What Washes Up

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  She froze, stopped breathing, and listened, but heard nothing. The only thing she could see through the open bathroom door was the edge of Wyatt’s bedroom door across the dark hall.

  She pressed her lips shut before she could call out to Wyatt. If he hadn’t called out to her first, it was either because he couldn’t or because he shouldn’t. She reached around to the back of her jeans and her entire body went cold. She wasn’t wearing her holster. Her service weapon was in her purse. Out there.

  She very carefully took one step closer to the bathroom door, gently setting the rubber sole of her hiking boot down on the tile. Then she took two slow, silent breaths, breathing out through her mouth, consciously trying to slow her heart and quiet the pounding of blood in her ears.

  Then she leaned forward and listened.

  Patrick stepped slowly toward the kitchen area, stopped before he got to the half wall that blocked his view of the kitchen itself. He hadn’t expected Wyatt to come around the corner, but he had. After, he’d expected Maggie to come flying out from the kitchen, but she hadn’t.

  He waited by the wall and listened. The only things he could hear were the sounds of the rain pattering behind him and the hum of the refrigerator. He didn’t hear a sound from Wyatt, but he’d seen the red spot blossoming on his stomach before he’d even dived for the floor. He knew he’d hit him. He just wasn’t sure how good, or whether Wyatt had a gun in there.

  He listened for a few more seconds, then took another cautious step forward and leaned out enough to see part of the kitchen. Wyatt’s feet, barefoot soles up. He watched the feet for a few more seconds, then stepped around.

  Glass crunched underneath his feet, and he froze. Wyatt was partly on his right side, partly on his stomach, his head up against the fridge. His eyes were closed, his hands still and empty. Patrick watched his face, but it didn’t even twitch. There was no flickering around the eyelids.

  Patrick blinked as a rain drop slid from his hair to his own eyelid. Then he took another step forward, his eyes darting back and forth between Wyatt and the living room. He could see almost the entire room and he was pretty sure she wasn’t in it.

  The only door was the front door. That had to be a hallway wall on the other side of the breakfast bar. She would be there. Maybe right there. He raised his arm, trained the gun in that general direction while he looked back down at Wyatt. There was no blood on his back, though there was already a pool of it beginning underneath him.

  Patrick glanced once more at the wall, then shoved at Wyatt’s hip with his foot. Wyatt rolled over onto his back after the second push. Man, he was a mess. He thought maybe Wyatt’s chest was moving, but he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t going to lean over and check, and he wasn’t walking around that corner so she could blow his ass away, either.

  He needed his own corner, his own wall. She could come to him, but he still had an appointment with the old man. He’d go out, but he’d go out when he was done.

  Maggie heard the sound of broken glass on tile, the sound of someone stepping slowly on broken glass. Wyatt was in his bare feet. Whoever was there was in the kitchen or dining area, she knew that. She swallowed as she wondered where Wyatt was, then made herself shift her focus. Could be one person, could be more. But it felt like one. She could feel the occupancy the way a person could walk into a house and feel that they were the only one there.

  She heard another soft crunching of glass, and she took a quiet breath and poked her head just far enough around the doorway to see the hall. There was no one in it, but she hadn’t expected there to be.

  She could see nothing of the kitchen area, except the line where the tile began, right at the wall of the kitchen. Her head felt naked, exposed, and the hairs on it responded by standing up, her scalp jerking like a spider had just walked up her leg.

  She pulled her head back in and lowered herself to a crouch, listened. Nothing. She needed to get across the hallway, to see if she could see into the dining area. She had no way to tell if the person stepped on the glass on their way in or on their way out. Whoever it was might not even know there was someone else in the house.

  She remembered her purse sitting on the floor by the breakfast bar and her stomach turned over.

  Being out in the hallway when someone turned that corner would be fatal. But waiting in the bathroom wasn’t going to be any less so. And Wyatt was out there.

  She slowly eased her head back through the doorway.

  “Really, Maggie? You and Wyatt?” a man’s voice called.

