Three Times a Lady

PART V

PERMANENT VACATION

‘Fort Myers Beach forms the tourist heart of Lee County, Florida. Studies have shown that virtually every tourist who visits Lee County crosses the Matanzas Pass Bridge at least once during their stay on their way to a fun-filled day on the sun-soaked shore of Estero Island.’

waterfrontfortmyers.com.





CHAPTER 30

Five months after her brutal rape in the parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office in Cleveland, Ohio, Dana swiveled back and forth on her stool at the Smokin’ Oyster Bar on Fort Myers Beach in Southwest Florida and ordered up her fourth beer of the morning.

The bartender twisted off the cap from an ice-cold Bud Light and slid it over with a smile. He needed to shout to be heard clearly above the group of drunken tourists who were noisily punctuating the sounds of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline on the jukebox over in the corner with the requisite ‘bah-bah-bum!’

Wiping up a puddle of spilled beer on the section of bar directly in front of Dana, the bartender yelled, ‘How’s your vacation going?’

Dana looked up at the man and gave him the once-over. Different guy than the one who’d served her the first three longnecks of the morning. About forty-five years old. Longish salt-and-pepper hair. Solid build. A throwback hippie quality about him.

‘How’d you know I was on vacation?’ she shouted back.

The bartender waited for a pause in the music and winked. ‘Tan lines,’ he said, then immediately moved farther down the crowded bar to attend to the group of rowdy bikers hollering for more shots. Having picked their poison for the day, this particularly motley crew had settled in to do mortal combat with Jack Daniel’s – no beer chasers required.

Dana leaned back her head and took a long swallow of her beer as the bartender moved away, savouring the way the icy alcohol cut into the back of her throat. A warm breeze blew gently through the tiki bar that featured no walls and a thatched roof, fluttering her short blonde hair around her head and keeping her from sweating like a pig.

Even in March, the mercury had already reached eighty-five degrees in Southwest Florida, and thank God for that. If nothing else, it was certainly a far cry from Cleveland, where the wintry weather hadn’t loosened its icy grip on the city one little bit since Dana had left. Then again, Cleveland had always been a place where summertime never started until somewhere around mid-June. A gloomy place where the skies that hung over Lake Erie remained gray and cloudy and pregnant with either rain or snow long after spring had officially sprung.

A place where Dana had lost her will to fight the good fight and had instead simply given up.

With her checkered past with the bottle, Dana knew there was no way in hell that she should have been drinking anything stronger than ice-water with a lemon twist, but they didn’t call alcoholism a disease for the simple fun of it. The siren song of the booze had finally won her over again after all that useless fighting, dragging her down to the same sorry place she knew all too well. The same sorry place she’d found herself following the deaths of Crawford Bell and Eric Carlton. The same sorry place she’d promised herself she’d never visit again.

Dana closed her eyes and sighed. Then she opened them up again and shrugged her shoulders. F*ck it. Lifting her beer bottle, she took another long drink and swished around the beer in her mouth.

With everything Dana had gone through in her life she deserved a drink whenever she felt like it. There was nothing for her to feel guilty about here. Nothing over which she should feel remorse. Those kinds of bullshit feelings were better left to the circle-jerk AA meetings she had zero intention of ever attending again.

Dana swiveled her barstool in a complete circle and idly peeled the label from her sweating beer bottle as the jukebox kicked over to Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. Another orgasmic cheer rose up from the tables full of tourists.

Tapping her foot in perfect time to the infectious island music, Dana swayed her butt in her seat, feeling at home here. Fort Myers Beach was famous for having one of the safest beaches in the world, and if there was one thing she needed to feel right now, it was safe. Down here in sunny Florida, the sugary-soft white sand reflected the sun’s heat so that you didn’t burn your feet on the way down to the warm water. The bathwater surf had absolutely no riptide to speak of. And the depth only dropped off a foot or two for every twenty yards you waded out.

Down here, she didn’t need to worry about insane women wearing black dresses calling her out by name on autopsy videos before facilitating her horrific rape.

The locals on Fort Myers Beach referred to their hometown as ‘paradise’, and Dana could understand why. No hyperbole required. As long as you could put up with the hurricanes that routinely ripped through the place like a bull in a china shop (and could ignore the flock of elderly snowbirds that flew down here each and winter before completely taking things over) it was paradise. A place where you could get lost in the crowd and maybe – just maybe – find yourself again in the process.

Dana lifted her stare to the ceiling and studied the fairly new construction. Though she’d missed the devastating effects of Hurricane Allison by half a year, you couldn’t tell by simply looking around the place. Winds of up to ninety-five miles per hour and a storm-surge five feet above normal had done no real damage to the charming pink and blue cottages dotting the sandy shore. The cleanup afterward had been little more than an afterthought, much like plowing snow off Interstate 90 back home in Cleveland following yet another lake-effect blizzard was an afterthought to the residents there. And why not? There were some things in this life that you simply needed to do. You didn’t bitch about them. You didn’t whine about them. You didn’t complain about them. You just did them. And if you didn’t, you’d find yourself snowed in until April or enjoying warm sea breezes through several windows in your home that the architect had never intended to exist.

Dana took another long swallow of her beer and swiveled in her bar stool a little more, wishing like hell that the alcohol would hurry the f*ck up already and drown her painful memories like the crying infants in a bathtub she knew them to be.

Shortly after her brutal rape in the parking lot of the coroner’s office back home in Cleveland, Dana had received the devastating news that little Bradley had been adopted out to another family. The domestic court judge and the June Cleaver clone who’d taken the little boy in seemed like nice enough people to her. Real stand-up folks, as a matter of fact. Honest-to-God pillars of the community. In addition to his duties overseeing a section of the legal system dealing with traffic offences in Westlake, Bradley’s new father served as a lector at the Assemblies of God Baptist church in Rocky River. The little boy’s new mother ran the PTA. Their four-bedroom house overlooked a tranquil lake stocked with steelhead trout, looking positively idyllic to Dana every time she’d driven past.

Lost in her self-pitying thoughts, Dana was abruptly jerked out of her reverie by the sickening sound of glass crunching against bone twenty feet away.

She whipped her head around hard to the right and saw bright red blood gushing down the face of a stunned-looking biker in his early fifties, courtesy of his fellow biker and bar mate. The wounded party put a hand to his head and came away with a palm-full of blood. His bloodshot eyes widened briefly in surprise. Then a slow, ugly smile creased his weathered face. Obviously, this didn’t mark his first rodeo.

Reaching around to the back pocket of his filthy blue jeans, the man produced a switchblade knife and flipped it open before taking a menacing step toward his adversary.

Even as Dana’s newfound bartender friend was frantically scrambling over the bar to get between the drunken combatants – a short billy club in his right hand to underscore his point that he didn’t especially care for fighting in his establishment – Dana fought every instinct in her body that was screaming out for her to intercede. Instead, she simply slipped a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill beneath her half-empty beer bottle in order to keep it from blowing away in the breeze before leaving the bar and losing herself in the crowd of suntanned tourists that was strolling through Times Square, the quaint little beach town’s unsubtle homage to New York City.

No reason for Dana to get involved here. No reason for her to risk her own neck. She wasn’t law-enforcement any more. She wasn’t an FBI agent any more. Hell, she didn’t know what she was any more.

Except for broken, of course.