“Yeah, well, you were doing eighty-seven.”
“Test driving this baby. Sweet, isn’t it? It must have gotten away from me.”
“More like you were trying to go flat out.”
“Give me a break,” she said dryly. “It’ll do a hundred without breaking a sweat.”
“Does the dealer who let you test drive this know you work at Southridge?”
“Sure. But I told him I had a sugar daddy and I batted my eyelashes. Wanna see?”
The sunglasses hid Sullivan’s eye roll. “You have a permit for the gun?”
“Do you really believe I don’t?” When silence was his answer, she said, “In the glove box.”
“Lower the window.”
“I have to take at least one hand off the wheel.”
“Still pissing me off, Ramsey.”
She pressed the starter button once to give battery power to the accessories and then lowered the window. When it was down, she folded her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead while Sullivan leaned over to open the glove box.
He took out her pistol first—a Walther 9mm Concealed Carry Pistol—because there was no sense taking chances. He thought he saw one corner of her splendid mouth curl in something that might have been amusement. More likely derision. He opted to ignore it.
“I’ll be back,” he told her once he also had her license and registration, and headed to his car. If she made a sarcastic reply—and really, what other kind would suit her or this particular situation?—he was out of range to hear it.
Everything checked out. No outstanding tickets. No points on her license. The dealer’s plates and registration were legit. Maybe she was right about the car getting away from her. The ride along this stretch of road was routine for her; she was probably daydreaming and didn’t notice the speedometer creeping into ticket territory. Yeah, right. She was doing precisely what he would do given the same chance to drive a hundred-thousand-dollar car. He wondered how she had managed to bring along the Walther.
Still, for all of that, he entertained cutting her a break with a warning and not writing out the ticket. Because he reasoned she’d give him a hard time no matter what he did, he decided she should contribute to Clifton’s treasury. When he returned to the Benz, he had the ticket ready to go. He tore it from the book and handed it to her. She accepted without comment, barely glancing at it, and waited until he returned the Walther and documents to the glove box before she started the car.
“Do you feel safer because you own a gun?” he asked her.
“No. Not at all. I feel safer because I know how to use it.”
Sullivan didn’t doubt it. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He stepped back as the roof began to lift. It was a marvel of technology. “Can’t say it’s been a pleasure, Ramsey, but I like what you’ve done to your hair.” He grinned as she lowered her foot on the gas. He was still grinning when he got back behind his own wheel.
3
There wasno good reason she and Sullivan rubbed each other the wrong way, at least none that Ramsey could put her finger on. Still, that rubbing, right way or not, created the same spark and crackle she got when she touched a doorknob after walking across a dry carpet. Why in God’s name would she want to spend time in the company of someone who prickled her skin with one tiny shock after another? She imagined it was no different for him because he made a point to keep his distance. Ramsey reckoned that if he had known she was behind the wheel of the Benz, he might have let her fly on by. On the other hand, he was a bit of a Dudley-Do-Right, so maybe not.
They’d met for the first time at the Southridge store. He was a hometown boy who left West Virginia after high school on a swimming scholarship to Tennessee. The way she heard it, Sullivan Day never looked back until his mother’s health declined to the point she could no longer care for herself. He resigned from the Philadelphia police when he could have taken a leave of absence and then surprised old friends and acquaintances by taking a position with the Clifton force after she died. That was about as much as she’d known about him when he showed up at the store in response to her call for assistance.
Ramsey could acknowledge now that she anticipated he would act as if the call was trivial. Under torture, and only then, she’d admit she’d been prickly and a little defensive before Sullivan Day even introduced himself. And if she were strictly honest with herself, which she did not really want to be, he had the kind of good looks that made her squirm. So, yeah, she was spoiling for a fight from the first.
Besides responding to calls from the Ridge, Sullivan Day also shopped at the store. Ramsey had spied him on at least a dozen occasions examining the produce, chatting Maria up at the deli counter, and choosing cold medicine in the pharmacy area. He also spent an inordinate amount of time in Aisle Fourteen—the light bulb aisle. That was just plain weird. What was the man’s fascination with light bulbs?
She wished he’d take his light bulb fetish to a hardware store. The fact that he looked damn good out of uniform did not endear him to her. She had been consoling herself with the thought that maybe she had a thing for uniforms she was only now discovering, but, no, it wasn’t that. She simply had a thing for tall, dark, and handsome. She was attracted to a cliché, which was disappointing. Even more disappointing, evidence suggested she was not alone.
On half the occasions she saw him at the Ridge, he was with a woman. Once he was accompanied by a woman and a toddler, which she found a little unnerving until she overheard the pair were the police chief’s married daughter and grandson. Her coworkers, especially those in the deli, made it their business to talk about him when she was around. Maybe they talked about him when shewasn’taround, but there was something meaningful in the way they spoke that made her think this was not the case. She did not dare show any interest. As quick as she could say “light bulbs” they would plot her a path that ended in Aisle Fourteen.
Ramsey entertained the notion of asking him out. To the extent that he was in her system, one bad date would remove him from it. She was confident the date would be bad because that was the only kind she had. Since moving to Clifton four years ago, she had been on five first dates and only two second dates. It wasn’t fair to say she hadn’t tried. What could be said was that she hadn’t tried very hard, and it was just as fair to say that neither had her dates. Dinner and a movie was not her idea of an imaginative first date, especially when the restaurant was a chain on the order of Olive Garden and the movie starred Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell. She was bored before those dates got underway and did not make much effort to carry her end of the conversation. She had hopes when one date suggested the Italian Festival. She understood it was a popular event in the valley, and it might have been an entertaining evening if her date hadn’t tried to sample every craft beer available. She lifted his keys—he thought it was a sexual advance—and drove him home. After abandoning him and the car in his driveway, she called a cab. Oh, and she kept his keys.
What had been a promising first date with easy conversation over dinner, mutual enjoyment of a local college production ofNoises Off, and drinks afterward, ended abruptly on the second date when the man’s wife showed up and calmly introduced herself. From Ramsey’s perspective, the woman’s confrontation was handled with weary civility. Clearly it was something that had happened before, and the wife had no difficulty believing Ramsey was unaware. In the event that high drama was still in the offing, Ramsey ducked out, but not before spilling her mojito into her date’s lap.
Her other second date never became a third. She couldn’t recall now if she had been disappointed when he hadn’t called again. It was that long ago.
Her coworkers had no boundaries when it came to trying to advance her love life, and she’d learned it was better not to demonstrate any interest in their chatter. When there were whispers that her sexual preference was women, they were not deterred. It seemed all of them knew someone who had come out loud and proud. Those introductions led to making good friends outside of work, but no lovers.
