August 21, 2004, 4:34 A. M.
A dog barked outside the bedroom window, distant, but close enough to force Jordan McManus to open his eyes. He hesitated to move—his arms and legs were tangled in the sheets with Ginny Kirsch's body. She had her back to him, their bodies molded to a perfect fit, their fingers still entwined, though the pressure and force of hanging on to each other was gone. Her breathing had returned to normal and they both had been silent as they drifted in and out of a dream world, in and out of the past, fifteen years before, when their love was new. The dog's sudden alarm put a final end to making love, and to the start of a gnawing feeling in the pit of Jordan's stomach that he'd just made a big mistake.
The past slipped away quickly for Jordan as he began to pull away from Ginny. The familiar touch they once had for each other no longer existed. It had vanished over the years when they'd see each other on the street, both married to someone else, their lives separate, but bound by the closeness of the small town they lived in, by the connections they still shared. Jordan's marriage had ended a year before, and Ginny's was, and always had been, more than a little rocky. This was the first time in nine years they'd let themselves cross the line, touch in any way beyond a knowing, longing glance.
“I've got to go,” Jordan said. Ginny opened her eyes halfway, as if she didn't believe him. His police radio sat on the nightstand, silent except for a steady low-level buzz. The window was open and a pair of sheer white curtains had been pulled aside and fastened to the wall with a thumbtack. A fan sat on the floor, aimed at the bed, blowing warm muggy air over the sweat-soaked sheets. The small bedroom at the back of the fourteen-by-seventy-foot trailer was as hot as a jungle at noon.
Dim light from the bathroom softened the cracked wood paneling that covered the walls, a jumble of half-empty perfume bottles on the dresser at the foot of the bed, and the pile of dirty laundry that lay in front of the open closet. There was nothing Jordan could see through the window that made him think anything was wrong beyond the walls. It was just a feeling. The kind you learn to trust when you wear a gun and a badge. A dog doesn't start barking at four-thirty in the morning for nothing.
“Can't you stay a little longer?” Ginny whispered. Her deep blue eyes were wide open, masked with a hardness he did not know.
“No, I'm still on shift.”
He reached to the floor and grabbed his boxers and uniform pants. His shirt was by the door, next to the dresser. Somehow, he'd managed to lay his utility belt and 9mm Glock on top of the dresser without knocking over any pictures or perfume bottles. His socks and shoes were lost in a pile of clothes that had not found their way to the laundry pile, tossed in an anxious, heated moment without any regard to where they'd landed. He was really in no mood to go on a scavenger hunt for his uniform through the mess on the floor. The fog was lifting from the drunkenness of his desire for Ginny's body, and he was surprised to find it had left a sour taste in his mouth.
“Like anything's gonna happen,” Ginny said, sitting up. “It's been a long time, Jordan.” Her voice was scratchy and weak, like she'd smoked a pack of cigarettes in the last ten minutes.
“No, I've really gotta go.” As quickly as the dog started barking, it stopped. Silence returned beyond the window, almost oppressively—even the crickets stopped chirping. All Jordan could hear was the fan whirling a million miles an hour and his heartbeat racing at the same rhythm as the blades of the fan. This was more than a trip back to his teenage fantasy world—the land of no consequences, the pleasure palace of new experiences. It was a fall. A headlong dive into home base when it was obvious the game was over a long time ago. He took a deep breath and headed for the bathroom.
Ginny reached out to touch him, to stop him, but it was a half-hearted attempt. Her hand fell back to the bed, and she closed her eyes and exhaled. Contempt was already spreading between them. Love for them had never been easy outside of the bedroom.
Jordan wanted a cigarette, but they were in the police cruiser parked a block away, hidden behind the Sunoco station that had been closed since they were kids. He relieved himself, washed his face and hands, and avoided looking in the mirror or at Ed Kirsch's razor and shaving cream that sat on the side of the iron-stained sink. There was barely enough room in the bathroom for him to bend over and pull on his boxers and pants. He immediately felt closed in, trapped, suffocated by the smell of another man's after-shave. He washed his hands and face again to try and regain his senses. It didn't help.
