Jennifer the dingbat Stairmaster wizard came prancing into my office with a well-dressed man who looked as if he was used to having his way, and she said, “Lilly, this is my special friend Marcus.”
As in Welby? I thought. “Special friend,” like Ashton?
“Marcus, this is my friend Lilly.”
I was at the office on a Saturday afternoon, making some headway in the pile of work that triplicated every night while I tried to sleep. Because it was Saturday and I was living at Sam’s out of a hastily packed suitcase, my clothes had fold marks, I wore no makeup, and I was already tired. In short, I didn’t want to meet a well-dressed man named Marcus.
“Marcus is a doctor,” Jennifer said. “Lilly is a lawyer.”
Neither Marcus nor I spoke.
Ashton tripped into my office, completing the overcrowded effect, and he smiled and said, “Hey, there, troops. Ready?”
“Ready for what?” I finally spoke.
“Jenn and I thought you’d like to join us, and Mark here, for dinner in Tampa tonight. Ybor City, the Colombia sound good?” Ashton squinted down a bit at me, as if he were trying to bring me into focus without putting on his glasses. “You might want to go home and freshen up a bit first,” he said.
Marcus smiled, showing a row of teeth so white they had to have been chemically altered. Come to think of it, his nose looked a little too perfect too. While I studied him, he studied me.
“She looks fine to me,” he said.
“Marcus is, like, just one of my best friends,” Jennifer trilled. “He even got me my job with the doctors’ business services.”
Marcus offered his hand to me. “Pleased to meet you.”
Yeah, okay, originality wasn’t his strong suit, I’d guess.
I took his hand. “I defend a lot of doctors.”
“Yes, Jennifer told me. I’m a radiologist. We never get sued.”
“Actually, I had a radiologist for a client once. He couldn’t tell left from right.”
Marcus smiled, touched my left shoulder, and said, “Left.” He touched my right and said, “Right.”
Cute, I thought. Real cute.
“You and Marcus can drive to Tampa in his Jag, and Ashton and me will follow,” Jennifer said. “Marcus lives in Tampa. So, like, you know, you can, ah, ride back with us, unless, you know, you, er, want to, you know.”
Like, all Jennifer’s “you knows” aside, I wasn’t going to spend the night with this guy. A radiologist with a Jag and abnormal, chemically altered teeth, as well as a probable nose job, who lived in Tampa and who could tell left from right. Is this who they were trying to fix me up with?
I wondered what they had told him about me. That my own associate, a woman technically my inferior and certainly within my control, had snaked away my lover? Yeah, I wanted to live that down with a perfect stranger.
“No, thank you,” I said.
Then Bearess, Jennifer’s sleepy-eyed Rottweiler, bounced into my office and licked Jennifer on the hand. She came up to me in a leap, gruffed a doggy hello, and licked my hand too. I petted her big head and she bounced back over to Jennifer’s side.
“First we have to take Bearess over to Olivia’s for babysitting,” Jennifer said and scratched the dog’s big head as the animal closed her eyes in an expression of doggy bliss.
“Leave her with me,” I said, “and I’ll take her to Olivia’s when I’m done here.”
Okay, so I used to be good at saying no. But Jennifer had that way about her, the pretty blonde trick of just pretending everybody was doing exactly what she wanted until finally everyone was doing exactly what she wanted.
Which is to say, Jennifer dropped me at my house, which Sam said the police department had declared poison-free and with no evidence of a break-in, to freshen up, leaving Ashton to protect me while she and Marcus drove Bearess over to Olivia’s and swung back in half an hour. Which was all I needed to shower, fluff my hair with Brock’s wonder gel, and put on a touch of Maybelline and a kick-ass pair of hip-rider white jeans with a red silk halter that showed off my long neck and firm arms, and possibly a bit too much else for a woman my age, but I worked hard at the Y and might as well show some tummy now and then. I took a funky silk jacket because it would be twenty degrees in the Colombia restaurant. So, okay: Marcus was a radiologist, and therefore dull by definition, but now that I’d had time to check him out, I had to admit he was a nice-looking man, enhanced by medical science or not. So I decked out to make an even match, not that I had any intentions of starting anything with him.
