When my mom saw me, she opened her mouth. Her eyes darted to my dad behind the counter. She closed her mouth and watched me with a tortured expression as I passed. I knew my dad had coached her: When Meg comes in, don't you go over there and hug on her like she won a beauty contest.
Without a word to anyone, I stacked dishes into the washer, tied on my apron, and took customers' orders. I waitressed and cooked, cleaning each little mess before my dad could point it out to me. If I worked fast enough, adrenaline put up a wall between me and my throbbing headache.
T was chopping sausage and reliving my jail time, wishing I knew exactly where Officer After had put his hands as he picked me up off the floor so I could turn the tables and get him in trouble with the Powers That Be, when my dad grumbled from the grill, "You've got a lot of nerve to come back here."
His beard hid his chin, so I couldn't tell anything from the set of his jaw. But his blue eyes snapped at the eggs on the grill. This was new territory. He might have washed his hands of me, but he'd never suggested I couldn't come home. Until now.
Normally the implied threat would have scared me silent. But Officer After had shocked the life out of me quite a few times over the course of the night, and I'd had enough. I banged the knife down on the cutting board beside the sausage. "Oh, you're kicking me out of the 'house'?" I made finger quotes. "And you're 'firing' me?" My parents made me work, but they didn't pay me. I reminded them of this whenever I got in trouble. "Good luck getting Bonita to cover my shift. She keeps her grandkids in the mornings."
He glanced up to make sure my mom was on the other end of the kitchen, out of earshot. Then he hissed, "I don't give a shit what your mother says. I'm tired of you playing her like a piano. I'm taking her to Graceland like we planned."
"You—" I stopped short. There was no point in whispering. You 're sending me to juvy? He would say I'd sent myself. Just then my mother dropped a baking pan with a clang like the jail cell door closing. The blood drained from my face and pooled around my feet. My heart sped up, pumping nothing. But I would not let my dad see me faint over this. I leaned farther forward over the counter and chopped more sausage, wondering vaguely where the knife would cut me when I lost consciousness.
My dad growled at me, " You are going to spend your spring break pulling night shift with that cop After, like the DA said on the phone. And then you're going to work morning shift here. If you have the energy to get yourself arrested in the eight hours you have left in the day..." Expertly he slid his spatula under the eggs and flipped them to cook on the other side without breaking the yolks. "Vaya con Dios. "
I watched the eggs sizzling on the grill, the yolks slowly growing darker. "What do you mean, I'm pulling night shift with After? I thought I might be on the fire truck or the ambulance."
"That's not what the DA said." My dad turned to me for the first time, blue eyes hot with fury. "You think you've got some more to learn riding in the ambulance?"
"Been there, done that," I sang, using the knife to scrape the sausage from the cutting board into a bowl. I pretended to put together the rest of the hash brown casserole with busy efficiency like I was kicking ass on Iron Chef But I was thinking of Officer After, his dark eyes sliding to my cle**age, his phantom hands on my helpless body. Now that I knew about my punishment, I rather liked the idea of taunting him with my sexy if by some chance we happened to be paired together. Screw his wife.
But if he'd not only masterminded the demise of my spring break but also chosen me to spend it with, he was back in control. Maybe he even intended to have his way with me. Stranger things had happened. More horrible things.
And I would deserve it.
*
"You stay in the vehicle," Officer After commanded me. "I may have to draw my weapon."
I frowned across the front seat at him. I had thought he might make me sit in the backseat tonight. Glory be, I had graduated to the front. And he didn't have a military haircut anymore. In the week since our unfortunate meeting, it had filled out into an almost normal haircut. He no longer looked like he'd just gotten back from Iraq.
Then I glanced at the rusty Caddy ahead of us on the shoulder of the highway, awash in broad strokes of blue from the police car lights. "Your weapon? Do you mean your gun? Why? They were just speeding."
"You haven't seen what I've seen. Yet." He used the controls in his door to raise my window, which I'd kept down all night despite the cold.
"Part of my assignment is to go with you everywhere and find out what your job is really like. I can't do that from the car."
"I think there's a rule that when my weapon comes out, you stay in the vehicle."
"No rule like that was specified by the Powers That Be."
He sighed through his nose. "If you get wounded, I'm pretty sure I'll be reassigned to jail guard duty." "I won't get wounded."
"I'm not going to argue with you. Do what I say." He opened the door.
"Wait a minute," I said, putting one hand on his bare forearm.
He looked down at my hand. Don't touch me while I'm in uniform. So much for his wanting to have his way with me.
I snatched my hand away. "Sorry. Reflex. But look, you can't leave me locked in your car. What if you get shot and I'm stuck in here?"
I didn't believe he'd get shot. I didn't believe anyone would get shot. Not considering how we'd spent tonight's patrol. After all his tough talk when he arrested me about how he wanted me to see something, this is what I had seen: I had seen a city cop herding cows out of the mayor's strawberry fields and back into the pasture next door. And I was paying this cop's salary with my tax dollars. Or I would be, if I were paying taxes, if I worked a paying job instead of slaving without pay at the diner. I owed, like, a dollar every year in taxes on my tips.
We had harassed a lot of innocent people. We chased skateboarders away from the sidewalks in the roundabout in the center of town. We chased kids parked in pickup trucks away from the back of the movie theater. Lois was right when she said Officer After knew how teenagers thought. Sneaky shit.
We had worked a fender bender at the Birmingham Junction, the intersection of the highway through town and the interstate to Birmingham. The Birmingham Junction was famous for wrecks, but this one wasn't even interesting—just a shattered taillight and a couple of infuriatingly polite Japanese businessmen from the car factory.
We had driven down to the bridge with the headlights off three or four times to make sure kids weren't drinking there. Ides of March my ass. It wasn't bad luck Officer After had caught us at the bridge. He caught us because he haunted that bridge, just as if he were the ghost of someone who'd died there himself.