18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

  Kissock’s was always dim with lots of dark wood and candlelight. She could smell the spiced shrimp boiling and hear the low chatter on the dining room side of the beams.

  The bar was crowded for a May weekend. Most were early tourists getting a head start on the season, but Ben King was there, the strip mall magnate who’d recently divorced, and he was sitting next to Jan Winkleman, a loan officer at her bank who was definitely not single. O’Shaughnessy was overcome with curiosity until Clarke Hamilton’s white smile flashed across the room and suddenly she realized that she was about to go under the microscope herself.

  Clarke stood as O’Shaughnessy slid onto the stool beside him, rubbing his hands together to make heat. “What’s your poison?” he asked. “I always figured you for a rum kind of girl.”

  “Then I’ll have a margarita,” she said.

  The prosecutor smiled and turned to admire her. Her hair was a mixture of caramels and blonds lying just on top of her shoulders. She had a softly defined jaw and her lips were brushed with wet gloss.

  She turned to him and smiled while Kissock ground a goblet in salt.

  “You guys ready for the blitz?” Kissock asked.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  “Hard to beat Roman candles on top of the Ferris wheel and naked chorus girls singing ‘I Love New York’ across two lanes of Ocean Avenue? Quite a year, I’d say.”

  She smiled. “It teaches one to be humble and never say never.”

  “Amen to that.” The old man grew serious. “How’s Gus holding up, anyway?”

  She looked at Clarke, then back at Kissock.

  “You know, those two are about the nicest two people I ever met. I just can’t believe it’s true.”

  O’Shaughnessy looked concerned. “I’m sorry?” she said. “What about Gus?” The only Gus she knew was Gus Myers, the department’s forensic chief, and she’d left him only hours ago.

  “Ah, shit. Am I talking out of school again?” Kissock leaned on the bar with both elbows. “Agnes,” he whispered. “Stomach cancer.” He patted his stomach, straightened up, and poured tequila in the glass. “Terminal, I heard.”

  “No,” O’Shaughnessy said, taken aback.

  He nodded. “She’s just about the sweetest woman who ever walked the face of the earth. I sure hope things work out for them.”

  O’Shaughnessy knew that Gus had taken his wife to the emergency room several months before; she was having stomach pains around the holidays and Gus thought she might have an ulcer. He’d said their youngest daughter was moving back into the house after a nasty divorce and that Agnes had already been under a great deal of stress at having to put her father in a nursing home. It was one of the rare times she’d ever heard Gus mention his troubles, and she never heard him talk of it again.

  “Ah, jeez, I hope that’s not true,” she said to Clarke.

  Kissock returned with a blender full of margarita, poured hers first, then set a Sierra Nevada on the bar for Clarke. Two more customers entered by the back door and Kissock left to greet them at the far side of the bar.

  O’Shaughnessy scanned the dining room for people she knew and was grateful not to find any.

  “Shrimp or a menu?” Clarke asked.

  He had narrow fingers and perfectly formed nails. Besides the Rolex, which was comfortably plain, he wore no other jewelry. She liked his hands.

  “Shrimp,” she said.

  “You know, I was a little surprised that you agreed to come out tonight.”

  She smiled. “Actually I was a little surprised you called me at home.” She lifted her glass and took a drink.

  He looked down at her hand; O’Shaughnessy still had her wedding ring on.

  “But you are separated?” he asked cautiously.

  She nodded and sipped the margarita; Clarke’s expression seemed to relax.

  “I hope it wasn’t the wrong thing to do?”

  “I’m here.” She patted his arm. “It’s fine.”

  Ben and Jan were scratching lottery tickets and drinking shots of something clear; Jan caught her staring once and O’Shaughnessy thought her expression looked conspiratorial.

  Kissock lit a cigarette, which made O’Shaughnessy squirm. “It’s all new to me,” she blurted out, “the separation thing.”

  Clarke looked at her curiously.

