Badge of Honor

by Carol Steward

“Cut the engine and get out. I’m not calling them off until you’re both out of the car and on the ground,” she bellowed as Nick tugged on her shirtsleeve.

  They could hear yelling from inside the car. Thirty seconds later, the driver turned off the Chevelle and gave himself up, followed by the passenger. Sarah burst out of the car, keeping her gun on the latter, Turrow, as Nick went to cuff and search the driver.

  One of the sheriff’s deputies nodded to her. “I think this is your arrest, Officer.” He stood nearby as Sarah moved the suspect to the car to pat him down.

  Nick wondered if he should turn his guy over to another deputy so he could help her. Nope, she’s just one of the guys; she’s gotta do the job like all of us. He glanced over, surprised that she didn’t hesitate with any of her duties, even though the arrested party was a good foot taller than her.

  “Get that cut on your forehead when you dived into the car?” she asked Turrow. “Take pictures,” she said, motioning for another officer to snap some photos before she cuffed the man. “You’re lucky that’s all that happened to you, with your friend’s driving habits, not to mention your bad choices,” she added. “Keep your hands on the roof of the car.”

  Instead of obeying, the suspect threw an elbow into her chest, and again Nick fought the urge to intervene. The sheriff’s deputy was there immediately to assist as needed. He kicked the suspect’s legs farther apart.

  “Is getting charged for resisting arrest and assaulting an officer part of your game plan?” Nick bellowed. He tightened his grip on his own suspect.

  “C’mon, Turrow, you’re not going anywhere, so how about acting like a gentleman?” Sarah said, trying to sweet-talk the guy into cuffs.

  The man spit.

  Stoically, Sarah pushed him against the car, finishing her search, removing a knife and two guns from the cargo pocket of his pants in the process. “You have the right to remain silent….”

  He fidgeted, making it difficult to get the steel bracelets on him.

  “These cuffs are too tight.” The suspect jerked his arm from Sarah’s grasp, then knocked her to the ground and started running.

  FOUR

  Nick shoved his prisoner into another officer’s hands and headed toward Sarah.

  She spun, kicking her suspect’s legs out from under him. Then she jumped to her feet and put her knee between his shoulder blades. “Anything else you’d like to try?” she asked the guy laying with his face on the concrete. He had not only hers, but three other guns aimed at him.

  Nick stopped on the other side of the prone figure, holding back a laugh. He waited as Sarah cuffed him, then helped her to pull the guy to his feet.

  “Look what you did to me!” the bank robber said, blood dripping from his nose.

  Sarah holstered her weapon and grabbed his arm. “I’d start exercising that right to remain silent if I were you.” She escorted him to the backseat of their patrol car. “If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law….” she said, then finished reading him his rights. She closed the door and looked at the prisoner sitting in a second cruiser. “Did you read your party his rights?” she asked Nick.

  “Done. Unless you object, I’d like to send him ahead to the jail, put some space between these two so they can’t collaborate on any details.”

  Officer Roberts jotted notes on a small pad. “Fine. We shouldn’t be too long here, should we?”

  “A tow truck has already been called to deliver the Chevelle to the police lot for investigation,” Nick confirmed. “The officer who responded at the bank will meet us at the jail to help with questioning. The shift supervisor is contacting the Nebraska department to let them know we have their suspects.”

  “So we need to finish writing up our reports before they can be extradited to Omaha on their warrants.”

  “That’s right. How’s your report writing?” he asked.

  “They’re done differently than I’m used to, but I think I’m catching on.” She looked up and smiled.

  After the scene was cleaned up, they transported the prisoner to the jail and waited while the guards searched him and offered first aid. Since both suspects lawyered up, Nick and Sarah had to wait for legal counsel to arrive before they could question them.

  “Good job out there, Officer Roberts,” Nick said as they left the jail afterward.

