Some Kind of Wonderful

by Maureen Child

  Because this time, Carol had been there. Carol had seen him at his worst. Hell, he'd thrown her onto the damn bed and held her down like she was a street punk. Groaning internally, Jack scraped his palms over his face and wished to hell he could wipe away that memory. But he wouldn't be able to. It would stay with him. It would become just one more brick to add to the wall surrounding him.

  Her scent nudged at him . . . making him remember other things, sweeter things. Like the feel of her in his arms, where she fit against his body like the last piece in a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Like the soft sigh of her breath on his neck. Like the warm, welcoming heat of her body when she'd brought him in from the cold.

  And maybe because of that night, the night when he'd found peace—for a while—he owed her the truth.

  He stared down into her eyes, and even in the moonlight, he saw the golden shine of them and wished— "Fine," he said sharply, forcing the words past an ever drier throat. "You want to know what's going on. I'll tell you."

  He tore his gaze from hers, because he couldn't look into that warmth and say what he had to say. Better to stare out at the cold, black night. At least it was familiar.

  "It was nearly two years ago. Christmas Eve."

  She sucked in a breath and held it.

  "I can almost hear the rain, even now." His voice went soft, hazy, as memory took him, pulled him deep

  into the nightmare he normally fought to stay clear of. "Pounding, driving rain. Water slamming into the street, splashing against the windshield in waves.

  "I had the graveyard shift. Couldn't get out of it. My wife was pissed about it, wanted me to call in sick. Said we had to talk." He choked out a laugh that felt like tiny knives digging at his throat. "Told her I couldn't, that we'd talk in the morning. But she talked anyway." God, he could see her, standing in the small living room, hands clasped at her waist, fingers locked and squeezing until the knuckles were white. He swallowed, but his mouth was dry, so it did no good.

  "She told me she was pregnant. I remember grabbing her, swinging her around, proud. Happy. Then I noticed she wasn't celebrating."

  He felt Carol's hand on his arm again and was grateful for it. But he didn't stop. Didn't think he could, now that he was finally saying it all out loud. It was as if the long-bottled-up words were chasing each other in the effort to be said. They came in a rush. Even the hardest of them.

  "She told me the baby wasn't mine."

  "Jack..."

  "Said it was Will's." His back teeth ground together, but he kept talking. "My partner. My best friend." Betrayal sparked inside him, as fresh and bitter as it had been two years before. The sharp slap of it hit him hard, nearly doubled him over with the memory of how he'd lost everything that mattered to him in one black night.

  "Oh, God, Jack." Her fingers tightened on his arm and Jack shifted his mind from the pain. He concentrated on her touch. On that anchor to help him through the rest of the nightmare. He was a blind man, stumbling

  through a minefield and trusting his life to the strength of the one slim rope he could cling to.

  "She said she was leaving me and that she couldn't lie to me anymore." He blew out a breath and shook his head. "I don't know why she suddenly couldn't manage it. She'd been lying to me for months with no trouble at all." Jack reached up and viciously rubbed the back of his neck, short fingernails digging into his own skin, diversifying the pain scrambling through him. "I couldn't even look at her," he admitted. "I was sick. Body. Heart. So I left and went to work. With Will. Every time I looked at him, I saw him and Kim, tangled up together, naked."

  A long, shuddering sigh slipped from between his lips. "God, I wanted to hit him. I wanted to smash in the smiling, lying face I'd known and trusted for years."

  A soft sigh of sound erupted from the baby monitor and he quieted, listening to the tiny snuffles echoing from the radio. Then Quinn rumbled out a dog version of a lullaby and the baby quieted again.

  "Go on," Carol said, and he heard the strained thinness of her voice and wondered what she was thinking. If she was feeling pity for him. Hell, of course she was. But that was because she didn't know it all yet. Hadn't heard the worst of it. When she did, everything would change. And in one night, he'd lose everything again.

  Only this time, he'd be losing the promise of something that might have been. And maybe that was worse than what he'd lost before. Maybe.

