Sharon ran downstairs, let herself out the side door, and knelt by Joyce's body. When she saw she was still breathing, she rushed inside and called for an ambulance.
It wasn't until she heard the first wail of the siren that she realized she was still completely nude, and ran inside to put on her clothes.
As chance would have it, the detectives who took Sharon home in the unmarked police car that night were the same two who had arrested her more than a year ago for complicity in the robbery of the jewelry store. And just as had been the case on that terrible, long-ago night, the older heavyset detective did all the talking while his younger, sandy-haired partner said nothing at all.
"It's all almost too good to be true," Sharon said as they neared her apartment house. She was sitting in the front seat between them, amused by the way both men took the opportunity to glance surreptitiously at her legs every time the car passed under a street light. "I'm afraid I'll wake up and find out it was all just a wonderful dream."
"It's no dream, Miss," the heavyset detective said. "A dying declaration will stand up anywhere, anytime."
"But she wasn't really dying."
"No, she wasn't. But she thought she was, and that makes it exactly the same thing." He paused. "She wanted to clear the slate."
"When she finds out she's going to be all right, she may change her mind."
"Let her. What counts is what she said when she thought she was going to die." He glanced down at her legs again, and took a deep breath. "When she cleared you of having anything to do with that robbery, she cleared you for keeps. All the officials involved in what happened to you a year ago will do everything in their power to make it up to you. Including my partner here and me. That means we'll go to bat with the governor. Offhand, I'd lay ten to one that you'll have a full pardon inside of two weeks."
"That's wonderful," Sharon said. "Just wonderful." She felt so warm toward these two big men that she shifted her position slightly so that her skirt rode up above her pussy. The next time the car passed under a street light, they'd see more than they expected to.
"As for Mark Haley," the detective said, "he got just about what he asked for. Somebody ought've told him Joyce Thornton knew more judo than he'd ever learn. But no, he had to go over there and pull a gun on her and tell her she had ten minutes to come up with the money he figured she'd beat him out of on that jewelry heist." He looked down at Sharon's legs again, and suddenly the car swerved so far to the right that it almost struck a car parked at the curb.
"What's wrong?" Sharon asked innocently, scooting down a little further in the seat so that her skirt would ride up even higher.
"Uh… nothing," the detective said.
"And she actually took the gun away from him?" Sharon said.
"She sure did," the detective said, stealing another look from the corner of his eye. "And that was all for Mr. Mark Haley. How long he'd have stayed in that wall if you hadn't got your brainstorm is anybody's guess. We pulled one out of a wall in the North End the other day that'd been there almost a hundred years."
"That's my building, there on the right," Sharon said, pointing.
Sharon and Vickie didn't finish making love until almost daybreak. When at last they composed themselves for sleep – nude, their heads between each other's legs, the way they always slept – Sharon knew that no luckier girl had ever been born. She had her youth and her beauty and her modeling career and, best of all, she had her good name back again.
No, that was wrong, she corrected herself as she burrowed her head further between the sleepy little silver-blonde's scented legs. No. Best of all she had Vickie.
She planted a long soft kiss on Vickie's cunt, rested her cheek against the satiny warmth of her thigh and, at peace with the world and herself, drifted off to deep.