by Rob Cornell
Doug turned out an easy mark, a cautious driver. I never once lost sight of him, while at the same time managed to keep a safe distance between our cars. I tried to keep track of where we were going. He headed north, into parts I wasn’t sure belonged to Hawthorne any longer. Then he turned East, snaking his way through a commercial district with a disproportionate amount of fast-food restaurants. I could practically smell a nearby mall.
I felt a little disappointed, worried Doug had decided to spend his Saturday shopping. But when the mall emerged on the right-hand side, Doug continued driving and didn’t change his general course until we came to the I-94 expressway.
Interesting. Doug had taken the long way. From his house he could have cut down and caught the same expressway southeast of Garfield Park. Might he be covering his tracks?
I flipped open my phone and dialed Autumn. “Doug say where he was going?”
“He said he was going to the mall. Was that you in the BMW?”
“You like it?”
“Are you following him right now?”
“I’m right behind him,” I said. “And he just passed the mall.” Doug led the way onto the east-bound ramp, toward Detroit. “We just got on the expressway.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Guys lie all the time about where they’re going. Doesn’t mean it’s another woman.”
She sighed through the phone, the sound like static. “Yeah, right.”
“I’ll call you back.”
Forty minutes later, Doug pulled off the expressway into a rest stop. He pulled into one of the slanted parking spaces along the curb. I cruised by and took a spot six down from his, with three cars between us.
Ahead of me, a row of snack machines stood in a glass enclosed space. My stomach growled. I opened my duffel bag, pulled out my camera and one of my sandwiches, never letting my eyes lose Doug.
He strode toward a picnic area to one side of the rest stop’s main structure. Several trees shaded the grassy area and the scattered picnic tables. A family of four sat at one of the tables. A woman in a floral print dress sat at another, her hands folded in front of her. She face the parking lot and stared directly at Doug as he approached.
My gaze never leaving Doug, I hefted my camera, opened the lens, and powered up. I held the camera poised in front of my chest, waiting for the right moment.
As Doug neared, the woman slid out from the picnic table. Her hands made fists at her sides. I lifted my camera to my eye in order to zoom in and get a better look. She wore her blonde hair short and spiky, and I placed her in her mid to late twenties. Her figure filled out her dress nicely, and her arms looked especially well defined. The closer Doug came, the more she flexed those arms.
I dipped the camera down to take in the full scene when Doug reached her. He gestured toward the table, but she shook her head and folded her arms across her chest.
I lifted the camera, framed them both, and snapped a shot.
Doug pointed an accusing finger at the woman. The woman flung out her arms from their folded position, slicing the air with her hands like an umpire declaring a runner safe. Then she pointed her own finger in Doug’s face, her mouth working so hard at whatever she said a glint of spittle flung from her lips.
I took three more shots as quickly as my camera would let me.
Doug shook his head, threw up his hands, did some more finger pointing. He grabbed her by the arms, stuck his face right in hers. His blonde hair, which had been neatly combed with a sharp part, hung in his face, one lock slicing across an eye. His cheeks puffed with heavy breaths. His fair complexion turned the color of a sunburn.
I took picture after picture, wishing I could hear them.
The next move happened too quickly for me to capture through the camera’s viewfinder. The woman twisted her body in some way. Her arms spun in outward circles. The following instant, Doug no longer stood in the frame.
I clicked a last picture of the women, then dropped the camera from my eye.
Doug lay on the ground, propped on his elbows, gaping up at the woman.
She looked ready to kick him while he was down.
I snapped a shot with Doug on the ground and her standing over him.
After a second’s hesitation the woman stepped around Doug and stalked toward the parking lot.
Doug scrambled to his feet, glaring at her back.
I glanced back and forth between Doug and the woman. He stood there. She climbed into a white Neon parked a couple spaces beyond Doug’s car.
I made a quick decision—Doug’s trail I could pick up later. I had to follow the woman.
Once she pulled past me, heading toward the expressway’s entrance ramp, I swung out and tagged along. She kept an even pace, but remained in the left lane, speeding past traffic on the right, and weaving around anyone not going fast enough on the left.
At first, I tried sticking to the right lane and only coming into her lane to pass, but that quickly became impossible. She was driving at least twenty miles over the speed limit, making my own driving hard to keep casual. I was no amateur, though. I’d lost track of how many cars I had tailed during my career as a PI. Eventually, I fell into a rhythm, keeping a few cars between us when I could, until her speed forced me to pass them.
After about five miles of this, I noticed her speed increasing.
I tried to keep up while still keeping back. A glance at my speedometer surprised me, the needle creeping past ninety. Another plus with the BMW, I guess. Such a smooth ride, I didn’t realize how fast I was going.
My mystery woman seemed to know exactly how fast she was going. Cutting in and out of either lane, the cars around her might as well have been standing still. She put a good amount of distance between us, and unless I started cutting people off, there was no way I could keep up.
Had she made me?
With a half dozen cars between us, the woman cut across both lanes and shot down an exit ramp that didn’t appear to lead anywhere significant.