  "Will knew something was wrong," Jack said, sliding back into the images rolling through his brain with the grace of a freight train. "But I didn't say anything. What the hell was I supposed to say to him?" he demanded of no one in particular. " 'Hey, congratulations. I hear you

  and my wife are having a kid. You must be so proud.'?"

  "Jesus, Jack—"

  He shook his head and narrowed his gaze on the blackness outside the window. The dark that was even now threatening to swallow him whole. "We went through most of the shift without a problem, then we got a call. A homicide." His throat squeezed shut and he wished desperately for a drink. But alcohol wouldn't help. Christ knew he'd tried to drown himself in vats of Irish whiskey for months after that night. But he'd only surface hours later with a hangover and even more crippling pain. So he'd given it up and tried to live with the pain.

  "We pulled into an alley behind a strip mall in east LA. Streetlights were out. But that didn't mean anything. Kids were always breaking the lights with rocks ... or bullets. Our headlights bounced off the rain like a laser, blinding. And the storm kept raging. Water roaring like a river down that alley and pounding off the windshield like it was coming out of an upended bucket. Couldn't see a damn thing."

  He squinted, trying in memory to see what he hadn't seen that night. But the images were still blurry, indistinct, and nothing could change what had happened. "Will got out of the car first. Don't know why. Just worked out that way. He headed for the back of the building, where our phone caller had said the body was. Even in the rain, that alley smelled like a cesspool. Rotting garbage and Christ knows what else." He shook his head as the stench filled his nostrils.

  Not even the scent of Carol's perfume of springtime and coconut was enough to dislodge that memory. "I was a step or two behind him. Still so damn mad at him, I could hardly stand the sight of him. My brain kept giving me images of Will and my wife. In my

  bed. Couldn't shake 'em." His fists tightened helplessly at his sides. There'd been nothing to hit then and there was nothing now. And God, he wanted to hit something. To pound on something until his hands were bloody.

  "It didn't feel right. Couldn't see a damn thing, but the alley didn't feel right. Will didn't notice. His rhythm was off. He was wondering what the hell was wrong with me, so he wasn't paying attention to what was happening. I knew it. I could see it in him." He inhaled sharply, deeply, and blew it out again in a rush.

  "The first gunshot came out of nowhere. Went wild, slammed into the building behind me, splintering the brick into little pellets of stone that snapped around the alley like bees. Will stopped. He just... stopped."

  Shaking his head now, he saw it all again in his mind's eye and still couldn't understand why his friend hadn't dropped into a crouch—gone for cover. Something. "He just stood there, looking at me like he was confused about what was happening. I shouted at him to get down, but the muzzle flash sparked like lightning at the same time and it was too late. Will got hit."

  Carol didn't speak and he was grateful. Instead, she moved in closer to him and wrapped her arms around his middle and simply hung on, tipping her head back to stare up at him. He shifted his gaze from the night to her eyes and told himself to not look away, because at the moment, the only light in the world was right there. In those pale brown eyes shining up at him. "He staggered into the damn Dumpster and trash rolled out of it and rained down on him when he dropped."

  He took a breath. "I couldn't get to him because the damn shooter was still firing. The shots were going wild, though. Hitting Will must have been pure luck, 'cause t
his

  guy's aim was shitty. I was behind the car. He couldn't get a clear shot at me."

  Reaching for Carol, he grabbed her face between his hands, kept his gaze locked on hers and said, "I watched for the muzzle flash. And when I saw it again, I fired off three rounds. There was a scream." A scream that still rippled through his head and brought goose bumps to his flesh every damn night. "And then the whimpering started. Like from a kicked puppy or something. Soft cries, nearly buried under the sound of the rain pummel-ing down around me. I couldn't go to Will. Not yet. Had to make sure the shooter was out of the picture first."

  "Of course you did."

  He didn't want her understanding. Couldn't take it because she hadn't heard all of it yet. Didn't know the worst of it. Couldn't grasp the depth of the nightmare. Not yet.