  “Thanks,” she said, wondering if he was always so formal. She wanted to tell him to call her Sarah, but since he was her field training officer, she opted against saying anything. “I think it went amazingly well, considering no innocent victims were hurt and not one vehicle suffered any damage. I’m sure you have a few suggestions of how I could have handled it better….”

  “I said you did a good job,” Nick stated quietly.

  She felt her heart beat a little faster when the corner of his mouth twitched. Sarah didn’t dare let his compliment go to her head. Evaluation of a call was part of the job. She didn’t need his approval. Or so she tried to convince herself.

  A second later, he smiled. “Do you want to grab a soda on the way out, to celebrate?”

  “Celebrate what? An arrest? Thanks, but I don’t drink soda on duty.”

  “Coffee? Water? The machines have it all. My treat.”

  She finally gave in and turned down the hallway toward the lobby. “I need to call my sister real quick.

  If you insist on buying, I’ll take a water.”

  She found a quiet corner and dialed her cell phone. “Hi, Beth. How’re you doing?”

  “Fine, until you called to remind me I shouldn’t be,” her baby sister mumbled. “I don’t want to talk now.”

  Sarah paced the floor, knowing she’d feel much better if she was at home with her sister instead of counting on a bunch of uninformed friends to watch out for her. “Are your girlfriends there?”

  “Yes. We’re watching a movie and having pizza.”

  Sarah closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You didn’t let some pizza joint deliver to the house, did you? Did you even tell your friends what happened? Did you tell Steve yet?”

  “I don’t want to. I want to forget it,” her sister said vehemently.

  “That’s not going to make it go away,” Sarah warned in a hushed tone.

  The line went dead as Beth hung up.

  She felt a cold chill as a shadow made the corner go dark. “You okay?”

  Sarah spun around, realizing Nick had returned with her bottle of water, and one for himself. “Yeah, you ready to go?” She hoped he didn’t push for more information, because tonight, she didn’t think she could stay quiet. She didn’t want to be here at all, but she knew her sister’s stubbornness would be as annoying in person as it was from a distance.

  “I’m ready, if you’re sure you are,” he said skeptically. “Is your sister okay? You didn’t sound very happy.”

  Sarah couldn’t talk. Not right now. She walked past the good-looking officer who had been through the mill with his own problems. “I’m not.”

  “I don’t mean to push…” he said under his breath. “But if you need time off, it’s better to take it than try to carry on when you’re distracted.”

  She stopped and turned to face him. “Did I seem distracted out there?”

  He stepped back and crossed his arms in front of him, then dropped them to his sides, probably afraid he’d split the seams of his perfectly ironed shirt. “No.”

  “You probably know how irritating sisters can be when they make poor decisions, right?”

  He looked at her, puzzled. “How’d you know I have a sister?”

  Sarah couldn’t believe she’d opened her big mouth. For some crazy reason, she’d hoped he would remember her. “We went to high school together.” Suddenly she felt very awkward.

  He didn’t respond, but studied her. “She’s not even close to our age. How’d…?”

  “I saw her at basketball games.” Sarah had done enough interrogation in her car
eer to know that his pause was due to discomfort. She was just rankled enough from her conversation with Beth to push the topic. “You don’t remember me, do you? I was older…. A geek with no social life….”

  “I presume you still are,” he said with an ornery smile. “Older, I mean.”

  She pursed her mouth and looked up at him. “Thanks for reminding me, Sergeant Matthews.” She shrugged. “Forget I mentioned it. It’s been a long time.”

  His lips quirked slightly, forming an adorable smile that she remembered from all those years ago. “I confess, I didn’t make the connection at first. I thought you looked familiar. In this line of work, it’s hard to remember where I’ve met someone. You’re Joel’s twin sister. I still can’t believe you two are twins, he’s so much taller….” Nick’s face turned a shade pinker with her silence. “Sorry….”

  She shook her head. “Yeah, thanks again for the reminder.”

  “He was a senior on the basketball team when I made varsity my sophomore year.”

