Freeing Lana (22 page)

2

“No
bullshit Tink, did you know?”

Lana
had caught him as he was coming out of the hospital doors sitting in the
required wheelchair before standing to get into Mel’s waiting car. He had
smiled grandly and waved at her as she approached him, calling her name as if
the very sight of her might somehow miraculously heal whatever still ailed him.
But her question had stopped him in mid motion as he was getting out of the
chair and the smile was gone instantly. Mel, one of the hospital orderlies and
even the older nurse that had talked with Lana the night Daniel had shown up,
they were all standing silently watching, seemingly afraid to make a sound.

A
passerby would probably equate their silence to the sort displayed when someone
realized they had somehow stumbled into the path of a mother grizzly bear and
her cub on some deserted trail, the idea being if they didn’t say a word,
didn’t move, then perhaps they might not be noticed and therefore not be
subjected to the wrath that seemed to inevitably follow such an encounter. The
deafening silence even managed to swallow the sound of the street traffic
behind her, as perhaps even innocent commuters might have had some idea how
close they were to danger.

“Lana,
I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he tried unsuccessfully.

“Bullshit!
You know damn well what I’m talking about, now tell me. Did you know?”

Mel,
realizing just how volatile the situation was quickly becoming, made his way
around the back of his sedan and positioned himself tactically between Lana and
Tink. He tried to show the warmth she had looked for earlier in his features,
but she wouldn’t have noticed even if he had managed to pull it off. As far as
she was concerned, he might as well have not even been there, and none of the
others either as far as that went.

Tink
stood there absolutely speechless, his eyes rocking backward in a defensive
state of shock before glazing over in a loud and clear indication of the guilt
she had already associated with him and the events that had changed her life
completely and irreversibly. When he lowered his head, unable to look at her,
Lana saw red.

“You
son-of-a-bitch!”

Lana
still had no working knowledge or even concerns that Mel or any of the others
were even there as she started after Tink, her fists already tightened white in
rage, her lips turned back in a primordial snarl that showed her clenched
teeth. Undoubtedly, those looking on would have preferred to be in the path of
the mother bear rather than the incensed Lana that was approaching them now.

“Lana,
take it easy,” Mel said hopefully as he reached out in an attempt to slow her
down if not stop her completely. All he did was divert her path, his hands
closing on empty air behind her as she sped past him, but it was just enough to
allow Tink enough time to slip into the passenger side of the sedan and close
the door behind him. As one of her fists collided violently against the thick
glass, Mel caught up and wrapped her in a restrictive hold, pulling her away
from the car, her legs kicking wildly in the air toward the now protected Tink.

Hours
later, back in Sergio’s apartment, Lana remembered the even in vivid detail,
recounting the conversation with Mel as the nurse applied the wrap to her hand,
the hand that now had two broken carpal bones as a result of the collision with
the car window. He had told her she should consider herself lucky Tink wasn’t
pressing charges against her for attempting to assault a police officer. That
was a felony, he had assured her. Her response had been that he was lucky she
hadn’t killed him, sending Mel over the edge with a flood of more warnings and
declarations about police officers, but Lana could see the weakness in his
warnings, as even he knew the hypocrisy it would take for Tink to actually try
to have her arrested at this point.

“He
really fucking knew,” she had finally said to Mel, causing him to blink rapidly
several times before turning and walking out of the room without saying
anything else.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

She
had been raging somewhere beyond furious when she got back to the apartment the
night before, and calming her down had been too much to ask of Sergio, leaving
him no choice but to flat out demand it. While she had eventually been able to
at least act as though it was no longer on her mind, it had remained there and
kept her up well after Sergio had sent her to bed. It remained on her mind
still as she went about the task of preparing his breakfast, but there would be
no hint of it on the outside, not in front of Sergio.

“Breakfast
is ready Ser,” she said as she approached him, “are you ready to eat?”

“Yes,
that would be nice,” he said.

He
got up and followed Lana to the table, taking his seat as she pulled the chair
out for him before taking her own place just behind his left shoulder. She
watched attentively as he ate, vigilantly refilling his coffee the moment the
cup reached the halfway point, and then returning to her place behind him.
Sergio made short work of the meal, a gesture she took as complimentary on more
than one level and as soon as he was done, indicating that he required no more
than the one serving she had provided for him, he returned to the living room
while she ate her own breakfast and then cleaned the dishes.

“I
think I’ll go to the library today,” he said as she was drying her hands,
“would you like to come with me or did you have something else in mind to keep
you busy?”

“I
do have a few things I need to catch up on here,” she said, “but I’d love it if
you would pick a book up for me.”

“Was
there anything in particular you wanted?”

“No,
just something new, anything you think I would like.”

A
few minutes later he was gone and Lana was again left alone with her thoughts
of Tink and the betrayal they represented. She made her way out the patio door
to the small balcony that accompanied the apartment. Since they had reunited,
Sergio had made no qualms about her smoking, only asking that she did it
outside, and she really wanted one now. She sat the coffee warmer on the small
table beside her after filling her cup with the Louisiana blend that Sergio had
introduced her to. She had grown fond of the chickaree flavor of the Community
Coffee he had to order online since the stores didn’t sell it locally.

The
cars buzzed by lazily below her on Antoine Avenue, their owners unaware that
somewhere on a balcony above them a woman, naked from the waist down, was
slowly sipping a dark roasted blend of imported coffee. They might have cared
no more than that same woman did about their various destinations or from
wherever they might have so recently come. They were nothing but a footnote in
Lana’s world, mere sights and sounds easily lost in the background of her
morning and just as easily forgotten long before they had even passed out of
view, had she been watching in the first place.

