Marking Time (WeHo Series Book 4)

by Sherryl D. Hancock

  Raine set aside her backpack, and moved to sit on the counter of Natalia’s kitchen, Natalia moved to stand between her legs, looking up at her.

  “I met one of Julie’s friends,” Raine said.

  “Aye dios mio!” Natalia bit out angrily, “One of Julie’s friends did this?” she asked her tone angry.

  “Easy now…” Raine said, grinning, seeing the hot Latina temper getting ready to explode.

  “Who was it?” Natalia asked, obviously still seething.

  “Uh, Jake?” Raine said.

  “Estas bromeando?” Natalia asked, wanting to know if Raine was kidding, her look shocked.

  “I kid you not,” Raine said, her tone serious.

  “Jesucristo…” Natalia muttered, shaking her head, then she looked up at Raine, “You were able to use your gun, right?”

  A grin tugged at Raine’s lips, “Why do you ask it that way?”

  “Ella es enorme, pasado, mala culo!” Natalia exclaimed, saying that Jake was huge, hulking and a bad ass.

  “Well, regardless of all that,” Raine said, trying not to be hurt by the fact that Natalia didn’t actually think she could have handled Jake without the use of her weapon. “No, my weapon never cleared leather, and Jake is now resting in jail.”

  “’Never cleared leather’,” Natalia repeated, her voice stumbling over the unfamiliar phrase, “Que significa esta?” Natalia asked, wanting to know what that meant.

  “It means,” Raine said, her tone wry, “That I held my own against your ex-girlfriend’s giant of a friend.”

  “Never cleared leather,” Natalia repeated, knowing she hadn’t just heard the explanation of that phrase.

  Raine brought her knee up, putting her foot on the counter, lifting her pants leg and pulling her back-up weapon out of its holster slowly.

  “This,” she said, as she pulled the weapon out, “Is clearing leather.” She said, then put the gun back into the holster again and slowly pulling it out.

  “So pulling it out of that,” Natalia said, pointing to the holster.

  “Yes, pulling it out of the leather holster,” Raine said, “Clearing leather.”

  “Aw,” Natalia said, getting it now; Shaking her head, “Cops use weird phrases.” She muttered.

  “Y los Mexicanos no lo hacen?” Raine said, saying ‘and Mexican’s don’t?’

  “Exacto,” Natalia said with a grin.

  “Uh-huh,” Raine murmured, grinning too.

  Natalia moved closer, reaching up to pull Raine’s face down to hers and kissing her. Pulling back she looked up into Raine’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry that this happened,” she said, her finger gently touching the bruise, then she shook her head, slowly, “Maybe this is too much,” she said, sounding forlorn suddenly.

  “Too much?” Raine repeated her look inquisitive. “What’s too much?”

  “This,” Natalia said, her hand circling between them. “You’re getting hurt, attacked, it’s peligroso, no bueno,” she said, her look pained.

  Raine looked back at her for a long moment, “So you’re saying that we shouldn’t be together because Julie can’t control her jealousy?” she asked, her tone calm.

  “You’re getting hurt…” Natalia said.

  Raine suppressed the smile that wanted to bloom because of Natalia’s concern, once again Raine realized how good it felt to have someone worry about her. It was all the more reason to stay, not to go.

  “Do you think I don’t get hurt doing my job, normally?” Rain asked, her tone soft.

  “Yes, but that’s work, not us.”

  “You don’t think our relationship is worth more to me than my job is?” Raine asked then.

  Natalia stared back at her, unable to answer that question.

  Raine hopped off the counter, taking Natalia’s face into her hands, to tilt her face up to hers.

  “I love you,” Raine told her, “And you’re worth everything to me.”

  She was rewarded with the most brilliant, beautiful smile she’d ever seen on anyone’s face before in her lifetime. Natalia reached up putting her hands around Raine’s wrists.

  “You mean that?” Natalia asked, obviously a little afraid to believe it right out of hand.

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean, Natalia,” Raine told her.

