah emerged from the second floor apartment. He’d waited another ten minutes while they looked around the parking lot. Finally, they slipped into a sweet-looking Mercedes, driven by the jackass with arms of steel, and Sean had followed them two car- lengths behind, all the way downtown.

  Careless, he thought as he pulled into the garage. They didn’t even look across the street. Sean smiled as he removed his gun from the glove box. That’s where most people screwed up. They figured they could turn their backs and nothing would jump out at them. Figured danger disappeared the first time they told it to. Figured among friends or in a crowd or on a public street they could be out of harm’s way, when in fact people really weren’t safe anywhere.

  He slipped the gun into his waistband with a lover’s pat. He wouldn’t need it; he was almost sure of that. Still, it comforted him to know it was there, next to his skin, just in case. He had a lot of ground to cover in the next hour or so. If Dakota didn’t have the flash drive with her in that stupid purse she lugged everywhere, he’d give her a personal escort back to Country Gardens Apartment Complex to find it. And if that escort included a little physical reminder to her friends about who was in charge, he didn’t see anything wrong with that. />
  The police report they’d filed was stuck at the bottom of a paper pile back at the station; he’d put money on it. A little lovers’ quarrel? Between two people who didn’t even live in the state? The Memphis boys wouldn’t look twice at it. The only thing he’d have to worry about was whether or not she’d seen the video or showed it to her friends or that duck-walking detective. That, of course, would screw things up. That would make every minute count a little bit more.

  Sean pulled the baseball cap firmly over his eyes and headed up Beale Street.

  8:00 p.m.

  “There it is.” Sarah pointed across the street. A line of people snaked down the sidewalk on the south end of Beale Street, Memphis’s famous block of blues clubs. Pat O’Brien’s, read the sign above the bright green door.

  “Looks like you have to wait an hour to get into that place.” After everything that had happened since ten o‘clock that morning, Dakota wasn’t sure she felt like getting elbowed by a bunch of strangers just to see a trendy downtown club.

  “Nope, we‘re not going there,” Sarah said. “Too touristy.” They ducked around the end of the line and headed for a dark brown door instead, just up the block. Piano Alley read the modest sign above the threshold. “Here.” Sarah led the way into a dimly lit room: long, narrow, and nearly empty.

  With a longing glance down the sidewalk, Dakota took one step inside and stopped. “This is your favorite bar?” No, forget it, let’s go to Pat O’Brien’s after all. Maybe Sarah was wrong. Maybe touristy was exactly what she needed tonight.

  But Sarah was already halfway to the bar. Dakota gave the place a once-over. A mahogany-colored bar stretched half the length of the room to her right. Opposite it, a grand piano waited for someone to lift the lid and start the party. Ceiling fans spun in lazy circles above them. The bartender, a college-aged guy with long, narrow sideburns and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, wiped down glasses and dumped peanuts into dishes.

  “Give it a couple of hours,” Sarah said as they found three chairs at a scarred round table. “There won’t be a place to stand. This place has some of the best music downtown. Wait ‘til you hear Ronnie.”