The Killing Tide, page 19
Stay with him or go after Tim Dawson?
She kept running. She didn’t have her first aid kit on her and she knew Stuart would be calling this in already. Rebstock and/or another unit responding might have even heard the shots. There was nothing she could do for Teagan that wouldn’t be done by someone else within a minute or two.
Besides, she had a killer to catch. No one had a chance of catching Tim Dawson except her.
She focused on running. Tim was ahead of her, but kept looking back over his shoulder, losing his rhythm. Alexa slowly began to gain on him.
Tim began to zigzag. At first Alexa didn’t understand why, but then realized he was afraid of getting shot.
But officers of the law, despite what some people thought, didn’t shoot indiscriminately. She could not gun down a fleeing suspect.
Even though she really, really wanted to.
Tim didn’t realize this, though. His mind was so poisoned by vengeance, he must have thought everyone acted on their urges like he did.
Like I almost have. Like Robert Powers almost did.
Yes, there’s a darkness inside all of us. The real difference is between those who can control it and those who give in to it.
Alexa felt like shouting out to him to give up, that his wife was lying injured back there. But she needed to conserve her breath. He wouldn’t listen anyway.
She picked up the pace, slowly gaining on him.
Suddenly Tim angled to the left, heading for the other side of wash. A large drainage pipe, almost the height of a man, fed into the wash on that side. Above, on the street level, was a gap between two buildings. Alexa could see the lights of a busy street with several shops open.
If he goes into the pipe, he might be able to jump me from a side channel. If he goes up to the street, he might grab an innocent bystander.
I can’t let that happen. I have to shoot him.
But I can’t shoot him, not just because of the regulations but because of me.
He’s the one who kills people from behind, not me.
God, it would feel good though.
She quickly scanned the area, hoping to see some police officers heading him off. There was no one. It was only her.
Alexa turned her gun to aim down the length of the wash and fired. That was the least likely direction for a stray to hit someone.
Tim ducked and looked over his shoulder. By the time he did, Alexa had the gun facing him. He never knew she had not fired at him.
“Do you want Ursula to end up alone?” Alexa shouted.
She wanted to sound menacing, rather than worried. Enraged, rather than hopeful.
And she did.
Because she was sick of this whole sad scene. Sick of selfish people who struck out at everyone else to cover up their failings and ease their unhappiness. Yes, Tim Dawson had been a victim, but he stopped being a victim the first time he had picked up a knife.
Now he was just as guilty as whoever had killed his daughter.
All the pity this man deserved had been replaced with contempt. While Drake Logan had been a killer, he had been driven by a grand and maniacal vision of humanity. As sick as he was, he really thought he was improving the world. Tim Dawson, on the other hand, was just a sad, selfish man lashing out at the world in order to make himself feel better. In his desperate bid to escape justice, he had even abandoned his wife.
Alexa felt like putting him down, like you did to a horse with a broken leg.
Dawson hesitated. Alexa paced toward him until she was just a few steps away. He stared at the gun, then back at the drainage pipe, still a good ten feet away.
“Drop the knife,” Alexa ordered.
Tim’s face twitched. His upper lip curled, baring teeth. With a roar he charged her.
Alexa aimed right between the eyes. His insane, twisted face seemed to loom up at her, encompassing her entire vision. She could not miss.
Suicide by cop? Not today.
Alexa brought her aim down just as he reached her and shot him in the leg.
Tim cried out, stumbling and falling. His head hit Alexa in the stomach. She staggered back, her gun going off a second time, the bullet panging off the concrete.
Tim ended up flat on his face. The knife skittered away.
Alexa rubbed her stomach, wincing.
Tim pushed up with his hands, trying to rise with a useless leg. He looked around for his knife.
Ignoring the pain, Alexa rushed over to him, put a knee on his back, holstered her gun, and cuffed him.
Just as she finished, the sound of running feet made her look up and put a hand on the butt of her gun.
