Jack Murray, Sheriff

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “You know I can’t do that.” Jack had stared at the blank facade of the house. The blinds and drapes were all pulled. In which room was the maverick cop holed up with his hostages?

  “Policy.” The former deputy’s voice suddenly thickened with rage. “Well, screw policy! I’ve got things to say. I want to say them to your face.”

  “Let your wife and the girl go. Come out and we’ll talk. So far, nothing bad has happened. Leave it that way. We’ll get you help.”

  “I’ll never wear a badge again after this.”

  Damn straight. “Probably not,” Jack said evenly, “but you don’t have to go to prison, either.”

  Hansen gave a short laugh. “You know, I don’t think I want help.”

  The negotiator, listening in on another phone, started mouthing a calming spiel. Jack had barely begun it when Hansen interrupted.

  “I’m going to die today. I have things to say first. If you disarm and walk in the front door, I’ll let the baby-sitter go. Otherwise, I’ll throw her body out. Your choice.”

  Straightening from behind the car, Jack exclaimed, “Damn it, Gary, she’s a kid! You wouldn’t…”

  “She doesn’t mean shit to me. I am a dead man. Dead men don’t feel pity. Your choice. You have five minutes.” Click.

  Two minutes had passed. Jack didn’t have to turn his head to see the teenage girl’s parents. He heard the rhythmic sob of the mother, the choked mumble of the father comforting her.

  “Get me a vest.” Shrugging out of his suit jacket, he unbuckled his shoulder holster and began unbuttoning his white shirt.

  Ben Shea shook his dark head. “You can’t do this.”

  “I’m doing it,” Jack said flatly. Funny. There hadn’t even been a moment of decision. He took the bulletproof vest that was handed to him and put it on.

  “I should punch you out and bundle you into that car.”

  Jack found himself grinning. “And lose your badge?”

  “Better than explaining to my sister-in-law and occasional partner why the father of her son is dead with a bullet in his head,” Shea said gloomily. He was married to Abby, the youngest of the three Patton sisters.

  “She’ll know why. I’m a bullheaded SOB.”

  The vest felt bulky and he doubted it would do any good anyway. Hansen would know he was wearing it. But, hey.

  He and Ben Shea briefly discussed what might go down in there. How he could signal for help.

  Jack tucked his shirt into his pants and buckled his belt, then pulled on his suit coat. Had to look good for the TV cameras, he thought ironically.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the parents. Huddled together, neither was looking at him. They didn’t know Gary Hansen had offered a trade.

  In minutes, either their daughter would walk out free, or not. Jack wanted to have faith that the man he’d once known would keep his word.

  “Wish me luck.”

  Lieutenant Shea held out his hand. They shook with the solemnity of two men who never expected to see each other again. Then Shea stepped back and Jack started across the street toward the house. Onlookers fell silent. Even the mother’s sobs ceased.

  Feeling like a circus performer, Jack had never been so conscious of the act of walking, the swing of each step. Blank windows stared at him, golden light filtering between slats of the blinds. Did Hansen see him coming? How certain was he that Jack would comply with his demand?

  In the absolute silence, Jack heard his own heartbeat. Fast but steady. Adrenaline pumped, but he wasn’t scared. He felt…exhilarated.

  This moment, he thought with unnatural calm, was a gift. How often in his life did a man have a chance to atone for past mistakes?

  He had just been handed one.

  As he reached the driveway, the garage door began to roll up with a faint hum. Automatic, triggered from inside. The interior light was on, the garage compulsively neat, cardboard boxes labeled in black marker side by side on shelves, tools hung on a Peg Board, two cars filling the space. Still nobody in sight.

  Hansen might be sitting in one of the cars, Jack thought with one part of his mind. With the other part, he pictured first Beth and then Will with regret.

  He couldn’t have faced either if he had let the girl die when he could have saved her. At seventeen, he hadn’t known the price exacted for thinking of himself first.

  The moment he crossed the threshold of the garage, the door began its descent. He kept his hands at his side and walked forward, between the two cars. A sidelong scan of both told him they were empty.

