Now You See Her

head in the gutter. Then I scrambled out from underneath the moped and sat on the curb.

I stared fascinated at my torn-open knee. A thin line of blood rode down the ridge of my shin and took a left as it reached my ankle.

As I watched myself bleed, the Rick James song “Super Freak” floated out into the street from the crowded bar behind me.

“When I make my move to her room, it’s the right time,” the drunken crowd sang along. “It’s such a freaky scene.”

“Hey, you OK? Can I help you?” called a beery male voice from somewhere on the sidewalk behind me.

I shook my head as I lifted the bike, got back on, and headed home.

Chapter 22

IT TOOK ME TWENTY MINUTES to get home. I took a shower and bandaged my knee. When I got into bed, I lifted the remote off the night table and turned on the TV. I was determined to stay up until Peter came home, but after only a minute or two I found myself nodding off.

The sky outside my bedroom sliders was the dark gray of predawn when I woke up. The TV was showing an aerobics program: thin young women with too much makeup, smiling like Miss America as they counted off toe touches.

Then the doorbell rang.

I stumbled out of bed. Was it Peter? Did he forget his key?

I was even more confused when I saw a squad car in the driveway outside the living room window.

I opened the door. It wasn’t Peter. It was a short female officer in a Key West PD uniform. I thought I knew all of Peter’s fellow cops, but I’d never seen her before.

“Jeanine Fournier?” she said.

Even in a dazed fugue, I could tell by her demeanor, by the intense look in her eyes, that something was seriously wrong.

I suddenly felt tired and powerless, thoroughly unprepared for whatever I was about to be told. Staring at the woman’s hard face, I felt like going back into my bedroom and lying down. The sun broke as I stood there, light rapidly filling the sky.

“Yes?” I finally said.

“You need to come with me, Jeanine,” she said.

What the? What was this?

“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” the lady cop said. “It’s your husband. Peter. He’s been involved in a shooting.”

Chapter 23

A SHOOTING?!

That one stupid thought kept repeating in my numb mind as I sat in the passenger seat of the speeding cruiser. Every few seconds, I would try to form another thought, but my indignant, stubborn brain wouldn’t have it.

A shooting? I thought. A shooting?

That meant that Peter had been shot, right? I stared down at the cop car’s incident report–covered carpet. It had to. Otherwise, the red-haired lady cop behind the wheel wouldn’t be involving me.

I needed to talk to Peter. To find out what was going on. Now he’d been shot? I didn’t know what to think as the cop car’s tires cried around a curve. What did it mean?

If I thought I’d been disoriented riding in the cop car, it was nothing compared to the skull slap I felt as we screeched to a stop beside a Shell gas station on North Roosevelt.

It looked and sounded as if the world was coming to a violent end. Besides a half-dozen siren-screaming patrol cars, there were three ambulances and a fire truck. Yellow evidence tape strung across the pumps wafted in the breeze from the nearby north shore. The whole block around the station looked like a huge present wrapped in the stuff. A crowd of tourists and beach bums stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, behind the yellow ribbon like spectators at a strange outdoor sporting event that was just about to get under way.

It seemed like every cop in the department was there. I glanced from face to face, marking the people I knew. At our pickup softball games and barbecues, these men had been so happy and laid-back. Now, as they secured the crime scene in their stark black uniforms, they suddenly seemed cold, heartless, angry, almost malevolent.

What the hell had happened here?

“She’s here,” a cop and good friend of Peter’s named Billy Mulford said as he saw me.

The last time I saw Billy, a blond, middle-aged fireplug of a man, he was doing a cannonball off a booze cruise boat at a retirement party. Now he looked about as fun-loving as a concentration camp guard.

“It’s Peter’s wife, Jeanine. Let her through,” he ordered.

I was too stupefied to question what was happening as the evidence tape was lifted up, and I was beckoned under. Why were they treating me like a first responder? The deafening siren of yet another arriving ambulance went off as Mulford quickly led me over the sun-bleached asphalt and past the pumps.

Just inside the door of the food mart, half a dozen EMTs were kneeling down beside someone I couldn’t see. My hands started shaking as I tried to figure out what was happening in all the commotion. I grasped them together in a praying gesture.

“Come on, come on! Give me some fucking space here,” a big black medic barked as he retrieved a syringe from a bright yellow hard-pack first-aid case.

“Coming out!” someone else yelled in a high, panicked voice a moment later. There was a tremendous clatter as a trauma stretcher was clicked into rolling position. The crowd of cops and medics began to part in front of it, letting the stretcher through.

My knees almost gave out when Mulford moved out of my line of sight and I finally saw who was on the stretcher.

I staggered back, shaking my head.

Something caved in my chest as Peter was rolled past me, his eyes flat and unfocused, his face and chest covered in blood.

Chapter 24

COPS MADE A TIGHT CIRCLE around Peter, shielding him from the public as he was rolled toward a reversing ambulance.

I noticed several things at once. He was sheet white. A thin spiderweb of blood was splattered across his cheek and neck. His uniform shirt had been cut open, and I could see more blackish blood caked on his arm, dripping off his elbow.

Peter didn’t just look shot, I thought, staring at him as he was lifted into the back of the ambulance. Peter looked dead.

“Let her through,” Mulford said, dragging me forward. “It’s his wife.”