Gun Shy

by Lori L. Lake

  Dez gave her a half smile and a shrug and got up to take the teakettle off the hot burner with her good hand. She got two mugs down from the cupboard, one at a time, and set them on the counter.

  “Here. Let me do that,” Luella said. “You sit down there.” In the absence of protest from Dez, Luella got the two mugs of tea ready and shuffled back over to the table where she added three spoons of sugar to hers. She lowered herself into the dinette chair, took a big sip, and said, “You’re nothing but skin and bones, Desiree Reilly. You need decent food to recuperate. I’ll be making up some good stuff for you today. It’s not like you’ll be able to cook. And besides, that so-called healthy stuff you eat isn’t enough to nourish a squirrel.” She reached for the sugar bowl and proceeded to heap another teaspoon of sugar into her lemon tea.

  Dez had to smile. Luella was from the old school of red meat and potatoes, rich desserts, and three squares a day. Dez had long ago ceased to eat fatty foods, beef, or pork, but she didn’t skimp. She ate plenty of grains, poultry, eggs, fish, vegetables, and fruit. She certainly ate enough to keep 175 pounds on her muscular six-foot frame.

  “You’re going to let me help whether you want to or not,” Luella was saying. “I’m not standing by this time while you waste away. For once you’ve got to—”

  “Okay.”

  “—take better care of your—what?”

  “I said okay. Whaddya got for breakfast?”

  The speed at which Luella rose belied her seventy-four years. She hustled toward the door answering, “Fresh made jam and toast, pancakes, fruit. You want bacon or ham?”

  “Everything but the meat sounds great.”

  As Luella made her way down the hallway, Dez heard her clearly: “I’ll let you off this time, but you need good meat to heal.” Skiff, skiff. “I think we’ll be having roast beef tonight.” Skiff, skiff, skiff. Luella’s arthritic knees navigated the stairs. “And some nice roasted potatoes to go along with it, and fresh juicy corn . . .”

  Dez stood up and got out some protein powder and a shaker cup. She drizzled water into the cup with the powder and shook it vigorously with her good hand, then sat down to drink it.

  She knew she couldn’t ask for a better landlady. She and Luella had an arrangement that worked for both of them. Dez kept up the yard and lawn, fixed anything mechanical that she could, and helped with heavy spring cleaning. In return, Luella did her wash and ironed her uniforms, looked out for Dez, and served as a loving mother. The arrangement had evolved over the last nine years until Dez was as fond of Luella now as she would be of her own mother; that is, if her own mother were still speaking to her.

  True to her word, Luella brought up a tray of breakfast treats. She sat drinking tea at the dinette table while Dez tried to eat. The food was excellent, but she had no appetite. After she ate what she could, Luella cleared everything away. She smoothed the hair off Dez’s brow and brushed her warm lips across her forehead. “You go get some rest, honey. I know you haven’t slept much. Call me if you need anything.” She shuffled to the door, balancing the tray carefully.

  “I’ll get the door, Luella.” Dez stood and saw her out, then faced the empty apartment. She was so terribly tired, but when she went to lie down, sleep would not come. She lay on her back, light slicing in through the small window high above the bed. Her mind raced, and she couldn’t help thinking about all the violence she had witnessed lately. She’d been a cop for almost nine years, and she’d only been in minor altercations, usually scuffles with people who didn’t want to be arrested. Those periodic chances to flex her muscles she actually enjoyed, not minding busting a few heads when needed. But she’d never broken a bone, never been seriously injured.

  All of a sudden, in the last fourteen months, a rash of attacks on cops had occurred. Two officers were shot to death by a crazy man who didn’t even go to trial but instead went straight to the mental hospital. Murders of civilians in the city had doubled, and she’d been to far too many bloody crime scenes lately. Worst of all, her partner, Ryan Michaelson, had died, and now she’d been wounded by last night’s attackers.

