The waiting room to the left was empty, the snowy television broadcasting an old episode of Star Trek to a non-existent audience. Across the hall, the reception desk was unmanned, the small office next door vacant as well.
Where was everyone?
Had he come through the wrong door?
Was he in the wrong end of the building?
God Almighty, had he come to the wrong hospital?
Frustrated, Dominic threw his keys on the floor and drew in a breath to swear, but someone beat him to it. ‘Get your ugly little fuckin’ munchkin face out of my grandson’s room!’ he heard a woman snarl.
When he bent to retrieve his keys, he realised the voice belonged to his mother.
Since when did his mother use language like that?
Hastening in the direction of the sound, he strode down the hall. Up ahead, a weasel-like doctor with a clipboard hurried from a room on the left, the room where his mother’s angry voice was countered by Kyle’s, ‘Jesus, Grandma, that was harsh.’
Eyes on a little guy scurrying towards an office near reception, Dominic hauled ass into Kyle’s room and slammed right into a nurse. Her arms pin-wheeled, hands clutched wildly at a blue-green curtain which slid away with a shhhh as she stumbled across the linoleum. The muttered, automatic apology died on Dominic’s lips when he saw Kyle resting on a narrow bed.
The boy smiled, his entire left arm, from bicep to fingertips, wrapped in a bright orange cast. There was a bandage under his chin, his eyes glassy and half-closed. He’d been hurt, but he was definitely not a mangled quadriplegic or anything close to dead.
Dominic forgot all about the nurse he’d knocked aside. Relief flooded into his body and he shot to his son’s bedside, resting his forehead against Kyle’s, a hand in the hair on the nape of his neck. ‘Oh, thank Christ!’
‘Hi, Dad,’ Kyle grinned like a happy drunk.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘I had a little accident.’
‘I can see that. What did yo—?’
‘Dominic,’ he mother cut in, ‘Get Miss Lessie out of here.’
‘Lesley, Gramma,’ Kyle’s words came out of a mushy mouth pressed against his father’s nose, ‘her name’s Lesley.’
‘What?’ Perplexed, Dominic released his son and turned. He followed his mother’s toxic expression and found the nurse he’d thumped into was Lesley. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Get her out of here, Dominic. Get her out before I—’
‘All right, Mom, just calm down.’ He couldn’t think straight. Irritation, relief and surprise tripped over each other in his brain. The moment was bewildering, yet the last thing that would help the situation was for his mother to continue her rant.
Scrapegoat, Fabian’s malapropism, ricocheted inside Dominic’s skull, reminding him to hold his annoyance in check, although he was muddled enough to mispronounce her name the way his mother had intentionally, ‘Why are you here, Lessie?’
She lifted her chin, a contemptuous, sibilant sound zipping from her lips.
‘Aw, Dad, ‘Kyle sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, wiping his nose with his un-casted hand, ‘Aunt Lesley was just telling me about Uncle Terry. And you and Mom.’
Aunt Lesley?
Uncle Terry? You and Mom?
Dominic’s stomach had only just dislodged from his throat. Now it hit the soles of his feet, a new kind of terror replacing his brief moment of respite. It had crossed his mind, enough to set him on edge since she showed up in the store, but he’d never really believed it.
Lesley knew.
Welcome to sickening panic episode number three. He crossed the space between them, his head lowered. ‘What did you say to him?’
Lesley rubbed her chin and rolled her eyes, muttering, ‘Oh, here we go again.’
He took one more step towards her and froze, an animal caught in oncoming headlights of a small truck with green eyes. ‘What did you do?’ He glowered down at her because it was all he could do. She smelled awful, her face worn, dark circles beneath her lower lashes. Or maybe he was just projecting his own sensations. Maybe he was breathing in the scent of his own fear. ‘What did you do?’
Expressionless, she held her ground and his gaze.
‘She hasn’t done anything,’ Kyle slurred, ‘I did it all. I fell and she brought me here, Dad. Aunt Lesley brought me here.’
‘Don’t you call her that!’ his mother hollered, moving towards her grandson.
