Contents Under Pressure Read online

  A soft tropical breeze billowed the sheers at the windows, and the room was filled with the scent of fragrant night blossoms. I had one last sharp moment of reservation. “The department? Our jobs?” I mumbled against his throat as he kissed my ears and my forehead.

  He was not so swept away by passion that the thought did not penetrate. His eyes locked onto mine, and at that moment we both knew that this could be a big mistake—but it sure as hell was not going to stop us.

  The slow-moving ceiling fan paddled over my bed, making me dizzy. My dress was bunched up around my waist, then around my neck. I leaned forward and was soon free of it.

  So we did what Gretchen had suspected all along, and it was wonderful. Then we did it again. And then we discussed it.

  “The chief always says he wants better police-press relations.” He lay naked and relaxed, with me curled up inside the curve of his arm.

  “I can tell you for a fact, this is not what he had in mind,” I said, raising up on one elbow and pushing back my hair. “What if he could see us now?”

  “Hate to lose another chief to heart attack. We could plead insanity.”

  “Or just say we took him literally.”

  Eventually we traipsed out to the kitchen, weak and exhausted, and opened the refrigerator. A gloomy sight. McDonald peered over my shoulder at the half-empty can of cat food on the top shelf.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said. “I would know it wasn’t tuna.”

  “Moldy cheese?” I said, sliding open the bin.

  “Just what I love,” he said, his finger lightly skating figure eights down my spine until I shivered.

  Billy Boots had responded as usual to the sound of the refrigerator door and curled around our bare legs. I found some ham, fresh lettuce, and tomato. McDonald sliced the bread, and I fixed him a sandwich and a glass of wine while his pants and my dress followed our lead, tumbling around together in the washer and dryer. After he finished his sandwich, he led me back to bed and we made love again.

  The night sky was wild and wonderful. I opened all the windows and blinds wider, drew back the curtains, and slipped back into bed beside McDonald. The cool ocean breeze caressed our bodies, carrying in with it the music of wind chimes and the exotic haunting perfume from the ylang-ylang tree outside. We were lulled to sleep, our bodies tangled together as though bedded down in a windblown meadow full of flowers.

  There was a faint light in the sky when something woke me. McDonald was moving quietly about the room gathering his scattered clothing. He had succeeded in finding all but his trousers. He bent to plant a light kiss on my forehead.

  “They’re in the dryer,” I whispered.

  “Ah ha,” he said, remembering. “Lucky I didn’t have to beat feet in a hurry.” He sat on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair.

  “Hope nobody stole them during the night. Occasionally that happens, with panties and things,” I teased.

  “What?”

  “Just kidding.” I sat up, slipped on his shirt, padded barefoot through the kitchen, and stepped out the backdoor. The sky looked bruised and threatening. I plucked the dress and the trousers from the dryer, shook them out, and ducked back inside.

  “Gee, my dress was there, but your pants were gone.” I tried to look serious, holding them behind my back.

  He took my face gently in his hands, kissed it, and, when I was thoroughly distracted, wrestled away his trousers.

  “Hey,” he said. “I wish I could stay, but I’ve gotta get home and change. I’ve got an eight-thirty bond hearing. Remember Placido Quintana?”

  “What? You can’t call in sick?”

  He laughed. “Mind if I take a shower?”

  “Nope.”

  “Join me?”

  “Sure thing.” He took my hand.

  We splashed each other, wrestled around under the spray, and scrubbed each others’ backs while he got psyched for court by singing, “I Shot the Sheriff.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I whispered over his slick, soapy, wet shoulder. “You nabbed the police reporter.”

  He stepped out of my shower, hair damp and tousled, his skin all ruddy and pink. “I wish ‘our song’ was more romantic,” I pouted, as he held the blow dryer over my hair.

  We slowly sipped coffee and eyed each other across my tiny kitchen table. “What a way to start the day,” he said.

  “Somebody has to do it. Maybe I should have car trouble more often.”