  After Ryan’s death, the department shrink told her it was normal to be upset about these things, and Dez eventually admitted she wasn’t sleeping well. The shrink gave her instructions: don’t go to bed until sleepy; if sleep doesn’t come within about twenty minutes of lying down, get up and do something else until sleepy; get up on time, regardless of whether she’d had enough sleep. She’d tried all these things with no success. When she mentioned it to the counselor, the word depression came up, setting off major alarm bells. The doctor spent time talking about it and about helpful types of medication, which scared off Dez completely. She resolved not to be depressed and, the next time the topic came up, she told the shrink she’d finally started getting good sleep again. She attended the mandatory six sessions with the department psychologist, and that was it. She never went back.

  But here she was, nearly three months since Ryan’s death, and still, no good sleep. Instead, her mind busily spun through traumatic events, tried to rewrite what actually happened, though she knew her efforts were futile. The only good thing about last night was how much she enjoyed subduing the two rapists. She’d relished the solid sound of her fist and feet on flesh. At least after this altercation she felt a sense of grateful relief—nothing at all like the feeling of helplessness she experienced after capturing Ryan’s killer. She would have liked to have beaten that man to death, make him pay for what he’d done, but she didn’t get the satisfaction. Ryan was dead, and that man was still alive. It made her angry to think about it.

  She banished memories of Ryan from her mind, tried to breathe deeply, to let her thoughts float away. Instead, her monkey mind took a few more twists and turns and brought other painful images to mind: a tall, willowy, red-haired woman with laughing eyes and a deep tan standing on a rock in front of the water of Lake Superior; sitting in the low light of a banked campfire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area; lying here in this very bed. The eyes, the smile, the presence: Karin. She put her out of her mind as best she could and rolled onto her side, annoyed and restless. She tried to settle her cast somewhere comfortable and ended up placing it on a pillow, her arm tucked close to her side. She tried not to think of Karin, but the more Dez willed her from her memories, the more stubbornly the redhead stayed.

  It was the oldest story in the book: older woman woos the younger, treats her special, gets her in the sack a few times, has fun for about three months, and then when commitment is at hand, the line is: “So long, been nice knowing you.” Dez was totally smitten, ready to plan a life, move in together, and spend the rest of her days at Karin’s side. The Day Of The Dumping, as she had come to think of it, she showed up at Karin’s place as planned. They’d made plans to go out to dinner, but as usual, they skipped the plans and wound up in bed, a trail of clothing dotting the hallway from the front room to the bedroom. Karin was inventive, passionate, and beautiful. Dez couldn’t get close enough to her. They lay in the brass bed after making love, and the phone rang.

  “No, don’t go,” Dez said. “Just let it ring.” She wrapped her arms tightly around Karin, laughing and teasing her.

  Her lover struggled. “Let me go,” she said coldly. She pushed Dez away and struggled out of the bed, pausing to grab her robe, but before she could get down the hall, the answering machine clicked in. A woman’s voice, a husky, trash-talking woman’s voice, filled Dez’s ears. In the middle of the message, Karin picked up, and Dez didn’t hear the rest. She lay wide-eyed in the bed trying to understand why someone else was calling her lover, her Karin, and begging to come over for sex and shrimp cocktail.

  Dez was shocked at the change in Karin when she returned to the room. Karin held a handful of clothes and tossed them on the bed. “It’s been fun, but it’s over.”

  “What?” Dez sat up in the bed, pulling the covers around her to try to stave off the ice-cold shock invading her body.

  Karin gra
bbed at her own clothes. As she slipped on jeans she said, “You had to know this wouldn’t last forever.”

  “But—but—I don’t understand. Why?”

  Karin sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. “Dez, please don’t tell me you’re going to make this difficult. Get up and get dressed. Go home. The party’s over.” She tugged a sweater over her head and smoothed it down, then stood with one hand on her shapely hip, a look of disinterest on her face.

  Dez was shaking too hard to get up. She grabbed her T-shirt and slipped it on over her head. “This was all a game for you?” She couldn’t keep the disbelief from her voice.

  “No, no, not a game. Just—just good fun. Like sports. A little action here, some fun times there.” She gave a jaded laugh. “Don’t tell me you ever thought this was something meaningful?” She laughed uncomfortably.

