“Knox and Hadley household Hudson speaking may I help you please,” her son said.
“Hey, lovey, it’s Mom. Can you put Granddad on?”
“Okay, Mom. How was police school?”
“We learned about crime scenes tonight, just like on TV. I got some yellow tape from the instructor for you.”
“Cool! Are you coming home soon?”
“As soon as I can.” In her rearview window, she saw lights. She leaned over and locked the passenger and driver’s doors. This is what becoming a cop was doing to her. Nowadays, she assumed every car on the road held a potential threat. She hadn’t been that paranoid in big bad LA.
“Hey, honey, what’s up?”
She sighed. “My car’s not working. Can you call someone to give me a tow? I’m on the Schuylerville Road, about a mile from Route 117.”
“Are you okay? What happened?”
“I don’t know. All the warning lights came on and then it just sort of . . . lost power. I’m fine, I just glided off the side of the road.”
“Humph. You stay put. I’ll pop the kids into my car and we’ll come and get you.”
“No, no, no.” God, no. Her grandfather had terrible night vision. Not to mention the assorted drugs he was taking. “It’s already close to nine. It’s a school night. I don’t want Hudson and Genny up late. Call someplace in town. I’ll wait here with the car and get a ride home on the tow truck.”
They argued about it back and forth for a while, with Hadley mentally tallying up each thirty cents as it vanished into the airwaves. Eventually, she had to threaten to get out and walk toward town if he and the kids came. That shut him up, except for the grumbling. He promised to call for a tow, and was starting in on a list of things she should do to check the car, when her phone ran out of minutes, right in the middle of “. . . spark plug connectors. . . .” She was almost grateful.
She sat back, resigned to the wait, letting herself drift in the cooling dark. She tried to recall the last time she had time to sit, nowhere to go, nothing to do. She could remember times when she was pregnant with Hudson. She’d be so tired after getting home from her receptionist gig that she’d sprawl out on the sofa, not eating, not watching TV, not doing anything. Dylan would come home from whatever party he had been working and ask her how the hell she could waste an entire evening doing nothing. She always figured she was doing something. She was growing a baby. Not that he would’ve given her credit for that.
Lights coming toward her, this time. She sat up to see if it might be the tow truck. It slowed down, its high beams making her squint, then crawled past, a bass line vibrating right through her closed windows. A jacked-up, giant, my-penis-isn’t-big-enough Humvee. Or were they Hummers? She couldn’t remember. God, she had a test on car recognition next week. She was going to flunk for sure.
Red brake lights bloomed in her rearview mirror. Then white, as the SUV backed up, returning. She sat up straight again. It parked on the opposite shoulder. The back door opened, illuminating the interior, showing her a brief glimpse of four men.
Oh, shit. Why her? Why now? Why couldn’t it be some elderly couple on their way home from a revival meeting?
The guy who had exited the back sauntered across the road, the headlights outlining the fluid roll of his hips. Hadley reached inside her purse and grabbed the inactive cell phone. She held it up to her ear and began chatting animatedly with dead air. “So, you’ll never believe this, honey, but there’s an SUV stopped right across the road from me. A young man’s gotten out. I think he wants to help me. No, no, I’ll just let him know you’re almost here.”
He was a young man, maybe Flynn’s age, but pimped out in an exaggerated hip-hop style that would have worked a lot better if he had been seventeen. And black. And somewhere else besides the cow country outside Millers Kill. He bent down and smiled at her through the window, and she saw he was Latino. He had three studs spaced along his upper lip, and for a second Hadley forgot to be scared, thinking, How the hell do you eat with that?
“Having car trouble?” His voice sounded flat and faintly accented through the glass.
“I’m fine,” she said loudly. “I’m on the phone with my husband, and he’s headed over here now.” She smiled like an idiot.
“Pop the hood, I’ll take a look.”
“No, no, that’s fine—” He strolled to the front of her decrepit car. Her flashers cycled him from light, to dark, to light again.