  "I found the shooter. Huddled in a doorway, curled up in a tight ball. He'd dropped the gun and was holding his stomach, like he could push all of the blood back inside. But it was running red into the rain, and his hands were too small anyway."

  Silently, she tightened her grip on his waist.

  "He looked up at me and the rain fell on his face, splashing against his eyes, and he said, 'It hurts. Make it stop hurting.'" Jack's eyes swam and his vision was as blurred as it had been that night. "He was ten, Carol. A little kid, who should have been at home watching cartoons or something and instead he was lying in a stinking alley, bleeding to death. He was trying to earn his way into a gang by killing a cop."

  "Oh, my God."

  He rushed on, letting the words fly now in his race to

  get it finished before she pulled away from him. Before he could read the censure in her eyes.

  Before he lost his nerve.

  "I called for the paramedics, secured the gun, and went to check on Will. But it was too late. He was dead. Eyes wide open and staring up at the rain, he just lay there, dead in the garbage. And I wanted to scream at him to get up so I could beat the shit out of him for stealing my wife. My family. But he was dead so there was nothing to do. Nothing I could do."

  "Jack.. r

  "That's not all, dammit." He grabbed her upper arms and squeezed as if afraid she'd try to make a run for it. To get out before she could be sucked even further into the nightmare his life had become. "You wanted to hear it, so hear it." He sucked in air like a man who couldn't get enough into his lungs. "I got a commendation for shooting the kid. For facing bodily harm in defense of a fellow officer. I killed a ten-year-old boy and they gave me a fucking medal for it."

  Even the words tasted foul in his mouth. It didn't matter that there hadn't been a choice. Didn't seem to matter that the shooting had been called justifiable. None of that took the sting out of his heart, his soul. A boy was dead and Jack wasn't.

  And as soon as he'd looked down on that boy, he'd known he couldn't walk into a dark alley again. Known he couldn't take the chance of killing another child. Yet leaving the force had destroyed what was left of his life.

  "You did what you had to do."

  'That's what I tell myself. If I didn't believe that, at least in my head, I wouldn't be able to live with myself." Now that the words were out, he felt almost lighter. As if

  by purging the blackness inside, he'd allowed a small sliver of light to penetrate the corners of his soul. And like a freshly cleaned wound, the ache throbbing inside him was sharper, brighter than it had been when it was simply festering.

  "Believe it, Jack," Carol said, her voice a soft hush of steel.

  "I want to," he admitted. "Need to." He sucked in another gulp of air and let it slide from his lungs an instant later. "My wife left me on Christmas morning. To this day, she's convinced I let Will die. That somehow I didn't protect him as I normally would have because of what she'd told me before shift."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "Is it?" he asked quietly, staring down into pale brown eyes that held more light than he'd known in two years. "God help me, I don't know anymore."

  here only drags them into it, too, and they don't deserve that." Then he focused his gaze on her. "Neither do you."

  Carol's brain raced.

  Her heart ached for him, but she could see in his features that he wasn't looking for sympathy. He just wanted her to run. To turn her back and walk out on him—as his bitch of a wife had, she thought. As his partner had.

  He expected her to leave.

  And maybe it would have been easier on him if she did.

  But Carol had no intention of walking away from him. If anything, she wanted to hold him tighter, closer. To somehow ease the pain that was tearing at him.

  He reached down and plucked her arms from his middle and took a step back.

  It was only a foot or two of space separating them, but it might as well have been miles. She looked up into his eyes and saw that the shutters were firmly in place again. Shutting her out. Shutting himself in.

  Well, he'd taken one step. He'd opened the door to his past and now it was simply too late to close it again.

  "You can't be serious," she blurted and, after the words were out, thought perhaps she might have handled that a little better.

  "You think I'm making this up?"

  "No." She shook her head and took a step toward him, but he moved too, keeping that buffer between them. "I mean, you can't really believe that you allowed Will to die. Purposely."

  He lifted both hands and rubbed the heels of his palms against his eyes. When his hands dropped to his sides again, his shoulders slumped as if he were standing beneath a burden too heavy for any man to carry. "I don't know anymore. I just don't know."