  She jerked her head back in, her heart pounding even harder than it had been. Who was that? She knew she recognized the voice. Her brain started whipping through a mental Rolodex of men’s voices.

  “What a stereotype,” the man called out. Maggie’s eyes focused on the toilet paper holder across from her as she sorted through voices in her head.

  “Hey, Maggie, does my father know?” the man called, and then laughed, almost a giggle.

  Maggie’s mouth opened and then closed. Patrick? Her eyes darted around as she tried to process that as quickly as possible. What the hell? Her first, useless thought was that he was pissed about the search at Sea-Fair, and she immediately brushed over it. She knew Patrick’s opinion of Wyatt was mostly disdain, and that he couldn’t stand her. But that wasn’t something for a very public man to throw everything away for. He was the Assistant State’s Attorney. He was rich. He was a Boudreaux.

  A Boudreaux. I’m tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes. She felt a quick swell of nausea as she realized that she hadn’t just withheld information in a case, she had become incapable of working one. If Harper had said Smith, she wouldn’t have just picked one Smith out of the phone book and decided it was him. Why had she been so stupid?

  A small voice reminded her that she had just watched David get killed, and that she had just been shot. That her entire month had been surreal and mind-bending. She quelled the voice quickly; she didn’t have time to excuse herself. She needed to get out there and find Wyatt. She needed to get out there and get her gun.

  She took a shallow breath and eased her head back out the doorway. She heard a scraping noise she couldn’t define. She still couldn’t tell exactly where he was. Which side of the breakfast bar he was on was the difference between suicide and possible survival.

  She got up on the balls of her feet, then silently dashed slightly diagonally across the hall to Wyatt’s bedroom, being careful not to brush against the open door. She took a second to catch her breath and listen, as she crouched just inside the room.

  “Your other boyfriend’s not looking too good, Maggie,” Patrick called. Then he spoke at a more normal volume. “You slut.”

  Maggie pushed the fear and then the anger down, shoved them into their own box and closed the lid. Then she blinked a few times. The vision in her right eye was blurry, but she could think around it. She just needed to stay cool. She edged closer to the doorway and peeked.

  Wyatt’s room was only about a foot closer to the living area, and it didn’t provide her a much better view. But when she leaned out just a bit further, she could see part of the wall across from the kitchen, and there she saw Patrick’s shadow. She was pretty sure he was in the actual kitchen.

  She heard him step on more glass as she pulled herself back into Wyatt’s room. He wasn’t bothering to be stealthy anymore. She heard something move on the counter.

  “You know, you should be grateful, Maggie,” Patrick said, his voice just slightly louder than a conversational volume. “If Pop found out you were sleeping around on him, he’d kill you. And I promise you he wouldn’t do it nearly so nicely.”

  Maggie took a couple of breaths and closed her eyes for just a second, saw the hallway in her mind, measured her distance. She was dead if he walked around that bar and looked. But she was dead either way.

  She looked back out the doorway, saw the shadow moving, and waited. It stopped, and she heard him move or put something hard on the counter.

>   She blinked once, slowly, and in the space of time that her eyes were closed, she saw Kyle swing at a curve ball, felt Sky’s head on her back at the sink. Then she pushed herself out into the hall.

  Once there, she stood up slowly, and put her back to the wall but not on it. It wouldn’t matter which side of the hall she was on if he took a look around the corner, but she needed to try to keep an eye on his shadow.

  “Hey Maggie? It occurs to me that I’m basically cleaning up your entire love life for you,” Patrick said. “First your hubby, now Wyatt, and pretty soon your sugar daddy. I bet that rankles, huh?”

  Maggie slowed her breathing to almost nothing and made herself stare at a scratch on the opposite wall, until she could zone out everything that he had just said. She waited a moment, until she felt the cold, slow, wave of calm flow into her mind, then started inching her way down the hall, her eyes on the dining area wall. He was moving, but standing in one place.

  “I don’t have all night, Maggie,” he called. “Gotta go see the old man.”

