by Jenna Rae
“Go to hell, Orrin.”
She’d thought it would be funny, but her voice sounded shrill and ugly. She whirled around, sure that Orrin would be behind her, his eyes glinting and his mouth drawn tight. Of course, he wasn’t there. She closed her eyes and decided to go ahead with her plan, though some of the fun had already gone out of it. She had felt like a whole new person after going to the salon, and she wanted to re-create that feeling and remember what freedom from fear had felt like.
Lola started at thrift stores but ended up driving several miles to a suburban mall, having decided that it was not a mortal sin if she wanted to buy a few brand-new things. If she got enough clothes, then she probably wouldn’t have to go shopping again for years.
Gawking at a dressing room mirror, surprised to find herself not entirely repulsive in a pretty blue camisole and French knickers, she wondered for a moment if Del would like the way she looked in them. She reddened and turned away. “Who cares?”
Smiling with relief as she reached her new home, Lola felt a kind of lassitude steal over her. She was safe. She was fine. No one would hurt her ever again. The stranger who’d attacked her was surely gone for good—why would he come back? There was no reason to be afraid anymore. While she was lugging her purchases up from the garage, her mind wandered back to that errant thought in the dressing room, and she was startled into running for the phone when it rang.
“Hello?” she said breathlessly.
“Finally! Dammit, Lola!” Del’s voice burst through the phone. “Where the hell have you been?”
Lola froze. She couldn’t think. The anger in Del’s voice paralyzed her. Her chest tightened. Panic flooded her, and she didn’t notice that she was shaking her head.
“Lola? You okay? Lola?” There was a long pause. Del’s voice was softer. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell like that. It’s just, I was worried that something happened. Is everything okay?”
Dumbly, Lola nodded. She rolled her eyes and cleared her throat. “Yes. Sorry. I’m sorry.” She looked out the window and had a moment of anger. Who was Del, to yell at her like that? But then she heard the anxiety in Del’s tone and was flooded with guilt.
“I called your house and your cell a bunch of times. It’s been, like, five hours.”
“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t—I’m sorry.”
“No.” Del sounded frustrated. “I just, with what happened the other night, you know—”
“No, of course,” Lola rushed in. “It was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about it. I left my cell at home. I haven’t been using it much. I never had one before. I—” she stuttered lamely, “I went shopping. I’m sorry, Del. I’m so sorry.” Please don’t be mad at me, she wanted to say, but her throat was closing despite her efforts not to cry, and she couldn’t speak any more.
“Cool.” Del sounded far away. “Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re okay. Call me if you need anything.” And she was gone without waiting for a response.
Lola swallowed with a gulp. She had bungled things badly. Del had been kind enough to try to help her, and she’d acted like an irresponsible airhead. Orrin was right, she didn’t think. She just did whatever she wanted and didn’t think about anyone else. She was so selfish!
Tears stung her eyes as she gathered up the silly, too fancy things she’d bought and carried them to the kitchen. The items from the thrift stores couldn’t be helped, but she would pick through and choose a few necessities from the new things and take the rest back. She’d been spending money too freely for weeks now, and it was time to get back to being sensible. Orrin was right. She had no self-control. That was why she ate too much and exercised too little and never got anything important done. She just dithered all the time. Why did she have to be so stupid? She was very, very tired. She dropped onto a chair and sat there as the afternoon faded into the darkness of evening.
Chapter Eleven
“Crap! Crap, crap, crap!” Del slammed her fist into her thigh.
She couldn’t believe she’d done it again. Every time she saw Lola starting to trust her, she’d say or do something to scare her. Wasn’t she going through enough right now? Stupid. I scared the hell out of her.
She overreacted, a part of her carped.
No, she didn’t. I did. I made her scared, and I acted like an ass, and it’s my fault, not hers. Her stomach hurt, and she rubbed it. Put it aside. Do something useful tomorrow.
She got permission from her captain to pursue the attack on Lola, though he acted like he didn’t really care what she did. She spoke with everyone she could think of, arranged for a sketch artist to meet with Lola, and poked around in Lola’s life.
What she found was depressingly predictable. Lola Bannon grew up in the system, birth parents unknown. She was found as a toddler, abandoned in an Amtrak station in LA. Del counted thirteen foster homes, three group homes and emancipation at sixteen. Scholarship to a small private college at sixteen. So, very, very smart. Got married to Dr. Orrin Beckett right at eighteen and dropped out. So, not smart about everything.
Then, nothing at all until the husband had a fatal accident. A girlfriend, a missing partner, some missing money, a messy tangle of an investigation. It was hard to tell who exactly had their hands in this little pie. The reports had all been redacted, and thick black lines obscured most of the words. But there was no stamp identifying which agency had redacted them. Who would spend that kind of time on something like this? Didn’t they have terrorists to catch?
Enough! It was time to go and make peace. But as she was heading over to Lola’s, the phone rang. Another murder. Another domestic. By the time she reached the crime scene, the media had gotten wind of the story and now trampled all over the front lawns of a row of Victorians in the affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood. Del’s first act was to pull a couple of patrolmen off what she thought of as “standing around gawking at the body” duty and onto crowd control.