  Natalia nodded, “I love you too,” she said, “Tanto.” Adding ‘so much’.

  They kissed then, and ended up making love in the kitchen and then moved to the bedroom where they made love again and then lay together afterwards. Natalia’s fingers brushed the multiple earrings in Raine’s left ear.

  “Why so many?” She asked, it was something she’d been curious about for a while.

  Raine grinned, “One for each foster home I was in,” she said simply.

  “That many?” Natalia asked, counting the earrings, she counted a total of 11.

  Raine nodded, “At least one a year and one year, two of them.”

  Natalia blew her breath out, shaking her head. “How did you grow up to be this wonderful person that you are?”

  Raine shrugged, “Who I was built to be, I guess,” she said.

  “No,” Natalia said, “You’re a whole other thing, Raine.”

  “What does that mean?” Raine asked, looking perplexed.

  “It means that you got through something like that with so little lasting damage it’s amazing.”

  “Oh, there was damage, believe me,” Raine said, her look serious.

  Natalia looked back at her, “Can you tell me?” She asked gently.

  Raine settled more comfortably on the bed, “Well, I don’t remember much about the first few homes. I have impressions of fighting, and yelling and feeling like I wanted to hide all the time, which I did. It’s what got me kicked out of the third home I was in. The woman said I was too difficult to keep track of, which was code for ‘she’s never around when I want to her to clean something’…”

  As Raine talked, her hand on Natalia’s waist moved in what Natalia assumed was agitation, and she was pretty sure Raine didn’t even know she was doing it. She just listened, her look a mixture of pain and sympathy.

  “When I was about ten, one of the foster family’s teenage sons tried to rape me, I kicked him in the balls. That got me kicked out of that home,” Raine said, her tone even.

  “They didn’t do anything about him attacking you?” Natalia asked aghast.

  “Nope,” Raine said, “It was actually somehow made out to be my fault, can’t remember how they got there with it, but… By this time I was taking the ballet class and I’d met my best friend.”

  Natalia looked confused, she’d never heard of a best friend before, “Who?”

  “Her name was Aurelia, I called her Auri, because the rest was just too long,” Raine said, with enough sadness that Natalia sensed that this was a source of pain for her.

  Natalia nodded, wanting Raine to continue and not wanting to interrupt with too many questions, even though they were filling her mind.

  “She made things a little better,” Raine said, “And she was the one that suggested I get an ear piercing for every home, I think she thought it might somehow influence my getting something permanent.” Again the sadness was there, in her eyes, and in her voice.

  “Was she good at ballet too?” Natalia couldn’t help but ask.

  “Oh yeah,” Raine said, smiling, “She liked to say that she was born with ballet shoes on.”

  Natalia smiled at that. “Is she the reason you auditioned for Julliard?”

  Raine looked back at her, then nodded slowly. Natalia could sense that she was tensing and the last thing she wanted was for her to close up on her, so she asked a different question.

  “So what happened after that last home, with the boy?” she asked.

  Raine blew her breath out, looking thoughtful, “I think that was the time I got the hippie couple,” she said, grinning, “They were the ones that taught me about ‘eating clean’, they actually encouraged my ba
llet thing.”

  “What happened with that home?” Natalia asked.

  Raine pursed her lips, her look sardonic “The man was a bit too ‘free love’ with the neighbor lady and she caught him, so they were divorcing and had to give up the fostering.”

  Natalia laughed at the description, but shook her head sadly, “So the one good home you found and it didn’t last.”

  “Kind of par for my course,” Raine said, shrugging. “A few more homes, and the last one was the one that finally made me decide that I was done being fodder for their mill.”

  “What happened there?” Natalia asked, almost afraid to hear.

  Raine closed her eyes slowly, then opened them again, “They were a Mexican family, with three kids of their own plus two other younger fosters. I became their full time babysitter. The minute I got home from school it was my job to do everything, cook, clean, take care of the baby…” Her voice trailed off.

  Natalia waited, knowing that what was going to come wasn’t good.