Rebstock was huffing across the wash for her, his jowly face sweating, smoker’s lungs heaving, a revolver in his hand.
“I got him,” Alexa said. “Go check on Stuart. He’s been shot.”
“He deserved it,” Tim groaned.
Alexa looked down on him. “What did you say?”
“Anyone who tries to stop the course of justice deserve to die.”
“On second thought,” Alexa said, standing up and forcing herself to put some distance between her and the prisoner, “Why don’t you take care of him, Rebstock. I got more important people to worry about.”
* * *
The ambulance flashed its spinning lights as it pulled away with Tim Dawson in the back, sedated and under guard. Behind it went a police car. In the back, slumped and handcuffed, sat his wife Ursula, arrested on charges of assaulting a police officer.
Alexa watched them go with mingled emotions. Ursula had panicked and done a foolish thing. Stuart had been hurt, and for that, Alexa could never forgive her. But the better part of her nature hoped the judge wouldn’t go too hard on her. She had suffered enough. Prison, yes, but not for too long.
For Tim, she felt no pity. He had forfeited that when he had turned from victim to perpetrator.
Instead she turned her attention to the second ambulance that had responded to the call. Stuart lay in back, an IV drip in his arm as he joked with the EMTs, working through the nervous aftershock of being under fire. She had seen that in herself and her fellow officers far too many times. The bullet from Alexa’s gun had ploughed a furrow in his side and he had lost some blood, but had not turned out to be serious. He would be fine.
But that did not make going up to him any easier. It had been her gun that had fired the shot, after all.
Just as she could never forgive Ursula, she could never forgive herself.
Just a couple of months after losing one partner, she had almost lost another.
Here she was trying to protect the innocent from evil, and she ended up endangering the people who fought on the side of good.
She had almost lost it back there, not paying enough attention while she went full-bore at the bad guys. She needed to get her head on straight. She needed to be more careful.
Alexa squared her shoulders, cleared her throat, and walked up to the back of the ambulance.
“Stuart, I’m so sorry,” she blurted before she had even got there.
His face turned grim. Slowly he shook his head.
“I don’t know how I’m going to live with it,” he said.
A lump rose in her throat and her stomach fell through the pavement. “Look, she got the jump on me. She—”
“The pain,” he groaned. “I just don’t know how I’m going to deal with the pain.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Alexa climbed into the ambulance.
“My head is going to kill me.”
“Your head? What—”
“From the hangover I’m going to have from all the beers you’re going to buy me!”
Stuart and the EMTs burst out laughing.
Alexa smiled, but then felt tears welling up in her eyes.
“Whoa, whoa,” Stuart said. “Hey, come here.”
Wiping her eyes, Alexa shifted closer to Stuart. The EMTs suddenly found things to do that required them to look in the other direction.
As Alexa sat down next to Stuart’s stretcher, the FBI agent took her hand, a strangely intimate gesture from a guy who preferred to joke around.
“Look. You got a scare. We all get scares on this job. And it’s coming so soon after the worst shock of your career. I get it. But I’m fine, and it wasn’t your fault. I was taken in by Ursula Dawson too. Hell, she really was innocent, at least until she saw what her husband was doing and decided to help him out. Good thing he didn’t confide in her from the start, or our investigation would have been ten times as hard.”
“But—”
“No buts. We got the bad guy, and Teagan is going to live. They told me that stab in the back missed all his vital organs. And the other wounds were superficial.”
Alexa nodded. The EMTs had told her the same thing. “Yes, but I should have been watching her more closely.”
“You were too busy watching the knife-wielding maniac. So was I. If you want to blame yourself for Ursula getting the jump on you, then you have to blame me too. And I’m not taking blame for that. The only thing I’ll take from you is a few gallons of beer.”
Stuart squeezed her hand.
