To Protect & Serve (9 page)

Yes, she had learned a few things about high-pressure sales
tactics.

“Okay, okay. Put me down, but I’d like to be kept apprised of the others who you con into this thing.”

She smiled. “Con?”

“Yes, con, Ms. Matheson. You are good at it.”

“Why thank you, Sir.”

“Hey, Taylor.” Hunter strode out into the station at just after five. “You did get groceries, right?”

“Groceries?” Jeff straightened from where he was checking the last tire on the truck. “No. I didn’t know we needed them.”

“What do you think? That refrigerator’s going to restock itself?” Hunter asked with a sarcastic laugh. “Or are you good at cooking with air?”

“C-cooking? I thought Brady and Dante were cooking tonight.”

“No, Brady and Dante have a standing date with a poker hand on Thursday night. So, that leaves you. What’s it going to be? You going to get groceries, or are you treating everybody tonight?”

Slowly Jeff scratched his ear, having not seen this bend until he was around it. “I guess I could get some pizza or something.”

“Oh, come on, we had pizza last week. Get a little creative at least.”

Creative. Creative. It was hard to be creative when he’d been working non-stop since just before six-thirty a.m. “Well, there’s a little place a few blocks down. I think they do take-out.”

“Well then what are you standing around for? Supper’s supposed to be served at six.”

After taking orders from around the station, Jeff walked down the hallway from the lockers, pulling his coat on as he did. It was time to stop bringing the coat, he thought, swinging it on anyway. Middle of April was far too long to be dragging that thing everywhere. He stepped past the break room on cat feet so as not to call more attention to himself. If Hunter so much as noticed he was in the vicinity, it was a sure bet he would find something new to rag on him about. Trying to keep his spirit and energy from smashing into the ground, he turned from the hallway and nearly crashed right into Lisa coming the other direction.

“Hey,” he said as his attention snapped to her. “You get your speaker?”

“Barely,” she said with a small smile. “You get your cleaning done?”

“Barely.”

A moment and then she started for the door. “I guess I’ll see you.”

“You want some company?” he asked, wishing there was a way to just stay with her without having to ask all the time. He saw her hesitation. “To your car I mean? The guys want take-out. I’m the designated go-for.”

“Oh, sure,” she said with an uncertain nod.

He opened the door for her, and together they walked out into the sunshine. His hands found his jacket pockets, and although it was 80 degrees, the safety of his pockets felt
very good.

“So, are you going home?” he asked, swinging his feet side-to-side so that the walk to the car had nothing straight associated with it.

“Yeah. Whole bunch of work, a little home.” She shrugged. “Not that home’s all that great anyway. Little apartment and a television to talk to.”

His gaze swung to her. “You sure that’s your life you’re talking about there? Sounds like you’ve been spy-camming mine.” They ambled into the parking lot, and his heart hurt at the sight of her little car in the visitor spot. He needed something to prolong this. “So, are you hungry? I’m going to get food anyway.”

The look she shot his direction sent him back into his own corner. “I’m not really big on dinner.”

“Oh,” he said softly, but he couldn’t let her get away again. “Coffee? You a Starbucks fan?”

“I’m not really into coffee.” She shook her head, and he noticed how her gaze traveled out to the traffic, far away from his.

Every logical part of him said she was trying to let him down easy, but in this case there would never be an easy. “Then how about a Coke float?” he asked, and that snapped her gaze back to his.

“A Coke float?”

“Yeah, you know, Coke and ice cream.” He shrugged. “A Coke float.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. “And you get this, where?”

“Couple blocks down.” He nodded forward as their steps reached the back of her car and stopped. “It’s the little cafe I was going to. Nothing fancy, but it’s kind of cool.” He waited, and when she said nothing, the fact that he was making a huge fool of himself scratched across his soul. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to, that’s cool. I just thought…”

She stopped him with one look. “It sounds like fun.”

In all the days she had been alive, Lisa thought that she could surely have learned to control herself by now, so where the it-sounds-like-fun had come from, she had no idea. Nonetheless, she found herself sitting in a booth across from him, a tall fountain glass filled with soft serve and Coke in front of her as he waited for the full order he had placed to be finished.

“I can’t believe you’ve never had one of these,” Jeff said, in that voice that made her toes curl. “Me and Kit lived on these things when we were growing up.”

“Nutritional,” Lisa said with a nod.

“Yep, right up there with broccoli and sprouts.” He took a drink of his, and then he looked at her with anticipation and a small amount of apprehension. “It won’t kill you, I promise.”

Slowly she took a sip from the straw, and a reluctant smile crossed her lips.

“Good, huh?” he asked, smiling for her.

She brushed the hair from her face as the fingers on the other hand laid softly on the table. “Pretty good.” Admitting any more scared her.

“Told you.” He leaned back in the booth and arched his arm over the back of it, pulling the heat to her cheeks. “So, tell me about this youth thing you’re working on. Looked like the captain was elated.”

She let out an exasperated sigh and shook her head. “You would think it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to stand up in front of a bunch of high schoolers and tell them about your job, but it’s more like I’m proposing to Chinese water torture them.” She leaned back and crossed her arms in a perfect imitation of Hayes and Fletcher. “‘Why don’t you come back when somebody else says yes, Ms. Matheson? I don’t have the guts to be the first one to say yes to this little scheme of yours.’ It’s so frustrating.” Then she glanced around lest one of them might be standing behind her before ducking and taking another sip of her drink. “If I could’ve just had the businessmen do it, this would’ve been a snap.”

He leaned forward. “So, why didn’t you?”