“Open the hood!” He smiled while he shouted. It reminded her of Dylan, the way he’d yell, “What’s your problem? We’re having fun, goddammit!”
She put on her best hapless female look and shrugged. He just smiled again, fished something long and flat out of his commodious cargo pocket, and leaned against the hood. The car dipped. Hadley heard a metallic clunk and the hood flew up, hiding Stud Boy, who, for all she knew, was stripping down her engine.
For the first time since she had been issued her service piece, she wished she had her gun. For two months, it had been too heavy, too alien, too intimidating. Now she wished she could pull it out from the lockbox under her passenger seat and rap on her window and see the look on this guy’s face. Not, despite her firing instructor’s gung-ho pep talks about “yer best friend,” that she’d ever use it.
But, oh, she wished she had it now. Then maybe she wouldn’t feel so scared.
Stud Boy ambled back to her door without bothering to replace the hood. “I hate to tell you, but it looks bad. Your alternator belt’s broke.”
She had no idea if he was bullshitting her or not.
“C’mon, we’ll take you where you’re going. Pretty girl like you shouldn’t be all alone out here.” His smile made her flesh crawl.
She held up the useless cell phone. “Thanks, but my husband’s already on his way.”
He rapped her window with a silver ring in the shape of a skull. He held it out, as if she ought to admire it. He had letters printed over each of his knuckles. Jailhouse tats, inked in with a sharpened pen and a homemade hammer. Oh, shit. His smile grew broader. “If you have a husband, how come you don’t have no ring?” His fingers slid down, out of sight, and she heard the click-click of the door as he tried the lock.
She dropped the little-wife routine. Hardened her voice. “I’m not going with you. There’s a tow truck on the way . . . and the man I live with knows where I am.” She considered telling him she was a cop, but with nothing to back that up, she figured it would just make her look more scared and desperate.
He kept smiling. He released her door handle and let his fingers glide over the window, creating shapes. She realized he was miming touching her and her stomach flipped over with a nauseated lurch. With his other hand, he beckoned to the Hummer. Across the road, doors swung open and men got out.
Oh, shit, she thought. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
“We don’t have to take you anywhere,” Stud Boy said. “You can just hang out with us in our truck.” A short, broad Latino pressed up against her door next to Stud Boy. He had a nervous ferret face that made him look like Peter Lorre.
Click-click. Click-click. He was trying the rear door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the two others, dark shapes on the passenger side.
Click-click.
“You must be getting cold, stuck out here,” Stud Boy said cheerfully. “You come with us. We’ll let you warm up.” One of the ones on the opposite side of the car said something, and they all laughed.
“You like to party?” Stud Boy asked. “We’ll have a party. We’ll make you feel real good.” He said something over the roof that she couldn’t make out, and one of the shadowy figures detached himself from her car and meandered across the road. Back to their SUV. He flung open the driver’s door and reached under the dash. Their rear hatch popped open. She thought about the handy do-it-yourself hood opener Stud Boy had produced from his pocket and knew, with the horrible sinking certainty of someone whose luck always ran bad, that the one across the road was going to
pull a jimmy strip out of the back of that truck, and she was going to be screwed. In every sense of the word.
She eased her key ring out of the ignition and folded her right hand around it, letting the keys jut up between her fingers. If she pretended to play along and acted scared and helpless—God knew, that wasn’t going to take much effort—she figured she’d have one good chance to catch Stud Boy off guard. Keys in his throat, knee in his balls, then the flat of her foot to his kneecap with her weight behind it. If she could put him down—put him down hard so he wasn’t getting back up again—the others might back off. She swallowed. Laid her hand on her door rest.
In her rearview mirror, she saw the flash of red and whites.
Oh, God, thank you, God, thank you!
The cruiser rolled in tight behind her vehicle, flooding her interior with the brilliant white light of the kliegs. She couldn’t tell if it was a state trooper or the MKPD, but whoever it was, she prayed he was big, hairy, and heavily armed. Stud Boy and his ferret friend stepped away from her window, and the guy on the far side vanished toward the front of her car. A moment later, her hood thunked into place.
