by Lauren Wood
Debbie glanced up from her magazine as I handed the envelope to her. “Thank you, Izzy. Your first paycheck and my second. Woohoo.”
I ripped mine open, and almost exploded in a very loud “woohoo” of my own. Jack wasn’t kidding about the amount he offered me, and I felt suddenly weak. “Damn. I can take up paying bills again.”
“What a wretched way to have to spend your money,” Debbie observed, putting her paycheck in her purse. “But I suppose it’s why we work in the first place.”
“How very wise.”
I returned to my office and put my own check away, then sat down at my desk. Meeting Jack’s warm eyes through the plexiglass, I smiled, blushing a little, knowing he probably read my mind at that moment. Then his phone rang, and the moment passed.
Since the night of the confessions when we both learned we each had a crush on the other, I stopped being confused emotionally. I relaxed around him, stopped mistrusting him and fearing his ulterior motives – I finally started to fall in love.
And to think we both had feelings for each other, and neither of us knew it. Nellie did, but she wouldn’t have broken my trust by telling Jack, or broken his trust by telling me. Such was her integrity that she let us both suffer, probably knowing that someday we’d figure it out.
“Ssst.”
The hiss broke into my reverie. Jack grinned impudently through the window. “Dinner tonight. Steak and seafood.”
I lifted my brow. “That sounds too much like sexual harassment in the workplace.”
“You bet it is.”
“Oh. Well, that makes it all right then.”
“Afterward, we’ll get a few bottles of wine, and take them to Nell.”
“Now that I got paid,” I said, “I can pay her some rent money.”
“Sure. Good luck with that.”
After I deposited my hefty paycheck in the bank, Jack drove us twenty miles up the interstate to an expensive restaurant called Murray’s. As it was way out of my league, I had never been there. When I saw the menu prices, I stared hard at Jack across the table.
“Dude, this is way too much,” I hissed. “After the security system you paid for, you shouldn’t be spending this kind of money.”
“With the way business is taking off,” he replied easily, “I want to celebrate. And for our first official date, I wouldn’t want to take you anywhere else.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You think that by bringing me here, you’re gonna get laid?”
He grinned. “The thought did cross my mind.”
“That might be tough at Nellie’s house with her there.”
“You forget I have a nice big house all to myself.”
“I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no,” I told him. “It’ll depend on how romantic you are.”
“Then I shall endeavor to be as romantic as possible.”
As the waiter arrived to pour wine, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been on birth control since the last ex boyfriend drove away. As I had also vowed to stay away from men in general, I never went to a gynecologist for another prescription.
Maybe we need to stay away from having sex until after I’m back on the pill.
Romantic or not, Jack was excellent company and a great date. He had me laughing until I almost cried, kept the wine coming, and the food was even better than I had been led to believe. Though I was slightly tipsy, Jack restrained himself from imbibing too much as he was driving us home.
Hours later, he paid the check. “Do I take you to my place?” he asked, his dark Italian eyes almost glowing in the light of the small lamp on our table.
I loved how he made it my decision. He wasn’t pushy, suggestive, teasing, hinting, or any other silly way a man asked for sexual intimacy. I remembered how my first ex simply pushed himself on me, and I learned early on it was easier to just give him what he wanted than to fight it.
I blushed. “I’m not on the pill,” I muttered, unable to look at him.
He reached over and caressed my hand. “Hey,” he said softly. “We don’t have to. I’m not going to rush you, Izzy. But if you want to, I have condoms.”
I finally found the courage to look at him. “It’s okay to say no?”
“You know it,” he said, no hint of any disappointment in his expression, his smile still warm, easy. “I asked you out because I wanted your company, and because I should have done this a long time ago. If I had the guts in school, I would have asked you out then.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Jack finally looked away. “I was scared to,” he admitted. “When we were kids, I bullied you, you tormented me. I thought you hated me. And if I dared ask, you’d laugh, and then make my life a living hell.”
