The Stranger You Seek

34





I met Big Jim at Penland’s Fried Pies and Gifts. He plopped down coffee for us both in monogrammed mugs and fried apple pies with ice cream. There were a few small tables and chairs near a stone fireplace inside, and Big Jim straddled a chair and smiled at me.

“They’re best for breakfast,” he said. I had no problem with that. I’d been obsessing about the pie since I’d had my first two. “Here’s the list you wanted. Competitors mostly. And a few people I may have crossed lately.”

I took a bite of pie and ice cream, washed it down with some coffee, and picked up the paper he’d put between us. It was a long list. “I didn’t realize Ellijay was this big.”

“Well, I guess I have a particular way of offending folks round here.”

“You seem like a nice guy to me,” I said.

“Yeah, but you’re kind of a pushover. It’s all about the pie for you.”

I smiled. I liked Big Jim. “You bring a picture of Sadie too?”

He nodded and pulled a wallet-size photo out of his denim shirt pocket.

“Nice-looking cow,” I said as if I had a clue. Big Jim’s eyes got wet and he had to look away.

I started at the Cupboard Restaurant in downtown Ellijay. It was large and open, with vinyl booths and the look of a cafeteria. I was taken to a small booth to wait for Ida May Culpepper, the first person on Big Jim’s list.

Two waitresses worked the room, both middle-aged and friendly, both knew their customers by their first names. I glanced at the menu and saw chicken and dumplings, collard greens with pepper vinegar, fried chicken livers, and lots of apple products—apple pancakes, apple bread, apple pie, apple cake, fried apples, apple salads.

“Here ya go, hon,” one of the waitresses said to me. The thick white plate she set in front of me had a huge slice of apple pie. “Want some coffee with that?”

“Oh no, I couldn’t. I’m just waiting for Ida May.”

“Can’t nobody sit at the Cupboard and not eat. How would that look? Pie’s on the house. Ida May will be with you shortly.”

Ida May Culpepper was a tiny woman in her late fifties with smokers’ creases above her mouth and dyed black hair. She slid into the booth and beamed at me. “What can I do for you today, hon?”

“Ever seen this cow?” I asked it as seriously as one can ask a question like that.

“Oh my Lord.” Ida May laughed. “You have got to be kidding me. Is this about Jim Penland’s cow? Don’t tell me he hired a detective to find that ole thing.”

“Afraid so.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “I got four in my pasture and two of ’em look just like this if you want to come see. Maybe you can get a hoof-print or something.”

“Mr. Penland mentioned the two of you had a run-in recently.”

Ida May sat back and looked at me. “He tell you why? I got four home-cooking restaurants and one bakery in two counties up here and we use a lot of apples. We don’t use his no more, though. We go to another grower. It’s not personal. I got to make money and Jim won’t come down on his price come hell or high water. It don’t make a damn to him that I helped him out when he was just getting started.”

“Sounds personal to me,” I observed.

“Well, maybe it is a little, but I still wouldn’t give two cents for that damn ole cow.”

Just outside Ida May’s restaurant, I saw the stack of Atlanta papers in a wire rack near the front door with a handwritten sign putting the price for dailies at seventy-five cents and the Sunday paper at two and a quarter. The headlines screamed: Gruesome Murder in Morningside Home. Wishbone’s 8th.

I went back inside and paid the cashier, stepped out on the street and walked with the newspaper. I needed to walk. It was barely ten-thirty in the morning and already I’d unbuttoned the top of my pants under my shirt. If I didn’t get out of the apple capital soon, I’d have to hire a truck to get me home.

I spent the next three hours checking off the names on Big Jim’s enemy list, which included the Snell family, who owned the second-largest peach and apple orchards in Georgia, claimed to have a town named after them outside Atlanta, claimed to have no ill feelings for their largest competitor, and claimed to be “good God-fearing folks.” They happily gave me a tour of their orchards, their processing center, their home, and their horse ranch. They fed me pimento cheese sandwiches cut into little squares, what we call pamina cheese down South. They invited me to church with them, but I would have just as soon been beaten with a stick.

