I was out of options and the best way to keep Imogen safe at that point was to get us to the police station. I crossed my fingers they were better than the small-town police in Pelican Bay.
When I returned to the table, two plates of eggs sat on the dirty piece of wood. Imogen grabbed hers and took a bite before I had my butt on the bench.
“She said you have to pay for your eggs, but mine are free,” Imogen said with a smile before she shoveled more food in her mouth.
I pushed my plate close to hers. “I’m not hungry,” I said, hoping she would take the food and eat her fill.
Instead of grabbing my plate with two runny eggs on the top, she looked at me with concern. “Not being hungry is a bad sign, Cyrus. You need to eat.”
A mini plate on the side of our table had four pieces of toast. I grabbed the top one and nibbled on the edge, but it tasted like stale dry bread and not the delicious first bite like I expected.
Imogen finished her plate of eggs, and I pushed mine closer to her while I finished my piece of toast. I picked up the second when a police car pulled up and parked in front of the bar. The toast crunched between my teeth and I breathed a sigh of relief, blowing crumbs onto the table.
Finally, we had time to tell our story, contact my brother, and get back to Maine.
CHAPTER 7
IMOGEN
The cop banged his coffee cup against the table and I jerked.
I’d never been scared of the police before, but seeing the lights on the police car as it parked in front of the bar made my stomach fall. The lights weren’t even on, and my stomach was full of eggs. But something wasn’t right. I pushed off the fear by blaming Cyrus’s worries for making me nervous. Police were our friends.
Still, Cyrus and I tracked the uniformed officer as he walked in the restaurant, and I couldn’t shake the feeling my doom walked through the door with him.
I should have paid attention to my gut.
After an hour in their interrogation room, I learned the police were not the saviors I’d expected.
“Are you sure you and Mr. Kensington didn’t decide to add excitement to your relationship by stealing a car and going on a joyride after a night of drinking and drugs?” the officer asked as he leaned across the metal table separating us.
What was everyone’s obsession with drugs in Florida? Did people come from all over to do drugs in the state? The officer said I wasn’t under arrest, but it sure sounded that way.
I’d told him my story twice already, but he didn’t listen. Not a single word. He stared at me as if what I’d said was the plot of an action movie, and I’d confused my facts from my drug-induced haze.
I leaned across the table too, not to get closer to him but because I couldn’t keep my body upright any longer. “I told you. We didn’t steal the car for fun but to escape the men who kidnapped us.”
He promised he had an officer looking into our story, but he never left the room to tell them my story. How could they be looking into it if they didn’t know it? He just kept asking me the same questions and waiting for me to trip up on the facts.
And even with me telling the truth, with each time I had to recount the story, I’d eventually get something wrong. My brain grew fuzzy. The eggs made me slightly sick from eating too quickly. It’s not like I’d used a notebook and written down what happened as we did everything.
The officer’s face grew red, and he leaned forward so far that the metal table scratched on the floor as he pushed it against me. “And I told you there is no marina where you say you swam from a ship.”
He was going slightly bald on the top of his head, and his face was not a friendly one. This wasn’t a guy walking the beach in a children’s neighborhood. He’d done hard time in law enforcement. And he also seemed to assume I was someone he needed to put behind bars.
I didn’t know what he wanted me to tell him. He’d heard the truth twice now. I couldn’t get any more truthy.
The angry man stood up unexpectantly, and I flinched as if he might hit me, but all that happened was his chair scraping against the concrete floor and causing ripples of a headache in my brain. “I am just about done with you out-of-towners who come for a bit of fun and then get too wild. You’re stealing cars and giving the great state of Florida grief.”
I was tired, too tired, so I didn’t expect to get angry, but the pissy police officer must’ve shared some of his pissyness with me because I couldn’t stop from yelling back. “I’m not giving Florida grief!”
If anything, Florida had given me grief.
I didn’t ask to be here, and I wanted to go home.
Who did this guy think he was? I never asked to be kidnapped and dropped here. Who wanted to steal a car and make a run for their lives? It was not my idea of a good time. Someone shot at us. I had to pee in a corner.
We didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t consider any of this fun.