I did think to call Sam and leave a message on his machine that I was going to run up to Tampa with my law partner, Ashton, and a client and would be late.
I mean, it wasn’t as if Sam and I were going steady. In fact, I didn’t even have a clue as to why I was staying at his house. That is, a clue from his point of view. Speaking strictly for myself, I was staying there because I didn’t figure any assassin in his right mind would aim for me in the house of a homicide detective. Besides, as Bonita had pointed out early on, Sam was a major hunk.
When Jennifer and Marcus showed up at my house, she overdid the cooing on the Jag and before I’d had a chance to mentally run through potentially enticing introductory conversation ideas for the ride up with Marcus, he offered to let Jennifer drive his Jag. Then Ashton wanted to talk stocks, tax shelters, and stuff with Marcus and assumed I would be bored by this, so why didn’t they ride up together, he said. The upshot was that I found myself in the passenger seat of a Jag belonging to a strange man who might or might not be my date, but with Jennifer behind the wheel wearing a big grin. Yeah, whatever, I thought, naively believing Jennifer would probably be more fun on the ride up than a radiologist with bleached teeth.
Driving I-75 from Sarasota to Tampa is fundamentally boring, so I turned to Jennifer and suggested, “Hey, why don’t we detour off onto 275 and take the Sunshine Skyway?”
“Isn’t that, like, out of the way?”
“We have an appointment somewhere? It’s a beautiful trip over the Skyway Bridge and then across the bay into Tampa. This time of day, crossing the Skyway’d be cool.”
“Yeah, Ashton said that you had, I don’t know, like, a thing about that bridge. Like, you’re really hooked on it and go out there to, I guess, what, meditate or something.”
Sure, I did have a thing about that bridge, but I didn’t know my fascination was common knowledge. “Come on, let’s go. It’s a great bridge.”
“You think it’s haunted? You know, from all those people that drove off the end when it broke when that boat hit it?”
“I don’t think you can have a haunted bridge.”
“Why not?”
“Jennifer, you ever hear of a haunted bridge before?”
“I think the world is full of things we’ve never heard of before.”
Well, that stopped me for a moment, suggestive as it was that Jennifer could think at a depth beyond her D-cups.
“Okay, maybe it is haunted. Let’s go see,” I said. But Jennifer drove right past the 275 interchange, and I sunk back into my leather seat.
With Jennifer driving the Jag at an impressive clip, we soon passed the Moccasin Wallow exit on the interstate, heading into Tampa, and a man in the middle lane crossed over in front of Jennifer, who was gaining in the fast lane. Apparently this was the guy’s stupid way of passing the slower car in front of him in the middle lane—I mean, really, it makes things on an interstate so dull to actually wait until there is, you know, like, a clear spot in the next lane before you swerve into it.
Shouting out an impressively loud and crude insult, Jennifer braked and swerved and cursed, spinning a moment onto the shoulder and then gassing the Jag, which responded so quickly my head jerked back. Cursing with words that included some that Bonita’s son had not taught me the Spanish equivalent of, Jennifer passed the jerk who had cut her off, careening around him on the shoulder and then zagging right back in front of him so close that he had to brake to avoid hitting her. The jerk spun a half circle back into the middle lane, where the slower car he had tried to pass in the first place narrowly missed colliding with him by spinning into the slow lane, where another driver showed good reflexes and spun off onto the shoulder.
“Showed him, fucking asshole,” Jennifer said, and then rolled down her window and gave him the bird in a long, emphatic hand-waving gesture as we peeled off, racing ahead of him.
“Well,” I said, feeling my heart racing, “wasn’t that fun? You think maybe you overreacted?”
“No. Why?”