  He frowned. “What you had was a lot more than just car trouble.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, wondering if I could somehow factor the cost of two new tires into my expense account. “I’m gonna wrap up the Hudson story and get this thing over with as quick as I can.”

  “That goddamn story. You never back off, do you?” He put his cup down.

  I shook my head and tried to change the subject by plopping myself on his lap and kissing him soundly. He was not placated. “Is all this about getting the goddamn story?”

  “You know better,” I said, spine stiffening in indignation.

  His eyes turned the color of sheet metal. “Be careful, Britt,” he said at the door. “Keep turning over rocks, and sooner or later something ugly jumps out at you.”

  I am never lonely. I love my life and living alone, doing whatever I please whenever I want to, like a spoiled child. But when the door closed behind that man, my apartment suddenly seemed empty. It had been a long time since I’d felt that close to anyone. I tidied the kitchen, thinking about the phone call, the flattened tires, and the message on my car. Suddenly, instead of feeling great, I was bummed out.

  Pulling on shorts and a T-shirt, I jogged the two blocks to the beach and ran the length of the boardwalk, turned, and started back again. The heavy tread of another runner thudded behind me. The sound had always been a comfort in the past; someone else sharing the same exhilaration. Now the steps, gaining rapidly, seemed ominous, filling me with dread. I scanned the beach and the boardwalk ahead. Few people were about. No witnesses. The threatening skies had kept most early risers at home. I picked up my pace, but he continued to gain. Heart pounding, I braced myself, my hands balled into tight fists, as the runner neared. And passed. A familiar face, a black boxer in training from the Fifth Street Gym, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a five-pound weight in each hand. He was out here every morning, rain or shine.

  My own angst made me angry, angry that one of my simple pleasures had become a frightening experience. How could I let anyone, any story do this to me? Why, I asked myself, was McDonald so angry? The answer seemed obvious. The cops who had chased D. Wayne Hudson are hiding something terrible, I thought, and he knows what it is.

  The sea was shaded tones of gray, green, and silver. Black clouds stacked up on the horizon, and even though the sun was shining, a drenching downpour began to fall.

  My mother had told me when I was a little girl that whenever the sun shone through the rain, it meant that the devil was beating his wife. I remembered running out into the backyard and putting my ear to the ground, but I never heard a thing.

  Fifteen

  On my way to work, I stopped at a little art supply store on Lincoln Road and bought a set of twelve jumbo color pencils, easy for little fingers to hold, with thick nontoxic lead in rainbow shades. Then I picked up half a dozen jelly donuts.

  Onnie and I devoured donuts and drank coffee while Darryl examined his new art supplies. Though scarred, the place looked much neater and cleaner, even cheerful. Probably because all the men in the family were still in jail.

  Darryl and his mom looked pretty good. This woman was no dummy, I learned. She had graduated from Northwestern High and had attended Miami-Dade Community College for a year-and-a-half. I could see where Darryl got his smarts. She had wanted to be a librarian, but her last job was for a firm that cleaned downtown offices at night. It turned out that I had covered the case that put Randolph, Darryl’s older brother, age nin
e, in Youth Hall. He had been with bigger boys who splashed lighter fluid on a dozing wino. Then one of them lit a match. The idea was not original; they had seen a similar scenario in a TV movie the night before.

  The lone bright spot in recent memory had been D. Wayne Hudson. He had picked up Randolph and two other Youth Hall inmates on Friday afternoons, driving them downtown to the big public library and cultural center to pick out books and see the displays.

  I did not bring up the topic during my brief visit, but as I left, Onnie said, “I still have that phone number you gave me, the one for the shelter.”

  “If you do decide to do anything, keep me posted. Let me know where you two are.” She nodded, as Darryl came running with a new masterpiece he had just dashed off: a house, a sturdy tree, and what could have been a dog, or maybe a cat. “This is wonderful,” I said. “Look at these colors!”

  “You can take it home with you,” he said shyly. “It’s for you.”

  “I would love to hang this on my refrigerator,” I said, “but…” His eyes grew huge. “The artist has to sign it first.”

