Now You See Her

Chapter 1

MARCH 12, 1992

Party till you drop, man!

Every time I think back to everything that happened, it’s that expression, that silly early-eighties cliché, that first comes to mind.

It was actually the first thing we heard when we arrived in Key West to start the last spring break of our college careers. As we were checking into our hotel, a very hairy and even drunker middle-aged man wearing goggles and an orange Speedo screamed, “Party till you drop, man!” as he ran, soaking wet, through the lobby.

From that hilariously random moment on, for the rest of our vacation it was our mantra, our boast, our dare to one another. My boyfriend at one point seriously suggested we should all get “Party till you drop, man!” tattoos.

Because we thought it was a joke.

It turned out to be a prophecy.

It actually happened.

First we partied.

Then someone dropped.

It happened on the last day. Our last afternoon found us just as the previous afternoons had, giddily hungover, lazily finishing up burgers under one of our hotel beach bar’s umbrellas.

Under the table, my boyfriend Alex’s bare foot was hooked around mine as his finger played with the string of my yellow bikini top. The Cars’ classic song “Touch and Go” was playing softly from the outdoor speakers as we watched an aging biker with a black leather vest and braided gray hair play catch with his dog off the bar’s sun-bleached dock. We laughed every time the collie in the red bandanna head-butted the wet tennis ball before belly flopping into the shallow blue waves.

As the huffing, drenched collie paddled back to shore, a stiff breeze off the water began jingling the bar’s hanging glasses like wind chimes. Listening to the unexpected musical sound, I sighed as a long, steady hit of vacation nirvana swept through me. For a tingling moment, everything—the coolness under the Jägermeister umbrella, the almost pulsating white sand of the beach, the blue-green water of the Gulf—became sharper, brighter, more vivid.

When Alex slipped his hand into mine, all the wonderful memories of how we fell in love freshman year played through my mind. The first nervous eye contact across the cavernous Geology classroom. The first time he haltingly asked me out. The first time we kissed.

As I squeezed his hand back, I thought how lucky we were to have found each other, how good we were together, how bright our future looked.

Then it happened.

The beginning of the end of my life.

Our wiry Australian waitress, Maggie, who was clearing the table, smiled as she raised an eyebrow. Then she casually asked what would turn out to be the most important yes-or-no question of my life.

“You motley mob need anything else?” she said in her terrific Aussie accent.

Alex, who was leaning so far back in his plastic deck chair that he was practically lying down, suddenly sat up with a wide, strangely infectious smile on his face. He was average-sized, slim, dark, almost delicate, so you wouldn’t guess that he was the place kicker for the nationally ranked University of Florida Gators football team.

I sat up myself when I realized that he was sporting the same slightly touched, let’s-get-fired-up smile that he wore before he took the field in front of seventy thousand people to drill a fifty-yarder.

Or to get us into a bar fight.

Our vacation had been everything the travel brochure headline—“Five Days, Four Nights in Key West!”—had promised. No school. No rules. Nothing but me and my friends, the beach, cold beer, Coppertone, loud music, and louder laughs. We’d all even managed to stay in one piece over the previous, hard-partying four days.

Uh-oh. What now? I thought.

Alex looked around the table at the four of us slowly, one by one, before he threw down the gauntlet.

“Since it’s our last whole day here, who’s in the mood for some dessert?” he said. “I was thinking Jell-O. The kind Bill Cosby never talks about. The kind served in a shot glass.”

The Cars song broke into a frolicking guitar riff as an expression of piqued interest crossed my best friend Maureen’s face. My pretty roommate and fellow co-captain of the Gators women’s varsity softball team was apparently game. So was her boyfriend, Big Mike, judging by his enthusiastic nod. Even our studious, usually pessimistic, sunburned pal Cathy looked up from her paperback at the interesting suggestion.

“Jeanine?” Alex said as my friends turned to me in silent deference.

The questionable decision was all mine.

I pursed my lips in worry as I looked down at the sand-covered bar floor between my sun-browned toes.

Then my face broke into my own mischievous grin as I rolled my eyes. “Uh… definitely!” I said.

All around the bar, people turned as my friends whooped and high-fived and pounded playfully on the sandy table.