Once the perimeter was established, Del took a second before heading in. It wasn’t any warmer up here on the hill than down below, but the sun shone brightly and made the whole place look like a postcard. She hadn’t ever been on a call up here and was struck by how pretty it all was—a chorus line of perfectly maintained mansions basking in the sun and gazing down on the churning sea of humanity below. It looked more like a movie than real life.
But inside the house, real life intruded in rude Technicolor. The victim’s blood was everywhere. Del, bootied and gloved, sidestepped bloody footprints and tiptoed around broken pieces of furniture. The furniture was nicer, and the rooms were bigger, but the scene here was eerily similar to the one she’d walked into two months before. Oh, and the victim was a guy. But being a man and having a nicer house and more money hadn’t saved him from his soon to be ex. Preston Daniels was cold and headed for the morgue just like Ana Moreno had been.
Del was completely occupied for the next several days. She managed to call Lola every day, and it felt good, talking to her, even for just a minute or two and even though there wasn’t any news to share.
“How’s your day?”
“Well,” Lola said, laughing, “Buttons ruined another one of my shirts. I swear, I need a lock on my closet door!”
Her laugh was lovely. Lovely Lola, she thought, hanging up. Lovely, lovely Lola.
Not everyone seemed thrilled with Del as the lead, but her new temporary partner, Tom Phan, didn’t seem to mind. She soon found that she liked him more than she’d expected to. He didn’t act like she was an interloper or a flunky or an airhead. He treated her like a partner, and she realized that it had been a very long time since she’d experienced that. He was also smart and observant and thorough. Nothing seemed to be beneath him, either. By the end of the week, thanks to a combination of hard work and luck, they felt confident arresting the victim’s husband.
“All our bases covered?” Phan stopped outside the station door, his hand hovering just in front of Del’s arm.
“Pattern of
abuse, physical evidence supports our theory, neighbor as a witness to two different attacks. Phan, I’m not worried.”
“Well, then, after you.” He smiled and tipped an imaginary hat, and Del smiled in spite of herself.
She went home Friday night in a better frame of mind than she’d been in for months. She’d done good work with a good partner and was reasonably sure that the murderer would spend the rest of his life in prison. She thought maybe Phan hadn’t minded working with her and that maybe he’d be willing to work with her again.
Phan had gone through some trouble with his partner the year before and had apparently been persona non grata ever since. Maybe the two outcasts would end up being a team. That she hadn’t had a really good partner in a long time reminded of her first partner. Jack Halloran had been a smart, tough, mountain of a man, and she’d measured every other partner in the years since against him. Every single one had fallen far short. She had learned a lot from Halloran: how to talk, how to read people, how to assert authority without abusing it.
Most of all, he’d taught her the importance of emotional self-control. She’d gone on patrol those first years like any other rookie—fired up, reactive, impulsive. She’d been a hothead with a chip on her shoulder, according to Halloran, and he’d been right.
“You know what separates us from civilians?” He’d asked her this one night on patrol, and she’d laughed.
“We have badges to go with our guns?”
He pulled over. She frowned and looked around. What was he reacting to?
“No, Mason. The difference,” he peered into her eyes, “is that we keep our cool and our focus. That’s what makes us cops.”
He’d pulled back into traffic and said no more, but Del had taken his words seriously and never forgotten them. Her ability to keep her cool had served her well, long after Halloran’s retirement party, and she still kept his advice in mind. She got so in the habit of masking and controlling her emotions on the job that she wasn’t able to stop doing so in her personal life too.
Elise, a pretty blond veterinarian Del dated for almost three years, summed it up when she complained, “It’s like falling in love with a robot. You say all the right things, you do all the right things, but it’s all a show. Your heart is locked up somewhere I can’t reach it.”
Del wanted to argue the point, but she had to admit that Elise was pretty much right. She liked Elise and enjoyed her company, but, like every other girlfriend before her, Elise would be easily replaced and almost as quickly forgotten.
Then along came Janet. Del had always been able to trust her instincts, and being so wrong about Janet had shaken her confidence deeply. She wanted to go back her to old ways, being able to maintain emotional distance from everyone in her life. That was best. She obviously couldn’t trust her own judgment. She let friendships fade, she ignored the interested looks of women she should have pursued, and she locked her heart away for safekeeping once more.
Lola, who was a victim and therefore off limits, and who had more baggage than a goddamn cruise ship, had somehow changed everything. Del felt completely unbalanced again. She frowned as she rode home, wondering if she would ever regain her equilibrium.
Chapter Twelve
“Don’t tell me I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying. That’s total bullshit!” The woman in front of Lola in line hollered into her headset, gesturing with her hands for emphasis, jabbing the air with her long, elaborately decorated fingernails.
Lola tried to tune her out, but it was impossible. She settled for avoiding eye contact with the loud, angry woman. Meanwhile, the beer-soaked man behind her kept shuffling closer and closer to her, never touching her, but exhaling his hot, foul breath into her neck. She hated the smell of beer, and the man smelled like he’d bathed in it a month earlier and not washed since then.
