My reasoning, at that moment, was that maybe being spanked like a disobedient little kid was exactly what I needed and wanted. I could free myself from guilt and personal responsibility for my sins by submitting to a few painful minutes of retribution. And after it was over, I told myself, I could start over and do the right thing—with an aching behind, but a clear conscience.
A few minutes after the whipping, while I was still sniffling and wiping my runny nose and feeling generally like crap, I got the lecture I'd known was coming. But it wasn't anything like I'd expected, and it made me cry.
There is nothing in the world more wonderful, yet probably more annoying, than being graciously forgiven for something you've done by the person to whom you did it. And that was exactly what Dan did. (An apology for the whipping, itself, would have been nice, but I'd already learned that he wasn't the kind to apologize for doing what he believed was necessary—or deserved.)
"If you really want to back out," he said softly. "Or if you feel that you need to—for any reason—I won't try to stop you, and neither will anyone else in the department. But what I want you to understand is that, even in prison, Bugosi will still have a long reach, at least until we take his business contacts out of the equation. After that, everyone he depends on to do his dirty work—like getting rid of you—will probably wander off to greener pastures. None of Bugosi's pals are loyal enough to hang around after the money stops rolling in."
"So, after he's convicted and put away, I should be okay on my own," I suggested, only half believing what I was saying. "A friend of mine has a small beach house out on Long Island—not far from Montauk. It's a very secluded area, especially after the tourists leave. When the trial is finally over, I thought I could go out and live there for a while. You know, stay out of sight, most of the time, keep a low profile, and wait for—"
I stopped mid-sentence because Dan was giving me a curious look—sort of like I had a live Montauk lobster on my head.
"You've had a lot of dumb ideas since this whole thing started," he said coldly. "But that is, without a doubt, the dumbest one, yet."
"What's so dumb about it?" I demanded.
"In the first place," he explained, in an overly patient tone that suggested I wasn't quite bright. "Seclusion is never the best idea when you're alone and unarmed—unless you're planning to stay awake twenty-four hours a day and never go the bathroom."
"Why do you always have to make everything sound so fucking grim," I inquired, in my very best whiny, petulant voice.
Dan sighed. "Because I don't want to fight cross-town traffic, then drive all the way out to Montauk just to find you've had your throat cut. Things like that can ruin a guy's weekend."
I rolled my eyes. "Even grimmer. Thanks a lot. What about a little support, here? Could you try to show just a teeny-weeny bit of confidence in my ability to take care of myself—something I've been doing for almost thirty-four years, by the way—without help from the government, or from you?"
"And how many of those years did you have a gang of mob killers searching for you?"
"Excuse me, Agent Crawford," I responded smugly. "But aren't you the one who just told me that, after I testify, and after their boss is locked up and not around to give orders, his thugs will lose interest?”
"That could take a while."
"Okay then, here's an idea. Why don't you come with me and hang around 'til the coast is clear? Just think of it. Moonlight skinny dips in the bone-chilling surf, illegal bonfires on the beach, incinerating marshmallows on a stick?"
He shook his head. "I can't do that. Once you leave the program, you're no longer my responsibility. I'll be assigned to another case and to another person. It's what I do, Beth."
"So, federal marshals don't get to take vacations?" I grumbled.
He didn't answer, and three days later, more out of pique than good sense, I signed the paperwork to leave the Federal Witness Protection Program. He'd already explained that he wouldn't be there for the trial, which meant I would probably never see Dan Crawford again.
Chapter 10
The house near Montauk was tiny, but it seemed, at first glance, to provide everything I really needed. It was located on an inlet just wide enough to allow for a narrow wharf and a small two-seater skiff equipped with an outboard and a pair of oars— just in case. What I hadn't expected was that the area was marshy and densely covered in knee-high eel grass, making walking sloshy at low tide and virtually unnavigable when the tide was in. A winding path led from the wharf, over the dunes to the house, but even that often came and went with the tides.
My friend, Caleb, called the place Mosquito Cove, for reasons I came to understand later. There was a rundown shack about twenty yards behind the house, where he had stored a supply of firewood, in the unlikely event that I would still be living there when winter came. I took one look at the deep weeds that surrounded the woodshed and agreed that staying for the winter wasn't an attractive idea.
My ‘plan,’ when I originally accepted Caleb's offer, had been to resume writing the book I hoped would make me rich and famous— though I would have been happy to settle for unknown but solvent. I had been living for too long off the largesse of Pauline and the government, and it felt good to be fending for myself, again. I spent the weeks leading up to the trial doing just that and enjoying it immensely, and while I had originally planned to return home when Bugosi was finally sent away for the rest of his worthless life, I decided at the last minute to stay in the cottage through the early fall. I felt quite safe, actually, knowing that several of Frank's cohorts, including Elena Hofritz, had followed their boss "up the river," and that his "gang" had reportedly gone to work for a couple of his competitors.
