Misadventures in Blue

by Sierra Simone

  Ran out to reinterview Gia Pisani. Back by lunch.

  I’m reading it over a second and third time when the phone at her desk rings. I answer it, in case it’s her.

  “Sutton.”

  “Um, hi,” comes a hesitant voice. “This is Shelley Abadinksy, from the Mastin Cancer Center office? I’m calling for Detective Day?”

  “She’s away from her desk at the moment,” I say, glancing at her note. Conclusions are fitting together in my mind, and there’s a sharp bite of worry in my chest. The itch to go find her is difficult to think through. “I’m one of the officers assisting her on the case. I can take a message and make sure she gets it.”

  “Sure,” Shelley says, sounding relieved. “And actually you might be able to help me anyway. I had our office manager, Gia Pisani, send in an updated inventory of all the missing items, but I just realized we might have to contact some federal authority, and I thought maybe Detective Day would know which one.”

  I’m standing and my body is already angled toward the cubicle opening, I’m that desperate to get to Cat right now. So I say hurriedly, “No need to report the televisions to anybody federal, ma’am. We’ll handle it all here at HGPD,” and make to hang up.

  “Oh, I’m not talking about the televisions,” she says, surprised. “Did Gia not tell you? Our cobalt therapy machine has been damaged, and the cobalt inside was stolen.”

  “Cobalt?”

  “Nuclear material? It’s used for radiation therapy.”

  Cobalt. It rings a bell from my army days, and my already tight hand practically cracks the phone receiver in half.

  Cobalt. It’s used for radiation therapy…and dirty bombs.

  “And you didn’t notice it was missing until now?”

  She sounds defensive when she answers. “Look, we just refitted a new therapy room with a LINAC machine, so we haven’t used the cobalt machine in over a month. It was scheduled to be removed next week. I went in there Friday to take a few measurements for the disposal company. That’s when I noticed it had been pried open.”

  And Gia Pisani is the office manager. Cat is interviewing her right now.

  Things come together in a horrible rush.

  “And I just wasn’t sure if we needed to contact someone like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or if you did that,” she goes, oblivious to the fact that I’m splitting apart with panic on my end.

  “Shelley, I’m going to call you back, but I have to go right now.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “We didn’t know about the nuclear material,” I tell her, already reaching up to click on my radio. “And I have to tell a lot of people about it right now so no one gets hurt.”

  “Oh,” she says faintly, the gravity of it finally seeming to sink in. “Oh, of course. I should have—yes, of course.”

  “Goodbye, ma’am.” And then I’m hanging up the phone and calling for a captain on the radio.

  “Day’s got two uniforms with her,” Captain Kim tells me as I’m speeding south to the medical office. “More are on the way.”

  “And the NRC?”

  “Notified.” A pause. “And the KBI and the FBI.”

  “Is she with Pisani now?”

  “They’re in the staff breakroom at the back of the building. The uniforms are just outside the door. Pisani doesn’t know they’re there. Everything’s under control, Sutton.”

  Funny how hard that is to believe when the woman I love is alone with a criminal who is apparently selling nuclear material on the black market. I click off the radio and focus on driving, pushing the low-profile detective car to its limits. It roars into the parking lot before any of the supervisors arrive, which is good. I don’t need them forbidding me from going in, because I’m going in no matter what.

  I park and push my way into the building. There’s an unfamiliar woman at the desk who looks puzzled at my appearance, so I assume she doesn’t know about the other cops in the building.

  “Where’s your staff room?” I ask through gritted teeth, trying to keep my voice low.

  “Back by the lab,” she says, still puzzled. “First left. Hey, are you with that one lady—”

  I don’t stay to chat. I move down the hallway as quick as I can, pressing the hood of my holster down and forward in preparation for drawing my weapon. I pray I don’t have to, because if I have to, it means Cat’s in danger…

  I round the corner and see a door marked Employees Only. Taking a risk, I open it with wary, slow caution, making sure I can slide into the restricted area without being seen or creating any noise. After I’m in, I close the door with a barely audible click and enter a fluorescent-lit hallway to see two patrol officers outside a windowed room. One of them puts a finger to her lips, indicating I need to be silent, and I creep up to join them.

  Through the window of the staff room, I see Cat sitting across a cheap table from Gia Pisani, two disposable cups of coffee between them. Gia is agitated but trying to hide it under a veneer of friendly confusion.

  Cat is unreadable—save for the occasional twitch of her lips as Gia talks. The Ice Queen’s signature cool amusement. It seems to piss Gia off.

  For a moment, I relax. It’s just an interview in a forgettably bland staff room—a tense interview, maybe, but nothing more. No weapons, no open containers of nuclear waste, no anonymous men here to protect their supply. Cat doesn’t know about the nuclear material yet, which means she won’t question Pisani about it, which means the interview probably won’t escalate into—

  Gia stands abruptly, her chair knocking back behind her, her cheeks glowing as she says something heated to Cat.

