I was called upon to spoon up some cheese grits just then, but I puzzled over the problem in my head. Something didn’t fit with Johnafter.
Just a few years ago, our town was in the middle of nowhere. Lately Birmingham had spread out to meet us. The outskirts of the metropolitan area were only a few miles away. Our small town had lost some of its charm and retained all its backwardness. Families moved to this area from up north to work in the car factories springing up everywhere. Not knowing any better, they bought the cheap houses being built here. They stayed here until they figured out it was no fun and moved closer to Birmingham. So for all practical purposes, our town was still in the middle of nowhere, but now we had a Target.
If you were college material, right after graduating from our high school you escaped to UAB. Then you found a professional job and settled in Birmingham, never to return. Except on special occasions, such as passing through on your way to the beach.
If you weren’t college material, you settled here in town. You had a baby at nineteen and then thought, duh, it’s too bad I don’t have an education, because I need a job. After a few years of working as a janitor, then a telemarketer, then a vinyl-siding salesman, you opened a shitty little diner. Your ingrate daughter got sick and dyed her hair blue. What a disappointment. You wanted said ingrate daughter to remain in town and keep your restaurant out of trouble by doing a large portion of the work for free. But alas, your daughter was college material. If she could keep out of jail.
What you did not do was make the highest score in the school on the ACT, then decide to cut your blond hair off, put on twenty pounds of muscle, become a cop, and stay here.
Something had happened to Johnafter.
I peered across the bag of chopped onions at the yearbook on the counter. I stared at his photo, with my hands over my mouth. And I realized that something was happening to me. For the first time in my life, I had a crush. On a cop. Who was never leaving this town.
Beware the Ides of March.
WHEN I GOT OFF WORK AT two in the afternoon, I rode my motorcycle to the city park. I could have jogged my daily five miles up and down the highway in front of Eggstra! Eggstra!, but I preferred the park. The hospital and rehab center were nearby. Lots of people with knee injuries or multiple sclerosis gimped along the track. It made you think that if they could do it, you could do it. Even if you had just spent eight hours flipping pancakes at Eggstra! Eggstra! on top of eight hours being faked out by a teenage cop.
As always, I stretched my muscles in front of the decorative park gate tiled with red, blue, and yellow handprints from my elementary school. Tiffany’s handprint was there, and Brian’s, and even Eric’s. Mine was toward the bottom-left corner. I still remembered how thrilled I was to see my handprint and name on the wall for the first time, back when I was young and dorky(er). I thought I was famous. Along with everybody else in the third and fourth grades. Now I regretted that a little piece of me would be cemented to this place forever.
I braced myself on the wall with one hand, put my leg behind me, and pulled on my ankle to stretch my quadriceps. My head throbbed and my blood tingled from too much caffeine.
The trees in the park held tight to the tiniest bright green leaves. The sky was so blue it looked fake, and the yellow daffodils looked plastic, like in a cemetery. This told me I was really sleepy and/or I really needed to get out of town.
And jogging toward me came the ghost of Johnafter.
I think I actually did a double take. His shirt was off, showing the sort of six-pack abs I saw all the time on TV but rarely in person. His white skin glowed against the bright greens and yellows of the park. Probably from living in the dark on night shift. His blond hair looked white, too, and from this distance, his dark eyes were holes in his face.
He didn’t look like a forty-year-old cop to me anymore. I didn’t see how I had ever made this mistake, either. And he didn’t look like the boy from the yearbook. He looked like what he was, a nineteen-year-old with a fantastic body. Get this—I resisted the urge to hide behind the tile wall. I felt shy in front of him. Like I admired him from afar, but I knew I didn’t have a chance with him. Suddenly I wished my hair was not blue.
He jogged to a stop in front of me and panted a few times to get his breath back. Finally he said, “Hey,” as if I was some girl from school instead of his prisoner.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked at the wall. “Are you on here?”
I put my leg down and kicked my handprint on the wall to show him. I picked up my other ankle behind me.
He bent down to look at my handprint. “Mmph,” he said. “Near Eric.”
This irked me for some reason. “Are you on here?” I asked quickly. As I said it, I realized I’d been scanning the wall for his name the entire time I’d been stretching.
He walked to the opposite end of the wall and reached way up to put his hand over a handprint. It was almost as far from mine as possible.
I craned my neck to see. “Why is yours the only one on the wall that’s black?”
“I went through a Goth phase when I was nine.” He looked pointedly at me. “I grew out of it.”
Did he mean my blue hair was immature? Ass. I said, “And you grew into your cop phase.”
He turned without a word, walked into the parking lot a few paces away, and opened the door of a pickup truck. Great, I’d pissed him off. Riding around with him tonight would be fun fun fun.
To cover his naked muscles, he pulled on an Audioslave T-shirt I remembered him wearing in Spanish class last year. Only it fit him more tightly now. He lit a cigarette, slammed the truck door, and sauntered back to me.
I gestured to the cigarette. “What do you think you’re doing? Flaunting your youth and good health in front of the cripples?”