Alexa chuckled and squeezed it back. “How about I do one better? I’m sure you’re getting some time off for this. How about a weekend at my family ranch? Dad always has a fridge full of beer and my brother Wayne is an ace at a BBQ grill.”
Stuart moaned and lay back on the bed. Alexa bent over him, panic rising in her.
“Are you OK?”
“OK? Hell, no! I got to spend a weekend getting sunburned and being bitten by rattlesnakes? I’m going back East where it’s civilized!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Chase ranch in northern Arizona, one week later …
Alexa sat on the front porch, a tall glass of lemonade at her side and Robert Powers’s journal on her lap.
She had been dipping into it on and off for several days. Its pages contained a treasure trove of insights and wisdom, and a lot about her former partner she had never suspected.
Despite reading it for several days straight, she was only a few pages in. She didn’t burn through it like she did sometimes with novels to get her mind off work. Instead she read only a page or one day’s entry at a time, savoring it like fine wine. She learned more that way.
Even in death, he was still her mentor.
And she had plenty of time in which to think about what it contained. Because of the shooting, she had been given two weeks’ paid leave while it was investigated. This was no threat to her job, just standard procedure. She and Stuart had sat in front of a review board giving their accounts of events, and the review board had looked on with sympathy, especially after Stuart had strongly defended her actions. There would be no blowback for accidentally shooting her partner.
That comforted her. The journal comforted her even more.
One entry read, “Finally caught that escaped convict. I felt bad, because we had a choice of two leads to follow and I picked the wrong one. Once we caught him, I realized the lead I should have followed was obvious. A case of 20/20 hindsight. In fact, at the time both leads looked equally plausible. I need to stop beating myself over the head about stuff I can’t control. Nobody is perfect, especially not at this job. You just have to accept your failings, try harder next time, and keep on going. Just remember that doing this job makes a difference. That’s the important thing. Being imperfect just comes with the job.
“Like that’s going to make me feel better!”
The last bit made Alexa chuckle. It warmed her heart too, knowing that her personal hero struggled with the same issues she did.
And you’re a personal hero to Stacy. Maybe you should stop trying to act perfect with her and let her realize you’re sometimes as scared and confused as she is.
The girl’s laughter rang out in the distance. She and Alexa’s brother Malcolm had gone for a ride.
She sure isn’t scared and confused right now, Alexa thought. Get that girl around horses and she’s the happiest kid in the world.
This was the third time Alexa had brought the kid up for the weekend. She loved the horses, the fresh air, and the distance from her parents, who never objected to their neighbor taking their kid out of the house for a couple of days. It made it easier for them to party.
Stacy even liked the work. Alexa’s father bossed her around like she was an unpaid ranch hand, and she didn’t mind at all. He’d become an adopted grandfather, gruff but loving. Stacy had never mentioned her own grandparents. Stacy didn’t mention a lot of things about her family life.
A spark of sunlight off metal made her look out over the desert. A car was making its way slowly along the dirt road leading to the ranch, trailing a plume of brown dust.
Alexa rose, set the journal down well away from the glass of lemonade in case one of the dogs knocked it over, and strolled across the front yard to the gate.
She stood there as Stuart puttered up the dirt road. It was shocking to see the guy drive so slow. Was he still in pain? Maybe she shouldn’t have invited him up here. Maybe he would be better resting back at home. As the car drew closer, the dogs all came rushing down, barking their heads off.
“Cool it!” she snapped.
They shut up, but kept a watchful eye.
She pushed the big metal gate open, its creaking reminding her that she needed to go to the ranch’s machine shop and find some grease. Stuart stopped halfway inside the gate and rolled down the window. The dogs started barking again.
“Good to see you,” he said with a grin. “I felt sure I’d get lost. Do you know you live next to a ghost town?”
“Bumble Bee isn’t quite a ghost town. It gets RV folks in the winter. How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Why do you ask? I told you on the phone.”
“I’ve been watching you for the last mile. You couldn’t have been going more than twenty, and I’ve never seen you drive the speed limit.”
