Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure

by Karen Goldner

  "You're looking pretty glum for someone who's just solved two murders," Teresa said as she dug into her ham and cheese omelet.

  "It's the money. I'm back to being broke, and worse, I owe Mark money and you've been footing the bill for a week, so I feel like…"

  "Stop," she said, putting down her fork. "You owe me nothing. To have an adventure like this? Do you know where I went on vacation last year? Washington, DC. One friggin' museum after the next. This was a real getaway!"

  We laughed for a minute, and returned to our plates. But I was still worried.

  "Are you okay?" I asked. In between marriages years ago, a roommate of mine had been raped. It had been really hard for her to feel safe again. I wasn't sure how Teresa would feel.

  "I am," she answered. "I appreciate your concern, and the policewoman's, and if this had happened somewhere else, in a different situation, I would feel differently. But it was part of this adventure that doesn't even seem real to me to begin with. And we stopped him. I stopped him." Her voice got stronger. "I stopped him."

  "You were awesome," I agreed. She had been.

  "You, too," she said. "I'm glad you came in when you did. I must admit, when he pulled out that gun I thought we were goners. You're sort of a super hero."

  I glowed when she said that, and looked down at my pancake, and felt her smiling at me, and for a few minutes enjoyed being amazing.

  36

  We drank a fair amount of coffee that morning, between what Perez had ordered and what we consumed with our enormous breakfast, but it was not enough to keep us both from power naps.

  I woke up a little after noon when my phone buzzed. It was Mark. I gave him a full report.

  "So D'Angelo and Denman are in jail, and presumably Susan and her group," Mark inventoried the bad guys. "What about the guy who killed Christine and shot at you?"

  I had forgotten about Passenger Guy. "Maybe he's gone on to another assignment?" I asked hopefully.

  "I'm just worried that you are the other assignment."

  I tried to laugh it off, but the idea worried me, too. I promised Mark I would call Detective Perez and see what he knew. Plus, I hoped that Perez might be able to help me with my bank account problems.

  There was no noise from Teresa, so I figured I might as well call Shelly while I was at it. Plus it felt great to listen to ooh's and aah's from my friends.

  Finally Shelly asked me a question I couldn't answer. "How long are you going to be in Miami?"

  "Honestly, I hadn't even thought about that. I'm sure Teresa is going to have to get back to work. She was only supposed to be off for a long weekend, but then she called her boss and said her aunt was very ill and she needed the whole week." That made me think. "I'm really glad she didn't quit her job, since we didn't get the money."

  "You're sure you're not going to get the money?"

  "I'm sure. It's all been forensically accounted for or however you'd say it. The cops know where it is, and there's no way I can get to it. I don't know whether Christine would have been able to get it, even without the cops. She thought she was double-crossing Frank when in fact he was double-crossing her."

  "Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas," Shelly said. Then she returned to her primary concern. "I was thinking that maybe I could come visit you for a couple of days. It's snowing up here again. Good grief, Tina, we already have about a hundred feet of snow on the ground and it's snowing again! It just doesn't stop in Minnesota."

  "Let me talk with Teresa and see what she's going to do. I can't afford to stay here once she's gone." The reality that had led me to leave New Orleans chasing an old classmate, the reality that my paltry life savings had completely disappeared into a computer, was sinking in again.

  "Hey, don't worry about that. I can pay for the condo for a couple of nights. What if I come tomorrow?" Shelly was the first person who ever told me it was better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, but it had been a long time since we had spontaneous fun together. I liked that my friend Shelly was back.

  “You’ve already bought the ticket, haven’t you?”

  “Guilty as charged.” She laughed. “I’ll be there tomorrow at four. Can you pick me up at their airport?”

  37

  My next call was to Detective Perez. He told me that Denman and D'Angelo had been denied bail by the judge on Friday afternoon. They were fighting that, and would probably get out on Monday, but they'd be in jail over the weekend. He had nothing so reassuring to say about Passenger Guy.

