Until Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of my father.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  I must start by acknowledging God for first giving me a level of talent and then allowing me to share it with you.

  Whenever I speak publicly, I always introduce you as My Heart and My Soul. To my daughter Anna Janay McCann and son Timmothy B. (Jake) McCann II, my love for you is ForAlways.

  To my mother Annie Mae McCann, thank you for teaching me the true meaning of faith. In more ways than one if there were no you, there would be no me.

  Thank you to all of the book clubs nationwide and in particular Circle of Friends II in Atlanta and Juliet Harrison, as well as Minds In Motion Book Club in Columbus, Ohio, and its founder, Dorothy Malone Daniel. I also would like to take a moment to mention the numerous bookstores who welcomed me on my first tour. Most notably Felicia A. Wintons and Books for Thought, Inc., in Tampa and Shondoalon and RaMin of RaMin Books in New Bruswick, New Jersey.

  It is said that no man is an island unto himself, so with that in mind I would like to thank three special women. Victoria Sanders for putting it together, Cynthia Johnson in Dallas for the encouragement, and Jennifer Sawyer Fisher in New York City for the focus. I would also like to thank the women readers across the country who said, “Tim . . . you have something here,” even when the words were raw. You can never ever know how much that meant to me then and now.

  Thank you to the thousands who hit our web page at www.DLastRomeo.com. I appreciate the sharing of your thoughts and you give Phillippians 1:3 a new meaning.

  Last, but not least, to my family and fellow writers. Euripides said, “Life has no blessing like a prudent friend.” I am honored to consider you a friend and now I trust you will enjoy the ride . . . Until . . .

  With a search of his backseat, the sheriff found his coffee cup. “Here, sugar, drink this,” he said, and offered the hastily poured cocoa from his thermos to the little girl who was still wet, shaking, and scared. The muscular gentleman with fingers as thick as a roll of quarters was the first highway patrolman at the scene that rainy afternoon, and the one to rescue her from the vehicle. Her forehead bled from the impact, but more than anything, she was in shock.

  Chapter 1

  Thursday morning

  Betty flung her childhood comforter to the floor, flipped her pillow to the cool side, and lay quietly on her bed as she gazed at the ceiling fan. In darkness, the cream-colored room turned to shades of blue. Her pillowcase was damp, but not with tears. From within the silence of the room, it seemed each sound outside her home was magnified. She heard the sweeping thrash of her neighbor’s sprinkler system against her wall. She heard the soft sigh of the pine tree next door moving in the breeze. On this morning, even the chirps of the crickets were more audible. The time was 4:17, and in three hours she would face the most important day of her career. She had been tossing in bed for over an hour. Neither the taste of warm milk nor the counting of yawns had worked, so she closed her eyes and whispered, “God, please let me go to sleep.” The ghost in the shadows of her mind had made a return visit.

  With a shallow inhale of the peach-hyacinth-scented air in her bedroom, she said out loud, “I need to relax.” She thought about Jacqui and smiled as she remembered their last conversation and the story about a certain police officer in town. Her thoughts went to Evander and how much she missed sleeping beside him, especially on a night like this one. Betty thought of the courtroom that smelled like an old textbook and the look on the sequestered jurors’ faces. And then she noticed the clock. It was 4:18. She curled around her pillow with the sheet tucked over her shoulders and closed her eyes with the knowledge that once again, for her, sleep would not come easy.

  “We the people of the state of Florida, in the matter of Lopez versus Midway Railroad United, case number 98-170C, rule in favor of the plaintiff.”

  As the foreman of the jury read from the index card, the widowed mother of two children wept. A couple of individuals in the gallery screamed, “Yes!” as the judge brought the court back to order with a swift pounding of the gavel. As a tear slid down Mrs. Lopez’s face and under her chin, her lawyer reached over and covered her quivering hand. With a peripheral glance, the attorney dosed her eyes while anticipation evaporated in her throat. Years of litigation were over, and the two ladies waited to hear the amount awarded to the family.

  “Count one, in the charge of wrongful death and reckless endangerment of Mr. José Roberto Federico Lopez, the people award in the amount of one million dollars,” the double-chinned brunette juror read from the card. After they heard the award amount, the spectators in the court again displayed their approval.

  “This is my final warning,” the judge said, and opted not to pound the gavel but to point its handle toward the disrupters.

  “Count two, in the charge of wrongful death and reckless endangerment of Lorenzo José Roberto Lopez, the people award in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars.” After saying these words, the jury foreman allowed a smile to appear, but never looked up from her card. Spectators in the gallery were again ecstatic, but restrained, as they squirmed with excitement.

  The people had spoken and Betty Anne Robinson had won the case no one in her firm wanted to take. She looked across the courtroom at the long table of attorneys and the CEO of the railroad company as they huddled together. Their appeal process had no doubt begun, but it didn’t matter to Betty. Once again she had reached into nothingness and pulled out a victory.

