Going Too Far(12)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"I don’t think you were worried about the danger to me," I said. "I think you wanted me to stay in the car because you were embarrassed to be seen with me in front of the suspects."

He looked up from his forms at me. Then he peered through the metal grate at the suspects. Demetrius was still moaning. Zeke snarled, "What’re you looking at?"

"You have the right to remain silent," Officer After told Zeke. He looked at me. "I don’t know what you mean. Why would I be embarrassed to be seen with you?"

He asked so earnestly that I felt like I had to explain the obvious. "My hair, and the way I dress."

"You dress like you’re Japanese," he said.

"The clueless Japanese who work at the car factory and wear those weird plastic sandals? Thanks."

"No, the cute Japanese girls you see at the mall in Birmingham."

He looked down at his forms, pen poised. But he didn’t write anything. That blush crept up from his neck and across his cheeks. He had just realized he’d called me cute.

"I mean, the Japanese girls," he said, still looking down. "You know how you dress. With your T-shirt and your jacket and your jeans and your shoes and your weird socks and your hairpins and your blue hair."

He was digging himself a deeper hole. Now he had told me he’d noticed every detail of what I looked like. Maybe that was part of his police training, so he could provide an accurate description of me when I escaped. Although blue hair probably would be sufficient to get me picked up.

Or maybe he was attracted to me.

I watched as he drew an X on the form and brusquely flipped to another page. I honestly didn’t know what to think anymore. Usually I was very good at reading people. T didn’t get emotionally involved. When you were an outsider looking in, it was easy to see clearly. This guy I couldn’t read.

"You dress like a manga character," he said.

Well, that explained everything. "Your kids read manga?" He probably had a daughter into manga, and I reminded him of his daughter. He had blushed because he thought I’d gotten the wrong idea. And he was right.

Now he looked up at me and held his hands out flat, pen between two fingers. "What kids?"

I noticed his left hand was bare. "They don’t let you wear your wedding ring on the job?"

He turned his big hand over and looked at it. "What wedding ring? I’m not married."

Zeke told me I could come to his prison for a conjugal visit any time I wanted. He would tie me down. My heart sped up like he really was tying me down with his words.

Bitch encircled one of my wrists, c**k held the other, and spread was snaking around my left ankle.

I dumped my notebook out of my lap and tried the door handle. Locked. "Shit." I pounded the window. "Let me out, God damn it!"

I heard the lock slide open. Then I tried the handle again, bailed out onto the grassy shoulder, and jogged toward the Caddy, away from the heh heh heh of Zeke.

Beyond the pool of headlights and the sweep of blue lights, the night was black. The highway was empty. Officer Leroy bent over in the Caddy, peering under the seats. I guess it was because he knew my dad (even if he didn’t like my dad), but I thought he would protect me from the suspects. And Officer After. Funny how a near-stranger’s weighty ass provided me comfort.

But I couldn’t really feel comfortable while a low hum vibrated through me. I looked around nervously until I realized it was Officer Leroy’s car engine on idle.

Officer After lit a cigarette behind his door, out of the wind. Then he tossed the pack into the car, closed the door, and walked toward me. He settled next to me, half sitting on the bumper of the Caddy.

I scooted a little farther away from him. "You promised me you wouldn’t lock me in the car."

He exhaled smoke. "I didn’t lock you in before. I locked it when I got back in. I forgot. Habit."

"Still. Your idea of punishing me is to stand me up in a corner and let lecherous men call me names."

"I hadn’t thought about it like that. But it’s fitting, in a way." He gestured with the cigarette, trailing smoke and a spot of fire. "It’s a warning about the kind of people you’ll meet if you keep doing pot after Eric is found facedown, dead in a ditch in a few years, and your ready supply runs out. The suspect who was impolite to you at the city jail last week is waiting to be transferred to the state pen on narcotics charges. And we’re going to find something good in here." He patted the trunk of the Caddy. "We catch a lot of folks running drugs from Florida through here to Birmingham. They assume they’re safe if they’re off the interstate. They’re wrong."

"I hate to tell you this," I said, "but drug runners don’t stash their pot in the trunk like a suitcase or a spare tire."

"Yes, they do. There’s no way to hide it anyway once we get the dog out here. They know that. They just hope this won’t be the time they get caught. But they’re high themselves, and they have poor judgment. They don’t understand they could greatly reduce their chances of getting caught by driving the speed limit. And by choosing a vehicle other than a stolen 1987 Cadillac Eldorado." He tapped ash onto the asphalt and took another drag. Exhaling, he said, "It’s cold out here. Come back to the car. We’ll leave as soon as Leroy finishes his search."

"I’ll come back to the car after you put that out. I don’t want to breathe your secondhand smoke. Talk about a dangerous job."

He laughed shortly. "Pot’s a lot more carcinogenic than cigarettes."

"And if I were a complete pothead, which I’m not, I still wouldn’t be smoking the equivalent of a pack a day."

"I don’t smoke that much, either."

True. This was the first cigarette he’d smoked in the nearly eight hours I’d spent with him on his shift. His habit couldn’t have been too intense.

"You will, though," I said. "It’s addictive. It’s like trapping yourself."

Eyeing me, he took an especially long drag. Like he was flaunting it, so there. This reaction seemed immature of him. I wondered how old he was, since he didn’t have a wife and kids. The short hair, big muscles, and official uniform made him seem older than he probably was. The way he moved and spoke with such confidence.

He flicked away the cigarette butt (littering wasn’t a crime suddenly?) and nodded toward the car. I hauled open my heavy door emblazoned with the city seal and the police department motto, To Protect and Serve, and sat down on the vinyl. The radio blasted Mariah Carey’s "Touch My Body."

Shouting over the music, Zeke gave me a few details about how he was going to rape me.