  “You know what Wildwood is like. It’s easy to become street talk around here.”

  He took a sip of his beer, nodded. “Did you know I’m in the witness protection program?”

  She laughed, circling the rim of her glass with one finger. “No, I hadn’t heard that one yet. But don’t you have a rather high-profile job for someone trying to remain inconspicuous?”

  “They don’t actually think when they make up these stories,” he said. “It’s just like the news; they go for the shock and awe.”

  She laughed again.

  “Fact is, I’m not even sure if Tim and I are over yet. We have things to work out,” she said. “I guess that’s the best way to describe it.”

  Reagan and Marcy were the largest part of what they had to work out. Every time they came back from a week at Tim’s, they wanted to know when Daddy was going to move back in. She thought at first that Tim was putting them up to it, but the more they talked, the more convinced she became that he wasn’t. It was what they really wanted to happen. It was what they expected the two of them to do. Work it out.

  She reached in her purse and pressed out a Nicorette. “Shitty habit, huh?” she said, popping it into her mouth.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Started when I was studying for the sergeant’s exam. Stupid thing to do, but it helped me relax. After that I only smoked in the office and when I went out for a drink with Tim, which was pretty much next to never.”

  She smiled and looked embarrassed. “We had plenty to do, with the kids.”

  She scraped nervously at a piece of caulking that had come loose along the edge of the bar. Kissock’s was a blue-hair crowd; Andy Williams was singing “Moon River,” a song that had made her want to cry ever since her mom died, but then more and more things made her want to cry lately, one of the seven signs of depression she’d read somewhere.

  “You never married? Never had any kids?”

  He shook his head. “Close, but I escaped in the eleventh hour. No—let me amend that.” He smiled. “She escaped in the eleventh hour.”

  O’Shaughnessy smiled. She liked Clarke; he wasn’t full of himself like so many of the other lawyers and cops she knew. Men who had a whole lot less reason to be.

  “This is the first time I’ve been out since we split,” she said.

  “Well, I can’t say you surprised me there.” He smiled. “You’re a little more than nervous.” He nodded toward her finger digging at the caulking and she quickly stuffed her hand in a pocket.

  “I don’t think the occasion rises to a date,” she said, “but whatever it is, it feels weird, I must say. Don’t take that personally, it’s me, not you.”

  The shrimp came. They ate and talked. Clarke told her about his sailing trip in Maryland, an annual law school reunion. The boys and girls crewed a boat from Baltimore to Saint Michael on the opposite side of the Chesapeake. You had to be there to get the shirt.

  They talked about their childhoods and they talked about the weather. They talked about the savings and loan case he was working on, the Carlino abduction, and the ex–police captain who fell and cracked his head open five days before his daughter was gunned down in a Philadelphia clothing store.

  O’Shaughnessy ordered a second margarita, thinking Clarke was fun to be with. He was educated, socially adept, polite, handsome…She wondered what was wrong with him.

  “What say we go to Trippers for a nightcap,” he said. “It’s just a little more invigorating there, don’t you agree?”

  “Trippers?” She laughed. “We’re too old to go in there. They have rules against people our age.”
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  “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t dance.”

  She looked at him as though he couldn’t possibly be serious, but when he reached for her hand and squeezed, she squeezed back.

  “It’ll be fun. Something different.” He discreetly dropped her hand and waved to an older couple leaving the bar.

  His hand had been warm and felt good in hers. She thought of Tim. She missed touching.

  The wind picked up, bending the tops of the trees in her front yard. She could see them from the street lamps as she pulled into the wet driveway. She got out and entered the house through the unlocked kitchen door. It was well after midnight and she was tired, though far too wound up to sleep. She took a bottle of water from the refrigerator and sat in her recliner, feet curled under her, watching the lightning flickering behind a blur of rain on her windowpanes.

  She put her head back and closed her eyes, remembering the kiss. They’d walked out of Trippers hand in hand. Dancing had been fun. Tim might have been the best husband and father in the whole wide world, but he never took her out dancing. Never.