“Shot, shots, shots,” Mike and Alex started to chant as our waitress quickly turned to get them.

As a responsible 3.9 GPA English major and student athlete, I was well aware that vodka and gelatin was a highly hazardous afternoon snack. But then again, I had an excuse. Actually four of them.

I was a college kid. I was in Key West. And not only was spring break ’92 quickly coming to a close, but it was three days after my twenty-first birthday.

Yet as I sat smiling, looking through the happy, crowded bar out over the endless Tiffany blue Gulf, I still had the slightest moment’s doubt, the slightest moment’s wonder if maybe I was pushing my luck.

The feeling was gone by the time Maggie returned with our drinks.

Then we proceeded to do what we always did. We raised our paper cups, tapped them together, and screamed, “Party till you drop, man!” as loud as we could.

Chapter 2

I SAW a video once of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It was recorded at some beachfront resort in Sri Lanka, and in it, as the ocean bizarrely recedes, a group of curious tourists wander down to the beach to see what’s going on.

Staring at the screen, knowing that the receding water is actually already on its way back to kill them, what disturbs you the most is their complete innocence. The fact that they still think they’re safe instead of living out the very last moments of their lives right in front of you.

I feel that same sick way whenever I go over what happened to me next.

I still think I’m safe.

I couldn’t be more wrong.

Several hours later, the Jell-O shots had done their job and then some. By seven thirty that evening, my friends and I were sardined into the packed Mallory Square for Key West’s world-famous outdoor drunken sunset celebration. The gold of our last sunset warmed our shoulders as cold beer splattered and stuck our toes to our flip-flops. Cathy and Maureen were on my right. Alex and his Gator outside linebacker buddy, Mike, were on my left, and with our arms around one another, we were singing, “Could You Be Loved” with as much gusto as Bob Marley himself.

In front of the outdoor reggae band, I danced in my floppy bush hat, bikini top, and cargo shorts. I was as drunk as a skunk, laughing hysterically, forehead to forehead with my friends, and the feeling I’d had at the beach bar returned, on steroids. I had everything. I was young and pretty and carefree with my arms around people I loved who loved me back. For a fleeting moment, I felt truly ecstatically happy to be alive.

For a split second.

Then it was gone.

When I woke, the cheap hotel room clock read 2:23 a.m. Turning over in the cramped, dark room, the first thing I noticed was that Alex wasn’t beside me. I quickly fumbled through my last memories. I remembered a club we went to after the sunset, loud techno, Alex in a straw cowboy hat he’d found somewhere, Alex twirling beside me to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

That was about it. The intervening hours, how I had gotten back to the hotel, were an impenetrable alcohol-induced fog, a complete mystery.

A ball of panic began to burn at the lining of my stomach like guzzled vodka as I stared at Alex’s empty pillow.

Was he OK? I thought groggily. Passed out somewhere? Worse?

I was lying there, breathing rapidly in the dark, woodenly wondering what I should do next, when I heard the sound.

It was a giggle, and it had come from the bathroom behind me on my right. I rolled myself up onto my elbows and tilted my head off the bed to look through the crack of its slightly open door.

In the light of a strange, low glow, I spotted Alex leaning against the sink. Then I heard another giggle, and Maureen, my best friend, appeared in front of him holding a lit candle.

At first, as Maureen put the candle down onto the counter and they began to kiss, I truly wondered if I was still asleep and having a nightmare. Then I heard Maureen moan. Realizing that I was very much awake, the enormity of what I was watching walloped into me like an asteroid into a continent. It was my worst fear, everyone’s worst fear.

My boyfriend and my best friend together.

Crippling waves of anger and fear and revulsion slammed through me. Why wouldn’t they? Primordial betrayal was being enacted right in front of my locked-open eyes.

I heard Maureen moan again as Alex began to peel off her T-shirt.

Then they were cut from sight as the bathroom door closed with a soft, careful click.

A T. S. Eliot quote from my last Modern Poetry class popped into my mind as I blinked at the closed door.

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper

Or a moan, I thought, turning and looking at the clock again: 2:26.

If my premed boyfriend wasn’t currently busy, he could have marked it down.

