Young Writers Society

The detective sighed when looking between his partner in fighting crime and the new partner who had just swallowed his load. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to sit in the back and have James’ hands in his pants the whole ride home. Or he could sit up front with Billy and be questioned the entire time by the young detective who certainly had a bone to pick with Winslow.

“I guess I have to get in the car, Billy, but I do have a couple of conditions for the both of you for the ride back to Mobile.”

Norton gave Winslow a glare as stood by the car with the driver’s door open and his foot on the running board, still smoking the cigarette that was barely staying in his mouth. Winslow carefully studied the younger detective as the ashes dropped onto the hood of the car. He quickly scolded him with a sharp yell of, “Hey! Either put your ashes in the tray or the street. I don’t need to guys in the motor pool complaining about the fucking paint job again.”

The detectives glared and nodded and winked back and forth at each other for a few seconds before they both slid into the car. It was their usual amount of communication when they had an issue with a kiss but the issue usually wasn’t who Winslow was sleeping with. And Winslow wasn’t even really sleeping with James, nor had he slept with anyone recently.

Speaking of his soon to be bed mate, the handcuffed sailor was resting his chin on the edge of the bench seat with red lips pointed towards Winslow’s cheek. Those lips were starting to tempt him again, but the detective quickly thought about the anger of the motor pool. And he assumed they wouldn’t be happy about having to remove any illicit stains from the carpeting of the car.

As he lit up a new cigarette, tapping it gently into the ashtray they kept by the gear shift, Billy asked, “So what are your terms and conditions for the drive home, Winslow?”

Winslow resisted pushing James into the back seat with a hand to the forehead. He knew that Billy knew what was going on between the two of them so he slowly answered, “I do not want either of you talking to me on the way home about what may or may not have happened in the back room. And I don’t want us to talk about this case right now because there is just too much going on.”

The detective paused to light up a cigarette of his own, rolling the window down in the still parked car, and letting a cloud of smoke out in a long huff.

“What would you like to talk about then, darling?”

The ask came from their passenger in the backseat who had moved his chin to resting against Winslow’s left shoulder. He could see James wiggling in the backseat as the cuffs were starting to rub his skin raw. And Winslow couldn’t wait to have those wrists tied up above his bed.

“Well,” he started with his thick southern draw kicking in. “We were all in the last war but we were all in different branches, and very different positions. So perhaps we should discuss our war stories.”

Billy gave him their regular nod and glare before starting up the car and heading back towards Mobile. He didn’t know how long it would be before they started talking but the war should be able to keep them silenced until they were at least to the Alabama border.

That would be far too few miles of silence.

It was a start though.

They drove along the dim and narrow roads with all of the cars heading towards Pensacola until they were through Elberta. At that point, the traffic shifted to moving towards Foley and Fairhope, and then picked up its pace as they rolled into Mobile. It was then that James announced, “Well as it’s quite obvious from my uniform, I am an officer in the Navy. And the not as obvious fact that I was stationed on an experimental vessel in the Pacific.”

Winslow could hear the slow clicking of the street light that they were resting under. They were just a few streets away from the precinct and the elder detective wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do with James. He knew that the sailor was going to go back with him to his apartment, but he knew that the witness had to come in to make up for the missing statement. It wasn’t like Winslow could type it up on his machine at home and then slip it into the stack like nothing happened.

Not after the little field trip that the duo had taken to the other side of the Gulf Shore. Seeing as Captain Jones already had a death warrant out on Winslow…

His fingers tapped against the side of the car to the tune of Sioux City Sue as they rolled down the road. Winslow let his head rest against the door frame while thinking about how many times he had played the little 45 in his apartment. The year of 1946 had been a lot of adjusting and all of those years in Hollywood, New York City, and Europe had left the detective with missing that “hillbilly music”.

Their passenger in the backseat quietly sang out the chorus line that Winslow was just about to reach.

“Sioux City Sue, Sioux City Sue, there ain’t no gal as true as my sweet Sioux City Sue.”

It was such a sweet voice singing a song that Winslow loved but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking all sorts of naughty things he wanted to do to James. He was thoroughly blessed when they rolled into the precinct parking lot and Billy commented, “I think I’m going to take the handcuffs off our witness and then you two can figure out the story that we’re going to report in the statement.” Billy turned around to the backseat with his arm over the bench and asked, “What exactly was your reason for running, James? You don’t seem like a murderer and you can’t have anything on your file to be a Navy officer on a classified project. So why run?”

The sailor was wriggling around in the backseat and Winslow could see the tears that were hanging at the edges of his eyes. He had never gotten the full story out of James - they had gotten a little too busy in the back room.

“The reason I ran was rather sensitive but I’ll tell you all that I know.”