His brown eyes widened at me, and he glanced toward an old lady moving at glacier pace on her walker. “It’s the one thing I do wrong.” He took a drag and sighed through his nose like he did when he was frustrated, but this time he exhaled smoke. “It keeps me awake. I’m tired. I’m always tired. The human body is not designed to work from ten P.M. to six A.M.”
“Have you tried coffee? Mountain Dew? Red Bull?”
“That would keep me up too long. I want to sleep when I get home. I already tried and failed for eight hours. After my days off, my first day back is always the hardest. I came here to run and tire myself out.” The picture of health took another drag from his cigarette. “Did you just get up?”
“No, I just got off work.”
“Work!” He ran one hand back through his hair with a puzzled expression, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was gone. “Where?”
“Eggstra! Eggstra!”
“For how long?”
“Since your shift was over.”
“God. Why?”
“My parents are at Graceland. I was supposed to go to Miami on the senior trip.” If he’d been in uniform, I probably would have added some sharp pricklies to this, such as, “I can’t go to the beach thanks to you, bastard.” Strange how I could say this to an enormous cop, but not to a cute blond boy in an Audioslave T-shirt. “They thought it was safe to leave town when I was leaving, too. Now that I’m staying, they need something else to keep me nailed down. Like Purcell, the asshole cook from last night, calling them to say I haven’t shown up for my shift or something. They don’t trust me. I wonder why not.”
He didn’t take the bait. He just shook his head and sympathized, of all things. “That’s a brutal schedule. Why aren’t you in bed now?”
“I have to run every day.”
“To lose weight? Please say no.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” He pulled at the hair on the back of his head. “Girls always think they need to lose weight, and you don’t need to lose weight.”
I stood up straight and covered my tummy with my hands. “You’re saying I’m too skinny.”
He took a long, though
tful drag and exhaled as he spoke. “No. You’re not.”
Was he saying I was fat in all the right places? I put my hands on my hips, pushed my shoulders forward a little for enhancement of cleavage in my V-neck T-shirt, and leaned to the left to stretch my side. I guess I probably looked pretty good, if you were into blue hair and extreme fatigue.
But he was a frightened horse about to bolt. He wore that expression he tended to wear when I got too close to him, the oh-my-God-she’s-trying-to-seduce-me-and-I-don’t-like-it look.
I gave up and relaxed my shoulders. “You’re talking about Angie Pettit. She doesn’t count. She’s a midget. She’s so cute and petite you want to pinch her head off.”
Johnafter took one last short drag from the cigarette, threw it down, and squashed it into the dirt with the heel of his running shoe. He imagined the cigarette butt was my head.
“I take it you’re still dating her,” I said.
“No. She broke up with me last fall.”
Ah, the cigarette was Angie’s head. “Why’d she break up with you?”
Now he put both hands in what was left of his hair and slowly stroked backward. Either this was a show of discomfort he controlled carefully when he was in uniform, or he wanted me to notice his huge triceps. Believe me, I noticed.
“Because I’m a cop,” he said, “and I live in this town, and she didn’t want to get stuck here. She wanted to go to UAB.”
This surprised me. Angie did not seem like college material. She seemed like cosmetology school material. Not that this was an insult. I knew from experience it was very difficult to get hair to take blue color and hold it for any length of time.
Oh, why not. I leaned to the right and asked him, “Are you dating anyone now?”
“What?” He stepped out of the way to let a jogger pass on the track. Watching the retreat of the woman’s large pink terry-cloth buttocks, he explained, “There’s not a lot of opportunity for me to date, or even meet someone. I’m not awake when other people are awake.”
“What do you do for fun?”
“Fun,” he mused. “What’s your definition of fun?”
“It’s not a good sign if you have to think about it that hard. Basically, your life sucks because of this job. Why do you want this job?”
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid.”
I wanted to scream, Why? But I knew I’d get another non-answer. “So, you ran track, right?”
“In high school?”
I straightened up. “You just graduated nine months ago. You really do act like you’re forty years old.”
He blinked. “I do?”
“Yes, in high school. Tiffany said you were friends with Will Billingsley and Rashad Lowry and those track guys.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly.
“Do y’all still hang out?”
“No, they’re at UAB.”
“Why didn’t you go to UAB?”
“I told you,” he said. “I wanted to be a cop.” He looked around the park like this conversation was making him uncomfortable and he needed a way out.
“Why didn’t you get a degree first in, whatsit, cop studies?”
“Criminal justice,” he said. “I wanted to be a cop sooner.”
“Won’t you need that degree eventually to move up in the department?”
“Yes. I don’t necessarily want to move up. I’m happy doing this.”
Yeah, you look happy, I wanted to say. But this convo was interesting. I couldn’t sound too rude and give him the excuse he needed to walk away. “If Tiffany hadn’t spilled the beans, were you going to tell me who you are?”
“You mean that I’m nineteen and we went to high school together?”
Duh, I thought. I couldn’t say Duh. Too obvious. My brain would not cough up an alternative witticism. I hadn’t slept in thirty hours.
“I wasn’t trying to hide it from you,” he said. “But I’m in a position of authority, and I’m trying to control people in sometimes dangerous situations. Naturally I’m not going to offer to people, ‘By the way, here’s where I’m vulnerable.’”
