Now You See Her

Florida Gator logo air freshener instead. Albert wasn’t offering any suggestions. I sucked in a hard breath, like a diver before going under, and finally looked.

The biker lay in the middle of the right lane behind me. He was facedown on the asphalt beside my skid marks, his thick gray braid half undone, his arms flung out in a Christlike spread. Traffic cones and stanchions from a work area along the side of the road were scattered around him like nailed bowling pins. He wasn’t moving.

When I noticed the dark, inky splotch in his gray hair and on the street beside his head, various parts of my body started to shake simultaneously, my knees, my hands, my lips. I let out my sour, rum-scented breath and covered my face with my quivering hands. My trembling, clenching fingers clawed at my skull like a rock climber searching for purchase.

“What have I done?” I asked myself between hysterical gulps of air.

Killed a man, came a stone-sober answering thought in response.

You just killed a man trying to save his dog.

I glanced up at the open road through the windshield. It curved away out of sight in the moonlit distance, beautiful, dreamlike, beckoning like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz.

That’s when the cool, rational, very sober-sounding voice in my head delivered two words, a sound bite, an ad slogan.

Just go.

It wasn’t your fault, my interior voice-over continued. You were trying not to hit the dog. There was nothing you could do. Besides, no one saw. Take your foot off the brake and move it onto the gas. Don’t look back. Don’t be stupid. Just go.

It was true that no one had seen it, I realized with a swallow. I was on an empty stretch of road near the airport with nothing but the deserted beach on the right. The only structure was an abandoned-looking concrete industrial building a couple of hundred feet up on the left.

The only witnesses to the incident were a silent armada of yellow school buses parked behind a chain-link fence across the street. Their dead eyelike headlights seemed to stare at me as if wondering what I was going to do.

I looked around for the biker’s dog. It was gone.

It was as if I came back online then. Having thought the unthinkable, the spell was broken, and I could once again focus.

I slid the car into park and turned it off.

I had to help this poor man. I needed to do what my father would have done. Start CPR, stop his bleeding, find a phone.

Go? I thought, disgusted, as I fumbled with the door latch. How could I have even considered such a thing? I was a good person. I’d been a lifeguard, a candy striper. That’s my good girl, my daddy used to say as I’d help him off with his high-gloss police oxfords.

I was getting out of the car when I noticed a pair of headlights approaching in the distance behind the injured man. Before I could breathe, an unexpected and dazzling flash of brilliant color crowned the headlights.

I stared, paralyzed, mesmerized, as the night suddenly blazed with a fireworks burst of police lights, blinding bubbles of blood red and vivid sapphire blue.

Chapter 6

THE FLASHING POLICE CRUISER was strangely silent as it rolled to a slanting stop halfway between me and the fallen biker. As the metallic squawk and chitter of its police radio reached my ears, my chin dropped to my chest like a condemned prisoner’s, waiting for the ax.

I looked up as I heard the heavy crunch of a footstep by the cop car’s open door. I couldn’t see the officer’s face, which was backlit by the blinding roof lights. The only thing I could make out was his large, squarish, dark outline against the crazily strobing lights.

“Stay there and keep your hands where I can see them,” the cop said like the voice of God.

I immediately complied.

Over the trunk of the cop car, I watched the officer quickly approach the injured man and squat by his side. The next thing I knew, the cop was looming over me.

He was unexpectedly handsome, with short black hair and pale blue eyes in a lean face. He was six two or three, early thirties, powerfully built. His all-American physical attractiveness made the whole situation worse somehow. Made my guilt sharper, my despair more vile.

“He’s dead,” the officer said.

Something at my core faltered.

“Oh, no,” I whispered like a crazy person into my lap. “Please, God, no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I buried my shaking head deeper into my hands as the recruitment-poster police officer leaned down beside my face and sniffed.

“And you’re dead drunk. Stand up and put your hands behind your head.”

Chapter 7

WHEN MY FATHER DIED and I saw his coffin for the first time, I remember thinking, This is it. Nothing will ever be this bad.

I was wrong.

The officer cuffed me and put me into the back seat of the cruiser. I was surprised at how clean it was. It smelled new. The rubber floor mats were as immaculate as the ones in Alex’s car, the seat was deep, plush almost. Except for the kind of black plastic mesh separating the front from the back, you wouldn’t think it was a cop car. Despite the fact that my father was a cop, I’d never been in one before.

My right leg started shaking like a newly caught fish. Was I having a stroke? I wondered, staring at my jitterbugging thigh. I hoped so. Because anything was better than facing this.

I snorted back a wet, spasming sob.

Anything.

I glanced at the back of the cop’s head as he lowered himself into the police cruiser’s front seat. Like everything else about him, his head was neat, ordered, squared off. You could probably have balanced a level on his broad boxer’s shoulders. He had good posture, bearing, my mother would have said.

Had he been in the military? my haywire brain wanted to know. I read his backward name tag in the rearview mirror. Fournier.

Officer Fournier put his head down as he typed my driver’s license information into his boxy front-seat computer terminal. Then his cropped head suddenly leveled again.

“This right?” he said without turning around. “Your twenty-first birthday was just a few days ago? You down here for spring break?”

I noticed for the first time that there was a slight Northeast-city inflection to his voice. Boston, New York, Philly maybe. Then I had another, less distracted thought. What color prison jumpsuit would they give me?

“Yes,” I said, choking back another sob. “I’m a senior at UF.”

I suddenly wanted to be back there so much I almost moaned. If only I could click my heels and be back to Frisbee and meal cards and the note-scribbled onionskin pages of my Norton Anthology of English Literature.

There’d be no more school, no more softball, no more nothing at all. I’d loved books my entire life, and ever since high school I’d dreamed of becoming an editor at a New York City publishing house. I’d vaporized my future,