“That’s not what the client wants, and the client is always right.”

“Ah, the real boss,” he said, and she smiled at his grasp of the situation.

“That’s what they don’t tell you about owning your own business. You don’t have one boss, you’ve got ten clients and each of them think they are the only project you are working on.
Voila
, ten bosses. It’s completely annoying.”

“I can imagine.” The blue of his eyes softened. “But I’m sure you’re up to the challenge.”

“Sometimes I wonder.” Lisa sighed softly. “It just seems like the harder I work, the farther behind I get—like I’m on some kind of hamster wheel going around and around and around, and the only way off is just to get flung into the cage wire.” Her finger traced several circles in the air and then pitched off to one side. She shook her head and put her lips to the straw. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s even worth it.”

He watched her take a sip of the swirled white-brown liquid.

Hopelessness dragged her spirit down. “I just keep thinking maybe there’s something else I should be doing—something… more important or something.”

“Like what?” he asked, and she felt his gaze although she didn’t look up.

“Like what you guys do. Being out there, saving lives. That’s something worthwhile. Not just putting some dinky little ads in a newspaper people are going to trash tomorrow.”

For a second he watched her. “That’s funny,” he finally said thoughtfully.

“What’s funny?”

He shrugged. “I used to think the same thing back in college.” Her
forehead furrowed in surprise, and he laughed. “Yeah, college. B.A. General Business. Not for me, for my dad really, but I put in the hours, and it says my name on the diploma. But business wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I really wanted this, so after college, I worked for a couple years at a job I hated, and then I decided it was now or never.”

“So you chased your dream.”

“Yep. But you know, it’s funny, I’ve been telling myself that once I was here, I would feel different. That I would be different, but now I’m here, and it’s still me. I mean I look around, and not much has really changed like I thought it would.” He looked across at her. “Well, in most things anyway.”

“So in some ways life has changed though?”

“Yeah.” His gaze went to his finger tracing up and down the glass. “But that’s not because of work.”

There was a beat in which neither of them said anything.

“Taylor, your order’s ready,” the cashier called, and Lisa's attention snapped across the little restaurant. 

He slid out of the booth with no more words.

She stood with him and swiped four bills from her purse as he held up his hand and reached for his own wallet. “No, hey, this is on me.”

Anger and fear flared. “I can pay my own way.”

A slow, lop-sided smile slipped onto his face. “I didn’t say you couldn’t.” His hand didn’t move when it had the wallet open. “Please. My treat?”

Every particle of her was screaming,
No, don’t let him. He’ll think you owe him.
However, a hard fist in her chest forced her to nod and pick up her money. “Okay.” She was going back to the office after all, back to safety. He wouldn’t follow her there.  He couldn’t.

Quickly he paid first at the table and then at the cashier’s for the food. Lisa waited only long enough for him to grab the bags of food before she stepped away from him in case he had any notion of leading her out. On her own push the bells on the door jingled as she strode out into the early Houston evening with him barely catching the door behind her. She was a woman, after all, not a helpless child, and letting him get every door wasn’t the best way to show him she had no intention of owing him anything now or ever.

They walked down the sidewalk as the bags of food banged into his leg with every step. Steps and steps they walked until they were standing on a curb side-by-side.

“Have you ever noticed that you can’t actually get all the way across a street in this town without the ‘Don’t Walk’ sign flashing?” he asked, and her gaze jumped over to him as she wondered where that observation had come from.

“What?”

“I’m telling you, you can’t.” There was not even a hint of levity in his tone. “The sign says, ‘Walk.’ You take two steps into the street, and it starts flashing, ‘Don’t Walk. Don’t Walk.’ I mean why don’t they just make it say, ‘Run’ and be done with it?”

Skeptical climbed over her as she fought not to laugh; however, his craziness was too much to withstand. She looked over at him and then shook her head and laughed.

“You don’t believe me,” he said as he looked out across the intersection. “See, watch. I’ll show you.” The lights on the intersection flashed green to red, a second and then the sign said:
Walk.
Sure enough she had barely made it three steps into the street before it started flashing,
Don’t Walk. Don't Walk.
“Told you.”

At the other curb, she stepped up onto the sidewalk. “And how long did this earth-shattering inspiration take you to discover, Einstein?”

“It used to be a game,” Jeff said with a shrug. “When Mom would drag us shopping, Kit and I would stand on the curb like we were at a track meet and try to race the walk signs.”

“Did you ever win?”

“Not once.”

“And your mom let you do that—run across the street?”

“She never knew.”

Lisa’s eyebrows arched skyward, and he looked at her and smiled.

“Holding hands. That was a big deal with Mom,” he said with a sheepish shrug. “You didn’t get out of the car that she wasn’t going, ‘You boys get somebody’s hand.’ To this day, it feels weird crossing a parking lot by myself.”

Lisa laughed outright. “You’ll go into a burning building, but you can’t cross the street without holding somebody’s hand?”

He leaned closer to her. “Don’t tell anybody. It might ruin my image.”

“Oh, okay. I won’t,” she said as if they now shared a conspiracy.  They reached the next curb. Together but separate they stood waiting. However, the moment the sign changed, she sensed that they were indeed in a race to see if one of them could beat the mythical sign. It didn’t work, not even midway across it flashed,
Don’t Walk
and Lisa wondered how many times she had crossed a street and never noticed that phenomenon.

Once they reached the other side, their steps fell in sync with each other, and although to an outsider, it might not have been obvious that they were together, to Lisa it felt like they were one in the same. “So, do you work tomorrow?”