In the hills above East Ellijay, I discovered that Clyde Clower, the sixth name on Big Jim’s enemy list, was not going to be as forthcoming. He slammed the door so hard that the double-wide shook, leaving behind him only the faint smell of Budweiser and marijuana. Big Jim had fired him a couple of days before Sadie disappeared. I snooped around outside a little, didn’t find anything, but Clyde was the kind of guy who looked like he was perfectly capable of getting ripped and stealing a cow. I decided to come back later and keep an eye on him.

I was beginning to feel worried for Sadie. She trailed around behind Big Jim’s family because she preferred them to the other cows. She opened doors and walked into the house. That cow was the best dog they’d ever had, Big Jim had said. And she was totally socialized now to humans. I hated to think of her in a strange place scared and with separation anxiety.

I decided to drive over to Ida May Culpepper’s and have a look in her pasture. My Neon huffed and puffed up the hill to her ranch house and a split-rail fence, three posts high, a barn, and a few cows. I walked to the fence, took out the picture of Sadie. Looked at the cows, looked at the picture. Back at the cows, again to the picture. I had no idea. I called Sadie’s name a few times. They all ignored me. It was more of a snub, really. They raised their heads briefly, appraised me, then went back to grazing.

There was a basket of apples Big Jim had given me in my car. Thinking that apples might be attractive to a cow, I got a few of them, put them on the ground while I climbed over the fence, and made my way out into the pasture for a closer look.

“Sadie, come on, baby. Want an apple?”

The cows started off slow, meandering toward me, then I heard hoofs galloping in the distance. I turned. It was a bull running fast, red clay dust boiling up behind him. His head was low and he looked mad. A flock of crows that had been pecking around in the fields lifted up at once. This startled the cows. They picked up speed, became deliberate and fast until they were all coming at me full gallop.

I started to run, turning to lob a few apples at them. They kept coming. Believe it or not, cows are fast once they get going. I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to get trampled in Ida May’s pasture. Hurling my last apple at them, I picked up speed and made a leap for the fence, squeezed through just as the bull got there. He was milling around, snorting at me and pawing the dirt. The cows were all fired up too. Good Lord. I reached for my phone.

“Tell me about Clyde Clower,” I said to Big Jim. I was out of breath, but I had cell reception on Ida May’s mountain and I didn’t want to waste it. I gave the cows the finger and walked back to my car, still short on wind after the run. “Does he have family up here?”

“His mama is a widow, I believe. Has a little place around here somewhere. You think Clyde took Sadie?”

“He’s a candidate, that’s for sure. Has a motive. But I know he can’t keep her at the trailer park. He’d have to hide her somewhere. You have any ideas where that would be?”

“I don’t. Clyde worked for me but only indirectly. I got lots of people working in the orchards. I don’t know much about their personal lives unless there’s a problem.”

“What was the problem with Clyde? Why did you fire him?”

“Came in drunk.”

“Can you get me directions to his mother’s house?”

“Yeah, hang on. She’s probably in the book. You talk to Ida May Culpepper?”

“Uh-huh. At the restaurant. Then I came to her house to check it out. Why didn’t you warn me the cows would come after me?”

Big Jim chuckled. “Warn you? Cows ain’t aggressive animals, Keye. I wouldn’t worry about them.”

“Right, well, I was in the field with those apples you gave me and they just about ran me down.”

Big Jim’s booming laugh came through so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Well, they are goddamn good apples,” he said, and laughed again.

Forest Mountain Road, where Clyde Clower’s mother lived, was tough for the Neon, a steady, winding incline into the North Georgia mountains. I couldn’t get any speed up at all. In the rearview, I realized, a Chevy pickup was very close, too close to my bumper. I heard the roar of the engine and the gravel under the tires and tried to work my way to the right a little, but the road was narrow and I had no place to go. The truck swerved around me, zoomed by like I was tied to a stump. A horse trailer was hitched to the back. It fishtailed and nearly knocked my car into the ditch. Gravel flew all over the place.

“A*shole!” I yelled, and saw a hand came out of the driver’s side window in front of me with the middle finger raised. The truck left me picking my way through a cloud of thick red dust to Mrs. Clower’s house.