  "His name is Ricardo Ramos. He's a hired killer," Perez said.

  "That's not exactly news, is it?" I couldn't help myself.

  Perez ignored my snark. "D'Angelo isn't talking, but we've been able to link him to Ramos through information from our organized crime people and from the rental car, the white Camry. Which is good, because we couldn't get a good description from our only living witness."

  "Touché, Detective."

  He laughed, which seemed to mean we were even.

  "I don't know if you can help me," I began, and then explained my bank problem.

  "Let me see if someone in the State Attorney's office can help," he said. "I'll tell them what's going on and maybe they can talk with the bank."

  "Thank you so much. And I don't know what my travel plans are right now, other than apparently I am staying for at least a couple more days. A lot of it depends on what happens with the bank. Do I need to stay in Miami, or could I leave next week?”

  "You can leave whenever you want. I have your cell phone number. We'll need you back here for the trial, but that'll be a long time from now. Please let me know before you leave town in case there’s anything that comes up, but otherwise you're free to travel."

  "You're a good guy, for a cop."

  Perez laughed.

  "No, really, coming from me that's high praise," I said.

  "We're not all assholes."

  "No, I guess you aren't."

  Perez gave me the name of the person in the State Attorney's office so I'd know who would be calling me. He thanked me again for the recording and told me to be careful over the weekend.

  Teresa was on her phone in the living room, talking with her boss. She hung up and sighed as I walked into the room.

  "Back to work Monday," she said. "The party's over."

  "Well, maybe not quite yet," I said, and explained about probable fun with Shelly and possible trouble with Ramos.

  She perked up at both. "Excellent. I wasn't ready for this to end quite yet. I need to book a flight for Sunday, and then maybe we can hit the beach again? It's a beautiful afternoon."

  An hour later we were sipping piña coladas from lounge chairs, gazing at the ocean and some truly impressive bodies, when I got a call from the State Attorney's office. A helpful young man named Jason asked me some questions about my banking problem. I explained what I’d been told in New Orleans. He gave me his number and told me he would be back in touch.

  "I'm trying to get this done this afternoon," he said. "I don't want you stranded over the weekend."

  "Jason, you have restored my faith in government." I meant it. I finished my drink and started to pack up just as he called back. He asked if I could be at the Collins Avenue branch of my bank by three thirty. I looked at the phone; it was nearly three o'clock, but "no" was not an acceptable response.

  "I'm on the way," I said, and was out of the chair with my towel flung over my shoulder before I finished the sentence.

  The young branch manager reminded me of the nervous young man at the bank in New Orleans. He was perhaps even more uncomfortable since he’d been called by a manager who had received a call from a friend at the State Attorney's office. The young man had been told to fix the problem, and he did.

  When Teresa and I walked out of the bank forty-five minutes later, my debit card had been reactivated, my accounts unfrozen, and I had three hundred dollars of walking-around money in my pocket. Just in case. I also had the young man's business card;
on the back of it I wrote Jason's name and number as well.

  "It's not twenty million, but it will have to do," I said to Teresa. I felt so rich that I bought us a nice seafood dinner. We drank too much and flirted with guys at the restaurant and had an altogether pleasant and normal vacation evening.

  38

  Saturday was sunny, so we hit the beach again. Teresa let me treat her to some Cuban food from a little bar near the ocean for lunch. I was beginning to like Miami.

  By the time we left the condo after lunch, the white fluffy clouds had multiplied and turned dark gray. I had hoped that Shelly's first night in Miami would be a nice one, but raindrops started hitting the Vue's windshield just before we pulled in to the passenger pick-up lane.

  I hadn't seen Shelly in nearly six months. She was exactly the same: same short curly blond hair, same tiny little figure, same loud taste in fashion. She wore green capris and a brightly colored flower-print blouse. I jumped out to help with her bag; it felt good to hug her.

