Obsession (Southern Comfort)

KATHLEEN
Murphy figured if she was consigning her diet to hell, there might as well be plenty of grease in the hand basket.

“That’s disgusting.”

She looked over the dry, crusty top of her otherwise soggy bun, into the disapproving gray eyes of her dining companion.  “You’re just saying that because you’re a doctor.”

Justin Wellington – tall, dark and censorious – frowned at the blob of sawmill gravy that dropped onto her plate.  “I’m just saying that because I haven’t pickled my brain cells wi
th refined flour, transfats and sodium.  And bacon.  Let’s not forget the bacon. Take away that slice of lettuce and you’ve basically got fried lard between two pieces of cardboard.”

“There’s lettuce on here?”  Kathleen took the top off her bun and peered at her sandwich with deep suspicion.  “Who puts lettuce on a good chicken fried steak?  There.”  She dropped the offending vegetable from her fingertips, patted the gravy-laden bacon back into place.  “All better.”

“My arteries just got second-hand atherosclerosis.”

“Give me a break,” she said around a mouthful, trying not to moan aloud as the grease hit her tongue.  Moaning would not be good. “Things got dicey after Dad’s little angioplasty scare, to the point that I felt guilty ordering fish and chips whenever I ate at Murphy’s. And don’t even get me started on the torments I’ve su
ffered over the pecan pie I brought for Thanksgiving. But now I have three – count ‘em,
three –
pregnant women in my family.  And can they be normal pregnant women and eat ice cream and fried pickles?  No, my sister had to go all health Nazi on me as soon as that little plus sign showed up on the stick.  Then she got my cousin to drink her crazy Kool-Aid, and eating ‘right’ became a family epidemic.  I’ve been consuming so many leafy greens that I probably bleed folic acid.  And Sadie,” she narrowed her eyes, thinking of her childhood best friend and current sister-in-law “appears to have been driven insane by first trimester hormones.  Of course, that could be the result of living with my brother.  But regardless,” she grabbed a napkin out of the tabletop dispenser to wipe her dripping chin “I caught her the other day, confiscating the Twinkies I keep in my desk at the station house.”

That outrage was still so fresh that Kathleen tugged too hard on the dispenser, endangering Justin’s salad with a displaced salt shaker.

“Twinkies.”  Justin’s nimble surgeon’s fingers snagged the shaker before it could roll.  He shook his head as he replaced it next to the pepper. “Well, the good news is that your family won’t have to spring for embalming when you die.”

“That’s urban legend.  Twinkies have a shelf life of like three weeks.  Anyway,” she dipped the corner of her cardboard bun into the quivering gravy blob “let me enjoy my gastronomical ruination in peace.”

JUSTIN
looked around the greasy spoon, a vehicle for ruination if he’d ever seen one.  Madonna’s version of
Santa Baby
piped over the speakers, and between the underdressed wait staff and the laminated menus he figured they had most of the deadly restaurant sins covered.  Or any kind of sin, he amended as he watched a suspicious exchange of cash in the booth across the way.

Kathleen must be jonesing hard to cheat on her family’s downtown Charleston pub with this place.

Keeping one wary eye on the activity in the booth, Justin returned the bulk of his attention to Kathleen.

Her head had dropped back so that her hair slid like shiny red silk against her slender shoulders, eyes closed in apparent ecstasy as she licked a drop of gravy from the corner of her lips.

“So how’s Anthony?” he asked, because it seemed like the safest thing to say at that exact moment.

“Who?”  Those lake blue eyes drifted open, foggy, still clearly under the intoxicating influence of grease.

“Anthony?  The man you’ve been dating for the past eleven months.”

“Has it been that long?”  She blinked, and when she looked at him again her eyes were sharp.  Sharp and not ecstatic at all.  Thank God.

He nodded. “I only remember because it was just after New Year’s.  And now it’s nearly Christmas.”  He poked at his Cobb salad, wondering if it was safe to eat.  Probably no worse than hospital food.  On the other hand, that wasn’t saying much. But then he’d come for the company – he and Kathleen hadn’t managed more than a random text message or two in the past several weeks – rather than for the epicurean delights of Jug’s Bar and Grill.

