Free Late Rain by Lynn Kostoff

who’d taken off on foot were still on the loose.
    Carl Adkin walked over. “You ok, Decovic?”
    “What the fuck took you so long?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You heard me.”
    “I got here as soon as I could.” Adkin fired up a cigarette.
    “You’re lying. You should have been primary backup. You couldn’t have been more than three or four blocks away. I saw you at the 7-ll off Atlantic.”
    Adkin jetted a stream of smoke. “You called. I told you I was on the way. You should have waited.”
    Ben tried to remember what he’d overheard about Adkin around the department. Nothing came to mind except a few stray references. Adkin, an all-state cornerback in high school who couldn’t cut it in college. A stint in the Marines. A sour marriage to a high school sweetheart. A couple of kids. Superior ratings on the pistol range. Adkin, raising and selling pitbulls on the side.
    “I went in expecting backup,” Ben said. He winced and cradled his throbbing forearm. “You left me hanging. I’m writing this one up.”
    Adkin dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “I told you to wait. There was a reason. I need to spell it out for you?” He made a show of incredulously shaking his head.
    “Maybe you should.”
    “It looks,” Adkin said after a moment, “that you’re a guy bears watching.”
    “That works both ways,” Ben said.
    “That’s how we’re going to play this?”
    Ben nodded.
    Adkin smiled.
    “Ask anyone. I’m a regular guy.” Adkin walked over to his cruiser and squatted near the right front fender. “Primary backup’s late on the scene,” he said, “all sorts of things could happen to the officer already there. I’d never leave a fellow officer hanging. He’s counting on me, right?”
    Adkin took out a pocketknife and slid it into the front tire, then worked it around before folding the blade and standing up.
    “Still going to write me up, Decovic?” he asked, walking over. “I told you, the call came in and I’m here as soon as I could. My fault, a tire’s going flat on me? Thing like that, it could happen to anybody.”
    “You son of a bitch.” Ben gingerly moved his arm. His nerve endings felt like an overturned anthill.
    “A flat, something like that, it happens,” Adkin said. “Couldn’t be helped.”
    Behind them in the parking lot, Sonny Gramm, the owner of the Passion Palace, circled his ruined Mustang and bellowed, bringing down God’s curse on them all.

SIXTEEN
    CORRINE TEDROS kept catching red lights. She was on Queensland Avenue, the main east-west artery connecting Route 17 to downtown Magnolia Beach, and no matter how much she adjusted her speed or took the Lexus through lane changes, she ended up beneath a traffic signal stuck on red, her knuckles steadily whitening on the wheel.
    Both sides of Queensland were stacked and packed with standard-issue commercial-strip clutter, a free-zone sprawl of fast food chains, car dealerships, minimalls, grocery stores, and outsized department and hardware stores, the clutter steadily thinning the closer you got to downtown where, like so much else in Magnolia Beach, development was still boom or bust.
    Magnolia Beach was like something half-birthed. When Corrine had moved there with Buddy, she had liked that quality. Half-birthed was protective coloration. She lived in a place that was simultaneously disappearing and emerging, a place where she was known and not known. A place where the future lunched on its own history.

    Outside, the ambient light on Queensland pushed back dusk. Corrine cut to the left and passed a blue and white pickup belching exhaust and whose bed was filled with a half-dozen Mexican day laborers in white T-shirts and black caps. The radio held the local news, most of which was underwritten by the sis-boom-bah boosterism of the city’s tourist bureau.
    A green Camry with out-of-state plates suddenly pulled into her lane. Corrine hit the brakes. A block later, she caught another red. She listened to