  It was very late when they got back to her car. Kissock’s was closed, all the lights were off, and everyone had gone home for the night. She wondered if anyone noticed her car sitting outside. Just then she’d had the exhilarating feeling of being wild like when she was young.

  They sat in his car, everything dark and warm, quiet but for the wipers sweeping the rain away.

  “Thanks for a great night,” he said.

  She looked at his face in the dim light, rain pattering softly on the roof. He was so good-looking, she thought.

  “Me, too. It was fun.”

  She reached for the door, but he gently took her arm and pulled her to him, leaning across the console to kiss her on the lips.

  She couldn’t say she completely opened up to him, but she couldn’t say she pulled away either. The kiss was long and good, his smell was good, the touching was good, oh yes, the damned touching was good.

  Then he let go and put his forehead against hers. “Can I see you again?”

  She looked back at him, scouring the door with her right hand to locate the latch, and when she found it, she pulled it open and said “Yes” as she stepped out into the rain.

  Sykes sat in his truck a few blocks away in a public parking lot off the boardwalk near Cresse. It was cold and the lot was nearly empty for a Saturday night. In just another month the population would explode, the beach and boardwalk would be overflowing with people, and the music of the Ferris wheel and the Gyro and the great pirate ship would carry up and down the coast.

  The winds sprayed chilled sea mist on his windshield. The sea smelled strongly of fish. The dark silhouette of Strayer’s Amusement Pier jutted out over the sea in the distance.

  This was how he’d spent his teenage years. This was where he’d met Susan Markey.

  Sykes’s hair—what was left of it—was patchy and short. He wore a green jacket with the Wildwood City seal sewn over a breast pocket, green trousers, and new construction boots splattered with blood.

  His job had been arranged through the State of New Jersey, driving a truck for the public works department in his hometown of Wildwood. The doctors said he could live normally for a year or more on chemo pills in combination with intravenous treatments. Still, the pain would steadily increase and the day would come when he would no longer be able to function on his own. The government would provide a hospice after that, but Sykes had no intention of being around for it.

  The job they provided wasn’t a very good job; in fact it was the bottom of the ladder in the sanitation business. The “meat wagon,” they called it. Scraping dead animals off the streets, hauling their maggot-infested carcasses to the county incinerator. Even the kids who rode on the back of the container trucks made more money than he, but Sykes wasn’t working for the money. Sykes was working to keep the government from checking on him.

  The job had its benefits. It was a one-person assignment, so he could do pretty much as he pleased. All he had to do was answer radio runs when his boss or some police officer wanted something dead removed from a public space or a highway. Other than that, he just drove around, supposedly looking for roadkill.

  He worked the evening shift, and there was only one night manager to deal with, a man who stared at God knows what on his computer screen the whole eight-hour tour. No one ever came out to check on him. No one ever asked him what he was doing. He was more or less invisible, blending into the background along Atlantic Avenue.

  He heard voices and glanced up at the rearview mirror. Someone was coming from the steps of the boardwalk. There were two cars under a flickering halogen in the lot besides his own, a red Miata and a Lincoln Navigator parked side by side.

  He slid below the headrest and waited until the voices passed before he peeked over the wheel. The woman went to the red sports car and the man followed her, unbuttoning her coat and putting his hands inside and all over her body.

  She was laughing and pulling away from him; finally she opened her door and climbed behind the wheel, then closed the door and lowered her window to kiss him once more.

  The man stood tall and rapped his knuckles on the roof of her car, then walked around the back of his Lincoln.

  He left first, tapping the horn on the way out to Atlantic Avenue. The Miata remained a moment longer. He saw the interior light go on and the woman’s head moving around; she was doing something with her face in the rearview mirror. Then he saw the light go off and the brake lights flash as she put the car in gear.

  “Yeah, baby,” he said to himself. “Take me home.”