  Maggie kept moving, and when she was about three feet from the end of the hall, she switched sides. She heard a sound she couldn’t quite make out. It didn’t make sense to her. She stopped, her back nearly against the wall, six inches of drywall separating her from Patrick. She listened, and blinked when she heard the noise again. He was eating the damn Cheetos.

  She slowly sank down into a crouch, and crabbed her way another foot or so toward the kitchen. She heard him doing something else at the counter and stopped.

  “Aw. I broke my little spoon,” she heard him say to himself.

  She edged forward again, and came to the end of the wall. She got on her knees so she could lean forward just a bit, then tilted her head toward the breakfast bar. Her purse was there, under the closest stool, but it was still about three feet away, too far to just reach out and grab it.

  She started inching forward on her hands and knees. Patrick, sounding so close, sniffed and then coughed softly. She laid down on her stomach, praying he wasn’t tall enough to see her, and reached out for her bag.

  She tried to mentally inventory her purse, to remember what would jingle, what would clink, as she slid it slowly onto the carpet, then pulled it back with her. She got back up into a crouch at the end of the wall, then reached into her purse and put her hands on her holster. She slid the Glock 23 from her purse, and only remembered to breathe once she had it against her chest.

  She needed to make a decision. There was no way she’d be able to pull back the slide without him hearing it, and if he heard it, he wasn’t stupid enough to walk around the corner and let her blow him away. He would wait, and he would be far more ready than he already was. He could wait indefinitely, but Wyatt was in there somewhere, and she could not.

  She got as low as she could on her hands and knees, sliding the Glock along on the carpet. When she could go no further that way without the gun hitting tile, she eased herself into the lowest squat she’d ever managed, the gun in both hands on her chest, listening as she heard the rustling of cloth.

  Then she didn’t need to make any more decisions. In the space of a heartbeat, she heard Wyatt groan, heard Patrick cry out, then heard the hammer of a revolver.

  She pulled the slide as she jumped up, and was already aiming when she cleared the breakfast bar. Patrick was in the middle of swinging his gun toward the floor.

  She shot him three times. The first one went into the middle of his back, and as his body jerked around from the impact, she shot him twice more in the chest. He looked up at her between the second and third shots, and he looked more irritated than surprised.

  Maggie stood on the foot rail of the stool, trying to see what was happening on the floor, but even if she had been tall enough, she wouldn’t have been able to see Wyatt past the backs of the two EMTs.

  There were too many people in Wyatt’s small kitchen. In addition to Wyatt, Patrick and the two EMTs, Terry Coyle was taking pictures of the scene, as one of Larry Davenport’s assistants examined Patrick’s body.

  A handful of deputies and PD walked in and out of the house, and she understood another handful were outside, keeping the street clear for the EMTs and keeping the neighbors at bay.

  Maggie had given a brief initial statement to Terry and handed over her weapon, but he had left her pretty much alone for the duration. Maggie checked her old Timex and saw that it had only been twelve minutes since she’d called 911, and only nine since the EMTs and the first Apalach PD car had arrived. Dwight, and then Terry, had been one or two minutes behind.

  To Maggie, the nine minutes had seemed like an hour. She had been yelled at twice already for asking why they weren’t just going to the hospital, had been told sharply by Carl Rosen, one of the EMTs, that Wyatt needed to be stabilized.

  She had stopped asking when she heard the other EMT bark something about Wyatt’s blood pressure dropping, then heard them use the paddles on Wyatt. She had felt the current in her own chest.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she heard Carl say quickly. “James, give us a hand?”

  The assistant medical examiner stood, and the three men lifted the board on which Wyatt was lying and grunted as they placed him onto the gurney that waited at the end of the breakfast bar. Maggie got a quick look at Wyatt’s pale face before Carl got in the way.

  “I’m going with you,” Maggie said.

  “No, you’re following, Maggie,” Carl said as he unlocked the wheels with his foot. “No room.”