This time, though, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror when he looked up. Like his mother, Jordan had sandy blonde hair, and wore it cut close to his skull, exposing a thin line on each side of his head, a pattern of baldness already genetically predetermined. A faded three-inch scar zigzagged under his right eye, nothing more than a blemish now that his skin had tanned from the hot summer sun. The scar was too difficult to think about, and for the most part, he rarely noticed it. He kept the memory of the scar hidden away in a dark and unreachable place in his heart, in a dungeon of anger he'd fought most of his life to keep bolted and locked.
He had his father's blue eyes—a misty blue that always held a hint of sadness, like dusk settling onto the horizon after a perfect summer day. If he could change anything about his appearance it would be his eyes. He saw nothing but betrayal in his father's eyes, and now, in his own. Jordan always swore he'd never be anything like his father. But he'd failed to live up to that vow when he slipped into bed with another man's wife. The door to the dungeon was cracked open, and the old rage made his head throb—he looked quickly in the medicine cabinet for a bottle of aspirin. He closed the mirrored door as soon as he saw a needle and a small wad of aluminum foil stuffed behind a half tube of toothpaste, and hurried out of the bathroom.
Ginny was standing at the bedroom window, still naked, her arms crossed over her breasts. She had unfastened the sheer curtains and they fluttered in the breeze from the fan. The light from the bathroom mingled with the break of dawn, and Ginny's shoulder-length blonde hair glowed against her sun-bronzed body.
A small blue and pink dragonfly tattoo, wings spread in flight, shimmered in the moisture on the small of her back. She was thirty-three, three years older than Jordan was, and her body showed little sign of bearing a child nine years earlier—she was thin, thinner than he ever remembered. She still looked ethereal, though, otherworldly, and forever young. For a moment, Jordan forgot about the needle, forgot again that he was a cop. But the pure image of Ginny at nineteen he'd held onto for so long faded quickly when the police radio buzzed again with static.
“I don't know how much more I can take,” she whispered.
“The heat?” he asked, searching for his socks. It had only rained a quarter inch in the last twenty-three days, and the temperature had hovered in the nineties for just as long, dropping into the mid-seventies at night. It was the hottest, muggiest August anybody in central Indiana could remember. The night air was so humid he could barely breathe, but seeing her standing there, he couldn't resist touching her velvet skin again, couldn't resist asking the question that was screaming in his head. He slid his hands around her waist and pulled her as close as possible.
“Are you using?” Jordan couldn't see the expression on her face, but he felt her stiffen and then relax as she arched into him. Her neck smelled of jasmine.
“No. Why would you ask me that?”
“The needle in the medicine cabinet. I thought maybe there was some aspirin . . . I wasn't snooping.”
Ginny pulled away and turned her back to the window, facing him. She was a good six inches shorter than he was, five-foot six to his six-foot one, and she had to reach up to touch his face. “It's Ed's, he's diabetic. Why? What were you thinking, that I'm shooting up?”
“I thought Ed might be.” He was relieved that he was wrong, but he wasn't sure that she was telling him the truth. The answer came too quick—but he wasn't going to pursue it, for all he knew Ed Kirsch really was diabetic. Even though diabetes didn't explain the aluminum-foil rock. They both knew Ed Kirsch's history, knew he had used and sold pot and speed in the past, when they were teenagers. But as far as he knew Ed had given up that life a long time ago—at least the dealing part. Jordan wasn't sure Ed had ever quit using.
There was no way he could make a bust for possession if the foil was a rock of cocaine, or crystal meth. How would he explain being in the bathroom?
Ginny's fingers were like short shocks of electricity on his face as she touched the scar under his eye. Jordan recoiled, and she looked at him oddly, forced a smile—she knew she was out of bounds and she didn't care. She never had.
“No, Ed knows better than that. Daddy doesn't like him the way it is. He's not going to give him a reason to arrest him,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “I just don't want to live the rest of my life like this. It has to be better than this, Jordan, it just has to be. I never dreamed marrying Ed would turn out like this. Let's run away. Go to Arizona or Florida, anywhere but here. Let's start over. Change our names. You could work on a fishing boat or be a guide in the mountains for tourists. I'll get a job at a grocery store, be a waitress. I don't care, as long as I don't have to be what I am now.”
“We had our chance for that a long time ago. It didn't work out too well, if I remember right. You weren't ready, remember?”
“I was young and stupid. I was scared. I didn't know what I wanted.”