Through the glass, she heard the crunch of boots on gravel. “What’s going on here?” a man said, his voice hard with suspicion and authority. She could see him outlined in her rearview mirror, tall, big, one hand resting on the butt of his service weapon.
Stud Boy raised his hands placatingly. “Nada, nada. We were just stopping to see if the lady needed any help.”
“Yeah? Well, she’s got help now. Clear off.”
The smaller, weaselly guy scuttled across the road, but Stud Boy hesitated.
“Either you’re in your vehicle, or you’re facedown in the dirt with my boot in your back. Your choice. You got ten seconds.”
Stud Boy glanced at the guy who was still hovering just out of reach at the front of her car, then gestured toward the Hummer. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said, smiling. His lip piercings glittered in the cruiser’s cold white light. He glanced down at Hadley. “Later, pretty girl.”
She wrenched her eyes from his and focused on her hands. Holding her keys. Her knuckles were white. She heard the thudding of overengineered doors, and then the Hummer roared to life and, in a spatter of gravel, pulled into the road and vanished.
The boots crunched toward her. The officer squatted down. “Hey,” Kevin Flynn said. “Are you all right?”
II
“Your granddad called the station.” They were sitting in Flynn’s cruiser with the heater on high. Flynn had complained of the cold when he snapped it on, but she knew it was because she was shaking. She couldn’t seem to stop. He had kept up a steady flow of chatter, walking her to the cruiser, grabbing her notebook and her criminal justice text, toting the two bags of groceries she had picked up at the Sam’s Club down in Albany. It was almost like the way she’d hear him rattling on at the station, except he kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Taking her emotional temperature.
“Of course, dispatch isn’t manned, most nights. Womanned? I bet Harlene would like womanned. Anyway, his call shot off to the Glens Falls board, and they gave me a squawk, and here I am.”
“Thank you.” She sounded like Hudson, when she made him thank his little sister. She took a deep breath—it was getting easier the longer she sat in the self-contained world that was the squad car—and tried again. “I mean it. Thank you. They . . . I was . . .” She shook her head.
His hand touched her shoulder, so tentatively she might have imagined it. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “And you don’t have to thank me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t—I just sat there. Like a victim. Like a babysitter in a horror movie.”
“Naw. They scream and run around a lot.”
She looked at him.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I’m used to taking shit from men, you know? They trash-talk at me, and I flip it right back to them. But these guys . . . I didn’t even tell them I was a cop. You know why? Because I’m not. I’m just a woman who gets dressed up in a costume five days a week and pretends to be one.” She leaned forward, bracing her arms on her knees, and his hand fell away instantly. “I am such a failure at this. A failure and a fake.”
“What, because you didn’t get out of your car and mix it up with four bad dudes? That’s just being smart. Hell, if it’d been me in that car with no weapon and no radio, I would’ve done just what you did. Stay put and keep my mouth shut.”
She shook her head again. “You don’t need a gun. You have that thing, you know, that cop thing going on. With the hard voice and the take-no-shit attitude.” She looked at him again. Eyeing his frame. “You looked huge. I mean, you’re tall, but you’re not—” She curled her fists and shook her arms in an iron-man pose.
He grinned. “It’s a trick I learned from Lyle MacAuley. He leaves his bomber jacket unzipped and kind of spreads his arms out. Makes him look twice as wide as he really is.”
She let her mind wrap around that one. “There are tricks to it? As in, performing?”
He twisted in his seat so he could face her. “Sure. Like what you were just talking about. The voice? And the attitude? I just copy the chief. Nobody gives him shit.” He paused. “Well, nobody except for Reverend Fergusson.” He smiled a little. “Look, when I started at the MKPD, I felt exactly the same way you do now. It was, like, the day after I turned twenty-one. I was sworn in before I’d had my first legal drink. And I was even skinnier than I am now, if you can believe that.” He held his arms open, inviting her to gaze upon his skeletal thinness. She didn’t see it. He was lean, all right, but in a good way, the way of a healthy young man who hasn’t quite finished fleshing out.