Immobilised by horror, Dominic blinked, and Lesley glared up at him, shaking her head with a snort. She glanced dismissively at his mother before settling her jasper eyes on the boy. ‘Good night, Kyle,’ she said, and turned on her heel, walking out the door.
His mother hissed after her.
Chapter 5
Breathe in love, breathe out anger. Was that how it went?
Breathe in. What the hell had Terry told his family about the circumstances that annulled their marriage? Heavens, she’d known he’d been dishonest about so many things, but had he really gone so far as to make up a cockamamie story so he could keep his most adored child status in the Brennan clan?
Breathe out. Why should she care? Why should it matter what he said to anyone? That part of her life was over years ago. Terry was Precambrian. Mesozoic. Jurassic. Hell, the oldest point in Earth’s history – that’s what her time with Terry was.
Breathe in. It was a shame to lose Kyle’s help. Breathe out. He’d been an eager handyman and nice kid. Breathe in, even if Dominic was a primo prick to ban her from his store. Breathe out. She didn’t need Trujillo’s. Breathe in. She had enough in her renovation budget to shop in Santa Fe and cover delivery costs. Breathe out. And she had until September to finish this flip.
Lesley was nowhere near being out of shape, but she was out of breath, and her throat was as dry as the White Sands Monument in the southern desert part of the state. Despite her fatigue, it had only taken eleven minutes to march the mile and a half back to the supermarket parking lot.
All the breathing in and out had done some good. Her thoughts shifted to how good a bed with clean sheets was going to feel. First she’d shower off the lingering barf aroma. Then, she’d slip naked beneath the crisp bed linen on the roll-away. Tomorrow, she could get up as late as she wanted. Since her partner was overseas for the summer, she didn’t have to worry about messing up Kelly’s schedule. Her time was her own on this job, and tomorrow morning she was sleeping in.
Lesley exhaled one last time. The grocery store was closed. Streetlights still shone brightly, illuminating the parking area like Wrigley Field during a night baseball game. The kids had deserted the lot. The tattooed men with their brown paper bag liquor were gone. A few cars belonging to the supermarket night staff were parked closest to the store’s front. She hurried towards a gleaming electric-blue Ford Mustang jacked up on white-wall tyres. The owner had hung a pair of very large, plastic testicles from a tow hitch at the back. If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have found the flesh-coloured balls hilarious. She would have laughed until her eyes watered.
Instead, Lesley rounded the Mustang, dug into her jacket pocket for the bike keys, and froze.
The groceries she’d bought sat on the asphalt instead of the bike’s saddle, where she’d left them. The bread, the peanut butter, the milk, it was all there in the brown paper bag, and she stared at it because whoever had moved her groceries had stolen her Harley.
Boyishness held on to John’s features and made him seem like the twenty-year-old Lesley had worked with in The Film Festival video store. To tame feral curls that would otherwise explode into an afro, John Tilbrook wore his hair in the short style he’d adopted in 1987. There were a few threads of silver in those short darkblond locks, the smile lines were deeper, his once-skinny frame had filled out admirably, but a mischievous glint remained in his hazel eyes.
It was hard to miss how adorable he still was. Although ‘adorable’ was a funny word to describe a man in his forties. ‘Boyi
sh’ was much better, probably because it denoted youth, unlike the dreaded c-word – cute – Lesley knew she’d be saddled with for the rest of her life. She was a cute little girl, then a cute little teenager and, one day, she’d wind up a cute little old lady.
She would have grumbled, but it took too much energy. She was running on fumes and those fumes had to last to get through this police report.
John handed her a cup of black coffee and gestured for her to have a seat on the other side of his desk. Pleased the aromatic brew was served in a cobalt blue mug instead of a Styrofoam cup, she sank into the corduroy-covered chair and slurped a noisy mouthful of fresh Maxwell House. It scalded her tongue, but she was too worn-out to care. A sugar rush would wake her up a little more. ‘God bless you, Officer Tilbrook. I don’t suppose you have a doughnut to go with this?’
‘Oh, come on Lesley, cops don’t chow down doughnuts,’ he said, opening a blank police report on his computer.
