I had already written Ides of March, police academy, get in your pants, and something I want you to see. Now I added vehicle, draw weapon, wounded, and suspect. Still scribbling, I asked Officer After offhandedly, “What was so dangerous about that? Herding cows was more dangerous.”
“Don’t laugh,” he said. “Herding cows really can be dangerous. You don’t want it to be exciting. You’re lucky there wasn’t a bull.” He drew an X through a section of the form. “Chickens are also difficult.” His dimples showed again when he laughed, just like he’d laughed for Tiffany that first night. He still wasn’t laughing for me. He was laughing at his own joke. Aw, Hulk Hogan made a funny.
The passenger suspect kept moaning, and the driver suspect yelled more loudly at Officer Leroy. Without turning around, Officer After said, “Shut up, Zeke. Hang in there, Demetrius,” and turned up the radio again—All-American Rejects, “Dirty Little Secret.” He went back to his forms. I studied him as he wrote.
I wondered if I was developing Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with my captor like Elizabeth Smart. Or if I was having some preprogrammed biological cavewoman reaction to a caveman saving me from a saber-toothed tiger. Because at the bridge when he threatened me, I’d only noticed Officer After’s dark uniform, white face, dark eyes. And his dimples. Now that he’d rescued me, so to speak, I noticed a lot more.
I noticed how smooth his face was, except for a scruff of five o’clock shadow (in this case, a bit after 5 A.M.) and some worry lines between his eyebrows. I noticed how sensitive and soft his mouth looked as he bit his lip gently, considering a section of the form. I noticed how long his blond eyelashes were, fringing his dark eyes. His lashes were not stubbly. This certified he had cut the hair on his head so short on purpose. He was not growing it back after losing it all to chemotherapy.
I’d never been attracted to older guys, my friends’ fat dads. I had even wondered how their wives could stand to have sex with them. But with Officer After, it was strange. I could sort of see how it wouldn’t feel like hell on earth to be his wife.
He probably got her pregnant when they were both a little older than me, maybe nineteen like my parents had been. Now Officer After had four children (down from fourteen—he seemed more responsible than that), with the oldest about to finish high school and get pregnant herself.
They lived in a triple-wide trailer and were very happy. His wife stayed up some nights, listening to the police scanner just to feel close to him. There was a lot of warm fruit cobbler. She cooked with butter, and this was one of the things that made him horny for her after all these years.
She went easy on the fruit cobbler herself so she could keep her girlish figure. She was one of the women around this town who looked like a hick but very, very pretty and carefully kept up if you could see past the big hair. Like Lois, twenty years ago. Oh, yeah, she turned Officer After on.
Unlike me. I glanced down at my shirt. No cleavage tonight. Though I’d fantasized about it a little, in the end the whole seducing-a-married-man thing had made even me uncomfortable. Tonight I was wearing a crew-neck skull-and-crossbones T-shirt to get across how I felt about my punishment, in case this was not already clear.
“I don’t think you were worried about the danger to me,” I said. “I think you wanted me to stay in the car because you were embarrassed to be seen with me in front of the suspects.”
He looked up from his forms at me. Then he peered through the metal grate at the suspects. Demetrius was still moaning. Zeke snarled, “What’re you looking at?”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Officer After told Zeke. He looked at me. “I don’t know what you mean. Why would I be embarrassed to be seen with you?”
He asked so earnestly that I felt like I had to explain the obvious. “My hair, and the way I dress.”
“You dress like you’re Japanese,” he said.
“The clueless Japanese who work at the car factory and wear those weird plastic sandals? Thanks.”
“No, the cute Japanese girls you see at the mall in Birmingham.”
He looked down at his forms, pen poised. But he didn’t write anything. That blush crept up from his neck and across his cheeks. He had just realized he’d called me cute.
“I mean, the Japanese girls,” he said, still looking down. “You know how you dress. With your T-shirt and your jacket and your jeans and your shoes and your weird socks and your hairpins and your blue hair.”
