So I was in a race. My cell phone was dead so calling Lucas to warn him was out.
The man with a walker finally made it down to the curb and the bus began to move. I should have relished a moment to take a breather, but my brain buzzed along at hummingbird speeds. Waking up from this crazy dream in a pile of ash and pools of my own blood still seemed a very viable option. Things kept moving along as if it was reality so I accepted I was wide awake, and maybe more awake than I’d ever been.
As much as I probably needed a hospital right then, I knew getting to Lucas was my priority. He’d help me and I’d tell him I saw some freaky hallucination where a woman who looked like me promised to kill him.
Thinking it didn’t make me feel crazy. Knowing that is was crazy made me feel okay, actually. I had a brain injury and it was doing some very freaky things to me. I needed Lucas to take over. He’d bring me to a hospital, he’d make sure they stopped the visions. And, just in case there really was someone trying to kill him…I willed the bus to go faster. But not over the speed limit. An odd feeling, but what about my world wasn’t odd at that moment?
Lucas had a heat seeking missile racing toward him and I had to get there first.
Lucas, my do-gooder. My Eliot Ness. With him I became Scout and to his Atticus, the lawyer who towered as a hero in my eyes. Yes, I also think he’s hot so maybe the father/daughter thing is a little wrong.
I saw in him all the things I let slip from my own life like his passion for justice I once shared. I felt jealous he wasn’t constantly playing angles, always worried if his time had run out on a whim. And here I come, flirting up a storm and starting our whole relationship by lying my ass off to him. I nodded and smiled on our third date when he told me the major case he’d been working on. The case that would finally bring down Calder and Rizzo and maybe even build a bridge to getting the Cantado cartel out of Juarez.
Y’know how some women spend so much time being good and they end up wanting to date a bad boy for a little spice? I’m the opposite. I’d become so bad that dating Lucas and his choir boy starched shirt reputation was the thrill. Give me a guy on a motorcycle who rides weekends and smokes pot once a month and I’ll throw him back in your face. Yeah, bad boys are a dime a dozen. I could make one phone call and get a lineup of ten guys who’d slit someone’s throat and give them a Columbian necktie* and stand them next to ten other guys who snorted lines of cocaine off the edge of a knife in the storage unit where they make the stuff.
(* A Columbian necktie is where you cut open a guy’s throat and pull his tongue out from the inside so it hangs out the neck hole looking like a necktie. Popularized in Columbia in the Eighties. Pretty self-explanatory.)
At the risk of getting all “He completes me” about this, I can say I did not want Lucas to die. I did not want to miss out on what we had coming in life. I did not want to blow my chance for him to lead me in starting over.
I’m a girl. I wanted my wedding day. I wanted to grow old with him and my idea of him dying is for him to go two days after I do at age 95 because he’s heartbroken and misses me so much he gives out like James Garner in The Notebook.
I may be a tomboy, but my heart isn’t made of rocks y’know.
THE MOST ROMANTIC NIGHT OF MY LIFE
Let me tell you about the night I almost got Lucas killed.
We’d been dating a while and things were going great. We got along, we laughed, the sex was great. All still true, by the way.
We were having dinner at a cute little Italian place with a piano player and dual clarinets doing jazz standards in the corner. A candles-in-wine-bottles, smell-of-garlic-in-the-walls kind of place. He knew I had to do a work thing afterward so I had a hard out at nine o’clock. What he didn’t know is my “work” was really for Calder and Rizzo.
I’d been contacted by a member of a rival cartel offering information on the twins. He figured, and I can only guess as to the inner workings of a cartel mind, if he gave the DEA enough to nail Calder and Rizzo then they would be out of the way and he and his cronies could move in. The fatal flaw with all these jerks is they fail to see there is someone else right behind them waiting with the same information about him and just as eager to turn it over to the feds. Ah, the circle of criminal life.
Anyway, I told Calder and Rizzo about the offer. They said to meet with him, see what he was selling and report back. So, fine, easy enough. No one gets hurt, the way I like it.
Well, Lucas had been a bundle of nerves all night long. He’s talking too much, laughing at everything. I figured, hey, Friday night after a long work week and he wasn’t used to drinking that much wine so I chalked it up to nothing special.
The night got away from us and before we knew it I checked my watch and it was quarter ‘till. Time to run.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” he said. “Can’t it wait?”
“Sorry.” I kissed him, leaning over our half finished tiramisu. I sucked down the rest of my wine and grabbed my purse.
“I thought we could talk,” he said. “Maybe later?”
“I don’t know how late I’ll be. I’ll see you this weekend for sure.”
“I know, it’s just…”
“Hey,” I said, playfully. “You work plenty of late nights and odd hours. The DA has you running in circles sometimes. You figure out how to get him to give you a night off, you tell me and I’ll bring it to my guys.”
“Oh, fine, I just really…”
“Babe, I gotta go.” I kissed him one more time before sticking him with the check.
I made my way over to an office plaza where we were supposed to meet. I waited across the street from the Symphony Hall which hadn’t let out yet. Odd place for a drug kingpin to request a meet, but I felt safer around there than in some of the sleaze pits I usually found these guys.
He was late. All my rushing around and I’m the one waiting.
Imagine my surprise when Lucas walks across the plaza. He came out from behind the big fountain there and it felt like a movie. Tons of tiny string lights hung from every light pole and all the trees were up-lit. If you strained hard over the rush of water you could hear a little of the symphony floating on the breeze.
“Lucas? What are you…you can’t be here.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” He always discounted the dangerous nature of my job. I think he thought of me more as a desk jockey than a real field agent. Better he think that than learn the truth.
“Seriously, you’ve got to go.”
He’d been emboldened by the wine enough to follow me. I thought maybe he shouldn’t be driving.
“Hold on, Samantha.” He seemed poised for some great speech. A speech he’d forgotten. He looked down at his shoes.
That’s when I saw them. Two men I knew from Calder and Rizzo’s army. They came out from behind the same fountain, but this time they were in a very different movie. Lucas started his speech.