Yep. She had made me.
I took the exit she’d sped down, flooring it now. The off ramp curved to the right and connected with a thin road splitting in both directions. I stopped at the intersection, looked both ways, and saw no sign of the Neon. The only structures in sight were a gas station and a diner with half the shingles missing from the roof and two cars in the parking lot, neither of them a white Neon.
The intersecting road went for a while to my right before hitting another intersection with a blinking red light. In the other direction the road curved around a stand of trees, disappearing beyond them. The woman could have headed off in either direction, or could have pulled behind the gas station or the diner to hide. Odds were she stuck to the road, knowing it would take a lucky guess and a lot of speed for me to catch up with her. I checked the nearby buildings anyway, but the only thing I found behind the diner was a dumpster in desperate need of emptying, and nothing behind the gas station.
She had slipped me, and good.
Chapter 4
Between her driving skills and the kung fu she’d pulled at the rest stop, I wasn’t sure what to make of the woman Doug had met with. All I did know was I had pictures of him in a spat with another woman, and I had to show those photos to his wife.
Well, I didn’t have to.
That’s the fence I sat on when I returned home to print out the pictures. Meeting a strange woman at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere did not make Doug an unfaithful husband. I’d caught him arguing, not making out. Still, the photos showed earmarks of a break-up with a twist. The twist coming at the end with Doug on the ground.
Back in the BMW—my old Civic forgotten—I headed toward Autumn’s with the pictures in an envelope on the passenger seat. I needed to call her first, make sure Doug hadn’t made his way back yet. I dug out my cell phone, but instead of dialing Autumn’s number I speed-dialed my friend Tom Fortier.
Tom answered in the middle of the second ring.
“‘Sup,
Rid?”
“You on duty?” Tom was a detective on Hawthorne’s police force, but our friendship had started back in high school. I was a choir geek, destined to be a famous singer, not a private detective. Tom had been the sort of kid with tape on his glasses and a bad case of acne. Law enforcement was the last thing anyone expected out of him.
Man, how things change.
“I’m free as a hippie with love on his mind.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Hippies are into free love, right? It means… it means I’m free asswipe.”
“I need an ear,” I said, making a left, changing course to head toward the High Note.
“Lucky you, I’ve still got one the wife and kids haven’t talked off yet. I could use a drink.”
“So happens I know a good place serves free beer.”
“Ah, the usual. Be there in fifteen.”
It took me twenty minutes to reach the High Note, and Tom, true to his word, had beat me there. I pulled into the lot and parked next to his empty car. A glance toward the door told me Tom had let himself in.
I found him sitting at the bar, already with a half empty glass of beer in front of him. Another full glass sat on the bar to his left. Two empty bottles bearing Bass labels sat to his right.
“Did you pour me one?” I asked.
Tom curled a hand around both glasses and drew them toward him like a gambler raking in the pot. “Nope.”
I strolled behind the bar and pulled a Bass from the fridge, popped the cap, and didn’t bother with the glass. Just one more thing for me to clean up before opening tonight.
“You know I hate it when you let yourself in like that.”
Tom made a jerk-off motion with his hand. He’d long since lost the taped glasses, getting laser surgery on his frosty blue eyes. Those eyes always seemed to focus on a point between himself and nowhere, as if constantly in a state of remembrance. “Lock’s easier than a three dollar whore, Rid. I’m proving a point.”
“Maybe you should teach my employees that trick, since it doesn’t look like my bartender’s bringing back my spare key.”
Tom’s eyes narrowed, but he still didn’t look at me. “You really should change the locks. He’s gonna come in here and rip you off.”
I looked around me. Silence hung like a haze of twilight in the bar during the day when none of the amateur crooners and professional drunks crowded the tables. The wall tiled with famous photos, the dead neon beer ads, the disco ball, none of it hurt my eyes like it did during business hours.
“He’d be doing me a favor, I think,” I said.
“Bullshit. You’d be the first to cry, something happened to this place.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why the hell else would you spend every damn night here?”
I had come up with a list of reasons to keep running the place when Sheila gave me the news the High Note was part of the inheritance. On top was because my parents had put it in their will that they wanted me to, and after fifteen years in LA with no contact, I thought it was the least I could do. I tried to remember the other reasons. They wouldn’t come.
“You’d be the first to cry,” I said. “No more free beer.”
He sucked down the last of his first glass, then sipped immediately from his second. His gaze remained in its own time zone, but I could sense his focus shift.
“What was it you needed to confess?”
I swigged my beer. “You get ordained over the internet or something? I never said anything about confessing.”
“I could hear it in your voice. Like the cat choking on a few feathers.”
I saluted him with my beer bottle. “My conscience is clear.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I took a case, is all. I need some perspective.”
Every once in a while, Tom will look at you.
He looked me in the eye. “A case?”
I looked down into my beer bottle. “Nothing formal. Just looking into something for an old friend.”
“You didn’t tell me you’d gone back into business.”