  Dez fought back tears as she untangled her clothes and tried to make her fingers work to put them on. She stood and slipped on her jeans, then faced Karin. “Yeah, I believed we had something good going here.” With an aching plea she couldn’t hide she said, “Are you seeing someone else, that other woman?”

  Karin let out a deep breath. “Of course. I thought you knew. Never stopped seeing her. She’s not the jealous type.”

  “How would I have known?”

  Karin shrugged. “I wondered if maybe someone from around the department would have said something. I may have a bit of a reputation.”

  “No,” Dez whispered. “No one said a thing.”

  And how could anyone tell her anything? She’d done all she could to distance herself from Karin in public, to hide from others the fact that she was a lesbian. Perhaps people might wonder, but she didn’t think so. She kept the secret to herself, and no one in the department would have known, except that Karin seemed to have had very effective radar. She’d played the seduction game to the hilt and Dez fell for it completely. A wave of anger washed over her, followed by a feeling of physical revulsion. She grabbed her things and stalked out of the house.

  The next six weeks were nearly unbearable. After a week, she didn’t care about Karin’s other lover. She went to Karin and told her she would look the other way, but Karin laughed at her, said the break was final and they were over. Every day at work, Dez had to see Karin at roll call. Every day was a misery.

  Then two things happened. First, Ryan asked her to partner with him in a two-man car, and second, Karin accepted a position with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Out of sight, out of mind. With Karin gone, Dez could finally begin the process of sorting out her feelings. She had never considered herself a particularly violent person, but in this case, she sometimes felt she wanted to hurt Karin. The images came to her in dreams: Karin, beaten and bloody, begging for forgiveness, falling off bridges to the rocks below, shot repeatedly. Dez was filled with a hatred so strong she felt sick to her stomach at times. But slowly it abated. As the winter days grew longer and spring beckoned, the injury that had felt like a death wound began to heal. After nearly eight years, she still bore the invisible scars, but she wasn’t dead. She survived, and never again would she let that happen to her.

  Ryan brought light into her life, his laughing presence a balm to her pained soul. Without even knowing the kind of medicine he was dispensing, he had taken her into his heart and made her a friend. With Karin assigned across town at the BCA, the constant reminder of her smile, of her shapely legs, of the passion they’d shared faded into the background. Dez had dated a few other women since then, but no one who stuck, nobody who was particularly special. In the past year, even before Ryan’s death, she hadn’t wanted to go out with anyone at all. It didn’t seem worth the effort, and she tried hard not to think about there being an emptiness in her life. At one time she wanted a lover, a life partner, but she was younger and naïve then. These days she no longer thought about it.

  Now Dez was left with those old images and memories only when she slowed down long enough that they could intrude, uninvited, upon her. Nothing like what occurred with Karin would ever happen again. Never again would she have to face her coworkers while feigning good humor and pleasantness when, deep inside, a pain festered and burned. A wall went up, a rule was made: all cops are off limits.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jaylynn closed her second blue exam book and wrote her name on the front of it. She stifled a yawn as she set the essay pad aside and opened the first blue book to go over her essays one last time before submitting them to the professor. Pausing to add punctuation where needed, she read carefully through her answers to all five questions. Satisfied, she closed both blue books, picked up her backpack, and got up to turn in the exam. The proctor took them without even meeting her eyes and stacked them on the corner of his desk.

  She felt like she was sleepwalking her way out the door and across the campus to the parking lot where Tim was to pick her up. She looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes early. She stopped and sat on one of the many benches in the Commons, closed her eyes, and let the warm morning sun bathe her face. Another hot day on the way, but at ten a.m. it had only begun to heat up.

  A honk sounded from the parking lot and she peeped open one hazel eye and spotted Tim’s faded red Corolla. She rose wearily and made her way over.

  “Hey there,” he said. “You’re early.”

  “So are you.” She dropped her backpack onto the front seat and slid in next to it.

