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“I did actually.”
Gemma approached her and gave her a hug. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. At least he didn’t get away. It was a weird day. There were a couple of minutes there where…I don’t know what happened. Maybe I blacked out. I thought I saw a woman who leaned over Agent Bryan’s body, then disappeared in a flash of light.” Dani shook her head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I saw an angel.”
Gemma circled her arm around Dani’s shoulders. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Gemma cradled Dani’s head in her hands, then stroked her gently. “I’m so glad you’re safe. God, Dani, I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you. My life would be nothing, so empty and meaningless.”
Dani put her hand over Gemma’s. “Don’t worry. I’m still here. I wasn’t hurt. It’s just a headache.”
“Did the FBI agent have a family?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows much about him. It’s a real mystery, actually. He may not even be an FBI agent. The FBI says they’ve never heard of him. We’re running his prints, but it’s obvious he was working under an assumed name. It’s the same with Darius. I have a feeling we’ll never get the real story about those two.”
Dani drained half the glass of tea in one swallow while Gemma returned to the sink to let out the dishwater.
“There was another mystery down at the station today,” said Dani. “You remember the collection we’ve got going on for that little girl with leukemia, Lydia?”
“Sure. The girl who wants to go to London.”
“Right. Yesterday we were almost to a thousand dollars.”
“Not very impressive after all this time.”
“Exactly, but today Riley starts screaming from the break room and everybody comes running, thinking he’s shot his leg off or something. Turns out he was just collecting the donations. Somebody put ten thousand dollars in the box.”
Gemma spun around to stare. “Did you say ten thousand?”
Dani nodded. “A big wad of hundreds.”
“Who did it?”
“Nobody fessed up. Nobody knows. I guess they want to be anonymous. Maybe it’s some sort of atonement. There doesn’t seem to be anything funny about the money. We ran a couple of the serial numbers just to be sure. It’s legit.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I know. It’s enough. We can send the kid and her whole family to England to watch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace or whatever it is she wants to do.” Dani stood and slipped her arms around Gemma’s waist. “I’m so glad I have you to come home to, Gem. You and Tucker. I’m a lucky woman.” She kissed Gemma on the mouth, then said, “I’ll go shower, then we can go paint the town red. Maybe even a little dancing?” Dani grinned and peeled off her sweater.
“That would be fun.”
Dani produced a folded piece of paper from her sweater pocket. “By the way, I was talking to one of the guys today at the station. He and his wife have been trying to get pregnant for a while. They finally did.” Dani looked uncharacteristically sheepish as she handed the paper to Gemma. “That’s the name of their doctor. He said she’s really easy to work with. Very accessible. And they’ve seen lesbian couples there, so…” Dani averted her eyes, looking uncomfortable.
Gemma glanced at the name on the paper, then wrapped her arms around Dani and kissed her on her reddening cheek.
Dani gave her a knowing nod before heading out of the kitchen, Tucker trotting along at her heels.
Gemma hollered after her. “And don’t leave your underwear on the bathroom floor. There’s a place for that, you know?”
She heard a grunt from the hallway, Dani’s usual non-committal response.
“I love you too, babe,” she said quietly to herself. She placed the doctor’s name under a magnet on the refrigerator, then went back to putting away dishes, grateful for her wonderful wife and her wonderful life.
Epilogue
After cleaning up a traffic accident at Haight and Divisidero, Dani and Perkins returned to their patrol car. It was Tuesday afternoon. So far, their day had been quiet. Dani was more than thankful for that after yesterday’s craziness. Perkins hitched up his pants before punching the key fob to unlock the car doors.
Coming around to the passenger side, Dani noticed they’d parked next to a familiar historic landmark. “Have you ever seen this?” she asked, waving Perkins over. She pointed to a bronze plaque embedded in a concrete marker. He stepped closer to read it, and she read it for the hundredth time silently to herself.
“During the great earthquake of 1906, on this spot, Filbert Moon, a drifter of unknown origin, pushed Mrs. Violet Baumbach and her daughter Eliza out of the way of a falling building, sacrificing his life to save theirs. As he lay dying under a pile of rubble, Mrs. Baumbach thanked him and expressed her sorrow that he would not survive. ‘No need to worry, madam,’ he said. ‘I have lived well in my time.’”
After reading the plaque, Perkins shot Dani a questioning look. “Yeah, nice bit of San Francisco trivia,” he said. “What about it?”
“The girl, Eliza Baumbach, was my great-great-grandmother.”
Perkins glanced back at the plaque with greater appreciation. “Wow. So if this Moon guy hadn’t pushed them out of the way, you’d never have been born.”
“Exactly. This is one of our favorite family stories. The only problem is that we’ve never been able to figure out who this Filbert Moon was. With a unique name like that, you’d think it would be easy, but a lot of family members have researched it with no results. Filbert Moon remains a mystery.”
“Well, maybe his sole recordable achievement in his life was this one selfless act.”
Dani shrugged. “Maybe so.”
They returned to the patrol car and resumed their normal beat. Perkins drove while Dani sat in the passenger seat watching out the window. She was still thinking about Leo Darius lying on the street where he had fallen to his death. She realized Perkins was also preoccupied with Darius when he said, “What did he mean by ‘It worked’?”
Dani shook her head. “No idea. I don’t know how he knew my name either.”
“Ah, the guy was unhinged. You can’t make sense out of somebody like that.”
They passed by the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Gus was in the process of lifting a little girl onto the pony cart. She was about six years old and grinning ear to ear. Her mother waited until she was seated before climbing on board herself. Comet looked bored, her eyes half shut.
Perkins turned down Hyde and they rode between apartment houses while Dani ticked off familiar landmarks in her mind. Ahead was a glimpse of the bay with Alcatraz in the foreground and the smooth hills of Angel Island behind that. A cable car loaded with passengers came toward them, bringing with it the familiar clang of the bell and the laughter of vacationers. When they passed Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world, Dani couldn’t help looking down at its kinky twists. A solid line of cars drove slowly down it, tourists checking off one of the items on their list of must-dos. Beyond and below, a solid block of white buildings spread out to the edge of the bay. Coit Tower rose up from a clump of greenery above them all. The sky was clear and the water calm and blue, dotted with a few white sails. It was a magnificent city, she thought. People were always predicting it would fall into the ocean when the next big earthquake ripped through the San Andreas Fault, but Dani had a feeling it would always be here, the shining city by the bay, shining into the future for a long, long time to come.
Bella Books, Inc.
Women. Books. Even Better Together.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Phone: 800-729-4992
www.bellabooks.com
Robbi McCoy, Erased