  “The baby got sick,” Raine said, “And I told them that the baby was sick. They wouldn’t do anything, they wouldn’t take him to the hospital, they wouldn’t call a doctor… Finally when I was sure that there was no other way, I went to the emergency room with the baby. I told them the baby was mine, and I told them what had been happening with him. It turned out he had pneumonia and they needed to keep him for a few days. My foster parents flipped, because now they had to go get him and pay the doctor’s bills and explain why I brought him in and they didn’t, when I was only 15. They were in hot water, and they blamed me for it. And the baby ended up dying anyway, and they blamed me for that too.”

  “Oh Raine…” Natalia said, reaching out to touch her cheek, tears in her eyes, “You know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

  Raine nodded, not looking like she really believed that, but not saying so. “After that I just did my own thing.”

  “And ended up at Julliard,” Natalia said.

  “Yeah,” Raine said.

  “With Auri,” Natalia said softly.

  Raine simply nodded, her look somber.

  “What happened?” Natalia asked, her tone both soft and cautious.

  Raine took a slow deep breath, blowing it out just as slowly, visibly gathering the courage to talk about the subject. The look on her face showed desolation.

  “Auri was the best friend I’d ever had.” She said, her tone haunted, she smiled sadly, her eyes looking down at Natalia for a few moments. “She was a lot like you, actually,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes. She looked away again, as if she needed to distance herself from what she was saying, “She was the one that tried to take care of me, brought me sandwiches from her parents’ house when we had class because she’d never know if I’d eaten or not, try to give me her allowance money because she knew I needed it for the train or the bus, always stuff like that…” Her voice trailed off as she stopped to regain her composure, swallowing convulsively against the tears that tried to come again and again. “I honestly think she was the first woman I was in love with, but I didn’t understand it at the time,” she said, shrugging. “Anyway, we got through Julliard together, and believe me that wasn’t easy. She pushed me, I pushed her, we helped each other study, we helped each other practice…. And we got through it….” She said, her voice trailing off again as she fought back tears again. “And then we graduated and wonder of wonders we both made the company and decided to cut loose in the city. We bar hopped, got stupid drunk,” she said, grinning wistfully, “And then we ended up at this local club, one in Spanish Harlem. I’d gone to the bathroom, because I was really messed up and I was hoping I could throw up and feel less drunk. I heard a loud noise outside the bathroom and I heard people screaming and running. I came out of the bathroom and tried to find Auri, at first I couldn’t find her. I started hearing that there’d been a drive by and that people had been shot out front. That lead me to going out front…”

  Natalia closed her eyes, knowing what was coming, but not wanting to be right.

  “She’d gone outside to talk to some guy,” Raine said, her smile sad, the tears came then sliding silently down her cheeks as she said the rest, “She’d been hit twice, she bled to death in my arms.”

  “Oh God…” Natalia said, reaching up to pull Raine to her, crying as hard as Raine was at that point.

  After a long time they lay quietly. Raine’s hand was on Natalia’s shoulder, her thumb moved back and forth, her look still haunted.

  “After that, I couldn’t dance,” she said, “I lost my spot in the company, they said they understood and that I could come back, but… I was done with dancing then.”

  Natalia nodded, understanding why now that Raine would graduate from a place like Julliard and not become a professional dancer. It was too wrapped up in her friend, the woman she’d loved.

  “How did you come to be here?” Natalia asked.

  “Picked the place on the map that was furthest from New York,” Raine said, “Fell into the law enforcement thing.” She shrugged, “I guess I wanted things like drive-bys to stop happening.”

  Natalia just shook her head. All of these things had happened to this woman, and still she was caring and sweet, Julie hadn’t been through half of what Raine had. It was a sobering thought.

