In the days after our wordless pact -- whose exact meaning was still unclear, even to me -- I sensed the captain's gun metal gray eyes boring into me out of nowhere. Across an overheating copier. Between two humming vending machines. In the reflection of the citizen's service window Georgia May and I manned, behind a peeling decal emblazoned with the words, "To Protect and To Serve."
"He's married, you know," George May informed me as the captain passed, leaving behind the faint scent of cigarettes and conspiracy. She gobbled another strip of crisped bacon hanging from some microwave contraption that looked like the scene of a mass crucifixion. Recently diagnosed with type two diabetes, she was somehow convinced she hadn't been getting enough pork fat. "Wife's an FBI agent," she added. "Mess with a lady like that and she'll cut you with her bare hands."
"How is that even possible?" I said, dismissing her with all the indifference I could fake. "Do they have kids?" I couldn't help adding.
"They had one," she replied, raising an eyebrow. I looked at her blankly. "Don't you ever read the newspaper?""Do I look like a total idiot?" I shot back, without a hint of irony. Rita always picked up the Sunday Times on her way home from Starbutts; she'd sit up tweaking and clipping coupons, then bring back a whole load of groceries for the sum total of two dollars and seventy-four cents. "Why pay more? she'd say brightly, waking me up for a bowl of deeply discounted Lucky Charms. Of course I hadn't seen Rita in awhile, which was usually a good thing. She'd come back with some wild story about a reasonably well-built bald guy with very high level studio connections, such as washing Town Cars on the Paramount lot -- who blew his entire paycheck on an eight ball and took her shopping in Vegas.
"Is the captain's kid's named 'Jeremy?'" I asked Georgia May. "He has this yo-yo on his desk, I wondered whose it was." There was also that empty picture frame and some kind of a ring, possibly inscribed with the words "Eternal Bond" -- though I didn't dare ask for confirmation.
"Just curious," I lied. "No big deal."
"You know what's good for you around here, you keep your nose clean, your eyes lowered and your mouth shut." She reminded me of all the big deal papers I'd signed in order to gain access to the Justice Department records system I worked on alone every night. Nothing on there had interested me much anyway, except maybe the arrest of the beloved former child actress best known for that alien movie caught taking a pee on the sidewalk outside The Gap. No charges filed. Officer error. Imagine that.
"Well, I guess I'm off, then," I told Georgia May, not about to share my silly fantasies about sucking that ring right off the captain's finger while knocking boots on the cookie table in the coffee room. He'd kick the door shut, wild-eyed with rage over the senseless murder of his wife and baffling disappearance of his son. "Forget them," I'd whisper breathlessly as he drove himself into me over a bed of crushed Oreos in a pool of non-dairy creamer. With every forceful thrust he branded my skin with the imprint of the red hot badge affixed to his lashing belt.
"Pardon me, do you work in Police Records?" a friendly voice asked from behind a camera lens, snapping my picture without bothering to ask permission. As a down-on-her-luck bikini model who'd come within inches of being named the new face of Maui Sunless Tanning Systems, I take that kind of thing as a very serious offense indeed. "How'd you like to make a few extra bucks?"
