by Doyle, S
“Goodbye my lovely Sinead, who spells her name correctly.”
* * *
Sinead called for an Uber and waited outside because she didn’t want to have to hear him say goodbye again.
The entire drive home, she felt a weight sinking in her stomach. Like she had done something wrong. Like she’d had this precious glass vase in her hand and she had squeezed too hard and broken it.
Why had she done that? Why had she ruined perfection with… reality?
Because she was a girl who lived in reality. The reality of cancer, the reality of a father destroyed emotionally, then professionally. The reality of mildly okay sex, awkward blind dating and a fairly boring job.
She didn’t really protect and serve. She mostly gave out speeding tickets and stopped teenagers from having parties when their parents were gone.
She was gray and David was all the colors.
All of them.
And she’d made him sad.
She thanked the driver but didn’t tip because the rules were you weren’t supposed to tip but she always felt guilty about not tipping which is why she didn’t like Uber. She opened the gate to the complex, listened to the familiar creak of metal and then made her way through the courtyard.
It felt like she’d been gone for years, not weeks. Passing the courtyard she had the thought like she did every time—why didn’t the management just fill the damn pool? Take care of it? Make it look like it was supposed to look? Instead of a place where only people who had hit bottom in their life lived?
Make it be the best it could be.
David would fill it. If she asked him to make that happen, he would find a way to do it. She would say it one day. It would happen the next. She would be astounded and amazed but by now she would not be surprised.
He would do anything for her. Deep in her soul she knew that.
And you broke it.
She walked up the stairs to the second level of the apartment complex and stood outside number 2B. She wanted to open the door by kicking it as hard as she could over and over again. That was the level of anger she felt at herself, at the universe.
Why did it give her something so good when it knew it was going to take it away?
That’s exactly what it had done to her with her mother, and she obviously hadn’t learned her lesson.
The universe had given her David. The universe was going to take him away.
Or was it?
He said he was falling in love. She was certainly falling in love.
Idiot. Of course you’re in love with him. No sane woman wouldn’t be. Hell, Cherise was in love with him and he hadn’t even fucked her.
Sinead went through the motions of putting her key in the lock and turning it. That was their agreement. If they were home, or not, the lock always had to be engaged. She was the lone cop among residents who did not like cops.
She knew this, because when she was in uniform there were a few who were always careful not to make eye contact when they passed her on the landings and stairs. And she was never asked to hang by the empty pool. Still, they had all silently reached an agreement. She didn’t bother them. They didn’t bother her. Still she took some basic precautions and made her father do the same.
Because that was the reality of her life. Not what these last few weeks had been. A crooked father, a shady complex, an empty pool.
She would have loved to close the door behind her, bang her head against it and ask herself over and over again.
What did I do?
You broke it.
What did I do?
You broke it.
But her father was sitting on the couch, all the lights out, watching ESPN.
Sports news. The only news her father ever followed.
She stood straight, her chin out a little, and tried to pretend that this wasn’t the first night she’d spent at the apartment in weeks.
He looked up at her.
“Dress guy finally dump you?”
She wanted to hurl something at him. Something that would take his smug look off his face, but there was nothing easily at hand in this apartment. No cute knickknacks. Nothing that turned a space into a home. Because he didn’t care and she didn’t care either, she just realized.
“Fuck you,” she told him.
“Nice mouth.”
“Yeah, well I learned from the best.”
She blew past him into her bedroom and slammed the door shut because it made her feel better to hear that noise. A crack of sound that identified some of the turmoil she was feeling now.
Why had she done it? Why did she have to go and ruin everything?
She fell onto the bed and thought that it smelled weird. Because it didn’t smell like him. It didn’t smell like them. Three weeks and her own bed wasn’t her bed anymore.
Shucking off her clothes, she got under the covers and tried not to think about what had happened. Instead she thought of the future. Tomorrow. Lunch. She would force them back to what they were and she would relish every minute they spent together.
Then when the time came, when he said he had to leave her to go back home, she was going to do the thing she’d never thought she would have the courage to do.
She was going to ask him to take her with him.
Chapter 10
Sinead woke up with a new purpose the next morning. The plan was in place. She was going to spend these days with David sucking the life out of each and every one of them. When the end came, if the end came soon, she was going to ask for it not to end. She was going to ask for a future.
After all, isn’t that what people who were in love got to have?
She was a good person. She tried to do the right things in life. Didn’t she deserve some happiness? Shouldn’t she at least reach for it? If David had taught her nothing else, he had taught her that.
As the day moved on she got more anxious to see him. Eventually she dressed in her uniform. Sometimes she changed at the station, but this way she could spend every minute with David until she had to go to work.
She took her patrol car and drove out to David’s house. She thought as she looked at the clock that she might be a little early but she doubted he would care. She was going to stubbornly ignore the lead weight that was still sitting in the bottom of her stomach.
