***
It’s two o’clock in the afternoon now. I’m cruising north in a Cadillac CTS, leaving the Turnpike for the I-75, headed for Atlanta, Georgia. I’m making a point to stay under eighty-five miles per hour while I enjoy the sweet new flavor of freedom.
The Cadillac is just like everything else the Tooleys own—top of the line, unblemished. The wood paneling is polished to a high sheen, the leather seats are clean enough for open heart surgery, and the engine purrs under me. I feel a kinship with the poor car—in stealing, I’m giving us both our freedom. Quinn’s Lexus is in the shop for service so Francine had lent him her Cadillac because he has a perfect driving record. Me, I’ve had two parking tickets and one minor fender-bender in the past so I would never make the grade, even in an emergency. That’s why, instead of my BMW, I took her car. Francine will get it back once the police start looking for me. She won’t know that up front, of course. Instead, later on tonight, after her and Tom’s ‘visit’ with Quinn, she’ll report it stolen (I did steal it, after all), something else for her to fret over on top of everything else.
I smile when I think that Quinn won’t be borrowing her precious car ever again. I wonder what he will tell people about why I did it what I did, if he will tell them the truth, if he will tell them anything at all. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’ll never be under his control ever again. Whatever else happens after today, I’ve taken that power away from him once and for all. I think about what’s inside my make-up case in the trunk and about what the beach towel is protecting so lovingly….
…and my smile sprawls to a grin.
I do feel a flicker of remorse that it will be Quinn’s parents who discover what I’ve done when they come by the house tonight at eight for the usual monthly dinner and chat, but only a flicker. They’ll likely be so beside themselves, they won’t even care about the Caddie until morning.
That thought makes me chuckle.
One of Mom’s sayings is that once you make your bed, you’re the only one who can lie in it. I wonder what she would say about the doozie I made in my bed this morning.
And that strikes me as so funny, my chuckle explodes into a full blown laugh and I almost run off the road into a ditch.
Suddenly there is a POW! and the car pulls back hard to one side, handling heavy and unsteady. Thanks to the Advanced Driving Course Quinn had me take, I can keep it under control and pull safely off the road. I cut the ignition and pound the steering wheel with my fists. Shit…shit, shit, shit! You’d think for all the care Francine takes waxing and valeting her damn car, she would at least check the fucking tires! I don’t need this now! Not now I’ve come this far and am so close!
I force myself to calm down.
Looking in the rearview mirror, I see a couple cars getting closer and closer but they swoosh right by, unknowing, uncaring about my predicament. The interstate outside Royal is quiet, but still…shit!
I get out, see that it’s the back left that’s blown. I pop the trunk, shift things around to get at the tools. I’m about to haul out the spare when I hear the “twu-up!-twoop!” of a siren and a state trooper pulls up behind my—Francine’s—car.
I freeze, my stomach balls into a knot, and my mind goes blank, a “brain fart” Sheila next door calls it—a complete inability to think, breathe, or move. My first thought when my mind clicks back into gear is, “Cops. Hard to find when you need one; pop up out of thin fricking air when you really, really don’t want ‘em around.
I let go of the spare and quickly ease the beach towel and make up case deeper into the trunk.
“That’s a bad blow-out you got there, Ma’am. Can I offer a hand?” comes a caramel-smooth Tallahassee accent inches to my left. When I turn my head, the trooper is talking to me but his eyes are on my backside clad in my oldest, tightest jeans. My instinctive reaction to that look is a verbal slap-down but being unfriendly to this trooper wouldn’t be smart, so I plaster on a smile.
“Thank you, officer. I can do it myself but I won’t say no to some help.” I shift aside and make a sweeping motion with my hand.
He flashes me a blatant come-on grin and my stomach retracts, my body with it, but he thinks my withdrawal is to give him more room to reach past me. He wouldn’t know that these days I can’t stand any man getting close. I get jittery. And having this trooper root around in the car trunk, so close to the make-up case and towel bundle, is making me even more so.
“Well, you see, officer,”—I imagine myself explaining—“some people don’t understand things until you actually show them first hand, as it were.”
I want the trooper to hurry up and be done. I glance at my Cartier watch—a Happy-Birthday-sorry-for-belting-you-in-the-chest gift from Quinn (I wore high-necks for two weeks that summer)—and realize that it’s less than four hours now before what I’ve done is discovered. Then they’ll be looking for me.
The trooper has the car jacked up, removing the flat and it suddenly hits me that now the car is tilted!
I ease back again to check if anything in the trunk has shifted but the case is still closed, nothing peeping out…or leaking out.
“Thank Jesus,” I accidentally sigh out loud and that gets the trooper’s attention.
He looks at me and smiles. “I know what you mean. Getting the flat off is the hard part. From here on out it’s easy, though.”
To keep him clueless I say, “I’ve changed flats before, but it would have taken me longer and I want to get where I’m going before dark.”
“Where you heading?”
“At…Alachua.” I catch myself just in time.
He doesn’t pick up on it, intent as he is on bolting on the spare. “Business or pleasure?” he huffs as he works.
I think fast. “Pleasure. Just getting away for a while, to relax. You know.”