Jordan hesitated. He wanted nothing more than to rescue Ginny, take her out of the life she'd gotten herself into. He knew how bad things turned out—he had watched her fade a little more every day. But he'd stayed out of her life for so long . . . and he wasn't up to getting his heart broken again. At least not so quickly. If they got back together, it would have to be the right way. Not like this.
He could watch Ed, arrest him if he was using or selling, but taking him out of the picture for Ginny wouldn't be a great start to any kind of relationship. They had enough baggage the way it was. “So now we'd just be stupid?” he asked. “I don't want to live anywhere else, Ginny. I can't just walk in here one day out of the blue and pick up and leave. Why would I want to do that? Why would you even think I would do that? Is that why you called me? You thought I'd sweep you up and take you away from all of your problems? Take you away from Ed? Come on, Ginny, tell me that wasn't your reason? We're not kids anymore. It's just not that easy—we'd have to give it some time. You'll have to leave Ed on your own.”
Ginny sat down on the edge of the bed and grabbed up the sheet to cover herself, her eyes moist, on the verge of tears. “No. He won't let that happen,” she said, turning her head away.
“I'm not scared of Ed Kirsch.”
“You should be,” Ginny whispered. She took a deep breath. “I'm sorry, I just wanted to touch you. Feel alive again.”
“You know something? I don't believe you.”
Her lip sagged into a frown like it always did when she didn't get what she wanted. “You're nothing but a goddamned third-shift security guard, Jordan,” Ginny yelled. “Whether you want to admit it or not, and a gopher for my father. You've been under his spell since you were twelve. Look at you now. You're a grown man and it's no different. You're just a deputy in a stinking small town in Indiana. A big fish in a little pond with a gun on your hip to make you feel powerful. How could you like your life? Nothing's changed. Not even you, climbing in and out of my bed when the mood strikes you.”
Jordan couldn't argue with her, she was right about most of the things she said. Being a cop in Dukaine, Indiana, with a total of two stoplights, was not like being a cop in New York City. It had its challenges, especially in late summer when the migrants came to town, but mostly he wrote speeding tickets and checked on locked doors at night—he really was a security guard on a basic level. But crystal meth had become a problem in the last couple of years, a rural scourge that had worked its way from the South and into the big cities—Indianapolis and Chicago—that Dukaine sat squarely between. Keeping an eye on the ammonia tanks, a key ingredient that could be found in the homemade drug, at the co-op was high priority. But even that only required sitting and watching. Users that made their own meth were a big concern and a drain on time—but the bigger problem was the mega-labs out west, rumored to be operated by Mexican drug lords.
It was the Mexican connection and the transportation of the drug, considering the influx of migrants during harvest season, that concerned most of the law enforcement officials in Carlyle County. Jordan hadn't seen any sign of big-time operators in Dukaine, but that didn't mean they weren't there. He had seen, though, the devastating effect meth had on its users; he'd been involved in three busts in the last six months, and each time there were children in the house where the meth was being cooked. The users lost everything, and it was almost impossible to break the addiction. Security guards didn't have to deal with seeing that.
“I didn't say everything in my life was perfect,” Jordan said. “Would I be here if it was?” He put his uniform shirt on—it stuck to his sweaty skin, making him even more uncomfortable. “I knew I shouldn't have come here.”
“Don't go.”
He kissed her on the forehead.
She drew back and looked at him harshly. “You still love me. That's why you came.”
The dog barked again. Jordan tried to ignore the remark, and took a step over to the window and looked outside. She was right about that, too. He'd never stopped loving her. How could he?
There were seventeen trailers in the Royal Lane trailer park, all lined up ten feet from one another, facing a single unpaved road that led in and out to Main Street. Beyond the road was a set of railroad tracks that skirted an eighty-acre tomato field. Over the field, he could see the bright lights of the SunRipe plant glowing against the early morning sky, a warehouse the size of two football fields, all lit up like it was the last Friday night football game of the season.
The plant was operating at full capacity, pumping out ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and various other products made from tomatoes, twenty-four hours a day. Tomatoes were the lifeblood of Dukaine, and the plant was the single largest employer in the southern half of Carlyle County. While the rest of Indiana was mostly covered with corn and soybean fields, there were over fifteen thousand acres of tomatoes in a hundred-mile radius of the SunRipe plant. During the picking season, an army of migrants descended on the town, more than doubling Dukaine's population from three thousand to seven thousand, straining the demand on every service in town, especially the police department. In all, thirty to forty migrant camps sprang up across the county every summer.