  Sarah nodded in confirmation and his embarrassment faded. “And you bumped him out of the last quarter of the state championship game.”

  Nick shrugged, the blush returning with her statement. “Is the chip on his shoulder, or yours? That happened…” He paused thoughtfully “…fourteen years ago.”

  Sarah laughed at the puzzled look on his face. “Oh, I think it bothered the rest of us a lot more than it ever did Joel. He was just happy that the team took the championship.”

  “We all were,” Nick said as he opened the door to the parking yard. “For the record, you were a brainiac, not a geek. That’s what everyone said, anyway.” They continued out to the squad car in silence. Sarah’s mind sped right back to high school, and the days she’d spent wishing she could be like the other girls for a change. The ones who were tall and pretty and knew how to flirt with boys, well enough to have gotten a date to the prom. Nothing scared high school boys away faster than a “brainiac,” apparently.

  So she’d reminded him. But was it a good thing that he remembered her, or bad?

  She tore her mind from those days long ago and refocused on her sister. Sarah planned on making a slight detour by Beth’s house, to make sure all was quiet.

  “What’s Joel doing now?”

  Nick’s question startled her. “Married with twin daughters, for starters. He teaches middle school in Denver.”

  “Sounds fun. And where’s your sister?” he asked as they reached the cruiser and went to their respective doors.

  At home, she hoped. Safe and sound. “She’s here in town.” What was Beth thinking, giving out her name and address the day after someone assaulted her? Didn’t she realize how fortunate it was that a group of students had happened by exactly when they did? Sarah got into the car and turned the key.

  “Unlock my door,” Nick called as he knocked on the passenger’s window.

  She hit the button, then offered a quick apology when he slid inside. “Well, that was a fun way to start the night, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That ought to keep our blood pumping for a few hours, anyway.” He asked a few more questions about Joel, but after that, it wasn’t long before he became the strong silent type once again.

  She wanted to keep him talking, but this being their first night of a four-week assignment, she decided to let him make conversation when he was comfortable doing so. She’d pushed enough for now.

  Nick had a rough road ahead, regaining his footing in the department after the charges that had been made against him. She could sympathize. While her reasons for leaving the FBI were nowhere as difficult to handle emotionally as what he had been through, she still couldn’t have walked back into the same team and pretended nothing had happened. In fact, she felt guilty leaving because they wouldn’t let her work undercover assignments. In time, she was sure she’d have the chance to commiserate with him. For now, they needed to let the wounds heal.

  Throughout the evening, they had little more than traffic stops to keep them awake. Finally, with an hour left in their shift, they returned to the station to complete their reports.

  Nick barely said a word as he worked at the desk across from hers. She looked up once to find him staring at her.

  “How’s it going?” he said immediately.

  He looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary. Sarah had the distinct feeling it wasn’t reports that were on his mind. “Okay, I suppose. I’m not sure how to explain the cuts on Turrow’s face.”

  “Self-defense. He was trying to escape.”

  She put her head in her hand. “There were four other officers between him and freedom. Would he really have run?”

  “You bet. He was ready to take each officer out, and dumb enough to think he could get away with it.” Nick walked around the desks and looked at what she’d written. “It happened faster than that. I barely took two steps before you’d taken him down. It was a natural reaction to a violent prisoner resisting arrest. Erase that sentence about your reasoning through it.”

  “But I did reason through it.”

  “You have ten years experience, Sarah.” He said her name with an edge of discomfort. “It’s instinct to defend yourself and the other officers. You’re trained to react to the opposition. Don’t doubt yourself. That can’t be any different on the streets than it was in the Bureau. There were enough officers around to verify that he’d elbowed you twice.”

  “You saw that?” Why had he been watching her, and not paying more attention to his own prisoner?

  “You are my trainee. It’s my responsibility to keep my eye on you,” he said with a straight face.

