The paramedic looked at his partner for support, but the other man shrugged.
Jamie smiled and lay back on the gurney, thinking she might just take the Vicodin prescription this time. The idea of floating sounded so nice. No pain, no thoughts... Or maybe not.
The women were silent as the ambulance bounced across the parking lot. Jamie squeezed her eyes against the pain that knifed her with every motion. The men up front spoke softly, the radio crackled.
Jamie knew they were all thinking about how close she'd come. She took slow breaths to manage the pain, tried to think of something amusing. Scott Scanlan was going to get it. That helped. And Chip Washington was gone. And Marchek... No, she couldn't think about that. Not yet.
She focused back on Scanlan, his cockiness. He was the easiest. Charlie's Angels, he'd called them. Jamie looked up at Mackenzie then over at Hailey. Hailey smiled at her, the way a mother might smile at a child. It was soothing. She tried to smile back.
"Maybe we could sell the story rights to Hollywood—" Jamie whispered.
Hailey frowned. "What?"
"Sell the story to Hollywood, make a million dollars." She took small, shallow breaths. "Retire."
"We can be stunt doubles," Mackenzie said.
"God, no," Jamie croaked. "Let's just consult."
Mackenzie grinned. "Who's going to play you, Jamie?"
"Probably Lucy Liu."
Hailey laughed.
Jamie glanced from one of them to the other. "After all, she looks the most like me."
She heard them laugh—big belly laughs—and she did, too. She stopped because it hurt too much, but at least she could. She could laugh and feel and breathe.
It was like she told people about her victims—she might never be okay, but she was definitely going to survive.
Epilogue
Twelve weeks later
Jamie glanced over at Z. His gaze was glued to the basketball court fifteen rows below them, his eyes shifting only enough to move up and down the court. And every time a player named Stephen Curry made a move, Z launched out of his seat like a rocket. Tony wasn't much better. They'd been jumping in and out of their seats throughout the game though the Warriors were beating the Spurs forty-seven to twenty-three.
Jamie sat back and drank her second Coke. Or was it the third? Her pants were fitting better. She was probably going to have to start monitoring what she ate before she outgrew them. Or maybe she'd just buy new ones. She paid more attention to the boys than the game. To her, they were infinitely more interesting. All she needed was some cotton candy. How could a professional team not offer cotton candy? They'd eaten everything else—hot dogs, pretzels, nachos.
The third quarter ended and Z jumped up. "Can we get some popcorn?"
Tony's mouth dropped open. "You've already had two Cokes, a hotdog, and nachos."
"And a pretzel," Jamie added. She smiled at Z. "But no popcorn yet."
Z grinned back at Tony. "Yeah, no popcorn yet."
Tony laughed, rubbed Z's head. To Jamie he asked, "You want anything?"
"No thanks."
Tony led Z out of the stands and she watched them disappear into the crowd. Jamie scanned the people, watching as the group on the court launched T-shirts into the crowd using giant rubber bands and gave away free pizzas to whoever could make the most noise. She still wasn't doing much jumping around. The pain in her back still wasn't completely gone although it was nothing compared to those first few weeks. She was on leave for almost eight weeks; the next four on desk work. Next week, she had the okay to go back to active duty. She was ready.
For the moment, she was content not to be running the chaos. She still dealt with plenty of it, but not tonight. Her caseload was heavy, but the stress would be nothing like it had been with Marchek. She and Mackenzie and Hailey had attended Chip Washington's memorial services the Saturday after he died. His death had been treated as an accidental shooting. The department had promised Washington's wife and the press that a full investigation would be conducted, but she knew there would be no investigation. Washington's wife would receive his pension and death benefits. She would never know the dark side of the man she'd married.
Jamie was not yet okay with the decision. She was not at peace with the fact that the man who had held her at gunpoint, who had every intention of killing her, who had killed Natasha Devlin, had been given a hero's funeral. It meant Devlin's murder would remain officially unsolved. Hailey would get no credit for solving it. Suspicion about who had killed Devlin would continue to proliferate. Much of it would remain on Tim. But the truth would hurt people, too. Washington's wife, of course. But also Hailey and Mackenzie. The shooting would necessitate an investigation by IA. Those were hard to recover from. Professionally but emotionally, too.
During her leave, Jamie had been talking to a therapist, something she never thought she'd do. And she was trying to quit smoking. She had one of those patches and she chewed a lot of gum—packs and packs of it—but she figured it was better than smoking. Every once in a while, though, she ripped the patch off and had a cigarette. Baby steps, she thought.
Lately she'd been doing a lot of things she never thought she'd do. She met Tim for coffee. One coffee. As friends. She'd been very clear about that. Still, it hadn't been awful. And she hadn't shot anyone, so that was something. Tim was assimilating back into the department. He complained about the way some of the other officers looked at him. Some of his old pals were no longer so friendly. All the charges against him had been dropped and he had received an official apology from the department as well as full pay and comp time for his days spent in jail. It didn't relieve the embarrassment, and nothing would restore his reputation. Jamie knew all about that. She remembered how things had changed after she'd shot at him and Natasha. It would probably get easier eventually, she told him. Probably.
