“Romance at the scene of the crime, huh?” Morley said with a nod. “That’s how it happens with cops. Occupational hazard. You slap the cuffs on somebody one night at the beach, and the next thing you know you’re letting them go and giving them a diamond ring.”
I shot a look over at the police chief. For the second time, I got the impression that he was prying, trying to rattle me in some strange way. But his eyes were on the road. There was no trace of irony or accusation.
Still, I held my breath as the words slap the cuffs on somebody one night at the beach kept looping through my mind. Was the phrasing just coincidental, or did he actually know my secret?
The inside of the police SUV suddenly seemed hot, airless. Drops of sweat started to bead on my neck and underarms, along my lower back. I tried to zip down the electric window. Nothing happened. Morley must have had the child lock on.
Who was Morley really, anyway? I wondered dizzily. Who was he to Peter? Just a boss? Or was he a friend? An enemy like Elena? An accomplice?
We suddenly slowed and stopped. I looked out the window. We were in front of my house now.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, getting out.
“Any time, Jeanine,” Morley said. “Sorry we had to meet under such bad circumstances. Remember, anything at all you can think of that might help us understand why Peter and Elena were shot, don’t hesitate to call. Day or night.”
“Will do,” I said.
The cool trade breezes that make Key West bearable felt ice-cold as I resisted running to my front door. Once inside, I locked the door behind me and went to the living room window.
Morley was still sitting there, idling in the street in front of my driveway. After a gut-churning three or four minutes, he slowly pulled out. I’d never been so relieved in my life.
I continued to stand there for the next few minutes, scanning out the window up and down the street. I looked out across our sandy little lane at the palm fronds waving in the wind for another five minutes before I turned to go.
I stopped as something inched into my peripheral vision. Outside the window down on the corner of the block, Morley’s PD Bronco slowed and stopped.
My face began to tingle, pins and needles in my cheeks, my lips.
What the hell was this?! Morley was watching the house now? Watching me?
I backed away from the window in disbelief, fighting for breath. My back hit a chair, and I collapsed onto the Mexican tile.
Chapter 28
IT WAS SUNSET when the sound of seagulls woke me from the living room couch. Two of them were fighting over something along the backyard seawall. I watched them with horrific fascination as they cawed and hacked at each other with their beaks.
I gulped down a glass of water at the sink. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I was opening the fridge when I heard a car and the crunch of wheels in our crushed-shell driveway.
I ran to the living room window in a full-blown panic. Morley’s black-and-white Bronco was gone, but instead, there was a police cruiser pulling into the driveway.
The cruiser’s passenger door opened, and I almost passed out.
The cruiser backed out of the driveway as Peter, his left arm stiff, walked to the door.
Peter?
Why was he here? Wasn’t he supposed to be in a frigging hospital bed!? Why the hell would they let him come home so soon? He’d been shot!
I backed away from the window, swallowing hard as his keys jingled at the door.
The lock clicked open as the knob turned.
Peter stopped like a kid playing freeze tag when he spotted me from the doorway.
I was frozen as well. Everything was strange, slightly off kilter. Even the light was wrong. It didn’t feel like sunset. It felt like the morning.
Peter closed the door behind him. Then his keys dropped from his hand as his blue eyes beaded with tears. He squatted and then collapsed onto the front hall tile.
“Those assholes at the hospital told me to stay, but no way,” he said, squinting up at the ceiling. “Soon as I woke up, I pulled that shit out of my arm and left. Fuck them and fuck those assholes who tried to kill me. I made it. I win. They lose. I’m home, Jeanine.”
I thought about everything then. All the strange things I’d seen. Everything Peter had been keeping from me. I knew that what Peter was up to probably wasn’t by the book, but I also knew that whatever it was, there had to be a good reason behind it.
Maybe he was in over his head, I thought suddenly. He did the finances. Maybe he’d made a bad investment and was trying to make up for it by doing something not exactly legal. Couldn’t his nocturnal activity be his way of trying to protect us?
After all, I, of all people, knew he wasn’t exactly a by-the-book sort of guy. Peter was a risk taker. He’d certainly taken a risk on me. If I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have married him, right?
A pang of love and sympathy for him went through me then. I didn’t want him to go to work ever again. I wanted him to stay here in our house, where it was safe. To stay here in our sanctuary, where bad things were kept away and all mistakes were forgotten.
I walked over and sat down beside him. I held his hand as he buried his face in my hair and cried.
“I was so afraid, Peter,” I said. “I thought I lost you.”
Chapter 29
ELENA’S WAKE was the following evening at the Dean-Lopez Funeral Home on Simonton Street. Peter and I were instantly swamped by the block-long line of dress-uniformed law enforcement on the sidewalk.
Peter, too, was wearing his crisply ironed uniform, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his dress blue coat draped over his wounded shoulder like a cape. I walked beside him in my somber black dress, holding on to his good arm.
Hundreds of hands patted Peter softly on the back as we walked through the parted crowd.
“We’ll catch those bastards, man,” a bald state trooper with a twirly circus-strongman mustache said.
“Hang in there, buddy,” said a short black female cop in a Marathon PD uniform.
Down the other side of the block, a crowd of saddened black people were also filing into the funeral home. I spotted young black boys in starched white shirts and bow ties, young girls in what looked like Communion dresses. There was even a Creole band playing for the mourners from the flatbed of a parked pickup.
They were there for the store clerk who had been killed, a fifty-three-year-old Haitian immigrant by the name of Paul Phillip Baptiste, who was being waked tonight as well. It seemed like the entire island had turned out.
Peter nodded with solemn concern as the gathered mourners embraced him and gave him their condolences.
“I couldn’t get through this without you at my side, Mermaid,” Peter whispered to me as we finally entered the funeral home.
I gave his hand a squeeze. “Where else would I be, Peter?” I said as we waited in line to sign the viewing room book.
Yesterday had actually been wonderful. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent so much unbroken time together. We ate in, and when we weren’t in bed, we were watching the sunset. A couple of times it seemed as if he wanted to tell me what was going on, but then he changed his mind and the subject. I didn’t press him. I don’t think I wanted to know. I just wanted us to be together. The world be damned.
Besides, I knew he would tell me everything eventually. We were best friends.
There was one odd moment this morning. As I returned to the kitchen after drinking my morning coffee in the yard, Peter was standing with his back to me, speaking softly on the phone. I stopped, frozen in the doorway, when he suddenly raised his voice.