  A washer and dryer stood at the back, the dryer open with clothes spilling out into a bright red plastic basket. A purse sat atop it. Jack pictured Janet Hansen pulling into the garage, deciding to grab a load of laundry on her way into the house. Had the baby-sitter called to her? Or had her husband opened the door and pointed a gun at her?

  A thump from the side had Jack swinging around, his pulse leaping. A cat. Damn. A cat. The orange tabby stared with wide, wary eyes from a perch atop the workbench.

  Deliberately Jack rotated his shoulders and breathed a couple of times, slowly. He should have noticed the pet flap in the door. Careless. He should notice everything.

  He climbed the two steps and opened the door. The cold barrel of a gun met his cheekbone, hard.

  “Good of you to drop in,” Hansen said.

  They were in a short hall with a half bath to one side. Beyond her husband, Jack glimpsed Janet Hansen, sitting on the closed seat of the toilet, her face puffy with tears long dried, left eye swollen shut and turning purple. Kneeling beside her was a slight blond girl who, in the one lightning glance, didn’t look sixteen. Thirteen or fourteen, maybe. Not much older than Stephanie. Janet’s arm was around her and the girl was crying with quiet intensity. She didn’t seem even to notice Jack’s arrival. Gary Hansen half blocked the bathroom doorway, both hands gripping the revolver that ground into Jack’s cheek.

  Despite the pain, he said calmly, “Let her go. Let them both go.”

  “Janet’s not going anywhere. She’s not leaving me. I already told her that.”

  “The girl’s not involved in this.”

  “Shari.” Hansen didn’t shift a millimeter, but he raised his voice. “Stand up.”

  The teenager froze, hiccuped. Despite what must be her own terror, Hansen’s wife said quietly, “Shari. My husband is going to let you go now. Just do what he says.”

  With her help, the girl stumbled to her feet and faced the door. Drenched with tears, her eyes were wild with fear.

  “Come on by me.”

  The girl ducked past. Those terrified eyes rolled upward to take in Jack’s face before fastening on her captor.

  “Janet. You, too.”

  She came with outward docility but a spark of rebellion and even hate in the one glance she cast her husband.

  The woman and the girl walking in front, the gun bumping the back of Jack’s head, they made an awkward convoy through the family room, kitchen and living room. They might conceivably be shadows seen through the blinds, no more. Even if they’d been spotlit, nobody could have gotten a shot. Hansen was careful to stay behind Jack.

  “Stop,” the former deputy said sharply. “Murray, walk her to the door. Yeah, like that.”

  Jack took the few steps forward, opened it, pushed the girl through. “Let Janet go. You and I can talk.”

  “No! Lock the goddamn door!”

  The sixteen-year-old had stumbled down the front steps and begun to run toward the street. Jack shut the door and turned the dead bolt. He hoped if he died today she wouldn’t carry it as a burden: I should have been the one. He wished there had been a way to let her know she’d done him a favor.

  He turned to face the man he’d known for years. Thought he’d known.

  “All right,” Jack said. “Now what?”

  “Now we go back the way we came.”

  During the procession through the house, Jack wondered if he could block Hansen long enough
for Janet to flee out the back sliding door or into the garage. Could she activate the automatic opener from in there?

  But instead of staying right on top of Jack, Hansen backed up a few steps. “Into the bathroom,” he ordered. “Both of you. Look at me.”

  His wife retreated until she came up against the toilet; then she collapsed onto it. Jack shifted to stand between her and the stocky blond man with sharp, crazy eyes.

  “Move over!” he snapped.

  Lifting his hands, Jack obliged. “You did the right thing, letting the kid go,” he said, voice as soothing as he could make it. “You’re a cop at heart, Gary. You don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  “You took my badge, remember?” Hansen filled the doorway. “You and my dear wife between you have taken every single thing that mattered to me.”

  For the first time, his wife lifted her head and stared at him with open fury. “Your drinking did that.”

  “You thought I’d let you leave.” His lips drew back from his teeth in a snarl as wild as a cornered coyote’s. Those strangely glassy eyes turned to Jack. “And you. You’re right. I’m a cop. What else did you think I could do? Sell shoes, maybe? Wash cars?”