Time of girlfriend’s death.

I didn’t scream as I sat up. I didn’t look for something heavy and then kick the door in and start swinging.

In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.

Instead, I decided not to bother them. I just simply stood.

Barefoot, I grabbed my jacket and stumbled out of the bedroom and through the hotel room’s front door, closing it behind me with my own soft, careful click.

Chapter 3

I WAITED until I was outside the hotel’s empty lobby before I started jogging. After a minute, I broke into a sprint. Down the middle of the pitch-dark street, I huffed and puffed, sweating like a marathon runner, like an action movie star escaping an impending nuclear explosion.

I was fast, too. Maureen was the tall, blond, long-limbed pitcher. Cathy was the short, tough catcher, and I was the lean, mean, in-between fast one. The now-you-see-her, now-you-don’t, lay-one-down-the-third-base-line-and-beat-you-to-first-base fast one.

And at that moment, I needed every ounce of my speed to take me away from what I’d seen.

Because what I’d witnessed wasn’t just the two-for-one end of my relationships with my boyfriend and my best friend.

I guess you could call it the proverbial last straw.

My dad, a Maryland state trooper, had died in the line of duty when I was eleven. All dads are special, of course, but my dad actually was an extremely special human being. Exceedingly kind, deeply moral, and a gifted, natural listener, he was the person everyone he came into contact with—coworkers, neighbors, the mailman, complete strangers—turned to for comfort and advice.

Which was what made his unexpected death even more devastating. It tore something deep and fundamental inside of my mom. Once an intensely religious teetotaler, she started drinking. She put on eighty pounds and stopped taking care of herself. Everything came to a head in the spring of my junior year in college when she committed suicide in my dad’s old Ford F-150 with the help of a garden hose.

Maureen and Alex had bookended me throughout my mom’s funeral arrangements. Since I had no brothers or sisters or close relatives, they had been more than best friends to me. They had been the only family I had left.

The trip down here had actually been Maureen’s idea. She knew the anniversary of my mom’s passing was approaching, and she wanted to cheer me up.

It was all too much. The pain of the betrayal I’d just witnessed hit me again like a wrecking ball. I began crying as I ran. Tears mixed with the sweat that began to drip off my face and onto the sandy blacktop and the tops of my bare feet.

I dropped to my knees onto the sand when I arrived at the beach. It was empty, just me and the dark ocean and the star-filled sky. Staring out at the black water, I remembered when I’d almost drowned at an Ocean City beach when I was nine. I’d been caught by a riptide, but my dad had saved me.

I breathed the night air in and out and listened to the lap of the waves, feeling more alone and desperate than I ever had in my entire life.

There was no one at all to save me now.

About twenty feet to the right beside me, I noticed a fat, concrete buoy-shaped marker.

SOUTHERNMOST POINT, CONTINENTAL U.S.A., was painted on it. 90 MILES TO CUBA.

I was standing, soul wrecked, about to take a shot at swimming those ninety miles, when I stuck my hand into the pocket of my shorts and realized something fascinating.

I had Alex’s car keys.

The keys to his Z28 Chevy Camaro, which had brought us down here from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He’d gotten his “baby,” as he called it, from sweating four summers at his dad’s landscaping business. I’d sweated four years, trying to get his numb jock skull through premed, so the sudden idea of taking the sleek red car out for a little spin instead of going for a swim seemed eminently logical. To my shattered heart, it seemed downright brilliant.

I ran even faster back to the hotel parking lot. After I sailed one of Whore-reen’s bags out the window, I gunned the Z28’s engine like I had pole position at the Indy 500.

Then I did what any self-respecting, suicidal, recently orphaned, currently being-cheated-on twenty-one-year-old girl would do.

I neutral-dropped my boyfriend’s Camaro out of the lot in a cloud of rubber smoke.

Chapter 4

AFTER A FEW FISHTAILING TURNS, I found an open road next to a beach and drove the Camaro properly—namely, like I’d stolen it. I didn’t drop the hammer. I very nearly busted it through the meticulously vacuumed floor.

Its 5.7-liter V8 engine roared hungrily, demonically, as it rose in pitch, the intro to a heavy metal song.