Her partner’s eyes went wide. “Driving a street vehicle on a dirt road? You crazy? Now if you gave me a Hummer, that would be a different story. I didn’t want to get a flat and die of thirst out here.”
Alexa laughed. “Come on in. The dogs won’t bite.”
Stuart’s car crept along until he found a spot between Dad’s and Wayne’s pickups. He got out and pet the nearest dog, which started wagging its tail furiously.
“So you feel all right?” Alexa asked after she closed the gate and strolled up to him.
“Oh, yeah. Annette’s got some unguent she makes herself. Old Mexican recipe. Not cream, not salve, but unguent. Ah, unguent. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Un-gu-ent.”
Alexa frowned. “You’re not going to talk about Annette all weekend, are you?”
Stuart got a distant look in his eye, then seemed to snap out of it. “Uh, no. Probably won’t talk with her either. She’s got some big case. Working through the whole weekend. She’s as much of a workaholic as you are.”
“You’re not exactly lazy yourself. Pop the trunk and I’ll get your bags.”
“I can get them.”
“I’ll get them. Then I’ll get you a beer.”
Alexa’s father tromped out of the house, his eyes narrowing a little.
“You that Fed my daughter invited?”
“Yessir.”
“Aren’t you a little short to be a lawman?”
Stuart paused, obviously unsure what to say, so he deflected the question. “My commander always said I should have gone into the tank corps.”
“Commander? You served?”
“Two tours of duty in Iraq.”
“Four years in that hellhole, you get back in one piece, only to get shot by a girl? Damn, boy. Let me get you a beer and man you up.”
He disappeared inside. Alexa let out a breath of relief. The way Dad’s tone had changed from mocking challenge to gruff ribbing showed Stuart had passed muster. The old man hated Feds, but he respected the troops, so it had balanced out.
“He’s just like you described him,” Stuart said, open the trunk of his car. Alexa grabbed the bags before he could.
“He’s all right.” Sort of.
She led him into the house and one of the guest rooms. “You’re right next to Stacy’s room. The walls are thin so don’t have any explicit conversations with your new girlfriend.”
“Oh, she’s not much of a talker. Takes nice selfies, though.”
“Too much information. Let’s go to the back porch. The others should be back there. Just a warning, my sister-in-law is here.”
“The reporter?”
“Yeah.”
Stuart’s face hardened, although he tried to hide it. If Melanie hadn’t been family, she was sure Stuart would have a few choice words to say about her.
So did Alexa, as a matter of fact.
And they almost came rushing out when she walked to the back porch and saw what Melanie was doing.
The reporter had been riding with Stacy and Malcolm. They were just dismounting in front of the barn, Melanie fumbling her way off the saddle and nearly falling despite having been married to a rancher for three years. Malcom took her reins to help her while Stacy led her own horse into the stable.
Alexa seethed. While there technically wasn’t anything wrong with her sister-in-law going for a ride with one of Alexa’s brothers, Alexa wanted to keep the nosy reporter as far away from Stacy as possible.
Plus she hadn’t thought to warn the girl not to talk too much to Melanie. It never occurred to Alexa the city girl would go riding with them.
She’s up to something.
Melanie wiped her hands on her jeans and headed for the house, leaving Malcolm to lead her horse into the barn.
When she caught sight of them, her face lit up with a smile, the same smile she used for the TV cameras. “Hi Alexa. Oh, isn’t this your partner?”
“Yes. My name’s Stuart,” he said.
“I hope you’re feeling better. How’s the gunshot wound?”
Stuart put on an innocent face. “What gunshot wound?”
For a moment, Melanie looked confused. That confusion quickly turned into annoyance.
She put on her fake smile back on and turned to Alexa. “Well, I better go have a shower. I have to get back to Phoenix tonight. Early start tomorrow. Horses may look pretty, but they sure do smell!”