  They rushed past her, and she saw Dwight coming back inside. She snatched up her purse as he walked up to her.

  “Is there anybody behind my Jeep?” she asked, rushing past him and making him pivot mid-stride.

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “I need to get out,” she said.

  “Hey, uh, we called Boudreaux. He’s out there.”

  “I don’t care,” Maggie said as she rushed out the screen door.

  “I’m just saying,” he said as he followed.

  Maggie wasn’t sure how many vehicles were outside. Red and blue lights swiped across her black Cherokee from every direction, but there was one PD car parked behind her in the driveway.

  “I need to get out!” she shouted to the yard in general, as she hurried down the walkway. One of the Apalach uniforms looked over at her and rushed to the driver’s side of the patrol car that was blocking her.

  Maggie looked at the street in front of Wyatt’s house. Little pockets of people lined the sidewalk across the street, some of them in uniform. A little old lady in a purple bathrobe looked at Maggie in horror, and Maggie looked down. Her hands were smeared with Wyatt’s blood, and her shirt was covered with it. She had a flash of the night, just a few weeks ago, when she had looked down and seen that David’s blood had drenched her tee shirt. The déjà vu almost made her vomit, and she pushed the memory away.

  The EMTs roared off toward Weems Memorial, and as they did, she saw Boudreaux across the street. He was facing her, hands on his hips and looking down at the sidewalk, as a uniform spoke to him.

  He looked up as Maggie reached her Jeep. He looked right at her, and their eyes met for just a moment before she jumped into the Jeep.

  She waited for the cruiser to back into the street, then she pulled out. As she stopped and put the Jeep in drive, she looked out her window. Boudreaux was right there on the sidewalk, just five or six feet away. The tears on his cheeks looked almost yellow in the light from the streetlamp behind him.

  Maggie hit the gas and pulled away.

  Two days later, Maggie sat in the recliner next to Wyatt’s hospital bed, as she had the night he’d come in, as she had the day before. She had left the hospital only to go to her parents, hug the kids, shower, swallow something, and return. Her Dad had been running to the house to feed the chickens, and Coco was content in her parents’ back yard.

  She was, for the second time in less than two months, on administrative leave until the investigation of the shooting was compl
eted. There was nowhere else she needed to be.

  The night he’d been brought in, Wyatt had been in surgery for more than five hours. The bullet had done a great deal of damage to his left hip, as well as his small intestine. He had lost a lot of blood.

  As Maggie understood it, an orthopedic surgeon had worked on the hip once the small intestine had been virtually removed, spliced, and put back in place. Wyatt’s doctor had explained to her that it was essential for Wyatt’s hip to be completely immobile, so they were keeping him under anesthesia for a few days. They’d put him into a medically induced coma.

  Despite the fact that they assured her they would call and let her know when they were bringing him out of it, Maggie preferred to wait. It wasn’t until the second day that Maggie had learned that Wyatt, when he’d been treated in the ER last year for a concussion, had listed her as his next of kin.

  She’d sat there staring at his still hand for more than five minutes, wondering how this beautiful man had come to be so alone that she was his next of kin.

  She’d wondered a lot of things during the hours that she had sat next to Wyatt’s bed.

  She knew that she had lost her ability to work effectively, to think effectively, as a cop. She had, for a time, confided more in a known criminal, one whose motives were a mystery, than she had in the man who had become more than her closest friend.

  From the moment she had walked onto the beach on the island, and looked down at what was left of Gregory Boudreaux’s shattered face, she had been changing, drifting away from who and what she was. She felt like the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water. It had been so gradual, so imperceptible, that she had let it happen, had given her consent by virtue of the fact that she hadn’t run.

  Maggie sighed and leaned back in the recliner, trying to find some position that she hadn’t already worn out. She couldn’t, so she stood up and stretched her back, looked at her watch. It was almost four in the afternoon, and she would need to leave soon.

  She heard the door swish open behind her, and looked to see Dwight coming in, wearing jeans and a button down shirt.