“Crazy Train,” I thought as I slammed back into my seat. Or was it “Highway to Hell”?

Parked cars that I blurred past started making that zip zip zip zip NASCAR sound.

I tried to decide what I wanted to wreck more at that moment: Alex’s pride and joy or myself. The notion of ending the utter silliness of my bad-luck life seemed very tempting. From where I was sitting without a seat belt, life was pain, and I was seriously thinking about ending mine as visibly and messily as possible.

The Z28’s speedometer was hitting three figures, its rear end starting to rise like an airplane on takeoff, when I caught some movement on the dark beach to my right.

I squinted at the motion through the windshield. It was a blur, something small running. Was it a rabbit?

No, I realized as I got closer very quickly. It was a dog, a collie with a red bandanna around its neck. I recognized the belly-flopping dog from the bar at the exact moment it changed course, like a guided missile, and shot out into the beach road.

Directly in front of the car.

Immediately, instinctually, I slammed on the brakes and spun the steering wheel to the right, trying to avoid it. A high howl of evaporating tire rubber filled the car as the Z28’s rear end fishtailed to the left like it was on ice. I tried to straighten it, but I must have overcompensated because the car suddenly reversed momentum and went into a rubber-barking, skidding, counterclockwise spin.

Shit!

I’d lost complete control of the car. My head flew back onto the headrest heavily, helplessly, like I was on a carnival teacup ride. I held my breath as I felt the right side of the car swell, threatening to flip. Instead, it did a 180 and kept right on rotating. It was when the car completed a full 360 that I saw what was looming ahead.

And I screamed.

Lit in my pinwheeling headlights, as if he’d been conjured there by a magician, was the dog’s owner, the biker from the bar with the gray braided hair.

The last thing I remember was pumping the brake again and again, savagely, as the ridges of the spinning steering wheel flickered painfully over the insides of my fingers.

I closed my eyes as the Camaro’s swinging front end clipped the man in the waist with a sickening, heart-skewering thump.

There was a brief crumpling sound of rolling weight onto the metal hood followed by a squeegee-like squeak as the man slid up the ramp of the windshield.

And then there was silence. Nothing but horrible, deafening silence.

Chapter 5

I FORCED MYSELF to open my eyes.

The Camaro had come to a shuddering stop another fifty feet to the north.

I stared at the empty road in front of me, my foot pinned down on the brake, my hands as tight on the steering wheel as a pair of vise grips. The only sound was my panicked breathing as sweat seemed to pour from everywhere at once, the inside of my elbows, the backs of my knees, even my ears.

The Camaro idled in the empty road, its engine chugging loudly like an animal catching its breath. I thought the windshield would be cracked, but it was unmarked. So was the hood. Besides losing a couple of inches of tire rubber and brake pad, the car seemed to be doing fine.

It was as if nothing had happened at all.

As if.

I didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror. I stared at Albert, Alex’s stupid grinning orange University of Florida Gator logo air freshener instead. Albert wasn’t offering any suggestions. I sucked in a hard breath, like a diver before going under, and finally looked.

The biker lay in the middle of the right lane behind me. He was facedown on the asphalt beside my skid marks, his thick gray braid half undone, his arms flung out in a Christlike spread. Traffic cones and stanchions from a work area along the side of the road were scattered around him like nailed bowling pins. He wasn’t moving.

When I noticed the dark, inky splotch in his gray hair and on the street beside his head, various parts of my body started to shake simultaneously, my knees, my hands, my lips. I let out my sour, rum-scented breath and covered my face with my quivering hands. My trembling, clenching fingers clawed at my skull like a rock climber searching for purchase.

“What have I done?” I asked myself between hysterical gulps of air.

Killed a man, came a stone-sober answering thought in response.

You just killed a man trying to save his dog.

I glanced up at the open road through the windshield. It curved away out of sight in the moonlit distance, beautiful, dreamlike, beckoning like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz.

That’s when the cool, rational, very sober-sounding voice in my head delivered two words, a sound bite, an ad slogan.

Just go.