  Cat merely crosses her arms and arches a perfect brow, as if to make the point that the young woman is embarrassing herself with this outburst. Like most cops, Cat has the gift of complete reticence—that is, refraining from reacting to another person until she’s good and ready—and her lack of response only provokes Gia to say more. Which was probably Cat’s intention the entire time.

  Hardly any sound makes it through the window, and at this angle, it’s hard to attempt any kind of interpretation to what Gia says, but Cat tilts her head and murmurs something in an unperturbed tone.

  Gia blanches, and I know whatever Cat said hit home. Hard.

  She’s so fucking good at this.

  Weird how I feel that thought in the pit of my stomach—not with lust but with fear.

  Because she’s so good, she’s more than good—she’s sharply perceptive, intelligent beyond measure, fierce as hell, and that’s not even taking into account all that sophistication and beauty. She’s so far out of my league that we’ve never even played on the same field, and with a sudden, gripping terror, I wonder if that was what our fight was about. If she’s not truly worried about our age difference or my job, but if she’s trying to let me down easy because I’m not good enough for her.

  And shit—she’d be right. I’m not.

  I have to glance down to take a breath—a big, deep one to try to stave off panic I’ve never known before, and right at that moment, something happens that blows even that panic right out of the water. Gia shrieks something and, in a clumsy but quick movement, fumbles a gun from behind her back where it was tucked in her waistband.

  She aims it right at Cat.

  I’m moving before I can think, my gun out and my shoulder ramming the flimsy interior door open, and it’s like all sound and feeling are gone, all extraneous sensation. There’s only the gun in my hand and the palpable presence of the woman I love who’s about to die.

  She can’t die.

  Oh God. She can’t die.

  Reality comes back in with a vicious, adrenaline-laced flood.

  The explosion of me through the door draws Gia’s attention, and I hear myself yell for her to drop her weapon. I hear the two other cops behind me shouting for Gia to get on the ground.

  Cat says something in a low, soothing tone as she gets to her feet and gracefully gestures for everyone to lower their weap
ons, and for a moment I think Gia is going to do it. I think she’s going to drop her gun and give up this pointless resistance.

  But then the officer behind me speaks again, his voice jangling with sheer human panic, and it jars Gia free from thoughts of surrender.

  She swings the gun.

  She shoots.

  And pain, big and stark, swallows me whole.

  Then darkness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cat

  I’ve died. I’ve died and I’ve gone to hell.

  And I’m not even the one who was shot.

  A cup of coffee appears in my vision. Black, slightly oily, tiny bubbles rimming the edge of the liquid where it sloshed gently against the paper cup. I take it, although the idea of drinking or eating anything while my stomach is still twisted up into my throat is laughable. I don’t bother to look over as Russo settles next to me, her own cup of coffee in hand.

  “How is he?” she asks.

  “Stable, last I heard. The bullet caught an artery in his arm and he lost a lot of—” My voice catches, and I suck in a breath, forcing myself to face tonight’s events with the usual blunt, cold honesty I face everything else with. “He lost a lot of blood,” I manage after a moment. “They closed the wound and did a transfusion, and he’s recovering now. I should be able to see him soon.”

  Russo reaches out, touches my hand with her rough, unmanicured fingers. I know she sees the dried blood still trapped along the lines of my cuticles. “You saved his life,” she says quietly.

  “Maybe,” I say, because at no point during those frantic, bloody moments after the gun went off did I allow myself to hope. At no point when I stanched his wound with my bare hands, the scene cruelly overlaid with my memories of trying to save Frazer, did I let myself believe it could end any differently.

  Instead, I felt his hot, wet blood against my skin, sticky and slick all at once, and I thought it’s happening again.

  It’s happening.

  Again.

  The uniforms cuffed Gia while she was frozen in horror at what she’d done—we arrested her without any one of us firing a weapon or using any kind of force. Good police work any way you slice it, and the paramedics were a credit to the city. They arrived as fast as humanly possible and took charge of Jace’s life with expert competence.

  Someone had to peel me away while they worked. Another paramedic? Captain Kim, maybe? But I was allowed to ride in the ambulance with him. Allowed to hold the hand on his good arm while I frantically searched for all the prayers from my Catholic upbringing.

  I could only remember fragments, and finally my thoughts disintegrated into vague, broken pleas as the ambulance raced to the hospital.

  Please don’t let him die.

  Please.

  Don’t let him die.

  “There was nothing else you could have done,” Russo points out in the here and now. “The other officers told me what happened. You had the interview under control, and from what it sounds like, you might have been able to talk her down even without Sutton crashing in.”

  “I should have searched her first,” I murmur.

  “You wouldn’t have been able to—not without cause—and what you had on her going into the interview would have been pretty weak grounds for a body search from a court’s perspective.”

  She’s right, and I know she’s right, and it’s almost worse that way. It’s almost worse to know I did everything right and still.

  Still.

  I take a drink of the coffee. Not because I like it or because I need time to think, but just because it’s something to do. Some new input that isn’t self-recrimination and terror and misery.

  “He did what Frazer did,” I say after a minute and mostly out of nowhere.

