“This is about my job again, isn’t it.”
“Only partly.”
“It galls you that I won’t quit just because you decreed I had to. Admit it.”
“Yeah, it galls me.” And he wouldn’t apologize for it. He worried about her. She ran around at all hours and alone. And she had a bad habit of getting in the middle of the stories she photographed.
“Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You hate my job. You hate my home. You hate my lifestyle. I guess I should count my blessings that you get along so well with my family.”
“You’re being catty now.”
“And you’re being unfair. You complain about how I treat you, yet I can’t ask you a few simple questions about your past without you shutting me out. That infuriates me.”
“You know everything there is to know. My parents died in a car accident, and I’ve pretty much been on my own since I was sixteen. End of story.”
“That can’t be all. How did you take care of yourself? Don’t you have any other family?”
“Not anyone who matters. I have an older cousin I lived with until I finished school.”
“You never told me that. Why haven’t you ever mentioned him?”
“Because we’ve lost touch. I wasn’t that close to him, anyway. He gave me a room to sleep in and that’s about it. I paid for it a thousand times over by working my ass off in his hardware store after school and on weekends.”
“You don’t have any grandparents? No other cousins? Aunts and uncles? Surely there’s someone.”
“No. The army was my family after high school.”
“What was your childhood like? I find it very odd that you never mention it unless I bring it up. It’s as if, I don’t know, it never happened. You don’t even talk about your life before you lost your parents. Why is that?”
“Because there’s nothing to tell. We were an ordinary family.”
“But why was—”
“Let’s concentrate on the present, okay? Nothing else is really important.”
She slumped and shook her head. “See? You’re closing up on me again. You do this every time and it makes me crazy.” Tears formed. “I’m terrified of what’s happening to us, Jack. We’re not making any progress toward getting back together. We’re not communicating. We talk, but we never resolve anything.”
“Then let’s not talk.”
“We have to. I have things I need to tell you.”
“Later. Let me hold you.”
He kissed her and brought her back down to lie with him spoon-fashion, his front pressed against her warm backside.
It was always the same. They made love, she cried, and he went back to his apartment to lie awake and feel guilty about her tears.
He’d tried to stay away, but he couldn’t. An hour didn’t pass when he didn’t think of her. And nights…God, nights were hell. In the dark, the regrets of his past closed in; demons with faces and names he’d tried to forget rose up to assault him, and only the hot pleasure of Lucky’s hands on his flesh drove them away.
Maybe he would bite the bullet and move back in. Living with her, even in this hellhole, was better than living without her.
He held her for a long time, until her tears ceased and her breathing began to slow. Quietly he eased from the bed, but she stirred at his movement.
“Don’t leave yet,” she said without opening her eyes, her voice sleepy.
“I’m only going to clean up.” He patted her gently. “Don’t you need to?”
She yawned. “In a minute.”
Padding to the bathroom, he flipped on the light, grabbed a towel and headed for the bathtub.
“Wait, Jack, no!”
Lucky’s panicked cry reached him at the precise moment he pulled aside the shower curtain and saw movement below.
CHAPTER TWO
IN THE GRAY of early morning, cops and firefighters wearing protective gloves searched the railroad tracks, their yellow slickers like strokes of paint on a neutral canvas.
Lucky checked her light meter, then framed a test shot in the viewfinder. She’d lose the effect of the slickers with the black-and-white film, but the rescue workers seemed ghostlike in the mist and that, along with the overcast sky, helped convey the somber tone. The composition suggested the horror of the officers’ assignment without actually showing it.
But she didn’t have the right perspective yet. She slid carefully down the steep grade of the track to where she, police and fire personnel had parked.
With the permission of the fire chief, she climbed on top of one of the pumper trucks and reevaluated the scene. From this slight overhead angle, she could include more of the track. She could also sneak a contributor to the tragedy—the Top Hat Gentlemen’s Club—into the bottom right corner of the frame.
Despite the fancy name, “The Hat,” as it was more commonly known, was little more than a shack; it owed its popularity to the two-dollar drinks served from midnight to closing and a waitress named Ginger. She’d posed for Playboy ten years ago, but her chest still had its fans.
The victim had apparently left the club drunk last night, decided to walk rather than drive, but passed out on the tracks, instead. The three-o’clock freight express to Birmingham had ended his life. Lucky had found the body when she crossed the tracks on her way to work.
Satisfied that she had a good photo for the front page of the Sunday edition, she braced her left elbow against her body, held her breath and squeezed off several shots, bracketing the exposures to compensate for the wavering light levels.
“Hey, Lucky,” called one of the police investigators. Deaton Swain picked through some weeds along the bank about ten yards away. “I dare you to get in the cab and turn on the siren.”
“I’ll pass.”
“C’mon, Lucky, don’t be a girl.”
“I am a girl, Deaton. Haven’t you figured that out in all these years?”
“Yeah, but you’re no fun anymore.”
“I grew up, Deaton. You should try it. We’re too old for pranks.”
He shook his head. “I’ll never be that old.”
Lucky finished up and rewound her film. She climbed down and stuck her camera, meter and film in the bag on the rear compartment of her Blazer.
With these two rolls, a couple waiting at the office and the roll she’d taken yesterday of the twelve-pound squash, she’d have a full morning in the darkroom.
Off in the weeds, Deaton was starting to whine.
“Oh, man, enough of this.” He yanked off his gloves. “I’m outta here. Let the uniforms handle it.” After making his way down the bank, he came over and plopped down on her tailgate. “God, I hate these messy cases. And I do mean messy.”
“Me, too. Give me a ribbon-cutting or a town-council meeting any day. At least those don’t involve dead people.”