by Thomas Kies
“Now,” I said, “I promised you a cup of coffee.”
Kevin leaned against the refrigerator with his hands in his pockets, much like his daughter had done earlier that afternoon at his house. He waited for what I was about to say next.
“But I have a confession to make, and I hope you don’t think less of me because of it.” I put my hands flat on the counter. “According to my court sentence, I’m not supposed to drink for six months.” I reached up and opened a cabinet door. Inside, clearly in sight, were bottles of wine, scotch, bourbon, and vodka. “I’m not supposed to drink,” I repeated, “but sometimes I cheat.”
He pushed himself away from the refrigerator and stepped up close to me, staring at the alcove of alcohol. Kevin pursed his lips and softly whistled. Then he said, “You know, sometimes I cheat, too. Scotch? Neat?”
Hot diggity damn!
I poured a healthy serving of Glenlivet for him and a tumbler of Absolut over ice for me. Then I suggested, “How about we go out and sit on the porch?”
We sat in chairs next to each other and breathed in the night air, thick with the sweet scent of roses that my landlady, Mrs. Soldaro, has planted all around the base of the front porch. A history of the universe twinkled down at us in the form of a sky full of stars. Crickets and cicadas hummed and chirped giving auditory proof that the earth was a living, breathing entity.
I took a long hard sip of vodka, the ice tinkling against my teeth, the liquid lighting a fire in my throat and igniting a familiar heat in my stomach. Almost immediately, the warmth and a sense of well-being stole into my consciousness. I took a deep breath. The world was okay.
“So,” Kevin sipped his scotch, “are you going to see that Frank guy again?”
I felt a cool breeze coming up from the harbor and pondered the question he’d just posed. Finally, I answered, “I don’t think I’m going to be seeing him at all. I think that book’s closed.”
Kevin looked out into the darkness. “I’m not sure I have a lot of respect for a man who cheats on his wife.”
“You were always faithful?”
“Yes.”
“Never thought about it?”
“Cheating on Joanna?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“She must have been quite a woman.”
“Once in a lifetime.”
“You were a little sketchy on how you met her.”
He laughed. “I’m sorry. Joanna was never too proud of how we met. It was in a bar. Figures, huh? It was my birthday and a bunch of us were hanging out at Whaler’s Café. This really pretty brunette down on the end of the bar sends our group a whole platter of Jell-O shots.”
“Joanna?”
“Yup.”
“Nothing says love like Jell-O shots.”
“Maybe you knew her,” Kevin suggested. “Her maiden name was Lewis, Joanna Lewis? She graduated at our high school a year after us?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t place the name, but high school was a long time ago and I’ve killed a lot of brain cells since then.
“Anyway, while the rest of my group worked on the shots, I went down to the end of the bar and thanked her. I asked her why she’d done that. She said that I looked kind of cute and it was my birthday.”
I took another sip of my vodka, listening.
“Strange thing, she wasn’t even supposed to be there that night. She was supposed to be meeting a friend of hers for drinks, a guy she worked with. But Joanna had written down the wrong date. It was a weird quirk of fate that the two of us even ran into each other. I fell in love with her that night, right then and there. We got married six months later.”
“Nice story.” I raised my tumbler in a toast.
“We’d been married for twelve years when one morning, after taking a shower, she came out of the bathroom and told me that she’d found a lump on her breast. I remember the sound of her voice. She was scared. I’ve never heard her scared before.”
Kevin stopped talking for a moment and I didn’t feel it was appropriate for me to say anything. The only noise was the distant rush of cars and the quiet symphony of crickets.
Then he started again. “The doctors diagnosed it as breast cancer. It was pretty far along. A few days later, they performed a mastectomy. But by that time, the cancer had already metastasized into her liver and lymph nodes. They began treating her with aggressive chemo treatments.”
Kevin was silent again. Then shaking his head slowly from side to side, he said, “It made her sick. She lost all her hair, of course. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Joanna kept her sense of humor and her dignity for as long as she could. Finally, she didn’t know what was worse, the chemo or dying.”
I reached over and held his hand.
“When it was obvious that she was only getting worse, they offered her experimental drugs. They gave her hope, gave all of us hope. But in the end it didn’t help.
“She died on Valentine’s Day. While she was lying in the hospital bed with all those tubes running into her arms and her nose, as weak as she was, more morphine pumping through her veins than blood, barely able to move, she touched her heart with the tips of her fingers and then, with what little strength she had left, she reached over and touched my hand. It was her Valentine’s present to me.”
I heard his voice crack. And then, in the dark, I heard him silently sobbing, trying hard to keep it from me. But in the shadows, he held a hand up to his mouth and his body shook.
Then I felt my own eyes water and my throat tighten, feeling his grief and wishing that I could take away the pain, feeling as helpless at that moment as Kevin was when he watched his wife die.
I looked up at the stars and wanted to say something profound. Like she was in a better place now or at least she wasn’t in pain anymore.