  “Yeah. I’ve seen you write—five miles a minute. So I figured you’d be done early, and I want to get over to the hospital and see when they’re letting Sara go.”

  He gunned the car and sped off down the street. Jaylynn leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

  “How’d the test go?”

  Without opening her eyes she said, “Fine. I think. Nothing unexpected. Need to get at least a B.”

  “Ah, that’s nice.”

  They rode the rest of the way to the hospital in silence, parked, and found their way to Sara’s room.

  Sara was asleep, her brown hair splayed across the pillow and her face turned slightly toward the light streaming in the window. Tim and Jaylynn crept in quietly, but as soon as they neared the bed Sara awakened with a start, her eyes wide. “Oh, God, you scared me.”

  Jaylynn moved to the far side of the bed, and she and Tim both reached simultaneously for Sara’s hands. “Don’t worry,” Tim said. “It’s just us chickens.” He leaned down and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

  Jaylynn studied her friend’s pale face as she leaned against the bed. She stroked Sara’s arm and squeezed her hand tight. “So, how’re you feeling this morning?”

  In a grouchy voice, Sara said, “I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I can’t wait to get out of here. I’ve never been checked on and awakened so many times in my life. And when I did fall asleep—geez!—what rotten dreams. How bad do I look?”

  Tim said, “You look beautiful, as usual.”

  Sara shook her head wearily and gazed at Jaylynn. “The truth now,” she demanded.

  Jaylynn studied her friend’s face. “Double black eyes are on the way. Your chin will be black and blue for days, and that wallop on your temple. Whoa, girl, does that hurt?”

  Sara touched her forehead. “They kept shining lights in my eyes all night. I guess they thought I had a concussion.”

  “Where’s your mom?” Jaylynn asked.

  “She’ll be back at two when they release me. She stayed until about seven this morning, then went home to sleep a few hours.”

  “Two!” Tim said, outraged. “Damn. When I called this morning, they told me you’d leave sometime after ten.”

  “You do realize that two is sometime after ten, Tim,” Sara said. She gave him a playful poke to the stomach.

  Jaylynn smiled and considered what a good sport Sara was. She didn’t know how she herself would handle it if she were in Sara’s shoes. Then again, she, too, had been attacked. But somehow it wasn’t at all the same. How could she ever admit to Sara that the experienc
e was completely different for her than for her friend? Already, since last night, she’d relived it in her dreams and thought through it over and over during her Con Law exam. She kept seeing the intense and powerful officer in a flurry of kicks and punches. She remembered the heavy feel of the wooden bat swinging in her own hands, the weight of the black gun. So fast. It all happened so fast, in a thirty second jumble of sounds and sensations. When she slowed it down in her mind and remembered the sequence of events, she was astonished at how much had happened. She couldn’t quite get her mind around it all.

  Jaylynn stopped leaning against the bed and sank down on it, still holding Sara’s hand. Sara was saying, “When I get home, I want to sleep for about fifteen straight hours.”

  “No problem,” Jaylynn said. “I’m going to collapse in my room, too.”

  Sara winced and took a deep breath. “Jay?”

  “Yes?”

  Sara looked down at the covers and squeezed her friends’ hands. “I can’t go back and sleep in that room—at least, not right away. I just can’t.” Tears welled up in her eyes.

  Tim leaned his hip on the edge of the bed so that Sara was flanked by two very concerned friends, both talking at once. She let them soothe her for a moment and then went on. “I’m wondering if maybe we could switch rooms, Jay?”

  Jaylynn shrugged and nodded. “I’ll be getting the best part of the deal. I get a huge room, and you get the little one. It doesn’t have as much closet space, you know?”

  Tim said, “I’d give you my room—”

  Sara cut in, “No way. No thanks. I’m not sleeping in the attic. I don’t care if it is nice up there. It’s too creepy for me.” She squeezed his knee and made him jump. “Besides, you’ve got it set up so nice with all the lava lamps. I wouldn’t want to wreck your love nest.”

  Jaylynn said, “As long as you don’t mind—just remember though, the phone won’t go that far. What about those long distance calls from Billy Boy?”