Her teeth snap, barely missing the finger he jerks away. “Do you put up the rapists’ pictures too?” she snarls. “The ones who drug the drinks and grope the girls?”
“One month,” he says again. “Break that, and there’ll be charges.”
He doesn’t say if those charges would be of a law enforcement kind or the monetary kind. She did break three chairs, several glasses, and possibly a table. Ellie starts with the dick punch, always, and the brawls sort of sprawl out from there.
After the bartender stalks back inside, Rebecca adjusts the two purses against her hip and studies her friend. She’d be a lot less tired of the brawls if they ever seemed to accomplish anything. “Feeling better?”
“He shoved his hand up her dress! After she specifically told him she wasn’t interested!”
“The friends she came with retrieved her,” Hafsah says quietly. “Hopefully they won’t be bothered by his friends.”
Ellie growls and stomps off.
“That’s the wrong way, tipsy!” Susanna calls and trails off into giggles.
Pot. Kettle.
Hafsah jogs after Ellie and turns her around. “Back to the dorms?” Hafsah asks hopefully.
“More booze!” yells Delia. The yellow-tinted lights outside cast strange shadows on her dark skin.
“Back to the dorms,” Rebecca confirms and hooks her arms through Susanna’s and Delia’s to get them moving in the right direction. She agreed to three hours, no more, and if they haven’t hit that, she’ll consider the brawl as added time. “Giggles and Chuckles here wanted to drink—they drank, and we all have classes in the morning. That and getting thrown out of one place a night is my limit.”
“You girls have limits?” asks a male voice. “Nice to know.”
Delia growls and lifts her pepper spray. The man standing in the streetlight edging the parking lot raises his empty hands in response, holding them out from his body to look as nonthreatening as possible.
“Det Corby!” Rebecca greets him cheerfully, fighting back a blush. “Who’d you piss off to be on patrol?”
Ellie spins around. And then around again when the momentum proves stronger than her spatial awareness. “Det Corby!”
The man grins at them. “Can I put my arms down?”
Delia glances at Rebecca, who nods.
Detective Patrick Corby of the Gainesville Police Department is still smiling as he puts his hands in the pockets of his black slacks. He’s one of the younger detectives on the force, barely thirty, and, according to three informal Twitter polls, by far the best looking. In deference to the heat and humidity, both still staggeringly high even now that the sun is down, he’s not wearing a blazer, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the collar unbuttoned above his loosened tie in hope of some relief. His gun and badge hang heavy on his belt.
Ellie and Rebecca met him through a class the fall of their sophomore year, when an injury confined him to a desk for a few months and he agreed to teach an undergrad seminar for criminology majors. The class is long done, but a handful of the students keep in touch with him, especially with regard to other classes and projects. Somewhere along the line he traded hot professor for hot friend, at least for Rebecca and her incredibly inconvenient crush. Even setting aside the question of whether he’s interested in her or not, she’s fairly sure that he’s the type of guy who stopped dating undergrads as soon as he wasn’t one anymore.
She approves of that, in principle. In practice, in this specific instance, it’s a little depressing.
“What brings you out?” Ellie asks, leaning over Rebecca’s back. Her chin digs into Rebecca’s shoulder because she can’t quite support her own weight. “I thought you were scared of the dark.”
“UPD is having a meeting, and they asked if we could help cover downtown.”
“A meeting?” Digging her phone out of her purse, Rebecca pulls up her email. “Oh, my. University hit up the LISTSERV.”
“What? What is it?” demands Susanna. She drapes across Delia’s shoulders, but since Delia is five inches shorter and about a hundred pounds heavier, it’s only Hafsah shoving them toward the wall that keeps them reasonably upright. Susanna doesn’t even seem to notice. “Oh, God, please tell me we’re not having a fire drill tonight. Do. Not. Want.”
“No, there was another alligator death.”
“Oh, no.” Delia looks up at them, lower lip quivering. Delia is an emotional drunk; whatever she feels, she feels three thousand percent. “Oh! They can turn into shoes! They’ll live again!” Whatever she feels also changes rapidly.
“A UF student died out at the hooker stop,” Rebecca reports, skimming the email.
“Rest stop,” the detective corrects with a grimace. “It’s a rest stop.”
“It’s a hooker stop,” chorus four of the girls. Hafsah doesn’t, but she does nod along with the others. When the stop opened back up after a complete remodel, the arrests for prostitution soared because of its proximity to Café Risqué down in Micanopy, and the well-lit, clean restrooms made a lot of the prostitutes feel safer. Arrests dropped over time, but even the state troopers don’t like to say if it was because prostitution and solicitation declined or if the troopers just got tired. It’s a topic the criminal justice students tend to discuss a fair amount, largely because it makes their professors uncomfortable.
“UF student ID, release of the name pending verified identification and notification of the family,” Rebecca continues. “They . . . huh.”
“What is it?” Ellie squints at the bright screen of the phone. “Come on, read faster.”
“The car has been there since Friday or Saturday,” she says. “That prompted a search of the woods behind the stop. No one was actually reported missing.”
“But it’s Wednesday.”
“Tuesday.”
“But it’s Tuesday.”
Both of them look up at Det Corby, who for all his efforts over almost two years can’t convince them to call him Patrick or even just Corby. He shrugs. “That’s state trooper territory, and they only found the body this afternoon. We just got called in to cover tonight so that the campus cops can go over safety guidelines and new patrols.”
“Right, they had that floater in the lake two weeks ago.”
Rebecca elbows her in the gut. Ellie oofs but doesn’t otherwise react.
“There have been over half a dozen deaths by alligators this spring, at least that we know of.” He rubs at his forehead, running his fingers back through sweat-darkened auburn hair. “Until the last few years the state has looked at maybe three in a year.”
“Well, what does anyone expect?” Susanna says with a snort. “The past couple years have seen habitat encroachment on an almost unparalleled level. When the gators are forced into urban areas, of course deaths are going to jump.”
“Hell of a jump.”
“Hell of a habitat loss,” she retorts, sounding remarkably steady for someone as drunk as she is. “I’m amazed there haven’t been more deaths along the St. Johns, given how dirty parts of that river have gotten.”