But I knew that wouldn’t help.
So I just held his hand.
***
We didn’t talk much after that. We finished our drinks and went back inside. Without asking, I poured us two more.
He looked at me with eyes that were red. “I shouldn’t.” He pointed to his glass. “I should go home.”
“Is your daughter waiting for you?”
He shook his head. “She’s staying overnight with her aunt.”
I stepped closer to him, close enough I could hear his breath quicken. “Look Kevin, I don’t want to be alone tonight.” I reached out and took his hand. “And I don’t think you should be alone tonight either. I want to hold you and I want you to hold me. Please?”
When we got to bed, we held each other a very long time, two old friends who had found each other after a life time apart.
And as long as we held on to each other it was okay. We were safe and the rest of the world was a faraway place.
And then he kissed me.
Before that night, Kevin had only kissed me once. Oh sure, he’d bussed me on the cheek a million times. But there was one time when we were seniors in high school, after we’d drank a few Budweisers and found ourselves in his parents’ basement playing pool. At some point, we were standing a little too close to each other and he looked at me and I looked at him and we kissed, right square on the lips.
And then we both did the damnest thing. We burst out laughing.
We’d been such good friends for so long, the kiss seemed silly. It was like I was kissing my brother.
But that night in my bed, after not seeing him for so long, we kissed and we didn’t laugh. We kissed some more and held each other.
And then we made love.
Chapter Eight
For the second day in a row, Laura Ostrowski reached me at home with an assignment. This time it was before ten in the morning. Mike Dillon had called to say that at noon the cops were going to make an arrest in a string of high-profile burglaries, sp
ecifically the Home Alone Gang.
The police wanted to have a reporter and a photographer there to capture the moment. Because I’m as adept with a digital camera as I am with a computer keyboard, the deputy chief had specifically asked for me.
It’s possible he was still feeling guilty for dissing Kevin last night.
It didn’t matter. This would be a good story.
I’d already been up since eight anyway. Tucker, true to form, had started to lick away at somebody’s face. Only this morning, it wasn’t mine. Kevin Bell got the Tucker treatment.
Waking up with Kevin naked in my bed was both exhilarating and embarrassing. Seeing him as he tried to protect his face from puppy slobber was absolutely adorable. After gently persuading Tucker to stop, Kevin gazed at me with sleepy eyes and smiled.
I couldn’t decide whether to kiss him or to pull the covers over my head. I know what I look like when I wake up in the morning and Medusa’s got nothing on me. I was amazed that Kevin didn’t take a look, throw himself screaming out of the bedroom window, and run like the wind.
Instead, he leaned over and kissed me. “Thank you for last night.”
“My pleasure,” I answered honestly. “I still owe you coffee.”
“I’d like that.”
“Mind if I take a shower first?”
“Only if I get the shower next.”
Then, of course, a natural progression of logic took over and I suggested, “It might be more expedient if we showered together.”
Sometimes I simply surprise myself at how slutty I can be. Although, now that I’m more mature, I prefer to think of myself as being lusty and provocative.
He ran his hand down the small of my back and let it rest on my derriere. He whispered, “I’m nothing if not expedient.”
***
Being together for the first time was an affair of the heart. We’d known each other our entire lives. We’d literally grown up together, been to each other’s birthday parties, known each other’s parents, taken high school classes together, done homework together, gotten drunk together, shared joys and victories, shared sadness and failures, shared our acceptance letters into college. We’d even shared the flu.
Up until then, we’d done and shared everything together except for sex.
We certainly changed that.
What we did that night was hold each other, comfort each other, and share our bodies and our love. It was warm and special and I’ll always remember it as such.
What we did in the shower was just raw animal sex.
And I’ll always remember that as such.
There’s something about hot water, steam, and slick, slippery skin that just really drives me nuts. We took turns under the showerhead; rubbing soap all over each other, making sure every inch of exposed skin was squeaky clean, some of it twice and three times. We even shampooed each other’s hair, which I found to be very erotic, especially when Kevin slowly and gently massaged my scalp.
I could have spent the rest of the year standing in the tub with that man.
But the problem with taking a long, leisurely shower in an old Victorian home with a lot of other people who share the hot water tank is you’re apt to run out of hot water.
And when my shower turns cold, it does it fast.
We both cried out in surprise and dismay when the first splash of icy spray replaced the warm lusciousness and it took only the blink of an eye for us to rinse off the soapsuds and get the hell out.
But we really weren’t finished.
Kevin spent a great deal of quality time drying off my body with a fluffy towel. Of course, he concentrated on certain parts, like my boobs and tush, and when he got down on his knees to get my feet, legs and inner thighs, well, between the gentle toweling and the delicious little kisses and licks he gave me, I about lost what little composure I had left.
Then I did the same with him. He has a really great body. Time always takes its toll, but hard work has kept him trim and muscular. True, fried foods and the booze put a few pounds around his middle, but his arms are buff, his legs are toned and his ass is hard as a rock. I took my time with the towel. When it was my turn to kneel in front of him, it was obvious what the height of his interest level was.