Jamie wasn't the only one breaking new ground. Tony had been out of rehab for three weeks and was still sober. He went to his AA meetings religiously, sometimes every day. Z was settling in to his second foster home. The first one hadn't gone too well. Tony didn't think this one would, either. But Tony picked him up every weekend for an overnight at Jamie's. Tonight—the game. Last week, Tony and Z had rented Men in Black I and II and they'd done a doubleheader that would have been torture for anyone who had taste in movies. Thankfully, Jamie wasn't one of them.
Tony was also teaching Z how to use the computer. They'd started by searching for Z's name and found Zephenaya, spelled Zephaniah, was a book in the Bible. Tony said that was news to him. To Jamie, too, though they'd both been raised Catholic.
The three of them sat by the computer and looked up the book of Zephaniah. Tony read from Zephaniah 1:3, where God preached to the people to have patience and mercy. God promised that the wicked would be punished for their sins and revenge would come to them.
Z had listened intently and made Tony repeat it.
Then he had looked up, his small brow furrowed, and asked, "Does that mean God will punish whoever hurt Shawna?"
She'd seen Tony's eyes grow glassy, had to glance away herself.
Tony wrapped an arm around Z. "I think it does." Jamie and Tony had told Zephenaya that the bad man was gone; that he couldn't hurt anyone ever again. Now, as Tony held Z, he met Jamie's gaze over the boy's head and she'd considered how hard it was to answer a child's questions. Maybe her father and Pat hadn't done such a bad job after all.
After that night, Tony had decided to pay for weekly grief counseling for Z. Tony still worried that Z didn't talk enough about Shawna. Jamie assured him that sometimes it took decades to work through that kind of grief. She thought Z had a big head start with Tony on his side.
Tony was also pushing to get approval to become Z's foster father. Though Jamie moved a little slower on the idea, she was amazingly open for someone who was certain that she would never have a family.
Jamie still spoke to Mackenzie and Hailey every few days. Hailey was already in the middle of a new hig
h-profile murder case, thanks to her father-in-law, and Mackenzie had gotten her cast off and was back to her beat. The rookie had her name down on the lists for Sex Crimes and Homicide, though she was years away from being eligible for either.
Jamie had heard through the grapevine that while she was recovering, Scott Scanlan had been dismissed from the department. In the course of the investigation, he had confessed to logging into Jamie's chat room using her ID. He wouldn't be tried for any of his crimes, but he was no longer a cop, probably wouldn't be one again. That was enough.
According to the rumors, he'd also moved out of state. Tonight's tickets had been a gift from Deputy Chief Scanlan. She'd been getting a number of things from Deputy Chief Scanlan recently. He'd paid her vet bill and sent a three-hundred-dollar gift certificate to a restaurant called Boulevard, where she'd taken Z and Tony. They had eaten expensive food, declined the wine list and cocktails, and decided next time they'd rather go to Chevy's at Embarcadero. Three weeks later Scanlan had sent another restaurant gift certificate, and she'd sent it back. He'd sent tickets to the game instead.
Jamie knew there were strings attached. Deputy Chief Scanlan wanted to be sure she didn't talk to the media. That wasn't her style, but she hadn't told the deputy chief that. Not yet. He could sweat a little. Lord knows, she had.
She spotted Tony and Z hiking back up the stairs. Tony held a big tub of popcorn and another soda. She wondered if any of them would sleep tonight and figured it didn't matter much. There was always tomorrow.
Both boys were grinning when they reached her.
"What did you guys do?" she asked.
Tony nodded to Z. "Show her."
Z pulled his hand out from behind his back and handed her a bouquet of pink and blue cotton candy.
"I thought they didn't have cotton candy," she said. "Where'd you get this?"
Z smiled proudly. "We bribed it off a vendor who had some in the back."
She smiled. "You're a tricky one, aren't you?"
Z nodded very seriously. Then he slid into his seat and turned to her. "Since I was so tricky, you gonna share it with me, right?"
Jamie laughed out loud. "Maybe a little," she said, winking.
"Half," Z said.
"Thirds," Tony cut in, leaning in with his hand out.
Jamie ripped it open and they all tore at it, shoving big strands of blue and pink fluff into their mouths. This was one of the good things, she thought.
She met Tony's gaze over Z's head and he winked, the gums around his front teeth blue. He nodded as though he understood.
Maybe he did. Maybe better than anyone, Tony understood.
She thought she did—better now than ever before.
The End
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ONE CLEAN SHOT
The Rookie Club
Book Two
Excerpt from
One Clean Shot
The Rookie Club
Book Two
by
Danielle Girard
Award-winning Author
Hailey Wyatt had never had a case that haunted her, until now. Her husband had been dead for eleven months when Hailey Wyatt and her partner, Hal, got a court order allowing them to move forward on the case that had been at a standstill for the past fourteen months. A wealthy San Francisco couple had been found dead in the wife's minivan—defense wounds on her, lacerations on him that were consistent with a letter opener she kept in the car. COD on her was strangulation, exsanguination for him. Crime Scene Unit, CSU, had ruled out other blood types, but the vehicle had contained no fewer than thirty unidentifiable prints and a dozen hair samples that didn't belong to the victims or their kids.
