“I didn’t say they’re looking for me. I just don’t feel like hanging around a creepy bus station half the night.”
“So you’re gonna hang around a creepier truck stop? C’mon, that don’t take a hellava lot of smarts.”
“Please, just take me there, okay? I don’t feel like talking either.”
The driver was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Look up ahead. Lots of blue lights. Either a wreck or the cops are runnin’ a sobriety check stop.”
“Turn around!”
“I can’t do a U-turn here.”
“Let me out!”
“What? In the middle of damn the road?”
Courtney opened the passenger door a few inches. “Slow down!”
“Hey! Wait a second, okay? There’s a side street up ahead about fifty yards. I can turn to the right and by-pass all that shit up there.”
“Okay.”
The driver cut through two lanes of traffic, horns blasting, drivers swearing. He made a sharp right turn and zoomed down a darker road, the staccato pockets of light from the streetlamps popping like overhead fireworks bursting. “Damn, girl. You know how to get the adrenaline pumping.”
“Thank you for doing that.”
“No problem. Long as I don’t see flashing blue lights in the next thirty seconds, we’re good to go. Why the hell are the cops lookin’ for you?”
“I don’t want to go into it.”
“All right. Probably best I don’t know. Don’t want to be called an accessory to some friggin’ crime, especially one I didn’t do.”
A few minutes passed in silence, and then the driver pulled into a large, well-lighted parking lot half filled with semi-trucks, neglected palm trees, and steel trash barrels overflowing with garbage. Beyond the rows of fuel pumps was a single-story brick building with a blue neon sign that read: Open 24 Hours. Many of the big rigs were parked with running lights on, diesels idling, drivers climbing in and out of the cabs.
Courtney watched a middle-aged woman open the passenger side door of a parked truck. She took a moment to adjust her short skirt as she stood on the top rung in spike heels, and then stepped down to the parking lot.
The taxi driver stopped near the building and turned back toward Courtney. “You sure you wanna get out here?”
“I’m sure.”
“That’ll be twelve even.”
Courtney handed him a ten and five. “Keep the change.”
“Be careful. Most of these drivers are hard working stiffs like me. Good guys. But some are real degenerates. They can use their mobility to do a lot of rough shit and never get it pinned on them ‘cause they’re here one hour and gone the next.” He looked around the three-acre lot. “Big place. I’m glad they have surveillance cameras out here. But it just makes some of them more careful.”
Courtney got out of the taxi. She paused and leaned in the front side window. “Thank you.”
“No problem. You take care of yourself. Shit, I don’t want to read that they found your body in a dumpster or some other God-awful place.”
Courtney smiled and then turned, stepping into the jumble of lights and sounds, the cranking of diesel engines as a country song blared from outdoor speakers. She walked around two truckers sipping black coffee from paper cups, steam rising in the cool night air. Their eyes met her as she walked through the odor of fuel, fry grease, bacon, and cinnamon buns, leading to the truck stop entrance drenched in the blue glow of a neon sign that read: PRIVATE SHOWERS.
18
Two hours after Dave had walked back to Gibraltar, I still sat in Jupiter’s fly bridge as the midnight hour approached. A warm breeze blew across the marina from the east, carrying the scent of the sea and night-blooming jasmine. Max slept curled up in a ball on the bench seat, an occasional dream-induced whimper escaping from her throat. I could hear a woman’s laugher coming from the Tiki Bar at the far end of the dock, the sound of Harleys cranking and pulling out of the parking lot. I was exhausted, tired but yet too wired to go down to the master berth for the delusion of real sleep. I had been sitting in the same spot for two hours thinking about the message the man with the falsetto voice had left with me. “She said one other thing … if you do have this mark on your left shoulder, you are related to her. She didn’t say how. Could you be her father?”
Courtney Burke said she was nineteen maybe close to twenty. Doing the math and trying to fit it in with the time-line of my life, I thought about the women I’d known — the women I’d taken to bed. I pictured Courtney’s face, the slight cleft in her chin, the texture of her hair, the slant of her cheekbones, and even the way she carried herself — straight, shoulders back, her strong sense of presence. Who might have resembled Courtney twenty years ago? I tried to superimpose images of former girlfriends over Courtney’s face. I struggled to match a gene pool that tonight had an opaque surface hiding the passage of time and people in my life. Most of the images were faded, blurred in a scrapbook that I rarely opened for all the reasons that they were part of the past.
I closed my eyes and attempted to run a movie trailer of my life from two decades ago through the film gate of my mind. Some of the women I’d known were there in full color, captured in slow-motion angles — the way they’d turned their heads, the way they’d smiled, their physical features still vivid. Other faces were harder to see through the lens of the past, the landscape of their appearances now more distant on the horizon, and the closer I tried to focus, the more stonewashed the faces became. It was like trying to replay a dream I’d made a mental note to remember, but couldn’t.
One picture stopped. It became a freeze-frame when I remembered her eyes.
Like the image of an old National Geographic cover.
Like Courtney’s eyes.
Her name was Andrea Hart. A woman destined for better things than what I could bring to the table after college graduation. She wanted no part of a possible “military life,” hop-scotch jumping from base-to-base if I wanted to climb the ladder while, at the same time, searching for purpose in what I would do. In retrospect, after we went our separate ways, I probably have Andrea to thank for my determination to get through Delta Force training and the Special Activities Division. The experience forever changed me — the good, bad, and ugly, scars and all.
Where was Andrea Hart tonight, twenty something years later? Could she be Courtney Burke’s mother? Could I be her father? No way. I touched the cleft in my chin and pictured her face. I stood from the captain’s chair, my back muscles in knots, a slight headache forming over my left eye, my scalp tight. “Come on, Max. Let’s go down. I need to use the computer to track a ghost from my past. If not, the image of Courtney and what she might represent, will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
She knew he was looking at her. Even from behind her, Courtney could feel his eyes on her like a breath. She was stirring cream and sugar into her black coffee when the man approached. She sat at the café counter inside the truck stop and sipped from a cup of coffee in front of her. She’d felt the man staring at her twice, both times when he’d walked past her, once heading from the restrooms, the second time when he pretended to be looking at magazines in the rack.
The man moved and sat on one of the stools beside her where he waited for the waitress to return from the kitchen. He glanced at Courtney, his face ruddy and chapped, lips cracked, eyes dancing like flames across her face. He said, “This place has the best coffee of all the truck stops in Florida.”
Courtney nodded. “It’s pretty good.”
“Ought to be real good. I hear the nightshift manager, gal’s name is Flo, puts on a fresh pot ever’ half hour.”