It wasn’t your fault, my interior voice-over continued. You were trying not to hit the dog. There was nothing you could do. Besides, no one saw. Take your foot off the brake and move it onto the gas. Don’t look back. Don’t be stupid. Just go.

It was true that no one had seen it, I realized with a swallow. I was on an empty stretch of road near the airport with nothing but the deserted beach on the right. The only structure was an abandoned-looking concrete industrial building a couple of hundred feet up on the left.

The only witnesses to the incident were a silent armada of yellow school buses parked behind a chain-link fence across the street. Their dead eyelike headlights seemed to stare at me as if wondering what I was going to do.

I looked around for the biker’s dog. It was gone.

It was as if I came back online then. Having thought the unthinkable, the spell was broken, and I could once again focus.

I slid the car into park and turned it off.

I had to help this poor man. I needed to do what my father would have done. Start CPR, stop his bleeding, find a phone.

Go? I thought, disgusted, as I fumbled with the door latch. How could I have even considered such a thing? I was a good person. I’d been a lifeguard, a candy striper. That’s my good girl, my daddy used to say as I’d help him off with his high-gloss police oxfords.

I was getting out of the car when I noticed a pair of headlights approaching in the distance behind the injured man. Before I could breathe, an unexpected and dazzling flash of brilliant color crowned the headlights.

I stared, paralyzed, mesmerized, as the night suddenly blazed with a fireworks burst of police lights, blinding bubbles of blood red and vivid sapphire blue.

Chapter 6

THE FLASHING POLICE CRUISER was strangely silent as it rolled to a slanting stop halfway between me and the fallen biker. As the metallic squawk and chitter of its police radio reached my ears, my chin dropped to my chest like a condemned prisoner’s, waiting for the ax.

I looked up as I heard the heavy crunch of a footstep by the cop car’s open door. I couldn’t see the officer’s face, which was backlit by the blinding roof lights. The only thing I could make out was his large, squarish, dark outline against the crazily strobing lights.

“Stay there and keep your hands where I can see them,” the cop said like the voice of God.

I immediately complied.

Over the trunk of the cop car, I watched the officer quickly approach the injured man and squat by his side. The next thing I knew, the cop was looming over me.

He was unexpectedly handsome, with short black hair and pale blue eyes in a lean face. He was six two or three, early thirties, powerfully built. His all-American physical attractiveness made the whole situation worse somehow. Made my guilt sharper, my despair more vile.

“He’s dead,” the officer said.

Something at my core faltered.

“Oh, no,” I whispered like a crazy person into my lap. “Please, God, no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I buried my shaking head deeper into my hands as the recruitment-poster police officer leaned down beside my face and sniffed.

“And you’re dead drunk. Stand up and put your hands behind your head.”

Chapter 7

WHEN MY FATHER DIED and I saw his coffin for the first time, I remember thinking, This is it. Nothing will ever be this bad.

I was wrong.

The officer cuffed me and put me into the back seat of the cruiser. I was surprised at how clean it was. It smelled new. The rubber floor mats were as immaculate as the ones in Alex’s car, the seat was deep, plush almost. Except for the kind of black plastic mesh separating the front from the back, you wouldn’t think it was a cop car. Despite the fact that my father was a cop, I’d never been in one before.

My right leg started shaking like a newly caught fish. Was I having a stroke? I wondered, staring at my jitterbugging thigh. I hoped so. Because anything was better than facing this.

I snorted back a wet, spasming sob.

Anything.

I glanced at the back of the cop’s head as he lowered himself into the police cruiser’s front seat. Like everything else about him, his head was neat, ordered, squared off. You could probably have balanced a level on his broad boxer’s shoulders. He had good posture, bearing, my mother would have said.

Had he been in the military? my haywire brain wanted to know. I read his backward name tag in the rearview mirror. Fournier.

Officer Fournier put his head down as he typed my driver’s license information into his boxy front-seat computer terminal. Then his cropped head suddenly leveled again.

“This right?” he said without turning around. “Your twenty-first birthday was just a few days ago? You down here for spring break?”

I noticed for the first time that there was a slight Northeast-city inflection to his voice. Boston, New York, Philly maybe. Then I had another, less distracted thought. What color prison jumpsuit would they give me?