  “Yeah,” Russo sighs. “I know.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  Russo gives a dry laugh. “Who? Cops? Men? Men who are in love with you?”

  I don’t want to answer that, and I can’t anyway.

  “I know he’s in love, Day,” Russo adds gently. “All anyone has to do is look at him and know he’s gone for you.”

  “He’s young,” I say, trying to sound dismissive. It only comes out as sad. “He doesn’t know what he wants.”

  “I disagree,” Russo says. “I think you’re the one who doesn’t know what she wants.”

  “He did what Frazer did,” I repeat softly, and she gives me a rueful look.

  “Is that so unforgivable?”

  I look down at my fingers, still stained with Jace’s blood. “It might be.”

  An hour later, with Russo gone and Jace’s family camped all around me, a nurse comes in to say we can go in to see him—but we can’t go all at once.

  I’m desperate to get to him, desperate to trace his lips with my fingers and reassure myself that they’re still warm. Anxious to see the rise and fall of his chest and know he’s here. Still here. Still alive.

  But Jace’s parents are here, and they have the right to go first. I lace my fingers around the cup of tepid coffee and give Jace’s mother a look I hope she’ll interpret as a signal that I won’t protest her going first…no matter how much I want to.

  She walks up to me. “You’re Cat Day?” she asks. Her voice is fractured from crying, and tear tracks have dried in streaks along her cheeks. She’s very pretty—gray-eyed and full-lipped like Jace, and as tall and broad as he is too.

  “I am,” I say quietly. “Please, you go in first.”

  She gives me a watery smile. “Jace told us about you,” she says, tucking a gray-salted lock of hair behind her ear. “That you two were dating, and he couldn’t wait—” Her chin trembles. “He couldn’t wait for us to meet.”

  Jace told his mother about me? Wanted us to meet? My heart flips over at the discovery, at the proof that his declarations weren’t just the lust-fueled blurtings I’d suspected. That he not only wanted more with me but was actively laying the foundation for more.

  Telling his parents. Wanting me to meet them.

  The same things my illicit fantasies have been showing me for the last three weeks: a real life together.

  My flattered joy is tempered with something unpleasant. I look up at his mother and realize she can’t be more than ten years older than me. I realize she’s looking down at me and seeing…

  Seeing what?

  A predator? A peer?

  Both options are depressing.

  “What you must think of me,” I manage with a weak smile, and she shakes her head.

  She reaches out and touches my shoulder. Not as a gesture of comfort but to draw my attention. I look at her hands, rough and calloused like Russo’s, and remember that she was a firefighter. That her son’s bravery and dedication to hard work comes from her.

  She’s touching stiffened patches of garnet splattered on my blouse. There’s dried blood all over me; I look like I’ve emerged from some kind of abattoir.

  “I think you’re a hero,” she pronounces. “You saved his life.”

  And then she and her husband follow the nurse into the ICU.

  It’s another hour before they leave, and finally I get to go in.

  Jace is still unconscious, his face pale and his huge frame dwarfed by the massive mechanical bed, and I cover my mouth with my hand so my unhappy gasp doesn’t wake him. As if anything could wake him up after all that blood loss and morphine.

  There’s a chair pulled up beside his bed, but I ignore it, dropping my things on the floor and crawling right into bed with him, careful not to tug on any cords or tubes as I do. He’s warm but not as warm as I’m used to, and I’m just as cold as I press my body along his and lay my head on his good shoulder.

  “Jace,” I mumble. “Why? Why are we here?”

  Tears are leaking now—the fast, uncontrollable kind and the first I’ve cried since Gia fired that gun. “I love you,” I finally admit, hating myself that I never told him before. That I never told him when it mattered. “I love you, and it scares me. It s
cares me because you love me back and you love me back so much that you’d get yourself killed trying to protect me.”

  Just like Frazer.

  Beneath my cheek, I feel Jace’s steady if shallow breathing. All around us, various machines and monitors beep and glow with reassuring consistency, as if to say he’s doing okay, he’s doing okay.

  But how can I ever be reassured of his safety ever again? After I’ve been spattered with coppery, vibrant blood as I begged and begged him to stay alive?

  Maybe he didn’t die today, but he came close enough to prove every point I’ve ever made about us. He is blessed enough to live and have this second chance, and surely he doesn’t want to waste it on a woman so much older than him. Surely he deserves more tomcat years before he even has to think about settling down.

  And most importantly…

  He’s too young and he’s too heroic.

  I’ve loved those young heroes before. I know what happens. I know how it ends.

  I cry for a long time into his big, muscled shoulder, leaving streaks of mascara on his hospital gown. I slide my hand over his chest to feel the thump of his heart, and I listen to the machines, and I tell him, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  And before I leave, I kiss his stubbled jaw and say, “And I’m so fucking sorry for what I have to do.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jace

  I’m too dizzy to open my eyes.

  Sounds bleed through the haze of strange dreams—sounds I don’t recognize—and I can’t open my eyes to see what they are because the world is spinning, spinning, spinning.