  He waited until she was on Atlantic before he turned on his headlights, followed her to New Jersey Avenue, then to Spruce.

  At Spruce she bore left to Taugh Creek, then west on Wildwood Boulevard. Only a handful of cars were out, since it was the off season, but he was merely a set of headlights on a city truck in her rearview mirror.

  She took the northbound ramp to the Garden State Parkway and Sykes accelerated, trying to close the distance between the small dump truck and her sports car. Chains rattled in the bed and the steering wheel trembled in his hands. He advanced to within fifty feet when he reached for his jacket and removed a small revolver from the inside pocket. He would get closer, then come alongside her in the passing lane and turn on his yellow beacon and interior light. When she looked over, he would point to her tires.

  He was just about to edge into the passing lane when headlights appeared in his rearview mirror and they were coming up fast. Sykes let off the gas and pushed the gun under his thigh. Then he gripped the wheel hard to keep the truck from weaving. When the car got nearer, he could make out the outline of the beacon on its roof.

  “Jesus,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

  He knew he would never pass a sobriety test, and if they happened to search his truck and found a gun, he’d be headed straight back to prison.

  But none of that was going to happen. Sykes had already made his life-and-death decisions in prison. There would be no more prisons in this life.

  He let off the gas until he was holding at fifty-five, wanting the sports car to get as far away as possible if the policeman pulled him over. It would have to be quick. Wait until he was at the window, shoot point-blank, and clear the scene fast. If he could get off the parkway before anyone saw his truck, he’d get away with it. No one would suspect a city worker in a city truck.

  The headlights got closer; the patrol car was almost on him when suddenly the blue lights started flashing. “Shit, shit, shit.” He thumped the wheel, but the words no sooner left his mouth than the cruiser accelerated past him and hooked in behind the sports car.

  Sykes slowed to fifty, unable to believe his luck, scratching the sore on his neck and cursing out of nervousness, then taking deep breaths. The Miata was beginning to edge off onto the berm with the trooper trailing behind it. He passed them both without looking over, taking the next
exit and using Route 9 to parallel his way back toward the county incinerator.

  He was carrying two dead deer, a collie, a seagull, a rat, and a stiff tricolored cat that he’d had to scrape off the asphalt with a flat-bladed shovel. The dog had a collar and tags, but Sykes burned it all to avoid more paperwork.

  Back at home, Sykes sat on his new sofa drinking beers from his six-pack, trying to calm his nerves over the near miss on the parkway.

  The woman in the red Miata would be home by now, complaining to her husband—on whom she had been cheating—about a policeman who wrote her a ticket on the parkway. The policeman who had saved her life.

  10

  THURSDAY, MAY 12

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  The city was having an unseasonable heat wave with temperatures soaring into the low nineties. It looked like it would hold for a few days—intolerable weather for a Philadelphian in the second week of May.

  Summer predictions of scorching weather had people scurrying to scoop up rentals on the shore or book vacations in Maine or Ontario.

  Sherry took advantage of the sun on her back lawn. She was wearing a black two-piece bathing suit. Her legs were propped on the lawn chair, water bottle and telephone next to her. Her Oakley sunglasses were fashionably frameless, a gift from Payne, who’d said he’d gotten them for a steal. She didn’t believe him.

  Payne walked through the house, grabbed two Heinekens from the refrigerator, and elbowed his way through the swinging screen door to the backyard.

  “A regular bathing beauty,” he said cheerily.

  “Is that you, Detective Payne, or one of the Chippendales gone for beer?”

  “John Payne. City detective at your service.”

  She made a pouting face with her bottom lip.

  He didn’t ask her how she knew he had the beers in his hand. Sherry heard everything. Absolutely everything.

  Payne twisted the top off one and reached out to touch the back of her wrist. She took it from him and put it to her forehead.

  He set the other beer on the ground, unbuttoned his shirt, and fanned himself with it for a moment.