“Yes,” I said, choking back another sob. “I’m a senior at UF.”

I suddenly wanted to be back there so much I almost moaned. If only I could click my heels and be back to Frisbee and meal cards and the note-scribbled onionskin pages of my Norton Anthology of English Literature.

There’d be no more school, no more softball, no more nothing at all. I’d loved books my entire life, and ever since high school I’d dreamed of becoming an editor at a New York City publishing house. I’d vaporized my future, too, I thought. Annihilated it like a mosquito into a bug zapper.

I was now one of those people that you read about in your pajamas, a name you shook your head over in the local newspaper’s police-beat section as you turned back to your coffee and thought about what to wear to work.

My life as I knew it had become a thing of the past.

Chapter 8

“WHO DO YOU want me to talk to first? Your mom or your dad?” Officer Fournier said, making eye contact for the first time in the rearview.

He really was easy to look at. Not pretty and dark like Alex. His was a paler, more angular, badass white man sort of handsome. His eyes were a strikingly light, almost silver blue.

“They’re both dead,” I said.

Officer Fournier let out a sigh. “You don’t want to lie to me, Jeanine,” he said sternly. “I think you understand your situation here. You really don’t want to make this even worse for yourself.”

“It’s true,” I said, sounding calm and sober suddenly. “My dad was a Maryland state trooper. He was killed in a line-of-duty roadblock car crash in 1982. I have his prayer card in my wallet. My mom died last year.”

Officer Fournier went into my wallet. He turned all the way around a moment later, suddenly much less imposing, with my dad’s prayer card in his hand.

“How’d your mom die?” he said.

“She committed suicide,” I said. I realized it was the first time I’d ever said it out loud.

“Wow. That’s rough,” Officer Fournier said, sounding almost sympathetic as he absorbed that. “Any brothers or sisters?”

I shook my head.

“Whose Camaro?”

“My boyfriend’s. He’s back at our hotel,” I said.

I sat there for a second.

“Having sex with my best friend,” I added quietly.

Officer Fournier shook his head as he looked back at the biker.

“Wow,” the blue-eyed cop said. “You’re all partying, and he cheats on you, so you took his car. I see.”

“The man had a dog. It ran out in front of the car,” I said quietly. “I was trying to swerve out of the way of the dog, and I went into a skid. I guess I was going too fast so I started to spin, and then the man was just… there.”

I lost it again. I folded like a lawn chair as I started crying.

After about a minute, I wiped my wet face on my thigh. When I sat up, Officer Fournier was staring at me in the rearview mirror with a look I couldn’t quite read in his pale eyes.

We held eye contact for a long, startling electric beat. I guess it was a strange time to feel attraction toward someone, but there it was. I couldn’t look away. He cut away first, tapping my dad’s prayer card to his chin.

“What if?” he said after a moment.

I had my own what-ifs going through my head right at that moment. Like, what if I hadn’t had Jell-O shots for lunch? What if I hadn’t taken Alex’s car? What if I’d never been born?

That’s when the officer suddenly opened his door and got out. Then there was a snap and a click and the door beside me opened, too.

“I’m making a judgment call here,” he said as he undid my cuffs. “Get back in your car and get out of here. Go back to school, Jeanine. This never happened.”

Chapter 9

I STOOD UP in the street beside the police car, rubbing my wrists, trying to absorb exactly what was happening. My head was spinning faster than the Camaro had, faster than the blinding carnival lights on top of the cop car.

I looked forward past Alex’s Camaro at the open road. Beside the empty beach, the dark water was as still as glass.

“I don’t understand, Officer Fournier,” I said.

“That’s funny. I’m having a little trouble understanding what I’m doing myself,” he said, putting the cuffs back on his belt and passing a hand through his cropped black hair. “And you can drop the ‘Officer’ there. My name’s Peter. Saint Peter, in your case, since I just saved your life. Now get back in your car and get out of here before somebody comes or I change my mind.”

“But how can I just go?”

“There aren’t any witnesses, and I haven’t called it in yet, is how,” he said.

“But I’m responsible.”