I glanced over and looked at the speedometer. Ninety-five. The Jag was smooth—I’d give it that. “Maybe you ought to slow down now that the excitement’s over?”
“Marcus said this car would cruise at one-hundred-twenty-five, no problems. Let’s see.”
Looking at the lines of cars in the three lanes of I-75 as it approached the many Tampa exits, I thought, Oh, no, let’s not. “Maybe another time,” I said. Like when I wasn’t in the car with her.
Jennifer eased up a bit, and I leaned back in the seat.
Then she hit the gas so hard my head jerked again and she spun around the car in front of us, and I heard the distinct sound of a siren. Oh, mierda, I thought.
Approaching a hundred, Jennifer turned her head and looked back. “A state trooper,” she said, rather matter of fact in tone, given what later developed.
“Would you watch the road!” I shouted, and she turned back. But she continued to press the gas pedal.
“Slow down,” I shouted. “You’ve got to stop.”
“In my purse,” Jennifer said, “there’s a Baggie. Get it out.”
I did. A Baggie with little white pills.
Mierda!
“Eat half, I’ll eat the other half,” Jennifer said, that matter-of-fact tone still oddly in use.
I looked in the bag. There must have been twenty of the little white pills in it. I studied them closer to see if they might be anything I’d want to hide a couple of for later, but they didn’t seem to be any standard prescription drug.
“Eat ’em, damn it,” Jennifer yelled, no longer matter of fact. I felt the car surge forward as she hit the gas, rapidly closing the gap on the car in front of us.
“Slow down, damn it!” I yelled.
“Eat ’em—just half, please. I’ll eat the other half. I can’t go to jail.”
“What the hell are these?”
“Acid. LSD.”
Acid, I thought, looking at the pills. Thirty years behind the times. People still ate this?
“Hurry up,” Jennifer said.
Instead of eating my way into a serious hallucinogenic overdose, I poured the pills from the Baggie into my right hand. Then I rolled down the window and put my hand out, low and flat against the door, dangling it as inconspicuously as I could, and began to dribble little white pills of LSD down the corridor of I-75 heading into Tampa. I doubted this was the first time this had happened as I watched the pills rain down on the pavement and explode. Given the commanding lead that Jennifer had on the state trooper, I doubted he would notice a trail of little white pills coming out the passenger side of the car. If he did notice, I counted on his survival instincts preventing him from trying to actually gather up what would surely be just LSD dust in the wind in the dense, high-speed traffic.
Eat ’em, my ass.
“Stop the damn car,” I yelled once the pills were gone, and I stuffed the bag into my bra, hoping there was no traceable residue on it but afraid the sight of a Baggie floating out of the car window might be visible and suspicious to the state trooper, who, I noted, seemed to be gaining on us. Also, littering is so tacky. I mean, those pills were biodegradable, but that Baggie would live forever.
“I can’t go to jail,” Jennifer wailed.
“What else is in the car?” I asked.
“Nothing. Swear.”
Though I sensed a lie, I would rather take my chances with the state trooper, even the criminal justice system, than die in a high-speed multi car crash on I-75, which seemed to be Jennifer’s current plan as she swerved around a car going an ordinary ninety miles per hour or so. She narrowly dodged a collision with the car already in the lane she’d just crossed into, and then she sped around it on the shoulder of the road. The siren blasted through the careening Jag, and I fingered the Saint of Somebody that Bonita had given me, which I wore around my neck.
“Stop the car. Pull over. Please. I don’t want to die here,” I pleaded.
“I don’t have a driver’s license.”
“Jenn, they don’t put you in jail for that. Honest. I’m a lawyer. I’d know. Now, stop.”
She began to slow down. I saw hope.
“Trade places with me,” she said.
“What?”
“Here.” She reached for my hand. “Take the steering wheel. Climb over me. You’ve got a driver’s license. Come on. Trade places.”