So, my life was my own, again—even if that life consisted of little more than long, lonely days, miserable nights spent weeping, and painful memories of the pool guy I'd loved—and lost.
Instead of writing, I spent my days wandering idly around the house, and when that became suffocating, I started taking long walks along the strip of beach just above my cottage. From the top of the dunes, I could see the bay in the distance and an occasional sailboat skimming across the water, but with the exception of Caleb, I had no contact at all with other human beings. There was a town not far away, but without a car, I would have had to get there on foot, through the tangle of weeds and marsh grasses that I called "the yard."
I also had the little skiff, of course, but after my initial failed attempt to get the outboard running, I didn't seem to have enough interest in seeing people to make a second try at it. Caleb had proven to be a truly good friend, however, and very generous with his time—time I knew he had to be taking from his family. He came by once a week— in his slightly larger boat— bringing me whatever grocery and personal items I'd asked for during his previous visit. When this episode in my life was finally over, it would be difficult to ever pay him back for all his kindness, but I vowed to do my best.
Though I would never have mentioned it to him, I had discovered a couple of annoying things about the cottage he'd been kind enough to lend me. Electricity was a sometime thing, for instance. It tended to go off at inopportune moments—like when I was trying to get through a particularly lonely evening by reading the same book for the third time, or when I was stepping out of the shower dripping wet and couldn't see to find a towel.
We had mice. Hordes of the little guys, who apparently slept during the day and came out at night to frolic noisily among my dishes and nibble at my Oreos. Since they had shown the good manners to never eat an entire cookie, I was willing, at first, to share what my good fortune had provided, until I discovered that mice tend to—as the crude saying goes—shit where they eat. After that, I kept my favorite snacks in the refrigerator and washed the silverware before I used it.
And then, in early autumn, I began to feel that the mice and I weren't alone.
It wasn't anything major, just little things, like some of the weeds behind the house taking on a tra
mpled look. I knew that geese sometimes do that when they're nesting, and I had seen a couple of foxes, but they'd never come close to the house or the shack—not to my knowledge, anyway. I felt stupid doing it, but I called Caleb to ask if there were black bears on Long Island—as there still were in New Jersey.
"A few," he said, with a hint of sadness in his voice. "Despite the ignorant so-called hunters doing their best to wipe them out. Bears aren't your problem, though, unless you're leaving food lying around. You're not leaving kitchen scraps and leftovers around, outside, are you? Even in plastic garbage bags?"
"No, Caleb," I explained wryly. "On my budget, I usually eat my own kitchen scraps. Even a starving bear wouldn't be interested in what ends up in the garbage can."
He laughed. "Well, then, your problem is probably raccoons, or maybe even coyotes. They've still managed to beat the odds out here. Nothing to worry about, though. Bears are pretty shy, and coyotes are mostly scavengers."
While I didn't completely buy Caleb's theory, I'd dealt with enough suburban raccoons in my life to know that the adorable creatures could make a real mess when they put their minds to it.
Okay, so, raccoons were obviously the problem. Very big raccoons.
Three nights after I talked to Caleb, the raccoons came for me.
I woke to a soft scratching sound and listened for a moment before turning onto my stomach and going back to sleep, with a pillow over my head. Whatever the charming little bandits were up to was fine with me, as long as they didn't keep waking me up to do it.
What they wanted to do, apparently, was to pry open my bedroom window and crawl into bed with me, because the next thing I knew, someone—definitely not a raccoon—was straddling my naked body, with his or her hand across my mouth and his or her mouth next to my ear.
I was being robbed! Me, whose only "good" piece of jewelry had cost a former boyfriend forty bucks at a local pawnshop.
"Stay absolutely quiet and don't move!" a male voice ordered. Not shouting, but in a harsh whisper, which could only mean that whoever was on top of me wasn't alone in the house.
For what felt like a very long time, I was too scared to move or to say anything, for that matter. My assailant, though, was evidently unsatisfied with the fact that I was already lying face-down and stiff as a board, as he removed his hand and stuffed a corner of the sheet in my mouth before breathing a second warning close to my ear, "There's someone in the house!"
No kidding! I thought. At that point, having gone from scared shitless to curious, I made an attempt to turn over—and paid for my curiosity with a sharp smack on my bare behind and by being dragged off the mattress, onto the floor and under the bed.
An instant later, I heard, and felt, two bullets tearing through the mattress just over my head and thunking into the wall behind the headboard.