We adjourned back to my bed.
By the time we were done, we were so sweaty that we needed another shower. So much for expedience. And hot water.
After we got dressed, Kevin barely stuck around long enough have coffee and a couple of slices of whole wheat toast. He wanted to get home, change out of the blue suit that he’d worn the night before and get into his work clothes before Caroline got home. He didn’t think staying out all night with an old high school friend set a very good example for his daughter. Plus, Kevin had those two potential jobs from last night that he wanted to go out and take a look at.
He promised to call me later and, since it was Kevin Bell, I believed him.
***
Fifteen burglaries had been committed over the course of six months in seven different towns in both Fairfield and Westchester counties. The last two had been staged only a little over a week ago in the towns of Wilton and Ridgefield, both north of Sheffield on the same night.
They would choose their victims carefully. Targeting the very wealthy, they’d raid homes that were repositories for easy cash, jewelry, high-end electronics, furs, and antiques. They knew when the owners were out of the house, attending the theater, a party or out to dinner. They knew which alarm company had wired the home and how to bypass it. Even the cops admired their professionalism.
After the seventh burglary, the press started calling them the Home Alone Gang. Full disclosure: I’m actually the one who gave them that name.
Their average take per house was estimated to be well over half a million dollars. They could crack wall safes, ransack jewelry drawers, empty closets, and take priceless pieces of art and furniture in under eleven minutes.
They left nothing behind that could identify them. Not a single shred of usable evidence.
The cops were stymied until the night of the Connor’s Landing murders. At about the same time I got the phone call from Casper telling me about the homicides, a beer truck on I-95 swerved to miss a Honda Accord that had cut in front of it. The driver of the tractor-trailer lost control and his vehicle overturned, sliding sideways along the highway for nearly a hundred feet. By the time it came to a stop, cases of Coors were strewn all over the road.
As fate would have it, an Escalade was following a little too closely behind the beer truck and a case of Coors Light twelve-packs crashed through the windshield. The driver of the SUV ended up in the hospital with minor facial lacerations from the broken glass.
An unexpected outcome of the accident was what police discovered in the back of the crippled Escalade. The SUV had been transporting over three hundred thousand in furs—furs that were quickly identified as having been heisted during one of the last two Home Alone robberies.
After the driver of the SUV, David Lobel, age thirty-five of Queens, was stitched up, the police charged him with possession of stolen property. While he was still in the emergency room, he was read his rights and asked if he wanted an attorney. He was also informed that if he cooperated, he might get an agreeable plea bargain instead of facing the myriad charges implicating him in fifteen burglaries.
He skipped the attorney and went for the deal. According to Mr. Lobel, he’d never taken part in any of the burglaries. He was only fencing the furs, buying them from the Home Alone thieves and taking them to New York to ship to Asia where they could safely be resold.
The police then pushed Mr. Lobel a little harder. Being a fence still made him an accessory. If he wanted to avoid serious jail time, he was going to have to help them find the Home Alone burglars.
Having been incarcerated once before, Mr. Lobel was justifiably reluctant about
going back to prison. He told the police that while he had no way to contact the thieves directly, they’d already set up a meeting for him to appraise the last of the loot, a meeting that would take place in two days in the parking lot of a local grocery store.
That was all the cops had to hear. This was the break in the case they’d been waiting for.
***
Shortly before twelve, I was sitting in Mike Dillon’s black Jeep Cherokee in the middle of the Stop-n-Shop parking lot. Not far from the front entrance of the grocery store, Mike had backed into a parking space, facing out, just in case he needed to move fast.
There was a storm rolling in from Long Island Sound but it was still unbearably hot and humid. Mike had left the engine running so we could sit in air conditioned comfort.
All around us, people pushed shopping carts. Cars pulled into the parking lot and cars pulled out. It was a blacktopped ant-hill of constant movement. “Why in hell are they meeting here, Mike? There’re people all over the place.”
“Ever hear of hiding in plain sight?”
I looked over at him. Mike Dillon had on a polo shirt, jeans, and a Yankees cap. I had on almost the same outfit, except for the hat. Mine had a Boston logo.
Go Sox.
Oh. One more thing that was different. Mike had a gun in a holster on his belt.
Nodding at the pistol, I asked, “Think you’ll need that?”
He smiled. “Genie, if I thought this was really dangerous, you wouldn’t be here. Cat burglars never carry guns. They know that if they ever get caught carrying a weapon, they’re looking at seriously hard time.”
“Okay, so what’s the plan?”
“We have four unmarked vehicles parked in locations that can easily block all the exits,” Mike said. “Because Lobel’s SUV is still being repaired, he’s going to drive up in an Escalade that we borrowed from the Cadillac dealer over in Darien. The chief warned me that this knucklehead better not put so much as a scratch on it.”