The police department consisted of Jordan; Ginny's father; the marshal, Holister Coggins; and Johnny Ray Johnson, the other full-time deputy. In the summer, off-duty deputies from the county sheriff's department filled in on a part-time basis. Even with the help, the days were long for the three of them, working a minimum of six days a week, twelve hours a day. Jordan always worked the night shift. He liked the quiet. Johnny Ray liked the noise of the day, the joy of being a cop, the sun glaring on his badge, so the schedule worked out for the both of them. Holister, for the most part, was always on duty.
Jordan didn't see anything out of the ordinary beyond the window, just the neighbor's cat crawling up onto a stained yellow brocade sofa that sat on the patio. He was jumpy because he knew he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. Breaking rules for the pure pleasure of it was something he thought he'd given up a long time ago. He was overreacting and he knew it.
“Ed and me have been in trouble for a long time, Jordan,” Ginny said. The anger faded from her face as she dropped the volume of her voice and lowered her head. “You know that. Ed's been sleeping with that little redheaded tramp down at the truck stop for months. He says he's on the road, but we never have any goddamned money. I know where he is. I always know where he is, and he's not on a run to Texas like he's supposed to be. Damn it, Jordan, you're my safe place. My rock. The one I could always turn to . . . the only person who's ever been there for me. And I need you now, more than ever.”
“Is this just a way to get back at Ed?” he asked, eyeing the door. “Call it even? Pretty easy to do if you ask me. Just call Jordan, he'll come running?”
“It's been nine years, Jordan. If that was my reason, I would've done it before now.”
Jordan knew about Ed and the redhead at the truck stop. He'd seen them together more than once, and he'd used that information to rationalize his own behavior a few hours earlier when he'd slid from the shadows and into Ginny's open arms. There were a million times he wanted to tell Ginny what was going on, but he'd vowed to stay out of their relationship, just like she'd vowed to stay out of his. And he'd vowed not to break the code of silence that came with his job. He knew a lot of secrets—knew more about most of the people in Dukaine than he wanted to. Every vow he'd ever promised himself seemed to be empty now, all in a matter of a few hours. What the hell had he been thinking?
“It'd be different this time, I promise,” Ginny said. “You're the only man I ever truly loved.”
“Sometimes, love's not enough.” Jordan drew in a deep breath of muggy air from the fan. For a second, he thought he saw fear flash across Ginny's face, like she wanted to tell him something, but the look disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
“I don't believe that,” Ginny said.
“If it's time to leave Ed, then leave. I'll make sure he can't hurt you.”
“You can't promise me that.”
“Yes, I can. I can make sure he can't hurt you or Dylan—and I'm sure Dylan's old enough to understand what's going on. He probably knows you two can't stand the sight of each other. Trust me, you'd be doing him a favor. But I won't play second fiddle to Ed Kirsch ever again.”
Ginny stood up, her eyes twisted as if Jordan had just slapped her. “You're a son of a bitch. A self-righteous asshole just like you've always been. You take what you want when you want it, and then you run. You always run, Jordan, when things get a little close, a little too complicated. You're hot on the outside, but cold as ice on the inside,” she said. “Get out. Get out of my house. Get out of my life, and stay out. I mean it.”
“You're going to wake Dylan up.”
“Are you afraid he'll tell Ed you were here?”
“I'm sorry. This won't happen again.” He grabbed his utility belt and 9mm Glock off the dresser, snapped it on quickly, and walked out of the bedroom.
“Don't go,” Ginny said, following him to the door of the bedroom. “Please don't go. I need you . . .”
Her sobs followed him down the trailer's hallway and he heard a door open. He turned and saw Dylan, blonde hair tussled and sleepy blue eyes on the edge of tears, peering out of his bedroom door.
Damn it, he thought, this is the last thing I wanted to happen. He put his index finger to his lips and whispered, “Go back to bed, everything's all right.”
When the nine-year-old boy responded with a half-smile and disappeared back into the bedroom, Jordan eased out of the front door just as the birds were starting to sing and the streetlights were going off.