  Mrs. Lopez, the thirty-three-year-old Mexican fruit picker who always wore a stroke too much makeup, sat placid as the eyes of the courtroom fell upon her. In the months prior to the trial, she and Betty had worked closely in preparation of the case. While they’d had numerous meetings in the conference room of Murphy, Renfro and Collins, there were often times Betty felt she sat in the room alone. And then one day she pushed her chair away from the dark mahogany table and turned to face her client. She knew their chances of winning the case were minimal if she did not get full cooperation from Mrs. Lopez, so she asked her point-blank what was wrong.

  As she cleaned her glasses with the hem of her floral dress, Mrs. Lopez looked at Betty with eyes rimmed in red and then told of how she’d been working in her garden on a chilly, overcast afternoon. How she’d been putting a protective covering over her tomatoes and squash when she heard the phone ring and ran into the house. The first thing she’d looked at was the Caller ID box and noticed the call was from the Gainesville Police Department. Since Federico, who had had a pet peeve about punctuality, was more than two hours late from his run to the store, she’d refused to answer it. She recounted how she’d walked into the living room and taken her rosary beads from the mantel over the fireplace and held them to her heart. She’d murmured a prayer to herself as the phone rang because all was well until it was answered. And then her twelve-year-old daughter had lifted the receiver, said “Hello?” and changed her life forever.

  “Miss Robinson, I
don’t know if you have ever lost anyone you’ve loved, but it’s a feeling that I can’t describe,” she said as she gazed back and forth at the shelves of the conference room lined with gold-trimmed law books. “The best way to describe the way I felt is that I was dead too. But still breathing. No mother should ever bury her child and husband.” With a shaky voice she continued, “A hundred times I’ve thought about dropping this suit. It seems every time I tell the story, a little part of me dies all over again and I don’t know if I can go through it in court.”

  “Consuela?” Betty said softly.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Consuela, you’ve come too far.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve come too far to allow them to get away. But it’s not about them anymore. They were wrong, and they were petty. But then many companies do terrible things every day to people and they will continue to do so whether we win or lose. No, this is no longer just about who’s right or wrong. This is about Federico now. This is about your baby and making what happened to them, for whatever reason it happened, mean something.”

  Mrs. Lopez had looked at Betty and, with tears in her eyes, had for the first time opened up and answered the questions she was asked in depth.

  Now, months later, the Honorable Peter Travsky thanked the jury as questions formed in Betty’s mind. Should I have brought in another witness from Midway to testify about their lack of maintenance of the railroad crossing arms in Little Havana? Maybe I could have gotten three million for her.

  “Mrs. Lopez,” Betty said quietly so as to not draw the judge’s ire, “I know no amount will replace what you’ve lost, but I am hopeful this will save someone else’s life.” Consuela Lopez shook her head once, wiped her weary eyes, and blew her nose into the wadded tissue in her hand.

  When the case was finally brought to a close, a smattering of applause was heard in the half-full courtroom. Betty turned, and the first face she saw was that of her mentor and senior partner of the firm, Jack Murphy.

  “Wonderful job, Betty, wonderful job,” Jack said, while he displayed a wide smile and extended his large palm. For the first two years Betty was with the firm she only did grunt work and felt like a glorified paralegal, until Jack stepped in and demanded she receive more of a challenge. Since then she had not let him down.

  “Thank you,” she said as she shook his hand and exhaled a sigh of relief. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

  Jack bore cinematic features, was perpetually tanned, and smelled of Polo cologne. He was an angular man in his seventies, but looked in better shape than someone twenty years his junior. His suits were tailored in the garment district of Manhattan and shipped to him every season and the Italian shoes he wore in a week’s time cost more than the firm paid administrative assistants in a month. “Listen,” he said. “I must return upstairs for that civil case with Patterson. He’s having a mess of a time up there. But I would love for you and Evander to join us for dinner tonight at the house. That is, of course, if you didn’t have anything planned.”

  “I’ll have to see if Evander can make it, but as far as I am concerned, I would love to.”

  “Great, great. Let’s say, eightish?”

  “Eight would be fine. Thank you, sir.”

  “No, Betty, thank you,” Jack replied, and gave her a thumbs-up sign. Before he left, he added in his part Irish, part North Florida drawl, “We’ll see y’awll round eight.”

  Surrounded by family and friends, old and new, Mrs. Lopez stood in the midst of the courtroom as her two daughters fought to get closer to her. Betty decided not to muscle through the crowd. Instead she gathered her files and allowed her client to enjoy the moment as much as she could. She reached for her attaché, then walked through the low saloon-style doors toward the courtroom exit. Betty sighed, shook her head, and looked back on the scrambling attorneys, the courtroom support staff, and Mrs. Lopez encircled by her mob of admirers. Her work that day was complete.

  As she walked out of the elevator, Betty hit the speed dial on her cellular phone to call Jacqui.