He was digging himself a deeper hole. Now he had told me he’d noticed every detail of what I looked like. Maybe that was part of his police training, so he could provide an accurate description of me when I escaped. Although blue hair probably would be sufficient to get me picked up.
Or maybe he was attracted to me.
I watched as he drew an X on the form and brusquely flipped to another page. I honestly didn’t know what to think anymore. Usually I was very good at reading people. I didn’t get emotionally involved. When you were an outsider looking in, it was easy to see clearly. This guy I couldn’t read.
“You dress like a manga character,” he said.
Well, that explained everything. “Your kids read manga?” He probably had a daughter into manga, and I reminded him of his daughter. He had blushed because he thought I’d gotten the wrong idea. And he was right.
Now he looked up at me and held his hands out flat, pen between two fingers. “What kids?”
I noticed his left hand was bare. “They don’t let you wear your wedding ring on the job?”
He turned his big hand over and looked at it. “What wedding ring? I’m not married.”
Zeke told me I could come to his prison for a conjugal visit any time I wanted. He would tie me down. My heart sped up like he really was tying me down with his words. Bitch encircled one of my wrists, cock held the other, and spread was snaking around my left ankle.
I dumped my notebook out of my lap and tried the door handle. Locked. “Shit.” I pounded the window. “Let me out, God damn it!”
I heard the lock slide open. Then I tried the handle again, bailed out onto the grassy shoulder, and jogged toward the Caddy, away from the heh heh heh of Zeke.
Beyond the pool of headlights and the sweep of blue lights, the night was black. The highway was empty. Officer Leroy bent over in the Caddy, peering under the seats. I guess it was because he knew my dad (even if he didn’t like my dad), but I thought he would protect me from the suspects. And Officer After. Funny how a near-stranger’s weighty ass provided me comfort.
But I couldn’t really feel comfortable while a low hum vibrated through me. I looked around nervously until I realized it was Officer Leroy’s car engine on idle.
Officer After lit a cigarette behind his door, out of the wind. Then he tossed the pack into the car, closed the door, and walked toward me. He settled next to me, half sitting on the bumper of the Caddy.
I scooted a little farther away from him. “You promised me you wouldn’t lock me in the car.”
He exhaled smoke. “I didn’t lock you in before. I locked it when I got back in. I forgot. Habit.”
“Still. Your idea of punishing me is to stand me up in a corner and let lecherous men call me names.”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that. But it’s fitting, in a way.” He gestured with the cigarette, trailing smoke and a spot of fire. “It’s a warning about the kind of people you’ll meet if you keep doing pot after Eric is found facedown, dead in a ditch in a few years, and your ready supply runs out. The suspect who was impolite to you at the city jail last week is waiting to be transferred to the state pen on narcotics charges. And we’re going to find something good in here.” He patted the trunk of the Caddy. “We catch a lot of folks running drugs from Florida through here to Birmingham. They assume they’re safe if they’re off the interstate. They’re wrong.”
“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but drug runners don’t stash their pot in the trunk like a suitcase or a spare tire.”
“
Yes, they do. There’s no way to hide it anyway once we get the dog out here. They know that. They just hope this won’t be the time they get caught. But they’re high themselves, and they have poor judgment. They don’t understand they could greatly reduce their chances of getting caught by driving the speed limit. And by choosing a vehicle other than a stolen 1987 Cadillac Eldorado.” He tapped ash onto the asphalt and took another drag. Exhaling, he said, “It’s cold out here. Come back to the car. We’ll leave as soon as Leroy finishes his search.”
“I’ll come back to the car after you put that out. I don’t want to breathe your secondhand smoke. Talk about a dangerous job.”
He laughed shortly. “Pot’s a lot more carcinogenic than cigarettes.”
“And if I were a complete pothead, which I’m not, I still wouldn’t be smoking the equivalent of a pack a day.”
“I don’t smoke that much, either.”
True. This was the first cigarette he’d smoked in the nearly eight hours I’d spent with him on his shift. His habit couldn’t have been too intense.