I pulled over and walked toward the white frame house. It sat on an unfenced piece of land with a flower garden near the front windows and a vegetable garden next to the house. Backed up to a barn, I saw the truck with the trailer that had nearly wrecked my car.

“I know you’re in there, Clyde. Might as well come on out with Big Jim’s cow. I’m calling Big Jim right now.”

“Go f*ck yourself!” he yelled from inside the barn.

I opened my phone and realized that I had no reception. Crap. A Gilmer County sheriff’s car spun into the dirt drive. The sheriff and a deputy got out. Big Jim must have taken my suspicions seriously and called them. I waved my arms and pointed at the barn.

“I think he’s got Jim Penland’s cow in there,” I told the two men as they approached. “I tailed him up here.”

Okay, so I only technically tailed him up here since he blew by and left me in the dust, but it was a detail they didn’t need.

I reached for my PI license, which was clipped to my back pocket, and they drew on me.

“Whoa, take it easy, guys. I’m a private detective working for Jim Penland to find his cow.” I was annoyed to hear a wobbly little laugh come out of me.

Clyde Clower came out of the barn at that moment with a lead on Sadie the cow. He saw the cops with their weapons drawn. He dropped the lead and raised his hands above his head. “It was just a joke,” he said, then spread out flat on the ground. This was clearly not his first arrest. His words were muffled from the dirt in his face. “I just wanted to shake him up a little. I was just coming to get her and take her back home. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Tell ’em, Kate. This here’s my girlfriend, Kate Johnson.” He was looking at me.

“Would you mind taking your guns off me? My name is Keye Street and I am not his girlfriend. I told you, I work for Jim Penland.”

The deputy patted me down and cuffed me. “Like Big Jim would hire a detective to find a damn cow.”

“I love you, Kate,” Clower shouted, and grinned at me.

“Check my ID,” I insisted, but the deputy pressed his palm against the top of my head until I folded into the backseat of the sheriff’s car.

“Now sit back there and keep your mouth shut.”

The other door opened and the sheriff unceremoniously pushed Clyde into the backseat with me. Clyde smelled bad. He looked at me and smiled. His teeth looked like a picket fence. “Whatcha in for?” he asked, and snickered. “Kate.”

“You smell like poop,” I said.

The sheriff shot me a look in the rearview mirror. “Not a peep,” he warned us, and we sank back into the seat, me and Clyde Clower, shoulder to shoulder, in the back of a Gilmer County sheriff’s car.

They did eventually look at my identification and Big Jim did convince them over waves of laughter that he really had hired a private detective from Atlanta to find Sadie the pet cow. I missed the reunion entirely, but Big Jim hugged me so hard he nearly crushed me before I started the drive back to Atlanta.

I’d made it as far as Canton, about an hour outside of town, when Rauser’s ringtone went off.

“The women I told you about, it all checked out, Street. Rape kits handled right. We’ll have DNA comparisons soon, and the composites after the attack look like our boy. And get this—one of the women said he used wire.” I knew how big this was. Ligature marks on the Wishbone victims always indicated he’d used wire, never fabric or rope. “So we were able to get a warrant for the wire. Never found it, but we found the knife under the mattress. Human blood on it is consistent with Melissa Dumas and Dobbs. Knife fits the wound patterns on the other Atlanta victims too. And if that’s not enough, we finally got the vehicle Charlie’s been driving. A Jeep Wrangler. Carpet fiber’s consistent with the fiber on Dobbs. He had it stashed in the garage at a rental house we found out he owns. Case is locked up pretty tight.”

I remembered the times Charlie had visited our office, about his little gifts, about watching him plant pansies in the planter outside our door. I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t have opened the door for this man.

“But you’d already searched his place, Rauser. And you brought him in twice. He knew he was being watched. I don’t get why you wouldn’t have found this stuff the first time. Why would he keep the knife there? And where are his trophies—photographs, video, the stuff he’s pilfering from the scenes? And these are rape cases, not murder. Why would he leave living victims?”

“Both these women used the same tactic. They were completely submissive, offered to comply, pretended they enjoyed it. Then they prayed for an opportunity to get away.”

“I don’t get it,” I insisted. “It doesn’t fit.”