Lying on your stomach under a bed, entirely naked and surrounded by gritty dust bunnies while listening to your house being shot to hell is not an experience I would recommend, but it brought me instantly alert and aware that the gun battle going on in my little house had nothing to do with a simple robbery and everything to do with Frank Bugosi. Oh, and one more thing. The smack on my butt had made it clear that one of the combatants shooting my house to pieces was Federal Marshal Daniel Crawford, coming to bail me out of trouble—again. And risking his life, in the process.
This time, though, I wasn't about to screw things up by trying to help. Besides, any aid I could give, unarmed and one hundred percent naked, would probably be limited, at best. From what I could hear, there were three people shooting at one another, and when I heard a single scream, followed by a loud thud, my heart nearly stopped. One down, but the battle continued, which meant that one of the intruders had been hit—assuming, of course, that two of the participants were the bad guys, and that Dan was the single good guy.
And just when I began to be terrified that my assumption had been wrong, there was another thud. No scream this time. Then silence. Unable to restrain myself any longer, I ran across the room, flicked the light switch with no result, and then began shrieking Dan's name into the darkness. When he didn't answer, I began to sob helplessly.
And when I felt a hand on my shoulder, I went completely to pieces, flailing my arms and kicking wildly into empty space.
"I thought I told you to be quiet," Dan said.
Still weeping hysterically, I threw my arms around his neck—and felt my knees go out from under me.
"Tell me I didn't faint, again," I muttered as I began to wake up.
Dan leaned down and kissed me. "Okay, you didn't faint. You were overcome by so much excitement and you swooned, as my great-grandmother used to say."
I sat up in bed. "Are you all right? You're not wounded or anything?"
"Not wounded, not anything—except tired. I haven't had a lot of sleep for the last day or so. That woodshed of yours isn't the most comfortable place to carry out a surveillance. "
"You've been surveilling me?" I yelped. "Without telling me?"
"Don't get your back up. I couldn't tell you, and I had no way of getting you out of here without being seen, so I decided to just hunker down and wait."
"Wait for what?"
"We found out, three days ago, that Bugosi's brother-in-law and the brother-in-law's poker buddy were asking around town about a lone white female who'd rented a house somewhere out here. His runaway daughter, he said."
"I thought I wasn't your responsibility anymore," I observed—a bit testily, probably, in light of the fact that he had just saved my life—again.
He smiled. "Technically, you're not, and I may get fired for doing it, but I had all this vacation time piled up, so I figured I'd spend some of it wading through a swamp to look for this annoying woman I used to know." He pulled me into his arms and kissed me again. "Besides, I always thought that marrying someone would make me legally responsible for her. You know, 'until death do us part,' and all that."
He winked. "There's also that part about you obeying me, but you'll probably need some time to get used to that. The specifics of exactly what the word 'obey' is going to mean will take a bit of negotiating, of course, but I'm sure we can work it out. I have a house in Maryland with plenty of room out back for a woodshed like your friend Caleb has. A solid, straight-backed chair, a couple of sturdy paddles I can probably make myself, and we'll be good to go."
I was thrilled with Dan's slightly odd proposal, and the little speech about building a woodshed in our backyard was cute, but I had other things in mind, at that point. What I wanted at this moment was for him to remind me, again, and in the best way possible, that I was going to need a lot more than protection.
I began by unzipping his fly. He stopped me.
He sighed. "Sorry, babe, but right now, I need to get someone out here to bag and tag Frank's brother in law and your other unwanted visitor."
Before he made the call, though, he glanced around the room and shook his head.
"Well, that's another security deposit down the toilet," he announced. "You know that I love you and want marry you, but I sure as hell wouldn't want you as a tenant."
Epilogue
Dan and I were married six weeks after the evening I have now decided to call, "The Night of the Raccoon," (with homage to Tennessee Williams.) We bought the little house near Montauk from Caleb, partly out of sentiment, but mostly because Dan said that repairing the damage to the fucking place would cost a hell of lot more than buying the dump outright. We fixed it up a bit, patched up the bullet holes, and painted the inside. We planned on using it as a weekend getaway, in case—as Dan says—we ever need to get away badly enough to sleep in a ramshackle shack in a weed-infested swamp, where he once had to shoot two guys.
That was before the raccoons and their sisters and their brothers and their aunts moved in, of course. We've since learned that while raccoons are definitely charming, they're not big on housekeeping or on potty-training their kids. They seemed happy enough in the cottage, though,
so we sort of deeded it over to them—gratis. Dan says if I ever try to rent anything again, ever, I won't be sitting down 'for a goddamned week.' I think he was exaggerating when he said it, but you never can tell with an Alpha male, right?
I finally sold my first book, by the way. I called it, "Pandora and the Pool Guy." Catchy title, don't you think?
The End
April Hill
April Hill is a best-selling author of women’s romance, known for her wry humor, sensitive character development and of course, the love.
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