Apricot brandy by Lynn Cesar Page A

almost out. She watched its shadowed gables skim past, a woman she loved in there, a woman she had to abandon to save her own life… and she was within seconds of saving it now, there were the gateposts, the whale’s lips, gaping ahead, and escape just beyond. The gravel drive sizzled and snapped under her tires.
    Keep it floored .
    She almost didn’t make the turn onto the highway, fought back and forth, came screaming out of a fishtail… and then she was on the swift asphalt, the river of escape, pedal to the metal, salvation-bound.
    Out of nowhere, headlights head-on, two great suns filling her windshield. There was an impact so total it knocked her body right out of her.
    Not much of her left, after. Heard something far away… the boom and clatter of steel… .

X
    Karen awoke alone in the sleeping bag. Out the window was the gray before sunrise and a thin, milky mist hazing the plum trees.
    She lay a long time, remembering last night’s lovemaking. Feeling defeated, but then feeling something hopeful, too. Could begin to imagine, with Susan’s sweet persistence, a cozy sunlight place for them, quiet mornings of love fulfilled.
    She rose and pulled on her jeans. “Susan?” she called, tying her shoes.
    And heard the gravel crackling out on the drive. Where could Susan be coming back from at this hour? She opened the front door. Susan’s car was gone. A patrol car coming around the bend.
    Karen knew right then, really, but at that point could still refuse to know, could step out onto the porch, brusque and puzzled, come down the steps as the car’s door opened, displaying the county shield. She was expecting Marty Carver to emerge, but confronted a thicker brute with a waxed flat-top and a broad, bullock’s nose.
    “What’s going— ”
    “I’m Officer Babcock, Miss. Are you Karen Fox?”
    “Yes, what’s— ”
    “Are you acquainted with a Miss Susan Kravnik of San Francisco?”
    “Oh, Jesus, what’s happened to Susan?”
    “Are you acquainted with her?”
    “What the fuck do you think, you moron? You know I am or you wouldn’t be here!”
    But the man was implacable, indulging his hate— with a straight face— simply by refusing to omit a single step.
    “Did Miss Kravnick have a rental? A new red Mitsubishi?”
    “Yes, she did.” Knowing the truth past all hope now, but still desperately bargaining with it, telling herself she didn’t know, not yet.
    “We need you to come down to the County Coroner’s office to confirm the identity of her body.”
    You could feel him, behind his straight face, loving that. An under-thug, this guy, but surely prepped by Marty Carver. For a moment, her hate of him and of Marty insulated her and held off the pain and the horror… .
    But then the hate blew away like smoke and she was left with it: Susan was dead.

    * * * *
    Harst poured Marty, and himself, a brandy. “So how have you been feeling, Mr. Assistant Chief Deputy?”
    Marty didn’t answer. He had been in the office ten minutes and hadn’t yet sat down, had paced, had opened the inner door to the morgue and wandered around in there. Harst had followed him around with his eyes, enjoying the mismatch between the man’s deep ignorance and the stoically masterful persona he tried to project. A tall, lean drink of water— Harst conceded he was cute. Recalled with pleasure hurling the man across the floor. A few years ago, he might have raped him too, just to teach him respect for his elders. It would have been a fitting ceremony for Jack’s interment, but Harst was eighty now and it had seemed too much like work. Were his own final hours indeed approaching?
    “I asked you a question, Carver.”
    You could see Marty didn’t want to spill the beans about the premonitions of strength he had been feeling in the last two days, but that, like the punk he was, he also craved to gloat. He said off-handedly, “I might have something for you, maybe next week.” This was their code for a cadaver that had to