Authors: Laurel Dewey
Tags: #Police Procedural, #Denver (Colo.), #Mystery & Detective, #Psychic ability, #Women detectives, #Crime, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Children of murder victims, #Fiction, #Occult & Supernatural, #Espionage
Protector (6 page)
Jane replied in the same clipped manner. “Get your hand off me, Martha, or I’ll knock you on your—” Jane peered around Martha. Emily stood on the landing above her. In her left hand, she clutched onto her navy blue vinyl case that held the Starlight Starbright projector. Jane felt an unnerving jolt of recognition. There was something vaguely familiar about the kid—strangely familiar.
“That’s it!” Martha announced. “I’m reporting you to your sergeant.” Martha spun on her sensible shoes and walked up several steps toward Emily. “You are foul-mouthed and inappropriate!” Martha exclaimed, speaking over her shoulder to Jane. But Jane didn’t hear a word of it; she was still trying to shake the odd feeling churning her gut. It was as if a memory suddenly surfaced without any lucid connection. “Come along, Emily!” Martha barked at Emily. Martha was halfway up the second set of stairs, issuing orders to Emily but the kid didn’t move. She stared undaunted at Jane.
Jane leaned against the wall. She wanted to say something to the child but . . . what? She figured a mild caveat might be appropriate. “Hey, kid,” Jane said in a half-whisper. “Don’t let her jerk you around.”
“Emily!” Martha beckoned from one flight above. “Come up here now!”
Emily stood for one more long second staring at Jane before she made her way back up the stairs and into Martha’s waiting hand.
Jane waited as the echoing clip-clop of Martha and Emily’s footsteps climbed the stairs. A dull sound of steel against steel penetrated the stairwell when Martha opened the door leading onto the third floor and let it slam shut. Standing in the sudden silence, she tried to contend with the elusive sense that something extraordinary was happening. She felt detached from her body but also filled with a palpable sensation that she knew more than she consciously realized. Given that she’d been blitzed on booze and blacked out many times over the last five days, she worried her current state might precede a complete breakdown. The thought of losing her mind forced the need of nicotine to suffocate the sharp edges. Jane took a long drag on her cigarette. The smoke caressed her throat and penetrated her lungs. She closed her eyes to drink in the sweet anesthesia. But suddenly, a disjointed series of stark images flashed in front of her. There was an outstretched Glock, a flash of blinding light and the genuine sensation that someone was desperately grabbing her right hand. Startled, Jane opened her eyes expecting to see someone holding on to her. But she stood alone.
“Shit,” Jane muttered under her breath. The walls closed in on her. She had to get out of the stairwell. Jane wanted more than anything to run upstairs, sit at her desk and focus . . . focus on anything mundane that would force the booze-induced images out of her head. Her ego quickly took hold when she remembered her suspension. Jane wasn’t about to go upstairs and negotiate with Weyler. A psych counsel now might prove her worst fears. She would do what she always did: bury the trauma and move forward. If she talked to Weyler, she had to be tactful. However, tact was not something Jane had mastered in her 35 years. Tact, as she was fond of saying, was for people who didn’t have the balls to speak the truth. She grabbed her leather satchel, pinched what was left of her cigarette between her lips and plodded up the stairs with purpose. Jane had no idea what she was going to say to Weyler but she figured the right words would spill out at the precise moment. She was so deep in thought as she climbed the steps toward the third floor door that she didn’t hear the loud voice of a woman yelling on the other side of the door. She flicked her cigarette butt to the floor, smashed it with the toe of her boot and swung open the door.
The grating pitch of the Mexican woman she’d seen earlier in the elevator with the scared little girl greeted her. The woman held on to her daughter with one hand and used the other to gesture excitedly toward several of the detectives from Assault. She spoke rapidly and hysterically in Spanish, adding a sentence here and there in English. “You don’t know!” screamed the woman, during an interlude of English. “He hurt my baby! My baby girl!!!”
