Read Online Running Dark by Joseph Heywood - Free Book Online

from all the cultures around us.”
    She took several garlic cloves, smashed them with the flat of a knife, took off their skins, snipped off their tops, wrapped them in aluminum foil with a little butter and chopped fresh chives, and put them into a warm oven.
    When the potatoes boiled, Service tested them with a fork, drained them in a colander over the small sink, transferred them back to the pot, and mashed them for her. She insisted on adding the salt, pepper, garlic, and butter, and stuck the batch back on the burner.
    She took his empty beer bottle, set it aside, and opened another for him. “Your wife left you over to Newberry,” Mehegen said, opening another bottle for herself. “She couldn’t cut it,” she added.
    Before he could react, she said, “Hey, I’m not snooping. Every cop in the Yoop makes it a point to know everything about every other cop up here.”
    He didn’t bother to point out that she was a dispatcher, not a road officer, and as far as he was concerned, his private life was none of her business. Not that he had much of a private life anymore.
    When the roast and potatoes were done to her satisfaction, she sent him out to her truck to fetch two bottles of wine from a warm sack in the backseat.
    She let him open both bottles to let them breathe. “Red wine should be room temp, right? I bought that warming sack over to Green Bay. Cost me way too much, but up here with so much bloody cold, how do you carry wine around and drink it properly if you don’t keep it warm? Be damned if I’ll stoop to screwtop wine.”
    â€œRight,” he said as she filled two plastic wineglasses with dark red liquid, handing him one as she sat down. “You want to say a prayer?” she asked.
    â€œNo, but you can.”
    â€œI don’t pray,” she said. “I plan.” She held her glass up and touched it to his. “Dig in.”
    Service expected the roast to be tough, but it was tender and flavored with slices of onion, garlic, basil, and rosemary. Over dinner and wine she gave him her life’s story. Age twenty-eight, divorced twice, not planning to trouble herself with marriage again. No boyfriend at the moment. She was working for the Michigan State Police, taking law enforcement classes at Northern. She had applied for the Troop Academy in Lansing even though the Troops had never hired a woman. She said her post commander assured her that it was being “seriously pursued at the senior command level,” and in a couple of years would happen. Meanwhile, she would finish school and, if necessary, take a county job where she could find one.
    â€œYou’re a skydiver?” he asked, looking at her T-shirt.
    She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.” She pulled on her boots, clomped outside to her truck, brought in a diminutive eight-millimeter movie projector, plugged it in, and threaded on a spool of film. “This isn’t all that long, but you might get a hoot out of it.”
    She refilled her wineglass. “Keep your yap zipped till it’s done, okay?”
    The film was amateurish, with the camera bouncing and jerking all over. Obviously the camera operator had jumped first, and then captured two people plummeting from the side door of a Beechcraft Bonanza. Service watched as the two spread their arms in free flight and flew toward each other. As the camera zoomed tighter he saw that it was a man and woman and they were wearing helmets and boots and nothing else, and when they got to each other, they somehow maneuvered and tried to copulate as they fell toward the ground. “Just like eagles,” Mehegen said. “We jumped at twelve thousand. I had the camera.”
    The camera angle went from a view of the upcoming ground to actually being on the ground, watching the naked couple land and do their parachute landing falls, just as Service had learned to do in the marines.
    The two were kissing