He picked up his fork and stabbed an anemic piece of iceberg lettuce from his plate.

“Christmas.”  She winced.  “Don’t remind me.  At the rate I’m going I’ll be hitting the Stop N Go Christmas Eve, cleaning them out of air fresheners and beef jerky.  Maybe if I wrapped them up with a nice ribbon…  Anyway,” she shook her head, sopped up more gravy with her bun.  “Um, Anthony.  Yeah, he’s fine.  Busy.  Getting a business off the ground is no walk in the park.  But leaving the force was the right thing for him at the time, and he’s a good investigator.  Once he’s moved beyond all the cheating spouses on whose backs – ha – he’s gotten started, I think he’ll like being a PI.  At least he doesn’t have to put up with bureaucracy. How about you?”

“What?”  The blond-haired kid from the booth got up and careened toward the restroom. Something about him was definitely off.  Too thin, too twitchy.  He couldn’t be sure, given all the hair in the kid’s face, but Justin thought his eyes looked a little swollen.

“You still dating Cindy, Mindy…”

“Mandy.”

“That’s it.”

“Uh, no.”   Drugs.  Maybe meth, or some kind of barbiturate.  The restaurant was around the corner from the hospital, and Justin knew there’d been a problem with some of the staff stealing Seconal to peddle.  The cops had made a couple busts, but plug up the dam in one place, it usually sprang a bigger leak in another.  Frowning, he leaned over to check out the other person in the booth, but only caught the back of his head as he slid out and walked the other direction.  Dark hair, short, curly.  Tougher build than the blond.

“Can’t imagine why.  Given your attentiveness, and all.”

“We just weren’t that... wait.  What?”

Kathleen snapped her fingers in front of his face.  “Hi, you may not remember me, but I’m Kathleen Murphy, your dining companion. I realize the overabundance of mammary stimulation in the room tends to make men stupid, so I can see how that might slip your mind.”

Justin pointed his fork at Kathleen.  “You picked this place, not me.  And you know I’m more of a leg man.  Besides,” he watched the dark-haired guy push through the glass door at the other end of the bar.  “I think I may have just witnessed a drug deal.”

She sat her half-eaten sandwich down with a plop.  “You’re just mentioning this now?”  She craned around to see where he was looking.

“Think,” he repeated.  “The skeevy-looking blond passed some money to the dark-haired guy.  Skeevy blond stumbles in the direction of the restroom, dark-haired guy exits stage left.”

“Did the dark-haired guy give the blond anything in exchange for the money?”

“If he did, I didn’t see it.  What?” he said when she turned
back around with a lowering frown.

“This is like me saying I think the guy across the aisle might be having a heart attack because he’s overweight and keeps rubbing his chest.  Maybe the guy just has heartburn – justifiably so if he’s eating in this place – but now that I’ve mentioned it, you feel obligated to check him out.  Instead of enjoying your chicken-fried steak.”

“If I had chicken-fried steak, I’d be the one rubbing my chest. And you’re homicide, not counter-narcotics.”

“You’re trauma, not cardiology.”  She shook her head and peered out the window.  “Doesn’t mean you’re not going to respond.  I… well, what do we have here?”

Justin abandoned any pretense of eating, following her gaze toward the other two males who’d appeared next to the dark-haired guy in the parking lot.  There was a good deal of posturing, some kind of hand gestures that resembled sign language.

“Y’all need me to top off your drinks?”

Justin turned, found his nose almost buried in their waitress’s abundant cleavage.  “Um, no.  Thank you.”  Whoever thought half-naked women serving food was conducive to a pleasant dining experience was… well, a healthy heterosexual male, he admitted.  Though it did make it rather difficult to make eye contact.  Which he managed, rather pointedly.  The waitress’s seen-it-all brown eyes blinked in surprise beneath her Santa hat.

“
Shit,”
Kathleen muttered under her breath, and he whipped his head back to see what had caused that tone.  A black Escalade pulled into the lot, winter sunlight glinting off its shiny chrome, and four more thug types piled like evil elves out of Satan’s sleigh. “Looks like the gang’s all here.”

