by Don Prichard
Rock slipped his arms around her and nuzzled her neck.
“We”—she gasped in a breath as warmth spread across her chest and down her arms—“we’ve only dated three months.”
“We’re not children. We don’t need more time.” Rock turned her face to him. “I love you, Eve.” His lips settled on hers, gently prodding. He slipped his fingers into her hair at the nape of her neck, pushed her into a more demanding kiss. His other hand slid to her chest, caressed the skin above her dress.
Eve’s warrior jolted into her mind. Scowling. Sword gripped in both hands. Her eyes flew open. “Rock, stop!” She put her hands on his, pulled them away, rose to her feet. “I have to go.”
He stood up with her. Pulled her tight against him. “Eve …”
“Don’t!” Panic scorched her throat. She shoved fists into his chest. “Let me go.”
Rock dropped his arms and stepped back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
She strode to the front door, swept heels and purse into her hands, and left.
At her own door, fumbling for keys, she dropped her purse twice. Rock didn’t follow her, but he was probably watching through his door’s peephole. The back of her neck prickled, driving a hail of goose bumps down her spine. It took three tries to insert her key and unlock the door. By the time she stepped inside, she felt like a fool.
In the foyer light, she saw Crystal standing in her bedroom doorway, eyes wide, mouth gaping. Eve’s cheeks heated in sudden awareness of her disheveled hair, crushed cabbage-roll sleeves, and a rose petal peeking from the bottom of her right heel. How explain this?
It wasn’t until Crystal’s eyes settled on Eve’s left hand that she remembered the ring. She was still wearing it. She grabbed hold of it, blurted out, “He asked me to marry him.”
Crystal’s face froze into a mask. She sucked in both lips, blinked several times.
“I didn’t say yes.”
Crystal’s chin corkscrewed into a clutch that pulled the corners of her mouth down. She backed into her bedroom, a sniffle barely above a whisper accompanying a jerk of her chest.
Eve exhaled a weak sigh as Crystal disappeared. The ring on her finger didn’t exactly say no either, did it?
For sure, she wasn’t trekking across the hall to return it right now. She needed to regain her composure, think of what to say. What a fool she’d made of herself! Of Rock too. He’d been presumptuous in his expectations, but aside from that, the evening—even the proposal—had been perfect. He didn’t deserve the bad ending she’d given him.
Would he be willing to wait on an answer? She didn’t want to say no, but she wasn’t ready to say yes.
Ready had to wait not only on her heart, but on Crystal’s heart too
Chapter 56
June
Forget Ace’s Gym. Today was one of those days for dumping caution and yielding to the great outdoors. Eve exited her car, spent several minutes stretching leg muscles, checked the security of her water bottle’s attachment at her waist, and took off down Lake Shore Drive. At six o’clock in the morning, the jogging path was relatively free of pedestrians and runners. Good. Her emotions were in a jumble and needed soothing. Running leveled her out: pinched what was low into a jump skyward, squashed what was high into a slope downward.
Her emotional high was a week old. High? She snorted. More like a rocket blast to Mars. In a matter of weeks, she would become a magistrate, an appointment that could jump-start a career as a federal judge. Given her memory loss and absence of over a year from the courtroom, her chances for nomination to circuit and appellate judgeships were doomed. Experience as a magistrate, however, opened a back door to the positions. The opportunity gave wings to her heart, and she stepped up her pace from a jog to fly down Lake Shore Drive’s footpath.
On the downside was Rock. His response to waiting for her answer had, understandably, been cool. Their next three dates were increasingly tepid. Then, on the very day she’d received the news of her appointment, he said goodbye. “I got a job offer in California I can’t turn down.” No regrets for the end of their relationship colored his words. Within two days, he was gone, his apartment vacant, no forwarding address. She felt as if their relationship had stepped off the roof of the Sears Tower.
She stopped on the footpath and lowered her head, heaving breaths of air in and out of her lungs. Wiped tears and sweat from her face. Straightened and trotted back to her car.
