David Handler: The burnt orange sunrise

“I should have been able to handle this myself,” Gretchen confessed, gazing at them. “But Shawn and I don’t like having guns around. I felt so helpless.”

“Don’t second-guess yourself. I’ve been trained to handle this kind of deal. You haven’t. Say you did have a gun, okay? Chances are, that raccoon would have taken a piece out of you by the time you got your shot off. And you’d be on your way to the emergency ward right now. You did right, Gretchen.”

“Well, thank you. And thanks for being such a, you know, good neighbor.”

This was the ultimate compliment in Dorset-to call someone a good neighbor. It was a compliment that no one had paid Des before. Gretchen Dunn was her very first.

Beaming, Des climbed into her cruiser and started her way back down the private drive to Route 156, positive that she could smell raccoon piss on her, although she could not imagine how this was so. As she lowered her front windows, freezing air be damned, it did occur to her that she’d just experienced her first genuine action of the entire winter. Until now, about all she’d been doing was filing one-car accident reports-weather-related, alcohol-related or both. Crime was way down from the peak summer months, when she’d had her hands full with bar brawlers and shoplifters. In fact, winter was so quiet here that Dorset scarcely needed a resident trooper at all. But it did need one, of course. Home break-ins would be rampant if she were not around. And the drug dealers would set up shop. And then Dorset wouldn’t be Dorset anymore.

It was past four now, and the sun had already passed behind the trees, leaving puddles behind on Route 156 where the sunlight had warmed the plowed, salted pavement. Those puddles would freeze back over real fast, so Des took it nice and slow, her hands light on the wheel, foot steady on the gas. She was a patient, humble driver when she was around ice. She did not tailgate. Did not make sudden stops or starts. She respected the ice.

But she hadn’t gone a mile down the narrow, shadowy country road before she came upon yet another fool who didn’t respect it. No, he’d been too busy listening to those TV commercials instead of his own common sense. And now he and his super-duper, manly-man’s Jeep Grand Whatever had gone skidding off the road into the ditch, where he was trapped inside a three-foot ice bank, his wheels spinning furiously as he tried to power his way out of there, pedal to the metal. God, how Des wished those damned commercials would stop showing SUVs conquering Mount Everest in third gear. In the real world, SUVs performed no better on ice than any other vehicle. But their dumb-assed owners flat-out refused to believe that. And so they disrespected the ice. And so Des spent half of her time rescuing them. In addition to the jumper cables and spare fuses that she carried year round, she had a winter ditch kit consisting of extra scrapers and blankets, two jugs of sand and a pair of eight-pound Snow Claws with hardened-steel teeth to slide under those spinning rear wheels. As she pulled over and got out, squaring her big Smokey hat on her head, she decided she just ought to go ahead and become a tow-truck operator. She’d make a lot more money.

He was young and burly and absolutely positive that if he just pressed down a little harder on that gas pedal, he’d be able to blow his way out of there. As she approached, he rolled down his window, glowering at her.

“Well, you’re good and stuck, aren’t you?” she called to him pleasantly over the angry whine of his spinning wheels. “If you’ll just ease off of the gas, I’ll see if I can help you-”

“Just leave me be,” he snapped at her irritably. “I already called Triple-A on my cell. I’m fine, okay?”

Des had encountered this before. A certain species of young male who refused to be helped by a woman, especially one of color. A point of pride with them or some fool thing.

“Suit yourself, sir,” she said, hoping the auto club was all backed up and he had to spend the next two hours sitting there. “But please put on your flasher, okay? We wouldn’t want anyone to plow into you.”

She climbed back in her cruiser and continued on to the Westbrook Barracks, reflecting on just how far she had managed to come in so short a time. It seemed like only yesterday that her smile had lit up the cover of Connecticut magazine. Back then, she had been the state’s great non-white hope, youngest woman in state history to make lieutenant on the Major Crime Squad, and the only one who was black. Within a year she’d moved right on up to homicides. Always, she had produced.

And now here she was, Master Sergeant Des Mitry, getting dissed by stranded mesomorphs.

This was the price she’d paid to pursue her dream, and she was willing to pay it. Happy to pay it. But there were moments, like right now, when it was growing dark and she was driving along in the middle of snowy nowhere, swearing she could still smell raccoon piss, that Des missed the action.

Even though that action had nearly torn her apart. Mostly, it was the faces of the murder victims. She could never seem to forget those faces. Especially the babies. The fact that her marriage to Brandon was falling apart certainly hadn’t helped. In order to cope with it all, she had brought home crime scene photos and started making drawings of them. Transferring the horror from her nightmares to the page, line by line, shadow by shadow. Injecting the images with fearsome emotional power. Turning them into one gut-wrenching portrait after another. Thanks to the twist of fate that had barreled her headlong into Mitch Berger, Des’s therapy became her salvation. Her portraits had gained her admittance to the world-renowned Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, where she was presently studying long-pose figure drawing two nights a week, thereby shining a light on every single weakness in her game. Still, a pair of her most recent victim portraits had been included in this month’s prestigious student show, and that was not shabby for a freshman. Des still had much more to learn, and she knew this. Yet she’d found herself getting itchy in class lately. Anxious to move on. She wasn’t sure where. She wasn’t sure why.

She wasn’t sure about Mitch, either. She could not imagine her life without him in it, even though they made no sense at all together. None. But lately her beloved, exceedingly chatty doughboy had grown strangely quiet and remote on her. Something was eating at him. He would not say what. All she had to go on was the lone grenade he’d lobbed at her across the dinner table a few weeks back-a cryptic, highly unsettling question that had instantly filled her with a million doubts. Doubts that Mitch had, thus far, done squat to assuage. Anytime it seemed that he was about to spill his guts he’d swallow hard and out would come… nada. His Great Big Fat Nothing Gulp, she’d taken to calling it. Des was terribly thrown by his behavior, more than she could have thought possible. In fact, Mitch’s strained silences were making her so tense that she was experiencing the recurrence of a dreaded nervous thing that she thought she’d said good-bye to back when she was a gawky, vision-impaired giraffe of a high school girl.

Still, she had to admit that he’d sounded like his bubbly old self on the phone this morning when he called to tell her they’d been invited to dinner at Astrid’s Castle. More excited than she’d heard him in weeks. So maybe it had passed, whatever the hell it was.

Then again, maybe it hadn’t.

She was tied up at the barracks for well over an hour filling out her incident report, requisitioning a new pair of boots from the quartermaster, and responding to one smirky male query after another about that pungent new perfume she seemed to be wearing. It was already six o’clock by the time she started home to her cottage overlooking Uncas Lake. Mitch was expecting to pick her up in twenty minutes. No way. She phoned him on her cell to say she’d have to meet him there. No problem. Mitch was used to her unpredictable work schedule.