“Oh, come on, Keye. We got the knife and now we’re going to have his DNA and we’re going to pull that DNA evidence we collected at the Brooks hotel scene and connect him to that one too. Look, you knew something was up with him or you wouldn’t have been out there on his street that night. Your gut told you it wasn’t just Charlie forgetting his meds, and your gut was right. When are you coming home so we can go out for some grape juice? I’ll be a big man after the next press conference. Very in demand. I’m afraid you’ll have to call ahead.”





35





My days were once again consumed by nanny background checks and subpoenas and Tyrone’s Quikbail, long surveillance hours on Larry Quinn’s personal injury cases—all the things I’d once complained about. Getting so close to the violence again, to a violent serial offender, to something as sinister as the Wishbone murders, had put life in perspective for me. I knew now that I didn’t want to go back into the darkness.

But I still had the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. A sponsor of mine at AA once told me that that was a normal state for an addict. We learn to carry that foreboding when we live in the shadows, always hiding our interior life, our addictions and cravings and demons.

Charlie Ramsey was in jail and awaiting trial. I felt sure he would never again see Atlanta’s streets. Two more women had come forward to identify him as their rapist. Charlie’s list of crimes spanned almost two decades, and the blood and knife evidence found in his home had finally shut him down and sealed his fate. The DA was confident of a conviction in the rapes and at least two of the Wishbone killings—Dobbs and Melissa Dumas—where physical evidence had been found on the knife. The carpet fiber that matched to Charlie’s hidden Wrangler wasn’t much by itself, but it would add to the growing evidence, another nail hammered in. Most important, and I suppose most telling, the killing had stopped. The letters, the emails, the roses had stopped too, of course. I wondered what Charlie had had planned for me in his fraudulent and damaged brain. Had I been destined to become another photograph on the War Room bulletin board? He went for Dobbs not because he fit into his selection process but because Dobbs was high profile. Charlie was expanding. He’d begun killing for the headlines and for the pure satisfaction of outmaneuvering law enforcement. It was not an unusual pattern for a serial murderer, but it was a terrifying one.

I had been so wrong about Charlie. My profile, in retrospect, had been shockingly uninformed. There was nothing in Charlie’s background that pointed to abuse. I was so sure that Anne Chambers and David Brooks had been symbolic of parental figures. So sure. There were other characteristics that did fit, however. His achievements as a star in football and in the complicated field of biomedical engineering. My advice had been to look for an overachiever, a star in his field. I never imagined someone who had excelled to that degree would then settle for the kind of goofy social veneer that Charlie had settled on. But what choice did he have, really? The accident had left him incapable of a normal life. We had learned that after the accident, Charlie, who had early in life exhibited volatility and sexual aggression, had even more anger. Because of his brain injury and the way it had manifested in a cognitive deficit, Charlie experienced more impulsiveness and had trouble socially processing. He had chronic pain, head and neck aches, depression, trouble concentrating. After surgery and some rehab, he had tried to return to work but had become verbally abusive, even resorted to violent threats in heated moments with coworkers. The poisonous pattern that had trailed him through life deepened. I myself had experienced it. It explained a lot about Charlie and who he had become. Still, my analysis had been so terribly wrong in so many areas. Was it a sign? The universe has a way of telling you when to let go of something. Maybe I wasn’t as great at my job as I thought I was. The universe has a way of telling us that too, doesn’t it?

The days had grown shorter and cooler at last. Autumn was here and the trees had turned fluorescent. Brown paper bags bulging with yard clippings lined the curbs in Winnona Park, where my parents lived. The crisp air was perfumed with fireplace wood.

My brother, Jimmy, who had for years resolutely resisted my mother’s urgings to come home, had flown in from Seattle for Thanksgiving. He did not bring his partner Paul with him, which was to me a disappointment. I loved Paul almost as much as Jimmy loved him. I scheduled a webcam date with Paul for later in the day.

Jimmy and Rauser had hit it off the very first time they met a few years back, just after I came out of rehab. Today the two of them had ended up in my parents’ oak-paneled den watching football with my dad—Cowboys fans all of them. Mother, who had been hovering and fussing over Rauser and Jimmy since we arrived, turned them loose with a platter of sausage balls and cold beer while she finished dinner preparations.