‘What do they eat then?’
Pausing from his typing, he raised an eyebrow and turned slightly, pulling open a drawer and tossing a handful of golden Twinkies onto the desktop. ‘Yippee ki-yay.’
‘I always wondered where a job in home entertainment would lead you, John,’ she said, laughing through a yawn. She’d forgotten how funny he was. ‘Now I see you really made something out of your desire to fight terrorists in the Nakatomi building.’
‘Shh,’ he grinned, pretending to glance around the empty station, ‘You’re the only one who knows Die Hard led me to law enforcement.’
Lesley rubbed her tired eyes, her contacts dry and foggy. There was a couch a few feet behind the desk. Oh, how she wanted to curl up on it and go to sleep. Why had she bothered to walk here anyway? Of course it was a novelty to see John again, they’d had a lot of fun during in the summers between college semesters, but surely police in this town had better things to do than look for a stolen motorcycle. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘I’ll buy you a whole case of Twinkies if you can wrap up this up in five minutes and give me a lift home.’
‘Bribing an officer of the law can land you in a detention cell.’
‘At this stage, if the cell had a bed, I’d be willing to deface public property. Got a penknife I can use to carve my initials into your desk?’
Besides the hair, John still laughed through his nose; the sound came as a sniff-sniff-sniff. ‘Did you move back here or are you just visiting the folks?’ he asked after an amused sniffle.
‘Both I guess. I bought a place to renovate and sell. It’s what I wound up doing for a living. How long have you been a cop here in Los Alamos? I thought you’d gone to Denver.’
Clearly well-practiced in touch-typing, John’s fingers flew over the keys while he kept his eyes on her face as he spoke, ‘I spent six years in Denver and four in Albuquerque before I wound up back here looking after my mom and Great Aunt Eilish. She just moved into a place over at the Aspen Ridge Lodge. I see your grandfather there a lot. He’s still a hoot. How about you?’ He adjusted the computer keyboard. ‘Where are you these days, when you’re not visiting? Detroit? Baltimore?’
‘Chicago now.’
‘Nice lake. Great pizza. Crappy weather. What’s your local address?’
Lesley shook her head to clear away some cobwebs that obscured her thoughts. ‘It’s on Isleta. I’m so tired I can’t remember the house number.’
‘I’ll fill it in when I get back.’
‘Back from where?’
‘Dropping you off.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Thanks.’
‘So it’s a red Harley Sportster with Illinois tags 3737 266? Is that correct?’
‘Right.’
‘You married?’
‘Divorced,’ she said because it was easier than explaining the details of an annulment. ‘You?’
‘Same. And the two men, they both had tattoos and beards. Is that correct?’
‘Right.’
‘And you say they seemed interested in the bike? They asked a few questions? Is that correct?’
Lesley nodded once, knowing if she dipped her head more than that it would probably plop against the desk. Worse, those Twinkies beside John’s keyboard were goading her, their soft sponginess teasing her into thoughts of pillows and clean sheets.
‘I gotta say, you sure look great, but why are you wearing hospital scrubs?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Man, you have had a bad day, haven’t you? OK. Can you describe anything else about the men, besides the American Eagle tattoo?’
‘One of them was missing teeth.’
‘Got any children?’
‘No,’ she mumbled after another almighty yawn.
‘Me neither. Which teeth were missing?’
‘Right front.’
‘How come you and I never went out?’
‘Valerie St Ives.’
‘Valerie. She joined the New Crystal commune and makes clothes out of hemp. How tall would you estimate these men were?’
Lesley shrugged and rolled her head around on her neck. The action made her eyelids feel even droopier. ‘One was about your size I guess. The other – maybe five nine, with a beer gut.’
‘You see anybody else in the parking lot?’
‘A bunch of kids – teenagers – doing what bored teenagers do in this boring town. Why did I come back here? What was I thinking? The Atomic City nickname makes it sound exciting, but this place is about as thrilling as watching toast brown.’
‘Hey. I live here and I like it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘Hanging out, skateboarding, jumping bikes, you know, the usual.’