  "Good grief, Tina, do you know how many silver SUVs there are? I almost hopped into one with this completely adorable guy. Not that it would have been so bad! The flight wasn't terrible, but when did they stop giving out snacks on airplanes? All I got was a diet soda. And what's with this rain?"

  Her stream of consciousness ended when she plopped into the back seat, took a deep breath, smiled, and said, "I am so glad to be here."

  I made quick introductions and we pulled away from the curb as the security guy pulled on a rain poncho. The wind and rain had picked up enough that the roof over the loading zone was not enough to keep dry.

  Shelly had a lot of questions, so as I drove I retold her everything that had happened, this time with more detail. Teresa navigated. She saw on her phone that there was an accident on the causeway, so she had me get off the highway and onto I-95.

  When my phone rang I asked Teresa to answer it, because the traffic was heavy and although I was getting better at it, I still didn't like driving in the rain.

  "It's Detective Lopez," she said, and put him on speaker so I could talk.

  "Tina, there are a number of things I need to tell you about. Are you able to come downtown?"

  "We're going the wrong direction for that. Can you just tell me?"

  "First of all, Mickey Denman was killed in jail a couple of hours ago."

  Shelly, who had leaned forward from the back seat to hear the phone, gasped.

  "Do they know who did it?" I asked.

  "No. It was in a crowded area of the jail and he was knifed. Whoever did it dropped the knife, and of course there are no witnesses. There are a few likely suspects, based on their previous cartel affiliations, but solving it will be hard unless somebody points a finger."

  We were all quiet for a moment. Not sad quiet, because it was really hard to be sad about somebody knifing Mickey Denman. More a "we don't know what to say" quiet.

  "D'Angelo is not dead," Lopez said flatly, "and that makes us think of him as a prime suspect behind the killing. If someone had wanted both of them dead, they would be."

  "Where is my friend Ramos?" I was starting to sound tough, at least to myself.

  "Still at large," he said.

  I felt less tough when I heard that. The rain had gotten worse, and I told the detective I had to stop talking. Teresa hung up the call and got back onto her phone with the map.

  "Okay, we're looking for the Florida 934 exit," she said as we zipped right past it.

  "We can just get the next one, right?" Shelly asked.

  "Not so simple," I said as traffic slowed to one of those mysterious crawls that simply appear sometimes in big cities. "There's another bridge to Miami Beach, but it's further off the interstate. I'll try to get over."

  Teresa helped by looking to the right and Shelly turned to see what was behind us. The answer? A lot of cars and no one to let us in. We lurched along for about ten minutes. Every so often I would take my foot off the brake to move forward, but I did not use the accelerator. The rain let up a bit, which was a small positive. At least we could see out of the windows again.

  "Hey, that guy's going to let us in," Shelly said. She waved to a generic blue sedan as he let us move into the space ahead of him in the outside lane. I looked in the rear view mirror to give him a thank you wave, and I froze.

  The driver of the generic blue sedan was Ricardo Ramos.

  Teresa saw my response. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "It's him. The guy driving that blue car is Ramos. The guy who shot at me. The guy who killed Christine." My stomach was in knots.

  My passengers sang a chorus of "oh my god, what are we going to do" while I kept an eye on Ramos via my rear view mirror. He grinned at me and I could have sworn he winked. I looked ahead and saw traffic moving.

  "Teresa, keep an eye on him in the side mirror. Shelly, turn around face front. Be ready to lie down in the back seat. This guy is after us. And Teresa, get my gun."

  Teresa moved to an angle where she could see the blue car and pulled Mark's gun out of my purse.

  "Gun?" wailed Shelly. She was doing as she was told, but I could tell it was killing her not to look. Better that than her actually getting killed. I stopped thinking about what might happen. Teresa called Perez before I could say anything and told him what was going on and where we were.