As determined as Jane was to get to Weyler’s office, she couldn’t help but take in the scene. Down the hall, twenty feet away, stood Martha, her hand tightly clasped around Emily’s wrist. Several detectives and police personnel poked their heads out of their offices. Even Weyler looked outside his office door to catch the action.
Jane started to move around the woman when out of the corner of her eye, she saw two officers escorting a slightly built Mexican man in his mid-twenties down the hallway. He wore a stained T-shirt, baggy tan pants and sported endless tattoos that flowed from his wrist to his neck. Even though he was cuffed from behind, he walked with an arrogant, cocksure swagger and held his head high.
Jane was about two feet from the screaming woman and in direct line with the approaching suspect when it happened. The woman caught sight of the fellow and, in one desperate stroke, withdrew a Glock from a passing patrol officer’s holster and pointed it at the Mexican suspect in cuffs. “No!” the woman screamed as she stood firm, both hands clasped around the gun and holding it outstretched toward the suspect.
Jane turned toward the woman and took a quick step back, within arm’s reach of the weapon. Every officer on the floor reached for their firearm. Martha pulled Emily down onto the carpet and shielded the child’s head with her body.
Weyler moved forward into the hallway and yelled toward the officers, “Stand down! Stand down!” Everyone took a step back except for Jane. Her eyes were locked onto the woman, who by now was shaking and choking back tears. As strong as the woman was trying to look, every fiber of her being was seized in terror. Jane carefully took her eyes off the woman and slid her glance toward the suspect who was frozen between the two officers not more than fifteen feet away. “Ma’am?” said Weyler quietly, his voice cutting through the tension. “Put down the gun.”
“No!” she screamed in her thick accent. “You don’t know what he did to my baby! No father should do those things to his little girl!”
The suspect smirked, sticking his chin defiantly in the air. “You lying bitch!”
The woman moved her finger onto the trigger. Everyone in the hallway stiffened. “I don’t lie!” the woman screamed as her daughter buried her head in her mother’s hip. “You broke her! She’s just a baby!”
“Ma’am, please,” Weyler insisted. “Put down the gun. Let’s talk about this.”
“No talk!” the woman yelled defiantly, her eyes burning holes toward the suspect. Jane drew her attention back to the woman and stepped toward her. The woman kept her eyes forward. “Don’t you try nothing!” she screamed at Jane.
“I’m not gonna do anything,” Jane said, an eerie calm to her voice. “I’m on your side.”
“Don’t you play no game with me!”
“I am not playing games. I’m serious. I want to help you.”
“How you help me?”
“Well, for starters, you’ve never shot a gun before, have you?”
“No,” the woman said, her throat choked with emotion.
“That’s okay,” Jane said offhandedly. “You’ve got the right idea. You just don’t have the right control. I need to move closer so I can give you some pointers, okay?”
“Don’t you try nothing!” the woman yelled.
“I’m not gonna stop you,” Jane said, almost insulted. “You want to do this right, or do you want to make a mess? Relax.” Jane slid her body next to the woman so that she could see down the barrel of the extended pistol. “You gotta stop shaking. Take a good, deep breath.” The woman drew in her lungs. “Now, let it out slowly,” Jane counseled. The woman followed suit, letting out a long stream of air. “Good. You’re not shaking as much. Okay, there’s several ways you can do this.” Jane directed her attention toward the suspect. “You can aim for his head,” Jane gently placed her index finger under the woman’s wrists and slightly moved the gun sight in line with the suspect’s forehead. “That’d be a sweet shot. However, we’re about fifteen feet away and even the best cop could miss. Your second option is to bring the gun down here.” Jane gently directed the woman’s aim to the suspect’s groin. “That’s a tempting shot. You hit the mark dead on and he never hurts anyone else like that again. But, tempting as it is, we’re still fifteen feet away and there’s a good chance you’ll miss. So there’s option three.” Jane directed the pistol at the suspect’s chest. “That’s what we call a ‘center punch’ and it always works. You fire a magnum plug right there and you solve your problem in less than a second.” Jane turned to the woman. “I’d go with option three if I were you.”
