She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. She knew that voice; she’d heard it much too often lately. If she could have, she’d have vanished on the spot.
Barbara’s face took on a purple hue as she scanned the bar code, the register chirped, and a total appeared in the little window. She took Daisy’s money, silently handed back the change, and shoved the PartyPak into a white paper sack emblazoned in red with the words Clud’s Pharmacy. Daisy dropped the change into her purse, took the paper sack, and for the first time in her life left a store without saying thank you to the person who had waited on her.
To her absolute horror, Chief Russo didn’t buy anything, just fell into step beside her. “What are you doing?” she hissed as they stepped onto the sidewalk. “Go back and buy something!” Maybe the redness of her face could be attributed to the heat rising in waves off the sidewalk. Maybe he wouldn’t notice she was mortified.
“I don’t need anything,” he said.
“Then why did you go inside in the first place?”
“I saw you go in and I wanted to talk to you. Condoms, huh?” he said, eyeing the paper sack with interest. “That looks like a big box. How many are in it?”
“Go away!” Daisy moaned, marching down the sidewalk with the PartyPak clutched to her chest. When she had hit on the plan of buying condoms to get men to notice her, she hadn’t meant him and she certainly hadn’t meant now. She had a half-hysterical vision of a line of men following her down the street, trying to peek into her sack. “She thought I was buying them for you!” By now at least one person, perhaps two, had heard the news of Chief Russo and Daisy Minor buying a huge box of condoms. The chief had even said he was in a hurry! She swallowed another moan.
“I can buy my own condoms, thank you,” he said.
“You know what I mean! She thought they were for us—that we . . .” She trailed off, unable to give voice to the idea.
“We’d have to be rabbits to use that many on our lunch hour,” he observed. “I don’t think it’s possible. How many are in there, six dozen or so? That’s seventy-two, so even if we had the entire hour, that means, roughly, using one about every fifty seconds.” He paused and looked thoughtful. “That isn’t the kind of record I want to set. One every hour, or every two hours, that would be different.”
She actually felt faint with shock, though she supposed it could be from practically running in the noonday heat. With his longer legs, he was pretty much at his normal stride; he wasn’t even panting.
Not that she was panting; she didn’t want to even think about panting while he was talking about using a condom every hour. She was breathing fast, that was all.
“You’re overheating,” he said. “Let’s stop in the Coffee Cup for something cold to drink, before you pass out on the sidewalk and I have to carry you.”
Daisy whirled on him and said with muffled outrage, “She’s probably already called my mother, and goodness knows who else, telling everyone that we bought a PartyPak of condoms on our lunch hour!”
“Then the best thing for you to do would be to go to the Coffee Cup with me so we’d have witnesses that we didn’t go to my house and do our best to use them all. PartyPak, huh?” He grinned. “I bet there’s an interesting variety. Let me see.”
“No!” she shrieked, turning away when he reached for the sack.
He stroked his jaw. “There’s probably an ordinance on the books against having pornographical items on the street.”
“Condoms are not pornographical,” she said, the bottom dropping out of her stomach. “They’re birth control and health-aid items.”
“Plain condoms, yeah, but there are probably some weird things in something called a PartyPak.”
Daisy chewed her lip. He wouldn’t arrest her; she was almost certain of it. On the other hand, this entire expedition had gotten out of hand so fast she was still reeling, and she wasn’t ready to push her luck. Silently she handed over the sack.
He didn’t just open the sack and look inside; he reached in and pulled out the PartyPak, right there on the street. Daisy looked around for a manhole to dive into, though any hole would have done. She’d made it half a step away from him before he seized her arm and hauled her back, all without looking up from the label on the back of the box.
“ ‘Ten different colors and flavors,’” he read aloud. “Including ‘bubble gum, watermelon, and strawberry.’ ” He glanced up and clicked his tongue. “I’m surprised at you, Miss Daisy.”
“I didn’t know about the watermelon,” she blurted, suddenly afraid there was a green-striped condom in the PartyPak box. This had been a terrible idea. Maybe Barbara would refund her money, unless there was a rule against letting people return condoms. “You weren’t supposed to return swimsuits and underwear, so Barbara might throw her out of the store if she tried to return the PartyPak.
“If I were you, I’d worry more about the bubble gum,” he said absently, still reading.
She blinked, taken aback. “Oh, I wouldn’t blow them,” she said, then clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at him with wide, horrified eyes.
“Shut up,” she said furiously a few minutes later, when he showed no signs of stopping laughing. He was all but howling, leaning weakly against a parked car and still clutching the box of condoms as he bent over to brace his hands on his knees. Tears were running down his face. She wished they were tears of pain.