  “All you had to do was go into alcohol treatment and you could have had your badge back. You’re a good cop, Gary.”

  “But not anymore.” Despair slurred his words as if it were ninety proof. “You two took everything I had. I never did like losing. Made me a hell of an investigator. Nice irony, don’t you think? Made me a good cop, and an ugly suicide. ’Cause, see, I’m not going to check out alone. Then you’d be winning and I’d be losing. This way… Well, hell. Maybe I don’t win, but I don’t lose, either. We’ll call it a draw.”

  “What about Jennifer?” Staring at her death, his wife fought back. “And Pete? Don’t you love them at all?”

  The gun swung her way. “I’ve already lost them, too, thanks to you, bitch!”

  “They’ll have nobody.” It wasn’t clear whether she was begging or stating a bleak fact.

  “Gary, for God’s sake,” Jack said urgently, “think about what you’re doing. Those kids love you. Get some help. It’s not too late. Nothing bad has happened.”

  Knowing he was wasting his breath, Jack subtly shifted his weight and inched his right hand toward the .357 SIG tucked in the small of his back.

  “But something bad is about to happen,” Gary Hansen said with sudden eerie calm. “Right now.”

  The projector clicked to slow motion.

  “Don’t…do…it.” Jack heard his own words, distorted by the very slowness, a record run on the wrong speed.

  Jack saw in snapshots. The tendons standing out on the back of Gary’s hands as he began to squeeze the trigger. The horror on his wife’s face, mirrored strangely by the expression on Hansen’s, as if he had suddenly seen what he was doing.

  At the beginning of this microsecond that stretched bizarrely, Jack launched himself into the air. He was pulling his weapon as he flew, not at Gary Hansen but to intercept the bullet.

  He was squeezing the trigger to kill when he was slammed in the chest. He crashed back onto Janet. Her “oomph” of pain was far away, tinny. The spreading agony in his chest was all-absorbing. They were tangled atop the toilet, Janet taking the worst of it.

  Nonetheless, he lifted his head and the SIG at the same time. His ears ringing, he didn’t know who had been shot.

  Until he saw Gary Hansen lying on the bathroom floor, his face gone.

  Janet Hansen screamed, kept screaming. The sound was a distant siren.

  Jack tried to suck in air that wouldn’t come and felt the darkness closing in.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  STARING WITH burning eyes at the television set, Beth saw the grainy images of the front door opening, the teenager bursting out as if pushed, almost falling and clutching at the handrail, then stumbling down the stairs and beginning to run. When no one else emerged, when the door shut again, a sob tore from Beth’s throat.

  What if he died? How could he do something so insane? The TV station kept showing reruns of the Butte County sheriff himself walking unarmed across the street, his stride deliberate. In a hushed voice, the commentator said, “We’re told that Gary Hansen, the deputy who resigned after being suspended from his job only days ago, has offered to trade the teenage baby-sitter for Sheriff Jack Murray. Unbelievably, Sheriff Murray seems to be accepting the deal.”

  The girl came out fairly quickly. Two SWAT team members in bulletproof vests rushed forward and enfolded her between them, escorting her behind the police cars where the TV cameras intruded on her sobbing reunion with her parents.

  The minutes ticked by. Beth clutched the cordless phone so tightly in her fingers that the plastic creaked. The reporter murmured comments from time to time; the camera panned from the house to the huddles of cops, to the black-clothed SWAT team sharpshooters barely visible on rooftops.

  When a muffled crack, crack sounded, Beth jerked. The reporter’s voice rose in excitement. Police swarmed toward the house.

  “It’s unclear what has happened inside, but shots were certainly fired,” the reporter declared.

  Frozen with terror, Beth stared at the television and waited some more. Police crashed through the front door. What seemed an eternity later, some emerged. Between them was a dark-haired woman, one side of her face grotesquely swollen in the stark white of the floodlight. But she was walking, her head turning, turning, as she searched for something.