It was just nerves. Nerves that somehow their dynamic would be different. Nerves that because he’d been open with this feelings he might start retreating because she hadn’t immediately reciprocated.
She would show him without words. She would show him every day and in every way how she was feeling so he wouldn’t have to question it. She wanted to never make him sad again.
As she turned down his street the first thing she saw were the flashing red lights. Every hair on the back of her neck rose as she quickly ascertained the patrol car was parked in David’s driveway. She pulled her car over and immediately jogged up to the front door.
The first officer she saw was Ted. An older cop, good guy, who she got along with fairly well. He spotted her and gave her a nod of his chin.
“O’Hara, what the hell are you doing here? You’re not on shift yet.”
“What is it?”
“B&E. Owner’s pretty pissed.”
Relief flooded her. David was inside and pissed. Which meant unharmed. “I know him,” she said as she pushed her way inside and then stopped when a dark-haired, handsome man with a decidedly non-British accent was shouting at another one of her fellow officers.
“What in the hell is the point of a security system if it can be turned off by the police? Isn’t it your job to arrest the person when you find they have broken into my house?”
“Sir, please calm down. We’re trying to sort this out.” It was Sergeant Neil, Sinead’s superior, and he was clearly trying to dispel the anger radiating off the man.
“Who are you?” Sinead asked the loud man.
“Officer O’Hara, why are you here? You’re not involved this.”
Sinead looked at her ser
geant and blinked mentally, not comprehending how she could not be involved in this. She’d practically lived in this house for the last few weeks. She had stuff here.
“I own this house, who are you?” the strange man said.
“Did David leave?”
“Who the fuck is David?”
It was in that moment alarms sounded in her head. Without saying anything she moved past Sergeant Neil and the angry man back to the bedroom. It was empty, the bed was made.
She started opening the dresser drawers, and the smells that hit her from the clothes there were wrong. Not David’s smell. Instead, a hint of a cologne that was completely foreign to her.
“What in the fuck are you doing? Get out of my shit.”
It was the angry owner. He was behind her in the bedroom shouting, but she couldn’t listen to him. She needed to find David’s stuff. She needed David to come back and tell his friend that he had called the police for no reason. This needed to be some colossal joke. She moved back into the bathroom. At least there she would find her stuff. Her deodorant, her moisturizers.
Except it was gone. All of it. Even the toothbrushes. In fact there was an antiseptic smell that hit her nostrils, stinging them. As if the bathroom had recently been cleaned with bleach.
David was gone. Her stuff was gone. The bathroom had been cleaned. And there was an angry man following her around who claimed to own the house and not know who David was.
“This isn’t happening,” she muttered to herself. “Where’s my toothbrush?”
“Your toothbrush! What the fuck does that mean?” the angry man asked.
She stared at the empty bathroom counter. “It should be in the cup. Next to his. Together.”
“Are you fucking losing your shit? Clue in, little girl. Someone fucking broke into my house, tripped the alarm and got away with it. Now I have an empty safe and no fucking answers.”
“Mr. Huntley.” Sinead’s sergeant joined them in the bedroom. “Understood. As I mentioned, we’ll get to the bottom of the security system. In the meantime we’re going to need your cooperation. We’ll call in the crime scene team and they’ll run for prints…”
“Fuck that. This was obviously a professional job. Do you seriously think the Mill Valley Police Department is going to find this guy? Find my stuff?”
Sergeant Neil’s voice tightened after that. “You called us, Mr. Huntley.”
“No, I didn’t,” he snapped back.
“Sir, that’s true.” Ted came into the bedroom. “A noise complaint was made by one of the neighbors. The alarm from the security system had been triggered. It had been going off for hours.”
“I get off a six-hour flight and I come back to this. Cops in my house, my safe blown, and you tell me someone from your department had the security system turned off three weeks ago.”
Because he knew all the answers, Sinead thought, but she couldn’t form words yet. Not while her brain was still trying to understand what the empty bathroom counter meant. What the homeowner not knowing who David was, meant.
It was bad. She could process that much. It was very bad. Suddenly she felt like she was falling into that abyss she’d thought about before. Only as the darkness started to overcome her, she was quickly realizing there was no bottom to this hole. She was just going to keep falling. And falling. And falling.
“We contacted the security company,” Ted informed the sergeant. “Their system wasn’t registering that the alarm had gone off today. However, they did note it had been tripped a few weeks ago. An officer responded to the call, but ultimately the security questions were answered correctly and it was turned off. We’re waiting on the badge number of the officer who answered the call.”
Sinead didn’t think before she said what was true. “It was me.”
The two officers and the man called Huntley turned to her.
“His name was David Whitmore. He’s a friend of yours. You were swapping houses while you were on vacation. He had a key…”
“I don’t know a David fucking Whitmore.”