  "Well, I do," she snapped and figured that kindness wasn't what he needed right now. He needed brutal honesty. He needed a kick in the ass. He needed a slap upside the head with a two-by-four. Unfortunately, she was unarmed, so she used her only weapon at hand— her mouth, and the fact that she wasn't afraid to say what he didn f t want to hear. "You didn't stand there and allow someone to kill your partner."

  "Carol—"

  "No. This is bull, Jack." She stepped in close again and this time when he tried to shift away from her, the backs of his knees hit the bed and he was caught. She pushed her advantage. Stepping up close to him, she actually felt the chill that held him in its grasp snaking out to ensnare her, too.

  She ignored the cold though and fought past it with the heat of her own outrage. "You were mad and you had a right to be."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "You were hurt." Carol cut him off, waving a hand to keep him quiet. "Betrayed by the people you trusted the most."

  He sucked in air, swallowed hard, and tipped his chin up to a fighting tilt. Unwilling—unable—to accept sympathy. Fine. She wasn't offering any.

  "When your wife 9 ' —she sneered that word and his eyes flickered, letting her know he'd caught the disgust in her tone—"told you she'd cheated on you— lied to you— deceived you . . . that she'd been sleeping with your partner—"

  "Jesus, Baker—"

  His eyes went wide with surprise, or shock, she wasn't sure which. But she wouldn't apologize. She couldn't say enough bad things about any woman who would do that

  to a man like Jack. "When she made her grand confession, did you at least tell her what you thought of her?"

  "I was a little shell-shocked." He straightened up and shot her a glare that should have fried the ends of her hair. Still, she kept right on, throwing words at him so fast, he didn't have a chance to close them off.

  "Not surprising," she snapped, absolutely disgusted with the woman she hoped she'd never meet. Carol kept muttering to herself as she took a step away from him.

  He relaxed a little as she moved off, then straightened up and tensed again when she turned around and came right back.

  "Jesus," he muttered.

  "That... bitch had the nerve to look you dead in the eye and tell you that when she knew you had to go out there onto the streets with Will?" Carol reached up and grabbed handfuls of her own hair and gave it a
yank. The resulting pain at least was better than the ache settled in her heart. Then she let go of her hair and shook a finger in his face. "On Christmas Eve, yet. When she knew that you'd be locked in a car for eight solid hours with the man she'd screwed you over with? That's when she decides to tell the truth?"

  A short, sharp sound shot from his throat, and under other circumstances, Carol might have thought it was a bark of laughter. But that couldn't be. Not while she was reaming him. Not while she was so furious on his behalf she could hardly see straight.

  "And when you came under fire—" She snapped the question out. "Did you run? Did you leave Will lying there in the rain while you saved yourself?"

  "No, but—"

  "No," she repeated hotly. "The man you thought was

  your friend—the man who'd slept with your wife—was lying there hurt and you did what you could to save him."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "Did you know the shooter was a child?" she demanded, slapping one hand in the middle of his chest.

  "No." He frowned, remembering again, and she wanted to drag him out of the past bodily and force him to stay here. In the present. With her.

  "It was dark," he said. "Raining. I saw the muzzle flash—"

  "And fired back."

  "Yeah."

  "Did you have any other choice?"

  "Not if I wanted to live."

  "Did you want to live?" she asked, her voice dropping a notch or two. This was the big question, she told herself. This was what she had to know. What he had to decide. And if she'd asked the question fast enough, he'd answer it from the gut.

  "I didn't want to die," he said with a growl of menace that ordinarily might have been enough to have her backing off a bit. Giving him a little space. But not now. Not when they'd come this far already.

  "Not the same," she said quickly, her gaze locked with his, demanding he see her. Silently, her gaze demanded more. Demanded the truth. "Did you want to UveV

  "Yes."

  Good answer.

  "Then why aren't you?"

  She went up on her toes, threw her arms around his neck, and hung on as if half-expecting him to pluck her off and toss her aside. He did neither.