And all these months we had merely thought this woman was a nitwit. Worse than that, she was crazy. Trade places while driving a car down an interstate at ninety-five miles per hour? In what universe would you live through that?
“I’ll trade with you after you stop the car.” I was lying, but it seemed a good thing to offer under the deteriorating circumstances.
“You will? Won’t the cop see us?”
I didn’t care if the state trooper did see us, especially since I wasn’t planning on actually trading places with her. “No,” I said with as much assurance as I could muster. “You’re too far ahead. He won’t be able to see us if we’re quick.”
She swerved over to the shoulder and skidded to a stop. Next thing I knew, Jennifer was sitting on top of me and slapping frantically at my hips with both of her hands.
“Scoot over,” she said, shoving at me. “Move,” she bellowed.
I scooted.
What the hell. In for a dime, in for a dollar.
While I tried to regulate my heart and breath and imagine what in the world I would say to the state trooper, I looked at Jennifer. Her face was red, her eyes big, and she was panting. Her huge, Barbie-doll breasts were heaving.
“Unbutton the third button,” I said, thinking cleavage was our only weapon now. But she didn’t budge, a catatonic look crossing her face.
I grabbed my wallet, pulled out my driver’s license, and got out of the car. If I acted contrite and passably normal, maybe the state trooper wouldn’t shoot me.
The trooper, who was young and red-faced, looked angry as he crawled out of his vehicle, outwardly cautious, his right hand free and near the holster on his belt. I’m sure I looked as crazy as Jennifer had. I didn’t say a word. Delvon had told me once that there are only three things you ever, ever said to a police officer if you are stopped or questioned: “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I’m sorry, sir.” I was silently practicing the “I’m sorry, sir” when I heard the other car door open and Jennifer popped out, the third button on her blouse opened and the bulges over her demibra radiant.
“Oh, officer,” she said, sounding remotely normal. “This is all my fault, I’m afraid. I am so sorry.”
You got that right, babe.
I glanced at the trooper and noticed that he had snapped open his holster and was looking down at us as if we were the Dixie Mafia personified.
At least one of us might be, I thought.
“There was a wasp in the car.” She took a step closer to him, walking with a lilting spring that made her hair and hips sway alluringly, full blonde armor ready. “I’m deathly allergic. I’ve got these little syringes of stuff I’m supposed to carry with me in case I get bit, but I forgot. And I panicked, and I scared my friend here. She was trying to drive and swat the wasp, and I was opening the windows so it would fly out, and I told her to go faster so the air would blow the wasp out, and, oh, it finally did, and I am so sorry.”
Nobody in their right mind would believe that, I thought. No bosom in the world could get us out of this.
The state trooper glanced back at me. “License and registration,” he said.
I handed him my license, and then I thought, Registration, mierda. It isn’t even my car.
“I’ll get it,” Jennifer said, grinning as if she were a cheerleader at the homecoming game and the trooper was the coach giving a last-minute pep talk.
“Easy, ma’am,” he said, easing over toward her, his right hand hovering toward his holster.
“Just in the glove compartment? Won’t be but a sec,” she said.
I contemplated running like hell, but then another car whooshed in behind the trooper’s car, and I turned toward the sound and saw Ashton and the doctor man get out and approach the trooper.
“Y’all stay back,” the trooper said to Ashton and Marcus, his hand now on his holster.
“Hey, girls, what’s up?” Ashton was grinning like a man in control of his destiny, or one deluded by substance abuse of long duration.
The trooper eyed us all. “You.” He pointed at Jennifer, and she beamed as if he had announced her the winner of the Miss Blonde Something pageant. “Get over there with them.”
We all watched Jennifer make a show of walking around the Jag in the shimmering heat of the late afternoon and stand beside Ashton and Marcus. “Hi, honey,” she said to Ashton, and she reached out and took his hand in her own dainty little pink-tipped fingers.
“You,” the trooper said, pointing at me, “get the registration, now, and go slow.”
I held up my hands toward the trooper to show him I had no weapons. “Yes, sir.”