  CHAPTER 6

  Things between Kashena and Sierra were still tense and Kashena was doing her best to cope with that stress, but it didn’t help that her team seemed to completely unable to do their jobs without assistance. The week following the raid that had started the trouble between she and Sierra things just got worse. Kashena got to see first-hand how inept Greg Fulham really was. He’d applied for a warrant, and gotten a judge to sign off on it. Ten minutes before the raid, someone had been looking the warrant over and found that Greg had put the wrong case number on the warrant. They’d had to cancel the raid, which had included an aviation wing as well as another enforcement unit from another division. Kashena had it with him.

  She’d just gotten off a call with Jericho telling her why her team had just completely blown a raid and wasted numerous staff hours. The SAC, who didn’t like Kashena because she made it obvious to everyone that more could be done if you actually worked at it. It was making everyone look bad, so the SAC had taken his first opportunity to slam SAS Marshal for her teams ‘screw up’. Kashena had been called by Jericho who had not blamed her in the least, and had said that they should get together to talk.

  Kashena was standing outside, to the side of the agency building smoking the third cigar since getting out there. She was leaning against the wall, one booted foot up on the wall behind her. Where she stood was an alleyway between two buildings, so she was surprised when a man walked up from the back area of the building.

  He was a tall, bald black man, he looked about 35 and very fit. In her head, Kashena thought ‘Marine’, she nodded to him, expecting him to walk past her. Instead he stopped and asked her for a cigarette. Reaching into her pocket she pulled out her pack, showing him.

  “Sorry, this is all I have,” she said.

  At that moment, a cop car went by on the street, and it caught Kashena’s eye as she turned her head to look at it, she heard movement behind her. She turned just in time to see a gun pointed right at her head.

  “This is for Jason,” the man said simply as he pulled the trigger.

  Moving with split second reflexes, Kashena swung her left arm around to slam into the man’s arm, simultaneously drawing her own weapon from its holster and bringing it up as his gun fired. She felt the impact hit her, but was focused on shooting him to eliminate the threat. She hit him square in the chest and he went down instantly with a very surprised look on his face.

  “Fuck!” she screamed, blowing her breath out, and starting to pace as people started to come out of the building having heard the gunshots. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she chanted as she paced, stopping as the pain hit her from her side, doubling over as she realized she’d been hit in t
he side.

  “Marshal!” yelled one of the men from her team.

  “Get Bach on the phone, now…” Kashena said, her voice strained from the pain she was in.

  “Ma’am, we need to get an ambulance…” The man started to say as he pulled out his phone.

  “Get Bach first!” Kashena growled, as she swallowed against the desire to throw up, her legs were shaking, and someone helped her move to sit down, leaning against the building.

  She jumped as someone else pressed something to the bleeding wound at her side.

  “Sorry,” said the person, Kashena realized it was Raine, Raine was already on the phone with the EMTs telling them they had an officer down.

  “Did you get him yet?” Kashena asked.

  “Yeah, here,” the guy said, handing her the phone.

  “Baz,” Kashena said, gasping at the end of it as a wave of dizziness hit her.

  “What’s going on?” Sebastian asked, his tone sharp.

  “Get to Sierra and Colby, now, get to them now Baz…” Kashena said, her voice fading as she blacked out.

  Sierra was in her office when Sebastian walked in unannounced, which was completely unlike him so it told her something was happening. She stood from her desk immediately.

  “We gotta go,” Sebastian said, holding his hand out to her.

  Sierra began to move immediately, “Is it Kash?”

  Sebastian nodded, “I’m sending an officer for Colby.”

  Even as she took his hand and let him lead her out of her office, Sierra felt terror sweep over her. What wasn’t he telling her? They got downstairs and out of the building, he put her in his Hummer and got in on the driver’s side. He started the vehicle with a roar, and threw it into gear.

  As he screeched around another corner, Sierra looked over at Kashena’s best friend. His eyes were stormy, his jaw set tight.

  “Please tell me what’s happening.” Sierra said, her voice the barest whisper.

  Sebastian glanced over at her, “I’m not sure,” he told her, “But she told me to get to you, and now I’m hearing that she’s been shot and they’re taking her to Beverly Hospital. So I’m getting you there as fast as I can.”