After several minutes of trying to avoid the shuffling beer man and the yelling phone woman, Lola lost patience and whipped around to confront the man. But she saw at once that he was broken. His eyes were red and rheumy, sunken in a nest of wrinkles barely recognizable as a face. He looked more than homeless, he looked like a walking corpse.
Her sudden turn startled him, and his eyes darted to her face. Well, one of them did. The other drifted to the upper right corner as though contemplating some skyward heavenscape. Lola instantly felt guilty. She smiled at the man, hoping to avoid upsetting him. But her smile seemed to frighten him, and he backed away from her as though she’d sprouted horns and a tail.
He crossed his arms and shook his head, and Lola made things worse by bursting into nervous laughter. She turned back around, still giggling, and the loud woman on the phone shushed her. Lola tried to look abashed, but the woman yelled into her headset for a good three or four minutes about how trashy the people were down at the police station.
“You see all kinds of crazy freaks down here,” she intoned, glaring at Lola and raising an eyebrow.
Lola got the giggles again. She stifled them and sneaked a glance around the phone woman. There were three people in front of her, all waiting for their turn to harangue the petite, pretty desk sergeant.
It was strange, walking into Del’s world, seeing all the activity and hearing all the voices and ringing phones, knowing that this was where Del worked. Most of the police seemed to be men. Was it hard, being a woman cop? Did they give her a hard time? Did they know she was gay? Did it affect how they treated her? How did Del feel about it? How in the world did a person get used to this hard world?
She glanced around with a sudden desire to flee the station. She should never have agreed to meet with the sketch artist. It wasn’t like she could really say much about the man except that he was mean and scary and his fists were hard. What good could she do? The glasses must have been a disguise. And it had worked. They were the only things she could remember clearly.
Her cell phone rang.
“Hello? I’m here. I’m sorry, Del, but there’s a pretty long line to get inside.” She glanced at her watch. She’d come twenty minutes early, but she’d been in line a good while. She heard a sound on the phone, and Del was gone.
“Del?” Lola flushed and put the phone away. Now Del was mad at her again.
But then Del was coming toward her, gesturing at her and sketching a wave at the woman behind the counter, who flapped a hand at Del and went back to nodding at the couple yelling at each other and her.
“Hey. Next time, not that there’s going to be a next time, just call me when you get here. I should have told you. That line takes forever.”
Lola scurried to follow Del, who gestured at an open door and made a face, pointing to her watch.
Lola nodded and smiled, but Del was already striding away. Obviously, she was busy. Lola stalled for a moment and watched Del enter a small room. There were three other officers in there already, and one of them said something that made Del and the others laugh. Del said something, and then they all started talking and sifting through the tall piles of paper in front of them.
Lola couldn’t stop watching. Del was so at ease! She seemed a part of things here. Del thought of this as comfortable, this overwhelming place full of noise and people and ringing phones. Lola was relieved, and ashamed of that relief, when the sketch artist, an older woman in a shapeless gray suit, came over and led her to a quiet room away from everyone. In there, it was easy to pretend, as the woman told her to, that she was just describing the man to a friend over coffee.
After an hour, the drawing could have been of nearly anyone, and Lola knew that she’d failed. She fled the station without saying goodbye to Del, unable to face her or the way everyone in this place scared her.
Lola had been home only moments when the doorbell rang. She looked out to see a group of kids clustered on the stairs.
“Hold on,” she yelled through the door, punching in the numbers. “Sorry.” She smiled uncertainly at the nearest youth, who beamed at her with bright eyes. “ Uh, hi. What can I do for you?”
&n
bsp; They were delivering her rented Christmas tree. The kids overwhelmed her with their chatter and questions and jokes and energy, and she was glad she’d taken the time to put on makeup that morning, and her fading bruises didn’t show. They set up the tree with a flourish, and she realized that she needed to offer them something. Money—a tip? Food? She wasn’t sure what to do and floundered. Suddenly, it was too late, and they were gone, and she was alone with the tree. She looked askance at it.
The poor tree didn’t have any lights or ornaments on it and looked naked. She’d never had a real tree before, a live tree, much less one that would live on after Christmas. Now that it was here, it seemed like a good distraction. Maybe it was silly. Del would think it was silly, maybe.
“So what?”
The silence seemed to mock her.
“She’s not the boss of me.”
Orrin would think it was silly.
“He’s not the boss of me, either.”
Tucking her cell phone into her purse, not wanting to make the mistake of again worrying—and angering—Del, Lola headed toward the shops. She was overwhelmed by the wide variety of choices and ended up just grabbing whatever pretty and charming and completely random ornaments caught her eye. It was fun, seeing the decorations and hearing the music. Lola began to feel like a part of things, carrying her lights and ornaments and exchanging smiles and nods with other shoppers. Maybe she could get presents for Del and for Marco and Phil. That wouldn’t be weird, would it?
At home, she turned on the radio and sang along to Christmas carols as she worked on the tree. After almost two hours of fussing over the meager decorations she stepped back to survey the results and was pleased. Orrin would have been horrified. It glowed with lights and was weighed down with ornaments. It was beautiful.