“Listen to me,” Peter said. “The state of Florida is waging a war on drunk driving, with extremely strict sentencing guidelines for vehicular manslaughter. Once I make you blow into the Breathalyzer, you’re looking at jail time. It’s a ridiculously stupid, politically motivated law. But the jury won’t see that, and neither will the judge. You can’t survive jail, Jeanine. You won’t make it.”

“But that poor man is dead. I can’t just walk away.”

“Let me tell you a little about that poor man,” Peter said. “His name is Ramón Peña. He was a hard-core meth and heroin addict who just got out of jail. We collared the repeat offender a couple of years ago, climbing out of an old lady’s window. He raped and robbed an eighty-three-year-old woman. Broke her jaw.”

Peter nodded at my surprise.

“When Ramón couldn’t find a drunk to roll, he’d bum money from tourists on Duval Street with his dog. That’s basically his obituary. Besides, it wasn’t even your fault. He was probably so high that he dove out in front of your car thinking it was a swimming pool. Ramón’s hurt enough people in his life. Don’t let his death take you out, too. You’re a decent person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now take your boyfriend’s keys and get out of here.”

“But…,” I said.

“I’m not asking you,” Peter said, putting the keys in my hand. “I’m telling you. Now go.”

Chapter 10

I WAS STARING at the keys, now miraculously back in my palm, when Peter’s police radio let out a long beep. A voice on the radio began chattering something I couldn’t decipher. Peter cocked his head, listening intently.

“What is it?” I said.

“Wait, wait,” he said, leaning back into the car, listening.

“Unbelievable,” he said when the radio voice stopped. He shook his head as he turned, his face crestfallen.

“What?” I said.

“Your boyfriend’s Camaro just came up over the radio as stolen. He told dispatch that not only did you take his car without permission, but that you’re drunk. First thing the DTs will do when they pull up is ask for all the overnight calls that came in. Next, they’ll want to see your boyfriend’s car, which for sure has blood on it. Which leaves no way out of this after all. I can’t believe this. I actually can’t let you go. I have to call this in now.”

Alex had called his car in as stolen? After what he did to me with Maureen, he actually called the cops on me? I felt incredibly weak suddenly. I felt like lying down on the asphalt next to the cop car and closing my eyes. Instead I just started to cry.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Peter said, putting his hand on my shoulder. He stared at me, his blue eyes as big as saucers. “Please don’t cry. I think we can fix this. I have an idea,” he said.

Peter made a dismal face as he slowly glanced over his shoulder at the fallen man, then back at me.

“We could get rid of Ramón’s body,” he said.

Chapter 11

“WHAT?” I said, wincing.

“I live a few blocks from here. I have a boat at my house,” Peter said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

My leg started hopping again like a Mexican jumping bean.

“But that’s nuts,” I said. “You know that, right? How nuts that is?”

Peter nodded with an almost comic enthusiasm. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” he said.

“But I mean…,” I said, hesitating.

“Look, Jeanine. It’s our only option. I’ll put him in the Camaro’s trunk. You follow me in the Camaro back to my house. I’ll take it from there. I’m working the graveyard shift. No one will even know I’m gone.”

“This is crazy,” I said, looking around.

“We’re out of time,” Peter said. “If a car comes by, I won’t have a choice. I’m trying to do you a favor, but if you’re not up to it, I completely understand. I’m not real jazzed about the possibility of going to jail myself. It’s entirely up to you.”

I stood there looking at him as he checked his watch. He blinked as he stared back, waiting calmly for my answer. Even with his big hands resting on his bulky gear-laden hips, he suddenly seemed friendly, a nice teddy bear of a guy, a drinking buddy, a big brother sticking his neck out for me, trying to do me a solid.

Had my father ever done something like this for someone? I wondered. Maybe he had, I thought.

I closed my eyes. There it was before me. The rest of my life. Jail or freedom. Right or wrong.

I thought about looking over again at the man I’d struck, but in the end I decided not to.

I opened my eyes.

In the silence, Peter clicked the cuffs together. Like the final tick of a scale coming to rest. Like the click of the bathroom door with Alex and Maureen behind it, I thought.

Then finally, I nodded.

“OK, then. Hurry up now,” Peter said. “Back up the car, pop the trunk, and follow me.”