  His mother guided his hand as he solemnly scrawled his name in blue in the lower right hand corner.

  Now I had two men in my life, I thought as I went on to work, wondering how long either of them would stay.

  It felt good to see Ryan back at his desk, working feverishly on his rafting story—it had grown into an exclusive two-parter on how he had followed the rafters’ perilous paths back to Cuba. Gretchen and managing editor John Murphy hovered behind him, reading over his shoulder and congratulating each other. Gretchen glowed, looking very much the fast-track executive in a pale Chanel-style suit with built-up Joan Crawford shoulders, as she accepted congratulations for her creativity and enterprise. The woman had emerged smelling like a rose again.

  Fred Douglas, my editor on this project, thought that I should not show up at the police officers’ homes alone. He suggested that another reporter or a photographer come along. Sounded okay to me, as long as it could be Lottie.

  We took her car, equipped with a two-way radio to the city desk, and a police scanner. Anybody who thought my T-Bird was loaded with the tools of my trade had never traveled in Lottie’s wheels. She goes her way, and her world goes with her. Stashed in the trunk of her company car are an assortment of cameras, lenses, and film; a tripod; a hard hat; blankets; sunscreen; insect repellent; a bright yellow rain slicker; sunglasses; rubber boots; rope; knee pads; hats; towels; plastic bags; HandiWipes; apples, oranges, granola bars, and bottled water; flares; flashlights; jumper cables; a tire repair kit; road maps; Spanish-language and Creole dictionaries; a police whistle; and an English racing seat mounted on a stake that can be driven into the ground to provide a portable perch for waiting.

  Whenever big news breaks fast, Lottie arrives first. Also tucked into the trunk is a brown cardboard accordion folder full of neatly filed plans and diagrams, detailing all entrances to the city’s major buildings, hotels, the convention center, and all the runways and terminals at Miami International Airport.

  We are each equipped with Q-beams, intensely powerful lights that plug into the cigarette lighter. On a job that is unpredictable, they come in handy. The late nights and bright lights of the city are bordered by unlit rural areas as dark as a coal mine at midnight. They stretch out to remote swamps, where a small plane could go down and not be found for years.

  We use the Q-beams most often to find street addresses at night, holding it at arm’s length out the car window in case somebody shoots at it.

  Inside Lottie’s Chrysler are packets of pictures she intends to someday deliver to people she photographed. Eventually she spills coffee on them and has to throw them out.

  According to my carefully mapped-out route, we would drop in on the Blackburns first, work our way back north to the body builders in a West Dade subdivision, then Carpenter in Miami Springs, and Ted Ferrell in Miami Shores.

  “How is Ryan’s story coming?” Lottie wanted to know, as we pulled out of the covered parking under the building.

  “It’s not a story anymore, it’s a two-part series,” I said, buckling my seat belt. “And guess who is queen for a day in the glass-front offices?”

  “Hell-all-Friday! No! It isn’t?”

  “Yes! Gretchen has more lives than a cat. How many times can she land on her feet?’’

  “She steps in shit, and it turns to gold,” Lottie lamented. “I thought for sure she’d get her ass fired this time.”

  “No chance. The managing editor took her to lunch today. She’ll probably get a fat bonus for her brainstorm.”

  “It almost would have been worth sacrificing Ryan to get her run outta this town once and for all.” Lottie looked sullen.

  “You don’t mean that,” I chuckled.

  “I know.” She sighed and steered around a carload of tourists, asleep at the switch when the light turned green, and accelerated up the expressway ramp.

  Lottie is a great wheel person, another of the few drivers I feel comfortable with. We had both taken police combat driving courses, and our reputation for being hard on the News’s cars was undeserved.

  We had no trouble locating our destination, with her driving and my navigating. The Blackburns lived a few blocks apart in South Miami, in one of those mazelike residential neighborhoods full of cul-de-sacs and dead ends. There seemed to be no one home at Roscoe’s place. We approached the door together, Lottie carrying only one small, unobtrusive camera so as not to spook anyone. In the driveway sat a dusty old Chevy van with a Confederate flag tag on the front. No one answered the doorbell. We gave it some time, in case he was sleeping. The lone sign of life was a liver-colored hound that bayed at us from a wire kennel at the side of the house.

