Seven
1
There was a time he couldn’t wait to pull a night shift like this. He was so young and night shifts were just so damned interesting. Night was when everything happened.
But then the birthdays started adding up, thirty and then the unthinkable thirty-five, and night shifts didn’t sound so interesting anymore.
For one thing, Sam Bowers knew, he had a hard time staying awake. Even when he was pouring coffee down all the time. For another, the night was a lot more dangerous than when he’d started back on the force. Mostly, this was because of drugs. Most people thought of the cities as the only place where there was a big problem. But drugs had come to rural America in a big way. Drugs made the existing criminal population a lot more dangerous. And drugs created their own class of criminals, dealers and pushers. These guys, blinded by greed, were perfectly willing to kill anybody who stood in their way. Anybody. Not a month went by without somebody being found dead in a grassy ditch beside some gravel county road. Drug deal gone bad. Always.
And one other thing about the night shift: it got in the way of your love life.
Here he’d been having a great time with Amy, the woman he loved, the woman he wanted to marry, the woman he hoped would bear his children; here he was having a great time with Amy, and his phone goes off, and fifteen minutes later he’s manning a patrol car, the chill autumn rain cutting down knifelike, the roads slick and hazardous, the number of cars on the road very heavy, this being Friday night and all.
Right now, he sat in the shadow of a large oak tree, watching a section of the main drag. This was about a mile from the highway, where the teenagers really liked to take their cars flat out. He figured if he could inhibit them a little bit right here, maybe they wouldn’t be so reckless when they hit the highway. A good friend of his had died during an illegal drag race. The kid was sixteen.
So Sam Bowers sat in his car and watched the street and listened to the rain thrum on the metal roof of the car, sounding vaguely like steel drums.
And thought about Amy.
That’s all he’d been doing since he’d fallen in love with her a year and a half ago.
Thought about Amy.
2
Amy did the electric slide, the tush-push, and the macarena.
She danced with old men, young men, bald men, hairy men, smiling men, frowning men, men who hit on her, men who seemed charmed by her not at all.
In the middle of it all, Sally Frazier, looking slightly disheveled but beamingly happy, rushed up to her and said, “Guess what he did out in the car?”
“What?”
“Put his hand inside my bra.”
Unfortunately, Sally, who had a tendency to speak very loudly, had attracted the attention of two older ladies who did not seem especially pleased with her good fortune.
“I just came in here to use the ladies’,” Sally gushed, paying no attention to the disapproving women. “I’ll let you know what else happens.”
Then she was off.
Amy tried a few more dances but then finally admitted the truth: the one and only reason she’d come out here was to see Sam. And Sam was gone.
And so, a few minutes later, Amy was gone, too.
3
Helen had dozed off reading one of her old Faith Baldwin novels. She had a sweet tooth as far as her reading went. She loved romances of the old-fashioned kind. And hated the romances today, where the heroines were little more than sluts and the men were thugs.
The scream woke her.
She wasn’t sure it was a scream. Might even have been part of a nightmare she had. She’d had a run of nightmares lately, inexplicably.
But somehow the echoes of the scream lay on the silence that filled the aerie.
A scream. Yes. Definitely.
And a woman screaming?
A woman? What would a woman be doing— Then she had a terrible thought: Is Darcy here?
She collected herself.
David. Her brother. He’d brought in a woman while she was asleep. And for some reason, the woman was screaming.
My God, she thought. He’s going to ruin my plans yet. A year at the outside, Dr. Reinhardt, the oncologist, had told her secretly. Maximum.
But what good would a vacated seat do her if it had been left in scandal?
Who was screaming and why?
She got up from the chair, pulled her robe around her, and started quickly down the hall.
Damn David, anyway. She’d been taking care of him all his life. Now it was his turn to take care of her. The least he could do was die and leave her his Senate seat. It was her turn for the spotlight, her turn.
He sat there on the edge of the chair with his head in his hands and made sickly whimpering noises. He wasn’t exactly crying but he wasn’t exactly not crying, either.
Every few moments, he’d looked over at Darcy on the floor. She’d made him very angry — said he was never going to get the photos back and that she was going to tell her father what he’d done to her — and he’d shoved her.
A blind moment of fear and panic.
Saw it all going down the tank.
Respected Senator in Tryst with Underage Girl.
What was it that Lyndon Johnson had once said? “The two worst things that can happen to a politician are to wake up with a live boy or a dead girl.”
Well, Darcy was dead, no doubt about it. He’d tried all her pulse points, and nothing. She’d cracked her head on the edge of the TV when he’d shoved her backward.
A complete accident.
A harmless little shove...
And now this.
This.
“My God,” Helen said, “what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know,” her brother said, still sitting on the edge of the chair. “She got hurt.”
“Obviously she got hurt, you stupid bastard. But that doesn’t tell me what happened.”
“I guess I pushed her.”
“You guess?”
“Well, I pushed her. Just a little. Not enough to hurt her. She just fell backward and hit the edge of the TV set. The edge is pretty sharp and...”
He was babbling now.
Worthless. One worthless son of a bitch, her brother David.
As she looked at the girl lying on the floor of the living room, Helen realized that she’d always assumed her brother would do something like this. Couldn’t leave the little girls alone, could he? No matter how many times he’d almost been burned, he’d always gone back and found another one...
She said nothing. Scuffed across the room in her slippers and knelt by the dead girl, knees cracking as she knelt.
Looked her over.
“Did you touch her after she fell over?”
“What?” He sounded groggy, drugged.
“I said did you touch her?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t touch her anymore, you understand me? The police lab’ll be looking for all kinds of evidence.”
She stood up and went over to him and cracked him hard across the face.
“You stupid bastard.”
“I didn’t mean to knock her over.”
“You didn’t mean, you didn’t mean. You’ve been telling me that all your life and I’m sick of hearing it. You didn’t mean. You killed her.”
“I didn’t mean—”
He stopped himself. Then smiled. “God, I almost said it again, didn’t I?” Then, in an almost imploring tone, he said: “What’re we going to do, Helen? What’re we going to do?”
By this time, Helen was far across the room at the dry bar, pouring several inches of scotch into a glass.
What she wanted to do was stand here and scream names at him. God knew, that’s what he had coming.