Elation and depression. Where was the middle ground? She’d been praying for relief.
“No answer doesn’t mean no listening.” Chaplain Peterman had done his best to comfort her in last night’s phone call. “Don’t let misery be your interpreter of God’s providence.”
She smoothed a towel over the driver’s seat to catch her sweat and plopped onto it. In other words, if she could see behind the scenes into God’s mind, she’d probably slap herself upside the head at how perfectly everything—good and bad—was working together.
Crystal had suggested they move too. A house this time. A place the two of them chose.
The distraction appealed to her. They’d start looking on Saturday.
***
Jake leaned into the cool gust of the car’s air conditioner. Detective Lee’s weekly visits were the one time he could fully escape the torments of heat, stench, and insects. “Any news from the lawyers?” Occasionally he had Lee check with the two men to bug them if nothing else. How could they keep saying the judge had Jake on his docket after a year and a half of inaction?
“Same story. No progress,” Lee grumbled.
Jake’s spine curved into a limp C. The slump always surprised him. Every time, he was sure he had his hopes in a tight grip. Every time, they slipped through his fingers to his feet.
God had him here for a purpose. The reminder straightened his shoulders. “At least we’re making progress here. The working drawings arrived, and we’re ready to go for the long haul.” If rain, typhoons, and delays in deliveries, not to mention sabotage, didn’t interfere, that would be eight months. February.
Brett and Dana would graduate from West Point next year. With the new Salonga Prison completed in February or March, Jake hoped it was on God’s critical path schedule to free him to attend the twins’ graduation ceremony in June. He glanced at his hands. Calloused. Fingernails jagged. Dirt so ingrained it looked like a tattoo. He’d be gripping that hope mighty tightly.
He handed Lee a paper. “Here’s what we need to hire in the way of skilled workers and technicians. Nothing more here the prisoners can do.”
Lee folded it and slid it into his shirt pocket. “We’ll have to start digging into your inheritance now.”
“Money is only a means of exchange”—Jake grinned at the ease of a philosophy afforded by a deep pocket—“and I appreciate your honesty in being my exchanger.” He didn’t doubt Lee’s integrity, but that didn’t mean Jake declined balancing his checkbook with the bank statement and receipts either.
They swapped Jake’s letters to Crystal and his family for their letters to him. Savoring them in private gave him the incentive to leave the car and trudge back into the prison.
Crystal’s envelope was thick with several folded sheets of paper. Jake chuckled. There must be news items beyond the who-said-whats of school and youth group that comprised most of her letters. And indeed he was right. His heart jumped at the changes she reported in Eve’s life. Not that Eve had been appointed a magistrate, but that Rock had moved away.
Crystal had never called the man Eve’s “boyfriend,” but the letter Crystal wrote after glimpsing the engagement ring on Eve’s finger had spilled every bean in the pot. Up until that point, Jake, for the most part, had been successful in corralling his thoughts and longings for Eve. Had done his best to channel them into antiseptic prayers for her welfare. Had abandoned all intent of pursuing her should he get out of prison.
But now, with that … that … interloper gone, he found himself kicking down the corral rails and setti
ng its captives free.
Fool!
All he was doing was making himself all the more a captive. To Eve, he was nothing but a convict. A murderer. An intruder in Crystal’s life. Even if he got out of here, he was forever branded with the prison bars of Salonga.
No magistrate would align herself with someone on the wrong side of the law.
Chapter 57
September
Eve and Crystal stood on the sidewalk and gazed at the house. “I think we found it.” Impulsively, Eve grabbed Crystal’s hand and squeezed it. Crystal let out a hoot and threw her arms around Eve. They had visited the house on South Hyde Park Boulevard four times. Each time they’d crossed off other possibilities for faults the Hyde Park house surmounted. It was time to take the big step and buy it.
The plum-red brick house, draped with a shawl of ivy over its north side, dormer windows crowning its third floor, a three-car detached garage in the rear, and a six-foot, black, wrought-iron fence marking its boundaries, was a matriarch of the neighborhood. Most of the other residences on the street were apartment buildings converted into condos with six to eight units.