“Vulnerable,” I repeated thoughtfully. Yes, this had been a very interesting convo. I’d discovered all sorts of buttons I could push to make him feel vulnerable and keep him off my ass for the rest of the week.
And then he turned on me. “So, why do you run? Not for health. That doesn’t seem like you.”
Where was that low hum coming from? I looked around, probably rather frantically. It was a streetlight malfunctioning behind Johnafter, flickering on in the middle of the sunny day, splashing additional light on his white head and shoulders.
“More out of blind fear,” I blurted before I thought.
He stepped forward and opened his mouth to ask me for more.
“See you tonight,” I said, and dashed off.
I was relieved when I finished my first lap and saw that his truck was gone. I felt a lot more comfortable with him in his police uniform. Impudence in the face of authority—that I could do. And after running the obstacle course of emotions in the park with hunky Johnafter, I much preferred a good old-fashioned high-speed car chase.
7
Hold on,” he said.
This suggestion was completely unnecessary. I’d fastened my seat belt tonight. Still, I clung to the door and the dashboard for dear life as he slung the cop car around 180 degrees.
He sped the car in the opposite direction after the suspect. The engine hummed low, then higher as he floored it. “Siren would be nice,” he said.
“Oh, sorry.” I flicked a switch on the box below the dashboard and got the chirping sound. “Sorry, sorry.” I flicked another switch to produce the proper wail.
Lois had fed us a call that drug deals were going down on the wrong side of town. In typical Johnafter fashion, we snuck around the streets with the headlights off until we surprised the driver of this Kia in mid-buy. Officer Leroy and some other cops had stayed behind to clean up the sellers while John and I chased the buyer who got away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” John murmured. John talked to himself a lot—I’d noticed this last night. Actually he was talking to suspects who couldn’t hear him. My guess was that he’d been on night shift by himself way too long. “Please, not downtown.”
“Yes, downtown,” I said, as if he were talking to me. We flew through the deserted streets and went airborne over the speed bump beside the jail/courthouse/city hall. “Yee-haw!” I hollered. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Try not to make us sound like The Dukes of Hazzard,” he said. “At least not with the window open.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Not the roundabout,” he said. Sure enough, the Kia entered the traffic circle in the center of town. We chased him around it twice.
“Okay, damn it,” John said, and I knew what he was about to do. At the last second, he jerked the car off the roundabout, down a street that was hard to see if you didn’t know it was there. He accelerated through three turns and re-entered the roundabout to cut the Kia off.
The Kia was too wise. He was out of the roundabout already. His taillights glowed way down at the high school. John cussed.
“You need some backup here, John.”
He nodded toward the CB. “That’s what Lois is telling me. There’s no one to help me. They took the sellers into custody, and now they’ve all gone to a wreck at the Birmingham Junction.”
“What if he starts shooting at us?”
“You watch too much TV. He’s small-time, like Eric.” John whipped out of the roundabout and floored it again. “I really don’t want to let this guy go. There’s no way my Ford is outrun by a Kia. That’s just wrong.”
“John,” I said. Below the siren, below the motor, a low hum vibrated the car.
He sped toward the railroad crossing, where red lights flashed in warning.
“John!” I gasped at the same instant he stomped the brakes. We skidded to a stop in
front of the blinking signals. The Kia kept going, squeaking past the locomotive with inches to spare.
John and I watched the progression of train cars. We’d lost him.
Sighing through his nose, John reached to the CB to call Lois. There it was again. I’d thought I smelled cologne several times in the hour since John’s shift started tonight. Not an overpowering slather—just a little, so I caught only a whiff of it when he moved.
It couldn’t be him. He wouldn’t dare make himself smell sexy to the blue-haired prisoner he found so distasteful. But I was pretty sure nothing else in this 1990s Crown Victoria smelled that good. I leaned closer, pretending to examine the siren controls, and tried to sniff him without letting out a big snort.
Unsuccessfully. He said, “I have some Kleenex in the trunk.”
Better to admit what I was doing than let him think I had postnasal drip. “You smell good.”
He stared at me, and my heart turned over. After last night riding around with my window rolled down in the cold, he’d wised up. He wore his leather cop jacket, which made him look that much more sharp and dangerous. His dark eyes pierced me, but the glow from the downtown streetlights softened his strong jaw and those sensitive lips. And his whole body was bathed in red as the warning lights from the railroad crossing blinked on, off, on, off, on.
Off, for good. The train was gone.
He looked ahead, into the empty street. “Where would you go?” he asked the suspect. Then he turned back to me. “Help me search for the Kia in parking lots as we pass. Sometimes they’re that stupid.”
Oh sure. I would search parking lots on the way to our destination. I knew exactly where we were going.
Sure enough, a few miles later he turned off the main road and onto the dirt road to the bridge.
“We’re driving down here again?” I exclaimed. We’d already visited the bridge at the beginning of the shift.
He unhooked the CB from the dashboard and handed it to me without taking his eyes off the road. “If you ever feel threatened, press this button to call Lois. She’ll send another car to save you from me.” He sounded almost hurt.
Going Too Far Page 6