  From one side of the front walk we could see a modest pool in the back. It didn’t look used much; the whole place seemed to lack a woman’s touch.

  Lottie was thinking the same thing. “Bet he’s divorced, or his current wife has hauled ass.” She cooed and talked soothingly to the hound dog, who stopped barking and cocked an ear to listen. He looked neglected. So did the house. I scrawled “Please call me,” on the back of one of my cards and stuck it in the door.

  We hit Roland’s place five minutes later, and had better luck.

  Two pickups were in the drive, along with a single-engine bass boat, an eighteen-footer with a narrow draft, the kind you could take out into the flats and swamps. The name DURTBAG was lettered on the prow. The trucks were blue, identical models. Both had Fraternal Order of Police symbols on their tags.

  “They’re not gonna be thrilled to see us,” I warned.

  “Is anybody, ever?”

  “Occasionally,” I smiled smugly.

  Lottie cut her eyes at me. “I knew you had somethin’ goin’ on. You can explain later.” At the door, she said, “You ring, you’re sweet.”

  A woman answered. Young, blond, and heavily made up, she wore a crop top over skintight short shorts. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if that.

  She looked suspicious at finding two women on the doorstep. Her brow furrowed as she eyed us through the shadowy screen, chewing her lower lip and clutching a Budweiser can in her right hand. Country music was playing inside.

  “Hi there,” I said cheerfully. “Is…”

  “We don’t want any,” she said, then licked her lips and grinned at how clever she was.

  “Officer Blackburn,” I said, “we’re here to see him.”

  “Which one?” She worked her mouth into a pout, doubtful again.

  “Both, if they’re here.” I beamed, oozing friendly confidence, and reached for the door handle. “Can we come in?”

  Looking sulky, she reluctantly shoved the screen door open. I had one foot inside when a man came up behind her. “Who is it, Jaycey?” He wore jeans and a T-shirt. It was Roland, maybe Roscoe. He stopped short. I smiled and offered my hand, stepping forward into the room.


  “Jesus,” he said, the color leaving his face. “Who gave you this address?”

  “Hi,” I said. “You remember me, Britt Montero, the News. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “How did you get this address?” he said slowly, emphasizing each word.

  His mirror image, minus the T-shirt, had appeared behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” his twin said.

  “We’ve been trying to reach you,” I said, stepping aside, enabling Lottie to ease in next to me.

  “Just one damn minute,” the shirtless one said. He turned to his brother. “Are you crazy? Letting them in here?”

  “I wanna know how they got this address,” the first one said. “And I didn’t let them in.” He turned to glare at Jaycey, who took two steps back and tried to look innocent.

  “You know it’s not difficult to get somebody’s address,” I said quietly. “I need to ask you some questions for a story about the death of D. Wayne Hudson. This is my friend, Lottie. She’s also with the News.”

  “Get outta my house and offa my property,” the first one said.

  “You must be Roland.” Lottie smiled warmly, her voice friendly and down-home. “Howdy. I like your music. Charlie Daniels, my favorite.” She looked at me as though I was caution. “Don’t you pay her no mind; she don’t mean to be pushy. She just gives people that impression sometimes. I’m not a reporter; I just shoot pictures.”

  Out the corner of my eye, I saw Jaycey’s hands fly to her hair and begin to primp.

  “Out,” the first one said, his expression darkening. “Get outta my house.”

  “I really think we should talk about this. Clear it all up,” I said.

  “You got no right bothering us at home,” the other said belligerently. “We don’t have to talk to you. Contact us through the department.”

  “But you haven’t returned my calls,” I said patiently. “This was the only way to reach you.”

  The first one moved toward us, hairy arms spread, as if to sweep us out the door. “Okay, okay,” I said, giving him a hands-off sign and stepping outside. “Then it’s accurate to say that you refused to comment?”