“I could never have done that,” I told him. “Even if I said no, which I wouldn’t have, I’d just leave it at that.”
“I know that now. But my teenage male ego was terrified of you. You had a good reason to use my crush against me.”
I laughed. “And back then I always thought you despised me.”
“You were my sister’s bestie,” he said with a grin. “I piss you off, and then she’d make my life a living hell.”
“Nellie and I did make a good team, didn’t we?”
Jack stood up from the table and took my hand. “You sure did.”
Hand in hand, we left Murray’s, and before we got into his truck, I’d made up my mind. “Let’s go to your place.”
Bending, Jack kissed me softly, tenderly, his hands gently clasping mine. “Only if you’re sure,” he whispered.
“I am.”
He opened the door for me and closed it after I got in. He walked around the truck as a tingling sensation worked its way through me, anticipation of intimacy with Jack. I imagined him making love to me, not the hard and fast fuck we’d experienced last week. The fantasies I’d played through my mind with him in the starring role tripped across my memory.
Maybe it’s time to see them fulfilled.
He got in behind the wheel and started the truck. Murray’s was a popular place to dine on a Friday night, even with its high price tag, and Jack needed to jockey the truck out of the parking lot. Headlights gleamed behind us as we pulled onto the highway, but I paid them no attention.
He held my hand over the central console, often rubbing his thumb over my knuckles. Traveling in the right lane, Jack let other cars and semis pass by, of which many did. Another vehicle started to pass as Jack turned to me, grinning, his mouth opened to say something to me.
The vehicle didn’t pass.
It hovered beside his truck, and in the light of its dash, I saw a hand lift a gun toward Jack, tilted at an upward angle.
“Jack!”
My scream came too late.
I saw the muzzle flash, and heard Jack’s grunt, but only heard the gunshot as though it came from far away. The car accelerated as Jack slumped forward over the steering wheel. The truck slowed as Jack’s foot slid off the accelerator, yet it started to veer all over the interstate as Jack no longer maintained control.
It all happened so quickly, I never had real time to feel fear or to think. But if I didn’t do something to steer the truck out of traffic, the big Ram would run other cars off the road or hit the median and roll. No matter what happened, it would be bad.
I fumbled to release the catch on my seat belt, fortunate to have hit it the first time. Ram trucks like Jack’s had a very big console between the seats, and I had to half lay across it in order to grab the steering wheel. I did it with my right, and with my left pushed Jack off of it.
He moved easily, limp, but I knew he was still half conscious and alive by the slight moans and grunts that came from his mouth. I steered the truck to the shoulder as it bumped along, still slowing its momentum. I hit the emergency flashers button, and they clicked on obediently.
Traffic whizzed by without slowing. When the truck reached about five miles an hour, I hit the ‘start’ button to kill the engine and hoped the damn thing would si
mply roll to a stop. It did. The dash lights remained on as the truck wasn’t in park, but it gave me enough light to see by. I opened my door, and the dome lights came on.
“Jack?”
I crawled off the console and exited the truck in order to run around to his side. Opening his door, I found blood soaking his shirt, dripping down the door, and splashing onto the leather. “Jack?”
He didn’t answer me. I put the truck in park to make sure it didn’t roll away from me, then put my hand on his face. His flesh was pale and cold to my touch. Shock. Reaching across him, I grabbed his cell and dialed nine-one-one. As it rang, I tried to see where the bullet had hit him, terrified it was in his chest, buried in his heart.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
“He’s been shot,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and not shaking. “We’re on the interstate near –”
I craned to see the mile marker, and it was just inside the reach of the headlights “Mile marker four-two-three. Please send an ambulance, I can’t see where he’s bleeding from.”
“I am dispatching an emergency crew now, ma’am.”
She asked me several questions, distracting me from finding out where Jack had been shot so I could put pressure on the wound. Jack moaned as I discovered it was in his upper arm. I put the phone between my ear and shoulder, and pressed my hand against it.