“Those guys?”  The waitress shook her head and leaned closer to Justin to get a look outside.  “They’ve been hangin’ around here for weeks.  The manager’s rousted them a few times, but mostly they’re like pigeons.  They scatter for a little while,
and then they’re back with some of their friends.”

“Have you considered calling the cops?”  Kathleen wondered.

“Right.”  The girl snorted, which caused her breasts to actually jump against Justin’s ear.  “And end up a smear on the pavement.  No thanks. I’m not going down wearing satin shorts and a Santa hat.  Those guys are somebody else’s problem.”

When the waitress removed her breast from his ear and strolled off with the pitcher of tea, Kathleen boosted her hip to slip the phone from her pocket.  “Looks like I’m that somebody else.  I think it might not be a bad idea to call for a cruiser to do a little drive-by. And this is why I hate counter-narcotics,” she mumbled. “It’s not neat and clean, like homicide.”

“Homicide is clean?”

She waved a hand. “You know what I mean. Somebody’s dead, somebody killed them. Victim, perp.  Prohibition gives gangs like that one out there a lucrative black market because idiots like your skeevy blond are determined to cook their brains. It creates its own violence.”

She glanced out the window, then angled away to cut the glare of sunlight off the face of her phone.  Justin pushed his plate away, feeling guilty.  He knew what it was like to have his downtime interrupted.

He’d just opened his mouth to apologize when the plate glass window beside him exploded.

Justin dragged Kathleen onto the floor and rolled her under the table as glass rained down and screams erupted.  The steady rat-a-tat-tat of some kind of automatic weapon spewed bullets like deadly projectile vomit.

“Not the kind of drive-by I had in mind.” Kathleen’s breath came fast and hot in his ear.  “And I’m off duty.  My weapon is locked in its safe in the damn car.” 

“I’ve got your phone.”  He stretched out his arm to where the phone had fallen in the center aisle.  Blood smeared his hand when he picked it up.  “Are you hit?”  He leaned up just enough to get a look at her face, run his hand over her torso.

“Glass.  Just glass.”

“Like you can’t bleed out if a piece of glass severs an artery?”

“I’m fine, except… is that my sandwich under my back? Just –
ouch!” 
She sucked in a breath as his fingers found the two-inch triangle embedded in her side.

The napkin dispenser had fallen to the floor, and Justin grabbed a handful as he eased up her green sweater.  The creamy skin just under her ribcage bloomed bright red around the glass.  “T
his is probably going to hurt.”

“Thanks for the warn – shit. 
Shit
.”  He pressed the napkins to her side when she went white.  “Maybe you could just pour some of that salt in there while you’re at it.”  

“Call it in.” He handed her the phone, met her eyes. “Keep the pressur
e on that wound and stay down.”

“Justin, I’m a cop.”

“An unarmed cop who’s bleeding all over her sawmill gravy.  Stay down, keep applying pressure.  I’m going to see if I can help anyone else.” 

He left her muttering curses and crawled out into the aisle, rising to a crouch to keep glass out of his palms.  Cold air rushed in through the shattered windows, scattering paper napkins with its bitter breath.  From outside came an aborted scream, then the shrill peal of tires.  No doubt the rival gang making their getaway. Inside, Justin thanked God that the assholes with the Uzi or whatever it was hadn’t struck at the normal lunch hour.  He and Kathleen both kept odd schedules, and their three o’clock lunch date me
ant that Jugs was mostly dead.

Empty,
he corrected, thinking of what the scene would look like in the parking lot.  Hopefully the restaurant’s patrons had been mostly spared.

“Oh God.  Oh God.” 

Justin looked to the left, saw the blond-haired kid propped against the wall outside the restroom.  His eyes were wide in a pasty, acne-scarred face, his trembling legs locked at the knee.  A dark stain spread along the front of his jeans. Justin called out as he duck-walked toward him.

“Get down.”
  He didn’t know if the thugs were all gone, and this guy was standing right next to a window.  “Are you hurt?”

The kid’s eyes wheeled in panic as Justin came closer.  “They shot him.  They shot Juan, man.  His head…
Jesus
.”  He started sliding slowly down the wall.