The boulevard, lined with stately maple trees at least eighty years old, was a noisy conduit of urban traffic, with city buses that hurled down the street at breathtaking speeds every twenty minutes. At the southern end of the boulevard lay the Museum of Science and Industry, a majestic limestone structure converted from its original 1893 construction as the Palace of Fine Arts. Shops and restaurants of every ethnicity began a block away in every direction, along with parks and more condos.
“You should have a reception,” Marianne exclaimed the day Eve closed on the purchase. “Celebrate your new home and your promotion to magistrate at the same time.”
Once the idea took root, Eve moved swiftly to execute it. The busyness helped push Rock to the back of her mind. Rooms were painted, drapes selected, and plush carpet installed in the living room and her and Crystal’s bedrooms. Crystal’s furniture and antiques undamaged by the fire at Aunt Betty’s were moved out of storage and delivered, and a moving date set to vacate Eve’s apartment.
“Install security devices,” Brad insisted. “Alarms, cameras, monitors, the whole deal.”
“A bit of overkill, don’t you think?” Eve flipped through a catalog listing hundreds of security gadgets. For almost two years, there had been no threats from Danny Romero. And now that she was a magistrate, she wouldn’t be able to prosecute him anyway. He was free of her.
Then the newly installed security system revealed three mikes hidden in the furniture moved from her apartment. Her stomach pinched for a week. She felt violated. Her apartment, her privacy, her life—all had been exposed to somebody’s scrutiny. Who had been spying on her? And why? She upgraded her security to top-of-the-line.
A possible answer came a week and a half later. On the third Saturday in September, she stopped by a Hyde Park florist to determine whether she wanted to use its services for her reception next Saturday. Her order filled a sheet of paper. Grand bouquets for the foyer and for the dining room table, flashy but smaller arrangements for every room in the house, and simple vases of multiple flowers to supplement the flower power in her living room. Any flowers but roses.
Chin, the owner, an elderly man of Asian descent with brown, almond-shaped eyes and as many wrinkles on his face as silver hairs on his head, showed not only patience but delight in waiting on her. For two hours they pored over books of flowers and bouquet arrangements and toured his refrigerated storage room. He knew his flowers, and it was obvious he loved them.
How could she not place her order with him? The bill made her swallow twice as she paid it, but for the first time since learning about the microphones planted in her apartment, she felt as if she could breathe without her stomach stinging with pinpricks.
The jangle of bells on the door of the shop drew her attention to an African American man of slight build wearing gray slacks and a white lab coat. Chin’s Florist Shop embroidered the left breast of the lab coat. Outside the door, she spied a white van with the same logo.
“I’m double-parked,” he said. He sauntered past Eve, and the pungent odor of cigarette smoke machine-gunned the fragrance of the shop’s flowers.
“Excuse me.” Chin flashed a smile at Eve, handed her a receipt, and hastened to the back of the shop. He opened a door to a room with a central counter surrounded by metal bookcases. Every horizontal surface was stuffed with vases of flower arrangements. “Eight bins.” Chin pointed to the right and stepped aside for the deliveryman to enter. “The blooms are fragile, so be careful.”
“All these to the same address?” The man emerged hugging a large bin with tiny white flowers peeking over the top. “What are they anyway?”
“Sampaguitas. All eight bins to the same address, yes. A nightclub.”
Eve dropped her purse. Fingers trembling, she picked it up and shuffled backward out of the way. At the sixth bin she came to her senses.
She had to follow that van.
Trouble was, her car was parked too far away to get back before he drove away.
She dashed out to the street. Squeezed between parked cars. Stopped to look both ways. Where was a taxi when you needed one? Please, God!
The man brought out the seventh bin, placed it into the back of the van.
Was there room for her to squeeze in and hide? She waited for the man to reenter the shop before sticking her head inside the raised hatch. The perfume of the Sampaguitas filled her nostrils.