He nods, stands up to wrap the job up. “In fact…” he glances at his watch, “this is the last hour of my shift before I head off on vacation. Taking two weeks off and spending most of it in Vegas.”
I want to swoop joy at the sky. Vegas, the other side of the country.
“When are you leaving?”
He glances at his watch again. “Two hours, sixteen minutes. Just have to drop the car back to the station, grab my packed bags, and I’m out of here.”
Now I’m really fighting not to hum Whoopee! He’ll be gone when the APB goes out.
He’s finished at last. “There you go. Good as new. But you need to get this blow-out seen to asap. Shouldn’t be without a spare.” As he dumps the bad tire back in the trunk, he’s again checking me out. “Don’t suppose you’d consider running away with me to Vegas? After all, I did save you from being stranded.” He gives me a wink.
“Hardly stranded. Like I said, I’ve changed a tire before. Anyway, I have…plans…in Gainesville.” I make it provocative.
The trooper fakes a dejected look. “Isn’t that the damnest thing? The best ones are always taken. Got anything I can clean my hands with? This towel here good?” And he reaches for it.
I leap forward. “No!” He stops and I catch myself. “No. I…I have wet wipes.”
Faking calm, thinking fast, I brush past him, putting a purposeful sway in my hips, a sway Sheila next door says calls just about every man in a twenty mile radius to come pay homage. Some women are beautiful, some are sexy. Apparently, when I put my mind to it, I’m both. It’s been so long since I’ve wanted to use my sexuality to draw attention that it feels wrong, not me. But when I look in the driver’s rearview mirror, the trooper is staring all right, his jaw slack. I keep his attention on my form by leaning into the car just so to reach for the wipes. When I straighten up and turn, he snaps his mouth back shut. While I’m handing him the pack, I slam the trunk lid shut.
“Thank you so much, officer.” I offer to shake his now clean hand.
“You’re more than welcome, little lady.” He holds my hand a second too long and I hope he doesn’t notice that my pulse racing.
Maybe he’ll think it means I’m attracted to him.
I ease my hand away, get in, start the engine and pull off while he’s standing there, staring after me. He has probably already got the license plate, of course, but he’s helped a damsel in distress before heading off to kick loose in Vegas. Last thing on his mind is the law.
And me? I have to stop for another bag of ice for the make-up case—I’m pretty sure water will start leaking out soon—but other than that, I’m still managing to buy myself time.
When I came home from the hospital, it didn’t take me long to come up with a new plan and find the things I needed for it. It did however take a while to build up the courage to actually go through with it. Turns out, all I was waiting for was that final push.
Last night we had a dinner party at home. I wanted to stay in bed, get over a headache caused by thinking too much about the vial I had locked away in my nightstand, but Quinn insisted I play hostess. He wanted everyone to see that everything was back to normal with us though it had been less than a month since he’d killed the twins. After dessert, he played the piano, taking requests, drawing melody after melody from the keys with the same hands he had imprinted on my cheek four hours earlier to convince me that the party was the best thing for me. The force of the slap was calculated so that I could get rid of the mild swelling with a couple blocks of ice, and cover the feint discoloration with make-up. Still, it stung for a while.
While he played, I sat off to the side watching him charm our guests and I knew…I knew…that he was happy I was no longer pregnant, that this party was to celebrate my being back under his control. That…and the earlier slap, were the final push.
Quinn is a tall man, well-muscled, fit from regimented workouts. The difference in our sizes put me at disadvantage, so this morning, just four hours ago, I served him a late breakfast in bed to show him I was glad we’d had the dinner party last night, after all. I watched him polish off the Belgian waffle, Italian sausage, and Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee…and Indian fish poison from the vial I bought from the wise-eyed Native American at the Reservation shop.
The poison worked fast. One minute Quinn was sitting up in bed, smiling because life was back the way he wanted it; next minute he was trying to control the twitching of his arms and legs before they failed him entirely. I stood watching, part curious, part fascinated. His facial muscles were the last to go so I got to see his disbelief when what I had done started to sink in. Then came the rage when I roped his elbows and legs to the bed posts. Finally there was that succulent fear when I rammed a tennis ball stained with my and my babies’ blood into his mouth. I reassured him that he wasn’t going to die, that I had only given him enough poison to paralyze him for several hours. That only seemed to make him panic even more.
My Calusa ancestors originated west of the Okeechobee and were an aggressive lot, overpowering any other tribe they came across and taking them as slaves. I bet Quinn has more than a few of them in his blood, too. My Timucuan people tended to be more sanguine, mostly farmers and fishermen. I read how they used a neat poison to paralyze the fish they wanted to catch but how, in war, they knew how to carve up a prisoner and take body parts as trophies.
I knew the part of Quinn I was going to take and why.
That beating he gave me that had killed our babies ruined me so badly inside that likely I will never have children again. That’s what the doctor told me the morning I left the hospital—that I would probably never be able to conceive again, carry a child full term, give birth. Quinn’s hands had robbed me of that privilege and joy of womanhood, and I figured those same hands were fair exchange for what he took from me.
So I took his hands with a hack saw from the garage, burnt the stumps with the iron from the laundry room, and left him there tied to our bed to think about the rest of his stinking life.