“You will, though,” I said. “It’s addictive. It’s like trapping yourself.”
Eyeing me, he took an especially long drag. Like he was flaunting it, so there. This reaction seemed immature of him. I wondered how old he was, since he didn’t have a wife and kids. The short hair, big muscles, and official uniform made him seem older than he probably was. The way he moved and spoke with such confidence.
He flicked away the cigarette butt (littering wasn’t a crime suddenly?) and nodded toward the car. I hauled open my heavy door emblazoned with the city seal and the police department motto, To Protect and Serve, and sat down on the vinyl. The radio blasted Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body.”
Shouting over the music, Zeke gave me a few details about how he was going to rape me.
Officer After leaned across the seat toward me—which, under the circumstances, made me start back. “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to beat the shit out of him for you.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right.”
“It’s one of the first things they teach you at the police academy.” Officer After turned to Zeke. “Say one more thing to her and I’ll add corruption of a minor to the list of charges.” Then he whispered to me, “I’m glad you reminded me of that one last weekend. Handy.”
“Aw, man!” Zeke said. “This is the last female I’m going to get for about two years.”
“You’re not getting this one.” Through the window, Officer After made a super-secret cop motion. Officer Leroy waddled over and dragged Zeke out of the backseat. Stumbling after Officer Leroy on the way to the other cop car, Zeke looked back at me and licked his lips.
“Ready?” Officer After asked me. I nodded. I was relieved Zeke was gone, but the weight of what he’d said to me still sat on my lungs. Demetrius’s tortured moans from the backseat were a constant reminder.
“Put your seat belt on,” Officer After said impatiently. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you every time I start the vehicle.”
I waited, hoping he would start the car anyway. He didn’t. “I can’t,” I said.
“You can. I didn’t say anything the night I arrested you, when you pretended to wear it. You were in the backseat where it’s safer, and I was tired of arguing with you. But police cars won’t start unless the front seat belts are fastened.”
I glared at him. “Do you think I’m a crack ho? How stupid do you think I am?”
“Then let me put it to you this way. Either fasten your seat belt, or we go to the police station right now, call the DA, and tell her the deal’s off.”
The seat belt felt like a hairy arm as I pulled it across my chest, and the click as I fastened it sounded like a key in a lock.
Officer After cranked the engine and pulled onto the highway. We sat in silence for a few minutes, except for the radio, Demetrius’s moaning, and my own breathing in my ears.
Finally Officer After said, “Meg.”
He probably realized I was going to faint again. My arms were crossed. I’d learned in public-speaking class at school that this position told people you felt uncomfortable. As if I could have hidden this. It also pushed my breasts up so I looked like I had a more ample bosom. In addition, my chest heaved with heavy breathing. My skull-and-crossbones T-shirt looked like a pirate flag waving in the breeze. No wonder Officer After had noticed.
“Meg, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s illegal in Alabama to drive without a seat belt. I can’t have you doing something illegal in my police car.”
It was touching for him to be so sweet to a criminal. I felt halfway guilty about making him feel bad. It really wasn’t his fault.
However, as I was having some trouble staying conscious, I concentrated on my own needs. I hit the button to roll down the window and hung my head out like a dog. Between moans, Demetrius complained about the wind and the cold. But unlike Zeke, he didn’t mention my privates, so he was easier to ignore.
Watching the sickeningly familiar highway and trees and buildings spin by, I wondered whether Graceland was everything my mom had dreamed or if she was actually more impressed by the chandelier in the lobby of Memphis’s Comfort Inn.
I wondered whether the football coach, the cheerleading sponsor, and my classmates had reached Miami in the bus yet. I wondered if they would get drunk first thing, or if they would run down to the beach first, like I would have done. I wondered how the sand felt between their toes, and whether the water was soft and warm.
I sat up when we pulled in at the emergency entrance of the hospital. “What are we doing here?” The hospital was one of my least favorite places to visit.