  She was close enough to the TV cameras that her sob was audible when she saw her children. The two, a boy and a girl, ducked under the police tape and ran to her. She collapsed to her knees with her arms around them.

  Tears ran down Beth’s face.

  “Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,” she whispered.

  “Thanks to the courage of Sheriff Jack Murray, both women survived tonight’s terrible ordeal,” intoned the reporter. “But where is he? Did he sacrifice his life for a woman we’re told he barely knew and a teenage girl he’d never met?”

  Suddenly more cops appeared in the broken doorway of the house. Beth’s ragged breath caught in her throat. Oh, God. Oh, God. Was that Jack?

  He walked out, the suit jacket missing, his white shirt partially buttoned and with the tails loose over his slacks. But he was walking, and he lifted a hand in acknowledgment of the cheers that rose from the crowd and police officers alike.

  “Word comes now that Deputy Gary Hansen is dead, shot to death. At this point, we don’t know whether he was killed by the sheriff, by his wife or by his own hand. The police are likely to be slow in revealing details.”

  Jack went straight to a squad car and climbed in the back. Immediately, it made its way through the parting crowd and disappeared down the street.

  Beth turned off the television, laid her forehead on her knees and cried in profound relief. She’d known she was falling in love. She hadn’t known the terror of loving a man who could walk into danger like that.

  She could only love him more because of it.

  AFTER THEY’D RELEASED him from the hospital and he’d filed a report, Jack drove straight to Beth’s house. Maybe she had no idea what had happened. If not, the doorbell would wake her. All he knew was that he needed to see her and take her in his arms. All Jack had thought about since he saw Gary Hansen dead on the bathroom floor was that now he’d have a chance to hold Beth again. Somehow, against the odds, he had survived.

  He hurt like hell. A huge bruise spread like a purple fungus on his chest. Without the bulletproof vest, he would have been dead.

  Jack parked in front of Beth’s house. Although other houses along the street were dark, tiny golden lights still shone along the eaves of her old house. Gazing at them, he didn’t move for a moment. He was stiffening, feeling twinges of muscle soreness in odd places. Being slammed backward, falling over the toilet, cracking his head against the wall, sliding down into the narrow place between, had left reminders he’d be conscious of for days. Getting out
of the damned 4×4 made him feel like an old man.

  When he turned toward her house, the front door burst open and Beth flew out. She came down the porch steps so fast, he hurried forward to catch her if she fell.

  She didn’t, but she flung herself into his arms as if he were making a lifesaving catch. “Oh, my God,” she cried. “You are alive. You scared me so badly.”

  Her tears soaked through his shirt. Jack realized with distant astonishment that dampness leaked from his eyes, too. Cheek against her hair, he hugged her and she hugged him and they rocked from foot to foot, murmuring everything and nothing. Two o’clock in the morning, and she had been waiting for him, expecting him, needing to see him as badly as he had needed to see her.

  “I love you,” he said finally.

  She tilted her head back and glared at him. “Oh, how could you do it?”

  A slow grin grew on his face. For the first time since he was seventeen years old, Jack didn’t have to doubt himself.

  “How could I not?” he asked simply, and didn’t have to answer his own question: Because you’re a coward.

  “You saved their lives.” Beth’s gentle hands framed his face; her thumbs moved at the corners of his mouth. Her suddenly tender gaze searched his face.

  The exhilaration, the adrenaline, drained away so fast his knees wanted to buckle. Jack swayed, his voice hoarse. “I had to kill a man tonight. A man I considered a friend.”

  “I know.” Her arms accepted him into her embrace again as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Oh, Jack. I’m so sorry you had to do that.”

  She half supported him as they went into her house. Inside, she insisted he phone Will while she made him a cup of herb tea sweetened with honey.

  The first thing his son said was “Are you crazy, Dad?”

  His laugh edged into hysteria. “Not yet. This was just…one of those things.”

  “Oh, yeah. One of those things every guy’s dad has to do in a day’s work.”

  He had to say this once to his son. “Your life, your mom’s and mine would have been different if twenty years ago I’d had the guts to think of someone else ahead of myself.”