My cousin Miki had come for dinner too. Miki was a photojournalist, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, and like our faces, our lives were worlds apart. She was the daughter of my mother’s sister, Florence, and years ago when Miki began showing up for our holidays without her mother, we were told Aunt Florence had left for Europe. When we got older, we discovered that Europe was just code for the loony bin. Aunt Florence has been institutionalized since Miki was twelve. Once, before Aunt Florence left for “Europe,” I remember visiting their home. There was a houseboat in the backyard. No one offered any explanation for this or acted as if it was unusual, but I remember seeing Aunt Florence walking down the ramp of the grounded houseboat to greet us as if she lived there. Jimmy sneaked on the boat when no one was watching and later swore it was lined with full clothing racks and cosmetics and coffee cans brimming with coins. My beautiful and talented cousin had scars on her arms from wrists to elbows. She had begun the war against her own flesh at fourteen. Cutting, overdoses, institutions, drugs, eating disorders, and years of misdiagnoses followed. She was now thirty-five and I knew nothing at all about her life, but I’m very glad that the poison in her veins is not the same blood that pumps through mine. I have enough crazy of my own. Thankfully, I seem to lack either the depth or the attention span for long-term depression.

Late Thanksgiving afternoon, we gathered in the dining room that hadn’t changed since my childhood—high ceiling and arched doorways and plaster walls that had been dented and patched a million times over the years. The room was a very pale yellow, with an oak table and chintz-cushioned chairs and an antique china cabinet in the corner. My mother’s taste ran to the traditional. She had packed the table with food; a leaf had been extended on each end. We joined hands for the blessing, as was the tradition in my Southern Baptist family. My father began, “We’re grateful to you, Lord, for all this good food and, well, for Miki and Keye being here, since they both damn near killed themselves with drugs and alcohol.”

My eyes popped open. My dad’s head was bowed and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Jimmy cleared his throat to cover a laugh. Miki’s eyes met mine. She was grinning.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Howard,” my mother said, hotly.

“And thank you, Lord,” Dad went on, “for my wife still being pretty and for my queer son.”

We all raised our heads on that one.

“Well, amen,” Rauser boomed firmly, and sat down at the table.

“Amen,” we all followed enthusiastically, and took our seats too.

“That was interesting,” my mother said, and shot Dad a look. “Potatoes, anyone?”

An enormous bowl of garlic mashed potatoes sat on the table along with a green bean casserole, chipotle sweet potato cakes covered with mango and cilantro and fresh chopped jalapeños, breaded baked goat cheese rounds on salad greens with fennel and bing cherries, and a stuffed Cornish game hen for each of us. For dessert, Mother had made Jimmy’s favorite, deep-dish blackberry cobbler with berries she’d picked and frozen in summer, and the pumpkin cheesecake with maple glaze and toasted pecans I wait for all year long.

“I made something spicy just for you,” Mother told Rauser with a smile. She had watched him sprinkle red pepper over nearly everything she fed him.

Rauser nodded and reached for the chipotle sweet potatoes. “You’re the best cook I know, Mrs. Street. You can’t get food like this anywhere else.”

“Well, I love doing it,” Mom told him, and flushed. “Especially for a man with a good appetite. It’s a sensual thing, cooking. You can’t peel the skin off a mango without realizing that.”

I stared at my mother, suddenly aware that she was flirting with Rauser.

“Awkward,” Jimmy muttered.

My dad seemed not to notice. I glanced at the water-size glasses filled with rum and eggnog and wondered how many of those they’d both knocked back today.

“Wasn’t always true,” my father said. I had heard him say this for as long as I could remember about my mother’s cooking. It was generally his sole contribution to our holiday conversation. “When we first got married, it was so bad we prayed after we ate.”

“Howard,” my mother complained. “That joke was not funny the first thirty years you told it. I frankly do not know why you think it would be now.”

“I think it’s funny,” Miki said without looking up. She was examining the ceramic turkey-shaped napkin holder next to her plate.

Mother looked at her, then moved her violet gaze to my dad. “Howard, you have turned my only sister’s daughter against me. I hope you are happy,” she declared in her rich coastal accent—a betrayed Scarlett O’Hara. My mother seemed to become more southern as she became more of a martyr.