“I may have broken the suspect’s arm.” Officer After looked sideways at me. “By accident.” I followed at a safe distance as Officer After dragged Demetrius out of the car and led him into the emergency room.
Tiffany met me in the entrance with a violent hug that nearly knocked me down. “It was so exciting to listen on the scanner to what was going on! I wish we could trade places!”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said as Officer After came back alone. “Tiffany, this is Officer After, who arrested you. Officer After, this is Tiffany Hart, who doesn’t remember you.”
They shook hands more cordially than they should have. Officer After didn’t have a problem with her touching him while he was in uniform.
“I am so sorry,” Tiffany giggled and gushed. “You know how it is when you’re drunk.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He’s been sober since birth.”
“Me too!” Tiffany said. “Until last Saturday.” She tilted her head annoyingly. Officer After showed his dimples.
“But I do remember him,” she said. “You know who this is, don’t you, Meg?”
Officer After’s dimples faded.
“Mr. Harrison, my yearbook faculty sponsor, also taught AP English last year. John was the only John in that class.” She touched Officer After lightly on the hand. He didn’t flinch. She prattled on, “But his full name had such a ring to it that Mr. Harrison used the whole thing, Johnafter. The seniors told the yearbook staff about it, and we all called him Johnafter, too. It was a running joke that if we couldn’t decide which picture to use in a certain place, we’d say, ‘It’s the perfect place for Johnafter.’”
“So he’s in the yearbook fifty times?” I asked.
“We didn’t have any pictures of him. No social shots. We decided he must be very antisocial.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “No, just his senior portrait and his track team picture. He was on the track team that won the state championship last year, with Will Billingsley and Rashad Lowry and Skip Clark. And he dated Angie Pettit. And”—she pointed at him as more came back to her—“he was in Spanish class with you and me, Meg.”
I turned to him. “¡De verdad!”
“Sí.” He eyed me warily.
“I missed that completely,” I said. “I must have been in the back of the class, smoking m
eth and hacking the Department of Defense computers. So, Johnafter, you’re only eighteen years old?”
6
I’m nineteen,” he said self-righteously, as if this made all the difference in the world.
Then he cut off my outraged protest by informing me that even though his shift was over, he would have to stay late (or early, since it was 6 A.M.) to wait for the Suspect to Receive Medical Attention and Transport him back to the Detention Facility in his Vehicle. Tiffany offered to drive me back to the police station so I could get my motorcycle. Officer After slipped into the emergency room to guard Demetrius.
One night down, four to go.
Before my shift at the diner started, I ran inside the trailer to snatch last year’s yearbook. Throughout the morning, between cooking orders of bacon and eggs, I flipped through the pages.
Alphabetically, he appeared on the first page of senior photos, where After, John should have been. But his name was printed Johnafter instead. That Mr. Harrison was a real card.
I double-checked the name, because the photo wasn’t the cop. It was a senior in the fake tux they made boys wear, with a thin face and longish blond hair. Like a normal boy.
The only thing I recognized was the heavy-lidded dark eyes. At first. But as I studied him, the sensitive mouth seemed familiar. And the chin. Last night in the dark car, the only thing I could see clearly most of the time was his chin in the glow from the radio.
In fact, the longer I stared at this normal boy, the clearer the memory became of glancing at him in Spanish class last year. We passed yesterday’s graded homework down the rows and leafed through the pile to pull our own sheets out. One page was always decorated with intricate doodles in the margins, careful little illustrations of the Spanish words. Perro. Sombrero. Corazón. I watched where this paper went. To an older boy with blond hair in his eyes, cute but shy, not my type. Not the type to like girls with purple hair, or whatever color mine was that month. Anyway, he wouldn’t look at me, or if he did, not for long. I would have remembered his dark eyes.
I stared into those eyes in the yearbook photo. I examined the caption underneath. Johnafter. Track 1, 2, 3, 4. Track Team Captain 4. ACT High Scorer 4. He got the highest score in the school on the ACT. So did Tiffany.
Going Too Far Page 5