“How is he doing, ma’am?”
“Still alive. I’m trying to put pressure on his wound. It’s in his upper arm.”
“Is he in shock?”
“Yeah.”
“The crews are on their way. You should see them soon.”
Sure enough, flashing red and blue lights closed the distance, and I heard the sirens. The dispatcher must have sent everyone on duty because I saw a very long line of them. Hanging up, I tossed the phone on the console, then used my free hand to flash the high and low beams at them. Jack muttered something unintelligible.
“You’re gonna be okay, Jack,” I told him, seeing his eyelids flutter. “You’re gonna be fine, help is here, I’m here, I’m not gonna leave you.”
“Izzy.”
His eyes opened. “Izzy.”
“Hush, now, just hush, don’t talk.”
His lips quirked upward. “I guess I ain’t getting lucky.”
The fire trucks, the ambulance, and the cops pulled around the Ram, blocking traffic, their lights spearing the night. I took a brief second to kiss him, smiled into his eyes, then made way for the paramedics. “It’s in his arm,” I told them. “He was shot.”
They took my place, talking to Jack, doing their thing to keep him alive, but I didn’t watch. Only then, when everything was out of my hands and there was nothing else for me to do, I started to shake.
Smeared with Jack’s blood, scared that he was going to die, in a panic that someone had actually driven up beside his truck and shot him, I clasped my arms around my chest and shook. As though I stood inside a frozen wind, I trembled and could barely speak to the highway patrolman who tried to ask me what happened.
More cops arrived as the paramedics worked on Jack, they and loaded him onto the gurney. I recognized a voice among the organized chaos of cops, firemen, EMTs, the noise from radios, the cars and semis sneaking past the roadblock in the median.
It was Dennis.
Abandoning the highway trooper, I threw myself at Dennis, as I was now hysterical with reaction.
“Easy there, Isabelle,” he said, holding me tight. “It’s all right. Calm down, you need to be calm so you can tell us what happened. Just breathe, just breathe, it’s all good, Isabelle.”
His soothing voice and arms had the right effect. The paramedics still worked on Jack, and I heard his voice answering their questions. I still shivered, but I could talk sensibly now. Surrounded by notetaking cops, swallowing hard, I began.
“We’d just had dinner at Murray’s,” I told my audience. “A car pulled up alongside us, and I saw a hand with a gun in it. I screamed Jack’s name, but the gun fired.”
I explained, my eyes on Jack, how he fell over the wheel and I steered the truck onto the shoulder. Then I told them how I got the truck stopped and tried to slow his bleeding. “I called for help, and Jack woke up just before you got here.”
Then came the questions – what kind of car, did I see the driver, did I recognize anything. I answered as best I could as investigators examined the bullet hole in the truck’s driver’s door. “We’ll have to tow it,” Dennis said, “and finish our investigations.”
“I want to go with Jack,” I told him as the EMTs loaded him into the ambulance.
“I’ll take you,” Dennis said. “I need to ask more questions.”
14
Jack
I never knew how much getting shot could hurt.
In the weird blur of being strapped to the gurney, seeing Izzy talking to the police among the flashing lights, and being told I was lucky to be alive, I knew I was. Izzy stood alone amongst the cops that towered over her, her arms crossed, dashed with my blood. I knew I was the luckiest man alive.
Catching a few odd glimpses of her as the nurses and doctors examined me in the emergency room, I worried less about her when I saw Dennis was with her. Then Nell arrived, both of them staring in at me, and after that I was wheeled to the operating room.
“Jack.”
Izzy seized my good right hand, walking along with me while Nell stroked my head from my other side.
“You saved my life.” I tried to smile at Izzy, but she didn’t smile back. Maybe I only thought I smiled.
“We’ll be here, Jack,” Nell told me, “when you get out of surgery, we’ll be here.”
Izzy said nothing with her mouth, but I saw her heart clear in her eyes.