  So much for her high school dreams of a hometown boy finally noticing her, she thought. Sarah highlighted the sentence and hit the delete button, wishing it were as easy to erase her own mistakes.

  FIVE

  Nick reflected on his first night back on the job as he drove up the canyon west of town in the Colorado foothills. Officer Roberts wasn’t far from his mind. It was difficult enough that his trainee was a former federal agent, but that it was brainiac Sarah Roberts made the assignment pure agony. Even though he knew it could be worse—he could be training a young rookie fresh out of the academy—he now regretted the day he’d accepted a field training officer assignment. That seemed a lifetime ago….

  Before fellow officers had accused him of selling evidence to their drug ring.

  Before his fiancée had walked off, worried that the scandal would ruin her journalism career.

  Before his honor had been assaulted from every direction.

  “I’m not sure how much more You think I can handle, God, but it might be time we have another discussion. Bringing an FBI agent to the department is one thing, but making my former high school crush my trainee is a really low blow.”

  As Nick pulled into the gravel driveway of the custom-built log home, his black Labrador greeted him from behind the six-foot chain link fence. She ambled toward the gate, her tail wagging and cheeks lifted in a smile. “Morning, Lexee.”

  She yipped a greeting, stretching her lanky body.

  “You ready to go inside?” Though the dog had a door of her own into the garage, he opened the gate and brought her in through the main entrance with him.

  The dog ran across the room, fetched a stuffed animal and attacked him with her toy. He couldn’t help but smile. “You don’t care what kind of night I had, do you?” he said as he tossed the toy down the hall for their early morning ritual. He filled a glass with orange juice and sat on the sofa to catch up with the news and baseball scores on his digital television recorder. The dog toy dropped at his feet and Lexee smiled at him again, eagerly awaiting the next toss. “You don’t want to hear me complain about my cute new partner, do you?”

  Lexee cocked her head to one side, as if to say, “Of course I do.” Then she flung the toy at him and crouched, ready for him to throw it again.

  The phone rang, and Nick jumped. He figured it had to be one of
his brothers calling to see how his first night back on patrol went. He checked the I.D. display to be sure it wasn’t someone else calling at three in the morning.

  “Hey, Garrett, what’s up?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” his younger brother said. “I’m taking a break while it’s quiet. Sounds like you had a fun evening. It’s deader than a doornail now. Man, I’d have loved to have been in your boots!”

  Nick smiled, thankful that he could share the peculiar sense of humor of the law enforcement officer with his family. What was bad to most people was great to a cop. “Yeah, it was a good evening. I suppose you also know that I finally made it as a field training officer,” he said, waiting to see if his brother had heard that, too.

  “Did you get the FBI agent?”

  “Ten-four,” he said with a chuckle. “What’s worse, she went to high school here. I played basketball with her twin brother. We used to call her the brainiac. I guess I’m not done being investigated, after all.”

  “Get over that already, Nick. If they didn’t trust you they would have come up with some reason to can you. I hear she whipped the bank robber. What’s her name again?” his brother asked.

  “Sarah Roberts. And yes, she has some pretty amazing defensive moves. She’s the shortest trainee with long dark hair…”

  “Yeah,” he said, obviously distracted. Nick could hear the radio in the background. “She didn’t look familiar. Did I know her?”

  Lexee dropped to her belly and squeaked the toy. Nick wrestled it away so he could hear Garrett, searching for something quieter to play with. “Probably not. Sarah and her twin brother are two years older than me, so she’d have been long gone by the time you and Kira were in high school. She remembered we’d adopted Kira.”

  “I think everyone remembers that. It was still pretty odd around here to see a mixed-race kid in our family.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.” Nick put his feet up and closed his eyes. “Her brother was the kid that I replaced in the championship basketball game my sophomore year. She razzed me about it. That was kind of weird.” He didn’t tell Garrett that she was even cuter now than she’d been in high school. “But all in all, it was a good night. It’s definitely good to be back to work.”