‘Want to have coffee sometime?’
‘We’re having coffee now,’ Lesley held up her almost empty cup.
Sniff, sniff, sniff, ‘That’s not exactly what I meant. Get a look at any of them?’
‘The girls looked like the Olsen Twins dressed as hookers and the skate-punks looked like—’
‘Skate-punks. Got it.’
‘There were two other kids. One had the accident. The other one’s named Sunny. Kind of pudgy, rides a BMX sort of bike. Maybe he saw something.’
‘You got that blood on your pants from the kid with the broken arm?’
‘Uh-huh.’
John leaned back in his chair, clasping both hands behind his head. It could have been a cop thing, but John had kept fit. There was no middle-aged paunch so many men over 35 developed. His dark blue uniform fit him snugly, the definition of his pecs outlined by the fabric. His body was a scaled down version of Dominic’s. But Dominic had those long fingers, even longer legs, and that tanned chest. As tight-looking as John’s musculature seemed to be through the material of his shirt, he had nothing on Dr. Brennan.
Lesley caught herself. The nonsensical, drifting-off-to-sleep notions woke her up a little. As if this day couldn’t get any more bizarre.
Fifteen minutes after they’d finished the police report, Officer Tilbrook took her to a patrol car and drove her home, explaining how she’d receive a follow up visit in the next few days, reminding her to contact her insurance company and the Illinois Department of Transportation to notify them about the theft.
He stopped the patrol car at the bottom of the sloped driveway and saw her to the door, his big police flashlight navigating a safe path through the blackness, around the dumpster and Bronco.
When she’d pulled back the busted screen door and opened up the house, the odour leapt on them like a panther.
‘I hate to be the one to tell you,’ John blew out a breath, ‘but your house smells like a litter box for lions.’
‘I know. I yanked out the carpeting, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. I’m going to have to scrub the slab with muriatic acid, orange oil, or something.’
John reached around her to turn on the inside light. Forty watt rays shone from the hideous exploding star fixture, making their long shadows stretch out of the house.
His dimly lit button nose was wrinkled when he turned off his flashlight. A second later, her back against the doorjamb, Lesley was framed between muscular arms. The curling cord of the police radio clipped at John’s shoulder tickled against her chest when he lowered his head.
And kissed her.
She was too wiped out to feel anything beyond the pressure of his mouth and when he drew back, dropping his arms, she muttered, ‘Unusual police work, John.’
His finger touched the tip of her nose. ‘Call it youthful curiosity that never had the chance to be explored.’ Smiling, he gave her a gentle push inside, closing the crooked screen door as she rubbed her face. ‘Lock up, go to bed, get yourself some air-freshener, and I’ll see you around,’ he said, walking backwards into the darkness of the overgrown driveway, his uniform disappearing into the inky night.
Dazed, and positively drained, Lesley shut the front door and turned the deadbolt.
A minute later, she dragged off her dirty clothes and sleepwalked to the bedroom, leaving them in a heap on the floor instead of stuffing them into a laundry bag in the bathroom. Foregoing pyjamas, she stood in front of the mirror above the black bathroom sink, clad only in a pair of undies, and barely managed to brush her teeth.
Forgetting all about showering off vomity bits, she took out her sticky contacts and tottered into the bedroom. Too exhausted to try and mull over John’s kiss or gauge how she felt about it, far too weary to rehash the revelation the entire Brennan family believed she was gay, she collapsed onto the roll-away bed and drew the blankets up over her bare shoulder.
In seconds she was dreaming.
Candy apple red, the Hog soared on the open highway. Cookie cut-outs of blue peeked through whipped cream clouds. The tarred road undulated ahead like black strap liquorice lined with verdant lollipop trees dotted by jujyfruit candies.
She had never ridden without a helmet before. She’d never been reckless enough to try it, but riding helmetless was a splendid sensation. The soft glow of a lemon-drop sun bathed her. Lime-scented grass perfumed the air and the wind combed through her hair with long, gentle fingers, caressing her face, skimming over her lips with a touch so tender, so ethereally erotic she gasped.
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