Sinead looked at the man. She thought about the wedding pictures David had shown her. This was the man in those pictures. And David had been able to answer all the security questions. That didn’t make sense unless David knew him.
She was about to explain the pictures when Sergeant Neil stepped in front of her. “Officer O’Hara, please report back to the station. You’ll give a full report there. Mr. Huntley, how would you like us to proceed?”
He looked disgusted. Beyond disgusted. There was real anger in the man’s eyes. Sinead’s instinct was that if the other two officers weren’t in the room with her, he might have physically assaulted her.
“I want you to fire her fucking ass.”
Sinead blinked again.
“Officer O’Hara’s role in this matter will be investigated. In the meantime should we start taking prints?” Sergeant Neil asked him.
“No. But expect a call from my lawyer. You’re going to pay for this.”
“Understood. We’ll leave now.”
Sinead couldn’t move. The two officers were starting to leave and she knew she was supposed to follow them, but she couldn’t make her feet work. If she took a step, then another, it would take her out of this bedroom where she and David had made love for weeks.
If she left this house completely, then realization of what had happened to her would hit her. She would have to accept that this was exactly as it looked. That she’d been played.
By a professional.
By David. Who maybe wasn’t David.
The agony that rushed over her was a physical thing. It almost brought her to her knees. He didn’t just leave her. He didn’t just go and not ask her to go with him. He took everything. Everything that had been these last three weeks and shredded it.
Shredded her.
“Officer O’Hara. Now.”
She looked to her sergeant and nodded. She couldn’t process the pain she was feeling. She couldn’t think beyond each second because if she did she would have to think about the future. The future where there would be no David. The past where a man named David Whitmore didn’t exist.
All she could do now was follow orders. She was supposed to report to the station. That was a place to go. A thing she had to do.
She would focus on that, and that was how she was able to finally move. One foot in front of the other. Walking instead of on the ground in the fetal position, howling.
She was not allowed to drive her squad car. Instead, Sergeant Neil asked that she ride with him. Another set of officers would be sent to pick up her car later.
She nodded at this information and wondered if she would be placed in the back of the car like any other criminal. However, he opened the passenger door as if somehow he sensed she wasn’t capable of handling that task.
All she could do was sit. Buckle her seat belt. And stare straight ahead so she would never see the house where she fell in love with David Whitmore again.
* * *
“Report.” The sharp order came through the phone.
Flynn sat in his car, the windows tinted, about a block up from the ranch where the activity was happening. He watched the officers leave the house. Saw the female cop get in the squad car and take off. Flynn considered the angry clipped voice in his Bluetooth.
Yeah, he thought, this wasn’t going to go well. He’d told his partner it was better to leave and not look back. A clean break. After they evacuated the house, scrubbed it down, restored it, Flynn had offered to be the one to continue surveillance. Alone. Make sure it all went down as expected.
His partner had looked almost relieved. As if the thought of having to watch it play out was too much.
Only now his partner was calling and he wanted a report. Flynn gave it to him.
“Cops were already in place when Huntley showed and started freaking out. I’m telling you I could almost hear him from down the street. Your girl showed up maybe twenty minutes later. She was inside
the house for about five, ten minutes. She just left in a squad car with another officer.”
“Could you see her from your vantage point?”
Flynn had binoculars with him in the car.
“Yes. I could see her.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line and Flynn was shaking his head thinking don’t ask it, brother.
“How did she look?”
Flynn debated the answer for a second. Why make his friend feel shittier than he already did?
“I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“Wrecked,” Flynn told him. “She looked wrecked.” There really had been no other way to describe the completely shell-shocked look on her face as she walked out of the house.
A soft sigh. Flynn knew that sigh.
“It’s done. You know what you need to do now.”
“Yep,” Flynn said.
He removed the ear piece, placed it in its case, started the car and drove away.
* * *
Garrett waited until everyone was out of the house. Then he ran down to the basement again to check that it was actually gone. As if he would have left anything behind.
Fuck, he was so screwed.
His hand shaking, he picked up his cell and called his father.
“We’ve got a problem.”
“What?”
There was no point in trying to hide what happened. “It’s gone. The bastard broke into my house and stole it while I was in Shanghai.”
Calm, nonplussed, always in control. His father was always predictable like that. “That is a problem. You understand what’s at stake? I’ve already made the necessary communications.”
Garrett absolutely knew what was at stake. It pissed him off that he was even involved in something this big. All he’d wanted was his damn wife back. His father, as he often did, took it to the next level.
“We have to call it off. All of it.”
“It’s far too late for that,” his father said calmly. “These people are not the type to take disappointment lightly. You need to get it back.”
“How the fuck am I going to do that? You know what I’m up against.”
Another pause. “That, my son, is your problem to solve. But you will solve it. Otherwise you will suffer the consequences. If not from them, then from me. It’s my reputation at stake, after all. Fix this.”