“I felt like somebody’s little brother, getting to tag along with the big boys. I kept waiting for . . . I dunno, some TV moment, when I would suddenly stop being Skinny Flynnie and start being bad-ass Officer Flynn.”
“Skinny Flynnie?”
He blushed. “That’s what they called me in high school.”
“Hah. They called me—” She stopped. “Never mind. High school sucks.”
“Oh, yeah.” He reached out to turn the blower down a few notches, and the way his wrist bones poked out of his shirt cuff did make him look like a teenaged boy. “Anyway, I was working this case last year, interviewing a witness, and she lied to me. She and her husband. I had to go back with the dep and reinterview her. I was really pissed off, thinking about how she’d played me, but then, it suddenly struck me; it was my own fault. Because up here”—he tapped his temple—“I was still Skinny Flynnie. I knew the rules and regs, I had learned the tricks, but I didn’t believe.”
“Believe.” This was starting to sound very California. “In what, yourself?”
He shook his head. “In the power of the suit.”
“Okay, you’ve lost me.”
“You know that movie where the dad puts on the Santa suit and he turns into Kris Kringle?”
“The Santa Clause? Oh, yeah. I know it.” Hudson and Genny had watched it approximately eight hundred times last December.
“Okay. All this”—he waved his arm around, taking in the computer and the mic and the racked and locked shotgun and his hat balanced on the dashboard—“is the suit. You put on the suit, and you become The Man.”
She thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve got the uniform and all that, and I still feel like a fraud.”
“Just give it time.”
Her mouth crooked up. Words of wisdom from a—“Flynn,” she said, “how old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
From a kid who was eight years younger than her. She curled into the seat. “I think you may have more time than I do.”
Spinning yellow lights appeared on the road ahead of them, resolving into a tow truck. She stirred, ready to get up, but Flynn’s hand was in the way. “Gimme your key,” he said. “I’ll take ca
re of it.”
She stripped the key off her ring and dropped it onto his open palm. She watched through the windshield as he spoke with the tow truck operator, handed over the key, and shook the man’s hand. Weird. Considering what almost happened with the freaks in the Hummer, she should still be jangling, jumpy, coked up. Instead, she felt as relaxed and boneless as she did in the shampoo girl’s chair at the salon.
Letting someone else take care of her.
Huh.
Kevin climbed back into the cruiser and tossed his hat back on the dash. “All set.” He turned off his light bar and shifted into gear. “He’s taking it to Ron Tucker’s garage. Best mechanic in town. He’ll do you right.” He pulled onto the road. She let the rolling fields and farms slip past them, almost invisible in the darkness.
“Flynn.” The question popped into her head from nowhere. “Did you run the plates on those guys?”
He grinned.
“What?”
“There you go. That’s thinking like a cop.”
“Did you?”
“Of course I did. When I pulled in behind you. The truck’s registered to Josefina Feliciano, DOB 7-25-61, POR Brooklyn, New York. Three points down for passing a school bus, no record.”
She shook her head. “Did you see the guy who was hassling me? With three studs in his upper lip? He looked like he escaped from an S and M convention.”
“Maybe Ms. Feliciano likes to hang out with rough trade.”
“You sure the vehicle wasn’t stolen?”
“It hasn’t been reported. Maybe one of them was Feliciano’s son?”
“God. Can you imagine? If my son ever gets anything other than his earlobe pierced—” She pictured the pumped-up SUV and the young men in their city clothes. “What were they doing up here, anyway? It’s a little far for a ride in the country. And it’s too early for people coming up to do Lake George.”
“Hikers? White rafting? Bird-watchers?”
She opened her mouth to shoot him down, then noticed his grin.
“Mexicans and Jamaicans control the pot trade up through the North Country,” he said. “Mexicans, for the most part. They bring it up out of the Caribbean and Central America, funnel it through New York City, and distribute it up here.”