The woman thought for a second, then nodded. “Okay,” she said calmly.
“Now, before you plug him, I need to know if you have a safe place for your daughter to stay.”
The woman furrowed her eyebrows as if irritated by the question. “What?”
“Is there a safe place for the kid to live? A family member you trust? Preferably not one on his side of the family. A sister? A brother?”
“She live with me!”
“Well, of course, I’ll do everything I can in court to make that happen.”
“What you saying?” The woman started shaking.
“Relax! It’s going to be okay. It’s just that after you kill the son-of-a-bitch, I’m going to have to arrest you and take your daughter away from you.”
The woman started to cry. “What? You can’t! She need me.”
“I know. But that’s why I need to know about a trusted family member who can look after her—”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Conservatively, probably six months to ten years.”
“Ten years!”
“I’m just throwing out numbers. I don’t know for sure. Hey, I don’t make these rules. If it were up to me, I’d say shoot the asshole and I’d buy you dinner. But I’m not in charge. So, again, have you got anyone you can trust with your kid?”
The woman started shaking violently and sobbing. “No! I can’t let her be away from me. She need me now!”
Jane let out a long breath of air coupled with a sigh. “Well then . . . you better not shoot the bastard. It’ll just get too complicated.”
For the first time, the woman took her eyes off the suspect and looked at Jane, tears streaming down her face. They stared at each other for what seemed like eternity until Jane moved closer to the woman’s ear and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The woman lowered the pistol. Jane carefully slipped it out of the woman’s sweat-soaked hands and gave it back to the patrol officer. She turned to Weyler. He didn’t say a word—he just stared at her with a look that bordered somewhere between apprehension and disbelief. Jane picked up her leather satchel and walked to the elevator, punching the “down” button with the side of her fist.
Everyone turned their attention to the woman. Everyone, that is, except for Emily, who watched Jane enter the elevator and disappear behind the steel doors.
Chapter 5
It was just after 10:15 a.m. when Jane sped out of the DH parking garage. As she rounded her Mustang onto 14th Street and curved around the Civic Center, she noted that it had taken just over an hour for her life to fall apart.
Jane saw the look on Weyler’s face after she disarmed the Mexican woman. She noted how he appeared genuinely guarded by her actions, as if it was something only a nutcase would do.
Nothing made sense to Jane anymore. When she woke up that morning, she had a plan. She always had a plan. It may have been a little blurry due to the alcohol burn off, but there still was a plan. Jane figured she had three or four legal-sized yellow pads filled with angles, motives, wild theories and other sundry notations regarding the death of Bill Stover, his wife and daughter. Every time Jane awoke from that blistering nightmare filled with fire and Amy’s dying eyes, she’d jot something down on one of those pads. When she’d reread her scribble in the morning, sometimes she could only make out a word here and there.
One thing was for sure, if this was the work of the Texas mob, it went against their usual pattern. Then again, it was hard to pin a hard-and-fast MO on a group that was still an unknown to law enforcement. In the end, Jane had only her gut intuition that had never failed her. After all, it was her gut intuition that told her that Mexican woman was up to something. That same gut intuition told her the Stovers’ death was not entirely the work of the Texas mafia. There was something or someone else. She could feel it.
She could also feel that numinous nudge creeping up on her—that sensation that she was balancing on a slim blade between sanity and illumination. She thought back to the Mexican woman and the outstretched Glock. Twice before that morning, the image of an outstretched Glock flashed like flint in front of her eyes. But there was something attached to the jarring, disturbing image—a swath of navy blue and bright lights. And that sharp tug on her sleeve; the tug she physically felt in the stairwell.
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