“Hey, Keye, where’s Diane?” Jimmy asked, probably hoping to change the subject. My brother was a natural peacemaker and an expert at diverting my mother. “I was hoping to see her while I’m here.”

I smiled. “She has a new thing.”

“Ahh,” Jimmy said, nodding. We had all watched Diane cycle through relationships for years. She was not the kind of person who could be happy alone.

Mother threw up her hands. “The one woman on God’s green earth you’re attracted to and she’s dumb as a box of hair.”

“Diane’s not dumb, Mother,” Jimmy said. “She’s sweet. And you will always be the only woman in my life.”

Mother softened instantly. “You’re just about the most handsome thing I ever laid eyes on. Do you know that?”

I had to agree. My brother was a pretty man, fine-boned, hazel-eyed, with deep chocolate skin. His heritage was a mystery. Nothing at all was known about his birth parents, but he had been a calming force in our high-strung family since he’d become part of it.

“You should come home more often,” Mother told him. “It’s not like it used to be. We have several African American families in the neighborhood now, and China must have opened some gate somewhere, because there are little Chinese girls running around everywhere.” She patted my father’s hand. “Howard, we were ahead of our time.”

I made a big show of eye-rolling and Jimmy had to look away. We had been in trouble at the table for most of our lives, my brother and I. Generally during the blessing I’d make him laugh, and Emily Street didn’t put up with laughing during the blessing.

It didn’t take long for Rauser to practically annihilate his game hen and start piling on seconds. He reached for another heap of green bean casserole. Mother made it southern-style with rich mushroom cream, bread crumbs, and fried shallots piled on top. Her casseroles were always a heart attack on a plate. A bowl of Crisco had less fat.

“Keye, don’t you ever cook for this man?” Mother asked. Then to Rauser, she said, “I did teach her a thing or two, you know.”

Rauser touched the napkin to his mouth. “We’re big on takeout,” he said, and turned and looked into my eyes, smiling. “And I’m just fine with that.” To my astonishment, he leaned over and very gently kissed the corner of my mouth. I felt his hand on mine under the table.

“Well, a man like you shouldn’t have to eat takeout,” I heard Mother say, but my eyes hadn’t left Rauser’s.

My father suddenly announced into the silence that followed, “I got something to show y’all after dinner.”

“He won’t let me set foot in that garage,” my mother complained, and wagged a finger at my dad. Rauser squeezed my hand, then let it go and turned his attention back to his plate.

So after dinner and coffee we all ambled out into the front yard and waited for the garage door to open. Rauser was next to me with his arm draped over my shoulders. I looked up at him and he kissed my forehead. I was dumbfounded. He’d been gooey like this all day.

Mother had her arm around Jimmy’s waist and he was holding Miki’s hand. The neighbors from the houses on each side came out and joined us while we waited for my father to reveal his latest project.

The garage door began to lift and there was a collective gasp as Dad’s new hobby came into view. All six hideous metal feet of it. We looked at it, squinted, looked at one another, and then looked at it some more. No one said a word.

My father seemed bewildered. “It’s a sculpture,” he told us. “An eagle with a rat in its mouth.”

Someone said, “Eeeww!” And finally Jimmy had the good sense to clap. Then we all clapped and cheered and my father took a formal bow.

“Damn fool,” Mother whispered, and covered her face with her hands. “It’s not enough that he spells out Leon on the roof every year in Christmas lights. Now this!”

My father was dyslexic but would not admit it.

“Feel like taking a walk?” Rauser asked me after the unveiling.

We strolled silently to the end of Derrydown and crossed Shadowmoor Drive. “By the way,” Rauser said as we walked over the wooden footbridge to the playground behind Winnona Park Elementary, “I broke it off for good with Jo.”

“Who’s Jo?” I said, and grinned at him.

“Keye, that night on the interstate when you went off the road, I thought my heart was gonna stop.”

We were standing near the swing set on the soccer field behind the school. Lights glared in the houses on Inman Drive and Poplar Circle, the two streets that bordered the school. It was an old neighborhood and full now of young families and renovated homes and new money. I saw a car pull alongside the park and cut its lights. Teenagers come here to make out. People park in the school lot at dusk and let their dogs run on the soccer field.