Hailey had ruled it double-homicide, "murder by spouse" as the department dubbed it when husband and wife both ended up dead, no clear suicide between them. It was the right call, based on practical assumptions and it was all supposed to come out right. But it hadn't. Abby and Hank Dennig had no more killed each other than John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
A week after the case was closed, a sheriff up near Sacramento linked a suspected-suicide to the Dennigs murders via a partial fingerprint on a small, round anti-N.R.A. button. The partial would have been sufficient evidence for a warrant except that the print matched a man named Nicholas Fredricks and Fredricks had the best alibi there was—he'd been dead for three years.
Hailey was exhausted. Though the court approval to disinter the body of Nicholas Fredricks was good news in the double-homicide, it had come on the Monday after a weekend consumed by the nastiest domestic homicide the department had seen since before her rookie days. Hailey had yet to spend more than an hour at home since Friday morning. Worse, her mother-in-law was taking Hailey's two daughters to Cirque de Soleil that night so she couldn't even be with her girls.
Outside her in-laws' house, Hailey took two long off her Albuterol inhaler and mounted the steps to the front door. Her father-in-law was seated in the kitchen, eating a sandwich on a paper plate, drinking Cabernet Sauvignon from a crystal glass. A senator, Jim looked as awkward eating off a paper plate as Hailey usually felt with china and crystal. He caught her look and smiled. "I know. Quite a combination, isn't it?"
Hailey sniffed the air. "Tuna?"
He nodded. "A terrible waste of a good vintage, but I was starving."
"You want me to make something?"
"No. This is fine. There's more in the fridge if you want some."
"Thanks." Hailey made herself a sandwich while Jim finished his.
"Wine?" he asked when Hailey had set the plate down.
"I think I'll pass."
"There's beer in there. The kind you guys like," he added and Hailey felt the room shrink at the mention of her dead husband.
When the doorbell rang, it felt like a welcome distraction. She crossed to the refrigerator for a beer and reached the table just as her phone rang. "Wyatt."
"There's two ways to look at getting called in again," her partner said in his slow, deep voice.
"I'm listening," Hailey said.
"One, we've worked our asses off all weekend and we're being called in again before I've even finished one beer and the game is still in the first quarter."
Hailey imagined Hal reclined in the worn navy leather chair that had been his father's, a Bud propped on his hip, and his hand on the remote. "And the other way to look at it?"
"This call is saving you from dinner at the senator's. You are there, aren't you?"
"Yes, indeed. I like the half-full. Nice touch."
Hal gave her the address and they agreed to meet at the scene in twenty minutes. Hailey looked at the untouched beer and opened the refrigerator to put it back. As the door swung closed, she heard something ping in the front hall. The sound, though soft, was distinct and she was moving as the second bullet was fired, another ping, followed in an instant by the crash of shattering glass.
Gun drawn, Hailey crept to the edge of the kitchen, pressed her back to the thin slice of wall beside the refrigerator. Waited to hear the sounds of someone coming, but the house was silent except for the rhythmic ticking of the big grandfather clock in the hallway and the purring of the refrigerator on her back. She rounded the corner into the hall slowly, barrel first, crouched low. "Jim!"
No answer as she turned into the dining room, cleared it and continued along the hall. The window beside the front door was broken, glass scattered across the dark wood floor, confirming that the shots had come from outside. "Jim!"
No response.
The front door was cracked open and Hailey had no idea if the suspect was inside or out. At the threshold to the front door, Hailey paused a beat, drew air until her lungs were full and kicked the door open. No shots fired and Hailey ducked low and stepped onto the porch. Empty. She scanned the front hallway again, still clear, and crossed to the top of the stairs, scanning the street from the level of the banister. Silence penetrated the dark w
here the scent of rotting leaves filled the wet air, empty of the sounds of tires. Whoever he was, he was on foot.
"Jim!" Still no response.
Hailey returned to the house and halted at the entrance to the living room. If her shooter was inside, this is where he was. Pausing in the doorway, Hailey counted to three and hooked around the doorjamb, flipped the light switch and dropped behind one of Liz's Windsor chairs. What if the girls had been here?
Blinking hard, she caught sight of a viscous trail of dark spots on Liz's white Persian rug. Behind the coffee table, Jim lay flat on his back. Just as she reached him, he groaned and lifted a hand to cup his ear and blood wept between his fingers. Beside her father-in-law lay a thin, white FedEx envelope and pinned to the clear plastic on the outside of it was a round, white button.
Hailey didn't need to read its anti-weapon message. She already had two others just like it.
One Clean Shot
The Rookie Club
Book Two
by
Danielle Girard
~
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One Clean Shot
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As one of four children, Danielle Girard grew up in a house where the person with the best story got heard, and it’s probably no surprise that fast-paced suspense stories have always been her favorite. Girard's books have won the Barry Award and been selected for the RT Reviewers Choice Award. Two of her novels have been optioned for movies. Visit her website at www.daniellegirard.com.
Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Dead Center (The Rookie Club Book 1) Page 26