Two
stories above her, on a similar balcony near the western most end of the
building, another woman was also drinking coffee, only no one was on the way to
pick out a good book for her to read, and there was no one to complain if she
had been smoking as well. Only she wasn’t smoking, and she wasn’t as oblivious
to the lives passing by below her as Lana was. The woman whose name Lana would
never know, was lonely and she watched each and every one of those passing
cars, wondering if perhaps the driver of one of them might someday be a friend
to her.

Lana
was unaware the woman even existed, just as she was unaware of the events
taking place across town. If she had known, she may very well have jumped off
the balcony and rudely disrupted the life of one of those passing motorists. But
they went by unheeded and she sipped her coffee slowly, and quietly, finding it
easier to let any lingering feelings for Tink casually slip away from her
heart.

She
had no way on knowing it, but in a small room at the courthouse, her name was
being used regularly and with little respect. Earlier, while she was standing
dutifully behind Sergio, one of the unseen cars passing by on Antoine Avenue
below them was on its way to the same courthouse. It was driven by a portly man
in a blue suit who had been summoned to hear an argument raised by a lawyer of
some recent prominence. The argument the lawyer by now had already vehemently
raised was in regards to a case that same judge had ruled over months earlier,
his decision sending a man to prison for abducting a young female clerk and
keeping her locked in his home for an extended time.

On
the balcony that extended from apartment 217, on the north side of the paradise
Place Apartments, Lana Martin was still sipping coffee, unaware her name had
been used regularly during that lawyer’s argument. Had she known of the
meeting, of the dishonorable way that same lawyer was portraying her character,
she would have undoubtedly been angrier than she had the moment she had seen
the guilt in Tink’s eyes. But she hadn’t been aware of the meeting at all, any
more than she been aware of the woman on the balcony of apartment 449.

As
Lana poured another cup of coffee, her only thoughts at the moment being about
whether she wanted another cigarette, newspaper reporters were scrambling for
the cell phones. In an earlier time, long before those reporters were employed
as reporters, their fathers would have been screaming into payphones the
overdramatized words of their own day. Stop the presses, they would have been
screaming. But these newer generation reporters, doubtfully never having an
opportunity to see a payphone themselves, were instead using cell phones to
inform their editors that they needed to update the papers’ websites with a
breaking story.
  

Sergio
Marsilis
was standing at the counter, waiting for the
librarian to stamp his two selections, Stephen King’s
Under the Dome
for himself and
The
Poetry of Robert Frost
for Lana. At that same moment, the woman who resided
in apartment 449 was crawling back into her bed alone, wiping allowing the soft
pillow covered in a maroon slipcase to wipe the tears from her eyes. At the
police department’s main building downtown, Mel Massey was walking out the
front doors, talking with Tom Tinkerton. Tom, known by Mel, as well as just
about everyone else as Tink, had just turned in his badge and department issued
pistol. They had thanked him for his service by allowing him the opportunity to
resign as opposed to being fired. His tenure would keep him out of jail, but he
would never wear a badge again.

Across
the street from the police headquarters, on the third floor of the county
courthouse, the honorable Judge Terrence Macklin was sitting quietly in his
office, the multiple phone calls that were now coming in with only short pauses
between them getting no further than his receptionist’s desk. Her name was
Laura Mableton, and two days after the honorable judge would announce his
retirement, some three months into the future, she would do the same.

Just
outside of the city limits, though still uncomfortably well within the physical
makeup of the town according to many of the residents, Daniel Morrow was
standing in front of a caged window as one of the trustees was handing him the
personal items he hadn’t seen since his incarceration. Standing beside him was
a lawyer Daniel now viewed as nothing short of a genius. As Sergio headed to his
car outside the library and Tink to his outside the police department, Daniel
Morrow was stepping into the cab that had been waiting for him in the prison’s
parking lot. Moments later, the cab pulled away from the prison. Its lone
passenger was a free man, his conviction having just been overturned.

Lana
Martin knew none of this.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

1

Lana
lay motionless on the living room’s plush carpet as Sergio slowly trailed the
business end of the riding crop along one of her inner thighs. The soft tender
skin there still sported a pink hue left from the leather’s most previous
kisses. Lana was reading from the book he had checked out of the library for
her, and she couldn’t help but look at up at Sergio and smile as she read the
last six lines from Frost’s poem, Paul’s Wife.

“She
wasn’t anybody else’s business, either to praise her or much as name her, and
he’d thank people not to think of her. Murphy’s idea was that a man like Paul
wouldn’t be spoken to about a wife in any way the world knew to speak.”

Lana
smiled as the last line hung in the air between them. The words were absolutely
beautiful. It was no accident that he had chosen this book, handing it to her
as she undressed before him, just as it was no accident that the complimentary
book mark the librarian had given him had been placed to mark this particular
poem. Asking him about it never made it past the stage of contemplation
however, as Sergio answered her before she could ask.

“That’s
how I feel about you Lana,” he said, his eyes holding her in their deepest
depths, “No one else has a right to so much as even think about you, much less
let your name grace their lips. Their minds can’t comprehend someone as perfect
as you, so they should never be allowed to speak of you. To do so would be nothing
short of blasphemous.”

Lana
couldn’t speak. All that time, when she had been ashamed of herself, frightened
she was sinking into a world of unforgivable darkness, he had been there with
her, but she hadn’t realized it. She had been convinced that the only way she
could truly be herself was to leave him behind, but he had never been behind
her at all. All along he had been waiting for her to reach him, a lone believer
waiting patiently for his goddess to descend and free him to worship her as no
one else could.