“I haven’t. It’s a onetime thing.”
“Those feathers tickling the back of your throat yet?”
“Shut up and drink your beer.”
He tipped his head back and chugged, his Adam’s apple throbbing with each swallow, until nothing but a streak of foam remained in the glass. His pinky finger sticking out, he replaced the glass on the bar just so.
“Can’t be bored, all the time you dump into this place. I know for a fact it ain’t money. So either you miss the gig, or she’s real pretty.”
“Would you let me tell you about it, instead of assuming yourself all over the place.”
“Come on, Rid. I don’t assume. I deduce.” He pointed past me. “Beer? Since you’re back there.”
I got both of us fresh ones. He filled one of his glasses. I stuck with drinking from the bottle.
“So who is she?” Tom asked.
I made a face like he didn’t know what he was talking about. “Why can’t it be because I miss the job? It doesn’t have to be about a woman.”
“So you miss it?”
I nodded.
“And there’s a woman involved?”
I gave him the meanest scowl I knew, but he wasn’t looking at me anyway.
“Fine, Sherlock. My client is a woman. But it’s not what you think.”
“Me thinks you doth protest a lot.”
“Isn’t it ‘too much’?”
“It’s that, too. Now give it. What’s her name?”
“Autumn Chodakowski, formerly known as Autumn Rice.”
His unstaring eyes narrowed. He sucked in his lower lip. I noticed his hand wrap a little tighter around his glass.
“Easy on the glassware, buddy.”
“You’re stupid.”
“You’re a peach yourself. Thanks.”
His lip curled. “That bitch screws you over once, and now you’re gonna let her do it again?”
“Whoa. Talk about protesting too much. That was high school.”
“Some people never change.”
“And some people do, Tom,” putting the emphasis on his name to make sure he knew I was talking about him.
“Not always for the better.”
“What’s with you? There something you want to tell me?”
He held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I just thought you’d had enough time to come to your senses.”
“I’m not trying to win her back or anything, if that’s what you think.”
“That’s good, ‘cause she’s married.”
“I know that. That’s why she hired me.”
His gaze snapped up. He flinched. I could tell he hadn’t meant to look at me.
“She hired me,” I explained, “to find out if her husband’s been seeing someone on the side.”
Tom laughed, smacked his forehead with both hands. “That’s rich. That’s just beautiful. Do you not see something so sick about this situation?”
“Awkward, maybe. Not sick.”
“Sick. Real fucking sick. What happens if you find out hubby’s banging someone else? Autumn going to get even by banging you?”
I vividly saw myself jamming my fist into Tom’s nose, could even hear the cartilage crunch. I took a deep breath.
Tom said, “I’ve pissed you off.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“All right. Wrong strategy. I’m trying to tell you, though, she’s bad news.”
“Why? Because she made a bad choice on how to break up with me? We were kids.”
“That’s not why.” He twirled the beer in his glass. “Like you said, people change. Fifteen years is a long time. You don’t know her anymore.”
“And you do?”
He rolled his shoulders as if working out a kink. “Will you trust me for once? As your friend, I’m warning you.”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that.”
He finished his beer.
“I’ve got to pick up the girls from school.”
“So that’s it? You’re going to leave me with a warning?”
Tom stood, rolled his shoulders again. It looked like the tendons in his neck had thickened. Blotches of red rose up along his jaw line and over his cheeks. I could smell the sweat on him.
He looked me in the eye again. I’d seen more of his eyes in the last thirty minutes than I had the past thirty days.
“I’m not the little nerd you knew in high school. I’m a cop. I know who’s trouble in my town and who isn’t.”
“That’s very wild west of you, Tom. I never pictured you as a cowboy.”
He stared even harder at me. A pair of eyes had never made me feel so uncomfortable. “You should be thanking me,” he said, turned, and walked out.
I tried to finish my beer, but it tasted flat.
Autumn stood waiting for me in the doorway, wearing a sundress with a simple, pale yellow pattern. The white strap of her bra peeked out on one shoulder. The front lawn smelled wet. From behind the house I could hear the faint tick and hiss of a sprinkler.
We ended up in the living room again, this time less awkward around each other, though Autumn’s gaze kept slipping to the envelope I held.
“Sit,” I said, and we both sat on the couch, Autumn smoothing her dress down along the sides of her legs.
I laid the envelope flat on the coffee table and flipped open the top. “They’re photos,” I said.
The color in her face drained. She smoothed her dress again, set her shoulders as if bracing herself for some impact.
“You took them today?”
I nodded.
“Is he …”
“I don’t know what to make of them,” I said. “I wasn’t even sure if I was going to show them to you yet.”
“I didn’t hire you to keep things from me.” She plucked at the edge of the envelope.
I slapped my hand down, pinning it to the table. “Hang on.”
She yanked at a corner, but couldn’t get the envelope free. A crease marked her forehead between her eyebrows. “Stop dicking around and show me.”
I jerked the envelope away from her, slipped out the photos, and lined them up, one by one, across the table.