  “I don’t know how. Her phone, maybe? She’d turned it back on…” Teresa looked at me with a shrug of apology, and then tried to walk back the accusation. “I mean, we didn’t think there was any reason not to. She’d been really good about keeping it off before.”

  Traffic was moving about fifty miles per hour by now. A semi positioned itself in front of us, and the sky opened up again. I shared a few choice curse words. Teresa was saying, "I don't know how long he's been following us." Shelly was silent.

  Now that traffic had cleared enough that Ramos would be able to get away, I was more afraid that he would shoot us, either from behind or by pulling up on the driver's side.

  I-95 is a big road, with six lanes of northbound traffic. We were in the far right lane, which made it easy to get off at the next exit, but that exit was in North Miami—a neighborhood I did not know and had not heard good things about. Consulting the map on her phone, Teresa said it was a long way on local streets to get back to Miami Beach. I wasn't interested in giving Ramos a bunch of stop light opportunities to shoot at us in an area where the sound of gunfire might not raise anyone's eyebrows.

  I looked left. There was a pick-up truck in that lane, coming up to pass Ramos. If I pulled out quickly I would make it in front of him and he would provide a little buffer to let me get around the semi. Having the semi's twenty tons between us and Ramos would buy me some time to get further ahead, or maybe find an exit that looked safe; ideally, getting off without Ramos seeing until it was too late. As I started to get over, Shelly saw the pick-up and screamed. I slid in front of it, just barely.

  "I needed to get around the semi," I said, and then I realized my mistake. There was another semi in the lane I had entered, far enough ahead that I hadn’t seen him from behind the first. I was stuck again, with only a very angry pick-up truck between me and Ramos, and I couldn’tt get back to the right. We were deluged with water from both semis for about fifteen seconds. I could barely see beyond the windshield. I slowed down instinctively and the pick-up honked. Teresa was pleading with Perez to get a cop to I-95.

  Finally some good news: as quickly as it had begun, the rain suddenly cleared. Looking back, I saw a tiny smart car coming up one lane over. I decided to double down, and pulled the same trick with the second semi as I had with the first. Shelly made the same scream.

  "No, nobody's hurt. Not yet. But hurry." Teresa’s voice was an octave higher than normal.

  We were driving about sixty miles per hour. It had rained hard enough that there were puddles on the road, puddles that didn't matter at forty miles per hour but could be a problem at sixty. The puddles were worse in the far left lanes, alth
ough I was worried about hydroplaning anywhere because the whole road was wet.

  There were signs for the Florida turnpike to the left and I was in a lane that looked like it might be exit only. I didn't want to get on the turnpike, where we would have to stop to pay tolls. Approaching the interchange, the two express lanes on the far left narrowed to one, and up ahead that lane rose from the main turnpike like a bridge. I tried to get back to the right to stay on I-95, but the traffic in that lane was heavy. Shelly had stopped looking forward and was giving us a play by play on Ramos. He was still behind the pick-up, but she said he kept poking his nose out around the truck as if he were trying to make an opportunity to dart back in. So far the traffic hadn't let him.

  The car in front of me sped up and so did I. As we curved to the right with the I-95 traffic, Shelly screamed and we heard horns and a very loud crash. Teresa looked back; I was driving too fast to look away from the road.

  "Jesus," she said, over and over.

  As we veered to the right, following I-95, I could see the interchange in the rear view mirror. A blue car was entangled in those gigantic metal pillars they use for overhead highway signage. Traffic behind had immediately backed up as cars slowed to avoid the crash.

  "Detective, I'd like to report an accident," Teresa said to Perez.

  39

  Perez told us to get off at the next exit, but I couldn't get over soon enough.

  "He says then get off at the Miami Gardens exit," she relayed. "There's a Denny's about a mile off the interstate. He'll meet us there."

  "Nothing closer?" I was still in the mode of being followed, but then realized we were safe. A mile was not a problem anymore.

  "Nowhere that we want to go," she quoted Perez. "He said the Denny's is safe."