The trooper followed me around to the driver’s side and kept a close eye as I opened the door to reach the glove compartment. Ashton, Jennifer, and Marcus stayed lined up on the other side of the car while I dug in the glove compartment. The state trooper watched me, right hand resting on his holster, eyes flicking back and forth between me and the trio by the side of the road. I handed the trooper a registration and proof of insurance.
“It’s his car,” I said, pointing at Marcus. “I was just test-driving it. We’re just awfully sorry, sir, but the wasp really had us both freaked out.”
And that bag of acid had us a little freaked out too.
And whatever else was hidden in the car.
“Get over there with them,” the trooper said, and I did.
He walked back to his car and radioed in the registration to see if the car had been listed as stolen. Then he collected identification from each of us, accepting from Jennifer an assortment of credit cards and her library card in lieu of the driver’s license she didn’t have. He called all of us in on the radio to see if we had any outstanding warrants. I was pretty sure Ashton and I were all right, but I sweated out Jennifer and Marcus. But we were cleared.
Then he asked me if he could look through the Jag.
“Help yourself,” I said, “but it’s his car. You might ask him. I’m just test-driving it. Never met the man before late this afternoon.”
Really, why didn’t I say I was just a hitchhiker and whatever he found in the Jag had nothing to do with me? Surely the state trooper had never heard that one before.
“Oh, please,” Marcus said. “Help yourself.”
I watched Jennifer’s face but saw only the vapid expression of a woman with nothing more to worry about than sweat stains on her silk blouse.
The trooper made all four of us sit in his car while he rattled through the obvious hidey-holes in the Jag. He seemed to take a long time. The Baggie in my bra scratched, but I didn’t dare take it out. None of us in the trooper’s car spoke, probably for fear we were being taped or monitored.
Apparently Jennifer had told the truth and the only illegal contraband was now LSD dust in the wind.
In the end, the state trooper wrote me a ticket for speeding and left it at that. I don’t know whether it was the heaving bosom, our fundamentally clean-cut, middle-class, middle-aged appearance (well, at least with Ashton and Marcus, that is), the story of the wasp, or just the state trooper’s own desire to be done with all of us once he failed to find contraband or outstanding warrants. But a speeding ticket was all that happened.
That, and I made Ashton let me drive his car while Jennifer and Marcus cruised into Tampa in the Jag well ahead of us. For once I went the speed limit. Well, okay, I went ten miles over, but nobody stops you for that.
“She’s totally crazy,” I said to Ashton.
“No, babe, she’s just high strung.”
I thought, Yeah, well, I’d ask for a second opinion.
“I’ll pay the ticket,” he said.
“Damn right.”
We drove the rest of the way in a strained silence.
Once in Tampa, despite my attempts to get Jennifer alone and ask what in the hell that LSD thing was about, I was never able to get her outside the range of strangers who could listen in. I prefer not to discuss illegal drug contraband in the hearing of people I don’t know, so I figured I would catch her later, back in Sarasota.
Oddly enough, we had a perfectly fine dinner at the Colombia, drank several bottles of fine Spanish wine, finished up with the famous Cuban coffee, and flirted our way around Ybor City, a historical area that years ago had deteriorated into a slum but, in the Florida pave-it-for-cash spirit, had been re-created into an upscale mall of bars and touristy places. After closing down the bars, we left Marcus and his Jag to whatever in Tampa. Neither Jennifer nor I had said a peep about the LSD in front of Marcus or Ashton.
Damn, Jennifer and I had a secret, and we’d had an adventure together. In girlfriend terms, I think that meant we were now officially best friends.
Best girlfriend or not, I wasn’t ever riding with her behind the wheel again. “I’ll drive,” I said, taking the key from Ashton.
On the long ride back, Ashton and Jennifer teased and giggled and had a bit of indiscreet oral sex in the backseat while I tried not to listen.
I never did think to ask her why she didn’t have a driver’s license.