After that came the surgeons, informing me what they had to do to save my arm, but most of it went right over my head. Just save it. I don’t want to lose my arm. The anesthesiologist told me I’d be fine. Then once the mask came down over my face, and everything went black. Waking periodically, talking heads informed me I’d be fine, they saved my arm. Then I lapsed again, and finally woke to pain.
And Izzy and Nell.
They sat on either side of my hospital bed, both holding one of my hands. Izzy, on my left, didn’t move it, but simply held it clasped lightly in hers. I blinked woozily as I woke, seeing her hair and clothes still splashed with blood. “Sorry,” I muttered thickly.
“Sorry? For what?”
“Bled – bled all over – you.”
She laughed. “I don’t care. The doctors say you’ll be fine.”
My arm burned with a horrible fire, and I shook off Nell to reach across my body. I don’t know what I intended to do, something to stop that agony, to shut it off, but she seized my hand again.
“Don’t touch it,” Nell warned, pulling my hand away. “Are you in pain?”
“Yeah.”
Nell put an object in my hand and set my thumb on a button. “It’s a morphine drip. Use it as you need.”
Damn, but I clicked that button until it stopped. The pain didn’t exactly end, but that dope certainly put me out. I faded into blessed unconsciousness and stayed out for a long time.
I was three days in that hospital, and Izzy and Nell stayed beside me in shifts, day and night. By the end of my first day, my hospital room was filled with cards, flowers, balloons that read “get well soon”, and cops. Outside of Izzy and Nell, they were the only visitors the doctors permitted.
Dennis was one of them, as was the great chief himself, Sheriff Walt Hopkins. He wasn’t a huge man, but he was imposing as well as intimidating. His dark hair had turned silver at the temples, and he stared at me with icy blue eyes as though I were the suspect. I wondered if he thought I had shot myself.
“We’re calling in the big guns, Mr. Stanton,” he told me in a friendlier tone than his eyes might suggest. “The state police.”
“Why?”
Izzy sat at my right, holding my hand, now cle
aned of my blood and smelling of the shampoo she had washed her hair with. “We’re all pretty sure it was Roger Andrews,” she said. “We think he saw us at the restaurant and went over the edge.”
“Now, we’re looking at attempted murder and not just stalking,” Sheriff Hopkins added. “We’re undermanned for this kind of investigation.”
“We also think Andrews might be living in one of the hundred abandoned houses in town,” Dennis told me. “We don’t have enough warm bodies to search.”
My arm still hurt something awful, but I manned up and refused to push the morphine button. “I only caught a fast glimpse of the car,” I said. “It looked like a silver Beemer, but I can’t be certain.”
“I thought it was, too,” Izzy added. “I can’t swear to it, but I think that’s what it was.”
“We have our suspect, we just have to find him.” Sheriff Hopkins paced around the room slowly as though filled with energy and vitality, the stuff I didn’t currently have. “The staties are sending a couple of their detectives to help. They’ll want to interview the pair of you.”
Izzy nodded and I offered a right shoulder only shrug. “That’s fine.”
“Unless Andrews leaves the state, we’ll find him,” Dennis said. “And if he does, we’ll sic the feds on his ass.”
“We’re also posting a reward,” the sheriff added. “Anyone who comes forward with information that leads to his arrest will get it.”
Tossing his chin at Izzy, Dennis grinned. “Jack, you owe your life to that cool head she has. She didn’t freak until after the EMTs got to you.”
I glanced at Izzy, who flushed. “I did what I had to do,” she muttered.
As Nell had filled me in on what Izzy had done to keep the truck from crashing after I was shot, I knew that only someone who kept some wits could have steered the vehicle out of danger. “I know.”
I’d always been a quick healer, and on my third day in the hospital, I was discharged. My pain had died considerably, but still flared now and then if I moved my arm too suddenly. Thus, with my left arm in a sling, armed with pain killers and antibiotics, I walked out of the hospital and into Izzy’s Mustang.