Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [7]
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