Melissa's Honor

Chapter 2

Chapter 2


The women in Melissa’s family were a superstitious lot, even after drugs and alcohol overtook their pride and dignity. In Melissa’s family, women who were born with birthday’s that somehow matched, were considered mystics, or people destined for unusual greatness. Usually one to a generation, Melissa’s grandmother as such a mystic. Born January 9, 1919, she was a child who made a fortune on her chickens and their eggs through the Great Depression. Melissa’s aunt was born on March 4, 1934, and became one of the first women to make Colonel as a nurse in the Army during the Korean war. Melissa was that generation of “special people” being born on August 6, 1986. When she married her handsome Irish policeman, the women of the family deemed that special, a return to their former days of honor and glory, where the men brought home the bacon in mostly legal ways and the women were able to socialize and raise their children without fear of bullets and dangerous drug deals on corner streets.





However, at this point, the women in the family who mattered were all dead. Her grandmother had passed ten years ago from a heart attack. Her aunt was shot to death in front of their old house in the projects three years ago, trying to score a hit from an unsympathetic younger man, disgusted by a woman with sores on her face tottering in stilettos. Her mother overdosed the year Melissa was married, finally taking enough to get the job done right.





Just like in the song by Metallica, nothing else really mattered right now. Melissa was outside the dog pound, waiting for them to lead her Husky back from the jail he was in. Her small car was packed carefully with the few possessions she had. The WalMart in Cheyenne was waiting for her to arrive in three weeks, her pay secured and her benefits transferred. No one held her in LA. No one cared. Melissa O’Conner was now the ex-wife of a convict and former policeman. No one had the right to torture her to get to her husband. O’Conner found himself more girlfriends in prison than outside it, girls who had some sick fetish of writing letters to convicts, starting romantic relationships with them with the power from a pen. He had no need for a young wife he had long since grown tired of.





Melissa saw her puppy tugging on his leash, making the cage man hurry. Melissa wanted to throw herself down on the gravel and hug him until neither one of them could breathe, but she kept her show of decorum and calmness. Her Jack was eventually brought to her, and the leash ceremoniously given to her with a firm warning that the next time Jack was brought to them, he would be euthanized. In another life, the spirited girl that had been Melissa would have been up in the man’s face, telling him where to get off. The Melissa that was the divorced wife of a disgraced cop quietly took the snotty comment and brushed it away as she secured the leash handed to her.





Jack sensed her strange mood and quieted immediately, looking at her with his intelligent little face, placing one of his huge paws on her shoe in connection. She patted his head, signed the last of the forms, then put him in her car and spun out of the horrid confinement called the “pound”.





Jack in the passenger seat, buckled in against an accident, Melissa finally relaxed when they merged onto the San Bernardino Freeway. Traffic moved smoothly and she had no problem getting to the main leg of their journey, I-15 towards Vegas. She knew that this part of the highway was patrolled and she kept safely in a pack of other cars, hidden by semis and any other large truck she could find. Her Kia was so small, it would easily pass under any but the most vigilant, or vengeful, radar.





The exit for I-15 appeared. She got into the exit lane and looked behind her, checking traffic. Her heart seized in her chest. That blue cruiser driven by that rotten Detective was three cars behind her. Her breath sounded choppy, even to her, and the blood rushing into her ears drowned out the sound of Jack panting. She turned down the air conditioner, checked her fuel. She had planned to re-fuel a few miles after she had safely gotten onto I-15 but now she was going to have to wait until she was out of that implacable Detective’s jurisdiction.





Detective O’Malley knew that O’Conner’s wife was aware of him. Her driving was no longer smooth, but a little choppy, a little too perfect. O’Malley might have been ashamed if his mother were still alive to chastise him for his behavior, but his mother was no longer alive, thanks in part to his onetime friend, caught selling drugs to his mother and her two sisters. It wasn’t much, just some medicinal pot, but the betrayal had been too much. O’Malley made it his business to see O’Conner behind bars if that was the last thing he would do.





O’Conner had been behind bars for nearly two years. O’Malley put pressure on him until the guy finally caved and gave his wife some dumb ass story about why he wanted a divorce. Truthfully, O’Malley thought that O’Conner was relieved to have a reason to get rid of the girl-woman he had been saddled with for too long. Melissa was a class act, poor as a church mouse, but she had breeding for all that, and it didn’t take an optometrist to see her finely chiseled cheekbones, thin face and long bones with curves in all the right places. Privately, O’Malley thought she was too thin, starved herself some to provide for that dog she was obsessed with. Whatever, he thought to himself. Finally he found her weak spot and got enough pressure on her to make her move out of the city and that was the goal. He wanted to give the woman a chance, and she would never have had one if she was anywhere that O’Conner would find her when he got out of jail.


Melissa had something that every drug lord wannabe could want: looks, good speech, knew her place, made an honest man out of whomever she decided to put her time into. She was a great cook, a good lay if O’ Conner’s boasts were anything to judge from, and she knew how to pinch pennies until they cried for mercy.  In an economy nearing the recession of ’81, that was no small quality. So the girl would have a chance. Hell, she was barely twenty-one. It would do her good to have a chance to actually live a life of her own.  Taking the dog was the worst thing he could do to her and figured it would make her move the hell out of LA. He was right, as he usually was.





Five miles on the I-15 he moved past the granny cars in front of him and pulled up along side her. He weathered her slightly pissed and slightly panicked looked with a bland face and met her eyes. Then he left and lost himself in traffic further ahead. She was free.








Not thinking that she would be able to breathe again any time soon, she pulled out the directions she had printed at work and made for her first stop of her trip. It was a little motel outside the Mojave National Preserve simply named: The Beached Whale.





“Well Jack, here we go,” she said to her dog, snoozing happily in the sun. “It’s you and me pal.” She shifted her sunglasses and sipped her water. “ I just hope that’s going to be enough.”