No. There was barely room for the last bin.
Please, please, please, God! She moved away, looked up and down the street again. She should have run to her car, risked she’d get back in time to follow the van.
Behind her, the van door slammed shut. She pivoted and saw the left turn signal flutter red. The vehicle pulled out into the left lane and stopped at a traffic light, its signal still blinking.
Eve sprinted across the street to the corner. The light turned green, and the delivery van made a left. Eve chased it, high heels clattering on the sidewalk, slamming her knees. If only she had her tennies on, she could keep up with it. The van wouldn’t outdistance her in this stop-and-go traffic.
And then God answered her prayer. “Hey, lady!” A brown face poked out of the driver’s window of a yellow vehicle and flashed a smile. “You wanna taxi?”
“Yes!” God bless you, friend—you are going to get a tip that will feed your family well tonight! She jumped into the taxi, gasping heaves of air, and stretched her arm into the front seat, finger pointing at the windshield. “Follow that white van, but don’t let him know.”
The driver laughed. “Jus’ like in the movies.”
“Exactly.” She echoed his laugh in a panting chortle of relief, then louder in gratitude to God for the answered prayer. Not just the answer of a ride, but of what might be the answer to a decade-long chase.
When the van pulled behind a building to make its delivery, Eve noted its address and had the taxi driver return her to her parked car. She had read about the Brits’ portable Vodafone featuring thirty minutes of wireless talk time. She wished she had one to call Brad Henshaw.
He’d probably be at the office. Should she drive there, or go home to call him? Her house was only minutes away. What if the office was bugged, or maybe the mole was there to overhear? Risks she didn’t want to take.
She called from her house. “Brad, can you meet for coffee in fifteen at the Corner Café?” Did he detect the tremor in her voice? Her hands shook when she got behind the wheel again. By the time she arrived and found a parking spot, she had to walk five blocks to her destination. The thump of her heart pulsated against her eardrums with every step. Her breath wrenched out from lungs tight with excitement. The top of her head felt as if any second it might lift off from her skull and rocket to the heavens.
By the time she collapsed into the booth across from her boss, exhilaration had her torn between tears and hysteria.
&nbs
p; Brad signaled for a waitress. “Catch your breath and order your coffee. I can tell you’re about to burst.”
When she finally settled down into a cheek-stretching grin, she let the news bust out. “We’ve got him, Brad. We’ve got Danny Romero! I think those were his mikes in my apartment. Maybe that’s how he knew where I was sending the detectives all the time to check for trafficking in his nightclubs. Or maybe it was a mole in our office. Doesn’t matter. My mikes are gone, and there’s no mole here to hear us. We can get him.”
She told him about the large delivery of Sampaguita flowers. “That’s what Marikit said she and the other children were called—Sampaguitas, because the girls were Asian, like the flower. Brad!”—she grabbed his hand—“I think Romero is featuring them tonight, putting them up for show. Please, you’ve got to check it out!”
Dignified, Lincolnesque Bradley Henshaw actually cackled. Actually rubbed his hands together in delight! “I’ll send an undercover cop tonight and have a raid ready to go—without going through our office.” His grin radiated to the corners of his eyes and lit his face brighter than the Christmas lights at Millennium Park. “Let’s hope the big honcho himself is there.”
“Let me go with you, Brad. It’s the culmination of everything I’ve strived for against Danny Romero.”
Brad frowned, tapped the fingers of his right hand on the table. “You know I can’t let you participate. I’m sorry.”
Eve huffed. Okay, then she’d find her own way to be there.
Chapter 58
Brad would kill her if he knew she was here. Eve leveled her binoculars at the nightclub nestled in darkness down the street. She was parked too far away to see anything. Anyway, she should have brought binoculars with night vision.
“Here they come! See ’em? No lights flashin’ to give warnin’.” Beside her, her new cabbie friend from earlier in the day pointed at half a dozen police cars and vans screeching to a halt at the front and rear of the nightclub. “Want me to pull up so we can see better?”