He turned and faced me, held both my hands. “I just always thought there’d be time. But that night I started to think more about how short time is. I’m a true jackass, Keye. I’ve waited too long to tell you that I love you.”

I looked at the lines at the corners of his eyes, the ones that always made him look as if he was about to laugh, so familiar to me, so comfortable. I looked at all that thick silver and black hair and those wide shoulders and realized I wasn’t numb anymore. Not even a little. I was on fire for him, this man who knew me so well and loved me in spite of it.

“When I called that night and Jo answered your phone …,” I started.

“I knew you were jealous as hell,” he said with a smirk.

“No way was I jealous.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “And maybe Jodie Foster will just walk right up to us right now, right here in the friggin’ park.”

“And? Where’s the part where she gives us a lap dance or shakes her rear end or something? I love that part.”

Rauser looked at me as if I’d just pulled down my panties in church. “It’s Jodie Foster, for Christ’s sake, Keye. Have a little respect.”

I leaned into him and we laughed. He wrapped his arms around me and I buried my face in his chest. He smelled like cold air and aftershave, and it crossed my mind that I hadn’t seen him light even one cigarette all day.

I heard the tiniest sound come from him, just a small oh, so faint, like a puff of air. I looked up at him and saw the oddest expression: shock, bewilderment.

“Rauser? What’s wrong?”

His brow furrowed and he took his hand away from his chest, held it out, palm up. Our eyes met just for a split second of recognition and horror. Blood. Jesus Christ! Blood! What the hell?

The second shot was just as silent and swift and pitiless, and ripped into Rauser’s temple. His legs folded and he fell. I dropped on top of him.

Oh God, oh God, oh God

I yanked off my scarf and coat with my right hand and found my cell phone with my left, used my thumb to punch in 911, then pressed my coat over the wound on Rauser’s chest and used my body to apply pressure.

“Rauser, talk to me. Rauser, can you hear me? Stay with me. Dammit, stay with me.”

There was too much blood. It was coming so hard it was pooling before soaking into the dry ground. Please God don’t let him die I’ll never drink again I’ll never complain I’ll never fight with my mother

I scanned the street while I lifted his head just enough to wrap my scarf around it. My heart was slamming against his weak pulse, his blood seeping into my coat, my skin.

“Nine-one-one, what is the nature and location of your emergency?”

“Officer down.” I think I shouted but I can’t swear to it. Time and sound and light, it all seemed to go haywire. I could hear my own breathing, like being underwater in a bathtub. “Winnona Park Elementary. The playground behind the school,” I told the operator.

My God, we’re in the playground. His arms were around me just a moment ago. Oh God—

“Unidentified shooter,” I said. My chest felt like a pallet of bricks had dropped on me. I was having trouble breathing normally. “The officer is Lieutenant Aaron Rauser, APD Homicide. Oh God, he’s barely breathing. Rauser, stay with me.”

I put more pressure on his chest. My scarf was soaked and crimson. The blood kept coming. The operator was trying to keep me on the phone. She wanted to know what I’d seen. She wanted to know my name. She needed me to be clear with the details. Was she sending officers into a dangerous situation?

“I don’t know where the shooter is. On Poplar, I think. My name is Keye Street. Oh God, just hurry.”

And then I saw it. Headlights blinked on and the car sped in reverse away from us, past the school, and spun out onto Avery.

I was still screaming at Rauser, crying. Stay with me. Rauser, I love you too. Stay with me.

“There’s a vehicle leaving the scene fast on Avery heading toward Kirk Road,” I told the operator.

“Can you make out the vehicle?”

“No, Jesus, it’s too dark. Where the f*ck is the ambulance? Rauser, don’t you die on me.”

My phone beeped to let me know a text had arrived, and I held it away from my ear to look at the screen. Just habit pure and simple. I wasn’t thinking anymore, just reacting. I felt utterly removed, as if I were watching someone else’s shattered life, registering just this escalating, surreal sense of unreality.

My fingers were so slippery with Rauser’s blood I nearly dropped my phone.

It’s just the 2 of us now, the screen said. Warmest personal regards. W.