  Betty and Jacqui had been a pair since Betty’s freshman year at the University of Florida. They’d met in Drop-Add when Betty was being harassed by a jock who happened to be the star receiver on the football team. As he’d begun to get more obnoxious in front of the other football players, Jacqui Jordan had come to her aid. She’d stepped between the two with her five-eleven, size-twelve frame and let him know in no uncertain terms that what he’d done was uncalled-for. She had come to Betty’s aid in one way or another ever since. The word sister could only begin to describe the relationship the two had formed.

  With skin and eyes as dark as a raven and hair she always wore pulled back in a single ponytail, Jacqui was Cleopatra beautiful. She wore dark auburn lipstick and natural-toned makeup. Her teeth were pefectly straight, her build perfectly symmetrical, and her style was completely ebony. Jacqui was a lady unafraid to say what she felt in any situation. She harvested a natural energy, a smoldering fire to succeed in spite of the odds. In the tenth grade Jacqui had gotten pregnant but lost the baby after the second trimester. Her grades were not the same afterward, so she’d dropped out of school and gotten a job with a plumbing supply company. But at twenty-one she’d started attending night school, received her GED, and continued her education until she graduated with an MBA from the University of Florida.

  Jacqui had opened Jacquetta’s three years out of college. She’d left a position with a brokerage firm because she had grown tired of working twice as hard as her colleagues and not progressing half as far as they did. After she listened to a Les Brown speech, she decided if she was going to be a success, she would need to find her own bootstraps. She’d chosen the restaurant business because she’d always wanted to employ family, and most of them worked in the food industry in one capacity or another. But Jacqui was the straw that stirred the drink.

  “Hey,” Betty said into the cell phone. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing special, girl. Just reviewing a couple of menu changes and the receipts from last night. So what’s up? What happened? Is the verdict in this fast?”

  “Yes! One five!”

  “Million?” Jacqui whispered although no one could hear her in her office.

  “Yes, girl. One point five million. Can you believe it?”

  “But you were thinking three fifty tops last night!”

  “I know,” Betty said, as a couple of well-dressed Wall Street types looked up from their papers as she passed. “I totally misread them. I figured they would award two fifty for Lopez because he was slightly inebriated and a hundred for their son, but the jury felt she deserved more. Go figure. What can I say?”

  As the young attorney, in her early thirties, walked through the courtyard, heads turned. Even as a demure child, Betty moved with confidence as she walked. In no way was she vain, but at times when she passed a mirror she would smile at what she saw. Her appearance was delicate, and the curves of her body now accentuated by an olive pin-striped suit were graceful. Her hair was pulled up in a French twist, her supple lips were heart shaped, and her eyebrows arched above smoked-almond eyes like the wings of an angel.

  “Well, that’s great. What did old Consuela do when they announced it? I would have been on the floor. You know how I am about a dollar. Right now, if I’d won that kinda money, somebody would be asking me, how many fingers do you see?” Jacqui laughed.

  “You know, that was the strangest part. But when I think about it, it makes sense. I watched her the whole while, and her face never changed. It was more than the money for her.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I mean, this woman worshiped her husband. You know, he was the only one she had ever been with. And still, to this day, she can’t say her son’s name without crying. I asked her to complete a document one time and she cried for a half hour after just writing their names. I couldn’t imagine losing my husband and a child in one accident. Then today, to top it all off, al
l these people who were never even in the courtroom for the trial show up yelling like fools as the foreman was reading the verdict. It was so embarrassing. As soon as it was over, they were all over her like flies. I wanted to speak with her yesterday about talking to a financial planner or something before the family could get to her purse. They don’t realize that money could be held up for years.” As she spoke, Betty leaned her cell phone on her shoulder while searching for her car keys. “But I didn’t want to put the cart before the horse. I’ll give her a call tonight or in the morning.”

  “That’s good. You know how people are when they smell a few dollars.”

  “Tell me about it,” Betty replied, and clicked off the alarm as she opened the door to her navy BMW convertible.

  “Damn shame you’re still on salary and don’t get to share in any of that.”

  “The money really wasn’t that important to me.”

  “Whatever,” Jacqui said over a sigh.

  “No, seriously. I just wanted them to pay for what they did to this woman’s family and to that community. Just because it was a Hispanic neighborhood, they thought they could get away with not maintaining those crossing arms. They also figured since our firm was based out of little old Gainesville, they could bring in all of those big-city attorneys. Get real,” Betty said with a twist of the neck as if they spoke face-to-face. “No, no, no, this one went deep. You know how teachers always say they’re compensated in a way other than money? Well, they couldn’t give me enough money for the way I felt when the verdict was read. Midway didn’t even have the decency to send that woman a bouquet of flowers. They had the audacity to say if he and the baby were buckled up, they would have survived the crash. Girl, I would have done it for free.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that free stuff, but guess who I finally got a chance to meet? Evander!”

  “You mean my Evander?” Betty said with a smile in her voice.