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 G.o.d.
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, G.o.d, 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, bada.s.s 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 s.e.x 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 gla.s.s.